Daniel 5 • Warning Love

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

Would you look in your bibles at Daniel chapter 5?
Daniel chapter 5.
If you hear the phrase "The writing on the wall," it comes out of this chapter of Daniel.
King Nebuchadnezzar, the one with whom Daniel worked for 40 years before King Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged the Most High God alone is the God of gods and King of kings:  that king is gone and now his son or grandson, we're not exactly sure of how to translate the word from the Hebrew, his son or grandson is now king.
And the nation of Babylon, the city, is under siege.
Well, the walls are so tall and strong and secure that Belshazzar, the new king, doesn't care.
And to thumb his nose at the enemy outside the gates, he decides to throw a party.
And to show how actual strong he and his gods are, he celebrates with holy vessels from the temple of Israel, the once great nation, from the temple of Israel's God.
Well, God decides to crash that party.
[Laughter]
And there is writing on the wall.
No one can interpret it.
And the king gets afraid.
It's the place in the Bible where you actually have the phrase, "His knees began to knock he was so afraid."
And the queen says, "Now, you know, I can remember somebody for your father or grandfather.
What was his name?
Daniel, who used to interpret things.
Let's call him and see if he can interpret the writing on the wall."
And in verse 18, we'll begin to read what Daniel says.
Let's stand as we read this portion of God's Word:  Daniel 5 and verse 18, as Daniel begins to speak and interpret.
"'O king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father kingship and greatness and glory and majesty.
And because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him.
Whom he would, he killed, and whom he would, he kept alive; whom he would, he raised up, and whom he would, he humbled.
But when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly, he was brought down from his kingly throne, and his glory was taken from him.
He was driven from among the children of mankind, and his mind was made like that of a beast, and his dwelling was with the wild donkeys.
He was fed grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, until he knew that the Most High God rules the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom he will.
And you his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this, but you have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven.
And the vessels of his house have been brought in before you, and you and your lords, your wives, and your concubines have drunk wine from them.
And you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways, you have not honored.
Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed.
And this is the writing that was inscribed:  Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin.
This is the interpretation of the matter:  Mene,'" which is Aramaic for numbered, "'Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel,'" which means weighed, "'Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; and Peres,'" which means divided, on the wall it was put in plural, as Daniel was expressing it to Belshazzar, he puts it in the singular as if to say, "And you, Belshazzar are divided," "'your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.'"
Verse 29, "Then Belshazzar gave the command, and Daniel was clothed with purple, a chain of gold was put around his neck, and a proclamation was made about him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.
That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed.
And Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old."
Let's pray together.
>>> Heavenly Father, I join with the hearts of the people in front of me, asking that You would guide us rightly in this portion of Your Word.
For at least in my heart, there is difficulty proclaiming it.
I recognize that we have bathed this service already in worship that extols the grace and the love of our God, but that love includes a willingness to warn.
And in this passage, there is clear warning.
As You say after 40 years of grace to another king, to this king, "If you will not receive My grace, there are horrible consequences."
It was a king long since past, but this word is still given to us that we might receive it and act upon it.
So grant me voice and Your people hearts to receive this word.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
My wife's sister, Karen, is a hospice nurse, which means that she deals with people at the extremities of life, difficult situations.
Sometimes people have trouble facing the difficulties.
And such was the case of an older woman that Karen was ministering to some years ago.
The doctor had tried to relate how sick she really was.
The family had tried to say it, but the older woman didn't seem ever to register what was being said to her.
One day as she was getting worse and worse and Karen, the hospice nurse, began to care for her, a bouquet of flowers arrived for the older woman.
And among the flowers was a stalk of snapdragons.
And some of you know that snapdragons have blossoms that if you squeeze them just right, they become little hand puppets with the lips being able to mouth your words.
And Karen, from her youth and her background, took one of the little snapdragon blossoms and just to cheer the older woman began to sing to her.
 7 You are my sunshine  7
 7 My only sunshine  7
 7 You make me happy  7
 7 When skies are gray  7  7
>>> Well, something triggered in the older woman and she also took a couple of snapdragon blossoms and began to conduct her own little puppet show.
The first puppet who spoke, spoke in mature and harsh tones the words of her doctor:  "Your blood counts are so bad we can't do anything for you."
The other puppet, the voice of a little girl, "You don't have to be so mean.
I understand."
What she would not process when said directly to her but when removed just a little bit by hand puppets, she could deal with.
Maybe that's something of what's going on in this passage of scripture.
As we recognize what God is saying to that people and to this people is, "I will not be mocked.
I will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it be good or evil."
