Daniel 5: The Writing is on the Wall - Tim Horman

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, good morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are now in Chapter 5 of our Daniel series.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you stand with me and let's pray?

[SPEAKER_00]: As we prepare to open up the word of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Father, that you are here this morning with us.

[SPEAKER_00]: I thank you for,

[SPEAKER_00]: The worship, this time of worship, we've already shared to stand before you to be with you, to experience and be reminded of your love and grace, which we've been singing this morning is given so freely yet it was not cheap.

[SPEAKER_00]: It cost Christ everything in order to pour out the mercy and love of God upon us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And for that Lord, we are so thankful.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, we pray as we open up your word that we might go deeper, we might learn more about the dimensions of your character, who you are, Lord for us, and of what you're doing in this world, and we pray in Jesus name.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: So please be seated.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Daniel chapter five.

[SPEAKER_00]: which is sometimes called belchazars feast or the writing is on the wall, which is of course where we get that particular saying.

[SPEAKER_00]: And since that phrase means something like something terrible is about to happen or the end is near, that would be a pretty good way to summarize the events of Daniel 5.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, before we get into the text, let me just set the scene, because we've now jumped forward quite a bit in the timeline in Daniel's life.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the events described in Chapter 5 happened about 70 years after Daniel was first brought to Babylon.

[SPEAKER_00]: which was when he was a 13-year-old, which means that Daniel is now well into his 80s.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's an old man.

[SPEAKER_00]: Nebuchadnezzar is long dead, and this scene describes the last desperate gasp of the one-straight Babylonian Empire, which is about to utterly collapse into ruin.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in order to really understand what's happening here in Chapter 5, it's really helpful to know some of what's going on in the background, which is not clear in the text, but which we know is happening from our understanding of history.

[SPEAKER_00]: that at this exact moment, this exact time, the events described in this chapter, a vast army had a mess outside Babylon's city walls and alliance of the meds and the Persians led by King Darius.

[SPEAKER_00]: who had completely decimated the Babylonian army in open battle a few weeks earlier.

[SPEAKER_00]: They had now advanced on the city and were working to dam up the U. Fratees River so that they could use the dry riverbed to kind of slip underneath the city walls that were otherwise going to be impregnable.

[SPEAKER_00]: In any case, the defeat of Babylon is inevitable.

[SPEAKER_00]: Babylon has no army to defend itself.

[SPEAKER_00]: And since the invaders have cleverly worked out how to get past the city's last real defense, everyone knows that the city is about to fall.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it's an image, an etching of this moment that we've used as the background for our sermon series.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the original etching, if you can see it, although it's pretty dark, so we had to brighten it up a bit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, the Babylonians don't know what's going to happen when the invaders eventually break through the defenses of the city.

[SPEAKER_00]: Will they be merciful?

[SPEAKER_00]: Will they slaughter everyone?

[SPEAKER_00]: Will they enslave everyone?

[SPEAKER_00]: Will it only be the rulers and the lords and the king who are deposed?

[SPEAKER_00]: Will they burn the whole city to the ground?

[SPEAKER_00]: No one really knows what's coming, but they know that it's something terrible.

[SPEAKER_00]: The city is on a knife edge, quite literally.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can just imagine, I just want you to try and put yourself into that situation, imagine the fear, the terror of this impending invasion.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what forms the kind of emotional backdrop of what is going on in Chapter 5.

[SPEAKER_00]: Another key point to make is that chapter five should be really red as the flip side of Daniel chapter four.

[SPEAKER_00]: In Daniel four, as Darren preached so powerfully last week, King Ibn Ezah with all his immense ego and pride, sets himself up against the God of Heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: But God cuts him down to size, humbles him in a dramatic way.

[SPEAKER_00]: And finally, really, when he's at his absolute lowest, more animal than human, Nebuchadnezzar turns his face to heaven and repents and honours God as the most high God above all things.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then God restores Nebuchadnezzar, and he continues to rule for about 30 years until his death.

