28 Then Nebuchadnezzar said, “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God. 29 Therefore I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego be cut into pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rubble, for no other god can save in this way.”
A firm rebuke will do, Nebby, but thanks for the support. The Islamic urge to parking lot the infidel goes back a bit, for roughly a millennia before Mohammed, we have Nebby looking to lay waste to the foes of God.
Good works done under pressure can bring non-believers around. You see secular folks like Nick Kristof seeing the good works of missionaries and suppressing the liberal urge to dis them as they note the positive work that hospitals and schools do in bringing folks, especially women and girls who get the short end of the stick in a lot of developing cultures, a better life. The folks that are seen as anti-women in reproductive health scuffles stateside are very pro women when real repression and misogyny is the norm, save when those scuffles are transplanted into foreign aid debates.
Miracles can bring them around as well, as we see here, but that can lead to a "what have you done lately" motif as the impression wears off with time; Jesus could feed the 5000 and heal the blind, but that didn't stop the crowd from turning on a drachma on Him. The power trio here had a track-record of service to Nebby, so that combined with that trip to the furnace made God that much clearer.
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