According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Encouraging us to settle ahead of time what we will or will not do. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle.

Damian Kyle: It is so important that our convictions about what we will live for and what we will die for, not as human beings, but as children of God, those convictions need to be in place in our lives before they ever get tested.

Guest (Male): Who among us hasn't said, "I can't believe I did that." Yes, sometimes we do say or do things in the heat of the moment that can be rather disappointing later on down the road. But settling critical issues ahead of time will make a difference. Welcome to According to the Scriptures with Pastor Damian Kyle.

As we open Daniel chapter three, we run across three of God's people that were able to stand when they were tested. Just goes to show us what it takes to stand when everyone else doesn't. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle.

Damian Kyle: Put yourself in their shoes and hundreds and surely thousands of the most powerful people in the world are all on their hands and knees before this image and the three of them stand on that plain of Dura. How much pressure is on them? And what does it take to stand in an environment like that?

It really is an amazing picture for those of you who are artists. This sea of people and then this giant image and here's these three figures that remain standing. It is one of those beautiful pictures of bravery and courage in the whole Bible and we can see it in our minds.

Well, Nebuchadnezzar is informed. Apparently, he didn't see them. There is a vast crowd, so he probably couldn't see everyone. But when you have got little rats like the ones that he had around him, he didn't need to see everything. And so therefore, at that time, certain Chaldeans came forward and they accused the Jews.

Now remember, it talks about the Chaldeans here, that the Chaldeans were a subset of Nebuchadnezzar's wise men. Chaldea was a province within the Babylonian Empire that was known for its wisdom. And so these were men who had been saved from being hacked in little pieces with their family and their house being made a dunghill because Daniel and these three, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, had received the interpretation of the dream or they would have all died.

This is a classic case of what have you done for me lately. They, just to be able to live with themselves, ought to have been grateful the rest of their lives to these three, let alone to be running to Nebuchadnezzar to inform on them. And they spoke and they said to King Nebuchadnezzar, "Oh king, live forever."

I don't care how egotistical you are, I think that would get tiresome for me after a while, but this was how you had to approach him. "You, oh king, have made a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, the flute, the harp, the lyre, and psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music shall fall down and worship the gold image; and whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace."

"There are certain Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; these men, oh king, have not paid due regard to you." They are going to make it personal. "They do not serve your gods or worship the gold image that you have set up."

The fact that they bring these three Jewish young men up and remind Nebuchadnezzar that he's the one that had promoted them lets us know that for sure there is a fair amount of jealousy that is involved in their informing on these people. You remember that when Daniel gave both the dream and the interpretation to Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar made him his chief representative in the capital of Babylon.

Daniel informed him of the part that the other three had played in this, and they were given positions immediately under Daniel. They had been given these very high positions as young men over much older men who had a lot more seniority and time and title than they did, and there was obviously a lot of bitterness over that.

They are looking for an opportunity to upend them so that they can have the potential to take their positions. They bring the accusation to him in this way and inform. Then Nebuchadnezzar in rage and fury, this is his reaction to any defiance that is expressed toward him, explodes in rage and anger.

He gave the command for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to bring them to him and so they brought these men before the king. Now Nebuchadnezzar spoke to them and saying to them, "Is it true?" Now Nebuchadnezzar has just heard this secondhand. He is a man who values their talents.

He certainly knew them. They were so high up in his cabinet and in his leadership in Babylon, he certainly enjoyed the benefits of their expertise and of their talent. He doesn't want to throw them into the fire unnecessarily. Good help is hard to find.

He's going to establish what are the facts here and basically give them a second chance. He says, "Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the gold image which I have set up? Now if you are ready at the time you hear the sound of the horn, the flute, the harp, the lyre, and the psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music, and you fall down and you worship the image which I have made, good."

"I'm giving you a second chance, gentlemen, and it's a wise person who will take the second chance. But if you do not worship, you will be cast immediately into the midst of the burning fiery furnace." Apparently, all of this is going on and there is a burning fiery furnace over here in left field that he's just got going as an additional kind of motivation.

