This is part of our Daniel series, you can listen to our sermon on our sermon archive page.
Life is filled with risks. Because we don't know everything, there are many little risks during the day. Will it rain? Probably. There are also bigger risks, the big questions we have in life: How can I find meaning? What happens after we die? A career change, buying a house—these are all risks. And sometimes there are dangerous risks, like being in an unsafe home situation.
Some risks in life feel insurmountable. They are like dragons in fairy tales, mythic beasts. How in the world can someone survive that?
G.K. Chesterton, an author and part of the C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers crew, has this great quote: "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed."
Why the Fiery Furnace Story Matters Today
One of the reasons Daniel chapter 3 is in our Bibles is for you to know: dragons can be killed. This is all about risk, how to risk well, what to be risky about. Everyone comes across risk in their life, just like dragons in fairy tales. The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace gives us hope—not as a fairy tale, but hope in the real world. In the real world, with real risks.
Not every life has a fairy-tale ending, or even beginning or middle. We're using the metaphor of the shadow of empire as a stand-in for all that's wrong in this world, all that's wrong in ourselves. Daniel and his friends have been exiled to this empire and now have to navigate living as faithful followers of God.
In this dark reality of empire, this biblical story about faith teaches us that Jesus Himself is the one who rescues us. He's the main character. That's good news because the dragons we face, the risks we're plunged into, are all too much for us by ourselves. Jesus has taken all the risk Himself and has given us all the rewards.
If we are all going to have risks in our lives anyway, let's do that well. Having faith means having a faith that risks.Also, a life that avoids risks is one that avoids faith.
The Setup: Empire and Idolatry
We find ourselves in the same place that the Tower of Babel was set up. There's a story from history, in Genesis, of people getting together to prove to themselves that they can be good and successful without God. It was a lame representation, and it also didn't last very long. All the people who gathered together were scattered.
Well, history repeats itself, doesn't it? Here we are again. Nebuchadnezzar, who only last chapter was bowing before Daniel and his God, is now setting up his own image for people to worship. Words are cheap! People who are well-off materially find it very difficult to live lives of surrender.
Seven times in this chapter we read that this is the image Nebuchadnezzar has "set up." It's a desperate man trying to be seen as somebody. It's like that person you know who just talks about their own life all the time.
The Image and the Orchestra
This image is about 27 metres tall—big for its time. Government officials come, and it's repeated, maybe even for a bit of comic effect. An address to all nations, in all languages. There's an orchestra there, made up of instruments from all over the place.
This is a multicultural celebration, an attempt to gather all people to himself, to shore up his own power. You know Nebuchadnezzar is on the socials, livestreaming everything. This is his attempt to go beyond Babel, to gather people all together and not be scattered.
We're More Like Nebuchadnezzar Than We Think
As we're reading, we should be getting the joke. This pompous, tone-deaf leader has a bit of an over-inflated ego. Nebuchadnezzar sets his image up to be seen as great. In doing so, he sets himself up as a punchline. He's just a joke, really.
Now, we all like reading Daniel and thinking that's who we are in the story. That's not wrong; it's just not the whole truth. We are very much like Nebuchadnezzar. We say we follow God; we might even bow before Him on Sunday. But the rest of our week, what does it look like? There are parts in every day where we get busy with the task of setting up our own image.
How we speak about ourselves, we set ourselves up. We get paid, and we think first about how we're going to set ourselves up. We have time during the week, and we think how we can use it to set ourselves up.
These things are not at all risky. They seek to avoid risk, and therefore they avoid faith. When we spend our lives setting ourselves up, it's only for a punchline.
The Risk: Refusing to Bow
The people whom Daniel and his friends just saved in the previous chapter come up and try to gain some favour with this king. "They aren't bowing down! They aren't doing the thing that everyone else is doing!"
The king gets furiously angry—again. Last time he meant to kill loads of people; this time it's killing again. Daniel isn't in this story; likely he was out doing his job somewhere else. But his friends, the ones that Daniel urged to pray for God to work, are there. Now they don't have Daniel. How are they going to act when their leader isn't there?
The Power of Biblical Courage
Because Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego have faith, they embrace risk. Having faith means we risk.
They refuse to bow down. They will act in line with how God has called them to live, and they don't bother defending themselves. They don't presume upon God, and they trust Him with their lives.
They say: Of course our God is powerful to save us, but for reasons that we don't know, maybe He won't save us. That actually doesn't matter. What matters is how we live. You can do whatever you want to us, but we don't serve other gods, we don't live like everyone else, we follow the one true God.
Nebuchadnezzar was not happy with that, and his fiery anger leads to a fiery furnace—heated to an amount where his own guards died whilst throwing these men into the furnace.
This is why to have faith means you must embrace risk. In this world, there will be times when you will be expected to embrace the shadow of empire. To live differently is to be seen as an outsider. Let's not think that people are always going to be happy that we faithfully follow God. Let's also not think that we ourselves will always naturally want to live the way God calls us to.
