The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is one of the Bible’s most dramatic accounts of God delivering His children from peril. As the book of Daniel relates, the three Hebrew captives were bound and thrown into a fiery furnace as punishment for refusing to worship the Babylonian king’s golden idol. But the fire did not touch them. To the king’s astonishment, the three came out of the furnace unharmed, with their clothes and hair unsinged, and not even “the smell of fire had passed on them” (3:27).

The fact that the men did not smell of smoke seems to indicate that their faith in God had protected them so thoroughly that no fear or resentment from the experience remained.

Recently I read an article about this story in The Christian Science Journal titled “ ‘The smell of fire’ ” (Louise Knight Wheatley, March 1920). It discusses several kinds of mesmeric thought that would keep us clinging to the memory of past challenges—pride, self-pity, sympathy, self-condemnation, and blame.