Daniel chapter 5 verse 1, the Bible reads,
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords
and drank wine before the thousand.
Belshazzar, whilst he tasted the wine,
commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which
his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out
of the temple, which was in Jerusalem,
that the king and his princes, his wives, and his concubines
might drink therein.
Now, Belshazzar, who we see here,
has a very similar name to the name that Daniel was given.
Because if you remember, when Daniel and the other Hebrews
were taken into captivity, they were given names.
Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael had their names changed
to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
And Daniel's name was changed to Belshazzar.
And it said that that name was according
to the name of their false god.
And obviously, you can see that this name is almost
the same exact name, Belshazzar, very similar to Belshazzar.
And the operative word here is Bel,
which is Baal, Bel, Baaliel, Beelzebub.
It's the devil, Satan himself.
The false god of the Chaldeans that they were worshipping
was actually the devil.
And it says here that Belshazzar is the king.
And we know that at the end of this chapter, this same night,
the kingdom is going to be taken from him.
And the Medes and the Persians will take over.
So this is the end of Babylon as a world power.
And it's the beginning of the Medo-Persian empire
as the dominant world power.
So we're going from the head of gold
to the arms and chest of silver.
We're going from the lion of chapter seven
to the bear of chapter seven.
So we're going from the first kingdom to the second kingdom
in that sequence of four kingdoms.
Now, this is a kingdom that's in decline.
And this is the way kingdoms or nations or empires often go.
They start out with people that are working hard
and accomplishing great things, building great things.
Whether they're good or evil,
they start out with ambitious people
like a King Nebuchadnezzar,
who obviously has some degree of wisdom and drive
and ambition and determination
to create this giant Babylonian empire that he built.
And what we see here is 70 years later,
this King Belshazzar, he's just sort of partying.
He's let things go, things have decayed.
I mean, if you think about it, this very night,
the Medo-Persian army is just about to come in
and wipe him out.
And what's he doing?
Is he getting ready?
Is he defending himself?
Is he preparing?
No, he's just totally asleep at the wheel.
He doesn't even know that they're there.
He doesn't realize that they've been working
at a plan to come in and take Babylon.
And he's just, and the Bible says here
that he's just making a feast to a thousand of his lords
and just drinking wine.
And this is the way every business goes.
This is the way every empire goes.
This is the way every church eventually goes,
where it's founded by visionary people.
It's founded by hardworking, ambitious people.
But then the people who take over
where everything's just handed to them,
they end up just being lazy and just eating and drinking
and being married.
So we see here a kingdom in decline,
an empire that's about to be wiped out,
a king that's about to be killed this very night.
And so he's just drinking and partying with his friends.
But not only that, the Bible says here
that he's taking the vessels that were stolen
from the temple in Jerusalem,
the gold and then silver vessels, it says in verse two,
which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple,
which was in Jerusalem, that the king and his princes,
his wives and his concubines might drink therein.
So not only is he drinking and partying,
but now he's going to desecrate the vessels of God's house.
These are sacred holy things that were supposed to be used
in the service of the Lord, not in a drunken party.
But notice it says that while he tasted the wine
at the beginning of verse two,
he commanded to bring the gold and silver vessels.
And you see, alcohol has a way of emboldening you
to do that which is wrong.
So it's while he begins to taste the wine
that he gets the idea of desecrating
the vessels from God's house.
And that very act is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
It's no coincidence that when he begins
to desecrate the vessels from God's house,
this is the exact night that God has ordained
for him to be killed and for his kingdom to be destroyed.
And we need to beware of the fact
that alcohol emboldens people to commit sin.
Now a lot of people think that drinking alcohol
is not that big of a deal, it's not that big of a sin,
or as long as we just drink it in moderation.
Well here's the thing, Belshazzar here isn't drunk.
Because it just says whilst he tasted the wine,
I mean he's just begun to drink,
he's just starting to drink,
and he already begins to sin right away.
You see, even in driving school,
they'll tell you that the first thing to happen
when you drink alcohol is that your good judgment
goes away, even if you just drink the smallest amount,
the first thing to go is your judgment.
You make poor decisions.
And we need to be sober, we need to be able
to differentiate between that which is right and wrong,
that which is holy and unholy,
the clean and the unclean,
and so we should abstain from alcohol.
The Bible says be not drunk with wine
wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.
Now notice, the opposite or contrast
of being drunk with wine in that verse
is being filled with the Spirit.
Have you ever noticed that alcohol
is often referred to as spirits?
And if you study the Bible, you'll see
that there's sometimes a correlation
between the fullness of the Holy Spirit
and drunkenness as being in contrast,
as being in opposition one with another.
Why?
Because they have certain things in common.
When you're filled with the Holy Spirit,
the evidence of that is boldness.
