The Courage To Speak | Courage In The Fire | Pastor Joe Coffey

This is a reading from Daniel chapter five.

King Belshazzar made a great feast

for a thousand of his lords and drank wine in front of the thousand.

Belshazzar, when he tasted the wine, commanded

that the vessels of gold and of silver, that Nebuchadnezzar

his father, had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem, to be brought,

that the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubine to my drink from them.

Then they brought in the golden vessels that had been taken

out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem,

and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines drank from them.

They drank wine and praise the God of gold

and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared

and rode on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace

opposite the lampstand, and the king saw the hand as it rode.

Then the king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him.

His limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together.

The king called loudly to bring in the enchanters.

The Chaldeans, and the astrologers.

The king declared to the wise men of Babylon,

whoever reads this writing and shows me its interpretation,

shall be clothed with purple, and have a chain of gold

around his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

Then all the king's wise men came in, but they could not read the writing,

or make known to the king the interpretation.

Then King Belshazzar was greatly alarmed,

and his color changed, and his lords were perplexed.

The queen, because of the words of the king

and his lord, came into the banqueting hall, and the queen declared.

O King, live forever.

Let not your thoughts alarm you or your color change.

There is a man in your kingdom in whom the spirit of the Holy God,

in the days of your father, light and understanding

and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, were found in him.

And King Nebuchadnezzar, your father, your father, the king made him chief

of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and astrologers,

because an excellent spirit, knowledge and understanding

to interpret dreams, explain riddles, and solve problems

were found in this Daniel, whom the king named Belshazzar.

Now let Daniel be called,

and he will show the interpretation that Daniel's brought in before the king.

The king answered and said to Daniel, you are that Daniel,

one of the exiles of Judah, whom the king my father brought from Judah.

I have heard of you, that the spirit of the gods is in you,

and that light and understanding and excellent wisdom are found in you.

Now the wise men, the enchanters, have been brought in before me

to read this writing and make known to me its interpretation.

But they could not show the interpretation of the matter.

But I have heard that you can give interpretations and solve problems.

Now, if you can read the writing and make known to me its interpretation,

you shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold

around your neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

Then Daniel answered and said before the king,

let your gift be for yourself, and give your rewards to another.

Nevertheless, I will read the writing to the king

and make known to him the interpretation.

O King, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar

your father kingship and greatness and glory and majesty,

and because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples,

nations, and languages trembled and feared before him

whom he would he killed and whom he would he kept alive.

And he would he raised up, and whom he would he humbled.

But when his heart was lifted up

and his spirit was hardened, so that he dealt proudly,

he was brought down from his kingly throne, and his glory was taken from him.

He was driven from among the children of mankind,

and his mind was made like that of a beast.

And his dwelling was with the wild donkeys.

He was fed grass like an ox, and his body was wet

with the dew of heaven, until he knew that the Most High God rules.

The kingdom of mankind sets over it.

He, he will in you, his son Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart,

though you knew all this,

but you have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven,

and the vessels of his house have been brought in before you,

and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines have drunk wine from them.

And you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze,

iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear, or known,

but the God in whose hand is your breath, and who are all your ways.

You have not honored.

Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed.

And this is the writing that was inscribed, many, many tackle and parson.

This is the interpretation of the matter.

Many God is numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end tackle.

You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting.

Paris.

Your kingdom is divided and given to the meat and Persians.

Then Belshazzar gave the command, and Daniel was clothed with purple.

A chain of gold was put around his neck, and a proclamation

was made about him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

That very night Belshazzar, the Chaldean king, was killed, and Darius

the Mede received the kingdom, being about 62 years old.

Everybody,

good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

I'm really, really glad that you're here.

Thanks for coming.

Happy Mother's Day.

To those of you who are moms, this is a day where we recognize

the quiet heroes that are in our lives.

There is no love quite like a mother's love.

So if you're a mother, grandmother, a step mom, a single mom, an adoptive mom,

or you're just a woman who, is a mom to somebody who needs a mom.

Thank you. We honor you today.

We also know that today can be a hard day for any number of reasons.

So if this is a hard day for you, I want you to know that we see you.

We love you.

We're really glad that you're here.

You're in the right place

because our church, we want our church to be like a family.

And you belong here. All right.

So happy Mother's Day.

All right.

This is the third week of our four part series on Daniel.

We we're calling it courage in the fire.

We're looking at stories about Daniel and his three

friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

They were exiles in a foreign country called Babylon.

And when you're in exile, in a foreign country, at first

you are very, very different than the prevailing culture.

But culture is like a river that flows in one direction.