[SPEAKER_00]: What's important here, though?

[SPEAKER_00]: If you remember that chapter 4 was written by Nebuchadnezzar, it's essentially his conversion testimony.

[SPEAKER_00]: It testifies to the whole Babylonian empire, how he finally and completely came to put his trust in Daniel's God in the most high God of heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: He calls him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he records this in great detail, he leaves nothing out, including all of the worst moments of his life, so that everyone in his kingdom will know what has happened to him, and who then the true God really is, so that these so-called gods of Babylon will be understood to be nothing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just the material they're made of, gold, silver, bronze, wood, iron, et cetera.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he writes this, I think, in the hope that his people will also put their faith in the God of Heaven just as he has done.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the last couple of verses of chapter four are significant.

[SPEAKER_00]: Nebuchadnezzar writes this, at the time that my sanity was restored, my honor and splendour were returned to me for the glory of my kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: My advisors and nobles sought me up, and I was restored to my throne and became even greater than before.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now I never can as a praise.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now note here what he does.

[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't exalt himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't say, I put myself back together.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, now I exalt and glorify the king of heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because everything he does is right and all his ways are just.

[SPEAKER_00]: And those who walk in pride, he is able to humble.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the implication is that everyone in his kingdom would have known this story, would have heard this story, especially his descendants, and those of the royal court, they would have either have read or have heard about all of this about Nebuchadnezzar's conversion.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that much is clear from what Daniel will go on to say to the current king of Babylon Belchaza, who is now ruling at the time of the events described in chapter 5.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Belchaza is actually Nebuchadnezzar's grandson, possibly even great grandson.

[SPEAKER_00]: The number of kings in between Nebuchadnezzar and Belchaza are as a little unclear.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what we do know is that he is, in fact, the second ruler of Babylon at the time, not the first.

[SPEAKER_00]: His father, sorry about all these historical details, the actual king is a guy named Nebonitis.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he is a way, or maybe he is too old to rule, we don't really know, he is still alive, but his absence is not explained.

[SPEAKER_00]: So essentially, the Crown Prince, Belchazar, is now ruling as the second in command.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's taken up the responsibility of ruling the empire in his father's place.

[SPEAKER_00]: But unlike his ancestor, Nebuchadnezzar.

[SPEAKER_00]: Bel Shaza does not humble himself before God.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, as we'll read, he does the opposite of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: He mocks God and he acts in a way that is essentially spitting in God's face.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this ends up being disastrous for him and for the whole of the Babylonian Empire.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the last sentence of chapter four, I think, is meant to be read as a warning, those who walk in pride, God is able to humble.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that warning is essentially the theme of chapter five.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you've seen the movie Titanic, you might remember that famous moment that even as the ship is sinking, the band keeps on playing on the deck right to the very end.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's something of that same sense of inevitability.

[SPEAKER_00]: that's going on in Daniel 5.

[SPEAKER_00]: Babylon is sinking, it's slipping under the waves, and what do we find balshers are doing?

[SPEAKER_00]: Those who've read the chapter before, what's he doing?

[SPEAKER_00]: He's throwing a party, he's having a great celebration.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm just going to read a couple of sections of the chapter and make a few comments along the way.

[SPEAKER_00]: King Belchazar, verse one, gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and he drank wine with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: While Belchazar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father, and that's meant in an ancestral sense, like we might say, Father Abraham, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem so that the King and his nobles, also his wives and his concubines, might drink from them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the King and His Noble, His wives and His concubines drank from them, and as they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver of bronze of iron of wood and of stone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly,

[SPEAKER_00]: The fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall near the lampstand in the royal palace.

[SPEAKER_00]: The king watched the hand as it wrote.

[SPEAKER_00]: His face turned pale and he was so frightened but his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now literally in Hebrew it says the joints of his loins were loosened.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll leave the meaning of that to your imagination.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I think we're getting a somewhat sanitized version of the events in the English translation here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now what happens next is that the king, as Nebuchadnezzar had done in the past when he was perplexed, summons all his wise men to explain the writing and to tell him what it means and he tells him they'll be richly rewarded if they can do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But none of them can.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the king grows even more terrified.

