Welcome everybody. This is the third in our January Intensive studies in the book of Daniel. As you know, we are working Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night throughout the month of January all the way through the whole of the book of Daniel together. And let me direct your attention, if I may, to Daniel chapter 3. Daniel chapter 3. Someone was asking me earlier if the ESV Journaling – the paperback ESV Journal Bibles on the book of Daniel, if there are any more of those available – I don’t think there are; I think they are all gone. But they are really inexpensive – we have a few? Where are they? You have them? So Rupert is the man to tackle if you want one! If you can beat him in an arm wrestle, you may have one! But yeah, they’re inexpensive and a really good way to record your notes and study the book of Daniel and you’ll have that whenever you return to Daniel.
August Landmesser – is that a name? It’s a name that just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? August Landmesser. Born in Germany in 1910. In 1935, he fell in love with a woman called Irma Eckler, a young Jewish woman, and he tried to register to be married to Irma in Hamburg. Of course they fell foul of the newly enacted Nuremberg Laws, the race laws, that forbid interracial marriage. He was commanded by the Nazi regime to discontinue the relationship. He was arrested after the couple, instead, attempted to flee the country. Eckler was murdered by the Nazis at the so-called Bernburg Euthanasea Camp, and Landmesser was imprisoned and then conscripted into the German army and he lost his life fighting in Croatia. Likely nobody would remember Landmesser today apart from the famous black and white photograph of a vast crowd gathered at the Blohm+Voss shipyard for the launch of a naval vessel. Everyone in the tightly packed crowd is performing the, by then, legally required Nazi straight-arm salute. It’s a massive crowd; everyone is doing it. They are packed in like sardines, everyone except a young man in the entire crowd. August Landmesser, who you can see if you zoom in; you can find this picture online very easily. And if you zoom in you can see him standing with his arms folded, not participating at all. The only one among the hundreds standing in defiance. Everyone else was bowing to the Nazi idol; everybody but Landmesser.
The spectre of totalitarianism in state sponsored idolatry isn’t hard to find in almost every era of human history and in almost every human society. But in Daniel chapter 3, we see a particularly ugly example of it. Nebuchadnezzar, the king, builds a giant golden statue, likely a stone image plated in gold. It is 90 feet tall by 9 feet wide, possibly of himself or perhaps of one of his gods. Either way, it was a giant monument to his own ego. Nebuchadnezzar commanded all the people to worship the image as a demonstration of fealty to his own divine prerogatives as the great king. This of course set the Jewish exiles living in Babylon, especially Daniel and his three friends, on a direct collision course with a mandatory paganism that they simply could not endorse. We are going to consider the passage before us tonight under three headings. First of all, in verses 1 through 15, we’ll notice the brutal absurdity of self worship. The brutal absurdity of self worship, verse 1 through 15. Then in 16 to 23, we’ll think about the tempered confidence of living faith. The tempered confidence of living faith. The brutal absurdity of self worship. The tempered confidence of living faith. And then finally, 24 through 30, the astonishing provision of God’s presence. The astonishing provision of God’s presence. The brutal absurdity of self worship, the tempered confidence of living faith, and the astonishing provision of God’s presence.
Before we look at those themes, let’s bow our heads and pray together and ask for the Lord’s blessing. Let’s pray.
Our God and Father, as we bow before You, we ask that You would, by Your Word and Spirit, shine the light of Gospel truth into all our hearts. Convince, convict, rebuke, exhort, train us in righteousness that we may all be thoroughly equipped for every good work. We want to honor the Lord Jesus. We want to hear His voice. And so we bow down and humble ourselves. We turn from sin and self to You now with expectation and hunger, asking that You would come and meet us and minister Your Word in demonstration of the Holy Spirit and in power. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Daniel chapter 3. This is the Word of God:
“King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits and its breadth six cubits. He set it up on the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon. Then King Nebuchadnezzar sent to gather the satraps, the prefects, and the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces to come to the dedication of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. Then the satraps, the prefects, and the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces gathered for the dedication of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. And they stood before the image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up. And the herald proclaimed aloud, ‘You are commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, you are to fall down and worship the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace.’ Therefore, as soon as all the peoples heard the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, all the peoples, nations, and languages fell down and worshiped the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.
