God Is Our Friend

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Transcript:

I noticed when I lived in Norman and then when I lived in Fayetteville that I grew up knowing my neighbors and knowing the people down the street. And I noticed when I moved to the house in Norman and then later the house in Fayetteville that people just aren’t as friendly as they used to be. People aren’t as friendly with their neighbors.

Well, and people aren’t as friendly in public. But I started to notice if I could catch my neighbors outside, I could make them talk to me. You know, it took me months to try to meet the neighbors because people nowadays seem to drive home from their job, pull into the garage with it open, close the garage door, and then hibernate in their house.

And then their community, the people that they are around, is somewhere outside the neighborhood. They may go to the ball games or they may hang out at bars or wherever their community is. But they don’t really have an interest in knowing their neighbors.

So it would take me months of trying to catch my neighbors outside. And usually I could make them talk to me. And then came the dreaded question, what do you do?

And then once they found out I was a preacher, they would hide. It seemed like they would run inside. Brother Shank, have you noticed this?

It seems like they will run in their house anytime you come outside. And I got to thinking, and I thought, I guess they thought I was going to convert them. I don’t know what they thought.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing the last few years, it seems like we as a society are getting more and more inward focused on ourselves and more and more isolated from other people. And there’s some danger in this because God created us for relationships with one another. God created us for a relationship with him.

We are social creatures by nature. You know, not all of us are as social as others. There are introverted people.

extroverted people. But God created us for relationships with other people, and I don’t think it’s healthy when we isolate ourselves and we have just these shallow relationships. And the point of shallow relationships, friendship isn’t always today what it used to be, what it used to mean.

Several of the adults were talking yesterday at a toddler birthday party about Facebook, which I think is used the right way, can be a great thing. It’s enabled me to keep up with family when I’m out of state and friends from out of state when I’m here. But people put so much stock in it and the conversation was, well, so-and-so was mad at me because we weren’t friends on Facebook.

And I thought, when did friendship come down to whether or not we’re linked up on some website? There’s got to be more to friendship than that. And we use that word friend so easily, but in such a shallow way.

Somebody to a friend of yours at the store. When they told me who it was, I was like, friend? I don’t have any bad feelings toward the person at all, but we’ve met twice.

I wouldn’t call us exactly friends, but that’s the way the world uses the word friend, and I’m probably guilty of the same thing. But, you know, as we go through life, we realize who our friends are. We realize what the meaning of friendship really is, and I think of the people who sat at the hospital for hours, and some of them for days when we were in the hospital with the stillbirth of our second child.

I mean, there were people who came up there. They might have had to leave to go to work, but every waking minute they weren’t at work. They were up there with us.

I think of the people who have gone out of their way to check on me over the last year. You know, when you think of friends, especially when you get, I’m on my way out of my 20s now. I’m not quite there yet.

But as you get past your college years and your 20s and your teenage years, you have some life experience under your belt, you start to realize what friendship really means and what it means to have somebody who’s there with you during the difficult times. I promise I’m going somewhere with this. We need to get past this shallow idea of friendship.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with having lots of acquaintances and people we know, but if we’re going to call it friendship, it’s something much more than that. It’s the people who love us, who care for us, who are there during difficult times. You know, the Bible talks about friends in Proverbs chapter 18, about a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

And, you know, I believe that that verse is speaking of Jesus Christ, but there are also people who are friends and can be closer to us even than family members. Folks, this is what friendship means. And the Bible does talk about friendship in terms of our relationship with God.

I believe it calls David a friend of God. I believe it called Abraham a friend of God. The Bible has called people throughout the Bible friends of God.

I mean, go back and check those names, make sure I’m not making that up. But I’m fairly certain I’ve seen it in there. And it does talk about, in terms of Jesus Christ, a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

It says that greater love has no man than this. for the, excuse me, greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friends. I don’t know why I’m getting so tongue-tied this morning.

You must have. Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friends. And that was speaking of Jesus Christ. As we’ve been talking about relationships with God this month, as we’ve been talking about what our relationship is to God and what his relationship is to us.

I want to talk this morning about God being our friend. God is our friend. And the reason I prefaced with all of that, okay, he’s up there griping about society and about Facebook.

It’s to remind us that this word friend means more than just somebody who likes us and we see on occasion. Friend has such a deep and rich meaning that we need to rediscover because it describes part of who God is to us. And we’re Last week in Daniel chapter 3, we’re going to go back to Daniel chapter 3 and hit the rest of the story.