[SPEAKER_00]: At this point, the queen mother enters the room.

[SPEAKER_00]: And she essentially looks at Belchazar, and she tells him to pull himself together, get your act together, Belchazar, you're making it full of yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: And she reminds him that Daniel, who served Nebuchadnezzar, who is still alive, is still known to be the wisest man in the kingdom, and that he'll be able to solve the mystery.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Belchazar calls for Daniel.

[SPEAKER_00]: and promises him, gold and rewards, be the third highest ruler in the kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, meanwhile, there's an army outside the city walls.

[SPEAKER_00]: You'll be the third highest ruler in the kingdom, Daniel.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you can tell me what the writing means.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Daniel's response is just awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet by now, he's too old and too secure in God to care about these rewards.

[SPEAKER_00]: or even to care about what belches are, things of him.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he gives him a very blunt response.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then Daniel answered the King.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can keep your gifts to yourself and give your awards to someone else.

[SPEAKER_00]: Nevertheless, I will read the writing for the King and tell him what it means.

[SPEAKER_00]: Your majesty, the most high god gave you your father Nebuchadne as a sovereignty and greatness and glory and splendor But when his heart became arrogant and hardened with pride, he was deposed from his royal throne and stripped of his glory

[SPEAKER_00]: He was driven away from people and given the mind of an animal.

[SPEAKER_00]: He lived with the wild donkeys and ate grass like an ox.

[SPEAKER_00]: And his body was drenched with the Jew of heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: Until he acknowledged that the most high God is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and sets over them anyone he wishes.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you, Belcher's, are his son.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have not humbled yourself, though you knew all of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: You hear that, though you knew all of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of Heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: You've had the goblets from His temple brought to you and you and your nobles, your wives and conquer bones, drank from them.

[SPEAKER_00]: You praise the gods of silver and gold of bronze and iron and wood of stone, which cannot see or hear or understand, but you did not honor.

[SPEAKER_00]: The God who holds in His hand your life and all your ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, He sent the hand, the wrote, the inscription.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the inscription that was written.

[SPEAKER_00]: Menae, Menae, Tekkel, Passen.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here is what these words mean, men A, which means to number.

[SPEAKER_00]: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.

[SPEAKER_00]: Tackle to means to weigh.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Paras, which means to divide, your kingdom is divided and given to the needs and the Persians.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then at Belchazar's command, Daniel was closed in purple.

[SPEAKER_00]: A gold chain was placed around his neck and he was proclaimed the third highest ruler in the kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you can almost see Daniel rolling his eyes as all of this is going on.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that very night, Belchazar King of the Babylonians was slain and Darius, the me, took over the kingdom at the age of 62.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the word of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, most scholars point out.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's clear what is going on here is that this is no ordinary feast.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is not just a dinner party with a few friends.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, typically, at a state banquet like this, with all the lords and nobles present, the king did not bring in his wives and concubines.

[SPEAKER_00]: They remained hidden away.

[SPEAKER_00]: But this time, we're told that along with a thousand or so nobles and lords, et cetera, the whole of Belchazar's harrym has been brought out to party along with the men.

[SPEAKER_00]: Notice, however, that the Queen Mother is not at the feast.

[SPEAKER_00]: She only comes in when she hears the commotion later on about the disembodied hand and the writing on the wall and presumably the terrified screams of her son.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why is that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, because to put it politely, this is not the sort of party that you'd want your mother at.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a back and all.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a wild, drunken, unrestrained, revelry.

[SPEAKER_00]: The wine is flowing.

[SPEAKER_00]: The slave girls have been brought in.

[SPEAKER_00]: You get the picture.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, why?

[SPEAKER_00]: Why if you have an invading army at your gates?

[SPEAKER_00]: Would you be throwing a party like this instead of organizing some kind of defense?

