Gooding, David: 4 - The Cost of Combatting Idolatry

And let us come for this final session to chapter three of our prophet. And here the story is well known, and I shall not need to take very much time over it, and I shall be leaving you therefore longer for your question time and your discussions, so that you can, in the time of the discussion, not only discuss chapter three, but any of the problems that remain from the earlier sessions of the day. Now we have noticed already, let us notice again, that Daniel's material is so arranged that the first five chapters deal with the question of values. That is particularly emphasized from a literary point of view, because chapter one begins with the fact that Nebuchadnezzar moved the golden vessels from the house of the Lord, and he set them in the house of his gods. When you come to the end of chapter five you will find that, uh, those vessels are mentioned again. Belshazzar took those vessels from Jerusalem out of the house of the gods in Babylon- Babylonia, and he brought them to the banqueting house and drank thereof himself, and his friends did likewise. That was such an outrageous, uh, thing to do that in God's providence it coincided with the end of the Babylonian Empire. And so at the end of chapter five of Daniel's book, we come to the end of one major historical period, that is the end of the Babylonian Empire. Chapter six will start talking to you about the next empire, that is the Persians. And in between chapters one and five, all the way through, as we have observed, Daniel has chosen subjects that have to do with this matter of values, getting our values right. In chapter one, as we saw, it was in the realm of education, in the university college to which Daniel and his friends had been sent by the king. In chapter two, as we saw in our last session, values are raised over the question of political systems and their comparative worth. In chapter three, Daniel will stay again with matters of politics, as he records how Nebuchadnezzar deified the state, or tried to. In chapters four and five, on the other hand, it will be a matter of getting our values right in the context not of education so much or of politics so much, but in the context of art and culture, architecture, and so forth and so on. Now, chapter three therefore, is indeed about getting our values right. For in this chapter, Nebuchadnezzar makes an image of gold and commands all the officers of state from the various provinces to gather and bow down to it. That confronted Daniel's three friends. I suspect Daniel himself was away somewhere on business, but it confronted his three friends with a profound difficulty. And brought upon them an exceedingly severe trial and test. We shall come to that in a moment, but shall we first notice the practical lessons that lie on the surface of chapter three? When God had brought the Babylonians originally against Judah, and had warned them through the prophets that he was going to allow Jerusalem to be taken and the kings deposed. There were some who imagined that it was pleasing to God that they should just pretend to be subject to the Babylonians, but not really be subject to them. One of the kings, for instance, made a covenant with the king of Babylon, and then he broke it, thinking himself very clever, perhaps even thinking himself very godly. And God, through his servants, had to rebuke those people in Israel. He had allowed the Gentiles to conquer them. They were to submit to the Gentiles and obey the powers that be. And that was very difficult medicine for Jews to take. Many of them would love to have raised a protest and a revolt and marched all over the place to resist these Babylonians and have done it in the name of Jehovah on the grounds that they were sticking up for the faith. That would have been false. For now, the times of the Gentiles had started. Judah had been given her last choice for the time being. Her kings were now deposed, and the civil power passed from the hands of the Jew into the hand of the Gentile. It was no longer godliness for them to fight Assyrians and Babylonians and other such mixtures. They were to submit to the Gentiles, pagans though they were. On this occasion, however, there was necessarily an exception made, where three young Hebrew men, being in high office under the Babylonians and therefore involved in this matter, had to stand their ground and refuse point blank to obey the civil authority. Even so, you notice they didn't try to lead a revolt, which would have been hopeless anyway, but they did refuse to obey. The lesson that lies upon the surface of this passage is that lesson that Christians from time to time must face. What our normal attitude is to the powers that be, and then what our abnormal attitude must be sometimes. In the New Testament, the matter is made clear, what our normal attitude should be. Paul writing in his letter to the Romans and chapter thirteen says, let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God. Therefore, he that resisteth the power withstandeth the ordinance of God, and they that withstand shall receive to themselves judgment. That could have been difficult medicine for some of the early Christians to take, for the powers that be, on that occasion, were headed up by Nero himself, that irresponsible tyrant, Nero, that playboy of the ancient world. He's credited with having had his own mother murdered, let alone who else he threw to the lions and to the gladiators for his own personal entertainment. Were the Christians to submit to a government headed up by a Nero? Yes, says the apostle. In words that we believe are inspired and come to us with all the authority of God. It is for Christians to submit to the government that God in his wisdom has seen fit to raise up. Not only does Paul say it, but Timothy, uh, but Peter says the similar thing, does he not, in his first epistle and chapter two. At verse thirteen he writes, be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whether