Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords and drank wine before
the thousand.
Belshazzar, while 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, Baal, Baaliel, Baalzebub, 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?
You know, 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 partying.
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 merry.
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 golden and silver vessels, it says in verse 2, 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 whilst he tasted the wine at the beginning of verse two, he commanded
to bring the golden 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 while 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.
Bible said in Acts 431, "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
soulening, 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.
It says in verse 3, "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 5, "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 were on the wall, the king saw the part of
the hand that wrote, then the king's countenance was changed.
So he's like, "Ah 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 7, "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 astonied, 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, "O king, live forever."
That's not going to happen, he's going to 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."
Of course, 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 worshipping 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."
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 in
interpreting of dreams and showing of heart 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 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 2, 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 know, you're going to 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 is 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 want to 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's 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 7 when he said how he
did the things that he didn't want to 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 to 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 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.
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 believest, all things are possible to him
that believeth."
And the man said, "Lord, I believe.
Help thou my none believe."
And you know what?
Jesus took that as enough faith because he ended up doing what that man needed him to
do.
And Jesus accepted that answer of, "Lord, I believe.
Help thou my none believe."
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.
Just 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, such that 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.
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, saying, "Oh, you just seem
so sure of everything.
You just know what you believe."
You got it right.
Yeah, we're sure because we've studied the Bible, and we're sure that the Bible is 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.
Do 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 going to realize I was wrong on this thing,
I was wrong on that thing.
But I'll tell you one thing that I'm not going to 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
going to 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.
Amen.
These other versions are wrong.
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
shall 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 is 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
going to 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 there's just one generation there.
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 Merodach.
And I remember again as a kid just reading the book of Jeremiah, reading Daniel and noticing
that guy Evo Merodach 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 going to tell you what it means, whether I get the reward or not.
The reward's not that important to me, I just want to 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 ruleeth 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.
You know, 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 as concubines and they've
drunk wine in them.
And Daniel tells Belshazzar, "Thou hast 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, hast 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 any time 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 a 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."
And I remember just, my dad's like, "Are you okay?"
It was a scary feeling, suffocating.
And then slowly, my breath, God's like, "Okay, I'll let you live.
All right, go start that church in Phoenix, Arizona."
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 any time He wants to.
And He can end the party any time He wants to.
He can take away our wealth any time He wants.
He can take away our health any time He wants.
We better serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling.
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, "Meanie, Meanie, Tekel, Eupharson."
This is the interpretation of the thing, "Meanie, God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished
it."
Tekel, "Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting."
Pires, "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, well 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 meaning, the word that's there is numbered.
That's what that word meaning means, it means numbered, alright?
And then the word teakal is the wade, right?
And then the word eupharson or here it says perez is divided.
So basically the three words that are written on the wall are numbered, wade, 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, Chaldean, 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.
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.
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, eupharson, this was another thing that confused me as
a child, why it changed from eupharson to perez.
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
perez, it's p-r-s.
And then you look at eupharson 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 eupharson, but they're probably more familiar with the word p-r-s, 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, p-r-s, right?
And the word p-r-s 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 P-r-s Uzzah, which is the breach made upon Uzzah.
Then also, when Judah had twins born unto Tamar, their names were P-r-s and Zerah, P-r-s
and Zerah, but it's P-h, P-r-s, also known as P-r-s.
And the reason he was named P-r-s is because the midwife said, "Howest thou broken forth?"
So he's called P-r-s, 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, okay?
And we even have the term now a breach baby, right?
So P-r-s 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 p-r-s 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, p-r-s, 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, yufarsin."
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 "Heres" 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 closed.
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 hereby decree that you're the third ruler of the kingdom.
It's like 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 goes 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.
So when we get into the next chapter, chapter 6, 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 would 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.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.