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, commentators have suggested a range of options here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps Belcher's has just given up.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's embraced the inevitable and figured he'll go out in a blaze of wine, women, and song.

[SPEAKER_00]: Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe it's political.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's distracting his lords and his noble, so they don't get ahead of the meads and Persians.

[SPEAKER_00]: Stage a coup, kill him, and off he's head as terms for a peaceful surrender, so maybe it's political.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe it's a mix of those things, but I think the most likely explanation is that this is religious.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is religious.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is hosting a great party in honor of the gods, and it's an active worship.

[SPEAKER_00]: And given we know that things like what is happening at this party, routinely happened in the temples of the Babylonian gods, offerings of wine and food and sex for all part of pagan worship.

[SPEAKER_00]: So perhaps, Belthashar's partying

[SPEAKER_00]: Or his parting is a kind of prayer that this one last unrestrained offering involving a thousand participants might just get the gods to notice an intervene in Babylon's favor because remember they always thought of warfare in those terms.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was one God fighting another and the God who had the most power, the God that received the most worship and honor and praise and adoration, the most followers was usually the God that would win.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of how they thought

[SPEAKER_00]: The key thing here is that he's got it into his wine-soaked brain that he'll also use this moment to mock the God of Heaven, the one who had become Nebuchadnezzar's God, and so he takes the sacred items from the Jewish temple that we mentioned in chapter one, and he desecrates them using them to give an offering to the gods of the Babylonians.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why would he do this?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, maybe he's thinking that it's in fact Nebuchadnezzar's God, who is to blame for this invasion.

[SPEAKER_00]: That he's somehow not powerful enough to stand up to the gods of the Persians and the Meds.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or perhaps, Baal Shahzara's thinking that since Nebuchadnezzar abandoned the old gods in favor of the God of Heaven so called, they have turned against the Babylonians and have now joined up with the other team.

[SPEAKER_00]: And since it was the glory of the old gods, so belches our things, that led Babylon to her original greatness.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's time he thinks also to put this so-called God of Heaven in his place and reinstate the old gods as the ones that they will worship.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what better way to do that?

[SPEAKER_00]: What better way to impress the gods?

[SPEAKER_00]: To get their attention than by taking the sacred items, once set aside for the worship of the God of Heaven, the God of the excels, Nebuchadnezzar's God,

[SPEAKER_00]: and defile them in an act of sacrilegious mockery in honor of the pantheon of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood of stone, the gods that Daniel says so clearly in this moment, cannot see, cannot hear, they do not speak and they do not understand.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's fruitless.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's pointless.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if his goal was to get one of the gods to pay attention to him, it certainly worked

[SPEAKER_00]: He's about to learn a lesson that the Apostle Paul put like this in Galatians 6 verse 7, do not be deceived, God cannot be mocked.

Galatians 6:7

[SPEAKER_00]: A man reaps what he soes, whoever soes to please their flesh from the flesh will reap destruction, whoever soes to please the Spirit from the Spirit will reap eternal life.

[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of doing what Nebuchadnezzar did,

[SPEAKER_00]: and humbling himself, and crying out to the God of Heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: Though he knew this story, he knew what had happened to his ancestor.

[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he insults God and sets himself up against him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what's clear from Daniel's response is that the issue is not so much that Belcher's are used, the sacred items, though that was certainly offensive.

[SPEAKER_00]: What is much worse in Daniel's view is the pride that has taken root in Belcher's

[SPEAKER_00]: Pride was of course also Nebuchadnezzar's problem, as we know in chapter 4, but ultimately he learned by God's gracious intervention to humble himself and to repent.

[SPEAKER_00]: The difference between he and Belchazar is that Nebuchadnezzar was acting in ignorance, at least initially.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Belcher's are cannot claim ignorance.

[SPEAKER_00]: He knows, as Daniel says, so clearly what Nebuchadnezzar experience, he had read what he wrote.