The Bible said in Acts 4.31,
and when they had prayed, the place was shaken
where they were assembled together,
and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost,
and they spake the word of God with boldness.
The fullness of the Holy Spirit gives you the boldness
to do what's right, to go out soul-ending,
even if you're shy or timid, to preach the word of God,
even when it's not popular.
That's evidence of the fullness of the Holy Ghost.
And then when people get drunk, what do they do?
They become emboldened to get into fistfights
that they wouldn't normally get into,
to do crazy things or take chances
that they would not normally take.
My grandpa, Dwayne Donald Anderson,
quit drinking because of this story right here.
He was one who drank, and he got saved,
and he still drank after he was saved.
Sorry Repent of Your Sins crowd.
And he went to church, and he heard a sermon
about Belshazzar and the handwriting on the wall,
and he really connected with this story.
He went home that night, and he said,
you know what, that's exactly how I get when I drink.
When I get drink, I get prideful,
I get arrogant, I get puffed up,
and I would be blasphemous like that,
or do something wicked like that.
And that's when he decided never to drink again.
By the time I was born, he hadn't drunk
in a super long time, and he never drank
during my entire lifetime that I knew him.
And so this was the story that did it for him, actually.
He actually related to this as a serious drinker.
There was a time when he was a serious drunkard,
and thankfully after he got saved,
and after he heard preaching out of this chapter,
he ended up quitting that sin.
Says in verse three, then they brought the golden vessels
that were taken out of the temple of the house of God,
which was at Jerusalem, and the king and his princes,
his wives and his concubines drank in them.
They drank wine and praised the gods of gold,
and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.
Now we look at this and think that it's ridiculous
to praise inanimate objects, hunks of wood and stone
and gold and silver.
But the Bible tells us that even though those idols
are just dumb, inanimate objects, that they represent devils
because the Bible says that the things that the Gentiles
offer in sacrifice to idols, they sacrifice unto devils,
and I would not that you should have sacrifice with devils.
So this is of the devil what they're doing here.
When they worship these false gods,
they're actually worshiping demons is what they're doing.
Verse five, in the same hour came forth fingers
of a man's hand and wrote over against the candlestick
upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace,
and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
This is pretty creepy.
He looks over, and it's not even a complete hand.
It's just fingers from a man's hand.
Basically just fingers not connected,
but just the fingers of a man's hand writing on the wall,
and the king looks over and sees that.
Now again, I don't think that he was super drunk here,
because if he was super drunk, he probably would have just
chalked it up as a hallucination or something.
But then again, once he sees it,
then everybody sees what's written, the writing remains.
So you know, he's probably going like this
to see this writing on the wall.
But it says that the fingers of a man's hand
wrote on the wall, the king saw the part of the hand
that wrote, then the king's countenance was changed.
So it's like, ha ha ha ha ha.
So he's terrified, he's not having fun anymore.
His countenance or his face was changed,
and his thoughts troubled him, and I love this part,
so that the joints of his loins were loosed,
and his knees smote one against another.
So he's so scared, he starts shaking.
It's almost like something out of a cartoon, right?
Where his knees are knocking together, he's so scared.
Now, who's ever been so scared that you were shaking,
that you actually tremble?
Yeah, I mean, most of us have been in a situation
where we became so scared that we trembled or shook.
And it's almost like being cold.
You start shivering and shaking
like as if you were very cold.
And so that's what we see here to the point
where his knees are knocking together.
This would probably freak you out too.
It says in verse seven, the king cried aloud
to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans,
and the soothsayers, and the king spake
and said to the wise men of Babylon,
whosoever shall read this writing,
and show me the interpretation thereof,
shall be clothed with scarlet,
and have a chain of gold about his neck,
and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
Then came in all the king's wise men,
but they could not read the writing,
nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.
Then was King Belshazzar greatly troubled.
I mean, now it's really bothering him
because nobody can figure out what was written.
What does it mean?
It says then the king was greatly troubled.
His countenance was changed in him,
and his lords were astonished,
meaning they were confounded, they were confused.
Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king
and his lords, came into the banquet house,
and the queen spake and said, oh king, live forever.
That's not gonna happen.
He's gonna be dead in a few hours.
Let not thy thoughts trouble thee,
nor let thy countenance be changed.
There is a man in thy kingdom,
in whom is the spirit of the holy gods.
And in the days of thy father,
light and understanding and wisdom,
like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him.
Now notice, these people are very steeped
in a demonic false religion.
They're naming people with Baal's name.
They keep talking about the gods, this.
Let's praise the gods.
And even when they speak about a man
who's worshiping the true god,
instead of saying, hey, this guy's filled
with the holy spirit, what do they say?
Oh, he's got the spirit of the gods.
So these people are very steeped
in their pagan, demonic religion.
