Our scripture reading this morning comes from Daniel chapter 3, verses 1 to 30. Daniel chapter 3. And I'll be reading from the English Standard Version, except in verse 27, I'll furnish a different translation than it has. hear the word of God written. King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits and its breadth 6 cubits. He set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. Then King Nebuchadnezzar sent together 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, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces gathered for the dedication of the image 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 hornpipe, lyre, trogon, 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. 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 worshipped 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, trident, 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've 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. 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, dragon, 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 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. 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're 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. and 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 him this way. Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon. The governments and politicians have the tendency periodically to dabble in religion and dangerously so. It was in the late 1930s in the heyday of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union when there was a provincial meeting and Stalin's name was mentioned and it brought on a standing ovation. That, of course, brought on a standing dilemma, because how does the standing ovation finish? Well, no one dared be the first to sit down, but finally one elderly gentleman simply could not stand any longer and sat down. His name was taken. He was arrested the next day. He had failed to worship the idol long enough. Or you come in the 20th of April 1938 to Buchenwald work camp or concentration camp. Where the prisoners are told that in honor of the Fuhrer's 49th birthday, they are at a given signal to rip off their berets and do venerate and do homage to the Nazi swastika flag. At the given signal, all the headgear gets ripped off and so on, except for one man, Pastor Paul Schneider. He was taken in and given 25 lashes with the oxide whip. That was just the first of a number of oxide treatments because he had failed to worship the idol. Nebuchadnezzar, the premier king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the 600s to the 500s BC, dabbled in religion, and dangerously so, and that's why we have this story in Daniel chapter 3, of saints in the hands of the living God, of the saving God. It's in the book of Daniel, which of course is a manual for the suffering church. We don't know, perhaps, exactly the significance of this golden image that Nebuchadnezzar made, but we don't need to know all the ins and outs of it. If you look at verses 12 and 14 and 18, it's clear that what was required in this homage was that it required acknowledgment of Babylon's gods, and it also required worship of this image, whatever it represented, whether Nebuchadnezzar's deified Babylon or whatever. The writer is telling us this story, though, with a definite purpose, because the writer wants you to make the same response as Daniel's three friends made. He wants you to respond to this scriptural account by saying, I will believe and obey the first commandment, even if it kills me, and it may. That's what he wants to put before you. That's the response he wants. And he brings three themes before you. He brings the theme of pressure and obedience and fellowship. I want you to look at as we walk through those scenes as he places them before us. First of all, he speaks to us of pressure in verses 1 to 15. And he especially underscores the power of pressure. Now, the dimensions of this image would be 90 feet high by 9 feet wide. Now, some scholars think that in the height, there must have been calculated some kind of significant pedestal of some sort, else that thing must have been quite tipsy, unless they were into guy wires and that sort of thing. That's neither here nor there for our concerns, but this was probably a loyalty ceremony taking the civil service of the satraps and the highest officials on down to the lowest postal clerks and so on, and require them to engage in an act of religio-political homage that would cement their allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar and his regime. It's just that it was overloaded for Israelites. with all sorts of paganism. And so you have this, and of course it's predicated on the assumption that everyone's a pluralist. It wasn't that Nebuchadnezzar was requiring that you had to leave your religion or your preferred superstition behind. No, you could go back to it. All you had to do was engage in this one act of obeisance and worship, and you could go back to your private religion or your faith of choice, etc. There were no problem with that unless, of course, you were a monotheistic Israelite. Now, he speaks in verses 1 to 15. The writer records this episode and especially underscores the pressure of it that these men were under. And I think it's helpful if we try to analyze the pressure just a little bit so we can appreciate it. For one thing, there's the pressure that comes from authority. You notice in the first seven verses of our chapter Six times the writer refers to Nebuchadnezzar the king. I know some translations have King Nebuchadnezzar, but the new American standard is on target here by translating more literally, Nebuchadnezzar the king. Six times in the first seven verses and only twice in the rest of the narrative. So there is just the whole weight of Nebuchadnezzar's authority behind this. And then, of course, there's the pressure of conformity that comes, isn't it? You see that in, say, verses 4 to 7, as they were cued as to how they were to act as the whole civil service corps is