He then tells them, "And who is the God who will deliver you from my hands?" Don't ever say that about God, the God of the Bible, because you're going to get introduced to Him, sometimes in a very unpleasant way. He will be introduced to God formally in the next chapter, but in some degree in this chapter as well.

In essence, he's kind of saying, "Listen, all right, your God can make known dreams. Your God can make known the interpretation of dreams. But your God cannot deliver you from someone like me. All I have got to do is make the order and you're going to be thrown into that smelting pot, into that furnace that is over there."

Then we have their response to him. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they answered and they said to the king, "Oh Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter." The idea is we have no need to deliberate on this. Don't bother striking up the band again. They are probably union, it is going to cost you a fortune.

No need to bother with that anymore, don't do it for our sakes, because nothing is going to change here. In other words, they are letting Nebuchadnezzar know that all of this is just already a completely settled issue in their lives. We will not bow down to that image, even under the threat of death.

Again, it is so important that our convictions about what we will live for and what we will die for, not as human beings, but as children of God, those convictions need to be in place in our lives before they ever get tested. If Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were standing there in this place and they thought, "Wow, we've never thought of this before, we need to do kind of a huddle and figure out what we're going to do," that is no time to be figuring out what are the boundaries in my life that I will not cross in terms of what God has commanded in His word.

That moment in time is not a good place for trying to figure that out. That needs to be worked out between us and God and our relationship with God long before any pressure is put upon us as Christians to compromise, whatever that compromise might be.

I remember reading as a fairly new pastor the story of James Calvert. He was a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands and it speaks to all of this. The captain of the ship that brought him to the Fiji Islands, as they were about to disembark to go onto the islands, he tried to turn James Calvert and the Christians back from going there.

He said, "You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages." James Calvert replied, "We died before we came here." That is the same kind of spirit. You can't threaten us with death here, because we died to the will of God long before you ever put the threat of our physical life in jeopardy to test what our commitment is to God.

I think it's easy for us to tend to think of a martyr solely as someone who has died for their faith. But it is very important to realize that in the biblical sense of the word, a person can be a living martyr, because to be a martyr as the word is used in the Scriptures, it simply means a witness.

You might remember in Jesus's letter to the church at Pergamum recorded in Revelation chapter two, there was a man by the name of Antipas that was a part of that church who was killed for his Christian faith. Jesus referred to Antipas as my faithful martyr.

He said, "I know your works, where you dwell, where Satan's throne is, and you hold fast to My name and did not deny My faith even in the days in which Antipas was My faithful martyr, who was killed among you where Satan dwells." The point is that Antipas was a martyr long before he died.

It is very important for us to understand this as Christians and to apply it to our own Christian lives. Death does not make us a martyr, biblically speaking. Death simply reveals that we already are a martyr. It reveals us to be one and thus what it speaks to us is that you can live our entire lives fully committed to obeying God's word and God's will for our lives.

We may never face death in this country perhaps as a result of it, and yet we can still live a martyr's life. You don't necessarily have to go on the other side of the world or some dangerous part of the world in order to live for Christ. It is possible to live as a martyr in Modesto, California.

Paul said precisely the same thing concerning himself, and not just concerning himself but concerning all living martyrs in this sense when he wrote in Galatians 2:20. He said, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."

He was basically saying, "I am alive in a physical sense, but I am a martyr. I am fully dead in another sense. My life is completely given over to God, whether it means life or whether it means death." In Acts chapter 20, as he spoke to the Ephesian elders there, he talked about the chains and tribulations that awaited him in Jerusalem and he had been warned about as he is making his way now to Jerusalem.

He said, "But none of these things move me; nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify of the gospel of the grace of God." So the Christian life is intended to be a martyr's life.

Whether that life is ultimately expressed in a long life of being a martyr while living or whether it ends up being expressed in death, the Christian life is the only life that's worth living. Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross," there is the martyrdom, "and follow Me."

"For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what is a man profited if he gains the entire world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He will reward each according to his works."