We talked about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as they’re commonly known. I’m trying to get back to using their names that their parents gave us that the book of Daniel tells us, Hananiah, Meshael, and Azariah, rather than the pagan names that Nebuchadnezzar gave them. But these three men refused to bow, and so they were to be cast into the furnace.

And we stopped last week and talked about God being our king just from the first part of that story. Today I want to look at God being our friend from the second part of that story. And there’s a little bit of overlap.

We’re going to start in verse 17 this morning, Daniel chapter 3. And this is where they’re speaking to the king. And they’ve just told him that we’re not careful to answer you in this matter.

We don’t have to think about it. Our answer is right here on the tip of our tongue. And they say in verse 17, If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

And so what they’ve said there is we don’t have to, you’ve told us we have to bow to this statue, and for those of you who were not here last week, I explained that after reading and studying on it, I really believe it was a statue of King Nebuchadnezzar meant to identify him with the god, with the pagan god Nabu. So they were not only bowing to a false god, but I believe there was an image of the king. involved here as well.

And they were told that they were going to be killed. They were going to be thrown into a fiery furnace and killed if they did not bow, just like everybody else had to bow. And these three men said, no, God has told us that we are to have no other gods before him, and we have to obey him.

And so they’ve said, we don’t even have to think about this for a second. Our God that we serve. He’s not just the God that we claim.

He’s the God we serve. And there’s a difference there. Lots of people claim to be Christians.

Lots of people claim to be God’s children. There’s a difference in claiming God and actually serving God. If it be so, our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace.

They said, we recognize that God can spare us from this fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. Okay, we recognize that he can deliver us from the furnace, but we know he’s going to deliver us from you. And what I shared with you last week was that, okay, he can let us out of the furnace, but he may not necessarily.

But we know one way or another he’s going to deliver us from you. He’s either going to set us free from this, or he’s going to take care of us in the furnace, or he’s going to let us get burned up in the furnace if he so chooses. But either way, we’re not going to be bound to bow to your stupid statue.

You’re not going to be able to make us do this thing that’s so offensive to God. We know that he will deliver us out of your hand. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

You can beat us, you can burn us, you can set us free, you can do whatever. We are not going to bow to your statue. And then, verse 19, then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury, and the form of his visage was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Therefore he spake and commanded that they should heat the furnace one seven times more than it was wont to be heated. Part of what makes me think this was also an image of Nebuchadnezzar was the fact that he is so enraged that they won’t bow. It tells me that it’s a personal affront to him.

Now, when people participate in other religions, you know what, I feel sad for them. I feel a lot of things because I believe that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by him. I believe in God’s word.

I believe there’s one true God. And so I feel like these people are missing out. But I’ve never felt a sense of fury like he describes here where I just want to slaughter them.

It’s an affront to God and I take that seriously. But it’s not an affront to me personally if that makes any sense. It’s an affront to me as a Christian.

But it’s not my personal pride that’s injured when somebody wants to worship Allah or somebody wants to worship Buddha or somebody wants to worship nothing at all. here when they’re refusing to bow down to this statue, it’s an affront to his pride. And the way I described it last week was, you know, the Caesars of ancient Rome used to try to identify themselves as gods.

Or the pharaohs of Egypt tried to identify themselves with the sun god Ra, I believe. And so they would put up these statues that are their form, their likeness, but they’re identifying them as whatever god it was. And so there’s a mixture here of pagan idolatry and just his pridefulness that he is just enraged.

And it says the word visage, that’s a really good old word that we don’t use anymore, but his face, his entire countenance changed. And sometimes what’s going on inside shows outside, doesn’t it? We’re talking about a friend yesterday who had gone through the tornado and lost their house.

And somebody said, yeah, I saw them at Walmart the other day and they just looked wild-eyed. I mean, you know that, some of you know what that looks like, But everything that they’ve gone through just affected them, and their whole countenance is different today. What was going on inside of King Nebuchadnezzar was showing on the outside.

You could see the rage and the fury in his countenance. And it was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Therefore he spake and commanded that they should heat the furnace one seven times more than it was wont to be heated.

So he tells his guards, okay, fine, go and heat up the furnace seven times hotter than it’s ever been. I don’t know what he planned to accomplish there because you can’t make them seven times as dead. But he said, heat it up seven times hotter.

The only thing I guess that it was going to do was make him feel better about his rage. Make it seven times hotter. And he commanded the most mighty men that were in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and cast them into the burning fiery furnace.

