“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.“ (Daniel 3:28)
At our Easter Vigil service, celebrated on the evening of Holy Saturday, we Lutherans read several portions from the Old Testament Scriptures. The longest of these is Daniel chapter 3 which tells us the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace. The story is quite colorful and dramatic, though somewhat repetitive. We read it at the vigil of Easter because it not only demonstrates the perilous folly of worshipping idols, but is also of faith in the midst of adversity and God’s care for us.
The King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had erected a huge idol. It was his attempt to deliberately counteract God’s sovereign will as had been revealed to him in a dream which the prophet Daniel had interpreted for him (Daniel 2). The statue in his dream was a composite of gold, silver, bronze and iron with feet of clay mixed with iron. In the dream, the Lord God Almighty destroyed the statue, demonstrating the weak and temporary nature of every earthly Kingdom that has ever existed.
So Nebuchadnezzar built his statue entirely of gold to circumvent God’s will. With such a statue, he wanted to proclaim his invincible power which could never be matched or destroyed by anyone, not even God. In addition, he had the idol built in the same place where the Tower of Babel had been erected. The king was challenging God’s sovereign authority. Nebuchadnezzar wanted to unite all the peoples of the earth, people who would be subservient, loyal to, and totally dependent on him.
The three young Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego disobeyed Nebuchadnezzar. They would not worship the idol. They served God alone. They voiced their beliefs despite the opposition and the threat of death even though they did not know that God would indeed deliver them. It was more important for them to be faithful to Yahweh.
We Christians are called to stand up for our faith, for the truth of the gospel despite the temptation to bow down before the idols our society and culture worships. Now many may scoff at the idea that we in 21st Century America would worship anything as superficial and blatantly inane as a statue, a practice of the uneducated, ignorant, and superstitious. Yet we modern folk, even we who call ourselves Christian, have our own idols. Daily we are faced with temptations to bow down to these: money, fame, power, and pleasure among others, and any thing, institution, person, politician, or celebrity which we trust or value more than God, including our government and our self.
We believers are called as where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be faithful to the Lord, to our Christian faith even though we suffer loss, pain, persecution, and ridicule. The Lord is in control despite what we see, despite the circumstances that surround us. Those who serve idols will suffer the punishment that befell the servants of Nebuchadnezzar who threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fiery furnace. The servants of evil, the servants of Satan, will be consumed by the fires of hell while the servants of the Lord most high will be carried by Jesus through the darkness of death into the dazzling glory of eternal life because they have faith in the love, mercy, and grace of the most high God.