According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Today on According to the Scriptures: No matter how powerful the wicked are, no matter how powerful our oppressors are, no matter how great the pride and the arrogance that is expressed within a world or within a nation toward us, or even worse, toward God and the things of God, that as Nebuchadnezzar learned in the previous chapter, the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He will. He's got the whole wide world in His hands.

Maybe you have heard the expression "the handwriting is on the wall." You knew that came from a Bible story, right? In fact, it's the Bible story we're about to look at here today on According to the Scriptures. Through it, we see what happens when our pride will take us over a line to leave what is holy behind. Pastor Damian Kyle is leading us through Daniel, and we're quickly discovering there are many lessons for us in this wonderful book. Here's Pastor Damian in Daniel chapter five.

Damian Kyle: Not all riches in life are measured in terms of gold and silver and power. A better way to measure riches is peace, confidence, joy. All of these things Daniel has that cannot be bought with money. He is exhibiting in the middle of that scene. Belshazzar has nothing that Daniel wants for himself, but Daniel possesses everything that Belshazzar wants.

It is a very ignorant person—I'm trying not to use the word "foolish" or "stupid" too many times in a sermon—but it is a very ignorant person, and I'm preaching to myself, by the way, who comes to the conclusions about the value of any human being on the basis of their station in life. You know it from your own life. Whether you are rich or you are poor, or you have been rich and now you're poor, or you're poor and now you're rich, or like most of us, somewhere in between those two extremes.

There are people who are amazing human beings, human beings that are astonishing in their character and who they are, and yet they will never know great wealth. They will never know great power. And people who have great wealth and great power, not a single person in the world respects them in and of themselves. It's a very poor way to determine riches and determine how people will be honored in the situation. Daniel's far richer than Belshazzar here.

And then what is Daniel going to do with another purple robe? What's he going to do with another gold chain? He knows what's going to come down. He could have another gold chain. He was fabulously lavished upon by Nebuchadnezzar. He had wealth, a lot. And then who knew what the Medes and the Persians were going to take during the night in looting and all?

So, did he need this third place in the kingdom? Did he need another gold chain? What's he going to do with it? Go to the disco? Oh, great. This will knock them out down there. Listen, I don't want a gold chain, but I've been dying for some puka shells. That might move me here. You can't offer a guy like this in his late eighties, having served God, anything. This man has nothing to offer to Daniel here.

So Daniel answered, not with a cockiness or anything like that, and he said to the king, "Let your gifts be for yourself and your rewards for others. Yet, here's the grace: I will read the writing to the king and make known to him the interpretation." Here is Daniel's concern: not to take the gifts because he does not want in the mind of Belshazzar to think that the God who has done this thing in this room, or His servants, that you can buy that with silver and gold.

Their services, the gifts of God that are in their life, or the God that they serve. He says, "I don't want anything. I want this to be as clean as clean can be. This is about you and it's about God. Let's not muddy it with any kind of an idea of payment." And he said, "Oh king, the Most High God..." He's going to give Belshazzar a history lesson before he gives him the interpretation.

He's going to tell him about his grandfather. Things he knew about his grandfather but chose to forget. What does his grandfather know about anything? He only created the Babylonian empire that I am running into the dirt presently. Oh, what could he have to teach me about anything? So he didn't heed the lessons of his grandfather.

Daniel says, "More than the interpretation, you need something as well, and that is you need a history lesson related to your grandfather. You need to be reminded of what you ought to have learned from your grandfather and you knew to learn it, but you chose not to learn it." He said, "Oh king, the Most High God, again, the Lord God, gave Nebuchadnezzar your father kingdom and majesty, glory and honor.

It was this God that gave that to your grandfather, the kingdom you're overseeing right now. That was given by God to him. And because of the majesty that He gave him, all peoples and nations and languages trembled and feared before him. Whomever he wished, he executed. Whomever he wished, he kept alive. Whomever he wished, he set up, and whomever he wished, he put down.

But when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened in pride..." Here's the great issue. This is the great lesson he didn't learn from his grandfather. We studied it last week. He was deposed from his kingly throne and they took his glory from him. Then he was driven from the sons of men. His heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild donkeys. They fed him with grass like oxen and his body was wet with the dew of heaven.

And then here's the point. Here's what your grandfather learned that you have never bothered to learn for yourself, or you would have never gone and gotten those vessels. "Until he knew that the Most High God rules in the kingdom of men and appoints over it whomever He chooses." That's the God that you've offended tonight.