And it says, whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father,
the king I say, thy father, made master of the magicians,
astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers.
And that should go to show you
that when you start talking about magicians,
astrologers, and soothsayers,
you're talking about that which is demonic.
You're talking about that which is associated
with false gods.
The reason why Daniel was advanced
to be the master of all the magicians,
astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers
was that an excellent spirit and knowledge
and understanding, interpreting of dreams,
and showing of hard sentences and dissolving of doubts
were found in the same Daniel,
whom the king named Belteshazzar.
Now let Daniel be called,
and he will show the interpretation.
Now, what she's leaving out of the story here
is that Daniel, although he was in charge
of the wise men of Babylon,
he refused to ever worship their gods.
So it's not really accurate
to call him the master of the magicians.
He was not a magician or a soothsayer.
He did not worship the gods of the Chaldeans,
nor was he a astrologer or anything like that.
But she is telling this story years and years later,
and she sort of just paganized him in her mind.
Oh yeah, he's got the gods in him.
He's the master magician, and so forth.
But it says in verse number,
but it says in verse number 13,
then was Daniel brought in before the king,
and the king spake and said unto Daniel,
art thou that Daniel,
which art of the children of the captivity of Judah,
whom the king my father brought out of Jewry?
I have even heard of thee
that the spirit of the gods is in thee,
and that light and understanding
and excellent wisdom is found in thee.
And now the wise men, the astrologers,
have been brought in before me
that they should read this writing
and make known unto me the interpretation thereof,
but they could not show the interpretation of the thing.
And I have heard of thee
that thou canst make interpretations,
and dissolve doubts.
Now if thou canst read the writing
and make known to me the interpretation thereof,
thou shalt be clothed with scarlet,
and have a chain of gold about thy neck,
and shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom.
Now when it says here that he can dissolve doubts,
and this is a term that's used elsewhere
in the book of Daniel,
it has to do with the fact
that when he gives the interpretation,
everybody knows right away
that's the correct interpretation.
It's sort of like back in chapter two,
when the dream is interpreted,
right away Nebuchadnezzar knew
this is the correct dream,
this is the correct interpretation.
He's able to preach in such a way
and speak in such a way
that people walk away convinced.
They walk away saying,
this guy knows what he's talking about.
He's not just some charlatan
who's like a fortune cookie
just giving us a vague thing
about how you're gonna have an unexpected run in
with an old friend later this week
or something like that.
But he's actually dissolving doubts.
I mean, he's giving people advice
or wisdom or interpretations
that they can walk away and say,
you know what, he's right, I get it.
And this is what good preaching should do.
Good preaching should not instill doubt in people.
It should dissolve doubts.
There are a lot of preachers
who instill a lot of doubt in people,
especially in regard to the issue of salvation,
which is the most important issue that there is.
The Bible's crystal clear,
what must I do to be saved?
And they said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
and thou shalt be saved in thy house.
The Bible said, for God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten son
that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish but have everlasting life.
Over and over again, the Bible teaches us
that salvation is by grace through faith,
not of works lest any man should boast
and that he who believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ
has everlasting life.
He shall not come into condemnation.
He's been passed from death to life
and we as preachers and we as soul owners
need to make the gospel clear to people
and give them assurance of their salvation
that's based on what the Bible says.
But there's a lot of preaching that's convoluted, unclear,
and it actually makes people doubt their salvation.
Now look, if someone's not saved,
I wanna make them doubt their salvation.
I hope they doubt.
If they're not saved, if they're trusting in works
as the basis of their salvation,
if they believe that they can lose their salvation
because they don't believe that Jesus Christ
has already done everything
through his death, burial and resurrection
and that salvation is a free gift
that's just received by calling upon the name of the Lord.
Look, if they believe in the wrong salvation,
if they're trusting in something
other than the finished work of Christ to save them,
then I want them to doubt their salvation.
But the wrong kind of preaching
is the one that gets up and says,
hey, you have to repent of your sins to be saved.
You know why?
That doesn't dissolve doubts.
That puts doubt in people's mind.
Why?
Because how can anyone be sure
if they've repented of their sins
when all of us will continue to sin after we get saved?
There's not a just man upon the earth
that doeth good and sinneth not.
As it is written, there's none righteous, no, not one.
Even the great apostle Paul himself,
arguably the greatest Christian who ever lived,
talked about the internal struggle that he had with sin
in Romans chapter nine, good night,
in Romans chapter seven when he said
how he did the things that he didn't wanna do
and that things that he wanted to do that were right,
he ended up not doing.
And he talked about his wretchedness
as a saved Christian battling the flesh.
Look, the flesh lusteth against the spirit
and the spirit against the flesh.
And these two are contrary, the one to the other,
so that you cannot do the things that you would.
