Don't Fear the Fiery Furnace

I only have a few minutes to write tonight while I wait for my kids to get out of youth group, so here’s what’s on my heart.

If you grew up in church or going to Sunday school, you’re probably pretty familiar with the story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but for those who aren’t, here’s a quick recap:

Basically these are three pretty studly guys in the book of Daniel. They’re living in exile in Babylon, but the king (Nebuchadnezzar) notices that they’re kind of the cream of the crop; they’re young, brilliant, handsome, and full of charisma. So he puts them to work in his service and gives them cool titles and responsibilities.

So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are doing their thing, worshiping the true God, and doing King Nebuchadnezzar’s bidding when the king gets this hairbrained idea to construct this stupid massive idol out of gold and to force the masses to worship it. Dumb, I know. Like it’s a statue. No one actually believes it’s a real god, but the king has all the power, so if he wants people to worship a piece of metal, then their job is to do as they’re told. (This is pretty much the original story of the Emperor’s New Clothes; there’s nothing new under the sun. Power corrupts, people fawn, empires, collapse because of peoples’ collective cowardice and insanity, and truth emerges victorious eventually, but often at great cost.) Anyway, I digress.

So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, being righteous dudes with brains in their heads are like, “Nah. That’s not the true God; we aren’t going to bow down to it; that’s dumb.” So they don’t. And the snitches get involved and rat them out and tell the egomaniac of a king, and of course he’s furious. So he summons the trio to a meeting and basically gives them an ultimatum: when the music plays, they are to bow. If they refuse, they can expect to be thrown into this massive fiery furnace that, on average, scholars guess was heated to about 1800F degrees. That’s hot.

But like I said, these guys were studly. They weren’t suffering from identity issues like a lot of today’s Gen Z individuals. They knew who and whose they were, and they said, “No.” They feared the true God more than the king, a fact which made Nebuchadnezzar really, really angry. So he told his minions to multiply the furnace’s heat to seven times its original temperature. Now I have no idea how this is accomplished. At this point we’re talking about something similar to the temperature of the sun, but in any case, the point is he was really mad and that there’s no surviving temperatures that hot.

Anyway, to make a long story short, the king tied up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and threw them into the fire to make a spectacle of their rebellion and defiance. But the craziest thing happened; they didn’t burn. When Nebuchadnezzar looked into the furnace, he was astonished to see them walking around up in there accompanied by a fourth man. (I’m not clear on who this fourth man was— whether it was Jesus or an angel, the point is that God intervened on their behalf. The king, unable to dismiss what his eyes had seen, had the good sense to knock it off and transfer faith from his stupid statue to the real God.

And here’s the coolest part of the story: literally the only things that burned were the ropes that had bound these men.

A lot of my work, and therefore my blogs, can be pretty heavy. But I recently rediscovered this story, and I found it so encouraging, so I wanted to interrupt my “Woe unto thee” blog circuit to plant a few seeds of hope.

Times today aren’t all that different to the way things were back then. We still have corrupt authority making wicked, and quite frankly, delusional demands of their subjects. Defiance is still severely punished on a public stage. But integrity and courage still win the day, even if we can’t see the happy ending in the middle of the storm.

What I love about the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is that it’s actually the fire that ends up liberating them. It’s the fire that frees them from the ropes that bind them. When the enemy planned to harm them, God used to set them free.

I’ve seen this play out in my own life. I was a scared, lonely single mom when I got fired for saying no to men in women’s locker rooms. When I lost my job, I thought my career was over. Everything I had worked so hard to achieve was gone. But I didn’t know that God would use that hardship to catapult me forward into my true calling.

Before I got fired, I published articles on the YMCA blog page, and the furthest my writing ever reached was a company newsletter. Now, I’ve been published in nationally circulated newspapers, op-eds, and magazines.

Before I got fired, I spoke at YMCA staff events and wrote speeches for other important people. Now I’ve spoken all over the country, at Senate hearings, in front of the DOE, and in activist workshops all over the place, only now I get to talk about things that I’m actually super passionate about.

I’m not tooting my own horn. God opened these doors for me, and I’m really grateful for it. But it was the fire of trial that burned the ropes of the limitations I had put on my own dreams and ambitions.

Anyway, I hope this encourages someone somewhere tonight. God is faithful to reward obedience. Do the right thing. Don’t fear the fire. Hold the line steady, and wait and see what the Lord will do.