The Way ✦ He Was There the Whole Time

The Scene

It has been two years since the company failed.

He had built it for nine years — forty-three employees at its peak, a product he believed in, a team he was proud of. When it went down it went fast, the way these things do, and he spent six months in the particular fog of a man who has lost something that was also his identity. He did not handle it gracefully. He was not present the way his family needed him to be. He said things to his wife in that season he has since had to go back and repair.

He is on the other side of it now. New role, steadier ground, the fog long lifted. He is sitting in church on a Sunday morning and the pastor is preaching on Daniel 3 and he is only half listening until the verse lands — I see four men walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods — and something stops in him.

He thinks about the nine months inside the collapse. The specific Tuesday he sat in his car in the parking garage and could not go inside. The night he drove two hours to nowhere in particular because he did not know what else to do with what he was feeling. The morning he sat on the back porch before anyone was awake and said out loud, for the first time, that he did not know if he was going to be okay.

He had not thought of those moments as the presence of God. He had thought of them as the absence of everything else.

He is not so sure now.

Scripture

Daniel 3:24-25

"Then King Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement and asked his advisers, 'Weren't there three men that we threw into the fire?' They replied, 'Certainly, Your Majesty.' He said, 'Look! I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.'"

The Teaching

The king sees what Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego could not see while they were inside it.

That is not accidental. The fourth figure — the one who looks like a son of the gods, who most readers recognize as a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ — was not visible to the three men in the furnace. It was visible to the man looking in from the outside. The ones inside the fire did not see who was walking with them. They experienced the presence without seeing it. The ropes had burned. They were unbound, unharmed, walking. But the fourth figure — the one who made the difference — only became visible from a distance.

This is the consistent pattern of God's presence in the hardest places. Jacob wrestled with someone in the dark at Jabbok and did not know who it was until the breaking of day. The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked seven miles with Jesus and did not recognize him until he broke the bread. The presence was real before it was recognized. The work was happening before it was visible.

I see four men walking in the fire. The king saw it from outside. The three men knew it only when they walked out — unbound, unharmed, smelling of nothing but the ropes that were gone. They did not see the fourth figure. They experienced the effect of his presence.

That is often how God works in the furnace. You do not see him while you are inside it. You see what he did when you come out.

The Way Before You

There is a season behind you — a furnace you walked through — where you could not feel God's presence and you may have assumed that meant he was not there.

He was there. The evidence is that you came out.

Not unaffected — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out changed, unbound from what the furnace was supposed to destroy them with. But unharmed in the ways that mattered. What was real in them survived. And the ropes — the things that had been used to bind them and throw them in — those did not make it out.

Look back at the season that should have broken you. Look at what you carried in and what you are carrying now. The things that burned — were they all loss? Or were some of them the ropes?

He was there the whole time. You are only now beginning to see it.

Reflection

Looking back at a season that was hardest for you — what evidence do you see now of a presence you could not see while you were inside it?

Prayer

Lord, I could not see you in the furnace. I felt the heat and the ropes and the fall and I did not see the fourth figure walking with me. But I am out now and I am looking back and I am beginning to understand what I could not see from inside it. You were there the whole time. Thank you for the presence I could not recognize until now. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.