Can YOU See the Writing on the Wall?

Daniel 5

Ezekiel 18:20, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” – Yes, the wages of sin is death.  God is holy, and sin offends Him, and can not enter His presence.

Daniel 5 is a vivid commentary on that verse. Sin brings death in the life of an individual, and in the life of a nation.

In ch. 4 Nebuchadnezzar was humbled and got saved.  Now he’s dead and we meet his son [or grandson,] and it’s 23 years later…

“At the feast of Belshazzar and a thousand of his lords

While they drank from golden vessels, as the book of truth records

In the night, as they reveled, in the royal palace hall

They were seized with consternation at the hand upon the wall

See the brave captive Daniel, as he stood before the throng

And rebuked the haughty monarch for his mighty deeds of wrong

As he read out the writing ‘twas the doom of one and all

For the kingdom was now finished said the hand upon the wall

See the faith, and zeal, and courage that would dare to do the right

Which the Spirit gave to Daniel, this the secret of his might

In his home in Judea, a captive in its hall

He still understood the writing of his God upon the wall

So our deeds are recorded, there is a hand that’s writing now

Sinner, give your heart to Jesus, to His royal mandate bow

For the day is approaching, it must come to one and all

When a sinner’s condemnation will be written on the wall.”

The Babylonian Empire was once the glorious head of gold, the crown of the times of the Gentiles. But it had gradually deteriorated; it had entered a state of debauchery, and degeneration until the hour of its doom was finally pronounced, suddenly and totally, and the Medo-Persian army sweeps in, and it is the end of a historic era.

This chapter becomes for us a powerful look at what causes the end of an empire, what causes something as great and magnificent, as wealthy and as far-reaching, as militarily mighty as the Babylonian Empire to fall. And I believe the message of the chapter applies directly to us today in the United States of America.

The Scene

V. 1          The first scene in the chapter is an orgy. It is filled with desecration, blasphemy, evil acts that history would describe for us, but I would not assault your brain with such. And in the midst of the debauchery is the awesome intervention of God, who pronounces doom on the whole empire. And in a few hours, that doom comes. And that’s the very same pattern for our nation. A country rises to its heights. At its height, it is filled with pride. In the midst of its pride and self-indulgence and materialism, it begins to descend into evil. And as it descends, it comes closer and closer to its destruction.

In Psalm 9, verse 17, it says, “The wicked shall be turned to hell, and all the nations that forget God.” The doom of a nation is spelled out – the handwriting is on the wall - when it forgets God.

After Nebuchadnezzar died, the empire began to decline. They went thru multiple leaders who failed, before it fell to Belshazzar.

Cyrus the Great, the king of the Medes and the Persians [think modern Iran], was eating up the world. And now his hordes literally surround the entire city of Babylon, and they have for months. They are standing at the gate, seeking entry.

Belshazzar sat in the banquet hall on an elevated throne, , and he drank.

It’s hard to conceive that the guy could be that stupid, to get a drunken orgy going while his city is enwrapped by this mighty enemy. But Babylon was considered impregnable. The Historian Herodotus says that the walls were 87 feet thick. You don’t burrow through that. And they were 350 feet high. And on top of it and all surrounding Babylon were towers that rose another 100 feet to 450 feet where they could watch what was going on. And there were 100 massive, bronze gates. And they had no problem with water because the Euphrates River flowed right under the wall and through the middle of the city. What did they have to fear? They had it all going for them.

And it says, in verse 2, that while he drank he called for the gold and silver vessels which his father had taken out of the temple in Jerusalem. When Nebuchadnezzar first took captives from Jerusalem, in order to show them that his gods, the gods of Babylon, were more powerful than the God of Israel, he desecrated the temple. He took all of the God and silver vessels that were in the temple used by the priests, and he hauled them off to Babylon, and he put them in a special place, in the house of his own deities. This was his way of showing his people that their God was stronger than Israel and showing Israel the same.

And apparently, these vessels had sat in this place all this time, and now Belshazzar, in the midst of his drunken stupor, is going to really mock the God of Israel. And so, he says, “Bring all of that stuff that is representative of the God of Israel, and we’re going to drink out of it.” An act of desecration and blasphemy, openly defying the God of Israel.