it be to the king as supreme, or unto governors as sent by him for vengeance on evildoers, and for praise to them that do well. For so is the will of God, that by well doing you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. As free, and not using your freedom for a cho- cloak of wickedness, but as bondservants of God, honor all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. And I repeat, in those days, the king was in general for the believers, the Roman emperor. It seems to me that those scriptures are categoric and clear and tell us what our normal duty as believers is. We must not be tempted to think like some who, in the days of our Lord, would have said it was wrong to give tribute to Caesar, that Caesar was a Gentile, pagan, idolatrous overlord, and it was wrong, therefore, for the Jews to take their money and give it to the support of Caesar. Our Lord made it very clear what his answer to the question was, is it right to give tribute to Caesar or not? He raised the whole question of ownership. Says he, show me a denarius. And when they showed him, he said, whose image and superscription is this? They said, Caesar's. Well, then he said, you give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. He chose to answer it in the category of ownership, and that is very significant, because when he came to Israel religiously, then he described the situation under the figure of a vineyard that God had let out to husbandmen. The husbandmen were the Jewish religious authorities. They, over the centuries, had brutally treated the prophets whom God had sent to them. And now at last, says our Lord in parable form, you ha- are about to take the very son of the owner, to throw him out of the vineyard and to kill him, in the foolish thought that you then yourselves will be owners of the vineyard. But when the religious authorities took that view, then our Lord told them straightly that whereas they would cast out of the vineyard the Son of God, the owner of the vineyard, he was not giving up his claim to be owner of the vineyard. And what God would do is he would send his armies and destroy those wicked husbandmen and give the vineyard to others. For Messiah is to remain owner of the vineyard. It is his vineyard, but that was talking in the sphere of things spiritual. How different it is when it comes to the sphere of things political. What will loyalty to the Messiah mean? Rising up, forming armies, and in the name of Jesus as king, trying to overthrow the Gentile oppressive governments? Indeed not. Said our Lord, you pay your tribute to Caesar. He owns the denarius. Give it to him. For the moment, our Lord is not disputing control of the governments of Earth. One day he will, as we have seen. But for the moment, loyalty to the Lord Jesus does not mean campaigning to overthrow a government. It means submitting. On the other hand, there do come times, do there not, when believers, for conscience sakes towards God, must disobey the civil authority. And what are the reasons for that are made clear by a case in point in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter four. Granted now, it was Peter and John before the religious Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, but they enunciate the basic principle. We must obey God rather than men. Acts four nineteen and again five twenty nine. For on this occasion, the Sanhedrin was demanding of the apostles and the Christians that they cease preaching in the name of the Lord Jesus. And that set up a direct conflict between the Sanhedrin's command and the command of the Lord Jesus. For the Lord Jesus had commanded them to preach in his name and to testify to the ends of the earth. When therefore the Sanhedrin commanded them not to preach, seeing they couldn't obey both, they had to choose which one they would obey. And of course, they chose to obey God rather than men. In our day, such situations may be rare indeed. We've no promise that they shall remain rare. Multitudes of our fellow Christians, almost from the start of Christianity, have had to face similar situations when the civil government has required of them to do things that they could not do in good conscience towards God. How many were there of your brothers and sisters in Christ who were hauled before the governors and the magistrates like Pliny, required to offer their incense on the altar to the genius of the emperor as lord? And for sake of loyalty to the Lord Jesus, refused to offer that pinch of incense to his majesty and were executed for their trouble, thrown to the lions or the gladiators and destroyed. As I say, that kind of situation may be rare enough for us. It is not rare, altogether too rare, for some of our fellow believers in certain countries of the world at this present moment. Governments may not deify themselves and ask for literal worship upon a literal altar. The governments there are that, overstepping their mark, insist on interfering in the affairs of the church and controlling not only the civil affairs of state and the affairs that belong to citizens as citizens, but demand to have their government representatives on the committees that run the churches and to be the controlling voice on how the Christian churches should be run. Thereby face our fellow Christians with grievous decisions. How do they accommodate this thing, if at all, in view of their loyalty to the absolute lordship of Christ in his church? We should not look upon our story, therefore, this afternoon as something that is really irrelevant to us completely. Let us thank God for the freedoms we have known under benign governments for so many years. Let us not suppose we shall always know those freedoms. What should we do if we were put to the test? As many as a- a- a- as as many of our early fellow Christians were put to the test in the days of the Romans. Have been in the days of the Russians. Have been in the days when Spain was a persecutor of evangelical believers. What