PREACHING AT THE PARTY (Daniel 5:13-31)

If we are partying life away, God will suddenly crash our party.

Transcript

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Did you ever throw a party that got interrupted? You know, there are a lot of things that can kill a party. Running out of food. People you want to come don't. Those you don't want to come do. The music could be bad. Someone might be a drama queen. Even God. God? God kills a party? That seems to be what's happening in Daniel chapter 5. God kills King Belshazzar's party. At this time everyone's having a blast. The atmosphere is festive. The music is loud, the wine is flowing, the mood is giddy, guests are drinking and doing all that comes along with it. And then the king orders God's holy goblets to be brought out. We see this in Daniel 5, verses 1 through 4. The celebration is in full swing, and suddenly a human hand, just a hand, appears on the wall and begins to write a strange message there. The wise men are called in, they're stumped, they don't know what to make of it. The brazen king and his woozy guests sober up very quickly, only to melt in terror. The massive hall of guests that's so noisy at one moment gets suddenly quiet. You have to ask yourself the question: why is Belshazzar throwing this party? And the reality? His empire's falling. It's falling to pieces. Now that may sound like a strange reason to throw a party, but let me give you a little bit of the backstory. Cyrus the Great and his army are gobbling up the world. In the year 539 BC, Medo-Persian and Babylonian forces are clashing. And Belshazzar's dad, Nebonidus, was defeated. They're Babylonians. Nebonidus is later captured, some fifty miles south of Babylon, in a place called Borsippa, and he's then exiled to Carmania until he dies. He never sees Babylon again. These are the Babylonian forces. And Belshazzar is the last remaining Babylonian official. Babylon is under siege for several months and is about to fall at this time. Now to escape this ugly reality, Belshazzar hosts a drunken orgy. He parties to escape, to ignore. He parties to insulate himself from the ugliness of reality. And then the hand appears. At thirty-six years old, Belshazzar bears the indignity of being Babylon's final ruler the very night it fell. As everyone stares at this writing that emerges on the wall and the hand that wrote it, the queen enters. And if you'll recall, she tells them to call a long-forgotten royal servant named Daniel. Her counsel is followed. Daniel 5.13 says, Then Daniel was brought in before the king. Daniel doesn't come on his own. He has to be summonsed. He's been forgotten. And Daniel never hangs around the other wise men. He's different. He always comes in on his time. Verse 13 goes on to say the king answered and said to Daniel, You're that Daniel? One of the exiles of Judah, whom my father the king brought from Judah. Belshazzar has forgotten Daniel. He talks town to him, calls him an exile. And Belshazzar is skeptical. Verse 14 goes on to say his words, I have heard that you, of you, that the spirit of the gods is in you, and that light and understanding and excellent wisdom are found in you. You see, the king only hears of Daniel's reputation. He seems to doubt it. It's as if he's saying, It's said that you have the spirit of the gods. In other words, you're supernaturally connected. It's said that you have excellent wisdom. Wisdom enables Daniel to give interpretations and solve problems. This is wisdom from God. It's by God's wisdom that he can read the writing on the wall. It's by God's wisdom that Daniel here ignores the king's very purposeful slight. Wisdom, I think, needs a definition. Wisdom is seeing a wider view that lets you use well what you know now to create a preferred future. I'm going to say that again. Wisdom is seeing a wider view that lets you use well what you know now to create a preferred future. And wisdom is given by God. Despite that, it also must be sought out. Both are said in the scripture. Can I ask you, are you wise? Can you, as it were, read the writing? Are we content with ignorance? Martin Luther King once said, Nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Harlan Ellison said, You're not entitled to your opinion. You're entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant. You see, by wisdom you can interpret. By wisdom you can solve life's problems. By wisdom you can read the writing. Well, next, King Belshazzar tells Daniel the problem. In verse 15, he says, Now the wise men, the enchanters, have been brought in before me to read the writing and make known to me its interpretation, but they could not show the interpretation of the matter. Once again, the king tells what he's heard. Verse 16 he says, But I have heard that you can give interpretations and solve problems. And finally, the king bribes Daniel. He says, Now, if you can read the writing, 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. A