Unbowed Believer

419  My 6 year old grand daughter, Ella, and I were watching a Veggie Tale adaptation of the Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego story the other day.  The veggie characters, Rack, Shack, and Benny, worked in Mr. Nezzer’s chocolate factory.  The heroes’ parents had told them that eating too much chocolate was not good for their health, so they obeyed and only ate small amounts.  One day Mr. Nezzer decide to have his chocolatiers craft a humongous chocolate bunny.  It was his plan to have all his employees bow down to the huge rabbit, and pledge to eat massive quantities of  candy, or else.  The veggie boys knew that bowing down went against all they believed, but the punishment for not complying was to be thrown into a blazing hot furnace with all the broken candies. What a dilemma!  I watched Ella, and could almost hear those gears turning in her little blond head, as she thought how she would respond. She turned to me and said, “I’d just bow down, but I wouldn’t say anything.”  I had to laugh, because even at an early age, we humans are always looking out for our flesh. We rationalize our behavior by saying we aren’t really caving in, it’s only pretending because we have our spiritual fingers crossed.

When faced with a life-threatening situation, how would you respond? Is your faith in God strong enough to sustain you, or will you go with the flow, hoping God will overlook and understand? I certainly pray we never have to find out, but many Christians all over the world are experiencing this exact type of persecution.  In the Bible version we know that the boys survived the fiery blast furnace, but they didn’t know how it would turn out.  Still this is how they responded to the king. “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn’t, we want to make it clear to you, Your Majesty, that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.” Daniel 3:16-18.

Wow, now that’s obedience, to have a faith so strong that it allowed for the fact that God might not work in the way they humanly envisioned. As it turned out, all the glory went to God, and King Nebuchadnezzar was won over. Today, my prayer for all of you is a supernaturally strengthened faith, one that will allow us to say with confidence, unbowed, even in the face of disaster, “There is no other god who can rescue like this!” Daniel 3:29.