[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of humbling himself as his father did, he doubles down in a willful act of mockery and desecration, designed to humiliate the God of heaven before all the other gods, perhaps in the hope that he'll impress those gods enough to intervene and save the city.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in the end,

[SPEAKER_00]: It is Belcher's are who is humiliated.

[SPEAKER_00]: As the hand of God appeared and writes, the judgment on the wall, the same hand that wrote the 10 commandments on the stone tablets in the days of Moses, and the terror of God's presence causes Belcher's are to lose his dignity in front of all his guests, but when Daniel enters the room, you can almost feel the weight of his stature.

[SPEAKER_00]: pouring off the page.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is full of the power and spirit and the wisdom of God, even well in two of his 80s.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he looks more kingly in this moment and more composed in this moment than Belscher's eye ever could, though he has dressed up in all of his fine robes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Daniel doesn't need Bolsheza's rewards because he knows that God alone is his reward, that there is literally nothing that Babylon could offer him so secure in his confidence in Almighty God that he speaks to truth without apology, even if it might cost him his life.

[SPEAKER_00]: He does not care.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been through this before and notice.

[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel is named here by his Hebrew name, not his Babylonian one, but his name means God is my judge and Daniel is so courageous because he lives knowing that that is true, that in the end it is only God to whom he will have to give an account of his life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet after always said and done, Bolsheza rewards Daniel still thinking that perhaps his money and status and power will be enough to buy God off to bribe God and to avoid the inevitable judgment, but it does not work, church.

[SPEAKER_00]: It never works, no amount of power or status or wealth or achievement or even your good works will ever be enough to impress God, not then, not ever, God cannot be bought.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the judgment comes to pass and belches us, kingdom and his life are stripped away from him just a few hours later.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as I read this scene,

[SPEAKER_00]: I could not help, but think of another one like it.

[SPEAKER_00]: When a man rather like Daniel, though infinitely greater, stood in front of another ruler who proudly thought that he had the power of life and death, that at the moment when Christ Jesus stood in front of Pontius Pilate and Pilate demanded, where do you come from, but Jesus gave him no answer, and Pilate then said, you refuse to speak to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you realize I have the power either to free you or to crucify you,

[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus answered, you have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.

[SPEAKER_00]: And church, this is the point.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have nothing except what has been given to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: You own nothing, nothing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one day, all that you have will be stripped away and you will stand naked before God and what will commend you then.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Hebrews 9 27 says, it is appointed for people to die once and after that to face judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: If your life, like Belcher's art is weighed in the balance, will it be enough to tip the scales in your favor?

[SPEAKER_00]: So, do not forget that the only reason you draw breath is because God wills it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is only by God's power that you live and move and have your being as Paul told the Athenian philosophers,

[SPEAKER_00]: or as Daniel said, Debelcher's are, honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: So even someone as powerful as Nebuchadnezzar or a belchaza, or any other ruler on the world's stage, even at this moment, could be removed at any time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes I think we forget this, and we end up treating the holiness of God with contempt.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a bit like belchaza, we take God's holiness as something ordinary.

[SPEAKER_00]: We take what is most sacred for granted, we presume on the grace of God, so our worship and our devotion ends up half-hearted, lukewarm, apathetic, even if we're really not that into it, an act of mockery.

[SPEAKER_00]: The writer and he delivered in her book, Holy The Firm writes this about much of the worship that she observed in the polite, well-managed churches that she grew up in, in 1950s America.

[SPEAKER_00]: She writes, why do people in church so often seem like cheerful, mindless tourists on a packaged tour of the absolute?

[SPEAKER_00]: Does anyone have the foggyest idea what sort of power we blindly invoke?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

[SPEAKER_00]: The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is madness to wear lady's straw hats to church.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know we don't do that anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: Matt, but what we should be wearing are crotch helmets.

[SPEAKER_00]: Usches should issue life preserves and signal flares.

[SPEAKER_00]: They should latch us to our pews for the sleeping God may wake some day and take offense or the waking God may draw us to where we can never return.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in the light of the awesome power and majesty of the holiness of God, there is only one posture that he's ever appropriate.