there before the image. The praise band is going to play. You get your nose in the sand, you get your backside in the air, and you enjoy job security. That's what's going to happen. And when you see a whole plane full of flattened worshipers, there's a tremendous bit of pressure and power behind that. It's sort of like the situation in the 1950s when the Philadelphia Phillies were once playing the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Granny Hamner of the Phillies socked a hit into the outfield, and Duke Snyder, the Dodger center fielder, tried to field it as fast as he could because he thought Granny Hamner might try to stretch the hit into a double. Indeed, he did try that. And so Snyder threw it into Pee Wee Reese, the shortstop covering second base. Well, you know how baseball operates. The ump is there and he says, goes this way if it's safe, right? And in the old days anyway, he gave the thumb if it was out. That's pretty simple. So Granny Henry slides into second base, Pee Wee Reese puts the tag on him and so on. And Beans Riordan, the umpire says, safe. Pee Wee Reese said, Beans, do you know what you just did? And like a kid with his hand caught in a cookie jar, he said, yeah, I know. So Granny Hammer's standing there on second base, and he wants to know whether he's safe or out, and so on. And so Beans explains. He said, well, there are three of us right here who heard me call you safe. But there are 35,000 Brooklyn fans who saw me call you out. Granny Hamner says, so what am I? He says you're out. That's not rocket science. You don't go against that many Brooklyn Dodger fans. There's that power of pressure, and that's what they were under here. And then that pressure was aggravated in this power of conformity by a bit of malice. You see it in verses 8 to 12, because there were some Chaldeans, whether they were native Chaldeans or whether they were the professional astrologers, it doesn't really matter here. But they seemed to be upset because Nebuchadnezzar had outsourced some government jobs, very high echelon government jobs, to these Judean exiles. And they were upset about it and so they went with malice to King Nebuchadnezzar and they said, you know, there are certain Jews, and you spit when you say those words, that defy you. You pay no attention to what you have decreed. And so that simply adds to the pressure. And then, of course, there's the pressure of intimidation, verses 13 to 15. Nothing intimidates like intimidation. And when Nebuchadnezzar hears that these three men have defied him, and perhaps because they were in the home province of Babylon, it was a special embarrassment to Nebuchadnezzar that they refused to worship his image. In any case, he goes into a towering rage. and you must sense then the power of pressure that comes upon these men." Now we have to ask ourselves, but is there anything that neuters the pressure? You can understand the pressure. You can understand where it comes from. You can understand perhaps its power and so on, but is there anything that can counteract that? And I think the writer gives us that. I won't go into all of it for we haven't time. I simply will draw your attention to the vicious verbs he uses. whether it's the writer himself or whether it's the recorded words of say some of the characters like Nebuchadnezzar. You notice that in verses 1 and 15 he refers to the image Nebuchadnezzar had made, or else Nebuchadnezzar himself does it, an image that was made. Now you know if you're an Israelite and you have a smattering of knowledge of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, you think that's the height of theological asininity, that you should worship something that is made. You see the dig that the writer's putting in there by recording that? It gets worse, though, because it's as if he takes up a literary machine gun and starts to shoot it, because there's an Aramaic verb translated in the ESV, set up, that occurs nine times in the narrative. You can pull it out on your own, but it's from verse 1 to verse 18, you'll find it occurring nine times. the verb set up, the image that Nebuchadnezzar set up. They were to worship the image that he set up. He set it up. He set it up. Now, if you take your orange highlighter, which is always a little more graphic than a yellow one and so on, and you take your orange highlighter and you go over those uses of set up in your text, and then you go back after you've colored it up, and you read over those instances, it begins to seem like a cumulative kind of mockery. He set it up. He set it up. He said worship something that was set up. The writer is talking our own Anglo language, isn't he? He's talking about a set up job. You get the joke? He's dipping his pen in sarcasm and satire. He's mocking this. And this is what gives you a handle on how to resist and counter the pressure. You see, it doesn't take the trembling, perhaps, out of the situation, but it takes the truth out of it. The writer is saying that image is no more divine than your knee replacement. There's no truth in it. Don't fear it. That's what he is saying. And he does that by mocking the whole thing. It's the sort of thing that occurred, or at least I think it is an analogy for it, when Adolf Hitler went to Italy in 1938. He was trying to cement an alliance with Mussolini, and Mussolini entertained him royally. And he subjected Hitler to certain displays of, quote, Italian military might and all of that. But the Italian people were kind of sullen. They didn't really take to the German dictator. In fact, there were four hours that Hitler spent in Florence that must have been terribly embarrassing for him because he discovered that the cheers that were rending the air were fictitious. They were the crowd effects and the sound effects from an Italian movie that was being played from amplifiers in open windows. Strange isn't it that you can have immense power and real emptiness side-by-side. That's what the writer is trying to tell you here. Can you resist this kind of pressure? He's implying that you can if you