A life that avoids these kinds of risks is one that avoids faith.
Building Confidence Through Action
Though this story does seem far removed from our daily lives, it wasn't terribly long ago when human beings did face human furnaces, killed because of what they believed in. What the downside of reading a story like this can be is that because it's so far removed and so exemplary, it can't really be for me. What can I do? I'm no hero!
I bet Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would not have called themselves heroes either. As they move forward faithfully, with whatever God has before them, they continually point to God, not themselves.
We wrongly think we need to already have the confidence in us before we can live this way. We need to feel it before we do it. But what happens most of the time is going through trials with faith is what gives us confidence to live this way. We don't have it until we go through it because going through it is what gives it to us.
So we may not be risking a fiery furnace, but for you maybe a risk is helping out more at a community group, taking on the call to be part of leading one in the future. Making dinner for a neighbour for no reason. Teaching children the gospel. Speaking to your friend about Jesus the next chance you have. Joining a serving team, even leading one. These are the ways we can leverage the blessings we have to continue to be the risky people of faith we're called to be.
Understanding what it means to be a Christian includes grasping this call to faithful risk-taking.
Modern Idolatry: What We Really Worship
Worshipping God makes us atheists to all other gods. If we are atheists to all other gods, we also don't join in with worshipping them!
Early Christians were called atheists because they didn't worship all the gods of Rome. Today, we face different idols, but the challenge remains the same.
Maybe you might think, "Oh, but I don't go to worship other gods." No? Well, what about those websites you go to when you're alone? The ones nobody else knows about? What is that but a different kind of worship?
If you have children: If your life revolves around them, surely that's worship! Are you leading them to follow God, or are they leading you?
Relationships: "I can't live without them" can be a good sentiment of love, but it can also be another way of contorting your life around them first before God.
To be an atheist to consumerism means asking how you can serve before being served.
To be an atheist to success means not sacrificing your children or your faith.
To be an atheist to toxic individualism means organising your life around others before yourself first.
And of course, money. That's an easy one. If you immediately think, "Yeah, that's not me," don't overlook it. Would someone say that you have to live a life of faith because of your generosity in giving? Probably not.
We all worship at the feet of these other gods far more than we realise and far more often.
Look at verse 7: "All the nations and peoples of every language fell down and worshipped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up."
To follow what everyone else is doing is to clasp hands with the darkness. I want you to understand that we are far more idolatrous than we think, and if that's true, we can afford to be more suspicious of our own hearts.
When a Christian engages in these other forms of worship, we are not only avoiding the kind of faith we say we follow, but we are inauthentic to who we really are. To not worship what everyone else is worshipping is a rebellious act. That's a Christian act.
If we are living in the shadow of empire, what we need to be are dissident disciples of Jesus! In the shadow of empire, others need us to be dissident disciples of Jesus!
The Question of Risk in Your Life
If you are moved at all by this story of three men risking their lives to faithfully follow God, let that momentum carry over into your life.
Your sexual ethics, your spending habits, your diary, your time, your ability to serve, especially how you treat the church—would you say your faith is risky? Or are you playing it safe?
Here's the other thing: we avoid having to actually practise our faith when we avoid the risk of the furnace.
I don't meet many people who set their lives up for a faith that risks. In fact, most people I know have comfortable lives where faith can be practised, and if not, it won't really affect them. A risk-avoidant life is a faith-avoidant life.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were all in—literally! To be blessed means not being confronted with a human furnace ourselves. Let's not use that blessing as an excuse to not be all in!
As a church in Manchester, we're discovering together what it means to live faithfully when the stakes are high and the risks are real.
The Rescue: God With Us in the Furnace
Now we come to the rescue, where after reading this story, we get to have the courage that comes from this story put into us (that's what encouragement means!).
We're Not the Main Character
The furnace—the same place where the image of Nebuchadnezzar's empire was created—will be where these three will be thrown into. The place where empire is created is not a place of life; it's a place of death.
Remember, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego didn't presume to survive. But they lived faithfully anyway. And God miraculously rescues them.
Remember the backdrop to this story: all kinds of people from all over are here, watching this happen. What a stage! What was the role of these three men? Were they to be superheroes? Were they to be incredibly gifted speakers winning the crowd over? Were they supposed to make a big deal of themselves? No. They simply followed God.
They aren't the main character, though they have an important role to play. A lot was at stake for them. The same is true for us. We, each of us, have an important role to play. If you don't, others will miss out. God has enlisted all of you for His mission.
Our church has an important role to play. If we don't work at it together, people will miss out. There are 2.8 million people here in Manchester who embrace the shadow of empire.
Sometimes, trusting God in difficult times means walking right into a furnace. And this brings us to the main character.
