Daniel 5 - The Writing on the Wall

Daniel chapter five, the writing on the wall.

As we come to Daniel Chapter Five, we're coming on the heels of a story we heard last week on the topic of humility.

Humility.

The importance of humbling ourselves before God.

And the topic is of such importance that we have another chapter devoted to the same topic immediately following chapter four.

Daniel chapter five continues the story of God humbling the proud.

And it is a continued reminder for us about the importance of humility.

When I worked at an elementary school, we had awards given to the kids at the end of the year, and there was one student who was being presented with an award for being the most humble, the most humble student.

Each student was to walk to the front of the class and receive an award from the teacher and shake the teacher's hand.

This was a kindergarten class.

And the one student who received the award for being the most humble, instead of walking humbly to the front and receiving his award, when he got out of his seat, he ran to the front and said, Yeah, I'm better than everybody.

He then proceeded to extend his hand to receive his award for humility.

He was mighty proud of his humility.

He did humility better than everyone.

And he wanted us to know it.

None of us naturally bend toward humility.

We all bend toward an inflated view of ourselves and our own importance.

It's been said that the human heart, because of our fallenness, curves inward upon itself.

We tend to focus inwardly on ourselves rather than outwardly on others.

And because of that, we often have a tendency to overstate our own importance, to overstate our own competence and power.

We tend to think that we're better than everybody, even if we hide it.

We all have that impulse.

And that is an impulse that, while very human, is also one that can lead to spiritual disaster if not unchecked.

And so God sometimes has to come into our lives and take us through experiences that humble us, that remind us of our own limitations and our dependence upon Him.

God does that not as punishment for those who are followers of Christ, because Christ already took the punishment for our sin, but he does it in order to train us, to teach us, to help us grow and to mature into his image.

God sometimes takes us through things to refine our character, and even though it's uncomfortable, we come out on the other side more dependent on him.

We're going to see that dynamic play out with yet another king in the Old Testament.

Last week we looked at King Nebuchadnezzar, and he was humbled before God despite his pride and his arrogance.

And now there's another king named Belshazzar.

We're going to read about in chapter 5.

And the story in chapter 5 takes place right around 539 BC, about 539 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, and it was right after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, this other king of Babylon that we'd read about.

After Nebuchadnezzar's death, Babylon, this nation, had declined.

There was a guy named Nabonidus who was the reigning king afterward.

And Belshazzar was Nabonidus' son.

At one point, Belshazzar was put in charge.

And that's where this story takes place.

Belshazzar has been put in charge of this declining kingdom by his king father.

The text refers to Belshazzar as Nebuchadnezzar's son.

The word son there can also be understood more generally as ancestor or predecessor, which is probably how it should be understood here.

So the king that we read about, Belshazzar, he followed a couple kings after Nebuchadnezzar.

But at this time, the kingdom that he presided over was not great and powerful in the way that it once had been.

It had been declining militarily, its strength, falling apart.

And here in chapter 5, it comes to an end and is taken over.

So with this background, we pick up the story in verse 1 of Daniel chapter 5.

Daniel 5 · chapter mention

It says that King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them.

He threw this big banquet.

The text doesn't say why, but the guy loved a party.

He loved a party, and there was a lot of food, certainly a lot of drink.

Verse 2: while Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and the silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them.

This takes us back to the very first chapter of the book of Daniel, when Israel was taken into captivity by Babylon.

Some of the items from the temple were taken.

These items were sacred objects meant to facilitate the worship of God.

They were for use specifically in the temple in order to worship God.

And yet, Nebuchadnezzar takes them and he puts them in the temple of a fake God.

It's an indication that he has no regard for the one true God.

And here, Belshazzar continues this after Nebuchadnezzar has died.

Belshazzar takes the articles from the temple of God and he uses them to get drunk with.

Verse 5.

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall.

The king sees human fingers appear and write a message, and it strikes fear into the king.

Verse 6, it says, His face turned pale, and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.

He was scared, he was shaken in his boots, he was terrified.

He was suddenly seeing a hand appear, and there was some writing going up on a wall that he didn't know what it meant.

Some of you may have heard the colloquial saying, the phrase that the writing is on the wall.

That's where this saying comes from.

It comes from this chapter in the book of Daniel.

The writing is on the wall.

Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall, but he doesn't yet know what it means.

And so he tries to figure it out.

What does this mean?

This weird thing that he's seen.

And the story takes a turn that we've seen already in the book of Daniel.

