King Nebuchadnezzar went on a three-phase journey to faith. In Part One I wrote about his dream in Daniel 2. This time I will look at the second episode: the story of the fiery furnace in Daniel 3.
Below is the chart I am using to look at these things. The “who” is who in the story is representing God, the “what” is what the idol is, and the “where” is where the king ends up in his faith. As you can see, this time the second person of the Trinity is in focus. In a fourth bonus post I will explain what is going on in the “Image of God” column.
| Neb’s Story | God | Who | What | Where | Image of God | Chapter |
| Part 1 | Father | Daniel | Dream | Belief in the God of Heaven | Physical | Daniel 2 |
| Part 2 | Son | Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego | Golden Image | Belief in the Angel of God | Social | Daniel 3 |
| Part 3 | Holy Spirit | Nebuchadnezzar & Daniel | Self | Belief in the Most High | Ethical | Daniel 4 |
Daniel 3: Nebuchadnezzar’s Golden Image
Who
The representatives of God in this chapter are the three Jews: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. They stand among “the satraps, the administrators, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces” (verse 2) who the king had called to worship the image he’d made.
The first interesting thing to notice is who is not mentioned: Daniel. Why isn’t he accused along with his three friends? I think a very possible answer is that because of his promotion at the end of Daniel 2 where he was made ruler over the whole province of Babylon, that he was not required to worship the image. As second in command to Nebuchadnezzar, he, like Nebuchadnezzar, was above the idol. As mentioned in Part 1, Daniel was now the king’s “father,” and you don’t tell your father what to bow down to.
But this is not the case with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. They are the king’s servants and they do have to do what he tells them to do. And of course, they don’t. Instead, they withstand him to his face.
I will again use the following two trinitarian templates to look closer at this “who” question. The middle features pertain to the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, in these lists.
Human Relationships: Father, Brother, Friend
Office: Priest, King, Prophet
The men’s defiance sends the king into a rage twice. (verse 13, 19). I want to suggest that rage is an aspect of both brothers and kings, but I will focus on kings here. Psalm 2 is perhaps our best look at the rage of a just king. “I have set my king on my holy hill of Zion…Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.” Kings, in contrast to priests, are to burn with with indignation at evil and demolish it. In Part 1 when Nebuchadnezzar was killing wise men for not knowing his dream it was not done in a fit of rage, but was much more systematic, more like a priest working at the temple. But a king does not chop up the meat and put it on the altar for God’s fire to consume. The king is God’s fire, hot zeal for justice. Nebuchadnezzar was not wrong for being enraged. That was what a good king does. His problem was what he was enraged about.
In the Trinity, it is Jesus who rages. “I have come to bring fire on earth, and how I wish it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49). Also, “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and those who practice lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father” (Matthew 13:41-43).
How about the “brother” aspect? Jesus Christ is the face of God. (Col. 1:15, 2 Cor. 4:6). And because he is the face or image of God, he is our brother. “For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the firstborn of many brethren.” A clue that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego are the king’s “brothers” is that when he hears their decision not to bow to his idol, “the expression on his face changed toward them” (verse 19). I wrote a paper in grad school about how Dostoevsky, in bibilical fashion, uses facial imagery all over in The Brothers Karamazov to illustrate the competition. When you are face to face with someone, you are not looking up to them like to a father, and you are not looking at the same thing with them like a friend. No, you are wrastlin’ with them, face to face, like a brother. The term “face” appears five times in Genesis 32-33 where Jacob faces both his brother Esau, and also the Angel of the Lord who he wrestles against. Again, Daniel is not mentioned in the fiery furnace story because he is Nebuchadnezzar’s “father”, and in the previous chapter the king “fell on his face, prostrate before Daniel” (verse 46). They are therefore no longer “facing” each other. But in Daniel 3 the king and his three “brothers” are in a faceoff.
In this story of the fiery furnace, we see the face of Nebuchadnezzar against his brothers. By facing him back, they are the true images of God as they burn from within with their Heavenly King whose face shines like the sun (Matthew 17:2, Revelation 1:16).
What
What is the idol, the false image, in Daniel 3?
The answer is easy, of course it is the sixty-foot image the king made for everyone to worship. No one knows exactly what it was, but we are told it was all gold. I suspect it was either an all-gold version of the metal man from the dream, or else a golden version of the mountain which the statue-destroying stone in the dream turned into. If the latter is the case, it was most likely an obelisk, as James Jordan tells us obelisks and pyramids were stylized mountains. My guess, however, based on comparisons between 2:31 and 3:25 which I will mention later, is that the image was of the metal man in the dream.
In either case, what Nebuchadnezzar is probably doing is taking what God showed him about the dream and putting it in a box. Now that he knew something of the future, he wanted to alter it so that it all would be gold, the metal of Babylon in the dream. But in the dream, only the head of the image is gold, not the whole thing, and certainly not the mountain that replaced it. The number six in the dimensions (verse 1) is obviously a reference to both Goliath’s height and Solomon’s gold imports. Both are the number of man, as we see in the mark of the beast in Revelation. And when you have men divided from their divine glory, you have animals. Nebuchadnezzar’s beastly heart will not be exposed until the next chapter, but here we see the number of it, the image of it, as indicated by its dimensions.
James Jordan explains that the ritual of worship of this golden image is like temple worship. All of the musical instruments gathered reminds us of the priestly musicians instituted by King David. This is a worship service.
Again there are human sacrifices for the idol, those who won’t bow to it and burned alive. There is no mention of being cut into pieces like in Daniel 2, but it does say they are bound, which is what is done to a sacrifice.
In Daniel 2, the uninterpreted dream was the king’s idol, the false image. But the interpretation made it a true image because it was revealed to be an image given by the God of Heaven regarding the future. So what is the true image in Daniel 3 of which the statue is but a counterfeit?
“Look! I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (verse 25). The word for “form” means appearance, the same word used to describe the image in the dream in Daniel 2 whose “form was awesome” (verse 31). The fourth man in the fiery furnace was the one who really looked like the glorious image the king was trying to reproduce, not the sixty foot golden statue.
The Angel of the Lord himself is in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego (verse 28). And he is not golden. He is enflamed!
Where
What new insight does the king have at the end of this story? Where does his faith land?
As mentioned above, after blessing God he mentions that God sent his Angel to be with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. He now believes in the Angel of God and he makes a new proclamation:
“I make a decree that any people, nation, or language which speaks anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made an ash heap; because there is no other God who can deliver like this” (verse 29).
Nebuchadnezzar has moved from believing in the God who reveals secrets (2:47) to believing in the God who delivers (3:29). God does not just know stuff, he also does stuff through the power of his Angel. The reality of the true God has moved closer to home for Nebuchadnezzar. Not only has he shown light on the darkness of the king’s dreams, he has also burned hotter than the king’s fury. Not only has he been above the king, sending dreams from Heaven, he has been facing the king, looking at him from the fire.
Another shift is that the king has moved from chopping people and burning their houses because they don’t know his dream to chopping people and burning their houses if they blaspheme the true God. Still pretty brutal, but the aim has shifted in the right direction. These “sacrifices” will be made to the living image of the true God rather than to the image in his dream.
Forgiving Gollum 