Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 3-4.

My lovely wife married me 22 years ago on the 23rd of this month.  So I am going to wish her Happy Anniversary every day from now until then.

Happy Anniversary, Darling!

When Nebuchadnezzar made his gold statue and set up the ceremony for everyone to bow down to it, I think he imagined it as a unifying event which could help unify all of the peoples of his empire.  For Nebuchadnezzar this ceremony was political, not religious.  Nebuchadnezzar did not care if Jews worshiped God, as long as their first loyalty was to himself.  Thus the nature of his threat, “what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?”  Actually, this same attitude is what got Nebuchadnezzar in trouble in chapter 4 after his second dream.  In both cases, Nebuchadnezzar came to believe that no power could stand between him and his desires.  Returning to the story about the gold statue, those who reported Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did so in order to gain political power.  Which brings us to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  For them, this had nothing to do with politics, not because they were unaware of the politics involved, but because their worship of God outweighed, for them, the political implications of their actions.  They believed that God could, and would, rescue them from Nebuchadnezzar’s hand, but if God chose not to rescue them, they would serve no other god.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.