And the Bible makes it clear
that if we say that we have no sin,
we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
So when preachers get up and they start telling you
that to be saved, you have to repent of your sins,
that's a confusing message
because which sins do you have to repent of, all of them?
How fully do you have to repent?
Because all of us as Christians
have repented of our sins to varying degrees.
I mean, some of us have repented of our sins
more than others.
And some of us have repented of some sins
that other people are still struggling with.
And vice versa, they may have repented of something
that I'm still struggling with.
So we all have sin, we all have the flesh,
we all battle these things,
we've all repented of our sins to varying degrees
at various times in our Christian life.
So that's pretty confusing when these pastors get up
and say, if you're still living the same way
after you're saved that you were before you were saved,
you're not saved.
It's like, whoa, wait a minute.
I thought it was just salvation by faith.
I thought as long as I've believed on the Lord Jesus Christ
and received Christ as Savior,
as long as I've confessed with my mouth the Lord Jesus
and believed in my heart
that God has raised me from the dead,
the Bible said I'd be saved.
But then they say, well, if you're still struggling
with the same sin 10 years later,
you better check your salvation.
I mean, that creates a lot of wrongful doubt.
Because we ought not to doubt our salvation if we're saved.
Now, if you're not sure,
and you have not fully placed all of your trust
in the finished work of Christ,
His blood, His death, His burial, resurrection,
if you do not believe that salvation is only by faith,
and if you do not believe
in the eternal security of the believer,
yeah, go ahead and doubt then,
because you're not saved.
You need to put all your faith in Christ.
But if you've already put all your faith in Christ,
if you've already fully trusted in Him,
doubting your salvation is not a good thing.
Doubting your salvation is a bad thing at that point.
Why?
Because at that point,
you're either doubting one of two things.
You're either doubting that you've believed on Christ,
or you're doubting that believing on Christ
gets someone to heaven.
Bible's pretty clear that believing on Christ
gets us to heaven.
So we wouldn't want to doubt God's word.
And if you're doubting whether or not you've believed,
that doesn't really make a lot of sense.
I mean, you should know whether you've believed or not.
Now, some people say,
well, I don't know if I believed hard enough.
Well, even if you just have a faith
as the grain of a mustard seed,
you'd have more than the disciples had.
He told them that would be an increase to their faith.
So God's not looking us,
so God's not looking for us to have a huge amount of faith.
He just wants us to take the faith that we have
and to put it in Christ.
I love it when Christ said to a man,
if thou believeth,
all things are possible to him that believeth.
And the man said, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.
And you know what?
Jesus took that as enough faith
because he ended up doing what that man needed him to do.
So Jesus accepted that answer of Lord, I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.
You know, that's a human being who has limited faith,
but he was willing to put what faith he had on Christ.
And so look, if you've confessed with your mouth
the Lord Jesus and believed in your heart
that God raised him from the dead,
there's no reason to doubt your salvation
unless you're trusting in your works.
Hey, if you're trusting in your works, you're not saved.
If you think you can lose your salvation,
that's just another way of saying
you're trusting in your works, to stay saved.
It's not your works that get you saved.
It's not your works that keep you saved.
It's the blood of Christ that gets you saved.
And it's the blood of Christ that keeps you saved.
And it's just by faith that we're saved.
By grace, not of works lest any man should boast.
But there are a lot of preachers
who end up making this issue cloudy
when it comes to salvation and they say
that you have to be willing to turn from your sins
and you have to be willing to repent of your sins
and all these things that are kind of hard to quantify,
hard to define.
They don't have a clear scripture to back them up
and they end up creating wrong kind of doubt.
We ought to be up here dissolving doubts.
You know, when I go out soul winning,
I want to go out doubt dissolving.
I want people to know for sure that they're saved
when I'm done talking to them.
I hope that when people listen to me preach
and then they talk to somebody afterward
and get the gospel, I hope they walk away
knowing for sure that they're saved
and that they don't have any doubt about their salvation.
We shouldn't doubt our salvation.
The Bible says the spirit itself
beareth witness with our spirit
that we're the children of God.
And so if you doubt your salvation,
you either need to get saved because you're not saved
because you're not fully trusting what Christ has done.
Or if you are, you need to just get into the word of God,
find some verses that give you assurance,
memorize those verses and settle that thing in your heart
of why you know you're saved.
So Daniel was the kind of preacher that dissolved doubts
and not just about salvation.
You know, preaching should dissolve doubts
on all kinds of issues.
It should make you sure and secure
about what you believe on all manner of subjects.
And a lot of people will criticize
fundamental Baptist preaching,
say, oh, you just seem so sure of everything.
Like you just know what you believe.
Yeah, you got it right.
Yeah, we're sure because we've studied the Bible
and we're sure that the Bible's true
and we've checked what the Bible says.
