Found Wanting
Notes
Transcript
24 “Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed.
25 And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin.
26 This is the interpretation of the matter: Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end;
27 Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting;
28 Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”
For decades, prophets warned of an invasion if Judah did not turn from their wicked ways. They were immoral, had turned to idolatry, and were neglecting the needs of the poor and needy. Isaiah warned them 100 years prior.
Micah had given the same warning. Habakkuk wondered how God could use the godless Babylonians to correct His own people. Jeremiah lived to see these prophecies fulfilled. Babylon had come. Babylon had fought. Babylon had won.
Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple, and took all the sacred furnishings and vessels, and put them in the temple of his own god of Babylon. His grandson, Belshazzar would use these holy items at a pagan feast, leading to God’s judgment on him. It looked as though the Babylonian idols had won, of course they couldn’t understand it would become a fulfilled covenant and promises from God.
God remained true to His Words - He would care for them and bless them as long as they followed Him and obeyed His statutes. If they failed, and disobeyed, He would correct/punish them and scatter them among the Gentiles. God would rather have His people living in shameful captivity in a pagan land than living like pagans in the Holy Land and disgracing His name.
To show the contrast, in the Babylonian leadership Nebuchadnezzar had come face to face with God and humbled himself. Belshazzar will come face to face with God and ignored Him for self-satisfaction. Nebuchadnezzar continued his reign, Belshazzar would see the nation immediately crumble. He had been weighed by a divine scale, and God found he was lacking spiritually.
Babylon was now in danger. The city was surrounded by the enemy, and yet Belshazzar thinks this is the best time to throw a party. He’s living up the good life, when life around him is falling apart. God had made up His mind, and now the literal hand of God writes out the sentence.
5 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.
6 Then the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together.
Don’t we have the same response when we have been caught red handed? When we are living the good life, thinking it’s hurting no one else, we are out for ourselves…then…then comes the sickening feeling when we are caught. Our fun is found out. Belshazzar’s color changed - that sick feeling must have been in his stomach. His thoughts alarmed him - he was going through all the things that might happen as a consequence of his sin. His limbs gave way and his knees knocked together - he didn’t know what was worse, the thought of being caught or not understanding what was written.
History was repeating itself. God sent a message, and the kind didn’t know what it meant. He called for his wise men. His wise men were confused. They may have been able to read the words, but they did not know how to interpret it. This terrified the king even further. If the most educated and able of his men couldn’t interpret what was written, how bad is this really going to be?
God was allowing men who felt they had knowledge and power to be exposed to the true power, glory, and might of God.
The rest of the palace heard about the crisis in the banquet hall, and when the news came to the queen mother, she immediately went to her son to offer counsel and encouragement. He first words were, “Don’t be alarmed! Don’t look so pale!” Things aren’t as bad as they appear to be! She was optimistic about the whole situation and certain that, once the handwriting was accurately interpreted, everything would be fine. Her attitude didn’t match the gravity of the situation, but her suggestion was a good one: summon Daniel, the king’s greatest adviser.
Belshazzar was ignorant - it’s hard to think he had not heard the stories of Daniel, one of the highest ranking officers in Babylon. He had proven his wisdom to Nebuchadnezzar. Surely Belshazzar had heard the stories from his grandfather! Instead, I can imagine he had heard the stories but had not committed it to memory. Now, he was too focused on himself right now, than the history from the past. The queen, even in her disbelief, brought truth to the conversation.
How many times do you see that in family life? The father will be a noble man, and a blessed man, but the son will be unworthy, sensual, carnal. It was so here, and in the midst of the siege, when you would think they’d be doing all that they could to preserve the kingdom and the city, Belshazzar throws a party. He calls together a thousand of his lords, and their wives, and their concubines, and he raises a dais on which he leads the celebration. And their tongues are loose, and they blaspheme God. Finally it leads into desecration: they call for all of those sacred articles that have been seventy years in some shrine in Babylon that Nebuchadnezzar took out of Solomon’s temple, and they desecrate them in that party and blaspheme the name of the true God. Now while that is going on, why, a hand appears and judgment is literally written on the wall.
Divine Words
Divine Words
24 “Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed.
25 And this is the writing that was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin.
Why couldn’t the astrologers, why couldn’t the magi, why couldn’t the enchanters and the sorcerers read it? There are some who speculate, saying that that writing may have been in a language nobody could understand, unless it was revealed from heaven. There are those who say that it was doubtless written in ancient Hebrew, or at this time in the Aramaic alphabet, in those square block letters that all Hebrew Bibles are written in today, and the language, the alphabetical language in which the Hebrew of Israel today is written, and they could not understand that ancient Hebrew script. However it was an illustration again of the inability of worldly wisdom to understand the mind of God without His intervention.
Daniel, now likely in his 80’s was brought to interpret the writing. He is offered wealth, power, and position. He declined, but simply interpreted the dire meaning of the simple written words.
The word Mene means numbered, counted, measured. God had numbered the days of Belshazzar’s reign and that number was now up. The LORD, not man, determines when a nation rises and when it falls. Furthermore, the LORD, not man, determines how many days a person lives. When Belshazzar was born, the LORD counted out the days of his life. Now his days had run out and were coming to an abrupt end. Note that the word Mene was written twice to emphasize the certainty that Belshazzar’s days were at an end. His doom was an absolute certainty.