Belshazzar goes to the priests and the magicians of his pagan religion and asks them for some kind of guidance.

But they turn up completely empty.

They don't know what it means.

This is the same thing that happened to Nebuchadnezzar, chapter 2, when God gave him a dream and he didn't know what it meant.

None of the pagan priests were able to interpret it for him.

Belshazzar is in that same position, but then he learns about a guy named Daniel.

He learns about somebody named Daniel.

The queen comes to Belshazzar and tells him about Daniel.

Verse 11.

Now it's important to note that at this point, when this story takes place, Daniel had been in Babylon for somewhere around 66 years already.

He had come to Babylon, he was taken into captivity as a teenager.

So he's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 80 years old at this point.

He has spent most of his life in Babylon.

He's perhaps semi-retired at this point.

Who knows?

But the current king, Belshazzar, doesn't know about him.

But the queen does.

The queen knows about him, and some other people in the royal palace know all about this legendary Daniel.

Daniel is somebody who, over the course of his life, had made a name for himself.

His reputation preceded him.

He had a positive reputation.

And Daniel's positive reputation goes all the way back to chapter 1.

And way back in chapter 1, we saw that Daniel, early on, when he was just a teenager, he came to Babylon and he made a resolution.

He resolved not to defile himself with the king's meat.

He resolved, he made a commitment right then and there, at a young age, that he was going to walk on the path that God had set out for him, regardless of what the people around him were doing.

And from that one singular commitment that Daniel made in his life, he had a godly reputation all the way up into old age.

If you want to have a reputation that glorifies God, it starts with a commitment.

It starts with a commitment not to defile yourself by dishonoring God.

It starts with a commitment not to stray from the way that God has prescribed for us to live.

It starts with a resolution not to depart from the standards that God has set for our lives.

Daniel resolved not to defile himself in chapter one as a teenager.

And now, in old age, he has a reputation that precedes him, and people know him as somebody who has a connection to the one true God.

I asked this last week, but it bears repeating.

When people meet you, even if they don't know the one true God, are they able to see that you have a connection to God?

Even if they don't know God, are they able to see you and see that you have a connection to the one true God?

The people all around Daniel didn't seem to know personally the one God of the universe, the God that we know as Father, Son, and Spirit through Jesus Christ.

Not everybody around Daniel knew that, but they knew that something about him was different.

And that was part of his reputation.

That there was a distinct way that he lived, there was a distinct wisdom that he possessed, and there was a distinct commitment that he had to doing the right thing, no matter the cost.

Now, of course, we can't always control our reputation and what people think of us, and there are many people in the Bible who followed God with all of their heart and had a bad reputation for it.

So we can't always control what people think of us, but we should do what we can, as far as it depends on us, to have a positive reputation for God's glory.

In other words, we shouldn't intentionally do things that tarnish our reputation before non-believers.

One of the requirements in the New Testament of a church leader is that they be well thought of by outsiders.

That people outside the church have a positive regard for them.

One's reputation can indicate something about one's commitment to God.

It's not an absolute.

Daniel has a positive reputation.

And so King Belshazzar, he learns about Daniel and he goes to Daniel and he offers Daniel a sweet deal.

He says, Daniel, you know, I saw this writing on the wall, I saw this hand.

I don't know what it means.

I want you to tell me what it means.

He offers him a deal.

He says, Not only do I want you to tell me, but I'm going to promote you and give you a place of honor, and I'm going to give you a big sack of cash if you can do it for me.

Maybe it's a little bit of a bribe.

I don't know.

Maybe he's saying, you know, Daniel, tell me something positive here.

Okay?

It's like, you know, when you open a fortune cookie, you hope it's something really good.

Maybe it's like that.

Daniel, though, isn't interested in that.

He says in verse 17 that Daniel answered the king, You may keep your gifts for yourself and give your rewards to someone else.

Nevertheless, I will read the writing for the king and tells him what it means.

Daniel wasn't in it for the promotion.

He wasn't in it because it was lucrative financially.

He was in it because he wanted to help others come to an understanding of what God was trying to say.

If our only guiding lights in life are that we do things which promote us in prestige or give us a lot of money in our bank accounts, that is a very empty way to live.

Note what the king thought was really important to Daniel.

He thought, you know, if I want Daniel to do this, I'm going to have to promote him, I'm going to have to give him a huge position of honor, and I'm going to have to give him a lot of money.

