Daniel 3:17-18

Daniel 3:17

Let us take three points in the history of these three young men.

I. Their resolution. They were entirely in the dark as to whether God would really come down, as it were, and interfere to save them from suffering or not, yet this made no difference in their resolution. They said, "God will deliver us; but if notsupposing He does notdeliver us we will not serve thy gods for all that." On the one side right, on the other enjoyment. Right shadowed with pain; enjoyment coloured with sin. Their answer was free and decisive, and we glory in it this day. And we ought not to leave out of sight something which makes this answer more remarkable still. Many a martyr has, in the words of a great martyr of old, stood firm, because the eye of faith enabled him to see clearly what was behind a flashing sword. He said, "Who would not labour to reach that brightness, to become the friend of God, and enter in a moment the joy of Christ?" We must remember that these Jews could not speak such a language, for these latter truths had not yet been revealed. If there was a deep conviction of the life to come, it was still a dim one at any rate they said nothing of the kind to Nebuchadnezzar. They neither revealed any such hope, nor sustained themselves by it. All they said was that they had cast in their lot with their own God, and the cause of God; and should that cause be bound up with the utmost sacrifice of self, they would die in pain if need were. "We will not serve thy gods." If life is falsehood, let me not live. If the truth is death, then let me die somewhere in God's world; some day in God's time the great contradiction will be washed out.

II. Their endurance. To them all seemed as if the second alternative were coming, and that He would not deliver. As the flames leap out, as they are hurried forward by the mightiest men in the army, as the fierce heat is too much even for the executioners, they are, as it were, hurled forward with such a force, that there is no halting, and they fall bound, as into some burning crater.

III. Their deliverance. In a moment no more three men, bound, weltering in flames; four men, loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and the form of the fourth as of the Son of God. How nobly and beautifully was it imagined that the praises they then sang to Him were such as tradition tells us that men wrapped and bathed in the most powerful natural force, and finding it powerless upon them, called on all the creatures of God by them to "Bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever."

Archbishop Benson, Boy Life: Sundays in Wellington College,p. 3.