That message, which is so hard for us even to receive in a church, we are enabled to receive as a hand long ago writes on a wall.
And in the distance that we need, perhaps we can begin to process it too.
After all, it's hard even in the church to hear the message:  Repent.
Identify the sin and recognize it has consequences.
If God did not love you, He would not warn you.
But because He loves, because He is that gracious, He gives real and even strong warning even to His people.
We benefit by the grace of God who is willing to warn, first, if we are just willing to heed the warning.
I mean, it's just an object lesson in the life of this pagan king who believed that because of his power or his wealth or his position that he could not be touched by his sin against God.
Oh, he had lots to support that notion.
An enemy is camped outside of his walls, but he doesn't care at all.
Something deep in him believes that human achievement will insulate you from God's judgment.
And, after all, his walls we know of ancient Babylon were as much as 350 feet tall and 87 feet wide.
You can actually still see the walled gates if you go to Berlin, Germany and see in the Pergamon Museum the Ishtar Gates, the remnants of a once great civilization that Belshazzar, this king, ruled.
But he's not danger.
He can't be hurt.
He is secure.
He can do as he chooses.
Except he does not recognize the Medes and the Persians will undermine the walls.
And he is in greater danger than he ever imagined.
If we see the message that there is real judgment and nothing, walls that humankind can erect, are really going to protect us, we see enough cautionary tales about us these days to recognize the truth of that.
Whether you're an executive of Volkswagen or Tiger Woods or Lindsay Lohan or Richard Nixon or Elvis or Idi Amin, there is not enough wealth, fame, and power to protect you from God when He starts to write, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin."
Numbered:  I have numbered your days, weighed and found wanting, and what you have built can be divided and shall be if you do not turn in repentance from your sin against God.
Because we can look far back in history and see that message in the life of Belshazzar.
And we see it writ large on the popular figures of our day.
We can still remove it from us and say, "Well, you know, that doesn't get near me.
I'm not Elvis."
But then we begin to recognize why we in fact make such conclusions that our sin will not touch us.
And the reason we often believe is not because we have fame or power or achievement but because we have spiritual insulation:  I'm a Christian; I believe in the grace of God, so no sin will come nigh my dwelling; no judgment will come to my family or to me.
And what we end up doing is we sing, "There is a fountain filled with blood," and we continue in our sin, taking the blood from the fountain and smearing it on ourselves and saying, "I'm secure; I believe in grace; there are no consequences to my sin," and do not believe that God would take offense at the way that we would use His own Son.
And, yet, over and over and over are the evidences before us.
We watch for entertainment "The Bachelor" and "Bachelorette" programs, which glorify and celebrate a hookup culture, not even willing to confess that the reality of what happens is that the more we take sexuality and we make it mechanical and selfish the more it becomes stale to us, so that younger and younger and younger people are looking for the medications that will keep them active sexually, when what is actually happening is they are losing interest because of the inundation in our culture, that without pornographic images, without selfishness of some sort, we cannot even help each other and what God intends to be beautiful and intimate and uniting and wondrous that we as believes ought to be celebrating.
So that we look at our college campuses and we see the statistics, which I know can be politicized in all kinds of ways, that say young women are being sexually assaulted one in four by the best and brightest of our children as a nation.
And whether or not you believe those statistics, you know that there is danger so often on the very places where there ought to be intellectual and personal protection.
And what God is simply reminding us as a culture is "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin."
"I haven't forgotten how to write," says God.
There are consequences to sin.
And so when we as a nations view the suffering of rev--, of refugees by the tens of thousands and turn our backs and say, "It doesn't come near me; I'm not concerned," to forget that God requires generosity of His people, requires compassion, and those who have forgotten how to express grace will not be able to experience it in the hour of their need.
"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin" is not just an ancient message.
It is a word from God who says there are consequences of turning from Me, and over and over again, I write large upon your culture as well upon the pages of scripture to say, "This is real.
There are consequences of sin."
We are fair to what God is trying to accomplish, however, if we're not just warning but if we are weeping at the same time.
Why does God write so plainly about the consequences of sin?
Surely one reason is so that we will take warning ourselves.
But warnings that we would utter, if they are not accompanied by weeping for the consequences of sin, will not accomplish the purposes of God.
I want you to read with some further clarity what I already read to you and recognize what is happening in the heart and mind of Daniel as he is recording this account for us.
Verse 18, Daniel is speaking to Belshazzar, the son or the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar.
And he's reminding the present king what happened in Nebuchadnezzar's life.
