{"id":5439,"date":"2026-05-15T08:13:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T12:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5439"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:13:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T12:13:23","slug":"the-fourth-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/15\/the-fourth-person\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fourth Person"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

When things go wrong and life falls apart, it\u2019s not unusual for people to want to fire God.

It would be like axing an incompetent personal assistant.\u00a0Is this any way to run a universe?

Or we want to go to Facebook and un-friend God \u2013 to remind him that his performance is totally unacceptable. The conflicts that are currently ravaging Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, South Sudan, and the Congo \u2013 with myriad innocent victims caught in the crossfire \u2013 are only the most recent examples.

In response, God offers us some surprising texts in Scripture that help us see a larger picture.

One of them is from the book of Daniel, where life comes crashing down on the heads of three young men.\u00a0Their names are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.\u00a0

They\u2019re forced to make a choice:\u00a0bow before the egomaniacal king of Babylon instead of God or be thrown into a fiery furnace \u2013 an ordeal which they cannot possibly survive.\u00a0Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego reaffirm their trust in God, knowing it\u2019s a death sentence.\u00a0

Into the furnace they go.

But then something happens.\u00a0To the shock of everyone, the furnace doesn\u2019t kill them.\u00a0The king himself can see them walking around inside.\u00a0And then he sees something else:\u00a0There\u2019s a fourth person, whom the king describes as \u201ca son of the gods,\u201d walking alongside them. They ultimately emerge unscathed.

In a world that is ravaged by tornadoes, child abuse, pandemics, treachery, and broken promises, all of us go into the furnace from time to time.\u00a0

In his book Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering<\/em>, pastor Timothy Keller points out that most of us assume we now have three options.\u00a0

We\u2019d very much like to run around the furnace \u2013 to avoid<\/strong> it, if at all possible.\u00a0Or maybe we can just race right through it \u2013 to deny<\/strong> how dreadful it is.\u00a0Or maybe we should just lie down in the middle of the pain and give in to despair<\/strong>.\u00a0

Yet none of these options is realistic or hopeful.

Keller \u2013 who himself entered the furnace of the cancer that took his life three years ago this week \u2013 insists that our call is to just keep walking, one step at a time, alongside the Savior who is always beside us.

That takes us to one of the Bible\u2019s most familiar texts, Psalm 23, where a pair of prepositions is often overlooked.

The first is the word through<\/em>.\u00a0“Even though I walk through<\/em> the Valley of the Shadow of Death\u201d (verse 4). God does not lead us into Death Valley in order to leave us there.\u00a0It may be necessary to walk into the shadows for a time, but our true destination \u2013 whether in this world or the next \u2013 is the green pastures and still waters that David describes at the beginning of the psalm.\u00a0\u00a0

As Winston Churchill said, “If you find yourself going through hell, keep going.”

The second key preposition is with<\/em>.\u00a0“I will fear no evil, for you are with<\/em> me.”\u00a0No one wants to descend into a death-shadowy\u00a0season of life.\u00a0But we will quickly discover that we can go anywhere with a security that will never fail us \u2013 as long as we are accompanied by\u00a0the One, the Fourth Person<\/em>, who has defeated Evil by means of\u00a0his\u00a0cross and defeated Death by means of\u00a0his\u00a0empty tomb.\u00a0\u00a0

It\u2019s easy to overlook\u00a0the essence of the Twenty-Third Psalm.\u00a0That’s because we buy into an age-old spiritual myth:

God’s job is to keep me out of trouble.\u00a0<\/em>

Actually, God’s job is to teach us to become like him.\u00a0And one of the most effective ways to accomplish that is by teaching us\u00a0to trust him during all the times we do in fact\u00a0get into trouble.\u00a0The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a kind of\u00a0grad school for the soul.\u00a0

Are you walking down a very dark path today, and trying to endure what feels like a fiery furnace?

Keep walking.\u00a0Go through<\/em> whatever you are facing.\u00a0\u00a0

There is no place we can ever go, there are no thoughts we can ever think, there are no decisions we can ever make, even in our moments of greatest weakness or emptiness or sheer stupidity, that can separate us from the love of God \u2013 if we are willing to keep walking with him.

For as we walk, we will discover soon enough that we\u2019re not alone.

The Son of God is walking beside us.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here When things go wrong and life falls apart, it\u2019s not unusual for people to want to fire God. It would be like axing an incompetent personal assistant.\u00a0Is this any way to run a universe? Or we want to go to Facebook and un-friend God \u2013 to remind him that his performance… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1114,396,675,112],"class_list":["post-5439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-daniel","tag-psalm-23","tag-responding-to-pain","tag-suffering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5441,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5439\/revisions\/5441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}