We've gotten the context.
We've read the whole book cover to cover,
scores of times and so, yeah, we're sure.
You think everybody else is wrong?
Yeah, I do.
Now I'm not saying I'm right about everything.
I'm sure that there are things that I'm wrong about
even when it comes to interpreting the Bible.
And I'm sure that five, 10 years from now,
I'm gonna realize I was wrong on this thing,
I was wrong on that thing.
But I'll tell you one thing that I'm not gonna realize
I was wrong about, salvation.
The big issues of the Bible,
the big issues like the inspiration of scripture,
the Trinity, salvation by faith, the deity of Christ,
these type of issues are not issues
that we're ever gonna be proven wrong on
because there's no doubt about those issues.
They're clear.
And when it comes to the finer points
of prophetic interpretation,
we all need to be corrected at times
or we all learn new things as we continue our study
in the Word of God.
But when it comes to Christianity versus other religions,
yeah, we're the only ones who are right
and everybody else is wrong.
Islam's wrong, Hinduism's wrong, Buddhism is wrong,
Mormonism's wrong.
When it comes to the King James Bible
versus the Bible of the Month Club,
yeah, we say the King James is right
and everybody else is wrong.
These other versions are wrong.
And so Daniel was a man who dissolved doubts.
I love that term.
It says here in verse number 17.
Actually, before I get to that,
Daniel was a man who could dissolve doubts.
Look at verse 16.
And I have heard of thee that thou canst
make interpretations and dissolve doubts.
Now if thou canst read the writing
and make known to me the interpretation thereof,
thou shalt be clothed with scarlet
and have a chain of gold about thy neck
and shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom.
Now, why is he being offered the position
of the third ruler in the kingdom?
There's a few different interpretations for this.
The interpretation that I had growing up,
just as a child reading the book of Daniel,
was I assumed that the queen was probably considered
the second ruler in the kingdom
and I figured it probably went Belshazzar
and then the queen and then he'd be
the third ruler in the kingdom.
But as I got older, I realized that that's probably
not true because I don't think that queens
in those days had that type of authority
and you don't really see evidence of that
in this particular empire of the Medes and the Persians.
Now, what history tells us, for what it's worth,
is that King Belshazzar was not the number one ruler.
He was actually the number two ruler
because the number one ruler was actually
out on a conquest for many years
and that Belshazzar was just acting as the king
while the other guy was gone.
Now, I'm not sure if that's true or not,
but that seems pretty plausible.
So that's probably the case here.
So if King Belshazzar is himself the second
in the Babylonian empire or if he knows
that the other ruler's coming back,
then he can offer the third rulership
in the kingdom to Daniel.
So that's another possible interpretation.
So there could be a few other reasons why.
Maybe there's just some other second in command
that's not mentioned here and he just isn't gonna
lift Daniel up quite that high.
So he offers for him to be the third ruler in the kingdom.
Now, who is this King Belshazzar anyway?
Now, it mentions that he's the son of Nebuchadnezzar
and that Nebuchadnezzar is his father.
But you have to understand that when the Bible says things
like son and father, it doesn't always mean
that it's just one generation there.
Jesus is called the son of David
and there are many generations in between.
This is not Nebuchadnezzar's son in the way we would think
of it as being just one generation, his actual son.
And the reason that we know that even just
from studying the Bible is that first of all,
we know that a long period of time has gone by
because we're at the end of the Babylonian empire.
And we know that the Bible teaches us about another king
in between Nebuchadnezzar and King Belshazzar
known as Evo-Marodach.
And I remember again as a kid just reading the book
of Jeremiah, reading Daniel and noticing that guy,
Evo-Marodach and thinking to myself,
this guy's between Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar.
So it would at least have to be his grandson.
And it could even possibly be his great-grandson.
So he's a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar
in some way, shape or form.
That's who this Belshazzar is.
So let's look at Daniel's answer in verse 17.
Then Daniel answered and said before the king,
let thy gifts be to thyself and give thy rewards to another.
Yet I will read the writing unto the king
and make known to him the interpretation.
He's saying, I'm gonna tell you what it means
whether I get the reward or not.
The reward's not that important to me.
I just wanna interpret this to you.
Verse 18, O thou king, the most high God
gave Nebuchadnezzar thy father,
which could mean just his ancestor, his grandfather,
his great-grandfather.
He gave thy father a kingdom and majesty
and glory and honor.
And for the majesty that he gave him,
all people, nations and languages,
trembled and feared before him.
Whom he would, he slew.
And whom he would, he kept alive.
And whom he would, he set up.
And whom he would, he put down.
So he was just an absolute monarch.
He had a lot of power as the emperor of Babylon.
But when his heart was lifted up
and his mind hardened in pride,
he was deposed from his kingly throne
and they took his glory from him.
