“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”
Isaiah 43:1-3
I wonder if this is the passage Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were reciting to each other as they were bound and dragged to Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. I wonder if these words helped give them the boldness to speak their defiance to the king:
“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, ‘O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.’”
Daniel 3:16-18
Going all the way back to Abraham and Moses, the Jewish people have always been defined by the miraculous intervention of God in their story: Abraham and Sarah conceiving Isaac; Jacob having 12 sons; Joseph’s providential deliverance to Egypt ahead of his family; the 10 plagues ending with the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea; the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai; the arrival at the Jordan the first time (fail); the arrival at the Jordan the second time (success); the conquest of the land; Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Ba’al; David’s expansion of the kingdom, etc.
Around 700 B.C. Isaiah reminded God’s people of two defining events: 1) the parting of the Red Sea and 2) the crossing of the Jordan River. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” He presents these as future possibilities, saying – “We’ve been through this before and God has always been faithful.”
But the next line is truly prophetic: “when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” Daniel and his friends were taken as captives to Babylon in 605 B.C., almost 100 years after Isaiah wrote these words. So God was preparing His people for a time of refining through the fire of the Babylonian exile. It was 70 years of figurative purging by the fires of suffering and also – at least the one time – literal exposure to a blazing furnace.
“Because the king’s order was urgent and the furnace overheated, the flame of the fire killed those men who took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell bound into the burning fiery furnace.
“Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up in haste. He declared to his counselors, ‘Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?” They answered and said to the king, ‘True, O king.’ He answered and said, ‘But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.’”
Daniel 3:22-25
God could have saved his three servants in any number of ways. He could have preserved them as He did Daniel in the lion’s den – by simply making them immune to the fire. But the way God protected them from the fire of Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath was by placing His own Son into that fire with them! In this case, the presence of the one “like a son of the gods” was enough to protect the three young Jews and get the king’s attention. But it foreshadowed the ultimate deliverance God would provide through His Son – when Jesus stepped into the fire of God’s just wrath and endured ever bit of its molten fury precisely so you and I would never have be thrown into that deadly furnace.
Jesus is the way through the Red Sea.
Jesus is the path through the flooded Jordan River.
Jesus is the victory over Jericho.
Jesus is the conqueror of Goliath.
Jesus is the One who stands in the fire for us.
“This is our God: King Jesus.”
“Remember those walls that we called sin and shame?
“They were like prisons that we couldn’t escape.
But He came, and He died, and He rose
Those walls are rubble now.
“Remember those giants we called death and grave?
They were like mountains that stood in our way.
But He came, and He died, and He rose
Those giants are dead now.”