kingdom, by the way, that's fallen apart. A kingdom, by the way, that's surrounded. Daniel enters the king's presence on reputation. He's about to display his character. You know the difference between the two, don't you? Reputation is who people think you are. Character is who you really are. And Daniel responds to the king in three ways. The first thing he does is to refuse the king's riches. Daniel says to the king, verse 17, Let your gifts 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. Now I kind of picture here Daniel as being sort of deadpan. There's no sympathy here, no empathy, no encouragement. He's been in this gig long enough. He's well past feeling. God's servants cannot be bought. Money will not change their word. Offers like this always have a hidden high cost, strings attached. Daniel simply refuses them. The second thing that Daniel does is he explains to Belshazzar the purpose for the handwriting. This is found in verses 18 to 23. He tells them the story of his daddy, and it is a stinging rebuke to Belshazzar. Now I want to read what he says in these verses. Daniel 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, he being God, him being Nebuchadnezzar, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. Whom he would he killed, and whom he would he kept alive, whom 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. And again, Daniel here is talking to Belshazzar about Nebuchadnezzar. He's reminding him of what happened to him. He goes on to say, verse 21, 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 and sets over it whom he will. Now here comes the rebuke. And 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 know, but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways you have not honored? Wow. Here is an eighty plus year old Daniel preaching to the king at a party. I mean, does he not realize how improper this is? Does Daniel not realize that you can't smooth things out by ruffling feathers? Did Daniel not know that the king is not asking for a sermon but for an interpretation, and yet Daniel confronts him? Like a machine gun firing at Belshazzar, the words you and your are used fourteen times in the verses that I just read. You are arrogant, you have ignored what you knew to be true, and you have honored false gods, and you defied the very God who allows you to take your very next breath. I'm telling you what, even pagan kings who do not know the God of the Bible are morally responsible before him. And the upshot is that we all need to learn well from our daddies. Belshazzar needed to learn from his daddy. Why is this? Because we're most tempted to repeat the sins of our family of origins. But those sins are God's voice putting us on alert to repent of them and to live differently. Our parents' failures do not make us less accountable people, but more accountable. Whatever my daddy or mommy did when I was young does not give me an excuse to repeat their sins. If anything, the experience of my pain and suffering as a result of that is a message that I should not repeat it. The third thing Daniel does is he interprets the writing. In verses twenty-four to twenty-eight, this is done. Verse 24 says, Then from his presence the hand was sent, his being God's. And this writing was inscribed. This is the writing that was inscribed. Mene, men, tequel, and parson. Now these are strange words because they're Aramaic words. And many people think that they're Aramaic for a decreasing sequence of weights. Mena or mina is about a pound and a quarter. Techel or shekel could be about four tenths of an ounce. Parson is a half shekel, or two tenths of an ounce. Now Daniel now explains and applies this puzzling phrase. He goes on to say in verse twenty six, this is the interpretation of the matter. Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. The sense, in other words, is this Mene mene, numbered, numbered, techel weighed, peres divided. Daniel's words echo in the hall the party was thrown in. Your numbers up, Belshazzar. You do not measure up, your kingdom's divided up. And here is this stoic, hard-hearted king hearing these words. And remarkably, he's unfazed. He doesn't repent. Verse 29 simply says, 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. And Daniel takes these things, because what is about to happen makes them all worthless anyway. God's judgment is very sudden. Daniel 5 and verse 30 says, That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed. Now I want you to understand this, how this unfolded. Babylon, the city, was 15 miles square and impregnable. Its walls were 80 feet thick, 56 miles long, 320 feet high, with a hundred massive bronze gates and towers surrounding Babylon that rose another hundred feet into the air. The Euphrates River flowed under the wall through the middle of the city to provide fresh water and beautiful scenery. North of Babylon, Cyrus and his Medo-Persian army divert the river so that