Daniel 3:13-18 – “Faith’s Sweet Consolation”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹³Then Nebuchadnezzar in shaking anger and hot wrath said to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Then the men those were brought before the king. ¹⁴Nebuchadnezzar answering and saying to them, “[Is it] true, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, my gods you are not serving and the image of the gold which I set up not worshipping? ¹⁵Now if you are ready in the time which you hear the sound of the horn, the pipe, zither, the lyre, harp, and pipes, and the all of the kinds of music you fall and you worship the image I made and if not you will worship in that moment, you will be cast to the midst of the furnace of the fire burning, and who [is] that god who will deliver you from my hand?” ¹⁶Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and saying to the king Nebuchadnezzar, “We not having need upon this matter to respond. ¹⁷If it is [so], our God whom we worshipping being able to deliver us from the furnace of the fire burning and from your hand, O king, He may deliver [us].¹⁸And if not being delivered, let it be [known] to you O king that your gods we are not serving and the image of the gold which you set up we will not worship.”

Before leaving these verses, there are a couple more thoughts I want to record. The first has to do with exactly what the guys said. In v17, the usual translation is that they said something like, “Our God is able to deliver us, and He will, but if not …” I would like to suggest it should be, “Our God is able to deliver us, and He may, but if not …”

I think it is “He may.” In Aramaic, as in Hebrew, there is very little “tense” as we know them. In English we have present and past and future and perfect and imperfect and past perfect and past imperfect and on and on. In Hebrew and Aramaic, they simply have what we call “Perfect” and “Imperfect.” That’s it. And they don’t mean what they mean in English. They’re more like “realized” and “unrealized” but even that doesn’t really help us understand them. In v17, the “He will/may deliver us” is an imperfect, an “unrealized.” What that means is that it could be either will or may. I could go on and on but the bottom line is that I think “may” makes way more sense and is a completely reasonable translation.

If we choose the “He will” translation, then it begs the question, “How do they know?” Someone may say, “Daniel told them,” or “An angel told them.” The problem I see is if they did in fact know that the Lord was going to deliver them, why did they go on to say, “And if not …”? It makes way more sense if they said, “He may, and if not …”

The “He may, and if not …” is exactly the perspective of faith we all have to live with all day every day. Personally, I think as we all face the threats and fears and dangers of living in this world, their words are a simple summary of a faith mindset: “My God is able to deliver me, and He may, but even if He doesn’t I will trust Him and do right, God help me.”

As I sit here typing on an August morning, I feel almost crushed by the barrage of worries and fears that endlessly circle my head, by the weight of it all that feels like it would crush the very life out of me. And I don’t think I’m any different than anyone who might stumble across these thoughts of mine. It’s the fallen world we live in. No matter what we do, the threats and fears will all be there. For us believers, it’s a matter of how we’ll choose to think. And just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we can choose to look out at our world and say, “My God is able to deliver me, and He may, but even if He doesn’t I will trust Him and do right, God help me.” As the song says,

Help me then, in every tribulation,

so to trust Thy promises, O Lord,

that I lose not faith’s sweet consolation,

offered me within Thy Holy Word.

Notice the “…that I lose not faith’s sweet consolation.” That is precisely what we all need in this fearsome, threatening world – faith’s sweet consolation. And what is that? Is it not the promise that our God is able, that He may deliver us, but even if He doesn’t we choose to trust “our Father’s wise bestowment” and say, “I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.”

It gives me great encouragement to remember that there is no such thing as a future without the Lord. In other words, no matter what my future holds, the same God will be there in each moment of each day. A couple of years ago I realized that is really what worry is – it is imagining a world without God, a future where somehow God is no longer in control. And the plain simple truth is there’s no such thing. Right? The same Jesus who loves me today, and who is today working all things for my good, will be the same Jesus in all the moments of all my tomorrows.

The guys woke up that morning roughly 2600 years ago and went out to live their life in this threatening, fearsome world. On that particular day, they were supposed to be literally executed – roasted to death in a fiery furnace – but they all put on their pajamas and went to bed that night. Our God is able to deliver us, and He may, but if not, God help us to do right, to love people, to work hard, to do our best no matter what, and even if we die in the process, may we die with a sweet spirit, still trusting our Lord, still loving even the people who kill us or fire us or mistreat us or betray us or laugh at us or whatever.

May we, like the guys, not lose “faith’s sweet consolation!”