[SPEAKER_00]: As James says, God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the, let me hear it, the humble.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or as Jesus said, if you want to save your life, you need to lose it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Pardon me, let me say that again.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to save your life, you will lose it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.

[SPEAKER_00]: What does Jesus mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: He means that humility is the only way into the kingdom and into the presence of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, humility is not groubling.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not hating yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not making yourself less than.

[SPEAKER_00]: which I think Darren shed so powerfully, plus week recognizing that there is a power above you, greater than you, a God who made you, and because he is your creator, it is only in him that you will ever find your true home, your true meaning, your deepest,

[SPEAKER_00]: satisfaction, the peace that you are searching for, the healing and freedom that you are desperate for, that you are made for.

[SPEAKER_00]: Humility is simply recognizing that you cannot make your life work without trusting in the help of Almighty God.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's because, sorry, it's not because God needs anything from you,

[SPEAKER_00]: It's because you need everything from God.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why pride is so dangerous, it's so deadly, and why God judges it so harshly.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Sears Lewis once wrote, according to Christian teachers, the essential verse, the utmost evil is pride.

[SPEAKER_00]: Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, all of that that we see going on in Daniel 5, by the way, are mere flea bites in comparison.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was so pride that the devil became the devil.

[SPEAKER_00]: Pride leads to every other vice.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is the complete anti-God state of mind.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.

[SPEAKER_00]: Other vices may sometimes bring people together.

[SPEAKER_00]: You may find good fellowship in jokes and friendly and so among drunken people or hunches people.

[SPEAKER_00]: But pride always means enmity.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is enmity and not only enmity between people,

[SPEAKER_00]: And so if pride really is, the chief cause of the misery in this world, then it stands to reason that the antidote, the only antidote is humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Daniel is confronting in Belcher's are.

[SPEAKER_00]: The desecration of the temple vessels is one thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the real issue is verse 22.

[SPEAKER_00]: You, Belcher's are, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, you have set yourself up against the God of Heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, while humility kills our pride, it doesn't mean that we become diminished as persons that it makes us less or weak or joyless.

[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, the opposite is true.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, look at Daniel in this moment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel is the model of humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet he has such an immense confidence and power.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he just radiates with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the only way I think to that kind of stature, to that kind of internal strength and moral courage that unshakable conviction is humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because humility says, I will build my life on God alone.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will trust in God to be my Savior.

[SPEAKER_00]: But pride says, I will build my life on myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will trust myself to be my Savior.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you build your life on yourself, what will help you when your strength fails you?

[SPEAKER_00]: When you make mistakes, when you face grief, when you lose everything, when your life falls apart, where will you be then?

[SPEAKER_00]: Belcher's are for all his wealth and power is shown to be weak and afraid.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is a man without substance.

[SPEAKER_00]: He has no moral courage or substance pride gives the appearance of strength, but it will always fail when it's tested, especially at the last judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: God is not mocked if we sow to ourselves, if we sow to our flesh, then we will reap destruction.

[SPEAKER_00]: You might be thinking at this point, if you know the gospels, but hang on, hang on, hang on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Didn't Jesus say that he didn't come into the world to judge the world, but to save it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what's with all this judgment stuff?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think Antiride explains this beautifully,

[SPEAKER_00]: But the light of Christ that God intends to bring illumination to the whole world is the same light that shines relentlessly into the world's dark corners.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when it does so, it brings judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the gospels, it is clear that Jesus had not come to judge the world or his realm or individuals.

[SPEAKER_00]: but it's also clear that the fact of his coming to bring rescue, salvation, life and hope would inevitably have the effect of condemning those who didn't want any of those things.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those who were so steeped in evil that the coming of light was bad news for them, not good news.

[SPEAKER_00]: If Jesus was now shining the true light into the darkness, they could only be one result.