He challenged God. And God accepted the challenge. He threw down the gauntlet. That’s the scene…

The Sign

v. 5          In the midst of all the revelry, at the same hour, God said, “The cup of my wrath is full,” as He had said to those at the time of the flood, “My Spirit will not always strive with man. My patience is over.” And the drinking, and the singing, and the feasting stopped. And the loud mouths were slammed shut. Deathly silence and fear fell like a pall over the whole group.

The archeologist Koldewey, who excavated Babylon, says that in their excavation of the palace of Babylon from the time of Belshazzar, they have found in the palace a large room, 55 feet wide and 169 feet long. That’s bigger than the East Wing of the White House used to be! And it has plaster walls. Isn’t that amazing? Just what the Bible said, “Wrote on the plaster.”

V. 6          He is troubled. He didn’t seem to be too troubled by a natural foe outside the gate, but he was pretty well troubled by a supernatural foe inside the palace. Sheer terror gripped that man’s heart. His face paled.

Haggai 2:7, God says, “I will shake all nations...” God shook one nation then, and someday God will shake all the rest of them, too, and there’ll be a whole lot of rulers standing with their knees banging together.

Zephaniah writes about how there will be “a day of wrath…against the fortified cities and the high towers.”

“And neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them.”

So, the scene and the sign.

The Shortcoming

Verse 7            He screamed at the top of his voice – “‘Bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers.’”

Now, this bunch is still around, folks. They were useless the first two times they were called on in the book of Daniel. But what else can he do? He calls the brain trust. But they couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together there either. They couldn’t even read it.

The Summons

verse 10-11     Have you heard that before? Who said that? Nebuchadnezzar did, decades before. He had called Daniel that. This queen could be Belshazzar’s mother.

v. 12        There’s the summons.

v. 13, “Then was Daniel brought in before the king.” Now, folks, let me just say it thrills me that the guy is never hanging around the rest of those people. He never fooled with any of them; he just awaits his moment. I mean he stood alone when he was a teenager. He stood alone when he was a mature man, and now that he is older, he’ll still stand alone, and never compromise. And he walks in an old man.

Daniel enters the scene, and we know something’s about to happen. Apparently after Nebuchadnezzar died, Daniel faded away into the shadows, because Belshazzar had to ask who he was.

V. 16        Daniel is not intimidated by this whole deal nor is he interested in being a third ruler in the kingdom. I mean who wants to be a third ruler in a kingdom that’s got a few hours to last? The higher up you go in the rank, the more likely you are to get killed. He wasn’t intimidated by any of these monarchs when he was a teenager, and he wasn’t about to be intimidated by them now. So, the scene, the sign, the shortcoming, and the summons.

The Sermon

Verse 17 – he doesn’t say “Long live the king;” the king is not going to live long – “He said unto him, ‘Let your gifts be to yourself’” – keep your own stuff - “‘or give it to somebody else’” – oh, the character and the courage of Daniel; “I don’t want your crummy stuff.”

He couldn’t be bought. He had integrity. Try to find a man like that in the politics of our society.

He reminds him of how God humbled his father in the next few verses, and then he indicts Belshazzar on three counts. Number one, verse 22, “And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this.”

Indictment number one, “You sinned against knowledge. You’re not ignorant. You have sinned against light. Your sin is not a sin of ignorance. God says time’s up, and judgment falls.

The same is coming from the heart of God to any soul who sits under the gospel of Jesus Christ today and refuses Christ, that is a flagrant sin of rebelling against knowledge. The severest of sins. How much greater punishment shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden underfoot the Son of God and counted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing.

Christ pronounced horrible judgment in Matthew 11 on some cities in Galilee, and He said, “I pronounce this judgment on you. It shall be worse for you than Sodom and Gomorrah because you refuse to heed the Word and the work that I did right in front of your face.

Second indictment, verse 23, “You have blasphemed God.”

And then thirdly, the indictment at the end of the verse is idolatry.

The Solution

verse 25           Aramaic is the language.

vv. 26-28         “Your number’s up.”

History records what happened - the Medes and the Persians built a dam on the Euphrates. It flowed under the wall of the city. They diverted all of that water coming into the Euphrates into a swampland. Now it is nighttime. And when the water level began to fall, in the midst of the banquet, it came down to be about to the knees or the waist of the soldiers. They marched underneath the wall on that shallow riverbed, went inside, killed the guards, threw open the gates, and the whole Medo-Persian army descended on that city in one fell swoop.