"But you, his son Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, although you knew all of this. And you have lifted yourself against the Lord of heaven." Uh oh. None of us wants to hear that be said to us. "And they have brought the vessels of His house 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, bronze and iron, wood and stone, which do not see or hear or know. And the God who holds your breath in His hand and owns all your ways, you have not glorified."

What is true of Belshazzar in that statement is true of every single human being on the face of the earth. He holds our breath in His hands. We live at His pleasure. To hold one's breath means to be in control of whether we live or we die. That's the kind of control that God has within our life. The God who has that control is a God to be glorified.

So here he confronts Belshazzar's pride and then he moves on now to give the interpretation of the writing. He said, "Then the fingers of the hand were sent from Him, sent from this God that you never bothered to learn about, even though it's in your heritage. It's in your family." I hope there's none of us tonight who are living a life of pride against God or living a life far away from God, having gone out into that kind of a life of rebellion against God, especially if we've done it against a godly heritage.

Against godly grandparents, against godly parents, against things that we grew up in. There are literally billions of people in the world who would love to have been raised in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. They sit in darkness waiting for some missionary to bring them the gospel and the truth of this God that we were raised in all of our lives and then have walked away from it. There's a greater responsibility for that.

The importance of that is our case, even the backslider in heart, if it's not outward, to come back to the godly heritage we've been raised in or we've been exposed to. He knew better. And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of each word: MENE, which literally means "numbered." Here is the interpretation: God has numbered your kingdom and finished it.

TEKEL, which means "weighed." They already knew that, but what's the interpretation behind TEKEL in Aramaic for weighed? Here's the interpretation: You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. No matter what the rest of the kingdom thinks about you, what all of Babylon thinks about you, what all of the thousand people in this room think about you, all that ultimately matters in life is what does God think about you by His righteous standard.

Your life and your empire has been put in the balances. God's moral law, God's righteousness put on one side of the scale and you put on the other side of the scale, and you have been found wanting. Then PERES—UPHARSIN means "divided." Here, PERES: Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. So here the whole interpretation of it: God has numbered your days and it's over.

The reason for it is because you've been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and now your kingdom is going to be divided. The word "divided" there literally means to be smashed in terms of a division. It isn't merely that it's going to be divided among the Medes and the Persians. It is that the kingdom would be wiped out in terms of this kind of leadership over it. God would hand it over to the Medes and the Persians to then rule it.

Then Belshazzar gave the command, and do as his word, you've got to give him credit where credit is due. They clothed Daniel with purple. They put a chain of gold around his neck and made a proclamation concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. That very night, Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain, and Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old.

So as all of it comes to pass before that very night is over. Nebuchadnezzar is long dead now. He thought this head of gold would last forever. He had no idea it would last about seventy years and give way to the shoulders and arms of silver in terms of the image that we looked at in chapter two, the dream that was there. I'll tell you, I wouldn't bet against a single promise that's listed in the word of God. All of it comes true to the most amazing details.

In terms of the fall of Babylon, it is interesting. You might think, "How in the world with those walls, with the food supply, unlimited water supply—I mean, how did they get through?" Well, because the Euphrates river ran through the city as a water source, there were sluices on each end of where the river entered into the city. What Darius did and the armies of the Medes and the Persians is upstream they diverted the river.

In part, diverted it just enough into a large marsh that it lowered the level of the river far enough that men could then get between the gap between where the water was and the sluice was and enter into the city. They came in and were so unexpected that they took the city with absolute ease. In fact, Babylon was so large, Babylonians were waking up the next morning and only then finding out that they had been conquered in the night.

All of it happening exactly as God had declared that it would have happened, again, in Jeremiah's prophecy. Isaiah prophesied of it as well. I think one of the great lessons, and it's a continuing lesson through these first six chapters of the book of Daniel in terms of for the Jews in Babylonian captivity, for us, for God's people all through the ages, these events, Daniel's record of them here in the chapter, it reassures us.

No matter how powerful the wicked are, no matter how powerful our oppressors are, no matter how great the pride and the arrogance that is expressed within a world or within a nation toward us, or even worse, toward God and the things of God, that as Nebuchadnezzar learned in the previous chapter, the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He will. He's got the whole wide world in His hands.

He's got the itty bitty baby in His hands as well. I think I heard Satchmo sing that for the first time when I was a young boy in the way that only Satchmo Louis Armstrong could sing it, and it impacted me because it was a truth of God. As a young boy, God was after me so long, just like you, long before we ever realized that that was going on. He is in control of human history.