And of course, we read about this in chapter four.
And he was driven from the sons of men.
And his heart was made like the beasts.
And his dwelling was with the wild asses.
They fed him with grass like oxen.
And his body was wet with the dew of heaven
till he knew that the most high God
ruleth in the kingdom of men
and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will.
So instead of Nebuchadnezzar feeling
that he had done everything on his own
and built everything and achieved everything,
he should have realized that God
actually gave him that empire.
There have been a lot of talented men
and great men and powerful rulers and generals.
But why do some of them achieve this type of greatness
while others don't?
Well, part of it has to do with the hand of God.
God's hand is present in world events,
lifting up one and putting down another.
And so if a man is lifted up,
it's not always necessarily because of his own wisdom
or greatness or power or might.
It might just be that it was God's will for whatever reason
to lift that man up at that particular time.
And he might put down another just for his own will.
He has reasons why he does these things.
Now I don't believe, like many people believe,
that God appoints every single ruler specifically.
Because the Bible talks about the Antichrist
coming to power in the end times
and it says the dragon gave him his seat and his authority.
In the book of Hosea, it talks about how they had
set up kings but not by him.
So there are some kings that are not set up by him.
And there are some rulers that are appointed by Satan
and not by God.
But God definitely has the power to intervene
whenever he wants and he often does intervene
and he often does lift up one and put down another.
Not because of their goodness or their badness,
but many times he has another agenda going on.
God is just doing it according to his own will
for his own agenda.
In this case, Nebuchadnezzar was lifted up
primarily to punish the children of Judah,
to punish the Jews, to punish Israel,
and to punish other nations.
So that's why God lifted up Nebuchadnezzar.
It wasn't that he liked Nebuchadnezzar
and thought he was a wonderful person,
but he was just a tool of God to fulfill his will.
And so he proved that to Nebuchadnezzar
by giving him the heart of a beast for seven years
and then after that Nebuchadnezzar glorified God.
Verse 22, and thou his son, O Belshazzar,
hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this.
So he's heard that story.
He's familiar with that history,
and yet he didn't humble himself.
But hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven,
and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee.
And thou and thy lords, thy wives and thy concubines
have drunk wine in them.
What's a concubine?
A concubine is a woman that you sleep with
that you're not married to.
So kings will often have wives and concubines
simply because it's beneath them to marry certain women.
They only want to marry royalty a lot of the time.
So they'll marry the daughters of other kings
and the daughters of other rulers and nobility,
but then there might be a woman
that they're just really attracted to,
but they don't want to give her that honor
of being one of their wives,
so they'll just marry her as a concubine,
or not, I should say, they'll not marry her as a concubine.
They'll basically just take her into the harem
as a lower status bed partner,
is pretty much what that concubine is.
And by the way, you young ladies,
think about that when he wants to move in with you,
but he doesn't want to marry you.
You're a concubine.
If he's not willing to make you the queen of the home,
if he's not willing to make you his wife,
then you should not have a physical relationship with him
because of the fact that you ought to have more dignity
and honor about your body and about who you are as a woman
than to just give yourself away to someone
who is not willing to marry you.
And so don't be a concubine.
You know, I remember when I was a kid,
there were commercials that said,
you know, no kid ever grows up and says,
I want to be a junkie when I grow up.
Well, you know what?
No little girl grows up and says,
I want to be a concubine when I grow up.
And so don't cheapen yourself by being a concubine,
by being a living girlfriend.
Be a wife and be a virgin on your wedding day, amen?
So the Bible says here that he's given to drink
to his wives, his concubines,
and they've drunk wine in them.
And Daniel tells Belshazzar,
thou has praised the gods of silver and gold,
of brass, iron, wood, and stone,
which see not nor hear nor know.
And the God in whose hand my breath is
and whose are all thy ways has thou not glorified.
That's a pretty powerful statement when it says
that his breath is in God's hand.
That means that anytime God wants to,
he can just go like this.
He's not going to be able to breathe, right?
Now God wasn't punishing me right now
because I give glory to God, all right?
I know my breath is in God's hand.
So that was just a demonstration.
But the point is that God could do that to anybody
anytime he wants, right?
Now I've had the wind knocked out of me a few times
and it's a pretty scary feeling.
I remember one time when I was a kid,
I crashed on a dirt bike.
I was out riding motorcycles out in the desert with my dad
and I was going really fast, hit a rock,
was thrown from the motorcycle
and the chest protector I was wearing
did not protect the collarbone area.
It was kind of a more minimal chest protector.
The next one I got had a big thing here.
But anyway, I was thrown from motorcycle
probably like 40 miles an hour or something
and I broke my collarbone.
But at the time I didn't know what happened.