Little did he know Daniel had little interest in either of those things.

Daniel's commitment was to the word of God and to what God was trying to say, and that was his North Star, his guiding motivation in life.

And even at his age, he continues to be of service, continues to serve God.

And in verses 18 through 21, Daniel explains to Belshazzar what the writing on the wall means.

He explains the events that we saw last week in chapter 4, what happened to King Nebuchadnezzar.

And in summary, Nebuchadnezzar was arrogant.

He looked over at Babylon and he said, I have built all of this.

He attributed all of his success to himself and none of his success to God.

He saw himself as being the one who determined his own destiny and created his own success.

And God said, You have forgotten about me, and I'm going to teach you who's really in charge.

And so Nebuchadnezzar was temporarily kicked off his throne.

He was made to live like an ox, and he went into the wilderness.

He lost his sanity, his mental faculties.

He ate grass like an animal.

He went from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.

God had to knock him down quite a few notches in order to remind him who was really in charge.

But then at the end of it, Nebuchadnezzar came to his senses.

He recognized God and he repented.

He turned around, acknowledged the one true God, realized that God is the one in charge of his destiny.

And when he humbled himself, God restored him to a place of honor.

It's not necessarily wrong to be in a place of power or a place of prominence or a high position.

It's not necessarily wrong if that happens to us, but I would caution us that we should not intentionally seek that out.

Daniel here is not seeking that out.

Because the king came to Daniel and said, I'll promote you, I'll give you all the riches you want.

And Daniel said, I'm not interested.

Sometimes God might bring something like that into our lives, and it's okay if under God's sovereignty something like that happens, but we need to be careful not to make that our main motivation.

Our motivation, like Daniel, should be helping others understand and follow the Word of God.

Now Daniel tells Belshazzar what happened to his predecessor, Nebuchadnezzar.

And we come to find out in verse 22 that Daniel actually was not telling Belshazzar anything he didn't already know.

Verse 22 is a key verse for understanding the story.

Daniel says, But you, Belshazzar, his son or his successor, have not humbled yourself, even though you knew all this.

Belshazzar knew the story of his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, and yet he repeated the exact mistakes that Nebuchadnezzar had made.

Verse 23, instead of humbling yourself, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven.

Belshazzar did not learn from the humbling that God took Nebuchadnezzar through.

He was aware of how God had humbled the previous king, but he didn't learn the lesson.

He continued the pattern of arrogance.

And because of that, the judgments that came upon Nebuchadnezzar would be even worse for Belshazzar.

Daniel goes on to interpret the statements, the inscriptions that were made.

And he says that there's a couple of statements to explain the meaning.

Verses 26 through 28.

In other words, you let power and prestige go to your head, and now you're going to be cut off from all that.

He says, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

In other words, God has assessed your behavior and it doesn't match up to what he requires.

And then your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

Daniel promises the king that his once great but now declining kingdom would come to a complete end.

This is more severe than what happened with Nebuchadnezzar, because Nebuchadnezzar experienced a temporary exile, but when he repented, God brought him back and restored him.

Now Belshazzar is past that point where God simply says, it's taken away from you completely.

Maybe some of us here this morning have been walking in a path where we've gotten off track with God.

Maybe some of us here have been walking in such a way that we've forgotten who's really in charge.

That it's not us in charge.

God is extending an opportunity for us to turn around.

And go the other way.

God is a God not only of the second chance, but the third, the fourth, the fifth, the infinite number of chances.

As long as you are alive, God is extending a hand and saying, you can make a 180, go the other direction, acknowledge me, and turn your life around.

The example of Nebuchadnezzar was meant to be that for Belshazzar.

Belshazzar had this example before him his entire life.

Not only did he not acknowledge God, but he used objects of worship to fuel his own desires, his own parties, his own drunkenness.

He was all about himself and not at all about God.

And now God says you're going to experience the consequences of that.

Verse 30.

That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain, and Darius the Mead took over the kingdom at the age of 62.

And so the downfall of the great Babylonian Empire came about.

What was once a mighty empire fell to the hands of another empire.

Belshazzar thought that he was all that, and so God let him experience defeat.

Sometimes God has to humble us.

Sometimes God needs to bring things into our lives that teach us that we're not quite all that we think we are.

There are a couple lessons that Belshazzar had to learn through this, and a couple things that we need to recognize that we can apply to our lives and learn from the story of Belshazzar.

A couple things we need to recognize.