You say, "Wow, that is so..." Look at that. I mean, God said, and then God did, and it all came to pass. It's true of every single promise in the Bible toward you and I under a greater covenant. The covenant and the relationship that we have with God based upon the blood of Jesus Christ. Certainly, the passage speaks to us. Pride is something that we all have to deal with. Pride, it just simply means to see myself above others.

The problem with pride—there's a lot of problems with pride—but one of the problems with pride or seeing myself above others is that it's not true. People may be better at certain things than you are or worse at certain things than you are. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about intrinsically who we are as people. We are not greater than one another, and we are certainly not to live a life of looking down upon others.

One of the problems with pride, Paul wrote about, if a person thinks himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. He rarely is deceiving everybody else. He's just fooling himself that he's better than everyone else. Everybody else can read him like a book, or her like a book. So that danger of that pride. One of the problems with pride is that if I view myself as greater than others, then I always have to be proving it.

That results in a very hard life, certainly for other people, but it is a very high maintenance life for the individual living that kind of life. It's exactly the life of Belshazzar that is found here. And we see that the mistreatment of people in arrogance and in pride so often then carries on into an arrogance and a pride toward God. Certainly, anyone who is arrogant and proud toward God is certainly going to carry that pride into their relationships with other people.

So in what is really one of the most sobering and ugly portraits of pride in all of the Bible, we just want to let it have its due impact upon each of our lives tonight. Is there anyone that we are disrespecting or mistreating or looking down upon in our lives as a result of our pride? In our marriages where it can be so dangerous. Always when a husband mistreats a wife, and more rarely but it does happen, a wife mistreats a husband, there's always awful pride that's involved in that.

Or the pride of a parent toward a child or a child toward a parent, or whatever the relationship might be. And I just ask the Lord tonight before we leave this place to just wash this ugly, ugly, terrible thing away from our lives. Again, nothing to be proud about in our lives as Christians. Certainly, and everyone, but we owe God not just our very next breath, we owe Him everything.

When that is the case, then the only thing we really have to be proud about—and it is not something that should translate into pride in our life—is in the Lord Himself. If you're here tonight and you are not yet a Christian, come to know this God now in this life while you have the opportunity to do that. Everything that we see, all of the absolute ugliness of Belshazzar as it's recorded for us in this passage, it absolutely pales in comparison in terms of being an affront to God.

In comparison to the person that spends their entire life shunning God's offer of salvation and rejecting the very Son of God. That is a very serious business to be engaged in, and you don't want to be found there, not in this life and the life to come. Come to know the Lord tonight. He longs to do that in your life this evening. Now let's stand together and we'll pray and close.

Father, as we see this dramatic display of arrogance and pride expressed toward You, and then expressed toward Daniel and toward others on the part of Belshazzar, we recognize it in our own lives, in our own pasts, in our own treatment of people, our own way that we view people. We see the ugliness of it on the printed page, and as we imagine the scene as You've given it to us in our minds before us.

I pray for myself and everyone in this room, and we pray for one another, that if there is even the smallest amount of pride that is being expressed through our lives as Your children, Lord, toward anyone, toward those we work with, toward those in our neighborhood, toward those that we live with, we're married to, that we're raising, Lord, whatever the relationship might be, that You would use tonight and the work of Your Holy Spirit completely burn it away from our lives.

And to give us that beautiful simplicity, that beautiful peace, that beautiful regal godly bearing of Daniel as we make our way through this world. And we ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.

Guest (Male): A hearty amen to that. Thank you, Damian. And friend, thank you for joining us here today on According to the Scriptures. We've made it through the first five chapters of Daniel with Pastor Damian Kyle, and before we part ways, I'd like to pass on a couple of notes of importance for you.

For resources like today's message on CD, you can reach out to us by phone. The number is 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. Pastor Damian Kyle's studies in Daniel can also be heard online at accordingtothescriptures.com, 1place.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Another way to listen to our studies is through our mobile app. You can download that today and listen to Damian wherever you go. Simply search for Calvary Chapel Modesto in the App Store or Google Play. Your financial support helps us bring the teaching of the word of God to the radio every day, and we're very thankful for each and every gift that comes in.

If you'd like to make a donation, visit us at accordingtothescriptures.com. Let me also give you our mailing address: According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California. The zip code is 95356. We'll catch you back here next time for According to the Scriptures, when Pastor Damian Kyle will continue our study of Daniel.