Therefore at that time certain Chaldeans came forward and maliciously accused the Jews. They declared to King Nebuchadnezzar, ‘O king, live forever! You, O king, have made a decree, that every man who hears the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, shall fall down and worship the golden image. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into a burning fiery furnace. There are certain Jews whom you have appointed over the affairs of the province of Babylon: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These men, O king, pay no attention to you; they do not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.’
Then Nebuchadnezzar in furious rage commanded that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego be brought. So they brought these men before the king. Nebuchadnezzar answered and said to them, ‘Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the golden image that I have set up? Now if you are ready when you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, to fall down and worship the image that I have made, well and good. But if you do not worship, you shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace. And who is the god who will deliver you out of my hands?’
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.’
Then Nebuchadnezzar was filled with fury, and the expression of his face was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He ordered the furnace heated seven times more than it was usually heated. And he ordered some of the mighty men of his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace. Then these men were bound in their cloaks, their tunics, their hats, and their other garments, and they were thrown into the burning fiery furnace. Because the king’s order was urgent and the furnace overheated, the flame of the fire killed those men who took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell bound into the burning fiery furnace.
Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up in haste. He declared to his counselors, ‘Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?’ They answered and said to the king, ‘True, O king.’ He answered and said, ‘But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.’
Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the door of the burning fiery furnace; he declared, ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out, and come here!’ Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire. And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king’s counselors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them. Nebuchadnezzar answered and said, ‘Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him, and set aside the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God. Therefore I make a decree: Any people, nation, or language that speaks anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses laid in ruins, for there is no other god who is able to rescue in this way.’ Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon.”
Amen.
Let’s think about the brutal absurdity of self worship first of all. You will recall in the previous chapter, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a great statue with a golden head. The head we learn represented himself and his own reign and the Babylonian kingdom. The rest of the statue, made of increasingly inferior materials, represented symbolically the successive kingdoms that were each to displace the other after him. The dream, you will remember, was intended as a solemn reminder from the living God that for all his might and glory, Nebuchadnezzar was still only a mortal man and his great kingdom would not last forever. And chapter 2 ended – do you remember – with the king acknowledging that. Indeed, the God of Daniel, who had revealed both the dream and its interpretation, was the God of gods and the Lord of kings.
And yet for all the appearance of new found piety at the end of chapter 2, here in chapter 3 we discover the king’s heart hasn’t really changed at all. This vast statue that he makes, whether it’s an image of himself or of one of his gods, is as we said a moment ago, undoubtedly a monument to his own ego and vanity. But do notice carefully it’s not a copy of the statue that he saw in his dream from the previous chapter. That statue, do you remember, had a head of gold, a torso of silver, middle and thighs of bronze, and legs of iron and feet of iron and clay. That’s not this statue. No, no, this statue is all gold from head to toe, as if a defiant king was asserting that whatever his dream suggested to the contrary, his golden kingdom would last forever and none will succeed him. There’s a sort of defiance about the construction of this statue in the wake of the previous chapter and its dream.
And so now having made the idol, the king gathers all his high officials for the dedication ceremony, verse 2. And when they heard the music, verses 4 and 5, they were to fall down and worship the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. And so verse 7, all the peoples, languages and nations did exactly that. Despite God’s previous intervention in his life, not only is Nebuchadnezzar determined to worship himself, he can’t be content until he has made everyone else worship him too. As disappointing as Nebuchadnezzar’s behavior is here, we really ought not to be surprised. After all, this is always the true character of the sinful human ego, isn’t it? It is rarely content merely to honor itself. Ego always wants the praise of others. True? We might not build a great golden monument to ourselves in our backyard, but we do all crave the affirmation and the praise of our peers, don’t we? While we shake our heads as silly, old Nebuchadnezzar who just doesn’t seem to want to learn his lesson, have we perhaps overlooked how readily we build an altar to ourselves in our own hearts and quietly crave as many people as possible to join us in our regular prostrations before it?