Verse 18, "'O king, the Most High God gave Nebuchadnezzar your father kingship and greatness and glory and majesty.
And because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him.'"
God gave to your predecessor great power, great wealth, great achievement.
And your predecessor could humble people until God humbled him.
He became like a beast living in the field.
He lost his mind; he lost his kingdom until he looked up to God and God blessed him again.
Four times in this short passage, Daniel is reminding Belshazzar, "He was your father; he was your father; he was your father."
And then verse 22, to kind of pour out his heart, "'And you, his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart though you knew all this.'"
Forty years Daniel worked with Nebuchadnezzar to bring him to an understanding of the God of gods and the King of kings, until ultimately Nebuchadnezzar, the last words before he exits the stage of this earth, are the first words that I said in this service today:  He is the Most High God; all His works are righteous; all His ways are good.
That's what Nebuchadnezzar said, and then he exit, exits the earth stage and enters an eternal one.
And now Daniel says, "But what changed changed back.
Belshazzar, you knew all of this and you did not honor the God your predecessor honored."
If you want to think how we know Daniel is grieving about this, you have to remember who the readers of this passage are.
It's not Belshazzar; he's gone.
Who's going to be reading this account of "You knew all of this and you did not honor God"?
It's the people of God who will be reading this for generation upon generation upon generation.
And Daniel, who in future chapters is going to be cracking open eternity so that his people are able to see far into the future, every time that crack is made as he sees into the future of his own people, he begins to weep for days and weeks and even months, as if to say if the warning is not accompanied by weeping, it does not accomplish the purposes of God.
And you and I must know that.
To simply wag the righteous finger of indignation is not to do the work of God.
We are entering into a time, you recognize of presidential elections in which our nation will become activated and polarized at the same time.
And the great temptation of God's people is to serve our politics rather than our mission, to simply look at people with whom we disagree and to chide and to criticize and chortle when they make mistakes.
And to recognize it does not serve the purposes of God if we will not at the same moment that we warn of the consequences of sin do not weep over the consequences of sin.
I don't know what will happen on this Global Gospel Mission that God may be calling us into, but I recognize if we are called as a people to be a voice into our culture we are going to have to discern:  Can we speak in the same voice that a previous generation has spoken?
After all, there are those who look at how could it possibly be that a nation that had such a string of evangelical approved if not evangelical claiming presidents could so quickly move from a moral standard that now we are approving homosexual marriages, that now roughly half of the nation's children are being born out of wedlock?
How could that have happened so quickly?
And the response of those in the church who are examining our actions, not the world, they are looking at us and saying what we were willing to do for most of a generation was to look and point at others with voices that were shrill and caustic and critical and not at the same moment show compassion by weeping over the consequences of sin.
How could we not weep when we look around us and we say, "Approved and subsidized by our government is an agency that profits in the sale of baby's parts"?
And part of us can just kind of get enraged and angered and point the finger and then at the same time say, "What does that do to the children born in our time who begin to look at their own bodies as commodities?
That if my body serves someone else, that's what makes it valuable."
And so all the things of sexual slavery and pornography and bulimia and anorexia and the things that are pushing a culture to just idolize bodies and body parts is a consequence.
And we, I don't know how to say this to you with the right tone:  Why are we not weeping at the same moment that we are seeing the damage done to the people that we love and cherish?
If we only warn, if we only chide, we cannot perform the purposes that God has given us.
We can look at the consequences of the values of a present generation and just kind of take, you know, abhorrent outrage in the fact that so many young people are experimenting by cohabitating before they get married, and there's a certain logic that says, "Why not just find out if we're sexually compatible before we get married?"
But God says, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin."
Do you not recognize there are consequences?
I mean, even the government figures say of every hundred people who cohabitate, saying they will get married, 40 don't.
And of the 60 who do get married, 45 of them will get unmarried within a few years, which means only 15 of the 100 who have sacrificed intimacy and purity and uniqueness in the experiment of marriage actually stay married.
And, okay, I can wave my finger of indignation or I can fall on my knees and say, "God, bless young people in a generation that I don't know what I would do and many of you will not know what you would have done had you faced the same pressures."
But to weep and cry and be concerned, be compassionate.
What we end up doing is we end up debating statistics, right?
And so we say, "What about the divorce culture we're in where the church is just as guilty as everybody else?"
And so we begin to say, "So the church doesn't stand for anything."
You and I have heard for a number, you know, these awful statistics that say, "In our culture, 50 percent of the marriages that are made will come undone in our culture."
Actually, almost no good demographer will say that anymore.
