Trust Series

Fearless in Babylon: Daniel 3

Pastor Jefferson M. Williams

Chenoa Baptist Church/ECC

01-22-2023

Which line is longer?

Imagine you walk into an experiment and there are ten people in the room. On the board are three lines [slide] and all you have to say is which line is the longest, which is obviously line A.

What you don’t know is that the other nine people in the room are actors and have been instructed to say that line B was the longest, when it obviously wasn’t.

What would you do? Everyone in the room identifies line B as the longest. You know that line A is obviously the longest. Do you go against the crowd or do you go along with them?

In research that has been duplicated multiple times, children all the way to adults agreed with the crowd more than 75% of the time!

Why? Because it is hard to stand against the crowd. It’s difficult to go against the flow. Peer pressure is real and it doesn’t go away when we become adults.

What do we do when the world we live in, modern-day Babylon, asks us to bow down to their way of thinking that differs from what we believe?

That’s what we are going to explore today as we study Daniel 3.

Turn with me to Daniel 3.

Prayer

Fearless in Babylon

In week one of this series, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, had been deported from their home in Judah to Babylon, a thousand miles away.

They were enrolled in Babylon High School and trained in the language, literature, and culture of the Babylonians. They had access to the king’s cafeteria but RESOLVED in their hearts not to eat the food because it wasn’t kosher and had been sacrificed to idols.

Daniel proposed an alternative diet of veggies and water and after ten days they were healthy and prospering.

In order to live fearlessly in Babylon, they had to resolve beforehand what they were willing to say no to, no matter the consequences.

In week two, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream and asked the wise men of his court to not only tell him the interpretation of the dream but the contents of the dream itself.

The wise men balked and said that no one was able to do such a thing and the king ordered their mass execution.

When Daniel heard about this, he asked his three friends to “PRAY and SEEK MERCY” from God. God answered their prayers and gave Daniel the interpretation in a vision in the night.

He explained to the king that in his dream he saw an “enormous, dazzling statue that had a head of gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly, and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.” (Daniel 2:32-33)

This statute represented the Babylonian empire and the empires that would come after that.

Nebuchadnezzar was so impressed that he made Daniel a ruler over the entire province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all the wise men.

And “at Daniel’s request, the king appointed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego administrators over the province of Babylon, while Daniel himself remained at the royal court.” (Daniel 2:49)

Look at Me! [Slide]

In chapter three, fifteen years have passed. Nebuchadnezzar’s ego has run amuck. He erected a ninety-foot gold-plated statue [Slide] on the plain of Dura of himself. This was very similar to the Washington monument and would have been brilliant and visible for miles.

By the way, the statue in the dream only had a head made of gold. This entire statue was gold!

He invited all the dignitaries of Babylon to the opening ceremony. Interestingly, Daniel was not present and may have been out of the country on official business.

Nebuchadnezzar made the crowd an offer they could not refuse. They had a choice between bowing down to the statue and being thrown into a blazing furnace. This was an easy choice for most.

Estimates place about two million people on the plain that day. When the music blasted, 1, 999, 997 people hit their faces to the dirt. There was enormous pressure to bow down. The Hebrew actually says “as soon as they were hearing they were falling down.”

But, in the back, those three Jewish rebels were at it again. They stood up. While other Jewish exiles were on their faces thinking of excuses why their actions were not blatant idolatry, Hannah, Mishael, and Azariah stood tall.

“At this time some astrologers came forward and denounced the Jews. They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “May the king live forever! Your Majesty has issued a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe, and all kinds of music must fall down and worship the image of gold,  and that whoever does not fall down and worship will be thrown into a blazing furnace. But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—who pay no attention to you, Your Majesty. They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3:8-12)