You’ll notice that there is a lot of pomp and circumstance that goes into this dedication ceremony, isn’t there? This is a grand state occasion, after all. The list of high officials in verse 2 is immediately repeated almost verbatim in verse 3 because we are meant to be impressed. In Hebrew narrative style, the way you do emphasis is by repetition. We are meant to be impressed. This is a list of the “Who’s Who” of the Babylonian Empire. The high and the mighty. They are all here you know, mingling, trying to look important, dressed in their finery, drinking champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres as they quietly perspire in the heat on the plain of Dura. Likewise, the complete list of musical instruments in verse 5 is repeated over again in verse 7 and over again in verse 10 and again in verse 15. Just as an aside, I feel as a matter of national pride that I have to point out the mention of bagpipes in the list of musical instruments in the Babylonian Philharmonic Orchestra is almost certainly a mistranslation. I just wanted to clear that up. There were no Scotsmen present at the dedication of Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, I feel confident! But whatever the precise instruments that were being used, the point is this whole scene is meant to look and sound really impressive. Much planning, a great deal of effort has gone into this grand spectacle. The musical extravaganza was supposed to be something special. Everybody who was anybody was here. This was the gala event of the year.
But as Daniel retells the story for us, he is quietly laughing at the whole silly spectacle. Twice – did you notice – twice in verse 1 and then again on the lips of Nebuchadnezzar himself in verse 15, we are told the king has made this image. And nine times over, in rapid succession, the author uses the verb translated “to set up” with reference to this statue. Almost every time it is mentioned, it is said to have been “set up.” “Swipe the uses of this verb with your orange highlighter,” suggests Ralph Davis, “and then go back over the text and see if it doesn’t seem if a kind of cumulative mockery is at work.” The image is a set-up job, we might say. The writer is telling you that it is no more divine than your knee replacement. This grand display of public piety and pagan civil religion is a complete farce. Unsurprisingly, however, none of the high officials wish to become fuel for Nebuchadnezzar’s ovens, and so they all go along with the charade.
I think they are like the townspeople in Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Do you remember how the story goes? The vain emperor loves lavish outfits, wants to be the height of fashion, and so when two men posing as weavers promise they can make the king some clothes of special significance but they will be invisible to the stupid and the incompetent, the emperor cannot resist. First, the emperor’s chamberlain and then the emperor himself visit the weavers to check on their progress, and both see that the weaver’s loom is entirely empty but they both pretend to admire the invisible cloth because neither of them wishes to be unmasked as fools. Soon, the weavers announce that their work is complete. They pretend to dress the emperor in his new, invisible finery, and the emperor, in turn, pretends to see it in all its splendor and immediately sets off on a procession through the city to show off his new wardrobe. Naturally, all the townspeople have heard about the emperor’s new clothes and they gather to see their monarch with his magical costume. And every citizen assumes that his neighbor or her neighbor can see the clothes, and each one of them is unwilling to have their own apparent stupidity exposed and so they don’t say anything. The crowd remains entirely silent. Nobody wants to admit that they can’t see the king’s alleged magnificence until suddenly a little child, utterly unselfconsciously blurts out that the emperor has been parading around through the streets this whole time entirely naked.
Peer pressure is a powerful thing, and Daniel portrays it here brilliantly, doesn’t he. The king’s magnificent idol is obviously a lump of stone covered in gold. He made it. He set it up. It’s not a god anymore than Nebuchadnezzar is a god. But the king asserts that it is, and so everybody goes along with the pantomime, their conformity ensured by the scalding furnace of the king’s oven, crackling and popping in the background. But Daniel’s retelling of the story is meant to awaken in us the same straightforward clarity that that little boy displayed as the silly emperor paraded past the townspeople in his birthday suit. The same clarity that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego displayed, who know, they see this image is not divine and utterly unworthy of their worship. Daniel wants us to mock the absurdity of self worship whenever and wherever we meet it. Egotism is absurd, and we are right to laugh at it, perhaps especially in ourselves and also in others, but we must never bow before it. See the silliness of false worship. It will help you stand firm against it. But be warned. Calling out the emperor who has no clothes on is a dangerous business. If you don’t play along and bend your knee before the latest idols of our culture like everyone else, your failure to conform may yet cost you dearly. And so first, the first thing to see is the brutal absurdity of self worship.
