THOSE THREE BOYS........

Bible scholars actually engaged in a really painstaking mental ‘torture’ to calculate that it was about 600 years before our Lord and Master was born that King Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and took captive many of Israel’s finest citizens and ‘carted’ them to Babylonia. Among these were three young men from the tribe of Judah [four actually, but this article zeroes in on the three].

It is instructive to know that it was God who actually gave Nebuchadnezzar victory over Judah as a result of their outright rejection of His tenets, leading ungodly lives by majority of them etc… God actually permitted him to take some of the sacred items from His temple. Interestingly, Nebuchadnezzar, haven been permitted by the Supreme God to take these priceless items belonging to Him, he in turn placed it in the ‘treasure house’ of his ‘god’.

Now, why will God permit such a dastard act which brings His Name and image into disrepute? It is like going out of your way to give that last coin making that nice jingle next the bunch of keys in your pocket to that beggar on the corner of the street. And after walking a few meters with your shoulders and chest puffed up like Johnny Bravo’s, you cast one last look just before negotiating that curve at your beneficiary only to be crestfallen, chest-shrunk and shoulder-sagged seeing your ‘alms’ being given to that young man who was honking the horn on his bicycle trying to tell you rhythmically that he is a vendor of Fan Milk’s products. Being human, you might go like “Darn! Darn!! Darn!!! I wanted to get that too…but I didn’t….I gave it to that confidence trickster”. But God is not human! He did that with an ultimate aim in mind.

After being shortlisted to go through a special training program, and choosing to only feed on a diet of vegetables and water, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego [led by Daniel] came out tops. They excelled in wisdom and knowledge and found favor in the King Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes. The king put them into service among his most trusted wise men and counselors. When Daniel proved to be the only man capable of interpreting one of Nebuchadnezzar’s troubling dreams, the king placed them among the movers and shakers of Babylon at the request of the former.

As is the custom with the power-drunk in our societies who have little or no regard for the fact that it was God who has placed them there to serve, Nebuchadnezzar was no exception. Old dude conveniently forgot that he had in Daniel 2:46-47 stated that “truly, your God is the greatest of gods, the Lord over kings and a revealer of mysteries”.

He assumed the position of a deity when he built a ‘gargantuan’ (in the voice of Hon. Martin Amidu) golden image of himself and like a Mufti, issued a fatwa barring any inhabitant of Babylonia from worshipping any other god save his image. They, upon hearing some musical interlude, were to bow and worship the behemoth image of him.

In fact, such detailed was the fiat that it challenged any man born of a woman, and claimed to have guts to dare disobey the orders of the most powerful king at the time, and see who was ‘large and in charge’ of Babylonia. Failure to do as instructed would result in the culprit thrown in a furnace.

Nebuchadnezzar wouldn’t have known about their outright disobedience to his decree had it not been the ‘kokonsa’ by some of his ‘wise men’ [emphasis mine]. This is the interesting part; didn’t the fatwa state that ‘everyone’ bowed and worshipped the image upon hearing the tune? When one is engaged in ‘total worship’, one is oblivious of the goings-on around his immediate environment. Had the king been wise, he would have realized one of two things; either the ‘gossips’ themselves failed to bow to the image or they did not ‘worship’ the image as they ought to – the idiocy of King Nebuchadnezzar, if you will.

Ordinarily, when a higher authority appoints a fellow to a high position, wouldn’t it be prudent for that fellow to obey his every instruction? Certainly not these boys! Courageously, they stood before him as the king pressured the men to deny their God. They said, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. 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.” (Daniel 3:16-18). These boys deserved slaps on their faces with the kings ‘ahenema’ before any punishment was meted out to them. What guts!

Furious with pride and rage, and rightly so, Nebuchadnezzar ordered that they be thrown into the furnace after asking that it be heated to seven times its normal intensity. So intense was it that it killed the soldiers who had escorted them to the furnace. But as the king peered into the furnace, he marveled at what he saw; “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.” (Daniel 3:25)

When he called out to them to come out of the furnace, these boys emerged unharmed, with not even a strand of hair on their heads singed or the smell of smoke on their clothing. Needless to say, this made quite an impression on Nebuchadnezzar who declared, “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.” (Daniel 3:28). In verse 29, he even took this a notch higher when he decreed that anyone who spoke ill of the Most High “will be torn from limb to limb and their houses turned into heaps of rubble”.

Through God’s miraculous deliverance of these boys that day, the rest of the Israelites in captivity were given freedom to worship and protection from harm by the king’s decree. And the boys received a royal promotion as a result.

Points of Interest   

·         -The fiery furnace was not like the small household oven your mum uses in preparing that ‘Neat Fufu’ (shouldn’t I send the producers of this product an invoice for the free ad?). It was a huge chamber used to smelt minerals or bake bricks for construction. The death of the soldiers who escorted them proved that the heat of the fire was not survivable.

·         -Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were young when their faith was severely tested. Yet, even when death stared them in the face with a wide grin and eyes wide open, they would not compromise their beliefs.

·         -Who was the fourth man Nebuchadnezzar saw in the flames? Whether he was an angel or a manifestation of Christ, we cannot be certain, but that his appearance was miraculous and supernatural, we can have no doubt. God had provided a heavenly bodyguard to be with them during their intense time of need. When we stand for God and exercise our faith in him, He will, as Hebrews 13:5 puts it quite succinctly, never leave us nor forsake us.

·         -God’s miraculous intervention in a moment of crisis is not promised. If it were, believers would not need to exercise their faith. These boys trusted God and determined to be faithful without any guarantee of deliverance.

Question for Reflection

When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego courageously took their stand before the king, they didn’t know with certainty that God would deliver them. They had no assurance they would survive the flames. But they stood firm anyway. In the face of death, could you boldly declare as these three young men did: “Whether God rescues me or not, I will stand for Him? I will not compromise my faith, and I will not deny my Lord!”? Can you???