Kyle Dresback

“O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up."

Dear Friends,

There are almost no heroic characters in the Old Testament. In fact, I think the book of Daniel may contain all of them.

Consider how hard it is to follow God when one has privilege and status in an imperial state. Kings and empires by nature are focused on self-preservation. They must acquire and retain power. But how do you foster justice, generosity, and peace when the overriding drive is for more power? The temptation for dissenters in such empires is usually either to seize power for themselves on the one hand or else simply to blend in over time. Many in the Church today have been lured in one of those two ways with predictable results.

Our heroes in Daniel show us a better way.

Though they were exiled in a foreign land, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego had a pretty sweet gig in Babylon as elected officials with some insider clout. But when coerced to bow to a power-grabbing king, they respond with a radically low-key refusal: “With respect, your highness, that’s not our way. Do what you need to do.” (My extremely rough translation.)

Their protest calls to mind other displays of non-violent resistance that we remember precisely because they were not themselves grabs at power but rather they laid bare the unjust power that was asserting itself: Tiananmen Square, Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, a Defiance Campaign in South Africa, a march of 10,000 in Dandi, India. These are glimpses of a kingdom that runs by another currency; a power that doesn’t take for its own sake but gives generously, even sacrificially.

And, of course, their protest calls to mind another Jew living under an imperial power in Galilee six centuries later who encouraged his followers to turn the other cheek and not to resist evil with evil, teachings that he followed even to his own death at the hands of those who sought to maintain their own power.

It is his very body and blood that we partake in, reminding us, his Body, that there is a better way.

In Christ,

—Kyle