But then if we are going to stand firm against all of that we are going to need the next thing this passage teaches us, and that is the tempered confidence of living faith. The tempered confidence of living faith. In verses 8 through 12, certain Chaldeans see an opportunity to take Daniel’s three friends down a peg or two, actually to knock them out of the race altogether. These Chaldeans, the word “Chaldeans” sometimes refers to an ethnic group, more often it is a way of sort of shorthand to speak about the occult practitioners of the Babylonian courts but either way here it simply stands for the jealous opponents of the people of God and the purposes of God, and they accuse Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
And don’t miss how strategic and cunning these Chaldean accusers are being. On the one hand, they probably avoid all mention of Daniel because he’s so influential in the king’s court. He has the favor of the Babylonian monarch, and to go after him directly might just push the king a little too far. But Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, on the other hand, they only hold their high government positions because of Daniel’s influence with Nebuchadnezzar. There’s a reasonable probability that the king has no clue who these three men are, but by reminding him that the king was the one who appointed them, albeit at Daniel’s suggestion, by reminding the king, “These men have their position at your say so,” they are highlighting how ungrateful these three men really were being. “Surely men who have enjoyed the king’s patronage and favor should be able to see their way to showing your majesty sufficient respect to genuflect before the king’s image, it’s hardly too much to ask, is it? We’re all doing it, after all.”
These are political power players and they play Nebuchadnezzar like a harp, like a banjo. And he flies off the handle right on que, doesn’t he? Look at verses 13 through 15. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are summoned to the king who asks them, “Is it true that you do not serve my gods or worship the golden image that I have set up? Now if you are ready, when you hear the sound of my praise band to fall down and worship the image that I have made, well and good. But if you do not worship, you shall immediately be cast into the burning fiery furnace. And who is the god who will deliver you out of my hand?” That last rhetorical question there in verse 15 is crucial. It sets up, really, the theological heart of the whole chapter. Here is the issue in a nutshell. “Who is the God who can deliver these men out of Nebuchadnezzar’s hand?” There are two gods in this chapter, aren’t there? There is the false idol of self at which Nebuchadnezzar worships and at which he expects everyone else to worship too. And then there is the true and living God before whom alone Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are willing to bow. And these two are in direct and irreconcilable conflict.
Daniel’s three friends heroically stand their ground. They already have the perspective that Daniel’s mocking record of this story is designed to create in us. They see right through the absurdity of Nebuchadnezzar’s idolatry and they are prepared, aren’t they, to bear the cost of faithfulness to the one, true and living God, whatever that might mean. Look at their remarkable confession of faith in verses 16 through 18. Look at verses 16 through 18. First, they refuse to mount a defense. This is bold, isn’t it? Verse 16, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter.” They don’t try to excuse their behavior; they don’t try to qualify their position, obfuscate the symbol, give the king some context to perhaps make him more lenient. And did you notice – not to make too much of this, but up to verse 12 every time Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned his title precedes his name. He is always “King Nebuchadnezzar.” But on the lips of these three heroic confessors in particular he is merely, “O Nebuchadnezzar.” They drop his title when they address him, although they do later acknowledge he is their king. It’s a borderline insult designed to show that they actually bowed under the lordship of a different sovereign.
On one occasion, Andrew Melville, who was a reformation-era minister in the Church of Scotland, said to King James VI, “Sir, we will always humbly reverence your majesty in public, but since we have this occasion to be with your majesty in private, we must discharge our duty or else be traitors both to Christ and to you. Therefore, sir, as at diverse times I have told you, so now again I must tell you there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is King James, the lord of the Commonwealth, and there is Christ Jesus, the King of the Church, whose subject James VI is, and of whose kingdom He is not a king nor a lord nor a head. We will yield to you your place and give you all due obedience, but again I say to you, you are not the head of the Church. You cannot give us that eternal life that we seek for even in this world, and you cannot deprive us of it either.”
And there are – we imagine Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego saying to Nebuchadnezzar, “There are two kings and two kingdoms in Babylon, O king. We will yield all due obedience to you our earthly sovereign in all things that belong to the proper sphere of authority given to you by Almighty God, but when it comes to the question of the liberty of our own consciences and the worship of God, we will be bound by no law but His alone.” They were saying in the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, “God alone is Lord of the conscience and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to His Word or beside it in matters of faith or worship.”