The Fourth Man in the Fire
This enigmatic figure. They threw three people in this impossibly hot furnace; now there's four. What in the world? Described as a "son of the gods."
Some people say this is an angel; some say Jesus. In fact, the earliest Christians interpreted this as pre-incarnate Christ. Whether it's an angel, a representative of God, or God Himself, what we have is Jesus' name in action. Immanuel means "God with us."
Whatever we might think of the sufferings and horrible realities of the shadow of empire, whatever we might have experienced with the shadow of empire, this story tells us: God enters into it.
He's not on the outside. He's there, on the inside, with them.
The fiery furnace was real for them and continues to be real for us—a metaphorical stand-in for all the real problems we will face. The furnace, whatever that is for you, is real. And only real faith allows you to get through it, just like the power of fairy tales teaching us that dragons can be killed. The biggest dragon is death.
It's foolish to think that life is only good or that if you're a Christian you won't experience pain. It's foolish to think that you can't bring your pain into church. This is the place where we get healed. Only real faith will allow you to honestly risk in a world stuck in shadow.
Exploring how to have a meaningful life means understanding this reality of God's presence in our trials.
Jesus: The Greater Rescue
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, along with a fourth person, survive the furnace. But Jesus, when He was on earth, went through something far more difficult than a fiery furnace, and He died. In one sense, He didn't survive. It was death, complete.
What Jesus went through was physically horrible, yes. It was public torture, humiliation, extending suffering as long as possible. But the real difference was the spiritual suffering.
God With Us Takes Our Sin
Jesus, God with us, took our sin—the building blocks of empire, the thing that separates us from God. God is with us, and on the cross, He takes the worst of us, our death, and puts it on Himself. He isn't delivered out of that fiery furnace. In fact, He dies.
With Him, all of our sin, all of our willing contributions to the shadow of empire, all of us that chase after comfort, all of us that make life all about us, all that we withhold from God—He took that and He killed it. Never to rise again.
But there is a rising again: Jesus, the destroyer of empire, can't be stopped by the empire of sin, and He rises again. He has a new, resurrected body, a new, resurrected life. And it's this life that He gives to all who follow Him.
It's only because of this resurrected life that we can have any hope of living faithfully in front of fiery furnaces. It's only because of this resurrected life that we can have any hope of living a worthy, risky life.
Faith Gives Us the Right Places to Risk
Every person will have risks in their life. It's not like only people of faith have risks. We are all plunged into a world of risks. Faith in God gives us the right places to risk and gives us a pathway to work it out.
As an example: Let's say you believe there isn't a God. You don't have to be terribly confident about that; maybe it's just a default belief. The risk there is now trying to navigate life on your own, in a world without inherent meaning. That means something like love or beauty, though it feels good, doesn't really mean anything more than that—a feeling. The risk for someone who believes there is no God is to navigate this world themselves, knowing they have to create meaning themselves.
Or take another example: death. How we deal with death is a risk. The risk for someone who is a Christian is to trust that God has us in the palm of His hand. We don't know from experience, and it's a risk. It's a risk worth taking, but a risk nonetheless.
The risk for someone who doesn't believe that God is there with them, even in death, is a different kind of risk. Maybe a risk that after death, we just cease to exist and it doesn't matter. Every time we try and set up something for ourselves, like Nebuchadnezzar, it doesn't go well for us.
This story is one story amongst many that teaches us: God is with us in everything, including death. We don't need to set something up for ourselves! After death, we don't just get life—we get love. It's not just about life after death; it's love after death!
Risks are going to come at us, and the older we get, the more complex and difficult these risks become. Faith in God—in this God—gives us the right places to risk and gives us a pathway to work it out.
If you want a life where you are risking for the right things, let's seek after Jesus, the One who went into the fiery furnace on our behalf.
As a church in Manchester, we're learning together that biblical courage isn't the absence of fear but trusting God in difficult times, even when the outcome is uncertain. Understanding what it means to join God's mission includes embracing the risks that come with faithful living.
Living a Faith That Risks
Jesus saw our chaotic world and was sent by the Father to be with us. Jesus, the Giver of life, experienced death—not for us to escape death, but to have victory over it! The Father has sent the Son, and the Father and the Son send the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life, to change us, renew us, and give us the life we need in God's kingdom, even in the shadow of empire.
If Jesus has conquered death, and if that's who leads us and that's who we trust, we not only expect to take risks, but we are given all that we need to get through them. A faith that risks—not through our own strength, but through the strength of this God, Himself, living in us.
The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego reminds us that dragons can be killed. The fiery furnace teaches us that God is with us in our trials. And the cross and resurrection of Jesus show us that the greatest dragon of all—death itself—has been defeated.
So let's live with biblical courage. Let's embrace the risks that come with following Jesus. Let's be dissident disciples in a world that bows to false gods. And let's trust that the One who was with three faithful men in the furnace is the same One who walks with us through every trial we face.