It’s Friday morning.
You’re at the door. Coat on. Keys in your hand. And there’s a word sitting in the back of your head that someone put there years ago.
The word is “exile”.
You’ve been told it’s a comfort. You’ve been told it takes the weight off your shoulders. You’re a stranger here. A sojourner. Just passing through. Don’t expect too much from this world. Keep your head down. Don’t rock the boat. Wait for the King to come back and sort it all out.
It sounds humble. It sounds biblical. It even sounds restful.
And it’s a life sentence with no hope of parole.
Now. Van Drunen wants Christians to shape their identity around that one word. He says the proper Christian stance in culture is the stance of an exile. Engaged. Productive. Neighbourly. But with no expectation that anything will actually change.
We’re like the Israelites in Babylon, he says. Building houses. Planting gardens. Knowing we’ll be out of here in seventy years.
And he’s got the verses. First Peter chapter 2. Jeremiah 29. Hebrews 11. Sojourners. Strangers. Pilgrims looking for a better country.
So if he’s reading those texts right, then the man who wants to take ground for Christ outside the church world is the one being disobedient. He didn’t get the memo. He’s at war with the plain teaching of the apostle.
But here’s what I’m going to show you today. Van Drunen has taken the most extreme penalty in the whole covenant and dressed it up as a vocation. He has taken a curse. And called it the Christian’s life calling.
And by the end of this, you’ll know exactly what kind of exile you are. The kind that carries a crown around in his back pocket.
My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. And this is Exiles No More.
Let’s go.
What this episode gives you
First. The claim. Van Drunen’s case for exile as the permanent Christian posture. Stated fairly, in his own framing, the way we’ve represented him from the start.
Second. Jeremiah 29. The text he leans on hardest. We’re going to read the verse he stops short of. Verse 10. And you’ll see that exile has an expiry date stamped on it.
Third. Daniel. Same Babylon. Same exile. Same seventy years. And the opposite posture entirely. Because the most famous exile in the Bible refused to live like one.
Fourth. First Peter chapter 2. The sojourner text. And the sentence Peter wrote three verses before it that changes everything.
And by the end, you’ll have an image burned into your brain until your dying day. A man in a foreign court. Praying toward a city that’s been burned to the ground. With more authority in that pagan palace than the king who signed his death warrant.
That man was an exile. And he ruled.
The claim: Van Drunen’s case from the exile texts
Let me put Van Drunen’s case the way he would put it. And I’ll be fair, because this is his strongest pastoral move.
He points you to First Peter chapter 1, verse 1. “Pilgrims of the Dispersion.”
He points you to First Peter chapter 2, verse 11. “Sojourners and pilgrims.”
He points you to Hebrews 11, verse 13. The patriarchs, who “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”
He points you to Hebrews 13, verse 14. “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.”
And he points you, above all, to Jeremiah 29, verses 4 to 7. God’s word to the exiles in Babylon.
“Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit.” “And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive.”
Build. Plant. Settle. Seek the welfare of Babylon.
Now here’s the building Van Drunen builds on that foundation. He says this is the template. This is the godly Christian, New Testament posture toward the whole world. You’re in Babylon. You’ll always be in Babylon. Right up until Christ returns.
So be a good neighbour. Do good work. Pay your taxes. But don’t get any big ideas about transforming the place. Cultural transformation, he says, is “eschatologically premature.” You’re a guest. Guests don’t redecorate the house, and they certainly don’t demolish anything.
And that is a serious argument. You need to feel the weight of it. Because if you stand up at the kitchen table and say Christ rules the nations, a well-read man is going to look at you and say: “Peter calls you a sojourner. Jeremiah tells you to settle down in Babylon. Do you think you know better than Peter and Jeremiah?”
And if you can’t answer that, you’ll sit back down, humbled.
So now we have the claim. Exile is the Christian posture. Babylon is our address. Settle in and wait.
Let’s open Jeremiah 29. And let’s read the verse Van Drunen never seems to reach.
Jeremiah 29 has an expiry date
Open your Bible. Jeremiah chapter 29. Put your finger on verse 4. Read down to verse 7. The bit Van Drunen quotes.
Build houses. Plant gardens. Seek the peace of the city. Got it?
Now keep your finger there. And read three more verses. Verse 10.
“For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place.”
Seventy years. Completed. Then I will bring you back.
There’s a clock on it. There’s a date on the calendar.
So when God tells the exiles to build and plant and settle, He is not saying, “This is how things are, better get used to it.” He’s saying the opposite. He’s saying, “I have sentenced you to a fixed term. Serve it faithfully. And at the end of it, I’m bringing you all home.”
Jeremiah 29 is not a description of the normal Christian life. Jeremiah 29 is a well-earned prison sentence with a release date.
And where does exile come from in the first place? Where do we find it in the covenant?