I mean, clearly that was a projection of the census bureau made over 20 years ago that has never come about.
It was never an actual figure; it was a projection.
And now those who continue to watch the figures say, "In our culture, it's probably more like 28 percent of marriages actually come undone over their course."
That's far few--, it's more than we wish.
But what about the church?
Of those who identify themselves as Christian, 35 percent fewer than the 28 percent:  35 percent fewer who call themselves Christian will ever get a divorce.
And for those who are committed enough as Christians to pray together daily as couples, only seven percent come undone.
Well, how dare the rest of you not pray.
No, that's not the point.
[Laugher]
The point is look at the beauty that we have to share with a culture.
Look at the wonder that we can celebrate of Christian marriage.
Look at the beauty of intimacy and unity that God intends for His people.
And to say, "If you lose that, I grieve for you; I don't just chide you."
If we as a people are not able to look at the responsibilities of the church and say when they're not being fulfilled, "We grieve," what good do we do?
So we look at young men in parts of our own city, a third of whom are going to jail, the ones who have the terrible graduation rates, and we say, "How terrible for them."
No, it's not what we're doing as a church.
How I rejoice for the tutoring programs and the Good News programs.
How I rejoice for the Adopt-A-Block programs and I say:  The church is trying to say, "We care."
But do you understand if we can't say we care at the same time that we are saying a path is wrong, we do nothing for the gospel?
If someone was just criticizing you, would you listen to them?
If they were just making fun of you for your values, would you find, "Well, I want to be with you then"?
If we cannot weep at the same moment that we warn, the gospel will not go forward.
And if there is not evidence of that more clear than what's happening right now in the church, then we are not watching the news through the eyes of scripture.
Think of what you know about all the persons who have been exposed by the Ashley Madison website breach.
And we can chide and we can chortle at the politicians and the government workers and the educators and the pastors who have been exposed.
But if we do not weep for the families broken and the careers ruined and the pastors who have committed suicide, how are we acting in Jesus' name?
Yes, we warn.
But we do not do the work of the gospel if we do not just as strongly, just as readily, with hearts full of compassion say, "I weep for those who are not on the path that God designed for the goodness and the blessings of the grace He intends."
God calls us to recognize we have a right in the church to say, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin," but not without tears.
If the tears are not there, we should not say it at all, because our goal is the gospel, not just criticizum--, criticism of people who do not agree with us in other ways.
Because what, after all, is the goal?
The goal is to reach hearts in very special ways.
I've been reading Joe Battaglia's "The Politically Uncorrect Jesus" of late.
And as we think about weeping accompanying warning, I think about him describing an occasion where he went with his daughter into a mall store to buy a blouse.
And just as he recorded what happened next, I recognized how a mature Christian deals with a sinful culture in a way that is critical of the sin and compassionate toward the sinners at the same moment.
He wrote these words:  "As I entered the store, I stopped dead in my tracks.
I thought I was in the wrong place.
Pictures of half-naked young women, not much older than my daughter, lying on top of equally undressed young men and those signs adorned the walls.
At the counter were a young man and a young woman.
I went to them.
I said, 'I am offended by these displays.
Please communicate my comments to your manager.'"
Well, that was the warning and that was the umbrage and that was the offense.
But then he continued with compassion, much to the embarrassment of his daughter.
[Laughter]
He said to the young man behind the counter, "How do you feel working in this environment, particularly when you are working beside a young woman?
Don't you feel the pressure of this?
Don't you feel embarrassed by this?"
Battaglia says, "My embarrassed daughter said under her breath, 'Daddy, they don't care.'
Said the young man behind the counter, 'I only wish my father cared as much.'"
He had processed it.
He had heard, because it wasn't just outrage; it was a heart of compassion that went right with it:  I care about you.
If we cannot communicate both, we cannot do the work of the gospel.
And the work of the gospel is precisely where this chapter is leading.
It is not just Daniel leading us to wag our finger at Belshazzar.
It's not just saying, "Listen, these were terrible people; don't be like them."
After all, Daniel is speaking and writing to a covenant people.
He is writing to the people who have rebelled against God as much as Belshazzar has.
And Daniel's goal is ultimately to lead them to a better place, not just to warn and not just to weep but ultimately to lead to a better way.
And to see that better way, you just have to look at the very last words of the chapter, verse 30.
I know it sounds awful.
"That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was keeled--, was killed.
And Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old."
Now, here's the hopeful message of grace:  A bad king was killed and an old king took over.
Aren't you encouraged?
[Laughter]
No, it's not the message.