And it's the easiest thing to do is to just let

that river take you and just float down the river.

It takes tremendous resolve,

tremendous courage to stand against the current.

One of the reasons we chose this series is because

of its similarities to our culture,

that if our culture is like a river that flows one direction,

is flowing away from God, it takes great resolve, great courage,

to live for Jesus right here, right now.

You know, there are a lot of reasons why I love the Bible.

One of the reasons is so brutally honest about the people I in the Bible is

it shows them, warts and all, all their flaws.

Which makes sense because the main theme of the Bible is that we need a Savior,

and it's comforting, to know that the people in the Bible

needed a Savior as much as I do as much as you do.

The downside is that there aren't a lot of people to look up to or examples

for other than Jesus, who's like, way up here.

But Daniel's one of the few people in the Bible

with no gaping flaws.

He he wasn't a clergyman.

He wasn't a minister.

He was a a businessman and an administrator

who was so good at what he did,

so full of integrity that he served

four different administrations, four different kings.

And, chapter one, it's King Nebuchadnezzar here in chapter five.

It's a king called Belshazzar.

We had the whole of chapter five read to us.

It's it's where the iconic phrase handwriting on the wall originated.

I have three points that I want to pull out of chapter five.

I want to talk about the party.

I want to talk about the writing, and I want to talk about the moment

the party is what Belshazzar does.

The writing is what God does, and the moment is what Daniel does.

All right, first the party.

Chapter five starts out like this.

King Belshazzar made a great feast for a thousand of his

lords and drank wine in front of the thousand.

Belshazzar, when he tasted the wine, commanded the vessels of gold

and of silver that Nebuchadnezzar

his father, had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem, to be brought at the king

and his lords, his wives and his concubines might drink from them.

Then they brought in the golden vessels

that had been taken out of the temple, the house of God in Jerusalem,

and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines drank from them.

They drank wine

and praise the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood and stone.

It's pretty wild party.

So, you know,

it starts out with a feast for a thousand.

Like, I don't know when the last time you had a party

for a thousand of your closest friends.

That's what Belshazzar is doing.

Then he breaks out the wine with the wine, is flowing freely,

breaks out the women as his wives and concubines

come, which is very unusual for that day and age.

And then it's like Belshazzar says, what the heck?

Let's throw in a little blasphemy.

Go get all the holy stuff that you can find and we'll use it

instead of our party cups for this shindig.

All right, it is a wild party.

One of the things that you should know is that historians tell us that,

a week to ten days before that,

a king named King Cyrus of Persia

had come down with his army and met the Babylonian army

and decimated the Babylonian army about 50 miles away from the capital.

So Babylon was essentially defenseless at this point.

So Belshazzar knows that death is coming,

is coming like a tidal wave.

And that's the context of this party.

A couple things.

One is that the reward and judgment of God,

sometimes is slow in coming,

but it comes

what I mean by that is that sometimes it seems like God's

not paying attention to obedience or disobedience.

I mean, you can do all the right things and be obey

obeying God, and nothing seems like it's working out in your life.

You know, Daniel, here

is somebody who has lived a life by all indication

of consistent, faithful obedience.

Well, one author called a long obedience in the same direction.

And here in

chapter five, he's been discarded.

He's been just cast away.

He's been marginalized even though he has been obedient.

Belshazzar is a king who's living more like a frat boy,

and he has wealth and power and prestige.

But judgment is coming.

It's slow,

but it comes.

And that means if if you are obeying God, you're doing all the right things.

And things don't seem like you're not being rewarded for it.

Be patient. God sees.

It also means if you're doing the wrong thing

and you know it and you think you're getting away with it, you're not.

God sees.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is there's a this party is almost frenetic.

I mean, it is it is a panicky kind of party.

And in that way, it's a microcosm ism of our world and our culture right now.

My dad was an English major, in college, and he loved Shakespeare.

And he would tell me about the plays when I was growing up.

And he he would quote Shakespeare sometimes.

And one of the quotes I still remember is a passage from Macbeth,

and it

says that life's but a walking shadow,

a poor player who stress and frets

his hour upon the stage and has heard no more.

It's the tale told by an idiot,

full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

One of the reasons that Shakespeare was such a genius was his ability

to kind of lay open the human heart and show us what is inside of us.

And that passage kind of shows

us the deep fear every human being

has of being insignificant of our lives,

just not mattering at all.

Here in the book of Daniel, with Belshazzar

knowing that death is coming, it's like he's casting around just to try,

try to find something that shows himself

that he has significance.

He starts with this big feast

to show his power and his wealth and the women and pleasure,

and then finally raising his fist in defiance of God.

