Recently, I was reading Azariah’s Prayer from Daniel 3. Azariah was one of the three Hebrew young men who were tossed into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to the golden statue erected by the Emperor. His prayer is a plea for mercy and deliverance from the evil that has befallen them because of the nation turning away from their God.
Azariah, aka Abednego (his Babylonian name), and his companions were among the Hebrew captives deported to Babylon when Jerusalem fell into Nebuchadnezzar’s hands. They proved to be such quick learners, intelligent and astute, that, along with Daniel, they were placed in high level positions of authority within the Babylonian administration. Out of some jealousy of their success from their native born equivalents, Nebuchadnezzar was prevailed upon to have a statue of himself cast in gold and to issue a decree that everyone in the Empire was to bow down to it on penalty death by being thrown into a fiery furnace for lack of compliance.
When it was reported to Nebuchadnezzar that the three young Hebrews stood tall before the statue, and refused to bend their knee, the other courtiers incited Nebuchadnezzar to call them in and demand their obedience to his decree. He was apoplectic that they refused to follow his orders. He commanded that they be thrown in the blazing, fiery furnace which was to be heated to 7x’s its usually temperature…the Bible relates that the soldiers who threw the three bound men into the fire were themselves incinerated because the heat of the furnace was so furious.
In response to the threat to their lives, the three young men were clear that they would not be swayed to comply with what was clearly against their consciences, no matter what the consequences might be. We read:
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. 17 If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us[b] from Your Majesty’s hand. 18 But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” (Daniel 3: 16-18 NIV)
What struck me in reading this exchange, and Azariah’s prayer, was the question: Would I have gone into the fire as willingly as they did? Do I actually believe and trust, with such unswerving faith in this same God who delivered them, that He, too, will keep me and protect me in a similar way? Am I ready to stake my present existence and my eternal future on the certainty that God will be with me, whatever the challenges, and whatever the outcome?
Their response is instructive, “…the God we serve is able to deliver us….But even if he does not…we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
Will you…will I…stand strong in the face of the challenge by authorities who are empowered to incarcerate or even to martyr us? Will we still say, in the face of the ever present, very real threat, “My God will deliver me…and even if He doesn’t, I will not scar my conscience by choosing an action that is abhorrent to Him and, so, to me.”?
Both Fr. Maximilian Kolbe1, a Polish priest, and Dietrich Boenhoeffer2, a German Pastor, come to mind. Both chose to risk everything to stand for their firmly held, individual and personal, belief in the Living God of Scripture. Each eventually paid with their lives…being put to death, after their incarceration, for standing up for gospel values against the insanity of the Nazi policies and practices.
Both were vocal, and public, in their opposition to the National Socialist political machinery and its impact on day to day life in war-torn Poland, and in war-ravaged Germany, respectively. Neither backed down, and both paid the price by being imprisoned, Kolbe in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he volunteered to be starved to death in the place of another Jewish man who agonized over what would happen to his family with his death, and Bonhoeffer, in a prison in Berlin, from where he was taken and hanged shortly before the Nazi regime fell and Europe was liberated by the Allies.
As Christians, we face an increasingly anti-Christian bias in our media, as well as in the policies and practices embraced by most of our elected political representatives at every level. As we stand for life, family, and freedom, more and more, we are being challenged, marginalized, hounded and harassed, persecuted, demonized and criminalized…the question is, how long before we see, ourselves or others, put to death to rid the society/culture of the blight of those, like us, who put their trust and faith in the Judaeo-Christian God and uphold the Biblical values and tenets of faith that accompany those beliefs?
Kolbe and Bonhoeffer lived in ordinary, normal circumstances, under the accepted rule of law and freedoms enjoyed in a democratic nation…until those freedoms were unceremoniously stripped away. Freedom no longer existed, for them, because they were on the ‘wrong side’ of what was acceptable under the Nazi regime and its power brokers. Both men, and their families and associates, were summarily plunged into an inferno of flaming hatred and destruction neither could probably have ever imagined might engulf them within the culture and history of their respective nations.
Are we heading into a similar, unbelievable, unstoppable crisis such as warranted the outbreak of World War II…which, I remind us, was fought to protect the very freedoms we are now losing, and that seem to be quickly eroding on all sides? Voices of dissent are no longer being allowed to raise a cry of protest, to protect and guard us all from the overstep of forces bent on shifting the values of our society and culture, so as to be able to remove freedom from those who dissent…because they dissent.
If this is what’s happening now…what’s to come?
1 https://www.stmaximiliankolbechurch.com/about-us/biography-of-saint-maximilian
2 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dietrich-Bonhoeffer/Ethical-and-religious-thought
Ending Our Life Well 