Daniel 3—the whole chapter, please!

As we relearn each and every Easter, God does his finest work in the tightest spaces.  Please keep that empty tomb in mind as we work our way through this Shelter series.  Easter is not a once-and-done date on a calendar; death-and-resurrection is how God always goes about his work  Be on the lookout for ways in which each of our Shelter Scriptures might be a kind of proto-Easter story.

This week we’re listening to one of the best-known stories in all of Scripture, the story of the fiery furnace.  There are many good reasons why this story consistently makes the list of Top Ten Bible stories, so be sure to read through it this week.

The backstory (see Daniel 1): It’s around 600 BC.  Despite years of prophetic warnings, the ultimate disaster has come upon God’s people: exile.  Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has conquered wide swaths of the ancient Near East, including the Holy Land.  He sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and carried off many of the surviving “best and brightest” of the Jews to Babylon.

Included in this group of POWs/exiles are four young men: Daniel and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah.  It appears they are still quite young, maybe teenagers. There is no mention of their parents or relatives; except for one another, they are alone. They don’t speak the language, they are completely unfamiliar with the culture and customs, and they have been conquered.  Babylon is a large and magnificent city, but for these young men, it’s a tight spot.

Exile is both a kind of shelter (they escaped death) and a kind of tight space.  The four friends are stripped of their names and given new names, based on the names of the Babylonian gods: Belteshazzar (Daniel), and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.  

The King is looking for officials who can help him administer his vast and growing empire, so the boys enter the “university of Babylon,” where they are schooled in “the language and literature of the Babylonians.”  Interestingly, the young men excel at their training; the King himself declares them “ten times better” than their Babylonian fellow-students—they’re “top of the class.” They enter the King’s service, becoming Babylonian bureaucrats.  

The service of the King is both a shelter (the other options would have been slavery or death) and a kind of prison.  Nebuchadnezzar is vain, power-hungry, insecure and at times insane, a terrible combination in a leader. In addition to all the other shrines and idols that dot the Babylonian landscape, the King builds an enormous statue (Ninety feet high!  Covered in gold!) and orders everyone, at the appointed signal, to bow down in worship. The alternative is the furnace.

The signal is given, everyone is flat on their faces—except for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who remain upright.

Upright.  They no longer have their Torah scrolls, but it doesn’t matter: they have God’s Word by heart, including the First and Second Commandments: no other gods besides the LORD, do not make or worship idols. The King can throw them into the furnace, but they are the only ones who can throw themselves down in front of a foolish idol.

Tight spots have a wonderful way of revealing our hearts’ true allegiances.  Will the boys bow or be burned? Will they remain upright and unbowed, or find themselves flattened alongside everyone else?

How is the pandemic pressuring you to “bow down”?  What might “upright” look in your life these days—where is God calling you to stand up in some way?