I told you, there are a

lot of reasons why I love the Bible.

One of the other reasons is that the Bible, like Shakespeare,

is able to open the human heart and show us what we feel.

But more than Shakespeare, what the Bible does, it shows us why

we feel, what we feel and what to do about it.

When God creates human beings, when he creates Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve

are in perfect relationship with him

and they know exactly who they are.

They have identity, they have purpose, they have significance.

And then when sin enters the world,

that breaks the relationship with God

and every human being, everyone you know

is on this desperate search for identity

and significance.

And all you have to do is look around and see.

It's it's almost it's a frenetic search.

People are panic. Yeah. I googled,

the question how many genders are there?

And a site called Team Talk, gave me this.

There are many different genders, including male, female, transgender,

gender neutral, non-binary, gender pin, gender, gender queer, two spirit,

third gender, and all or none or a combination of these.

Those are ten different variables.

And it ends by saying it could be a combination of any of the 1010

different variables in a combination, or it's that over a thousand

different possibilities. What?

Why would any culture in the world say that there are a thousand different?

You know why?

It's this desperate, frantic search

for significance, for meaning, for identity?

The fourth century theologian Augustine had it right when he said,

Oh God, you have made us for yourself.

And our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee.

That's the first point.

The second point is the writing.

So Belshazzar throws this huge party and then,

ask for all the holy vessels to be brought out.

He blasphemes and then a hand comes and writes on the wall.

This is what it says.

Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster

of the wall of the king's palace opposite the lampstand.

And the king saw the hand as it wrote.

The king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed, and his limbs

gave way in his knees knocked together.

That's where we get that iconic phrase, the handwriting on the wall.

My first question is.

Why would God do that?

Oh, why would he write

on the wall at all?

I mean, judgment was coming.

Belshazzar obviously deserved judgment.

Not only had he ignored God, he had blasphemed to God.

If I if I was God, I would have just let the judgment come without warning.

The Persian army, fierce and merciless.

But instead God writes on the wall.

And Belshazzar,

who didn't want anything to do with God, a moment before

now, is desperate to find out

what God is saying to him.

Do you see how gracious that is?

I used to think that God wrote on the wall, really?

To just let Belshazzar know the jig was up and it was time to pay the piper.

But that's not it at all.

C.S. Lewis has a really famous quote about pain.

He says, God whispers to us in our pleasures.

God speaks to us in our conscience,

but God shouts to us in our pain.

Pain is God's megaphone

to rouse a deaf world.

What God was doing to

Belshazzar was getting his attention.

He was giving him

one last

chance, which is incredibly gracious.

I met with a man a couple of weeks ago

who has just been diagnosed with stage four cancer.

He's going to fight it with all he has,

which is exactly the right thing to do.

But in the middle of our conversation, he said,

you know, I I've never been closer to God than I am right now.

I've never been closer to my family.

I've never treated every day as a gift.

A diagnosis like that

can be like handwriting on the wall can make your knees buckle.

It can also be an invitation

from God

to draw close to him.

And this is what is true.

If you live long enough, you will experience

something that will make your knees buckle.

Handwriting on the wall

is coming for all of us.

That's one thing.

The second thing that strikes me about the handwriting on the wall

is that God writes in a code that's so weird.

Like he writes four words, many, many tickled Berson.

And it's not like I have to believe that God knew the Babylonian language.

My guess is God is pretty fluent.

You know, in all languages.

Why does he write in code?

Like Belshazzar is desperate to know

what God has said,

and he writes in a code.

That brings me to my third point, which is the moment.

So Belshazzar throws this wild

party of God right on the wall.

Belshazzar is desperate to know what God is saying,

so he offers this huge reward, but no one can tell him.

And then the Queen speaks up.

And this is what the Queen says.

The Queen, because of the words of the king

and his lords, came into the banqueting hall,

and the queen declared, oh King, live forever.

Let not your thoughts alarm you or your color change.

There's a man in your kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods.

In the days of your father.

Light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods were found in him.

And King Nebuchadnezzar, your father, your father, the king

made him chief of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and astrologers,

because an excellent spirit, knowledge and understanding to interpret dreams,

explain riddles, and solve problems were found in this Daniel,

whom the king named Belteshazzar

now let Daniel be called,

and he will show the interpretation.

One of the reasons we chose this series is we were.

We wanted all of us to look at the courage

that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had so

we could be inspired to have the same courage.

What happens here is that

Belshazzar experiences something that makes his knees buckle.

He needs to know what God has said.

He doesn't know who to turn to, and the Queen remembers Daniel.

