My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth! Psalm 121:2

 Walking Around

 "Look!"  Nebuchadnezzar shouted.  "I see four men, unbound, walking around in the fire unharmed!   And the fourth looks like a god!"  Daniel 3:25

             King Nebuchadnezzar reports some extraordinary details here in this account of Shadrach, Mesheck, and Abedneggo's time in the fiery furnace.  Three men tied up and thrown in, but four are seen in there, and the fourth appears to be no ordinary man.  The four of them are walking around.  Unharmed.  In a fire.  Can you imagine how shaken the eyewitnesses must have been?  I've read this verse many times, and it stirs a sense of awe every time, but this time, I saw something new that thrilled me.  (I love it when that happens, don't you?) One word, set off by commas:  unbound.  

            When Jesus called Lazarus from the grave, He said to the bystanders, "Loose him, and let him go."  Jesus loosed Lazarus from death, but He commanded others to unbind the graveclothes.  Who unbound the three who, without a doubt, had been tied securely before being tossed into the furnace? That one who "look[ed] like a God"?  And who was that one?  An angel?  Jesus? Scripture doesn't answer any of these questions; it just tells us that the men were walking around in the fire, unbound.

            Oh, unbound!  Those three young men of ancient times walked around in the same freedom, the same "peace that passes understanding" that we have available to us if we walk with Jesus.  He gives us, not freedom from trouble, but freedom from fear and hopelessness as we walk around in the seven-times-hotter furnace of whatever we're going through.

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through as if something strange were happening to you.  Instead, be very glad for these trials make you partners in Christ in His suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world.  I Peter 4:12-13

            As Shadrach, Mesheck, and Abedneggo were not alone, we are not alone.  As they were unbound, we are unbound.  Unbound from our past, perhaps not the consequences, but the things about it that we've let bind us and keep us ineffective. Unbound from the harm others might intend toward us, unbound from worry, unbound from fear, unbound from what others think, or say about us.  Unbound from anything that has us tied up in the knots of another's making. 

            As we move into this Christmas season, I can't help but think of another binding:  Mary's swaddling of the Christ Child, the One who would later allow Himself to be bound to a cross so we could be unbound.  Unbound!

Daye Phillippo

December 2014