The Book of Daniel by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 20, 1908

The Book of Daniel

By Editor

The Rights of Conscience Vindicated

THE EDITOR

Then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury, and the form of his visage was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: therefore he spake, and commanded that they should heat the furnace seven times more than it was wont to be heated. And he commanded certain mighty men that were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and to cast them into the burning fiery furnace. Then these men were bound in their hosen, their tunics, and their mantles, and their outer garments, and were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. Therefore because the king’s commandment was urgent, and the furnace exceeding hot, the flame of the fire slew those men that took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste: he spake and said unto his counselors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods. Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace: he spake and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, ye servants of the most high God, come forth, and come hither. Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came forth out of the midst of the fire. And the satraps, the deputies, and the governors, and the king’s counselors, being gathered together, saw these men, that the fire had no power upon their bodies, nor was the hair of their head singed, neither were their hosen changed, nor had the smell of fire passed on them. Dan. 3:19-27.

An Ancient Auto da Fe

The burning of dissenters is not a modern method of disposing of those who obstinately refuse to conform to the ritual established by the state. Ancient Babylon set the example which has been followed by its spiritual counterpart, in using this means of securing uniformity in faith and practise, and the tragedy which was enacted on the plain of Dura has been repeated in many countries, in which demons in human form have employed satanic methods in their efforts to take from men the divine right to worship according to the dictates of their own consciences. But Nebuchadnezzar did not indulge in that refinement of cruelty which in later times has suggested the long-drawn-out torture of slowly roasting the unfortunate victims of religious persecution; and the heating of the furnace “seven times more than it was wont to be heated” would, in the ordinary course of things, mean the most sudden, and therefore the most painless, death which could be inflicted by fire. As the event turned, however, this venting of his fury became only a stronger evidence of the wonderful deliverance which was wrought for the three Hebrew captives.

From the minute description given of the clothing worn by the condemned men, it would appear that they were arrayed in the garments which befitted them as those who had been placed “over the affairs of the province of Babylon.” As more exactly representing the meaning of the original words, their attire has been described as consisting of “wide trousers, fine linen shirts, precious garments, and robes of state,” and it has been suggested that, “being thus clad the three Hebrews came forth conspicuously to confess their God, and, as if courting observation, to make the Babylonians understand that they were not ashamed to suffer openly for his sake.”

Because these three protesters against the authority of the state in spiritual things feared the King of heaven, they were not afraid of what the king of Babylon could do unto them. By their conduct, they were inculcating the lesson which the great Teacher afterward expressed in these words: “Be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” In order to preserve that freedom of mind which is the heritage of man created in the image of God, these three Hebrews permitted their bodies to be bound and to be committed to the flames, and before all the assembled multitude the reality of the power of the fire was demonstrated in that the “mighty men” who were charged with the execution of the king’s sentence, were themselves destroyed by approaching near enough to the mouth of the furnace to cast in the victims of Nebuchadnezzar’s fury. As helpless as logs of wood, and designed merely as fuel for the raging fire, “these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.”

Set Free by Fire

And now the tables are suddenly turned, and Nebuchadnezzar beholds a sight which leads him to question the correctness of his memory of what he himself has just done. His own consciousness testifies that he commanded three men to be cast into the fire, and yet he sees four men in the furnace. Did he really cast in three or four? He remembers that the men were bound before they were consigned to the flames, but now he beholds the four men “loose, walking in the midst of the fire.” Is his mind confused so that he can not trust its testimony? His counselors assure the king that it was three and not four who were cast into the fire, and the description of the fourth shows that he is a being of a different order from the three: “The aspect of the fourth is

like a son of the gods.” While his statement “will not be taken by any Chaldee scholar to have any intentional reference to the incarnate Saviour, still, we may fairly consider whether this was not indeed the ‘angel of the Lord’ that went with Israel through the wilderness, in whom was the name of the Father, and against whom the people sinned, provoking him by their rebellion, and whom the inspired writer of the epistle to the Hebrews expressly names as Christ.”

The only effect of the fire was to burn the bonds, and thus to mock, as it were, at the authority of the king who had attempted to exercise unwarranted control over the conduct of these men who were first servants of God and second servants of the king. Nebuchadnezzar, who had by his command caused these men to be put into the furnace, now calls them forth, addressing them as “servants of the most high God.” Any thought that the king was merely the victim of a distorted vision was dispelled when in the presence of the representative men of Babylon they walked forth from the midst of the fire, having been preserved from even the least semblance of injury.

The Living Martyrs

“The grandees, wondering, pressed close around the living martyrs, saw, handled, and even smelt. As to their sight, it fell on countenances serene with innocence, and radiant with joy. As to their touch, they found the texture of the men’s raiment firm—their flesh healthy—their persons not scathed with flame, nor feverish with fear. The hair of the men’s heads was carefully dressed in the Babylonian fashion, long and neatly braided, as it lay between their shoulders; and the beard, cut square, fell, as accustomed, on their bosoms. As to their coats, or rather trousers, worn after the Hebrew fashion, they were not even changed, much less consumed. . . . As for the sense of smell, it served to witness that the costly perfumes spent in the morning, as if to anoint them for burial, had lost nothing of their fragrance—fragrance yet exquisitely pure, breathing gladness, as became persons adorned for a feast. The smell of fire had not passed on them. The pitch, the naptha, the stench, had not hung about them; and the men, who had contracted no taint from the licentiousness of palaces, passed untainted through the suffocating vapor of the furnace. Here stand the princes, proof under the sharpest tests, material and spiritual, ready again, with loyalty untarnished, to minister to their king.

