Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
No Other God Who Can Deliver
Daniel 3:28-30
28 Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word, and have yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god except their own God. · WEB
The king blesses the God who overruled his own decree, and then defends that God by threatening death — the old method turned to a new object.
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 king pronounces the blessing, and every clause of it is accurate. God sent his angel — his own account of the fourth figure. The three are his servants, which is what they had claimed and what the whole trial was about Daniel 3:17. And they trusted in him: the king identifies the thing he had watched, which was not defiance but confidence.
Then he says something no one had asked him to concede: they have changed the king's word, and have yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god except their own God. He admits his decree was overturned — by three men with no army, and by their willingness to be killed rather than to bow. The empire had made obedience physical, a body on the ground at a signal Daniel 3:5; the three met it in the same currency, yielded their bodies, and the currency turned out to be theirs to spend. This is what makes the scene the model it is: the state's ultimate sanction is the body, and the man who has already surrendered his body has nothing left for the state to take. Scripture makes the same calculation elsewhere in almost the same terms Matthew 10:28 Revelation 12:11.
Therefore I make a decree that every people, nation, and language which speak anything evil against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill Daniel 3:29.
And the confession curdles into legislation. The words are word-for-word the threat he had used on his own wise men Daniel 2:5: the method has not changed, only its object. He has learned that this God is real and has learned nothing about him — reverence enforced by dismemberment is not reverence, and the God who had just declined to force three men to bow does not need an empire's help in silencing critics. This is the second time a truth has entered this king's mouth without entering his character Daniel 2:47, and the pattern is instructive: a man may be genuinely impressed by God and still assume that God does business the way he does. Nothing in Scripture asks the state to punish blasphemy on heaven's behalf; the plain of Dura and this decree are the same instinct pointed in opposite directions, and both are wrong.
Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon Daniel 3:30.
The three go back to work, at higher rank. The chapter closes where it should — not with the miracle but with the administration, three men who had settled the question of allegiance in advance and were therefore fit to be trusted with anything else. The king who promoted them still has one lesson to learn, and it will take seven times and a field of grass.
held with reason What this mark means