They say, "Listen, there is no need to put us to a second test. We will do precisely what we did the first time in verse 16." Further explanation that they give to Nebuchadnezzar: "And if that is the case, you're going to throw us into this fire, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, oh king. But if not, let it be known to you, oh king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image that you have set up."

Wow, God bless them. Holy Spirit at work in the Old Testament. Now this is a fascinating confession that they make here. They declare to Nebuchadnezzar God's ability to deliver them and that not only does God have the ability to deliver them from his threat, but that He will at least deliver them from Nebuchadnezzar's hand.

And if not, even under the threat of death, we're not going to serve your gods, we're not going to worship this golden image. Here you see this tremendous spiritual maturity of these three young men. They knew God could deliver them. They knew that there's nothing that's impossible for God to do.

But they readily declared that they did not know in this instance whether God would deliver them from the fire or not. There are a lot of things that occur in our lives where we know what God can do, that God can do anything. So He can do anything and everything in this situation.

But within that trial, while we know that about Him, we do not know what He will do. We know the Bible reveals Him to be this powerful, but we can't find a specific promise in the word of God that guarantees us that we will not go through this kind of tribulation.

We know that He can deliver us from the fiery trial, but we have no promise from God in the Bible that He always will do that. So they lay all of this out, the possibility that it might not be God's plan to deliver them from the fire. This is just a very thorough understanding of the word of God.

They didn't want Nebuchadnezzar thinking that if they ended up in that fire, that their God was any less God by virtue of the fact that they ended up in that furnace and because He didn't deliver them from that terrible difficulty. Many faith teachers today would say that a Christian making this kind of a statement is kind of a cop-out.

They would say that Christians possess a lack of faith for leaving God any other option than the one that we want. So we just claim that promise, we just believe that promise, and somehow our faith in the promise God hasn't given us in His word, God is going to be kept to that.

But God doesn't look at that at all and say that a person that looks and says, "God may do it. He's perfectly capable of doing it, but He may not do it." God doesn't view anyone as lacking faith related to that kind of a situation and an understanding of Him.

In fact, the Holy Spirit in the New Testament in the book of Hebrews chapter 11, the great Christian Hall of Faith that is there, these three Hebrew children are listed in the Hall of Faith with this understanding of God. In verse 34, he is listing who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, here talking about these three, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle and turned to flight the armies of aliens.

But to call this phrase that they use, "but if not," concerning God, to call that a lack of faith in any way is to ignore the book of Acts. It is certainly to ignore the epistles of the New Testament and it is to ignore the life of Jesus Himself in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before He was crucified.

He went a little further and He fell on His face and He prayed saying, "Oh Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will." That's a mature understanding of what the word promises us in the midst of tribulation in life.

I have watched so many Christians suffer in 35 years of pastoring such heartbreaking crises of faith in their life and such a terrible turmoil in their relationship with God because they claim from God what God has never promised us. They claim promises that do not exist in the Bible.

There is no promise in the Bible that guarantees us as Christians that we will always be spared suffering and trial. They demonstrate the maturity of confessing God can, but He may not in His sovereign will. I think they did it in a kind of a mature understanding of these things.

When we say, "God can do this, but He may not do this," we say that with the confidence that since God could spare us the fiery trial, if He doesn't, it must mean that He is up to something even better related to our lives. Not something easier, but something better, something necessary for us to one day hear from the lips of Jesus, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of the Lord."

There have been times in my life where I've gone through things that I haven't understood at all. They didn't seem necessary to me and you lose your bearings, the trial is so difficult, it's so awful, all I want is to get out of it, and I think you understand those kind of trials.

Then it finally dawns after some amount of time in the realization: "Well, okay, He's not delivering me from this fire, so apparently somehow this trial, this fire in my life is an important part of me one day hearing a 'well done' from Him." That perspective in a trial can take us a long way and infuse a lot of perspective and a lot of encouragement in a trial.

Guest (Male): There's more to learn from these three men of courageous faith, and we'll have that for you tomorrow on According to the Scriptures as Pastor Damian Kyle revisits Daniel chapter three. Interested in a CD copy of this message? Simply call us, the number is 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530.

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