First thing that we need to recognize and learn from this story is that our life is in God's hands.

Our life is in God's hands.

I love what Daniel says to Belshazzar in verse 23.

End of verse 23.

He says, You did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways.

Says that God holds your life in his hands, but you didn't recognize it.

We could say, to put it another way, that Belshazzar bit the hand that fed him.

He despised the one who made him.

He didn't want to acknowledge the one who sustained his entire life.

He didn't recognize his dependence on God, made himself all-sufficient.

And when we get to thinking that we need no help outside of ourselves and that we can do it all, then we are not honoring the God who holds our lives in his hands.

Listen to what the Bible says in Acts chapter 17, verse 28.

Acts 17:28

It says that in God we live and move and have our being.

There is not one movement that we make apart from the enabling power of God.

Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3, it says that Jesus Christ sustains all things by his powerful word.

Hebrews 1:3

He sustains all things by his powerful word.

We talk often about God as the creator, that God created us.

And that is well and true.

We didn't create ourselves.

But not only does God create us, but God also sustains us.

In other words, our continued existence, every single moment of every single day, is totally dependent upon the Word of God, just as our creation was.

God spoke and we came into being.

God's powerful word upholds us and sustains us today and every day.

There's an analogy that's sometimes been given for God's creation of the world, and that is that God is a bit like a clockmaker.

You know, some of those uh those clocks that are very intricate and have all sorts of chains and wires and everything, and they run.

And kind of like a grandfather clock.

And sometimes an analogy has been given that God created this world kind of like a clockmaker creates a clock.

And God set it up.

And once the world was created, now it's just going on its own.

We have a clock in the back of the sanctuary.

Some of you may have looked at that while I preach.

Somebody made that clock.

I'm not really sure whether the person who made that clock is still alive or not.

But that clock continues to operate even if the person who made it died.

Sometimes we think like that about God.

That God made this world, God made us, but once he's made us, he can check out and now we can keep things running.

You know, God created us, but then he turned our lives over to us.

And so it's great that he made us, but you know what?

We can take it from here.

That's not true at all.

To continue the analogy, if that clock is the created world, God created it.

Then if God does not sustain it, the clock stops working.

If God does not sustain us, we are no more.

If God does not sustain this world, this world is no more.

Do you remember the day that you decided to be born?

I doubt it.

Do you remember the decision you made to come into existence?

You remember when you created the lungs that give you air?

You remember when you fashioned your heart that pumps blood to your body?

You didn't do any of those things.

God did.

He created you.

And not only did he create you, but he sustains you every moment of every day.

You were totally and completely dependent on him.

Belshazzar did not honor the God who held his life in his very hand.

God holds your life in your hand, and when we don't acknowledge that, it's like knocking away the hand that holds us up.

Let us recognize our dependence moment by moment on God's sustaining power.

We need to recognize from this text that God holds our existence in our hands.

We also need to recognize that our future is in God's hands.

God predicted Belshazzar's downfall.

Belshazzar got quite proud of his little kingdom, even though his kingdom was kind of crumbling.

He was quite proud of it.

But God knew that it was about to come to an end.

Not only does God know the future, God has planned each one of our days for us.

Listen to what Psalm 139, verse 16 says.

Psalms 139:16

God not only knows the next page in your story, he wrote it.

You are discovering the story God has written for you as you go.

We might not be able to see around the corner into the future.

God not only sees the future, he wrote the book of the future before we were born.

God revealed to Belshazzar what would happen to him, and it came to pass that very same day.

Belshazzar thought that he was Lord over his own fate, but he needed to learn that really he wasn't at all.

What this means is that we need to hold our future and our plans openly before God with an open palm.

Listen to the wisdom of James chapter 4.

James 4 · chapter mention

It says this listen, you who say, today or tomorrow, we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.

You don't even know what will happen tomorrow.

What is your life?

You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Instead, you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

All of us have plans about the future.

There's nothing wrong with having plans about the future.

It's a good thing to plan ahead to some extent, but we need to hold those plans loosely, hold them openly before God, recognizing that we can make our plans, but the Lord directs our steps.

Book of James says that our lives are like a mist.

You ever woken up in the morning and it's a little bit misty out, but then as soon as the sun comes up, it's gone?

The mist was only brief, barely lasted through the morning.

That is our lives.

We're a mist.

Here today, gone tomorrow.

As a result, we need to hold the future loosely and entrust our plans to God.