Now look carefully at the first words of verse 17 for a moment. Verse 17. In the English Standard Version that we use here at First Pres, verse 17 reads, “If this be so, our God is able to save us.” So the ESV translators are connecting the reply of these three men to the threat of being thrown into the flames. In verse 15, they understand, the translators understand the text to say something like this. These men are saying, “If we are thrown into the flames, then our God is able to save us.” Ralph Davis, however, suggests that, “They are probably not picking up on the king’s furnace threat but on his God question in the last half of verse 15.” And so along with some other scholars, he translates the sentence quite differently. Nebuchadnezzar asks them, remember, “Who is the god who can deliver you out of my hands?” and here’s how Ralph Davis translates their reply in verse 17. He says, he has them say, “If our God exists, whom we are serving, He is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace and from your hand, O king, He can deliver.”
The point is, they have absolute confidence in the ability of their God to do the very thing Nebuchadnezzar is so sure no one and nothing can do. “Your god, symbolized by this ridiculous 90 foot tall colossus isn’t real. You made him up yourself. You set him up yourself. But our God, if He is the real thing, well then the hand of your petulant rage, however strong it appears, will be no match for the grip of His omnipotent grace.” They have no doubt, none, about God’s ability to rescue them. Their faith is confident.
But then look at verse 18. Notice how their confident faith is, nevertheless a carefully tempered faith. “But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” They are quite confident of God’s power to save them from their trials, but they have no assurance that He must save them from this particular trial. Their faith rests in God’s almighty power, but they make no assertion that He is in any way bound to act as they hope that He will and know that He can.
You might have come across some dangerous strands of teaching out there that suggest that to admit the possibility of God doing anything other than the thing we are naming and claiming in faith is to sin and to fall into unbelief. “No, no, no,” they say. “We must engage in positive confession and speak the reality that we want to see into being.” But that way of conceiving of Christian faith bears absolutely no resemblance at all to the faith of Daniel’s three friends, does it? They have no idea, they have no idea of the sovereign design of God for them. It might be to rescue them, but it might also be that God designs that they would die as martyrs for their faith. Either way, they are unafraid to challenge the king’s claim that God can’t save them. They know He can, but they face with realism and honesty the possibility that He might not.
Here’s the character of a true, biblically ordered faith. It obeys the revealed will of God in holy Scripture – that’s what’s going on in verse 18, isn’t it? God has said we are to have no other gods before Him. We are not to make a graven image and we are not to bow down and worship them. So that settles it for us. We are not doing it. We are going to trust the Lord and obey His Word no matter what. True faith obeys the revealed will of God in Scripture and true faith submits to the secret sovereign will of God in providence, whatever it might hold. Faith learns to say, “What e’er my God ordains is right; His holy will abideth. I will be still whate’er He does and follow where He guideth. He is my God, though dark my road; He holds me that I shall not fall, and so to Him I leave it all.” That’s what these three faithful witnesses are doing here, isn’t it?
And as they do, they point us to the Lord Jesus Christ who embodies this very pattern like no one else ever did. You remember when He faced His own fiery furnace of the wrath and fury of a holy God at Calvary. Do you remember that He cried out, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” And yet even He, the incarnate Son of God, bowed meekly under the governance of the heavenly sovereign and said, “Yet not My will but Your will be done.” True faith isn’t marked by the presumptuous assertion that God is somehow obligated to do our will in heaven as we do it on earth. We can never be sure that God will heal us or rescue us or fill our bank accounts or prosper our businesses or give us material success, although we must always assert that He can. No, no, the real mark of true faith is meekness under His sovereign will and a determination, His grace helping us, to do what His Word tells us we must, whatever the circumstances and no matter the cost.
Well in verse 19, Nebuchadnezzar’s rage finally breaks its bounds. He is, we are told, “filled with fury, and the expression of his face was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He ordered the furnace heated seven times more than it was usually heated.” The king called for some of his mighty men to throw the three faithful friends into the fire, bound, wearing all their court finery, presumably so that the fire would be certain to catch quickly. Verse 22 says that the flames were so fierce that the men who cast the friends into the furnace themselves perished, simply because they were so close to the heat. Literarily, the out of control fire is a device that is meant to mirror the monomaniacal fury of the king’s temper, neither of which is survivable by anyone who gets too close. And so we watch in horror as the king’s rage destroys the guards that drag the three friends to their fate, and we naturally expect that the same fate will befall the three Jewish believers as, verse 23, “they fell bound into the burning fiery furnace.”
