Three Youths Stayed in the Furnace for Permission

The first thing they refused was dinner.

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The chief of the guards had orders about the captive boys from Judah, and the orders were that they ate what the king ate, meat off the king's kitchen and wine out of the king's cellar, because a king who is building administrators feeds them himself. Daniel would not touch it, and neither would Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. "We will do our part," Daniel told him, "and the Holy One will do his."

Ten Days of Legumes and Water

The guard had a neck to protect. If these four came to the king's table thin and grey while the rest of the intake filled out, he was the man who would answer for it, so he said as much, in the plain way of an official who is not cruel and is not going to lose his post either.

"Test your servants ten days," Daniel said. "Give us legumes and water, nothing else, and at the end of the ten days look at our faces and at the faces of the boys eating the king's bread, and then do whatever you decide."

Could they really stand it, the guard wanted to know. Ten days on pulse and water.

"We are the children's children of the man who stood up under ten trials from God," they told him. "Abraham's merit will stand for us." So he gave them the legumes, and on the tenth day he walked the line of young men and looked at each face in turn, and the four who had eaten nothing off the royal table were the brightest faces in the room.

The Image on the Plain

Years later Nebuchadnezzar put up a golden image on the plain and called in every officer he had, and the order went out that when the horn sounded, everyone in the empire went down on his face.

The three of them came to the king with the account already divided. "Taxes we will pay you," they said, "and tolls, and levies, and whatever else the crown assesses, since you are the king and the road is yours. Deny the Holy One we will not." Then they said the part that took the argument away from him. "Whether God saves us out of your hand or does not save us, we are not bowing to that thing."

So he had them tied, hand and foot, in their coats and their hats, and thrown into a furnace he had ordered heated past any working temperature. Inside the fire they lifted their eyes and prayed, and the prayer was not for rescue. "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto your name give glory."

Who Went Down to Get Them

The angels stood up to go, since angels do not need to be asked twice about fire. The Holy One stopped them where they stood. "For my name they went down," he said, "and I will go down myself and loose them, because the Lord looses the prisoners."

Then he flooded the furnace. He put water through the whole burning shaft of it and brought the structure down level with the ground, and the three of them stood in the middle of that with the ropes gone off their wrists and a fourth figure beside them.

"Come out," the angel said.

The Refusal Inside the Fire

They would not.

The fire had already lost. The way out stood a step and a half in front of them with an angel holding it open, while the king who had tied them was somewhere outside the wall among his officers, so every hour they stayed was an hour spent inside a furnace on the word of a man who had wanted them dead by supper. They looked at the opening and did not take it.

"We came in here by the king's permission," they said, "and by the king's permission we will go out, or else it will be said afterward that we ran."

They had it from Noah. When the water was down and the ground was dry and his sons were pushing at the door of the ark, Noah would not let them open it, because they had gone in at God's word and they were going to come out at God's word, and they waited in that boat on dry land until the word came. "Go forth from the ark." So the three of them stayed in the leveled furnace and waited for a mouth that had never in its life said a true thing about God.

The King Came to the Door

Nebuchadnezzar had to walk to it himself. Not send a herald, not shout it from the platform, but come down off his seat and cross the ground in front of the whole administration of Babylon and stand at the door of his own furnace, near enough to feel what it was doing to his face.

He called them by the names he had issued them, the Babylonian names, Shadrach and Meshach and Abed-Nego. Then he had to put the rest of it in his own mouth in front of his officers. "Servants of the Most High God, come out and come here."

Only then did they come out, one at a time, past the satraps and the prefects and the governors who had all bowed at the horn, with nothing burned on any of them but the ropes. Behind them the furnace kept burning, since nobody had thought to give it any orders.