Nebuchadnezzar's Golden Image

OPENING REMARKS

The whole of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, apart from six chapters in the book of Daniel. Chapters 2 through to 7 of this book are written in Aramaic. These six chapters are also arranged in a fascinating manner. Taken together they form what is called in ancient literature a chiastic structure, there is a symmetry to them if you look carefully. Chapter 2 and chapter 7 form a pair, chapter 3 and 6 another symmetrical pair and chapters 4 and 5 mirror one another thematically as well.

People from all over the world are familiar with the book of Daniel in a superficial way, even non-believers know the story of Daniel and the lions den. But few even in the church have plummed the depths of the book of the prophet Daniel. I believe it is a book which speaks to our current age in a profound manner and it is my hope that as we study it together God will illuminate our hearts and minds with the riches of revelation He has stored up for the Church here.

Daniel 3:1 ESV

1 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.

We are told in chapter 3 that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up this golden image in the plain of Dura. Scholars believe the plain of Dura to be a river bed some 10 miles to the south of the ancient site of Babylon. We are told that the image was 60 cubits high by 6 cubits wide, perhaps more of an obelisk than a statue. Think washington monument rather than statue of liberty. 60 cubits is about 90 feet, thats a good deal taller than the angel of the North, which can be seen from miles around. In fact, a huge structure has been dicovered at that location made of cut stone, biblical archaeologists believe it might be the remains of the base of Nebuchadnezzars image. This image would have looked spectacular, glistening in the heat haze across the Euphrates valley, dominating the skyline in every direction.

Daniel 3:2–7 ESV

2 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. 3 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. 4 And the herald proclaimed aloud, “You are commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, 5 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. 6 And whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace.” 7 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.

There are 5 things you need to understand about the worship of the golden image which King Nebuchadnezzar commanded:

It was a perversion of God’s revelation.

In chapter 2 God gave Nebuchadnezzar a dream which featured a great image, mighty and frightening. So frightening that Nebuchadnezzar stopped sleeping for a time. The statue’s head was made of gold, it’s chest and arms of silver, it’s stomach and thighs of bronze and it’s legs of Iron, it’s feet were a weakened mixture of clay and iron. Each metal represented a human form of government, each government giving way to the next until finally a great rock strikes the feet and smashes the statue to dust. The rock then grows into a great moutain that fills the whole earth, this represents the Kingdom of God.

Who or what was represented by the gold head in Nebuchadnezzars dream? Do you remember? It was Nebuchadnezzar himself. Who to whom Daniel says God had given the kingdom, the power, the strength and the glory. Forever? No, for a season, until the kingdom of silver supplants him. The point of the dream was to show that it is God who is the Lord of Lord’s, it is He who gives rulers and governments their power, and ultimately only His Kingdom will endure forever.

Nebuchadnezzars golden image is a perversion of this revelation, it is a shaking fist at the heavens. Where are the weakened feet? The iron, the bronze, the silver? Gone! All replaced with gold. Nebuchadnezzar is saying to God, I reject your sovereignty, I am sovereign, the kingdom, the power, the might and the glory are mine forever. No one will take them from me, not even you. Nebuchadnezzar’s rejection of the limitations and boundaries which God had placed upon his reign amounted to open rebellion. This is the foundation and ground of all sin, the desire to be autonomous, to throw off all limitations, the desire to be God. The fruit of this kind of rebellion against God’s sovereign decree is restlessness, selfish ambition and an inability to be satisfied; you always want more, you feel you deserve more. There is a simple beauty in accepting the station and position that God has allotted to you in this life. It has not been allotted to me to be the king of England, no amount of hoping, strategising or hard graft will change that, the sooner I accept that the better. God allots to each of you a specific station in life, the key to enjoying it is to stop wishing he’d given you another one.