So heat it up seven times hotter and then get the biggest men in the army and have them tie these men up and go throw them in there. Verse 21 says, Then these men were bound in their coats, their hosen, and their hats, and their other garments, and were cast into the midst of the fiery furnace. So in all of their clothes, I mean, they were bound up.

They were, they and everything they had on was just bound up. They were tied. They were in a real predicament here.

There was no escape for them. And it really came to the point where their trust in God is put to the test. You know, they said earlier, we trust God. But now they’re going into the furnace.

They’re at their lowest point. They have no option at this point. but to trust God.

So they were bound up and cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. Therefore, because the king’s commandment was urgent and the furnace exceeding hot, the flame of the fire slew those men that took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Think about this.

It was so hot that the men who bound them up, who tied them up, and went to throw them in, were killed by the heat. Now you would think, obviously, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are not going to stand a chance here. It says, I would imagine, if it’s hot enough to kill the men who got close enough to throw them in there, that it would just vaporize them when they went in there.

They’re really not even going to survive long enough to feel anything, I wouldn’t think. And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down into the midst of the burning, fiery furnace. I’ve always pictured a furnace that opens sideways and they walk up to it and sort of heave them in.

Rereading this, it makes it sound to me like they’re being thrown off of something and down into it. So like a fiery pit, really no chance that they’re going to be able to run back out or anything. They’re down in, you know, imagine, this is the way I’m kind of picturing it.

Imagine, you know, you’ve seen movies where they throw somebody into a volcano. That’s kind of what I’m picturing at this point. So they fall down into the furnace, it says. Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished and rose up in haste and spake and said unto his counselors, Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?

So the king sees something, and it makes him stand up in amazement. Didn’t we throw three men into the furnace? Yeah, that just happened.

How would you forget? How brutal a person do you have to be that, oh yeah, we threw three people into the furnace this morning, I wasn’t quite sure, I forgot. He’s got to have a lot of shady stuff going on if he has to be reminded of that.

Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, true, O king. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt.

They were in the midst of the fiery furnace, and they were walking around. You know what it tells me that they were walking around? The restraints had been burned off.

They were in the midst, that’s pretty hot that it burned the restraints, and yet they’re up walking around, and they have no hurt, and the form of the fourth, wait a minute, the fourth, we threw three men into the fiery furnace. This is incredible to me still. And the form of the fourth is like the son of God.

Probably good reason for that. And I have heard people try to explain this away and say, well, that was a pagan expression. It means like a son of the gods.

It just means somebody exceedingly strong and mighty or glorious or they shone or something. Okay, I don’t care if he saw it and thought it was the son of Nabu or not. We know Nabu’s not real and doesn’t have a son.

And yet there was a very real God who was present in these circumstances and who was taking care of them and that they appealed to. And somebody very real saved them from the flames of fire. And I don’t care if he saw it and misinterpreted who it was or not.

I mean, Jesus’ own apostles looked out and thought they saw a ghost on the sea. I don’t care what they looked at it and thought it was. The description can only be one person.

There’s only one person who was real, who was real and had the attributes that would have made King Nebuchadnezzar say it was a king of the gods, or a son of the gods. So whether he knew for sure who it was or not, we know who it was. And it was the son of God in there in the midst of the furnace with him.

Then Nebuchadnezzar came nearer to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace and spake and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, ye servants of the most high God, come forth and come hither. Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came forth of the midst of the fire. So they are well enough that they’re able to walk around in there.

They’re well enough that they’re able to answer him. And well enough that they’re able to get out of there at some point and come forth. And it was because the fourth man was in there who was like the son of God.

And you may be wondering, okay, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, isn’t that before Jesus? It is. It’s before the birth of Christ in his human form there at Bethlehem.

It’s about, I’m trying to remember here, I want to say it was about 500, between 500 and 600 years before that. And yet, you know, I don’t want to get into all the theological terms and everything, because I’m not sure I understand all of it. But there are these things in the Old Testament that the Bible scholars call Christophanies.

And I couldn’t tell you what all of them are, but they basically are appearances of what they call the pre-incarnate Christ, before he was born in human flesh. You know, Jesus Christ didn’t start existing in the manger. You realize that, right?

He’s been present through all of it. The Bible talks about nothing was made but by him. Read back to John 1.

1, and in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. We see in verse 14 that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. That’s talking about Jesus Christ, and he was there in the beginning.