I mentioned last week that there was a time in my life where I had some plans for my future and some things that I thought I was going to do, and a lot of those plans came crumbling down pretty quickly.

I had applied to a school that I was rejected from, and then I had planned to apply to some others, and I went through some serious health problems for a couple months and wasn't able to make those applications, was hardly able to get out of bed for a few months.

It was a very, very humbling experience because I had a lot of confidence in the plans that I had in my mind, and those plans weren't necessarily bad.

But looking at it in hindsight, I got pretty far ahead of myself.

I took too much confidence in my own planning and in my own ability.

And it's like the Lord had to kick me down a few notches and say that your very existence, your health, your success, all of it is dependent on me.

Don't forget that.

God needs to teach each one of us that, that our future is in his hands.

So we can plan, but we need to do so loosely and with an open palm.

And third and finally, we need to learn from this text that success, our success, is in God's hands.

Our success is in God's hands.

We all like to be successful at things, however we might define success.

We want to achieve success however that might look, but if we want to achieve success, we need to begin with humility.

That is the paradox of the kingdom of God.

It's upside down.

The way up is the way down.

The way to greatness is the way of humility.

Listen to what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 23.

Matthew 23 · chapter mention

He says that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

James chapter 4, verse 6, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

James 4:6

When Nebuchadnezzar repented, in chapter 4, his kingdom was restored.

But Belshazzar refused to do so, refused to repent, and his kingdom was taken away.

God continued Nebuchadnezzar's success when Nebuchadnezzar humbled himself.

Now we have to be careful about concluding from this too broadly that if we're just humble enough, God is going to make us as successful as we want.

That's not the point.

But I do think that we have some grounds for saying here that the success that Nebuchadnezzar experienced as a king was in part due to the humility that he displayed before God.

When he recognized who was in control, then he was able to achieve what he couldn't in his own strength.

I don't know how you define success in life.

But however you might define success, achieving true success will begin by humbling yourself before God.

God grants success sometimes as a result of humility.

The way to greatness is to become little.

The way to make a major impact is to not major on ourselves.

The way to be great is to acknowledge our dependence on God, to trust the future to Him, to recognize that He upholds us and to place our lives in His hands.

Belshazzar had to learn that.

Because it frees us to tap into the power of God that we're not able to access when we're puffed up with pride.

When we are puffed up with arrogance, it clogs the pipe, so to speak.

And the power of God is not able to flow into our lives the way it is when we humble ourselves.

Humility is the way to greatness in God's eyes.

And if we want to be great for God, we have to start by recognizing how small we really are.

Pastor John Ortberg tells a story about being with some friends and family at a street fair, and they spotted there one of those mechanical bowls that tries to buck people off.

You know what those are?

You ever seen one of those?

It's a mechanical bowl, and you get on it and it and it jerks around and you have to try to hold on, see how long you can hold on without being kicked off.

Well, John Ortberg saw this bowl being operated and kind of wanted to ride.

He wasn't so sure about it, but then he said, maybe he'll try it.

And uh his middle school son looked at him and said, Dad, are you sure?

Well, that motivated him to try it.

He had to prove something to his son.

So John Ortberg went up to this mechanical bowl, and the operator explained that the bowl had 12 levels of difficulty.

And the operator said, It might not be easy, but you have to keep yourself centered.

Keep yourself centered on this bowl.

Shift your center of gravity with the bowl as it moves to stay on.

So John Ortberg got on.

It started slow, and then it started really bucking, moving faster and faster.

And Ortberg was holding on for dear life, holding on tight, flailing around, going every direction, trying not to fall off.

Several times he slipped one way or another and thought he was gonna fall off.

But he hung on and hung on, and his arms were tired.

But it came to an end, and he was still on the bowl, exhausted, sweating.

So he got down and he had this look of pride on his face.

And the operator just said to him, Nice job.

That was level one of 12.

It was a humbling moment for John Ortberg when something that he thought was a great accomplishment turned out to actually be very little in the grand scheme of things.

It was a humbling moment.

Sometimes we have humbling moments in our lives.

But God, in those moments, is teaching us a lesson about dependence.

And the question is: will we be like the example of Nebuchadnezzar?

Humble ourselves, repent, and acknowledge God, or will we be like Belshazzar and lose what God has given us when it's too late?

Who will we be like?

Will we repent and turn to God while there is time, or will we continue on in pride until the end?

That is the question that God has for us through this text, and it's the question that each one of us has to answer about our own lives before God.