the riverbed under the wall all but dried up. And the night of Belshazzar's orgy, this Medo-Persian army wades in knee-deep water under the wall, unlocks the gates inside, and poured into the city. The city fell without a fight. I mean, it is literally lights out for Belshazzar. In verse 31 of Daniel 5, we read, And Darius the Mead received the kingdom, being about 62 years old. So here's Belshazzar, the Babylonian puppet king. He is being replaced by Darius the Mead, who is 62 years old. And as Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed earlier in Daniel chapter 2, Babylon, the head of gold, is being replaced by the chest and arms of silver, the Medo-Persian Empire. Now I want to take a minute to allow this passage to connect with us. And this is a convicting passage. How do you weigh in? How do you measure up on God's scales? Now that's a safe question to ask in an impersonal setting like a church service. But I'm asking that to you personally. In this podcast in private. How do you measure up on God's scales? What would you say? Is your number up? Have you measured up? Is what's yours divided up? Now you may be listening to this and saying, well, you know, everybody's lacking on God's scales. No, they're not. And that's hardly the point. Because God is not going to say to you, well, everybody got a bad grade, so I'm going to either throw out the test or grade on a curve. God doesn't grade on a curve. And he does grade. He grades instead on a cross. And you must choose that right now. The time to realize that we are all lacking, our days are numbered, and what is ours is divided. The time to do all of that is before the message is ever written on the wall. Read the handwriting on the wall before it gets there, because after it is written, it's too late. This is why James says in James chapter 4, grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Let God crash your party. Isaiah says in Isaiah 55, seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he's near. The point is that God's not always going to be found. Your heart will not always be open to change. Remember God now while you can. Evil days are coming when you will groan because your body is spent and you just will not care anymore. You will not have the willpower to make the choice to do what's right. God says therefore in passages like Joel chapter one, wake up you drunkards and weep. Don't sleep, stay alert. It's time to sober up. Can I ask you? Are you laughing your life away? Are you partying on the edge of the grave? What will it take to get serious? There was a man named Alfred Nobel, and he was the inventor of dynamite. In eighteen eighty eight he awakened one morning to read oddly his own obituary. Now what had happened is his brother had died, but a journalist carelessly assumed that Alfred had died. It allowed Alfred the shock of seeing himself as the world saw him. And to the world, he was merely the dynamite king, the guy who got rich off of destruction and death. And yet that was not his heart. His true heart was unknown. Because what he longed to do is to break down barriers that separated people and ideas in order to establish peace. And yet he would be remembered as a merchant of death. So he doubled down to correct this. And he wrote his final will and testament, rewrote it actually, to give all of his estate to create a fund. And from it a man, a prize would be given to a man, the one man who that year had done the most for world peace. The man who invented the dynamite craze created what today is called the Nobel Peace Prize. What would you say about your own obituary? What would your obituary say if you died right now? It's a valid question. You do not know how long God is going to delay his judgment, how much runway you have left in life. For Belshazzar it was that very night. Do you remember Jesus said to the rich fool? This night thy soul is required of thee, and the things which thou hast prepared, who shall they be? Sober up before God crashes your party. Now is the day of salvation. Right now the handwriting is on your wall. It's present, but not yet visible. Why? Because God is being merciful to you. And the good news is that Jesus can erase that writing before it appears. Now once it appears, it's too late. And this is why Peter said in Acts 3 and 19, repent therefore and turn back that your sins may be blotted out. Blotted out. To be blotted out means wiped away or erased. Jesus' blood has erasing power. No matter how big your letters, no matter how bold they are, no matter how scarlet they are, or black they are, how indelible they are. No sin is too big, too ugly, too dark for Christ's righteousness to cover and Jesus' blood to erase. In Christ, your judgment is not on the wall because your sin is not on the books. And my friend, that's worth a party of a different kind. So join the party of those whose sins have been erased and let Jesus erase your judgment before it ever appears.