05/04/2021
"May the Fourth be with you" is of course a play on the Star Wars blessing, "May the Force be with you." But the ancient Hebrews are having the last laugh. Babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar created a golden idol and set it up in the plain of Dura. Whenever music was sounded, his subjects had to fall down and worship it or be cast into a burning fiery furnace. But "certain Jews" -- Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego -- would not worship it. They were arrested and told the king, "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. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy god, nor worship the golden image which thou has set up." The enraged king had the young men bound and thrown into the furnace, and its heat -- seven times its usual heat -- killed the soldiers that threw them in. Then the king, astonished, said to his court, "Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? ... Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God." And in the same spirit, May the Fourth (One) be with you as well, as you walk through your own fiery trials!