But moments before came v. 29     Daniel is rewarded, and then came the soldiers…Belshazzar’s day of reckoning. [v. 30]

Someday soon the Babylon of Revelation 17 and 18, the final world system is going to fall in a holocaust infinitely greater than this one.

I can’t say with certainty that the US is the Babylon of Revelation, but I believe that all of the elements of rejecting God that I see in Babylon, I see here in our country.

I see the sin of drunkenness. And in the very same palace, 200 years later, Alexander the Great, undefeated by all the armies of the world, died in his own vomit in a drunken stupor. It wasn’t just Belshazzar. Alcohol and drugs have destroyed so many. We are a drunken nation.

Secondly, pleasure madness. They were having a party while the end of the world was minutes away. They were living it up and had no idea they were bringing about their own destruction.

Thirdly, immorality. The worship of their gods involved sexual perversion that I would not speak of. Archeologists have discovered artifacts in the digs around Babylon that have engraved on them pornographic pictures from this era.

Fourthly, this society was destroyed because of its idolatry. They were worshipping all their manmade gods and blatantly rejecting the true God. There were thousands of deities that cluttered their culture. And we have the same thing: we have zillions of false Christs, false Messiahs, religious phonies, cults and occults, gods of sex and money and things and pleasure and education. We have literally crowded God out of our whole country, except for small vestiges here and there of those who really know Him.

Fifthly, blasphemy. They mocked God. You can’t believe how fearful a thing that is. But today’s comedians and our own workplace jokes now feature the God who made us and allowed us the breath to speak.

We mock God with our empty prayers before congressional meetings. We mock God with religious charlatans who use His holy name to get rich and fill the needs of their empty egos.

Sixthly, willful rejection. No nation that I know of, in the history of the church, has had any greater opportunity to hear the gospel than this nation.

“To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

We have been so blessed, and yet no nation ever turned its back on it as severely as we have. We don’t learn anything from history. How foolish.

Seventh, another problem that I see is guilt. This Babylonian society was ridden with guilt, because sin brings guilt. And you know what? The king saw the writing on the wall, and his countenance was changed, and his thoughts were troubled, and the joint of his loins were loosed, and his knees smashed together. Why? Guilt!

When you see a police officer do you feel joy? Or do you suddenly slow down or reach for your seat belt?  You see, we interpret everything that happens to us according to our consciences.

After Adam sinned God came to Eden, and looked for him. Normally, Adam would have said, “Here I am, Lord. Do you want to have a conversation?” Instead he ran and hid. Why? He had guilt in his heart. Our nation is literally ridden with guilt. Never have there been so many psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, mental illness, alcohol, drugs, misery, sorrow, suicide. It’s all over the place because we are totally swamped in our guilt.

Eighth, America’s characterized by greed and impure motives. In verse 7, he says, “I’ll give you gold, and I’ll give you scarlet, and I’ll make you the third ruler in the kingdom.” “I’ll give you all this stuff.”

That’s how our entire system works today. Think about it. The whole American system is based upon greed and selfish motives. You buy people, don’t you?

Another thing that struck me about this was their confidence in human security. They thought their city was impregnable. Now I’m proud of our military and I have confidence in them and their leaders.  I feel safe with my current President.  But let’s never forget that our hope is in the Lord!  Besides, we don’t have to be defeated from without when so many of our own people are defeating us from within.

One historian says there wasn’t even a spear thrown that night in the fall of Babylon. And Belshazzar was systematically executed as were others. But there was no battle, just execution. Why? Because they believed their own resources were enough. It’s a form of humanism, people. They forgot that it is the Most High God who rules in the kingdom of man.

We live in a humanistic day, when man says, “I am the master of my fate; I’m the captain of my soul; I’ll decide what’s right; I’ll do what I choose to do.” The ultimate stupidity is to think that we have the strength in ourselves.

What made Babylon fall? Pride, verse 22, “You didn’t humble your heart.”

We started with Ezekiel 18:20; and we finish with it, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

But the Bible promises that those who put their faith in Jesus Christ shall escape the wrath to come, shall be delivered from the hour of tribulation, shall be saved from judgment, and taken to heaven.

America:  It’s time to see the writing on the wall!