would we do? Early days, when I first went to Spain, they used to tell me of one particular young gentleman who was required to do his service in the army. At the end of the service, there was a parade, as was customary in those far off days. When the soldiers were paraded, and all the ecclesiastics were there, and the top brass of the army, mass was held. At the time when the host was elevated, all had to bow down to the host. This particular lady went to his officer commander and said, please, could I be excused the parade? Why? Well, I don't want to be rude, but if I were present, I would not in all conscience be able to bow down. He said, young man, you'll be there. I shall be sitting on the row behind you in the cathedral, and if you don't bow down, I shall have my pistol in your back. What would you have done? Ah, perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of extreme cases like that. Perhaps we should be following the lesson that Daniel is trying to teach. If you would be strong when the difficulties are immense, start being strong in the little things of life and getting your values right there. Courage and the willingness to face sacrifice is not necessarily born in a moment. It comes of the habit of regular decision, presenting our bodies a living sacrifice to be loyal to the Savior in the small things, so prepared to be loyal in the big things. So come now to this big thing, and we know the story well, don't we? Nebuchadnezzar commanded that they set up an image of gold, and all his high officers were to be assembled, and when the orchestra played, they were to bow down. The ancients weren't such innocents as you think. They knew the power of mass psychology. It is not difficult to hazard a guess, surely, why Nebuchadnezzar would have done this thing. If Daniel two is true, Nebuchadnezzar had had a dream. And the interpretation of that dream by Daniel had suggested that Nebuchadnezzar's empire would soon depart. In chapter three, therefore, Nebuchadnezzar is doing his best to hold his ramshackle empire together so it doesn't depart. And who would like be likely most to upset it and split it? Well, not the ordinary peasant, but the high officers of state, the satraps and whatnot. These were the gentlemen that could conspire behind your back when you weren't looking and fail in their loyalty. So he made an image of gold, and he put it on the plain, and he summoned the high officers of state, and they were to bow down to it. Of course, it was a literal idol, if you like, but all present knew that that golden image was but an outward form, signifying the state Nebuchadnezzar. When the young men, for instance, refused to bow down, Nebuchadnezzar looked at him, his mustache twitching in all directions, and said, if you don't bow down, who is the God that can deliver you out of? Out of what? Not the hand of my God, but out of my hand. A case of a civil power, an emperor trying to get control over the loyalty of his subjects to a point where it passes all that is right and proper, and claims for the state that absolute loyalty that is due only to God. It is in that sense that the book, uh, that the wor- the the Bible uses the term worship. When we use the term worship today, we often think of singing of hymns and holy feelings within our breasts. That is one meaning of the word worship. Uh, another meaning, and sometimes, uh, it is more, uh, frequent, as for instance in the Revelation, worship means the bowing down before ultimate authority. In that sense, it was that his satanic majesty came to the Lord Jesus and said, young man, I'll give you all the kingdoms of the world, if you will, on this one condition, you bow down and worship me. Not hold a few meetings in praise of Satan, of course not, sing a few choruses to his satanic majesty, but bow down and recognize that I am an ultimate principle in this universe and in the affairs of men, and have to be come to terms with. You have to compromise with me. No, said Christ. Then Calvary for you, said Satan. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only. Shalt thou so. I pause to point out that this is not narrow-mindedness upon the heart part of believers, in refusing to give to the state that worship and loyalty of the heart that should be reserved for God alone. These three young men were not only honoring God, they were striking a blow for human freedom. Or for a human being to be asked to bow down before a government of fellow human beings and worship it and give it unquestioning and ultimate and absolute loyalty, that spells a slavery and an indignity that is fearful to contemplate. We have seen examples in history. The world shall yet see the harvest that will be reaped from the atheistic, materialistic theories that are taught in our Western world. If there is no God, then something has got to be acknowledged as the ultimate power, which all will consent to bow to. How will you run a universe? How will you run this planet that is getting smaller every day and the population exploding? How will you control men and women if you can't engage their loyalty, their absolute loyalty to something to which everybody is willing to or can be forced to bow down? And what shall that ultimate thing be? What it should be is God Almighty. But if there's no God Almighty, what's it going to be? You should not laugh at the Bible when the Bible says there will come a time when to solve Earth's problems, the genius of a ruler of the day shall institute the worship of man. For if there's no God, then you won't go worshiping caterpillars, I presume. Not now, that's a bit late. What will you find to worship? Except idealized man. There's coming a very big showdown. God will allow sin, human transgression, to go to its great harvest, to come to its full flowering, so that men may see where the denial of God leads to and the fearful slavery it brings about. And then men will be glad when God's son comes and destroys it and sets the world free. So these