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Country Life SDA Church

Eric Walsh

Faith that Fireproofs

Our scripture reading for the sermon, the 2 Timothy 3.12 says, yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.

Our message today is entitled, Faith That Fireproofs.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your Word.

And I ask now, Lord, in a special way that you just make me a nail on the wall.

And Lord upon that nail, I ask that you hang a portrait of Jesus Christ.

I don't wanna be seen or heard today instead, Father, let us hear a word from you.

So we're gonna go to the book of Daniel and we're gonna go to chapter 3.

As kind of referred to in the children's story, this is a story of God's people in captivity.

There was more than 1 wave of captives taken, and Daniel, who's the author of this book, is a contemporary of Ezekiel and of Jeremiah.

In fact, there are those who would suggest that Daniel was probably taught of Jeremiah in some ways before he was taken captive.

They get here, and the 4 of them are now under scrutiny.

There was a reference in the children's story to chapter 1 where actually the dietary laws of the Jews were challenged at Nebuchadnezzar's table and they passed that test.

And the Bible actually gives you, for maybe the first recorded time in all of history, it gives you the first case-controlled study, for those of you who have ever done research, right?

The case are the 4 of the Hebrew boys, Daniel and the 3 boys, and the controls are all the others.

And they come out better because they believe God.

I want you to imagine what it would have been like to be forced to walk from Jerusalem to Babylon, hundreds of miles by a captor who was quite ruthless.

So he started, the way to start making you Babylonian is to actually feed you Babylonian food.

And now we come to a story where all of it comes together because in Daniel chapter 2 Nebuchadnezzar is given a dream and it shakes Nebuchadnezzar, the king, the most powerful man in the world, is shaken to his core by this dream.

He is so pleased when he hears the interpretation that he is the head of gold that Nebuchadnezzar in his in his arrogance sets up an image basically to himself.

Daniel 3 and verse 1 Nebuchadnezzar the king the Bible says made an image of gold whose height was 3 score cubits and the breadth thereof 6 cubits.

He set it up in the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.

Some say this thing would have been at least 90 feet tall.

It would have taken some time to build it.

And the fact that it would have taken time to build it is relevant because it means that those who were of the house of God, who were also captives, had plenty of time to prepare for the day when they were asked to bow.

They couldn't just pop up a giant statue like that back then.

They had to wait and they watched and they would have to have known what might come.

And so it makes it even more egregious in many ways that only the 3 are recorded as standing.

The dream that he had from Daniel chapter 2 is prophetically relevant.

Peter, I love the line in Peter's writings.

Peter says, we have a more sure word of prophecy.

And a lot of people don't like that we go to these prophecies.

Because these prophecies give you an assurity in the word of God.

When you go back and you look, that Daniel was able to, the book of Daniel, in this case, Nebuchadnezzar's dream and interpretation, is able to tell the exact course of kingdoms that would come into the world.

And what's powerful is if you really study prophecy, it will tell you every major kingdom especially where God's people are going to be impacted by that kingdom from Babylon right to America here we have the first of those and it ends with the feet of iron and clay and you can see that this was a powerful thing.

It was predictive of what would happen later on.

In fact, later on they were able to show some of these prophecies to some of the leaders of places like Medo-Persia and convince them that there was something special about what the Jews taught.

Now, the Book of Daniel, we talked a little bit about this Monday night at our first chapel for the homeschool kids, and even if your kids aren't homeschooled, If they go to public school, any school, every first Monday night, they're welcome to come.

And we talked about assurance that there is a God and trusting in God, and we can trust in God's word.

This article from The Guardian is really powerful.

It shows that, it says that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than thought, experts say.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls have many books in it, but 2 of the key books that are relevant to me are the Book of Daniel and the Book of Isaiah.

We now know, based on AI and some new dating, they said that they put a castor oil on some of the books in order to initially date them, and it might have skewed the dates and made them look younger than they were.

They are now saying that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls existed at the time of Daniel.

That means that we have evidence, and I believe that as time goes on, and they specifically look at the book of Daniel and Isaiah, that they're gonna be able to say these books existed, they already can say that for some of them, hundreds of years before the prophecies they predicted came to pass.

The book of Isaiah is especially important because it is the messianic book of the Old Testament.

It predicts so many characteristics of Christ when he comes Imagine now that we know the book existed hundreds of years before Jesus was born so they couldn't have written those facts in afterwards But as important in the book of Daniel is the 490 year prophecy which predicts to the day the anointing, baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, the crucifixion, the cutting down of the Messiah in the middle of the week, and then the stoning of Stephen.

I say all of this to tell you, you can trust your Bible.

And as it said, the rocks are going to cry out.

Through archeology, they're gonna continue to discover this.

So as we go through this story, know that you can trust the story.

Verse 2, then Nebuchadnezzar the king sent to gather together the princes, the governors, and the captains, the judges, the treasurers, and the counselors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces to come to the dedication of the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up.

People were brought, and this is important on 2 levels in the story.

The people who witnessed this were from all over the Babylonian empire.

They came from hundreds of miles for this.

And that's why this list here is so long.

Then another time in the Bible or in Christian history that this happens is when Paul is brought before Nero and all of the dignitaries from all over the Roman Empire are brought together and Paul is warned not to preach the gospel but of course Paul disobeys and we are totally preaches his most powerful sermon that leads to his martyrdom.

Here it is again people have come from all over Babylon.

Verse 3, then the princes, the governors, and captains, the judges, the treasurers, the counselors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces were gathered together unto the dedication of the image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

And they stood before the image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

Someone shouts out, to you it is commanded, he says, O people, nations, and languages, that at the time you hear the sound of the cornet, 1 instrument, flute, 2, harp, 3, sackbutch, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music, 6 types of musical instruments mentioned, you fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king has set up.

Everyone's there from all over the empire.

They have a band put together and the relevance of this music is also quite important.

All of these musical instruments represents different parts of the empire.

So they bring together all of these musicians from all over the empire and create an orchestra in order to set a mood of worship.

Verse 6, and it says, "'And whoso falleth not down and worship the same hour, "'shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.

So the punishment if you don't do what is told to you to do is that you are going to be thrown into a burning fiery furnace.

So it's interesting because stone was rare in Babylon.

So the Babylonians mastered the art of making brick.

In fact, Nebuchadnezzar was a bit of a narcissist.

And so you can see from this image, there's an actual picture of 1 of the stones they found.

This is a stamped brick from Nebuchadnezzar II.

And when you look at it, they actually stamped his name into each piece of brick.

So when they built a building, it looked like a Louis Vuitton bag or something.

His name is just all over the bag, all over the building.

But this is why they like furnaces so much and 1 of the punishments, 1 of the ways that they would honor their gods is to send sacrifices into these burning furnaces.

So this was all set up for fear and for worship.

Says, therefore at that time, when all the people heard the sound of the cornet flute harp sackbutt psaltery and all kinds of music all the people the nations and the languages fell down and Worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up.

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Faith that Fireproofs

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