And the temptation at this point is to imagine that for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego at least, being used as kindling in Nebuchadnezzar’s giant pizza oven somehow means that God has let them down. He hasn’t rescued them. Their faith has failed them. They’ve gone now to their doom, defeated and disillusioned with a God who could have but did not intervene to rescue them from the flames. But that is not at all how they saw things. They knew that God would be glorified either in their deaths or in their deliverance. They left the decision of which outcome best served the divine agenda to God alone. Being thrown into the flames was not defeat in the perspective of these three friends. If God required that they remained faithful unto death, so be it. It was a sacrifice they were prepared to make. Hebrews 11:34 talks about these three men and speaks of those who “through faith, quenched the power of fire.” But it goes on to speak of others who, through the same faith, “suffered mocking and flogging and chains and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn in two. They were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy.” The faith that delivers from the fire is the same faith that sometimes also suffers a martyr’s death. Which would be their lot, these three faithful witnesses understand, is ultimately none of their business. Their only comfort in life and in death is “that they are not their own, but belong body and soul to their faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” And so they commit their ways to Him and follow where He leads.
In our own day of relative ease and comfort, this whole notion of costly service, of a martyr mindset, I think has become increasingly remote to our Christian experience. We are so used to instant medical and technological and economic solutions to almost every inconvenience of life that I fear it has become all too tempting to view Almighty God Himself as just another provider of goods and services whose principle function is to ease our passage through an otherwise convenient world. Could it be that we are not at all ready for the fact that the Lord might actually call us to costly sacrifice as part of the ordinary path of Christian faithfulness? Certainly the kind of costly sacrifice in our text that would be a shock I think to most of us, was no surprise at all to the faith of Daniel’s three friends. They were ready to pay this price.
Without wishing to be melodramatic about things or wishing to overstate the challenges before us today, I do think we need to take the growing marginalisation of basic Christian convictions in our present cultural moment far more seriously than we have been doing. I don’t think there’s any real doubt that to be faithful to the claims of King Jesus, while we all live in our contemporary Babylon, is becoming increasingly costly, especially in the public square, for more and more of the Lord’s people. And so parents, assisted by pastors and elders and Sunday school teachers and youth and family ministry leaders, there is a special urgency falling to you to train the next generation and to equip them with this kind of gutsy resolve that they will need in order to stand up for the crown rights of the Redeemer no matter the cost. We badly need a new generation characterized by the realism and the lion heartedness of Daniel’s three friends. The apostle Peter’s instructions to the suffering Christians of Asia Minor could not be more relevant to this passage and to our own circumstances. Peter says, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings that you may also rejoice and be glad when His glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” Is that a perspective that you have?
The brutal absurdity of self worship. The tempered confidence of living faith. And finally, the astonishing provision of God’s presence. The astonishing provision of God’s presence. The murderous deed is now done. Nebuchadnezzar has thrown them into the blazing oven and he is again, suddenly in the text, he is overcome isn’t he, not now with rage for once but with absolute astonishment. He asks his courtiers in 24 and 25, “Is it just me, or did we not throw three men into the oven? How come I can see four men, unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, completely unhurt?” And verse 25, “The appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”
When the three friends are called by the king out of the fire, all the Babylonian A-listers are left speechless. Their mouths are hanging open at the amazing spectacle of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, completely unhurt, not even a little crispy around the edges. There’s not so much as a whiff of smoke about them, verse 27. What are we supposed to make of that? Well first – and this is crucial – notice God did not save them out of the fire. He saved them in it. He is often, He is often pleased to pluck us from the flames of the crisis or from the catastrophe when we are crying out to Him, isn’t He? He is often pleased to avert the disaster and rescue us. He loves to show kindness to His children and we should come running to Him whenever sore providence overtakes us and ask Him to rescue us. We should. But very often, God is not pleased to save us from the catastrophe. Instead, it is His design to save us in the catastrophe. We fall, bound, into the burning fiery furnace sometimes, don’t we? And there, somehow, in ways we can’t fully comprehend at the time or articulate afterwards, somehow we are kept and preserved and sustained. It’s the promise of God in Isaiah 43:1-11. God says to His people:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”
Don’t miss what God says. It’s not a promise that you won’t pass through waters. It’s not a promise that there will be no flood, that you won’t ever be required to walk through flames. It’s a promise that when you do, “I will be with you.” That’s how you will be sustained. The presence of the Lord walking through the flames with them, keeping them, is what Daniel’s friends experienced. There really is no question, you know, whether we will face the fiery furnace at some point in our lives. We will. You will. The only question is whether you will face the fiery furnace alone or if there will be a fourth man in the midst of the flames walking with you.
Secondly, we need to linger over the identity of the fourth man just for a moment. Some commentators are, in my judgment, needlessly squeamish about His identity. But really, who else could this be but the preincarnate Christ whose office it is to descend into the flames of suffering and death that He might be a sympathetic Savior to His people. When God says, “I will be with you,” that is an ancient promise that stands at the very bedrock of His covenant promises, beginning with Abraham. And it echoes throughout every age of Biblical history. You can trace it right through the Scriptures. And it finds its accomplishment and final climactic fulfillment in Emmanuel, “God with us,” in the Lord Jesus Christ. When you pass through the waters, Jesus is with you so that you will not be overwhelmed. And when you walk through the fires, Jesus will be with you so that you are not consumed. It’s the presence of Christ in the furnace of affliction that we need to look for and pray for and seek. In fact, Philippians 3:10, Paul speaks about the fellowship of “sharing in Christ’s suffering.” There is a communion, a fellowship with Jesus that can only be known in the fiery furnace of affliction. He will draw near to you there like nowhere else. Look for Him there.
And then finally, I can’t help wondering if the apostle Peter was thinking about this whole scene when he wrote his first letter. We already, we just quoted Peter’s use of an image of the Christian in the fires of affliction in 1 Peter chapter 4. He uses it earlier in the book in 1 Peter chapter 1 at verse 6 when he writes to the same suffering Christians in Asia Minor about their trials, as if they themselves were being thrown into a fiery furnace. He says to them, “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while if necessary you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise, glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Remember the purpose of God in our trials, in allowing us to fall into the flames and into the furnace of affliction. His purpose is to refine us, to bring praise and glory and honor to His own great name as He keeps us and fulfills His promises towards us in the extremes of our need.
In the case of Daniel’s three friends, an amazed though clearly still unconverted Nebuchadnezzar promotes them. Doesn’t he? He decrees that their God should be held now in honor by all the peoples of his empire. Nebuchadnezzar’s idol to his own ego is unmasked, even in Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes, for the vanity exercise that it had always been. And the Lord is revealed as the promise keeping, flame quenching, sinner saving, one, true, living God of all the earth who never deserts His children when the fires of affliction rage around them. We sang it earlier, didn’t we? “When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, My grace all sufficient shall be thy supply. The flame shall not hurt thee, I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose, I will not, I will not desert to its foes. That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.” Our God is so good. Let’s pray together.Our loving heavenly Father, we praise You, how we praise You, that when we have walked through the flood and fallen bound into the burning fiery furnace, the fourth man walked with us. The Lord Jesus stood with us. Emmanuel was with us and we were not overwhelmed. We were not consumed. Yet we confess how quickly we forget it, and as the next crisis dawns, sometimes our faith is shaken. Give us grace, O God, to trust Your holy Word, to look to the cross where Your Son, our Savior, plumbed the depths of suffering and loss, endured the raging furnace of divine judgment against sin, and triumphed that He might be a sufficient Savior with grace for us when our own trials threaten to overwhelm. Keep our eyes fixed on Him, we pray. Teach us to trust Him, to walk wherever You lead, to put obedience to Your Word ahead of our own comforts. Give us the courage that we will need, that tempered and yet firm conviction and faith that we see in these three friends of Daniel’s. Do it, O Lord, that the name of Jesus might be lifted high, that He might be truly exalted in our own lives, our families, our homes, our circumstances. And we ask it all in His matchless name, amen.