King Nebuchadnezzar First Tried To Kill Me
1/13/2016
“Look!” he answered, “I
see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt,
and the form of the fourth is like the son of the gods” Danial 3;25
Babylon; the city where you can forge your wildest
dreams, sleep in the most beautiful of palaces and worship as many gods as you
can imagine. As far as worldly beauty goes, it is the queen of sinful lust and
desire. If you love the world, you will love Babylon. If you are a Hebrew like
me, Babylon goes against all your senses and represents hell on earth for the
LORD’s faithful.
My name is Shadrach. My close friends and coworkers are
Meshach, Abed-Nego, and Daniel, the man with many visions of the future of
God’s people and the demise of the great Babylon.
My countrymen were carried off into exile to Babylon
during my father’s generation. Those who weren’t slaughtered in Israel were
carried off to this eastern land where the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers meet.
This is the cradle of civilization, but for us Hebrews, this is the land of our
captivity.
It was so awful when our great city of Jerusalem was laid
siege. The people were surrounded by the city walls. The Babylonians
outnumbered us in numbers and their technology was superior. They taunted us by
catapulting our dead brothers over the wall. Decapitated heads were slung over.
We could hear the cries of the women and children as they told us to give up.
The battering rams battered at the doors. The fiery arrows were shot over the
walls.
Some of my people were forced into cannibalization of the
weak and young to stay alive. The hearts melted like beez-wax within our
chests. What was worse was that for
years prior to this, some men who claimed to be prophets of the most high,
declared that our punishment was upon us because we had forsaken the LORD and
worshipped other gods like the foreigners around us.
The people disbelieved and even killed some of those
prophets. God’s messengers were cast out of the land, humiliated, starved,
sawed in two, and hunted down like wild dogs. As death approached, and defeat
was imminent, the words of those messengers hit my people’s hearts just as if
David himself had shot a rock at us with his slingshot, the way he killed
Goliath.
I was one of the lucky ones. My parents were one of the
ones who were captured in the city, to be dragged off into exile in Babylonia.
My people were made to serve the king, King Nebuchadnezzar.
Government officials were sent out to see the mental
capacity of the children of these exiles. If any of them showed any promise,
they were taken from their parents so as to enter the service of the king in
his palace.
All types of skills were taught to these elite groups of
exiles. Some were turned into the arts, including music, the visual arts, and
all sorts of writing arts. Others were made to be servants of the high king
himself. They were to advise him on the sciences, the state of political
sciences, astronomy, the purchasing power of gold, and all sorts of other
matters.
The rest of the population was put into manual labor. This
meant building up of the city, the maintenance of disease-infested sewers, and the
purifications of religious activities. Other parts of the exiled society were
for sport. They were made to fight against trained warriors to the death. Some
were given training while others were not.
During the time of the exiles, the great king
Nebuchadnezzar had made a large golden image. It was the image of a large
man/beast. The upper body was of a man with a long beard, and long hair while
the lower part was that of an ox, which represented strength and prestige. The
king made a decree that when he sounded off for all the musicians to play
certain music, all peoples no matter what language, country of origin, or
economic status, were to bow down and worship this golden image.
My Jewish friends and I said we would not worship this
hideous image, and so we didn’t. We knew who our God was. Our God was the
creator of everything visible to the eye; animals, beasts, mountains, fields,
everything. Man was said to be made in God’s very image. This meant that all
the spiritual attributes that God contained in himself, he created in man and
woman. God was both masculine and feminine. He was both strong and nurturing.
He was rugged, strong, and direct, and also beautiful, prestigious, and poetic
in all his ways. God’s mind was above everything yet he chose mankind to share
in his intellectual property, and not to be depraved just as the animals are,
who being of lower being, cannot think or praise the almighty God, the way we
are commanded to.
Knowing all this, there was no way I would fall to my
knees over a manmade image in the shape of an unnatural beast representing a god that did not
even exist. If I must lose my life for this, then I must lose my life. Even as
a servant of the king, I knew that it was always possible to disobey man while
at the same time obeying God. I trusted that God would rescue us. If he didn’t,
then it was his will to let us return to his presence eternally, forevermore
able to worship at his throne.
So it was no surprise when the king ordered us into his
blazing hot furnace of fire in the ground. The king was so angry that he
ordered that the furnace be turned up seven times the normal heat and that we
be bound in chains and thrown in.
We were thrown in. The furnace was so hot, that the
valiant men who tied us and led us to our death, were themselves killed by the
heat. God rescued us. We were in the fire, yet we were not affected by the
fire. Our hair was not even burned. Our clothes were never singed and we never
smelled of smoke. We were prepared to meet our maker, yet it was our maker who
decided to join us and he kept us alive and safe.
The great Angel of the LORD was there speaking with us.
He spoke to us of eternal things; the greater picture in all this. He did not
speak to us as one speaks to another man. He spoke to us with his mind. He
could read our thoughts and he communicated to us through his thoughts. The
thoughts were so deep that it was a communication so intense and so pure and so
loving, that I had never had a day like that before, or after during my whole
life.
King Nebuchadnezzar came to the opening of this great
fire and called out our names. He asked how we were and said that if our God
was with us and had indeed saved us, then we should come out so that he can see
and believe. We walked out
The king immediately dropped down to his knees and begged
that we ask our God for forgiveness. He then began to praise the God of the
exiles. He came up and touched our faces and our clothes. He smelled our
clothing and told us it was as if we had never been near the fire, while his
own men had perished while only coming close to it.
The king then told us from that day forward, we were to
forever eat at his table and drink of his wine. We were to always be within
reach on the matters of administering his government. The next law that he
declared was that if anyone said any sort of malice to the God of the Hebrews,
they were to be cut into pieces and his house was to be demolished.
I have remained in the king’s service to this day. The
LORD rewarded me with my faithfulness in that I am free to worship him at any
time without malice, hatred, or any other sort of molestation to my rights.
The End.