I fully believe that’s why in Genesis 1. 1, it says, let us make man in our own image. You know, you watch the History Channel and they’ll try to tell you it was a bunch of aliens.

I believe it was the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit speaking as we and as us. And so they have these things that are called the Christophanies, these appearances of Christ before he was born. I don’t fully understand how that works.

If you’re looking for a detailed explanation, you need to go find somebody from the seminary. I don’t know. But there are all these instances where they look at it and say, could that be Jesus?

Another example would be in the book of Joshua, where the captain of the Lord’s host comes to Joshua and says, and Joshua falls down before him and says, are you for us or are you for our enemies? And he says, neither, but I’m for the Lord God. And there are these places like that in the Old Testament where it talks about an angel of the Lord.

Well, angel can mean a cherub, something with wings, and what we think of wings and a halo. I don’t know if they actually wear halos. But the word angel most literally means messenger.

That’s why in, that’s why I’m throwing out a lot of verses here, I’m sorry. That’s why in the beginning parts of Revelation, it talks about the angel of the church at so-and-so. What’s the messenger of the church?

And a lot of people, including myself, believe it’s referring to the pastor or teacher. And it’s not saying pastors are angels because we’re human just like the rest of you. But there’s this idea that the word angel means a messenger of God.

It can mean one of these winged creatures that God created that we see in the book of Isaiah flying around the throne of God, singing holy, holy, holy. Or it can mean somebody sent on God’s behalf with a message. And that very easily could be God the Son.

And so some people believe the captain of the Lord’s host was Jesus. I don’t know. But I do know here in God’s word it says that the fourth man was there and he was like the Son of God.

And I believe the reason he was like the Son of God is because he was exactly like the Son of God. And because of him and because of his power and his walking through the fire with them, they were able to come out of the midst of the fire, as it says in verse 26. And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king’s counselors being gathered together saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed.

Neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them. And the reason it’s important that it lists all these princes and governors, it wasn’t just a hallucination that Nebuchadnezzar had. All these other people were witness to it too.

And they were thrown in this furnace that was seven times hotter than it normally was. And they didn’t smell like smoke. I went to a relative’s house yesterday and was inside for just a few minutes and they smoke and didn’t even smoke while I was there.

And I came out smelling like smoke. They were in this fiery furnace, they didn’t smell like smoke. It said not a hair on them was singed.

I’ve gotten close to bonfires before at cookouts and realized that, what is that? That singed hair on your arm. And yet they were in the midst of this fire and nothing was singed.

Their coats weren’t burned. This is incredible. And this sort of thing does not happen on a regular basis.

And I’m not saying that to dispute the fact that it did happen. There, you know, even if you find it incredible, there are too many, if somebody was going to make up a story like this, why all the details about where it happened and who was there? That doesn’t happen either.

This is incredible that God did this and God walked through the fire with them. God the Son walked through the fire with them. Then Nebuchadnezzar spake and said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

It’s really kind of changed his tune here. Who hath sent his angel and delivered his servants that trusted in him and have changed the king’s word and yielded their bodies that they might not serve nor worship any god except their own god. Wait a minute.

It says here that they’ve trusted in him. We get that. He’s delivered them.

We get that. It changed the king’s word. We see other places in the book of Daniel that they had this tradition in some of their eastern cultures that once the king made a decree, nobody could change it, even the king himself.

And the king was called the king of kings. Their king was called the king of kings. Up until the 70s, the Shah of Persia was still called the Shahanshah, the king of kings, which we know we serve a different king of kings.

But nobody, I mean, their assertion was nobody on heaven or earth can change the word of the king. And yet, he says who? Who has changed the king’s word?

And yielded their bodies that they might not serve nor worship any god except their own. So the god of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had delivered them because they trusted in him. He had managed to do the impossible, not only in preserving them from the fire, not only in the deliverance, but in changing the king’s word, because nobody could do that.

And he says, therefore, I make a decree in verse 29. Therefore, I make a decree that every people, nation and language, which speak anything amiss of the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego shall be cut in pieces and their houses shall be made a dunghill, because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort. Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon.

So he changes his position here and says, Anybody that speaks ill of the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they’re going to be hacked to pieces and their houses are going to be laid waste. Now, I personally, I’m just letting you know, would not be in favor of that today that we get the government to, you know, persecute people who don’t share our religious views. You know, we live in a different time these days.

but I certainly understand the change of heart he’s had here. Certainly can understand the change of heart he’s had here. That he went from before to saying, you know, who is the God that is going to deliver you from me?

