• The Explore the Bible lesson for Aug. 3 focuses on Daniel 3:1, 8-12, 15-18, 24-25, 28.
A false god is anything we assign the power to declare our worth to us other than the God who created us. We will worship, serve and honor whatever or whomever we believe gives us worth. Every single day, many false gods compete for that position in our lives.
The challenge of being a follower of Christ is the daily discipline of remembering the source of our truth worth and value. The single greatest power we possess is the power to choose what God we will worship.
Nebuchadnezzar’s statue
King Nebuchadnezzar built an enormous gold statue. A cubit was a measurement roughly the length of a man’s forearm. That means the gold statue the king had constructed measured roughly 100 feet in height and 10 feet in width.
It’s hard to know why the king built the statue. Perhaps the king thought that much gold represented his power and his worth to his people. As a result, the people were commanded to bow down to the statue and worship it, thus worshipping the king who had it built. Nebuchadnezzar’s greatest weakness was his need for the worship of his people in order to believe he was of worth.
The command was real. A failure to worship the statue would be a failure to recognize the authority of the king. The resulting sentence would be death by fire in a furnace. Yet for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, there was a fire of faith within their hearts greater than any fire the king could stoke. They’d be given the opportunity to prove it.
Faith will be tested
Even before we get to the furnace, Scripture has brought forward one of the most consistent lessons to be found in all the Bible. It’s a lesson that appears in the Garden of Eden and extends to the end of the Bible. If we choose to serve God, we will find that faith tested, and we will be given the chance to prove whether it is solid-gold truth or just so much talk.
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“Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
Sometimes being a faithful follower of Jesus demands we rethink the faith we’ve been given, even by our ancestors. Faith must be reclaimed by each generation. Just because our grandparents or even our parents believed the way they did doesn’t mean their faith automatically transfers to us when we’re born. In some cases, the faith of our ancestors needs to be discarded and replaced by one more Christ-centered.
At some point, in one way or another, our faith must become our own. Otherwise, when the time of testing comes—and come it will—our faith won’t be enough to face the test. We’ll only be willing to live for and die for our faith if it our personal faith. It is not possible to borrow or even inherit anyone else’s faith.
Three questions
A good test to help us discover who or what we worship is to ask ourselves three questions. How do we spend our time? How do we spend our money? How do we treat people, especially those who do not love us? Our calendars and check registers and our relationships are the three greatest evidences of how deeply the truth of Scripture has found its way into the core of our souls.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego told the king their faith would not allow them to worship his handmade god. They went on to say if they were thrown into the furnace, their God would deliver them from the fire. Then, they went further. Even if God chose not to deliver them from the fire, that would not alter their commitment to worship the true God and the true God only.
To stay true to our faith even when we can neither predict nor control how that faithfulness will turn out may be the greatest evidence we have surrendered all we are to one true living God. In the end, the faith of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego bore such a powerful witness it began to change the culture, even the politics, of those who had heretofore worshipped false gods.
Being a follower of Jesus means living for the long haul, not reacting or responding only to immediate fears or gratification. Only those who steadfastly choose to worship God and God alone will have an eternal impact on this temporal world we now call home.
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