Then a little while later, when King Nebuchadnezzar made his ninety-foot statue and told everyone that, when the call the prayer went out, they all had to bow to it, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednago once again did the right thing by refusing to bow down to anyone but God. Their God points must have soared!
It’s tempting to think that when these three friends got thrown into the fiery furnace, God looked at their score and said, “Wow, these guys are great! They deserve to be saved!” We would never actually say that, of course. But inside we make a connection between their actions and God’s salvation.
But it doesn’t work that way. If God really was keeping score then many of the people in the Bible would be in deep trouble, and so would we. Jacob, for example, messed up far more often than he got things right. And so did many of his children and grandchildren. You could say King David, a man after God’s own heart, racked up serious points in the Goliath incident, but then he also lost a lot of points in the whole Bathsheba and Uriah affair—and a bunch more with the way he dealt with his son Absalom… I’m pretty glad that my bad days aren’t written about like Jacob’s and David’s were.
So if the whole point thing doesn’t really work, then what do we mean by “success”?
Let’s turn back to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednago. When Nebuchadnezzar was about to throw them into the fiery furnace they said “We do not need to defend ourselves before you in this manner. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O King. But even if he does not, we want you to know that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
These three friends changed the game. Nebuchadnezzar tried to make it about success, but Shadrach Meshach and Abednago were only interested in faithfulness. It’s not the results that matter, they said. Even if God doesn’t chose to save us, we are going to remain faithful to him.
The world often works like this: we get what we deserve. But that’s not the way God works. The message of the gospel is that we don’t get what we deserve. Grace abounds! It’s in our response to God’s grace that we begin to think about success.
We’re going to make mistakes and we’re going to fail. But God will continue to chase after us and call us back to him. Real success is about putting ourselves in God’s will and doing our best to stay there. And as Shadrach and his friends pointed out – you can’t use worldly ways of accounting to measure that.
--Robert J. Keeley, professor of education at Calvin College, author of Helping Our Children Grow in Faith , and editor of Shaped By God:Twelve Essentials for Nurturing Faith in Children, Youth, and Adults.
Posts