[SPEAKER_00]: A head on clash.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure that you have experienced that head on clash in your own life.

[SPEAKER_00]: The point is that the presence of Jesus in our lives before it brings peace, brings a crisis.

[SPEAKER_00]: A crisis of choice between living for ourselves, living according to the flesh, or living for God, living according to the Spirit.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the only way through that crisis, the only way to solve that crisis is what?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's the only way.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just want to finish with a very well-known story, and I'm paraphrasing John Lennox's commentary here on this, because I found this just so profoundly beautiful.

[SPEAKER_00]: He writes this, that the lampstand in the bankooting hole eventually ran out of oil, and the writing was swallowed up in darkness.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet the hand that wrote on the wall in Babylon that night would write again, but next time in the dirt, in the city of Jerusalem.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the Apostle Paul, I'm sorry, John pardon me, describes this occasion.

[SPEAKER_00]: as the introduction to the claim that Jesus made about himself that I am the light of this world, and that whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And immediately before that statement, John details an attempt, and you might remember this moment by the religious leaders to entrap Jesus.

[SPEAKER_00]: They had caught a woman in the act of adultery, and they dragged her before Jesus through in front of him, and they said, teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery, and the law of Moses commanded us to stone such women to death.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do you say?

[SPEAKER_00]: This is clearly a moment of judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: The religious leaders had read the writing, as it were, the writing of the law by the finger of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: It condemned adultery that much they knew.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they exposed the woman to the light of the law, thinking they might force Jesus to contradict it by refusing to apply the penalty.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus responded by doing what you remember, he got down in the dirt with the woman, and he began writing with his finger in the dust.

[SPEAKER_00]: John doesn't tell us what Jesus wrote, who knows, maybe he was writing Mene, Mene, tackled person.

[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know, but the religious leaders continue to press Jesus for a response.

[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually Jesus stood up and he looked at them in the eyes, and he said to them, remember what he said, let him, who is without sin among you, be the first, the throw, the stone, at her.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then once more, he bends down and begins to write in the dirt.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now the effect was powerful, and the religious leaders were astonished.

[SPEAKER_00]: But when they heard about it, when they heard this, they went away, one by one, John tells us beginning with the older ones because they've been around a bit longer.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before Him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now what does Jesus do in this moment?

[SPEAKER_00]: The religious leaders had shown the light of the law into the woman's life, the light of judgment, and they were ready to kill her.

[SPEAKER_00]: They thought that they had nothing to fear from the law.

[SPEAKER_00]: However, they had just come a knowingly into the presence of a much stronger light than the light of the law, a light that penetrated even into their insensitive consciousness, consciences,

[SPEAKER_00]: The light of the world, the woman's accusers felt exposed, condemned, and ashamed, they could not bear a light like that so they walked away from it back into the darkness, yet the woman remained in Jesus' presence, and this is the odd thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: She felt no less guilty, we imagine.

[SPEAKER_00]: No less exposed than the religious leaders who had just left, and she could have run away as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually Jesus stands up and he says to the woman, woman, where are they, where are your accusers?

[SPEAKER_00]: Has no one condemned you?

[SPEAKER_00]: No one, Lord, was her response.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then what does Jesus say?

[SPEAKER_00]: These are the words that change the whole world, friends.

[SPEAKER_00]: These words change the whole world.

[SPEAKER_00]: and I do not condemn you either.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now go away and send no more.

[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't condone her sin, but from that moment on, her life would be different.

[SPEAKER_00]: But its energy would be derived from the fact that Christ had forgiven her.

[SPEAKER_00]: The light that had driven away the hypocritical and guilty religious men had also brilliantly illuminated the path to her forgiveness and it's still doing that today.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you believe that?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, friends, it is the only way to step into this, the only way to receive this forgiveness is humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is to recognize, out of this story, this had a profound effect on me as I meditated on this story this week.