Do you remember in preceding chapters, Daniel had interpreted the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, where Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed of a great statue, head of gold, shoulders of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay, until a rock from heaven, cut without human hands, came and struck the feet of the statue, toppled it until it began to fall into pieces.
And Daniel says, "These are the success of kings of men until the kingdom of God comes to rule."
And the fact that now there is a Mede and Persian empire that's coming into beb--, into Babylon is saying, "We have started the dropping of the dominoes."
What God said would happen shall happen.
It is happening.
But remembering at the end of the domino path there is a rock who will provide our salvation and whose kingdom will ultimately rule the world.
What Daniel is saying to his people as he writes about Belshazzar, "You must turn from your sin.
You must identify what is evil and wicked and not according to the plan and the blessings of God.
And you must turn from it, because there are consequences to sin.
God will not be mocked."
At the very moment that Belshazzar began to drink from the vessels of the temple of God is that moment that the finger of God appeared writing on the wall.
And God reminds us in the New Testament that you and I are His vessels; we are the jars of clay into which He has poured His glory.
And for us to say, "I came without thought, with impunity, without any concern about consequences," continue on a course that dishonors God, He says to us again, "I haven't forgotten the words:  "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin."
Why?
So that we will go a different direction, so that we will plant our hearts in better soil than the sin that threatens to hurt us.
Some years ago, Kathy and I were living in a house that was right by a busy highway, and just to create something of a privacy screen, I began to collect cedar trees out of the woods to plant along the corner of our yard just to create the block from the traffic.
And I was in the woods one day and I picked a cedar shoot and kind of pulled it out of the ground and shook the dirt from it only to discover that that cedar shoot was growing up through the pull tab off a soda can.
Now, if I had not pulled up the cedar shoot and shaken the dirt off of it, what would've eventually happened to the cedar tree?
It would've been strangled by the pull tab through which it was growing.
And what God does in a chapter like this, for you and me, as much as we may hate it, He takes us up, pulls us hard from the soil in which we have planted our lives and says, "Is there any sin there?
Is there lack of looking at what's really going on in your life that would damage you, your future, your career, your family, your children?"
And willing actually to pull hard and to shake the dirt and we don't like being shaken and we don't like being pulled out from our roots, but He's saying, "I love you enough to save you to tell you what is wrong," to have you examine so that there would be opportunity for true life that God intends to flourish and the blessing of His grace to occur."
And that's what's going on here as Daniel is pointing forward to his people and he said, "There is a Messiah coming.
The evil and the consequences of this world are not the final chapter.
God loves you enough to warn you, and He Himself would weep for you to go a different path," which is why He sends Daniel so that we would hear and listen and turn.
What is in our life?
Is it the immoral things?
Is it the relationship that we are living in in pride and selfishness so that we are not able to humble ourselves before maybe even the closest person in our lives and say, "I have wronged you," or, "We have not been on a good path; we need to reexamine this"?
Is it we as a church not wiling to examine:  Have we offered to our community that has so blessed us what it needs for the health of the gospel?
All of these are our obligations.
And God, as hard as it may be to read, says to His people, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin:  I have not forgotten how to write."
So heed the warning.
And weep for your sin.
And turn to the path of the Savior.
The best way I can think to express it is the account of Jessica McClure, which is a name that will ring true for some of you.
"U.S.A. Today" said this was the most moving personal account for American society that had happened in the last 25 years.
Jessa McClure is an adult now, but when she made national, international news, she was 18 months old.
Do you remember what happened?
Every mother's nightmare:  A toddler playing in the backyard, phone call in the house, checks--, the mother goes in to check the phone, not knowing that there was a hole about eight inches in diameter in the yard going down to a well.
And in the little time to go in and answer the phone, baby Jessica goes in the well shaft, one leg up, one leg down, so that she is wedged in a shaft of stone 22 feet below the ground.
They couldn't extract her.
And so they bored another shaft 29 feet down parallel, going five feet across.
When they finally got to her, she had been 58 hours in the ground.
Now the threat was not the shaft:  It was dehydration and shock.
But they thought they had her.
They got to her.
They reached, and she was so wedged in the shaft they could not pull her loose.
Now as the doctors began to examine what could happen, they finally said to the rescuers, "Pull hard.
You may have to break her to save her.
She cannot stay there anymore."
Why did God write Daniel chapter 5?
He is willing to break us to save us.
He loves us that much, that to turn us from our sin and its consequences He would weep for us, send His Son for us, and then urge us:  Seek and follow His grace.
I'll even break you to let you know that.
I love you enough to save you.

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