Go back to Deuteronomy 28. We read it in the first episode. Verses 1 to 14. The blessings. Obedience. Headship. The head and not the tail. Verses 15 to 68. The curses. Disobedience. Scattering. Exile among the nations.
Exile is not on the blessings list. Exile is way down the escalating list of punishments for breaking God’s holy covenant.
So look at what Van Drunen has done. He has reached into the covenant. He has shimmied past the blessings. He has cantered all the way down to almost the deepest curse in the whole document. The scattering. The exile. The judgment. And he has lifted that out. And he has told the blood-bought, justified, Spirit-filled church of Jesus Christ: “This is your posture. This is your home address. Permanently.”
Think about what that costs you. You’ve been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. You’re seated with Christ at the right hand of God. You’re a son. An heir. A member of a royal priesthood. And the theology says your proper stance in the world is the stance of covenant-breaking Israel under the rod.
That’s not a reading of the text. That’s a sentence handed down on people who were already set free.
Daniel, the exile who ruled
Now here’s the part that should end the argument.
Van Drunen likes to point at Babylon. So let’s go to Babylon. And let’s meet the most famous exile who ever lived. Daniel.
Carried off as a boy. Marched hundreds of miles to the seat of power of the pagan superpower. Renamed after a pagan god. Belteshazzar. Enrolled in the king’s own school to be reprogrammed into a good Babylonian.
If anybody had grounds to keep his head down and wait it out, it was Daniel.
So what does Daniel do? Does he quietly assimilate? Does he reason his way along with his pagan neighbours on some shared, neutral, natural-law basis?
Chapter 1, verse 8. “Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s delicacies.”
On what basis? Not on the basis of natural law. On the basis of God’s law. The covenant food laws.
Keep going. Chapter 2. The king has a dream nobody can interpret. How does Daniel crack it? By the Spirit of God. Verse 28. “There is a God in heaven who reveals secrets.” Not by Babylonian wisdom. Not by the shared reason of the realm. By revelation. By the covenant God speaking.
Chapter 6. The famous one. They pass a law. No praying to anyone but the king for thirty days. And what does Daniel do? Verse 10. He goes home. He opens his windows toward Jerusalem. A city in ruins. A temple burned to the ground. And he gets down on his knees three times a day. In open defiance of the civil law. Because the civil law had crossed the law of his God.
Where do we find Daniel the quiet, neutral, natural-law citizen of the common kingdom? Nowhere. We find a man who breaks the king’s food rules by God’s law. Who interprets dreams by God’s Spirit. Who prays toward the covenant city in defiance of the king’s decree. Who walks into a den of lions rather than stop.
And here’s the sting. Van Drunen uses Daniel as his model two-kingdoms man. The exile who engages the culture without trying to transform it. But the actual Daniel didn’t transform Babylon by blending in. He transformed it by refusing to.
By the end, the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar is used by the Holy Spirit to pen paragraphs of Scripture. Chapter 4. A chapter of the Bible, dictated by a Gentile emperor, praising the Most High God. That’s not a man keeping his head down. That’s a dominion man in a foreign palace, dragging an empire to its knees before the living God, by humbling the apex of that superpower, the great king himself.
And it’s not just Daniel. Joseph in Egypt, second in command of the whole kingdom, governing by the wisdom of God. Nehemiah, cupbearer to a pagan king, who rebuilt the walls of a city. Esther, who risked her life to overturn a genocide written into the law of the Medes and Persians.
Every single godly man and woman in a pagan power structure in the whole Bible does the same thing. They engage covenantally. They shape the culture. They bend the place toward God. Not one of them is sitting on their hands in Babylon waiting for the bus to come in seventy years.
What Peter says before “sojourner”
You’ve watched Daniel rule Babylon on his knees. But Van Drunen has one more text. His favourite one. First Peter chapter 2. The sojourner verse. And there’s a sentence sitting three verses above it that he marches straight past.
First Peter chapter 2, verse 11. “Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.”
There it is. Van Drunen’s verse. Sojourners and pilgrims.
But read the whole sentence. What is Peter actually telling sojourners to do? He’s not telling them to withdraw from the culture. He’s not telling them to lower their expectations for the world. Look at the object of the verb. “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” That’s the instruction.
The sojourner language is doing moral work, not political work. Peter is saying: you don’t belong to your appetites. Don’t be ruled by the flesh. He is not saying: you don’t truly belong in the common world, so keep your hands off it and quit fiddling.
And look at the very next verse. Verse 12. “Having your conduct honourable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation.”
Your good works. Which they observe. So that they glorify God. That’s not withdrawal. That’s a visible, public, culture-facing witness designed to change what the watching world thinks of God.
Now back up. Three verses. Before Peter ever says the word “sojourner”, what does he call these same people? Verse 9.
“But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light.”