2. It was man-centred.

We don’t know for certain whether the golden image bore any resemblance to Nebuchadnezzar himself but we can know without a shadow of a doubt that it represented him, it represented his kingdom and his glory. Worshipping this image was a sign of alleigiance to him and to the kingdom of Babylon. We know that because later on this chapter when Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego refuse to worship the image Nebuchadnezzar responds like this; Daniel 3:15 “who is the god who will deliver you out of my hands?”” This was a form of humanism, the worship of man, the worship of state. Every humanistic form of government in history has tended to end up deifying it’s leaders; Babylon, the Roman empire and the cult of Caesar, the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany, Stalin and the Soviet State, Mao of Communist China and so on. Each of these states has demanded some level of worship from it’s subjects. A pretense of religious freedom is usually kept up; you may worship whomever you please so long as you put a pinch of incense on Caesars altar too.

Numerology in the Bible is a fascinating study. Of course like anything it can be pressed too far by fanciful minds, but in prophetic books like Daniel numerological patterns shouldn’t be disregarded. We know that certain numbers mean certain things in the Bible; the number 3 is symbolic of perfection, the number 7 symbolic of spiritual perfection and completeness, the number 10 is symbolic of human government and of course the number 6 is synonymous with man, or humanity. 10 times in chapter 3 we read that it was the King personally who set up the image. What might we draw from that? That Babylon’s government was autocratic, Nebuchadnezzar ruled like a god, what he said went. The image he set up was 10 x 6 cubits high by 6 cubits wide, symbolic of humanity, to worship the image was to worship man.

One feels King Nebuchadnezzar would have agreed with the atheist philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche when he said, “There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.”

Nebuchadnezzar was an architypal narcissist, obesessed with his own glory and ruling over his people like a god.

3. This worship appealed to the senses.

There was an impressive, golden statue to beguile the eyes, the sound of many instruments playing to ensnare the ears and the sight of a great multitude of important, powerful people from all over the world gathered together to worship. What a spectacle this would have been. No blood, no sacrifices, no sins to be atoned for, not like at Jerusalem, there was no cost to this worship. All that was asked was that you succumb to your senses and bow down.

4. It was universal in nature.

We are told several times that Nebuchadnezzar invited leaders of every stripe; politicians, lawyers, money men and scholars from across the entire empire to come and worship the image. The intent was to unify all peoples under one religion. It was a perverse kind of unity movement. This unity in worship wasn’t based upon theology, or truth but upon fear. Fear of the power of Babylon, fear of standing alone against the beast, fear of ridicule, persecution and death. We are told in Revelation 13 that in the last days the false prophet will set up an image of the antichrist and all will be commanded to worship it; one world religion, any who do not worship the image of the antichrist in those days will be killed. Daniel 3 is a foreshadowing of what is to come, that there will be an attempt to unify all people in the worship of an idol.

5. There was coercion.

There was an extreme price to pay for anyone who would not bow to Nebuchadnezzars image; they would be thrown into the fiery furnace, which would no doubt have been in view for all those arrayed before the image. In any system of false worship, or in any worldly, narcissistic form of religion there is always a price to pay for those who will not conform. In these religious systems you will always find multiple levels of manipulation, abuse and coercion. The base motivation behind the worship of Nebuchadnezzars image was ultimately fear, fear of what would happen if you didn’t.

You can use these 5 points to identify any form of false worship, and in particular false worship which pretends to be Christian.

How can I tell a false Christianity from true Christianity?

It will pervert God’s word - Just like Nebuchadnezzars image removed the silver, bronze and iron so will false teachers remove certain parts of God’s revelation. They will never preach through the Bible, instead they will only present certain parts of it over and over again, the parts that they prefer and have decided are the best and they ignore the rest of scripture. We get the word heresy from the Greek word αιρεω meaning to choose or to prefer, this is where just like Nebuchadnezzar, the minister chooses which part of God’s word they like and prefers it over all the rest of scripture. Then they decide to only preach that, that’s how heresy begins.

It will be man centred - You will find that the teaching is always focussed on you; 10 ways to be bolder, how to walk in healing power, becoming a prosperous person etc. God is simply a means to an end; He came so that you could be better, richer, stronger, more successful. At the centre of these organisations instead of finding a Biblical form of leadership, you will find one person who has set themselves up as a sort of king, who rules like a god just as Nebuchadnezzar did. What they say goes.

