The savage punishment intended for the audacious rebels is abundantly confirmed as common in Babylon by the inscriptions, which may be seen quoted by many commentators.  The narrative is exceedingly graphic.  We see the furious king, with features inflamed with passion.  We hear his hoarse, angry orders to heat the furnace seven times hotter, which he forgot would be a mercy, as shortening the victims’ agonies.  We see the swift execution of the commands, and the unresisting martyrs bound as they stood, and dragged away by the soldiers to the near furnace, the king following.  Its shape is a matter of doubt.  Probably the three were thrown in from above, and so the soldiers were caught by the flames.

’And these three men ... fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace’ Their helplessness and desperate condition are pathetically suggested by that picture, which might well be supposed to be the last of them that mortal eyes would see.  Down into the glowing mass, like chips of wood into Vesuvius, they sank.  The king sitting watching, to glut his fury by the sight of their end, had some way of looking into the core of the flames.

The story shifts its point of view with very picturesque abruptness after verse 23.  The vaunting king shall tell what he saw, and thereby convict himself of insolent folly in challenging ‘any god’ to deliver out of his hand.  He alone seems to have seen the sight, which he tells to his courtiers.  The bonds were gone, and the men walking free in the fire, as if it had been their element.  Three went in bound, four walk there at large; and the fourth is ‘like a son of the gods,’ by which expression Nebuchadnezzar can have meant nothing more than he had learned from his religion; namely, that the gods had offspring of superhuman dignity.  He calls the same person an angel in Daniel iii. 28.  He speaks there as the three would have spoken, and here as Babylonian mythology spoke.

But the great lesson to be gathered from this miracle of deliverance is simply that men who sacrifice themselves for God find in the sacrifice abundant blessing.  They may, or may not, be delivered from the external danger.  Peter was brought out of prison the night before his intended martyrdom; James, the brother of John, was slain with the sword, but God was equally near to both, and both were equally delivered from ’Herod and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.’  The disposal of the outward event is in His hands, and is a comparatively small matter.  But no furnace into which a man goes because he will be true to God, and will not yield up his conscience, is a tenth part so hot as it seems, and it will do no real harm.  The fire burns bonds, but not Christ’s servants, consuming many things that entangled, and setting them free.  ’I will walk at liberty:  for I seek Thy precepts’—­even if we have to walk in the furnace.  No trials faced in obedience to God will be borne alone.  ’When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; ... when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.’