Serve
“But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image you have set up.” Daniel 3:18
Serve – What is an agricultural word doing in the middle of a passage about idolatry? That’s the question here. The word is Aramaic, not Hebrew. It is pelach and it means, “to split in two, as in cultivating a field with a plow”. But the association is to be working in the service of a deity, to cultivate the relationship. It ties the false god of Babylon to work.
Oh, now it’s interesting. In an agricultural society, Nebuchadnezzar sets up a “work god”, a god that represents the underlying economic strength of the empire. And the king says, “Now this is what you will worship. You will put yourselves in service to this representation of our ideals.” Three men from Israel say “No”. They say “No” even if it means they will be killed. In this verse, they announce that even if God does not save them from the furnace, they will still not worship the social virtues instead of the Maker.
I don’t think that we would be fooled into worshipping a golden image. But can we say the same about the “virtues” that we serve in our culture? Power, money, freedom, liberty, our rights. Do we serve them over the Creator? Of course, here’s the big one: WORK! Have we made WORK our god? If you watched with any detached observation what happens every day across this land, you might certainly wonder what we really serve? There was a time when the day of rest meant the day of worshipping the real Creator. Now it is another WORK day. What god do we really cultivate?
These three men said that even if God did not rescue them from certain death, they would not bow to the ideals of a false society. Do you suppose we are strong enough to say, “Even if God lets my oh-so-important life collapse, I will not bow to the god of WORK”?
The heat is on. The furnace rages. Are we ready to step out of the frying pan because worshipping WORK is no better than worshipping that golden image?