All I knew is I was thrown from the motorcycle,
I hit the ground, I had a sharp pain in my chest
and I couldn't breathe.
And time is going by and it felt like a really long time.
Not being able to breathe, I just thought, this is it.
This is it, I'm dying.
This is how I die.
I die on a motorcycle, you know?
And I remember just, my dad's like, are you okay?
You know, it was a scary feeling, suffocating.
And then slowly, you know, my breath,
God's like, okay, I'll let you live.
All right, go start that church in Phoenix, Arizona.
That's what I, no, I'm just kidding.
It wasn't a spiritual experience like that.
It was more just a really painful experience.
But God has all of our breath in his hand.
And we ought to remember that all the time
and fear the Lord and realize that anything that we do,
he allowed us to do that.
And he can end our life anytime he wants to.
And he can end the party anytime he wants to.
He can take away our wealth anytime he wants.
He can take away our health anytime he wants.
We better serve the Lord with fear
and rejoice with trembling.
The Bible says in verse 24,
then was the part of the hand sent from him.
And this writing was written,
and this is the writing that was written,
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Eufarsin.
This is the interpretation of the thing.
Mene, God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.
Tekel, thou art weighed in the balances
and art found wanting.
Peres, thy kingdom is divided
and given to the Medes and Persians.
Now I remember reading this as a small child
and thinking to myself,
that's a lot of meaning to pack into one word.
This is a really expressive language.
You know, when you're a kid,
things kind of go over your head a little bit.
But I loved reading the book of Daniel when I was a kid,
the first half of Daniel, that is.
I loved reading it and I remember thinking that.
But then as I read it a little more carefully,
I thought to myself,
obviously these words only represent
one of the words in that sentence.
And that's why the magicians, astrologers,
Chaldeans, and soothsayers couldn't interpret the meaning
because the whole sentence isn't there, it's just one word.
So when it says Mene, the word that's there is numbered.
That's what that word Mene means, it means numbered.
All right?
And then the word Tekel is the weighed, right?
And then the word Eufarsin, or here it says Peres,
is divided.
So basically the three words that are written on the wall
are numbered, weighed, divided.
Now these guys, they don't understand what that means
because that's pretty cryptic
when you just have those three words.
Now these three words, if you look at them carefully,
they resemble other words from the languages back then,
from Aramaic, Chaldeans, Hebrew,
those type of Semitic languages.
First of all, the second word there, Tekel,
it's pretty similar to a word that we know, Shekel, right?
It's just really one word,
it's really just one letter different
because the SH sound at the beginning is a T sound.
But a Shekel is a weight of measurement.
There's also a weight of measurement known as the Mina,
which is a city in Arkansas
where Bill Clinton used to smuggle drugs
and so, but that's another sermon.
But it's also a unit of measurement.
It's also a coin that's known as a Mina.
So it makes sense that a unit of measurement,
a unit of weight, a coin,
would come from a root word that means numbered, right?
And it makes sense that the Shekel
would come from a more ancient word or a related word,
which means weighed,
because the Shekel is that which is weighed, right?
And then when it comes to this word, Eufarsin,
this was another thing that confused me as a child,
why it changed from Eufarsin to Pires.
But what you have to understand is that
when words change parts of speech,
they morph into different forms.
It's like a verb getting conjugated, okay?
So you have the infinitive form
and then you have the conjugated form.
And that's what we see here
because if you look at the operative three letters here
in Pires, it's P-R-S.
And then you look at Eufarsin
and what do you see there as the consonants?
P-R-S and then an N on the end, right?
And then the vowels are changing.
It's just a conjugation.
It's just the same word in a different form.
So he's going back to the root word to help them understand
because maybe they weren't familiar with Eufarsin,
but they're probably more familiar with the word Pires.
So he gives it to them in a form
that might be more familiar to them.
Now, this is pretty similar to a Hebrew word in the Bible,
Pires, right?
And the word Pires in the Bible means breach.
Because you remember when Uzzah put forth his hand
and he touched the ark and David was upset
that he had made a breach upon Uzzah.
So he called the place Pires-Uzzah,
which is the breach made upon Uzzah.
Then also, when Judah had twins born unto Tamar,
their names were Perez and Zerah.
Perez and Zerah, but it's P-H, Perez, also known as Perez.
And the reason he was named Perez
is because the midwife said, how has thou broken forth?
So he's called Perez.
So broken is the past tense of breach,
because breach comes from the same root word as the break.
You've broken forth.
You've made a breach, OK?
And we even have the term now a breach baby, right?
So Perez means breach.
And what is a breach?
A breach is something being broken or split.
That's where we even get our word for pants, britches.
It comes from the older word breaches,
and breaches is simply the plural of breach.
So this word, Pires, means something
that's breached or broken or split, in that sense,
or broken through.