The worship will be carnal - As a musician obviously I love music, it is a gift from God. But it is extremely powerful and unless we are using our discernment as Christians we can allow our senses to be ensnared by beautiful music and we let go of our reasoning faculties. As they say; heresy is often sung long before it is preached. False worship will appeal to the senses, to the eyes, the ears and to the emotions and will make it easy for you to worship, with very little mention of sin or repentance and lots of repetition it can be almost hypnotic.

False unity promoted - There is a movement today in the church called ecumenism which is desperately seeking unity, seeking unity for the sake of unity. Now there’s nothing wrong with unity, it’s a good thing, we know that where brothers dwell in unity God commands the blessing. However, biblical unity, or at least the kind of unity that honours God is built upon truth or in other words, upon sound doctrine. In this unity movement, doctrine is always dumbed down or even despised since it is viewed as the enemy of unity. But Christ told us that truth does divide and that it should divide; division is not to be blamed upon truth but upon sinful hearts that refuse to submit to the truth. Unity must be pursued, yes, but not at the cost of sound doctrine.

There will be evidence of coercion, manipulation and control - Within false systems of worship there will always be a cost to not bowing down to the image they have set up. And there will be abusive systems of control which have been set up to keep people from challenging the leader. Healthy questioning and debate will not be welcomed.

Now back to Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego.

Here they are stood before the image, the herald stands up and commands the crowds to bow as soon as the music plays. As the orchestra starts up they look around them and all the great and good from right across the empire begin to bow their faces down to the earth. Great men, wise men, rich men, powerful and influential men all bowing down to the golden image. Surely they are intelligent enough to know that this image isn’t really a god? Don’t they see that this is nothing but a dead idol, just an elaborate power play by a ruthless king drunk on his own glory. Of course they do, of course they can see that. But they have families to feed, money to make, important jobs that they want to keep doing. Why throw all that away for the sake of a small, painless token of alleigience, it’s just a bow after all. Just one little bow and the king will let you get on with whatever you were doing before! He’ll even let you serve your own God, Shadrach Meschach and Abednego, He’ll let you keep your influential positions in his court, surely it wouldn’t be wise to throw that all away and risk hurt to your own people just to make a maverick stand against the king’s image? Don’t make it a hill to die on, don’t be so reckless.

I want you to imagine the pressure those three men would have been under to bow along with everyone else, imagine the thoughts and counter arguments that would have rushed through their heads at that moment. Imagine how alone and exposed they would have felt as everyone around them lay prostrate before the golden image.

Following Christ in these days is getting more and more like this, you feel exposed and alone, like a fish swimming upstream all the time. It’s not glamourous to make a stand for Christ, there is no public acclaim for doing so. For those who refuse to compromise these days are thrown into a furnace too, maybe not a literal one but a furnace of ridicule and derision.

We will be called things that we’re not and persecuted not for being followers of Christ but for being radical fundamentalists who do not know the true way of Christ which of course is love and tolerance. You’ll go down as the greatest bigots and haters of mankind in history. Down through history you have a wrong idea of martyrdom and persecution. You think that these men were persecuted and martyred for their sincere faith in Jesus Christ. That was the real reason but no one heard that publicly. They were martyred and they were persecuted as enemies of the state, as bigots, as narrow minded stupid people who had fallen for a rouse and could contribute nothing to society. Your suffering will not be noble. So your mind must be filled with the Word of God when all people persecute you and turn on you. - Paul Washer

It may not happen in our day but Revelation 13 promises that a day is indeed coming in the future where a new image will be set up and all those who do not worship it will be put to death. Would you have the courage to make a stand for Christ in that day? I wonder, could we make the stand that these three young Jewish men made? Not an angry, noisy protest with banners and slogans but a simple, quiet refusal to compromise in our worship to the Lord.

This strength of character in the face of tyranny didn’t come out of nowhere for these men. It began way back at the beginning of the book of Daniel with their refusal to compromise in the area of their diet, in the smaller things.

Luke 16:10 “10 “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.”

There are some who believe fancifully that they would be right there, standing shoulder to shoulder with Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego and go with them to the fiery furnace, when they can’t even make time for God on a Sunday. Let’s begin where Daniel and his three friends began by being consistently faithful in the little things, faithful in our prayer, in our worship, faithful in our participation in the local church. Then, by God’s grace we may be strengthened for greater tests ahead.

Pray