In the Furnace

After the disaster that was 2020, everyone was hoping for a better year in 2021.  Unfortunately, the year wasn’t the success I’d personally hoped for.  Early in the year, I began to face ministry pressures that were different from anything I’d faced before.  Throughout the year, that pattern continued.  Every time we’d weather another challenge, just as everything would stabilize, another tsunami of stress would roll over us again. Instead of calming down, the year grew harder and harder, culminating in December with some serious issues to resolve.  

At one point, I was seeking counsel from my parents, and I mentioned something like, “It just keeps getting worse, and I don’t know how much more I can take.”  My dad said it reminded him of the furnace in Daniel 3, when the three Hebrew children refused to bow to King Nebuchadnezzar. For their disobedience to his direct order, he ordered them to be thrown into a blazing furnace, and then ordered it to be made seven times hotter. The furnace grew so hot that the servants attending the fire were killed just for being close to it.  Nebuchadnezzar, in his anger, threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into that deadly blaze. My ministry experiences in 2021 seemed like the furnace was just getting hotter and hotter.  

And yet… For as much as the fire raged in a furnace that was seven times hotter than it even needed to be, the men survived. In fact the passage makes a big deal of the reactions of the witnesses. Four specific phrases detail the miracle of their survival: they survived it, they were not singed, their clothing was not scorched, nor they did even smell like fire when they emerged.  But as my father reminded me the day I talked to him, “That wasn’t the real miracle.” 

The real miracle was that they walked with the Son of God.  It’s great that they survived, and I don’t downplay that miracle at all.  Surviving the furnace is pretty amazing, but perhaps in the survival, we overlook that they walked with the SON OF GOD in the fire. They didn’t go through the experience alone, no matter how hot the fire was.  

I walked through the fire this year in more than one experience, and yes, it felt like it just got hotter and hotter, but I was never alone. At the heart of the blazing crucible, I came face to face with the fourth man in the fire, the Son of God.  

This season we often reference Emmanuel, “God with us,” as the hope for mankind.  God is with us.  God is FOR us.  Even in the trying, miserable dumpster fire that was this past year. But the good news is that even in the messy meltdown, God Himself meets us there with His own grace so that we walk free with no lasting damage. While I’m already counting down the days with hope for a better year to come, I know that no matter what I face, I walk with the Son of God, and that’s the greatest miracle of all.

(Photo from a Spanish castle which still had ruins from an 11th century furnace)