And what she remembers about Daniel is his reputation

that he had an excellent spirit.

This is what is true.

You may be the only Christian in your family.

You may be the only Christian at work,

the only Christian at your gym.

And everyone in your life at some

point is going to experience something that will make their knees

buckle.

And when that happens

and they need someone to talk to them,

live your life in such a way

that you're the one they think of

that when they think, man, I don't know

what to do at this moment in my life.

I don't know what's going to happen.

I need to talk to someone who can tell me

that to be.

I remember years ago I joined a bike club,

in part because I wanted to ride, but, in part because I wanted to be around

people who were not Christians, not church people.

Not not that I was so tired of you guys,

but it was going to give me an opportunity

maybe to talk to them about Jesus. But,

that was a pretty serious bike club and we were out of breath

most of the time, so there was no time to talk.

So I wondered if I was ever going to get a chance.

And then one of our riders

got hit by a car, and I was the first call they made.

And I remember getting the call,

and then Saint John's been hit by a car.

Can you come to the emergency room?

We need you now.

And that was my moment.

There's going to come a moment

in the lives of the people around you

who they need to talk to somebody live your life in such a way

that when that happens, they think of you.

Then the second thing that happens is

Daniel's offered a reward and he turns down the reward.

And it's not just that he's

being snarky about the reward,

it's because he doesn't.

He wants to make sure that Belshazzar knows he doesn't have mixed motives,

that what he's going to tell him this message from God isn't

for some other reason.

You know, sometimes I think I hear about, you know, Christians getting

into conversations with non-Christians, and it becomes an argument.

And it's it's almost like the Christian wants to be right

more than we want to bring someone to Jesus.

And that's a mixed motive

here.

Daniel doesn't

make an appointment with Belshazzar so he can tell him why he's wrong.

He just waits for Belshazzar to have that moment when his knees buckle

and he calls for Daniel.

And then Daniel talks.

And what Daniel says, he launches into the story about Nebuchadnezzar.

He says, O King, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar

your father kingship and greatness and glory and majesty,

and because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples,

nations, and languages trembled and feared before him whom he would.

He killed, whom he would

he kept alive, whom he would, he raise up, whom he would he humble.

But when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened,

so he dealt proudly.

He was brought down from his kingly throne, and his glory was taken from him.

He was driven from among the children of mankind,

and his mind was made like that of a beast, and swelling

was with the wild donkeys.

He was fed grass like an ox.

His body was wet, and the dew of heaven, until he knew that the Most High God rules

the kingdom of mankind, and sets over at whom he will.

And you, his son Belshazzar had not humbled your heart, though

you knew all this, but you've lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven,

and the vessels of his house have been brought in before you,

and you and your Lord.

Your wives and concubines have drunk wine from them,

and you praise the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron,

wood, and stone, which you do not see or hear, or know,

but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways.

You have not honor.

What's he doing?

What he's doing with Belshazzar is he's giving them hope.

What he's saying is, you know your father, Nebuchadnezzar, he was great.

Probably greater than you.

He made the same mistake.

He was weighed on the scale

by God and found wanting.

But he repented,

and God was gracious.

You know what he's doing?

He's giving him the gospel.

You see that,

right?

When when somebody comes to you and they're something's happened

in their knees, a buckle, they're saying, I don't know what to do,

what how do I face this?

You can tell them, listen,

let me start with this.

And what you need to know is

Daniel had no idea how Belshazzar was going to respond.

He left that up to God, but he gave him the gospel.

You can say to the people in your family, at work,

at the gym,

listen,

you've been weighed on the scale and found wanting.

This is what the Bible says we all have.

But Jesus has come

so that you could be saved.

Don't you see?

This is God being gracious, God getting your attention

because he wants relationship with you.

You may be the only.

You're the only Christian in some circle,

and in that circle it's going to happen.

There's going to be handwriting on the wall when it happens.

Live your life in such a way that it's you.

They think of,

and then tell them the gospel.

Have the courage to speak

and then leave the results to God.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven, we come to you and I am.

I'm grateful for it.

I love the book of Daniel.

I love what he does here.

But more than that, I love what you do.

That Belshazzar, as far away from you as he could possibly be.

You still give him an opportunity

like you gave me, like you've given all of us.

Like you're giving somebody right here, right now.

Lord, I pray that we will turn to you.

And after that, I pray that we will live our lives

in such a way that when the people around us

have something

that makes their knees buckle, that they'll think of us

and we'll be able to share your love with them.

The news of Jesus.

Thanks for your grace.

Thanks for giving us such a wonderful Savior.

We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.