Talismans of Worship: Daniel 3:1-7
God tells us we are to have no other gods before Him. Usually when we hear this phrase it is used to illustrate how God wants to be our only focus in worship. God is, after all, a jealous God. Yet, there is more to it. He needs to tell us to have no other gods because we like to worship things.
Sometime after Daniel and his friends are appointed into leadership over a province of the Babylonian Empire, Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden statue. This act involves a huge amount of hubris. This statue is a major undertaking, and to have it be in Nebuchadnezzar’s own image shows his desire to remind the people who makes Babylon strong.
A cubit is around a foot and a half, so a sixty-cubit statue would be about ninety feet tall. This is no small figurine; if the surface was gold the reflection alone would be impressive from far off. It certainly would inspire a reaction.
Nebuchadnezzar requires all people to worship the statue whenever they hear the instruments of worship. This sounds preposterous. The statue is obviously manmade; how can it be a god? How can worshipping a manmade object bring any kind of result?
Worshipping a statue would be akin to someone worshipping their car, or their phone, or their television. Which, come to think of it, a reasonable percentage of people do treat their possessions with an amount of attention approaching worship. Maybe worshipping a statue isn’t as foreign concept as it might seem.
From the ancient mindset, though, this request would have the opposite effect. The modern mind wrestles with why someone would worship a statue; the ancient mind was so accustomed to worshipping anything that adding something else to the list was no stretch. Much like people carry around good luck charms or believe that certain objects imbue them with special characteristics, people in the ancient world did the same. If something seemed to help create a charmed life for a while, you worshipped it for as long as possible in hopes that the charmed life would continue.
Additionally, many ancient cultures assumed the near-divinity of their leaders. Most cultures saw kings or emperors as divinely appointed emissaries and some even saw kings and emperors as fully divine beings. Worshipping an image of Nebuchadnezzar would not have been a stretch for anyone in Babylon who followed the Chaldean gods.
Studying human tendencies always brings up a bit of a curiosity. What do people hold important in their life? How do things we keep become tokens of worship? Why do we ascribe special power to charms? Are there talismans in our life we treasure for no other reason than they are lucky? Human beings like to worship things outside of ourselves. It’s a part of who we are. No wonder God tells us we are to have no other gods before Him.
