When Suffering becomes a Witness

I've sat in many hospital waiting rooms. I've seen this scene play out with those I was there to console, and also in strangers who received the news they prayed wouldn't come.

And when the news comes, people don't all react the same way. But in that moment, everyone is watching everyone else. Not intentionally. It just happens. There's no rudeness or judgment in it. It's something closer to hunger, to desperation.

Who here knows how to do this? What's the right way to respond? Because I don't know how to express what I'm feeling. I don't even know what I'm feeling!

The question that's there in ever face, but is rarely recognized or expressed is this: is there a way I can possibly bear this?

So, let's turn back to Daniel 3.

If you haven't been following the last several meditations working through Daniel, here's what's happened. Three men are thrown into a furnace heated seven times its normal heat. The soldiers who threw them in are killed by the flames. And then Nebuchadnezzar, a man who has just ordered a triple murder, leans forward and squints into the fire.

"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).

The Aramaic here is worth pausing over. The phrase is bar elahin, "a son of the gods," and Nebuchadnezzar, a polytheist, means it the way a polytheist would. He is not making a confession of faith in the Trinity. He is describing what he sees according to his own worldview.

But what he sees changes him. Before, he asked, "Who is the god that will deliver you out of my hands?" (Daniel 3:15). Now he declares, "Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego" (v. 28).

 

The Greater Miracle

We tend to read this as a rescue story. It is that. But there's a lot more going on here. Consider what the three young men actually said before tossed into the furnace:

"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).

They do not know they will be saved.

They have only their fidelity, and they are prepared to carry it into the fire and die with it intact.

Which means that the miracle of their preservation is, in a sense, secondary.

Had they burned, they would have burned free.

The chains were on their bodies; nothing was on their souls.

But the kind? Nebuchadnezzar, standing outside in the cool air, breathing easily, in no physical danger whatsoever, was the man in mortal peril.

He was bound. Destined for a greater flame. But unlike the three men, he didn't know it.

So perhaps the deepest work God does in Daniel 3 is not the extinguishing of a fire. It is the testimony given to a tyrant.

 

What They Prayed For

Between verses 23 and 24 of the Hebrew text, the Greek tradition preserves something remarkable: the prayer prayed inside the furnace. And here is what should stop us. Azariah's prayer is almost entirely a confession of Israel's sin and a plea for God's glory. "For your name's sake do not give us up forever, and do not annul your covenant" (Daniel 3:34). He asks that God's enemies be shamed and "that they may know that you alone are the Lord God, glorious over the whole world" (Daniel 3:45).

They are on fire, and they barely pray for themselves at all!

Instead, the better part of their prayer is that the world would come to know God.

And then the Song of the Three follows, which I wrote about yesterday: "Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord; sing praise to him and highly exalt him forever" (Daniel 3:57). Sun and moon. Frost and snow. Whales. Birds. Every green thing.

They are inviting the whole cosmos into praise, and they are doing it from inside an oven.

This is not cold stoicism. It is not prayed through a clenched jaw with gritting teeth.

It is a wedding song sung in a crematorium.

 

The Uncomfortable Question

So, who do we identify with the most in this story? We all want to identify with the three men. And we should. But if we're honest, a part of us identifies with the king, too.

I have been Nebuchadnezzar.

Not with any worldly crown, not as a ruler of a literal empire. But I've held the same posture: the assumption that I am the lord of my own interior kingdom, that I get to determine what is worshipped there and what is thrown out. I have built statues to my pride and ego. I have demanded that other people bow to my preferences, my moods, my carefully constructed sense of how things ought to go.

And I have been, in those seasons, precisely as unaware of my chains as he was.

The good news is that Christ suffered for tyrants.

Not only for the three faithful men in the fire. For the man who lit it. "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5:6).

The fourth man in the flames is there, in part, so that the man outside the flames might be saved.

Which raises a question we should ask ourselves. Because as Christians, we should put ourselves in the place of the three men too: is my faith in the furnace bearing any witness at all?

When the fire comes, and it always does, does anyone looking on see a fourth figure standing beside me?

Because everyone watches. Just as everyone watches those enduring sorrow in the hospital room. When someone's suffering, when their humiliation is public, when they're really going through it, people notice. Too often, they notice and do nothing. But what of it? If our suffering is a witness, let the watch. Let them see.

Will they see the "fourth man" who accompanies us? Will they see in our cross, the true cross? Will they see in our salvation in and through suffering, the one who suffers that all of creation would be saved?

Or do they simply see a person burning like anyone else?

 

Practical Steps

Name your furnace honestly. Not everything difficult is a furnace, and not every furnace is deserved. Ask specifically: what am I in right now that I did not choose and cannot escape? Some of the "furnaces" are easy to see, because the pain is too intense to ignore. Other sufferings, though, they don't come with a single, profound, momentary pain. They're more like the aching knee that persists for years, that gradually wears at us, makes it harder to walk straight. And if you've been walking with that limp for a long time, you might not even notice it anymore. Other people do. They see it. Even if they say nothing, they are watching. So don't just ignore it. Recognize every burden you're carrying and name it. Offer it to God without any editorial gloss. Be honest about the pain.

Add one intercession to every flame. This is a discipline, not a feeling. When you tell God about your suffering, before you finish, name one person who does not know Him and ask that this suffering count for them. Now, you can't suffer by your own merit for anyone's sin. But if you're suffering with the "fourth man," if you're suffering is united to Him, allow His suffering to be channeled through yours. Let them see. And even if they don't, offer it to God anyway.

Assume you are being watched, and endure your furnace with grace, with faith. Someone in your life is going through a furnace that might not even look like one. Nebuchadnezzar thought he was comfortable, but he was on a path to a furnace that burns a lot hotter than the one he threw these men into. Let them see in your suffering, in your trial, how your joy cannot be consumed by worldly flames. Let them see how you carry your burdens not alone, but with the "fourth man," with Christ who carried a greater burden for you. Your conversion, your fidelity even in a small unglamorous trial, bears witness. And people will notice.

Pray for the one who threw you in. By name. This is the hardest item on the list and the one that most resembles the Cross. Because while some sufferings we've brought on ourselves, often we endure hardship because someone else treated us unjustly. The temptation is to rail against them. To play the victim. To demand a little "social capital" from the world on account of what's been done to us. That's what the world does. Especially today. People are carrying around their "victim status" as a kind of crown, and demanding the world conform itself to accommodate them. But we are not victims to the world. Let us be victims of Love.

The fire in Babylon went out. The tyrant walked away changed. We do not know, ultimately, if Nebuchadnezzar was "saved," or got to heaven. But isn't it remarkable that, even in this moment, the greatest tyrant on earth at the time was moved even a step closer to God? Conversion is not typically a "single event," it's often a progression of successive events, and each one matters.

Remember in that furnace, whatever it might be, there's someone unbound and unhurried. A fourth figure. And His presence can redeem even the worst flames we endure in this world and transform them into grace. Into a witness. Because in that moment, when the three men were sent to martyrdom, God was already doing what He would later do on a hill outside Jerusalem: standing in the flame that was meant for someone else. And by that cross, He accomplished salvation not just for a single man crucified beside him, not just for his disciples, but for the entire world. Even for tyrants.

 

God Bless,

Judah