This is God’s sovereign direction of the world, its history, its time, and you. As the writer to the Hebrews says, in Hebrews 9:27:
27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,
It is appointed: there is a set time when you are born, there is a set time when you shall die, and when that time comes, those days have run out and finished, you shall certainly die. That’s why the ninetieth Psalm says,
12 So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Most people live as though they were going to live forever. God says they are fools! We have a certain number of days, and when that number has run out, you shall certainly die. And that applies to kingdoms. It applies to all of God’s earth. There are certain allotted measures of time, numbers; and that is the end, it is finished.
The word Tekel means weighed. Belshazzar had been weighed and found wanting. He had been weighed against the righteousness of God and found to be totally deficient. The king had completely ignored the LORD and His holy commandments and had chosen instead to live a fleshly, covetous, and prideful life that glorified idols and dishonored God. He had chosen to pursue the fleshly pleasures and greedy spirit of this world and had arrogantly defied the LORD Himself. Therefore, when weighed in the LORD’s balance, the king came up short, utterly lacking in righteousness and morality.
Mankind will always try to measure up, try to keep those scales balanced. Whether it be by religion, by ritual, and by rubric to measure up to God, to pull himself up, to lift up his weight to God. Oh, he’s done all the right “things”. He’s baptized, he attends Sunday School, he comes to every service, he teaches, he’s a deacon, he does everything the world says is “right”. He does everything right, trying to put more weight to his side of the scale. God simply says,
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
But we say, “Lord, just look what I have done in your name,” as though the rituals and things of this world (even if they were with divine intent) would mean something to God. They may even be sincere in what they do, like Saul of Tarsus, who said, when he was persecuting the Christians and casting them into prison and some of them putting to death.
9 “I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
10 And I did so in Jerusalem. I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them.
11 And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme, and in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities.
Trying to make ourselves worthy to God by being sincere, brings us to the same place as Belshazzar “You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting”. It is not by anything man can do. We can’t wash away our sins, we cannot make ourselves righteous, we cannot wash out the sin stain on our soul. It is only through Christ.
12 And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
The word Peres/Parsin means divided. Belshazzar’s kingdom was now to be divided and given to the Medes and Persians. The king felt that Babylon was secure because of its massive walls, stores of food, and seemingly endless supply of water from the river that ran through the city. But the Persian army had diverted the Euphrates, and while the king and his guests were reveling in their drunken party, the enemy was sneaking its army under the wall at the site of the dry riverbed.
So that night, that night, silently those conspirators, noiselessly those conspirators gathered, and at a signal, at a certain signal some of them opened the gates of the city, and the armies of Cyrus marched in. And at that same signal, some of them seized the royal palace, and “in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.
God does that to life: He separates us from it.
27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,
God does that to kingdoms: He divides it and gives it to others.
43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.
This concerns me for the future of America, if we do not turn away from the sinful track we are on as a nation.
The very fabric of America are her Christian people. And the great guiding light within our nation should be the mind of God. And when God looks upon a people, a nation, and sees them separated from Him and His directions for us, His will for us, there’s nothing left but an inevitable and final judgment.
In the second chapter and the third chapter of the Revelation, God writes to those seven churches of Asia which could be any church today. As He would say to the church of Ephesus,
4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
It is God that makes a church live, not the greatness or spectacular oration of the preacher and certainly not the genius of the organization or its people. It’s the presence of Christ in it that makes it live, and when the presence of Christ is withdrawn, it shall surely die.
The question each of us have to ask is this, “When God weighs me in the balance, will I be found wanting?” The only people, churches, and even nations who can measure up to God’s standard are those who have placed the centrality of their faith in Christ. Anyone not trusting Christ as personal Savior will be found lacking and deficient. They will be rejected by the LORD…just like Belshazzar and the nation of Babylon.
Closing
Closing
Daniel’s interpretation of the handwriting was not a warning to King Belshazzar, but rather a pronouncement of judgment. It was a sentence. The day for warning and a hoped-for repentance was over. The king had gone too far in his sinful behavior, beyond the point of ever repenting. As a result, the LORD had to judge him. Belshazzar immediately felt God’s hand of judgment falling upon him.
The day is coming when every one of us will see God’s “handwriting on the wall.” On that day, we will stand before the LORD to face His judgment. That day may not be far off for some of us. And as shocking as it sounds, a number of us are looking at death square in the face right now and do not know it. And after death, the judgment of God
Belshazzar made a fatal mistake. He could have repented, but instead kept in his current lifestyle - even after seeing the handwriting on the wall.
22 And you his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this,
There are many things we may not understand today about life, or even about salvation. We, like the queen, should seek Godly counsel.
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.
Salvation is simple, and today as we sing our song of invitation, I bring you this simple request.
9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
11 For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.”
12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.
13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Make the decision now, and in a moment as we stand up and sing; I ask that you come down that aisle and down to the front and make your commitment to God “I’m calling out to you, God, I believe in my heart that it is through Jesus that salvation is freely offered, and I confess and repent my sins and ask forgiveness through Jesus my Lord. I’m giving my life to you, here I am, save me.”
Don’t be found wanting by God. Would you come?