young men refused to bow down. How well we know the story. We've read it from our youth. Have you ever felt that you'd like to have been those chaps? You know, it's a little bit of Jack and the Giant Killer thing, isn't it? I wouldn't have minded it myself, you see. Here's this horrible great tyrant, whiskers going red in the face, threatening you with death and destruction, and here you come, little, uh, white-faced, uh, little Christian, and you defy him, and everybody gasps, uh. Oh, but how courageous you are. And then, just as he's going to throw you into the furnace, then God does a miracle, and you don't have to suffer anything. Isn't that marvelous? What a story it makes at the next missionary report meeting. What a... Hey. You risked everything and in the end didn't have to suffer anything at all. Glorious. But if we read the story like that, we misread it as a fairy story. That isn't what the story says. God did not save those three young men from suffering, did he? You say he did, because when they got in the fire, they weren't burned up. No, that didn't save them a lot of suffering, though, did it? For the fire was so hot that even the men that threw them in died. They were suffocated. Sure, if God hadn't done a miracle and preserved them in the furnace, their sufferings would have been short indeed. They would have instantaneously almost have been suffocated. They would have felt very little, and for a very short time. Isn't true to say that God didn't stop them from suffering, for the real suffering was not in the furnace, but before they got there. Can't you imagine those last few days with those three young men after business, and they get home, and they've had the meal, and the children are in bed, and now husband and wife sit down to talk it over. What days and nights they were. Must you refuse? I mean, stupid man. I mean, there'll be a lot of people there, you know, Sheriff Abignigo, he will be there, and he'll bow down, the old cynic, and as he bows down, he'll say, curse Nebuchadnezzar, isn't the God wonderful, curse Nebuchadnezzar. Can't you do like that? Silly old image. I just bow down to make the look of it. There's a lot of these other chaps doing that. They don't begin to believe the nonsense. Why can't you do it? I mean... If you don't bow down, you'll be in the third. What's going to happen to me and the kids? In a strange land, no widow's pension in that circumstance. Nothing but the slave labor camps, and for a woman, worse. What kind of suffering do you imagine that to have been? As night after night, they talked about it and tried to pray about it, and came at last to take the decision. It was like tearing the very flesh off their bones, wasn't it? You say, why didn't God save them from that kind of thing, from suffering that, from having to take that terrible decision? Well, truth to tell, friends, he can't. For here were these men engaged in the combat against idolatry. How can you face id- uh, the idolatry and fight it without paying a price? Sooner or later, in big things or in small, God must allow it for us all. God will stack himself on one side and everything we have on the other, and ask us to make the choice. He asked Abram to do it, didn't he? He asked Job to do it. To choose anything above God. That is idolatry. If we are going to be saved from idolatry, then in the course of daily life, who knows, in this situation or that. God will arrange it that we're brought to make our choice. God and loyalty to God and his word on the one hand, and what seems everything else I count dear on the other. There's the suffering. And God cannot save us from that suffering. They made their decision. They yielded their bodies. They were thrown into the furnace, and all the wonder of the story. There in the furnace, having let go all that was perishable, they found the imperishable. Say not that they had lost anything. They had found the eternal, the imperishable, a someone that the fires of earth cannot burn up or consume. And true to his promise, he was with them in the furnace, and they found him. It is true at all levels. When for his sake we let go the temporary, we find him the nearer, who is the eternal. Called upon, if need be, to let life go, and God help me to do it if the occasion demanded. We shall find it brings us into that eternal realm that is utterly imperishable. It burned something on them. The bonds that had bound them and set them to walk freely. So are all God's de- trials along this line designed to do, to free us from things that would shackle us by holding our the- their place in our affections and loyalty that only God himself should hold. They came out of the furnace. What a testimony they were to Nebuchadnezzar. He'd never met anybody like that before, that believed in a God like that before, that was prepared to lay down his life. Nebuchas- Ne- Nebuchadnezzar's first reaction was, what a God he must be. We show, don't we, what kind of a God he is by our preparedness to sacrifice for him. And we think of our Lord walking out to the poverty of Calvary, saying, and the only time he ever said it, that the world may know that I love the Father. Oh, how easily we talk about our love for God, and Christ so rarely, but on this occasion he talked of it. I love the Father, he says, and now the world shall see it. Come, said he, let us go hence. And the second thing that impressed Nebuchadnezzar was this, three young men with their careers in front of them. And for them, principle and their God was so important, says Nebuchadnezzar, they yielded their bodies. It staggered him beyond belief. And still the ancient apostle calls us likewise to do the same. I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you yield your bodies, not in some great extremity and traumatic experience necessarily first, but in the ordinary affairs of life, yielding your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. May God write his word upon our hearts and then upon our experience.