Read that slowly. A chosen generation. A royal priesthood. A holy nation. His own special people.
Now I want you to tell me. Is “a holy nation” the language of a refugee community waiting to catch a bus? Is “a royal priesthood” the vocabulary of a guest who mustn’t touch anything? Is “His own special people” how you describe a tourist?
No. That is the language of Sinai. Exodus 19, verses 5 and 6. The exact words God used when He constituted Israel as a nation at the mountain. Peter takes the founding charter of a nation and lays it on the church.
So here’s the order Peter actually wrote. First: you are a royal priesthood and a holy nation. That is your identity. That is the controlling word. Then: as sojourners, don’t be mastered by your lusts, and live such good lives that the pagans end up glorifying God.
The crown comes first. The sojourn comes second. And the sojourn is the way the crown behaves in an as-yet-unconquered country. Not a reason to take the crown off.
Directional sojourning versus structural sojourning
Here’s the distinction you have to carry out of this episode. There are two ways to be a sojourner.
You can be a sojourner in the sense that you’re not ultimately at home in a world that’s running away from God. That’s true. That’s good. That’s what Hebrews 11 means. Your final hope is not located in this present age.
Or you can be a sojourner in the sense that you’re structurally alien to the earth itself. A guest in creation. With no claim and no business shaping it.
The first one is biblical. The second one is anti-biblical.
Ouweneel calls it the difference between directional sojourning and structural sojourning. You’re a stranger to the world’s rebellion. You are not a stranger to God’s good earth. The earth is the Lord’s. And you’re His heir.
So put it together. Jeremiah 29 has an expiry date. Daniel ruled Babylon instead of waiting it out with his head down, never rocking the boat. And Peter calls you a holy nation before he ever calls you a sojourner.
Where is the permanent, passive, hands-off exile in any of that? Never in the text. Only in the reader’s imagination.
Van Drunen built a posture on a curse, propped it up with a verse about your appetites, and quietly skipped the sentence where Peter crowns you.
What to do this week
I’m not going to leave you with four chapters of demolition and no instructions. Four things. For this week.
Step one. Read Jeremiah 29 to the end.
Open your Bible. Read verses 4 to 7. The bit you’ve heard quoted. Then don’t stop. Read verse 10. The seventy years. Read down to verse 14. “I will bring you back from your captivity.”
And ask yourself one question. Does this sound like God describing the permanent state of His people? Or does it sound like a father telling a son: serve your sentence well, because I’m coming to get you?
You’ll see it for yourself. Exile always has a door marked exit for the remnant. Curses were made to be broken.
Step two. Memorise First Peter 2, verse 9.
The whole verse if you can. The four titles for certain. “A chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people.”
Say it to yourself in the mirror. Because the next time a man tells you you’re just a sojourner with no claim on this world, you don’t argue. You say: “Read me the verse before that one.” And watch him find the word he forgot was there.
A holy nation doesn’t need to ask Babylon’s permission. It’s got its orders direct from headquarters.
Step three. Name the place you’ve been waiting it out.
Don’t start with Van Drunen this week. Start with yourself.
Where have you been living like an exile when you should have been living like an heir? Is it your work? Have you decided it’s just a job, nothing eternal, nothing kingdom about it? Is it your town? Have you written it off as Babylon and stopped praying for it, stopped building in it? Is it your nation? Have you given up on it because a theology told you giving up was the godly thing to do?
Write it down. One place. And ask: have I been calling my own retreat “humility” or “obedience”?
Because the prison cell doesn’t need bars when the prisoner thinks it’s his home.
Step four. Sit with the next question.
We’ve now pulled down all three of Van Drunen’s pillars. The covenant pillar. The natural-law pillar. And the exile pillar, today. The demolition is done.
But knocking down a prison doesn’t build a house. So from here, we build. And the first question is the biggest one. If you’re not an exile waiting to leave, then what on earth are you for? What’s the job?
So this week, do this. Open your Bible to the very beginning. Genesis chapter 1. Read verses 26 to 28. The first words God ever spoke over a human being. Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill the earth. Subdue it. Have dominion.
And ask yourself a question that’s been hiding in plain sight since page one. Was that command ever cancelled?
Because next, we’re going to follow that command from the garden, through the flood, through the Cross, all the way to your front door. And we’re going to find out that the job you were given in Eden is the same job that’s waiting on your desk on Monday.
Sent in, not waiting out
Let me leave you with this.
Van Drunen handed you a covenant curse and told you it was your calling. But open the letter. Before Peter ever calls you a sojourner, he calls you a royal priesthood and a holy nation.
You’re not a refugee with nowhere to go. You’re a king in an as-yet-unconquered country. With a crown in your pocket and orders from headquarters.
So stop living like you’re waiting for a bus out of Babylon. You were sent there, like Daniel was, or Joseph.
Start thinking along those lines.