hear the mockery of heaven. it will strengthen you to defy the tyrants of earth. That's the power of pressure. But secondly, he wants you to see his theme of obedience. In verses 16 to 18, and he especially underscores the obstinacy of obedience. Now, as you look there, you notice that these three friends of Daniel's are going to be given a second chance, as it were. But they essentially, in verses 16 to 18, say to Nebuchadnezzar, oh, king, you just as well save your orchestra fee. Don't even mess with it. It's not worth your time. You notice their response. Even though there could have been all sorts of considerations entering in, they could have said, well, you know, we really need to take seriously this second opportunity the king has given us. If we don't keep our jobs, who is going to look out for the interests of the Jewish exiles here in Babylon? We at least can serve as a kind of a buffer. We can look out for their interests if we're in this high echelon job in the bureaucracy. But if we should lose our job, we lose our lives, et cetera, what will happen to the Lord's people here? But that didn't enter in. I suppose they could have said also, well you know, King Nebuchadnezzar could have fried us right away. He could have just chucked us into that furnace and that would have been the end of it. Why is he giving us a second opportunity? We probably shouldn't just spit in his eye and defy him again, should we? but that didn't enter into it. And I suppose they could have said, as sometimes the politicians today would, well, we have to look at the personal, and we have to look at the official. Personally, I'm opposed. This goes against my personal faith, and my personal belief is still in the Lord as the only God, et cetera. But sometimes, in an official capacity, in a government job, You have to, in your official capacity, do something that you actually cannot support in terms of your private conviction. But if I look upon it as just an empty ritual, perhaps I can go through. No, there was none of that. No, no, they just spoke to Nebuchadnezzar in terms of the ability and of the pleasure of God. Do you see what they say there? They say, If our God exists, verse 17, and they had no doubt that he did, but if our God exists, whom we are serving, he is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace. So they speak of a power and ability of God. He is able to deliver us. But then notice also that they speak of the pleasure of God, verse 18, but if not. We don't know what God will do. This is God's, sometimes we call it His circumstantial will, what God does in certain circumstances. We don't know, they say. We don't write His script for Him. We may become three puddles of carbon. We don't know what God's going to do. It's not in our hands. We don't know His pleasure. And then you notice that they say, nevertheless, we do know all the will of God that we really need to know. The last of verse 18. Be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you've set up." What are they saying there? They're saying, though we don't know God's circumstantial will, we do know God's revealed will. We have it in Exodus 20, verse 3, Thornwell lectured this morning, you shall have no other gods beside me. So God has given us his revealed will. We don't know what his pleasure is in the circumstances. but we know what He wants of us, and that's all that matters. Do you see what faith does? Faith knows the power of God, verse 17. Faith guards the freedom of God, verse 18, but if not, we don't know what He'll do. And faith holds to the truth of God in the last of verse 18, we will not worship serve your gods or worship the image you have set up. And you know, there are some people who would be upset with that. Some Christians today would say, oh, you shouldn't have done that in verse 18 when you say, but if not, that sends negative vibes into faith, shouldn't do that, no, no. Because you see, there are some Christians who think that every Christian should have a spring in his step and a smile on his face, a song in his heart and a swagger in his hips. that every Christian ought to have a certain kind of cockiness about him. There are some people who would rather rewrite the story if they could, I suppose. They would say, now Nebuchadnezzar, we have a little plan here called a positive confession, and we're going to engage in that. It means that what we agree for God to do, God has to do, because we really, really believe it. And so Nebuchadnezzar, we're going to call down deliverance. We're going to bind the fire. Oh please, these three friends didn't have a God like that. God was not their errand boy. No, no, they did not prescribe God's course. They simply held to God's commandments. Now you notice that they avoided the temptation that could easily have come. The temptation is in this kind of a situation, isn't it, to think that our security is what matters. That wasn't their focus. Their focus was on their worship, not on their safety, but on their obedience. That's all that mattered. Jeffrey Thomas, in his exposition of Daniel 3, says sometimes you come down to points like this and you have to see what really matters. And you have to see, as he said, sometimes we don't have to be rich, for example. We don't have to marry. We don't have to become parents. We don't have to live, but we have to obey. And they knew that. And so there is this obstinacy of obedience. Now there are these three words that they place up against burning, fiery furnace. But, if. It was Jean Cadier, the French reform scholar, who once spoke of a student who came up to him after a lecture and said to him that he had been converted from reading Calvin's Institutes. And the prof wanted to know what message in particular had brought this transformation about. And the student said, well, I learned from reading Calvin that all my worries about health and about the uncertain future which had hitherto dominated my life were without much importance and that the only thing that counted were obedience to the will of God and a care for His glory. Oh