And this word means divided.
So you can see how the word for divided here, Pires,
could be related to a word that means broken,
because when you break something,
you're dividing it, right?
So you can see how these words are kind of related.
So none of these words is really super mysterious
when you start comparing other words
in those Semitic languages to these words,
Mini, Mini, Tikal, Ufarsan.
So I'm sure that all these language experts who
walked in there and looked at the handwriting on the wall
could vaguely figure out that it had something
to do with numbered, weighed, and divided,
but they don't really know what it means.
So it's mainly the interpretation
that they're after, not just being
able to read the writing, but to be
able to interpret the writing.
And so the interpretation was that God
has numbered his kingdom and finished it.
It's over.
You're done.
You're doomed.
Tikal, thou art weighed in the balances
and art found wanting.
And let me tell you something, every unsaved person,
if their good deeds and bad deeds were to be weighed,
they're going to come up short.
That's why we need Christ to be saved.
That's why we need the grace of God to save us.
We would all come up wanting.
We've all sinned and come short of the glory of God.
And coming short is the same as being found wanting.
And then it says thy kingdom is divided and given
to the Medes and Persians.
It's also interesting that the word
that he uses here for divided, it's kind of a play on words,
because Perez is very similar to the word for Persia, who's
going to come in and take over.
So that might be why he chose that word.
So he gets the interpretation.
It's not a very good interpretation.
You're doomed.
You're done.
You're toast.
You're going to get wiped out.
And your kingdom's not even going to go to someone else.
It's going to get split.
It's going to get divided between two groups of people,
the Medes and Persians.
Then commanded Belshazzar.
And they clothed Daniel with scarlet
and put a chain of gold about his neck
and made a proclamation concerning him
that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.
That's about to end in a couple hours.
So this is a very short-lived government position.
They make this proclamation, oh, I
hereby decree that you're the third ruler of the kingdom.
Are these people stupid or something?
What they ought to be doing is trying to figure out,
where's the Persian army?
If we're going to get wiped out tonight, where are they?
Are they outside the gate?
I mean, these guys are so dumb, they're
more worried about making proclamations,
getting out scarlet robes, putting gold chains around
necks.
They ought to be sounding the alarm.
They ought to be getting ready to fight.
And they must have believed that what he told them was true.
Because otherwise, they wouldn't be giving him the reward.
But yet, they believe that what he told them
was the right interpretation.
Yet, they're not able to defend themselves.
Or they just have no will to defend themselves.
They might have just known, we're weak.
We're lame.
We've been partying.
We drink too much.
We're not like Nebuchadnezzar.
We're not great military leaders.
That's why we're about to get wiped out.
So let's eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die.
That seems to be the attitude here, because there's
no mention of them doing anything to stop the Persians.
And they do stop to make this proclamation.
And they do stop to put jewelry on Daniel.
In that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans,
slain.
He was killed.
And Darius the Median took the kingdom,
being about three score and two years old.
And so we see here that Darius the Median
is three score and two years old when he becomes the king.
And let me just point out, there's another Darius.
And this is something that can be confusing to people
sometimes when they're reading Ezra
and when they're reading later in the book of Daniel.
Because the Bible is careful to tell us here
that this is Darius the Median.
Because there's another Darius that's Darius king of Persia.
Because remember, this is a dual kingdom of the Medes
and the Persians.
Darius king of Persia is a different guy,
especially because he's alive much later.
This guy's already 62 years old.
So the Bible tells us his age.
Also, I think, just to make sure we understand, different guy.
This guy's already 62.
He's the Median.
He's not the king of Persia.
So what's the moral of the story here?
The moral of the story is that pride goeth before destruction
and a haughty spirit before the fall.
When you start drinking, beware.
Because that's going to lead you into sin.
And sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
And when you start getting prideful and arrogant
and mouthing off, especially when you start getting
blasphemous, even toward the Lord,
you better just expect God to destroy you and wipe you out.
So this is where the transition happens
from the kingdom of Babylon
to the kingdom of the Medo-Persians.
And so when we get into the next chapter, chapter six,
Darius is the king and Darius is going to be the one
that ends up reluctantly having to throw Daniel
into the lion's den.
Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.
Father, we thank you so much for this great chapter, Lord.
I thank you that this chapter was used in the life
of my own grandfather in order to get him
to stop drinking, Lord.
And I pray that you'd even speak to other people's hearts
that they would also realize that alcohol
is not going to do anything good for them.
It's only going to lead them into sin.
And I pray that, Lord, you would give us wisdom
and help us not to be puffed up or prideful or arrogant
as Belshazzar was, but help us to be a humble
and righteous man of God as Daniel was
that would dissolve doubts
and that would understand your word
and that would speak the words of truth and humility.
And in Jesus' name we pray, amen.