Daniel 3:16 Series

That’s the list I want to be in. The list of the winners, the victors they trusted God and God came through. God is good. But let’s keep reading the same author, the same book, the same chapter, carrying on from the same verse Hebrews 11:35-39 But others trusted God and were tortured, preferring to die rather than turn from God and be free. They placed their hope in the resurrection to a better life. Some were mocked, and their backs were cut open with whips. Others were chained in dungeons. Some died by stoning, and some were sawed in half; others were killed with the sword. Some went about in skins of sheep and goats, hungry and oppressed and mistreated. They were too good for this world. They wandered over deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.

All of these people we have mentioned received God’s approval because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised.

If I had my druthers I’d druther be in the first group. But we don’t always get our druthers, do we? And the people in the second group were serving the same God as the people in the first group. And we are told by those in the know that there have been more Martyrs in the last hundred years then there were in the nineteen hundred years before that. And God hasn’t tumbled off his throne, he’s still a good God and a merciful God and we have to believe that ultimately he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Over fifty years ago five young missionaries flew to South America to reach a tribe that had never heard the name of Jesus. One of those missionaries, a young man by the name of Jim Elliot made this statement “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” It wasn’t very long after he made that statement that he and his companions were killed by the very people he went to reach. People around the world reacted in shock to the news of the slaughter. How could God allow that? And yet Jim Elliot’s wife Elizabeth eventually saw that entire tribe come to know Jesus. Elliot couldn’t have kept his life even if he had of lived to be a hundred. And yet how many people will live for eternity because of Jim Elliot’s sacrifice?

And as the guys stood staring into the flames of the furnace they said "God will deliver us, but if he doesn’t, tough we still won’t bow." Can you believe in the goodness of God no matter what?

Let’s go back to the story. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s response was not what the king was expecting to hear and he was furious. He commanded that the three be tossed into the furnace and they were.

From the description given of the furnace it would appear that it was commonly used for executions, that is was constructed in such a way that the accused were tossed in through an opening in the top. In this case the fire was burning so hot and so furious that it actually killed the soldiers who were escorting the three men. And so the story ends. They took a stand for God and they lost. Good was defeated and evil was victorious, but was it?