yes, that's where the three friends come down. And so they say to Nebuchadnezzar, but if not, It's the obstinacy of obedience to which God's people who hold the first commandment are called. Now then thirdly, he speaks to us of his theme of fellowship, and that's in verses 19 to 30. We could call it what he really underscores are the flames of fellowship. You notice in that section, if you just briefly look at your text, verses 19 to 23 really could be summarized by the term committal, like committal to the grave or something like that. Well, this is committal to the burning fiery furnace. And then you notice that verses 24 and 25 can be summarized by the idea of surprise. We'll come back to that. And then you notice in verses 26 and 27 that there's an idea of witness because all the bureaucrats that are there watching this need to testify and witness that there's been no harm at all on these three men. And so there is this weighing of the evidence for purposes of testimony. And then in verses 28 to 29, there's the confession of Nebuchadnezzar when he finally says there's no other God who is able to rescue in this way. I want to take you back to verses 24 and especially 25. You remember that Nebuchadnezzar there, as he watches this whole scene, has to check to see if his contacts are in. Because he said, didn't we put three men in that fire bound and so on? And like all good lackeys, they always say, yes, you're right, O king. And he says, but I see four men. It's a matter of math. And then there's a matter of freedom. They are unbound, walking in the midst of the fire. And then there's a matter of security. They're not hurt. And then there's a matter of identity. And the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods. Now Nebuchadnezzar says down in verse 28 that their god has sent his angel and so on. When Nebuchadnezzar says the fourth is like the appearance of a son of the gods, he means like an angelic or a supernatural being. Now you can't let a polytheist like Nebuchadnezzar determine your theology and so on, but what is he talking about here with this fourth man and his identity? What are we to make of it? Could this be an appearance of the Christ to his people in their need before his actual enfleshment in history? I think it could be. I think it is. Though I'm not sure I can prove it. point-blank from this text. We might just call him the fourth man, right? But isn't this so like our Lord? You see what he did? He didn't keep them out of the fire, did he? But he found them in the middle of the fire and walked with them in it. Were they flames? Yes, they were, but they were flames of fellowship. They were not left alone. And isn't that the way Christ does with us? He doesn't keep you from the loneliness, but he comes to you in the loneliness and walks with you in it. He doesn't keep you from the betrayal. But He finds you in the betrayal and goes with you through it. He doesn't prevent the loss, but He comes to you in the loss and the fourth man walks with you through that loss. It reminds me here of that passage in the last of Mark chapter 6 where Jesus walks on the sea. I can't expound that very fully, but you know the fun is often made of that passage and so on, primarily I think because they don't understand the Old Testament background of it. But in any case, you remember Jesus was on the mountain praying. His disciples were in the Sea of Galilee fighting a headwind and so on. And he's there on the mountain, there on the sea. What help can he be? But then it says that in the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea. Now, holding aside for some other difficulties, what would early Christians, when the apostles or other preachers of the gospel would preach that story and that passage and that incident to early believers, what would they assume and what would they infer from that? Would they not infer from that that that taught them that there was no barrier that could keep their Savior from coming to his disciples in their need. So he was on the mountain and they were on the sea. He walks on the sea. There's nothing that can keep him from coming to his people in their need. And isn't that what's in Daniel 3? That the fourth man comes and walks with his servants. And isn't that what some of you have found? That He doesn't keep you out of the operating room, but the fourth man shows up when you're there. And He doesn't necessarily keep you out of the funeral parlor, but Christ finds you there. stands beside you, and he trudges home with you to the empty house. And the fourth man finds you in your sorrow and walks with you in it." Now, this passage, this furnace story, tells of deliverance, but it is about worship. And Daniel 3 means to tell me and you that the only matter that matters is that I keep the first commandment even if it kills me. now that we live in post empty tomb time we have all the more reason to be faithful was Oz Guinness that told once of situation in the former Soviet Union when the KGB sent out some some agents on a Sunday morning to church it's and trying to, part of their effort to wipe out religious belief. And one such agent was struck by the deep devotion of an older woman who was kissing the feet of a life-sized carving of Christ on the cross. And so he went up to her and he said, babushka, grandmother, Are you also prepared to kiss the feet of the beloved General Secretary of our great Communist Party?" Why, of course, she shot back, but only if you crucify him first. So we can meet now those three words, burning, fiery, furnace. with three of our own. Hold rugged cross. And if the fourth man has gone that far for us, we dare not turn away from him." I'd like to lead you in prayer now. with an excerpt from John Calvin's prayer when he finished his exposition of Daniel 3. Let us pray. Grant, Almighty God, that you would arm us with the unconquerable power of the Spirit, that we may not yield to any terrors or threats of men, but stand fast in the reverence of your name right to the end. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.