The Parish Magazine June 2023

PARISH NOTICEBOARD — 6
Standing firm in faith
About 600 years before Christ, King Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon swept south with his army, overran Judah and
conquered Jerusalem. He sought out the noblest of Jewish
youths to take to Babylon where, for three years they were
taught to think and act like Babylonians, but four of them
stood firm in their faith.
The aim was to make wise courtiers out of the captives who
would then faithfully serve the king so their names were
changed to honour the pagan Babylonian gods — their
Jewish names honoured God. One of their stories is told in the
Old Testament Book of Daniel.
Daniel and his three friends names were changed to
Belteshazzer and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. However,
they stood fast to their faith in God while those around them
wavered.
SOMETHING REMARKABLE!
Things came to a head when Nebuchadnezzar built a huge
golden 90 foot high idol and assembled his musicians. When
they played, everyone had to lie down and worship the idol.
If you refused you would be thrown into a fiery furnace and
burnt to death.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego would have nothing to
do with worshipping a pagan idol — thou shalt have no other
gods — so into the furnace they were thrown.
The furnace was stoked so hot that the soldiers escorting
them died from the heat as they approach it.
Then something remarkable happened, a fourth person
appears in the fire and saves them from even being scorched.
Nebuchadnezzar calls the fourth man an angel of God.
This was not the first time an angel of the Lord, or God,
appeared in fire, it happened to Moses when God first called
him, it happened during the wanderings in the desert when
the Israelites were at night guided by God in a pillar of fire,
and when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples on the day
of Pentecost.
We are not told who the fourth person was, and that is not
important. What is important is that God was with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednigo in a powerfully visible way. It was by
God’s hand they were led out of the fire, and it was God that
Nebuchadnezzar recognised and to whom he decreed that
everyone should give glory to.
DIGGING DEEPER
As Christians we believe that God’s hand that will lead
us is Jesus, for he is the way, the truth and the life. And this
is one of the reasons why some have felt it necessary to dig
deeper into who the fourth person in the furnace was to show
that he was Jesus. Some of their arguments make sense. For
example, one link to Jesus is said to be in Paul’s second letter
to the Thessalonians when he writes: The Lord Jesus shall
be revealed from Heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire
taking vengeance on those who know not God, and who obey not
the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. These shall be punished with
everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the
glory of his power.
Whether it convinces you or not, there is an undeniable
similarity with story of the fiery furnace in Daniel. Jesus who
comes with fire destroys the wicked but does no harm to the
The Parish Magazine - June 2023 17
Mosaic of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in a fiery furnace in
Westminster Cathedral Jozef Sedmak, dreamstime.com
righteous writes Paul, while Daniel says the fire killed the
soldiers but not Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
This is also is the point of the parable of the weeds that
Jesus told. On the last day, the unrighteous will be weeded out and
thrown in the fiery furnace while the righteous will shine like the
sun in the kingdom of their Father, said Jesus.
SURROUNDED BY EVIL
So what relevance to us does a story from 2,600 years ago
about God leading three people to safety and of one at some
unknown time in the future when Jesus returns to finally
rid the world of evil? Well, they are, of course, both relevant.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego not only lived in a world
surrounded by paganism but their captors were trying to
indoctrinate them into their ways of evil. The parable of the
weeds paints the same picture in the future, where a good crop
is spoilt by evil seeds being sown among the good.
Today the good in the world that God created for us is being
nibbled away by the evil that Jesus promises to deal with at
the end of time. Because there is so much of it everywhere,
and because so many people around us accept it as the norm,
it can often be easier for us to comply with such evil in the
world than to stand firm against it. It’s often easy for us to bow
down and accept it, just as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
were expected to do. But surely however hard it may be for us
to stand firm in our faith it can’t be as hard as it was for those
three who were prepared to face the fiery furnace rather than
disobey God.
And as God provided someone to lead Shadrach, Meshach
and Abednego to safety, he will do the same for us if we stand
firm in our faith. In fact, the good news is that he has already
provided not one, but two people, for us —Jesus who is the
hand that leads us to an everlasting life with God the Father,
and his Holy Spirit who guides and comforts us and gives us
the strength and the courage to reach out and grasp the hand
that Jesus is holding out for us. For this we should constantly
be thanking God. Amen.