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Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Nebuchadnezzar said, ‘Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him. They disobeyed the king’s command and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, August 11, 2024
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Our God is a God who uses conviction—and even stubbornness—for good.
This passage is full of rigid imagery and characters. We open on King Nebuchadnezzar and the massive golden statues he has commissioned to represent his authority across Babylon. His expectation is just as massive as the statues themselves—not just that everyone under his rule will recognize his power, but that they will worship him because of it. He preemptively declares that anyone who doesn’t fall on their faces in reverence of him will be thrown into “a furnace of blazing fire.”
We learn very quickly that he wasn’t kidding, or being hyperbolic. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three men who were forcibly assimilated into Babylonian culture and who served at a court level, refused to play by Nebuchadnezzar’s new rules. They still held their Jewish faith and wouldn’t say otherwise, even if it meant death. They were thrown into a furnace, but nothing happened to them. They were unharmed and ultimately emerged from the flames free from burns or marks.
This story can certainly be understood as testimonial to what God was able to do through Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—that is, delivering the faithful. But what about what God was able to do through Nebuchadnezzar? What about transforming the defiant?
God showed up in a way that would resonate with Nebuchadnezzar. Direct, strong-willed and certain. Powerful and unbending. And Nebuchadnezzar responded! He rescinded the idea that his was the only authority in Babylon—that he was the only force worthy of worship—and he ended up spreading the word across the kingdom.
Our God speaks our language: our stubbornness, our misguidedness. Our God not only understands conviction, but cherishes it when it is used as a tool of love and justice. There is nothing we could do—no stand we could take—that God couldn’t use to change our hearts for the better and bring us into deeper relationship with the people around us.