To saying, okay, nobody gets to say anything bad about God. God has incredibly and miraculously changed the mind of the king here. And yet, perhaps the more important story, I mean, the world would look at this, their world would look at this and say, what an incredible thing has happened.

Look at the change of heart that the king has had. And that’s incredible. But the real story here is not God and Nebuchadnezzar.

The real story here is God and his relationship to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. How he was for them, in this case, the friend who sticks closer than a brother. How he was the friend who cared for them, who walked with them.

And we could talk about God being our savior as well. And we will in future weeks coming up in another passage from the book of Daniel. But in this case, as much as he saved them, it was because he was with them that he saved them in this particular instance.

And that’s where I see this applying to what we know from the Bible about God being the friend of his people. First of all, this morning, God is a friend who is loyal to his people. God is a friend who is loyal to his people.

How many times did he promise the people of Israel that if you will walk with me and be my people, I will be your God as well. And how many times did he promise to deliver them? Think about this.

Even when he was punishing them, they are in the years of captivity right now. And before that, the prophets coming from God had pronounced judgment on the people of Israel and said, you’re going to be carried off by the Babylonians. You’re going to be in captivity to the Persians.

You’re going to be punished in this way for 70 years. And they’re going to come in. They’re going to destroy your country.

They’re going to carry off your people. It’s going to be horrible. And yet, I will restore you at the close of that time.

Even when they were acting up, even when they were forsaking God, even when he was having to punish and chastise them and discipline them and get their attention, there was still the sense in which God said, and yet I’m going to love you and I’m going to preserve you through this and I’m going to take care of you and restore you on the other side. God had made a covenant with Israel and God was loyal to it. Israel wasn’t always, and yet God kept his covenant.

God is a God who keeps his promises. And just as the people of Israel were God’s people in the Old Testament, so we are God’s people today. Now, it may be in a different sense.

I believe that some aspects of God’s covenant are still there with Israel and that He still has plans for them as a people. But God speaks in the Old Testament of those who trusted in Christ being God’s people as well. There are places where it talks about us being grafted into Israel, us being adopted into Israel.

Folks, as God’s people today, as those who trusted in Jesus Christ, God, you need to understand this aspect of when we think about our relationship with God a friend to us. God is loyal to us. We talked last week about God being our king and our need to be loyal to God, that God deserves our loyalty and God deserves our obedience.

We don’t need to speak about loyalty from God in terms of need. He doesn’t need to be loyal to us, first of all, because he doesn’t need to do anything, but God doesn’t need to be loyal because God already is loyal to us. God says, those are my people.

And they recognized this in verses 17 and 18 when they said, if it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. He said, one way or another, we know what God can do, but we also know what God will do. And we know that God is going to take care of us.

They were in some of the deepest trouble of their life and still they had this unshakable confidence that God was going to care for them, that God was going to deliver them. And why was that? Because God had been a loyal friend to them.

These people didn’t just know of God. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah knew God. You can’t be a friend without knowing someone.

So I think it’s funny that, again, the talk about Facebook yesterday, they call it friends, and so many people have friends they’ve never even met in real life. If we don’t talk with people, if there’s no sharing of ourselves with other people, It’s not friendship. And yet God had revealed himself through the scriptures and through the prophets to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

And they had spoken with him. They would bow to him in prayer. They knew God.

There was a relationship here. And God was their friend. I’m hesitant.

It feels weird even to say that God is our friend. Not because I think he’s not, but because I don’t want people to think, well, that’s all he is. Believe me, I still maintain there’s a sense wherein we should fear God and tremble when he speaks and obey.

when he speaks. And yet God is also our friend. I think I’ve told you before, I always found it so irritating when I was at OU that kids would walk around with t-shirts that said, Jesus is my homeboy.

First of all, I don’t call anybody that. Or I would see, they’d have shirts of George W. Bush that would say, W is my homeboy.

That was still, I still thought that was disrespectful because he’s the president, or he was the president. You know what, have a little Jesus is our friend that’s not all he is but he is our friend he’s a friend that we should know a friend we should love a friend we should respect and so because some people have gone too far this direction said Jesus is just our buddy it feels weird to say Jesus is our friend please understand when I say that I mean he’s our friend but that’s not all that he is as well but God is a friend who is loyal to his people there are times that we’re not loyal to him the way we should be But God is a keeper of his promises and God is loyal 

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