“Even the very golden pillar, though the iron pens of scribes added nothing to its record, stood a monument of the miracle that closed the ceremonial, and dismissed the imperial assembly; while in the thoughts of all, so long as Persian rapacity did not strip off its gold, and deface its beauty, it stood conspicuous from afar; and people, of all the tongues that muttered confusedly in the streets and plains of Babylonia, told of the furnace, the heaven-defended princes, and the most high God. Myriads, who never drew near it to decipher any name of god or man, told aloud of the God of the Hebrews at the first sight of that lofty pillar from afar.”—Rule.

Faith and Fire

The remarkable deliverance of these three men who placed loyalty to the King of heaven above loyalty to the king of Babylon, is evidently cited by the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews as a noteworthy example of living faith. On the one side, this marked exhibition of power over the destroying elements was wholly due to the direct interference of the God of heaven, the angel of whose presence was manifested to human sight. But on the other side, these three worthies “through faith . . . quenched the power of fire.” Thus do the divine and the human co-operate in saving men from the fire which shall never be quenched.

A Miracle Defined

Such an interposition of divine power as is shown in this deliverance from the fiery furnace is rightly called a miracle, and in view of the present tendency either to deny miracles altogether, or to affirm that every exhibition of the power of God is a miracle, it may be well to consider the real nature of miracles. This has been well stated in the following language: “The distinction indeed which is sometimes made, that in the miracle God is immediately working, and in other events is leaving it to the laws which he has established, to work, can not at all be admitted: for it has its root in a dead, mechanical view of the universe, which lies altogether remote from the truth. . . . Laws of God exist only for us. It is a will of God for himself. That will indeed, being the will of highest wisdom and love, excludes all wilfulness—is a will upon which we can securely count; from the past expressions of it we can presume its future, and so we rightfully call it a law. But still from moment to moment it is a will; each law, as we term it, of nature is only that which we have learned concerning this will in that particular region of its activity. To say, then, that there is more of the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of his, is insufficient. Such an affirmation grows out of that lifeless scheme of the work, of which we should ever be seeking to rid ourselves, but which such a theory will only help to confirm and to uphold.

“For while we deny the conclusion, that since all is wonder, therefore the miracle commonly so called is in no other way than the ordinary processes of nature the manifestation of the presence and power of God, we must not with this deny the truth which lies in this statement. All is wonder; to make a man is at least as great a marvel as to raise a man from the dead. The seed that multiplies in the furrow is as marvelous as the bread that multiplied in Christ’s hands. The miracle is not a greater manifestation of God’s power than those ordinary and ever-repeated processes; but it is a different manifestation.”—Trench.

Miracles and Laws

“Satan would say of miracles, ‘Let God never interfere to deliver;’ man would say, ‘Let God always interfere to deliver;’ God has determined in his wisdom to interfere when it is most for his glory, and best for you. Were God always to deliver his servants by a perpetual miracle, it would not be a miracle; it would be called—to use the phraseology of the day—‘a law of nature.’ Were God never to deliver his servants, then the world would say, and Christians would begin almost to think, ‘There is no God.’ He interposes miraculously often enough to convince that God is, and God acts; and he interposes seldom enough to make more vivid the interposition as an evidence of a divine and providential Power. I need not say that a ceaseless miracle is, by its very necessity, no miracle at all. The present law is that water should run down-hill; but if the law were that it should run up-hill, and if it had been so for eighteen centuries, men would say, ‘For water to run uphill is a law of nature;’ and if anything occurred to make it run down-hill, they would say, ‘This is a miracle.’ The present law is that the vine should be planted, that the rain should saturate the soil in which it grows, that the juice should rise through the stem and go into the branches and the leaves, that it shall effloresce into blossom, and ripen into fruit; that the fruit shall be pressed, the juice fermented, and be converted into wine. But Christ, by one word, shortened the process; and instead of taking a year to allow the water to turn into wine, which is the ordinary law, he did it in a minute, saying, ‘Let the water be wine.’ But if water always became wine by the speaking of a man, that would be a law, and the other process would be the miracle. What is continuous is called the law; the suspension of the continuity indicates the interposition of the Lawgiver. A ceaseless miracle, then, is an absurdity.”—Cumming.

A World-Wide Lesson

By working this miraculous deliverance, the God of heaven vindicated the rights of the individual conscience, and testified to the inhabitants of Babylon and to all the world that even that civil power which he has ordained has no authority in the spiritual realm; and the lesson remains the same even though there have been millions of martyrs in whose behalf there was no miraculous interposition.

The principle of religious liberty which was established by the experience of the three Hebrews is of full force to-day, and the story of the burning fiery furnace ought to be told in all lands.