[SPEAKER_00]: I realized, as I read it, that I, too, am the woman caught in adultery.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm also the men standing there with the rocks ready to kill for righteous reasons, religious reasons.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also Belcher's are, and so are you, and until we recognize this, until we acknowledge this, until we say we admit to our need of God's grace, we cannot receive the forgiveness that Christ is offering.

[SPEAKER_00]: But remember that forgiveness while free was not cheap, it cost Jesus everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: God has always been a God of judgment, but he is also a God of mercy, and in order for those two things to meet and as the Psalms tell us to kiss, for righteousness and mercy to kiss, to join together.

[SPEAKER_00]: Someone still had to pay the penalty for our sin.

[SPEAKER_00]: Someone still had to pay for belches our sin.

[SPEAKER_00]: Someone still had to pay for the sin of the woman caught in adultery, for the sins of the religious leaders.

[SPEAKER_00]: Someone needed to pay in order to satisfy the righteous requirements of judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus did all of that for you so that instead of judgment you might receive the mercy, the grace, and the forgiveness of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I treat that promise to often in my own life that sacred, holy gift, like something cheap.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I forget that I didn't actually earn any of this, that all of it is a gift, but I cannot stand before God in my own righteousness, but I need to humble myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: and recognize that everything I am, everything I have, everything I will have in the future is held entirely in the hands of Almighty God.

[SPEAKER_00]: John Lennox says this, the Christian diagnosis of humanity's fatal flaw is radical.

[SPEAKER_00]: sin has alienated us from God, and we cannot put it right ourselves to acknowledge that as humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the solution is equally radical.

[SPEAKER_00]: God in Christ has taken the burden of sin upon himself on the cross so that through humble repentance and faith in Christ we can

[SPEAKER_00]: Is there anyone who is thankful he had this morning for that unmerited, supernatural gift?

[SPEAKER_00]: And again, a name in this morning, had to go back to Hebrew's nine, where Hebrew says,

[SPEAKER_00]: finishing with this, just as people had destined to die once and after that to face judgment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now I quoted this earlier, but I didn't complete the sentence.

[SPEAKER_00]: How does it finish?

[SPEAKER_00]: So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many, and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's stand together and pray.

[SPEAKER_00]: Father, we are so thankful that there is, therefore, now, no condemnation, no judgment for those who are in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life has set me free

[SPEAKER_00]: And further, we thank you so much that you have done all of this in order that we might be set free forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: But we also acknowledge that the only way in is by humility.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so before we move on from this moment and worship, one last time before we conclude the service.

[SPEAKER_00]: We do want to take a moment, Lord, to humble ourselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: and to ask for your forgiveness, for ways in which we might have like belchazaar, treated the sacred things, the holy things that you have done in our lives, and treated them with disdain, with neglect, as something ordinary,

[SPEAKER_00]: We have forgotten just what an immense gift, all of this really is, that without it, we would be lost forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we are so sorry, Lord, that we have done this.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have hardened our hearts against you in these ways, so we have become lukewarm often.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that our worship is not from a place of humility but a place of pride, an act of mockery.

[SPEAKER_00]: Forgive us for these things, Father.

[SPEAKER_00]: And take us deeper in to the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to remember, to be renewed in our faith.

[SPEAKER_00]: To be renewed in our understanding of what and immense, immeasurable, eternal, lavish gift.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is that we have received through the blood of Christ.

[SPEAKER_00]: A gift we have not earned, and we did not deserve.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus, you did not condemn us, but in our humility, you welcomed us in, and have embraced us forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we are so thankful.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are so thankful.

[SPEAKER_00]: Are you thankful this morning, church?

[SPEAKER_00]: We are so thankful, Father.

[SPEAKER_00]: As we worship now, I pray.

[SPEAKER_00]: The light and the glory of these things has grown dim, has grown dim.

[SPEAKER_00]: Come Holy Spirit, we pray and remind us of the Storos, open our eyes again to the truth.

[SPEAKER_00]: and reveal to us once again just how incredibly rich and generous and overwhelming is the love of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we are so, so thankful, and we pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen.