Friends in the Fire

Read Daniel 3:14-29

Daniel 3:14–29 NIV

and Nebuchadnezzar said to them, “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the image of gold I have set up? Now when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image I made, very good. But if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace. Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?” Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” Then Nebuchadnezzar was furious with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and his attitude toward them changed. He ordered the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual and commanded some of the strongest soldiers in his army to tie up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and throw them into the blazing furnace. So these men, wearing their robes, trousers, turbans and other clothes, were bound and thrown into the blazing furnace. The king’s command was so urgent and the furnace so hot that the flames of the fire killed the soldiers who took up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and these three men, firmly tied, fell into the blazing furnace. Then King Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement and asked his advisers, “Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?” They replied, “Certainly, Your Majesty.” He said, “Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.” Nebuchadnezzar then approached the opening of the blazing furnace and shouted, “Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!” So Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came out of the fire, and the satraps, prefects, governors and royal advisers crowded around them. They saw that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hair of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of fire on them. Then Nebuchadnezzar said, “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God. Therefore I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego be cut into pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rubble, for no other god can save in this way.”

Let’s pray.

We went over to a friend’s house this week for dinner, which is something we rarely find time to do, so it stuck out for me as I was writing my sermon on Friday and yesterday. But we were at dinner, and we ate, and all of our kids were playing nicely so we sat down and had a moment to just relax and interact with people who aren’t our kids for once. But, of course, what do people with kids talk about when they get a chance to get away from their kids – their kids.

It's not something that we try to do, they’re just a HUGE part of our lives and so they come up when we’re at this stage of life. But as we were talking, my friend vocalized a question that I think many of the people in my generation feel and, I’m sure that this isn’t new – as we’ll confirm here in a second, but they voiced a concern on how much we, as parents, should be “indoctrinating” our children by pushing them toward a Christian belief system. Are we limiting their experience or forcing their choice in a way that they’ll resent or cling to for the wrong reasons. I immediately responded with, “Nope. We’re good. They’re going to get indoctrinated to something and we indoctrinate our children no matter what we do, giving them a good ethical and moral system as well as a teaching in faith, loyalty, and trust are all good things. There is no truth in the Bible, when applied to your life, that does not make it better. If our children choose to follow Jesus, that’s still a choice that they’re going to make on their own.”

But I sat there, and I thought about it. I thought about it from as many different perspectives as I could and it dawned on me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I say that because when I think about that question and I think about this story in particular, what strikes me is that even though this story seems so foreign in so many ways – it is so far in history, it takes place in a far off land, it takes place amongst a culture and a people that are separated by the distance of no longer existing anymore. All we have to go on is archeology and – let’s face it – how they’ve been presented in movies and storybooks and even those are probably far off from reality. It feels like they are separated by not only those things, but the environment of kings and mystics, a reality where the supernatural are easily explained and accepted as a part of our rationality rather than something that we immediately rationalize away with our Enlightened minds.

And yet… And yet, we live in the exact same world facing the exact same dilemmas. One dilemma in particular gives rise to this entire issue and occasion for Daniel’s three amigos being thrown into the fire: pluralism. We live in a pluralistic society. That means that the current, prevailing thought and the world we live in is that there are many different people with many different religions and belief systems, so how can only one of them be right? We need to be willing to accept all as being a part of our society in their own funnel as long as we don’t attempt to push our religion outside of our silo into another’s silo. So we start wondering who we’re allowed to even evangelize – what our world has begun to call “indoctrinate” – to, including even the consideration of if we should press upon our children our own beliefs. We are taught this so much that it causes even the most devout believers to wonder if pressing Christianity upon their children is really the “right way to bring them to the Gospel”. The reason for this is because this – again, this is the current prevailing thought – is the only way that we can achieve true peace with one another. If we start insisting that our way is right and another’s way is wrong and we start imposing our religion upon them then we might as well be totalitarians in their sight, right?

This is no different than what was happening almost 3000 years ago in Babylon. They were also a pluralistic society where there was a lot of different beliefs and gods and the laws in Babylon at the time were that you could believe in anything you liked, but you had to accept everybody else’s as well. No person could hold their own Gods above those of any others or – and this is the important part – deny anybody else’s god. To enshrine this idea, King Nebuchadnezzar had a giant gold tablet created and the law was that everybody had to come and worship this tablet as a way of keeping everybody on the same level. It wasn’t like what the cult of the emperor would become in Rome, this was purely devised as a method to “keep the peace” in the pluralistic society and this created tension. It created tension then and it still creates the tension that we still feel today. It’s the tension that comes when you’re a monotheistic person in a pluralistic society. Because we do believe that our God is the one and only God. We do believe that the only way to Him is through Jesus Christ as he is the way, the truth, and the life. We can acknowledge that other people believe other things, but we ultimately are forced to acknowledge – if we believe what we say we believe – that they’re wrong.

That same tension that we feel today is what Shadrack, Meshak, and Abednego were feeling in their society. Everybody said they must, the law said that they must, but based on their belief, on the culture they had been taken from as children, the culture that had held them in the Kings palace as sin ran rampant and they chose to remain devoted to God in how they ate and drank. As they grew up and were schooled in the mystical arts, astronomy, astrology, and magic of the day, they still clung to their God as being the source of their wisdom and that wisdom kept them alive. When all others were being killed, it was Daniel and the three amigos who were saved by the divine grace and protection that their God was giving them. Yes, they were still slaves, yes they were still under this tyrant of a king, and they did not know what freedom was, but they knew who God was. To them he was a God of protection, and they were his. They were witnessing and testifying to this and that – THAT – was the thing that they were not allowed to do. Believe what you want, just keep it to yourself.

Does that sound familiar? It is wild how easy it is to bounce back and forth between their world and our own with so much separation in between. Because that’s kind of what we’re told in our society today and why there is so much tension with Christians and the pluralistic world we live in. For pluralism to work, you have to be willing to let your religion be your religion and not interfere with others. But our religion tells us to do the exact opposite! It tells us to go and tell ALL people of ALL tribes, and ALL nations, and ALL languages. It definitely does not say – here’s the good news, keep it a secret. That’s what he Gnostics claimed to know – the secrets of God and Jesus – and that’s why they were declared heresy because we are most definitely not supposed to keep it a secret and neither were our three amigos in today’s story either.

And while I don’t know that the tensions between Christians and the world have been at a level like this, the tension that Shadrach, Meshak, and Abednego was too much. It wasn’t just that they wouldn’t worship the golden image, it was that their defiance of it revealed the truth of their hearts and that was that they knew the real God and they weren’t going to play pretend with everybody else. In doing so they were acknowledging that their God was better. They were disrupting that very fragile, very tenuous peace that King Nebuchadnezzar was desperate to keep. And keeping that peace – the same peace that they crucified Jesus to try and keep, the same peace that we are instructed not-so-subtly in our schools, our governments, our offices, and outside or our churches and homes to try and keep.

And this shows us how powerful the witness of devotion can be – that witness was so…. Defiant, so troublesome that the king had them crank the fires to 7 times hotter than their normal temps – so hot that it killed the men throwing them into the fire - had these three bound and thrown into it.

And when we’re talking about devotion, you would think that this would be that key moment, that frame in the story that we would cling to and ask ourselves, “Am I so devoted or can I be so devoted that I would be willing to die for my faith in God? But I think that’s too heavy of a question for most of us to answer because that’s not how devotion works. Devotion isn’t something you awaken to in a moment of need. It’s something that is built over time.

Think about the things we’re devoted to. We’re devoted to our God, our church, our spouses, our work, our hobbies, our friends, our families… we’re devoted to these things, but those devotions weren’t snap decisions. They were built over time. They were built over a relationship that needed sustenance at the beginning – kind of like these three did when they first came to Babylon. It’s built on struggling through difficult situations together. And, most of all, devotion is built to those people that are willing to show up for us. These three didn’t have a devotion that came to them in a moment. It was something that they developed over the course of their lives. And I would say that devotion never ever comes in an instant, it is always built over time and shared experiences, but there is always an exception to the rule: our children.

And not every parent is perfect. Not every scenario is perfect, and I can only speak from my own experience here, but when I got to see Cullen for the first time – when I got to hold Shane for the first time, the only words that I can use to really describe it perfectly are completely lifted from one of my favorite shows, but the character said this, “I am yours. All that I am, and all that I have, I give to you.”

Devotion. Complete and instantaneous devotion.

And, like I said, not everybody has that same experience. Not every situation or every person is perfect, and neither am I. But the coolest thing about all of that being true is that if that’s how I felt – as human and broken as I am – about this person, these people that I helped create. Then how much greater must God’s devotion be to us?

So devoted, in fact, that when we’re in the flames – just like my three, fiery amigos here – He’s there too. And there are so many incredible truths and so many different facets we could chase down within this story but as we’re talking about devotion and we’re talking about what it means to be devoted to God, we can’t help but look at these final two aspects of their devotion.

The first thing is that as the king peers in and sees them walking around in the fire with the fourth – God or an angel or Jesus himself maybe – he first notices that they are no longer bound. They were thrown in bound, but now they are free and moving around in the furnace freely. That means that they could have escaped. They could have made to walk out or get away, but they remained in the fire. Why? Why stay any longer than you have to in the flames? We can say “because God was in there” but we don’t have any real idea who it was. We know there was a fourth, but the scripture never reveals who it was, so we are left to speculate. But the more important truth is that sometimes we just have to stay in the fire – to remain in these difficult situations because God needs us there and he’s in there with us too.

Because had they gone running out, even untouched, the end of this story wouldn’t be the same. Because here is the real power of devotion. Even in a pluralistic society like Babylon and like the world we live in today, our devotion is seen by others, and it can draw them in to see who walks with us. Who walks with us across the mountains, and who stands with us amongst the flames. Because the story doesn’t end with the three amigos bursting forth from the flames and proclaiming the greatness of God. It ends with King Nebuchadnezzar proclaiming God’s greatness and glory! The power of witness and the testimony of our faith when we are amongst the burning flames speaks far louder than any bullhorn on a crowded street and any sermon preached in any pulpit.

And this is the beauty of the story. It shows us that our devotion has the ability to proclaim God’s glory louder than any voice. If we go back to the beginning of the story one last time, we see that when the image of gold was to be worshipped, it says in verse 4 that ALL people would hear all of these instruments and come worship. Instead, what they ended up hearing was the praise of God’s glory from the lips of the king himself. He wouldn’t just proclaim what had happened, but that their God was the only one who could do what he did. Not other god could possibly be greater than He. So, his name was to be sacred, any who spoke against Him would be put to death. Somehow, we arrive right back at Matthew 28. The greatness of God being proclaimed to all people and it began with devotion. Devotion, built on the knowledge that HE first loved us, that HE was first devoted to us so that we might know his love and return ours unto him because He gave us everything when he gave us his Son. He showed us that all that He has and all that He is, he gave to us. He gave us everything when he gave us his Son so that we might never know what it means to walk alone amongst the flames. So that we might feel and know of his loving devotion to us, and that we might return it by placing our trust, our loyalty, and our faithful devotion in him. He is our friend in the flames, and this devotion is what we will proclaim to the world.

Let’s pray.