The Fourth Man in the Fire

Have you ever noticed how the worst moments of your life are almost never the ones you saw coming?

We prepare for the crises we can imagine. We buy insurance, save for retirement, get the annual physical. And then the phone rings at two in the morning, or the doctor says a word we’ve only heard in other people’s stories, or someone we love walks out the door and doesn’t come back.

The furnace we end up in is rarely the one we built a fire escape for.

Three young men in Babylon knew something about furnaces.

The Scene

I've been going through this in a series of several e-mails the last week or two on Daniel, but in case you missed those e-mails, here's what's happened.

Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden statue on the plain of Dura and commands that when the music plays, everyone must bow. Three Judean exiles refuse. They are hauled before the king, who offers them one more chance and then adds a taunt: "And who is the god that will deliver you out of my hands?" (Daniel 3:15).

Their answer is rooted in a profound and inspiring faith: "If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up" (Daniel 3:17-18).

But if not.

That phrase matters. These men do not bargain. They are willing to accept whatever God's will is in the situation. They simply refuse to make God’s faithfulness contingent on their own comfort. They will worship whether or not the fire burns them.

So into the furnace they go, bound, fully clothed. The furnace is heated seven times hotter than usual, because the king is so enraged by their obstinance. It's so hot that the soldiers who threw them in were killed by the flames.

And then Nebuchadnezzar rises from his seat in astonishment.

"But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god" (Daniel 3:25).

Who Is He?

The Aramaic here is genuinely fascinating, and worth slowing down for. The phrase rendered “the appearance of a god” is bar-elahin—literally, “a son of the gods.”

The King James rendered it “the Son of God,” and generations of Christians have read the verse as a direct appearance of the pre-incarnate Christ. This goes back long before the King James, though. Many of the earliest Christians saw what's called a Christophany here. An appearance of the Second Person of the Trinity intervening in history, manifesting in His grace before the fullness of His revelation is known.

But we should be honest about what’s happening in the text. Because this phrase isn't on the lips of a patriarch, or a prophet. They're spoken by a pagan whose theology would hardly have room from the nuance of the true God's eternal essence.

Nebuchadnezzar is a Babylonian polytheist. He is not likely making a Trinitarian confession. In his mouth, bar-elahin means something like “a divine being,” a member of the heavenly court. The plural elahin is the natural way a pagan king would speak of "gods," even though the Hebrew Old Testament uses the "plural" elohim as a kind of plurality of majesty to refer to the one true God.

Daniel offers a few other insights that can help.

A few verses later Nebuchadnezzar says: "Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him" (Daniel 3:28). The same Aramaic word, malak, “messenger” or “angel,” reappears in the next chapter when Daniel narrates the same pattern of divine rescue: "My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths so that they would not hurt me" (Daniel 6:22).

So at the level of the human author’s intention, the fourth man is almost certainly an angel—the mysterious “angel of the Lord” who appears throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes speaking as God, sometimes distinct from God.

Why Christians Have Never Been Content to Stop There

Here is where Scripture repays patient reading. Christians, going all the way back to the writers of the New Testament, always held that a text can mean more than its human author consciously grasped, because the divine Author is writing a single story across many centuries. The literal sense is the foundation. But foundations exist to hold something up.

For early Christian thinkers like Irenaeus and Tertullian, reading the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of the New Testament made the identity of this figure unmistakable. The Gospel of John insists that "no one has ever seen God" the Father (John 1:18). Therefore, whenever the invisible God took physical, visible form in the Old Testament to rescue or guide His people, the Church Fathers recognized the pre-incarnate Word, stepping into time and preparing humanity for His eventual incarnation.

They were simply following the New Testament's own lead; the Apostle Paul does this exact thing when he retroactively places Jesus squarely in the Exodus wilderness, declaring that the spiritual rock that accompanied the Israelites "was Christ" (1 Cor. 10:4). Jude does it too; in some of the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of Jude 1:5, the text explicitly names Jesus as the divine figure who "saved a people out of the land of Egypt." To the early Church, Jesus had always been walking through the fire with His people.

And often, it's precisely in this formulation in the Old Testament (in Hebrew, despite the fact that this portion of Daniel is in Aramaic): the malach YHWH, the "angel of the LORD."

Consider what the fourth man actually does. He does not extinguish the fire. He does not lift the young men out of it. He enters it. He walks in the middle of the flames with them, and his presence is itself the deliverance. The fire that killed the soldiers standing outside does not touch those standing inside with him.

Is it any wonder Christian readers have found their Lord’s face here?

This is what we recognize in the Incarnation. God’s answer to human suffering was not to abolish it from a safe distance but to climb down into it. "And the Word became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). The One who is "a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity" (Isaiah 53:3) did not send a memo into the furnace of human mortality. He got in.

Whether the fourth man was Christ himself or an angel bearing Christ’s own manner of loving, the theology is the same, because angels do nothing except what God does through them. The pattern revealed on the plain of Dura is the pattern revealed on Calvary: deliverance from inside.

What This Asks of You

Three things, I think. All of them simple, none of them easy.

First, stop demanding an exit before you’ll worship. The three young men said but if not before they knew the outcome. Most of our spiritual crises are not really about God’s existence; they are about God’s terms. We want a God who prevents furnaces. We have been given a God who occupies them. If your prayer life has quietly become a negotiation, it may be time to say but if not, and mean it, and see what happens to your soul.

Second, look for the fourth man in the middle, not at the door. When you are in the fire, the temptation is to scan the horizon for rescue and therefore miss the Presence standing beside you. Notice that the three men were thrown in bound and Nebuchadnezzar sees them unbound and walking. Something happened in there. Ropes fell off. Freedom came inside the flames, not after them. When you next find yourself in a hard season of life, ask a different question than “when will this end?” Ask: what has come loose in here that I couldn’t untie myself?

Third, be somebody’s fourth man. You cannot end most of the suffering around you. You can almost always enter it. The friend in grief does not need your solutions; she needs your presence, unhurried, in the heat. This is the most Christlike thing an ordinary person can do: refuse to comfort from the doorway. This is how we participate in Christ's love most fully. By allowing His love to change us, to re-form in us the Image of God, in which Christ restored for us most perfectly. It is loving others not just similar to how He loves them, but just as He does. Which means entering into their trouble, their pain, their suffering.

Nebuchadnezzar counted four men where he had thrown three. He was wrong about a great many things, but not about that.

God Bless,

Judah