Daniel 5:1

BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST

‘A great feast.’

Daniel 5:1

I. The seat of the scorner.—We see in this narrative that Belshazzar had, in the pursuit of a sinful course, reached this seat. He was a man of an entirely different character from the Nebuchadnezzar of the previous lesson, who was not his literal father, but his predecessor on the Babylonian throne. You can discern a marked difference in the bearing of Daniel to him and in his bearing towards this predecessor. He spoke to Nebuchadnezzar with the utmost respect and reverence, but there is curtness and a tinge of contempt in his words to his successor. ‘Let thy gifts be to thyself, and thy rewards to another’ (Daniel 5:17). He had not the same attachment to the one that he had felt towards the other. Belshazzar lacked any force or strength of character, and appears to have been a man given up to sensual pleasures. This is shown in his arranging a carousal in his capital when an enemy not to be despised was approaching its gates. This reveals a character which such a man as Daniel would regard with contempt. When, during the carousal, his nature was inflamed with his indulgence, he got the idea into his head of using the sacred vessels that had been brought from the Temple of Jehovah at Jerusalem. He at once gave orders that they should be brought and take the place of the others that until now had been employed at the banquet. He evidently imagined that he would in this way show the superiority of the Babylonian gods over the God of the Jews who had been conquered. It was a piece of foolish bravado, behind which there was the spirit of the scorner. He scorned the religion of Jehovah, after His supremacy had been impressively revealed in the tragic experience of Nebuchadnezzar. He had scorned not in ignorance, but in the face of the light that had in this remarkable manner come to him.

II. A dark shadow.—A dark shadow was cast upon the feast just when the revelry had reached its height, and the sacred vessels filled with wine were being circulated among the guests. It was brought by a mysterious hand that appeared and wrote some words on the wall of the banqueting chamber which were not understood. It would appear from the narrative that the prince alone noticed that mysterious hand at this work. Along with the sacred vessels, the golden lamp-stand that had lighted the holy place of the Temple at Jerusalem had been brought, and had been placed, with its lamps burning, against the wall opposite to where the prince sat. It was on the wall behind it that the mysterious words were written with the strange hand. His guilty conscience was stirred, and made him tremble all over. He felt that some announcement of an ominous kind was being made to him by that God in Whose service the lamp-stand had been used. His bravado left him, and terror took hold of him. He could no longer enjoy his carousal. Conscience in the wicked has but to be awakened, as it was now in him, to spoil all their pleasure and to fill them with fear. It brings a dark shadow over them.

III. The message interpreted.—The hand, after doing its work, disappeared, but the writing remained. Belshazzar at once summoned all the magi at his court, and pointing them to the words, asked them to give the interpretation of them. He promised a rich reward to the one who would succeed. But they were all baffled. The words were in a vocabulary with which they were entirely unacquainted. This failure, surrounding the words with all the greater mystery, increased the trouble and fear of the prince. When Daniel, at the suggestion of the queen-mother, was summoned, he at once told him what the meaning of the message was. It was an intimation that the power which he had received from God and had abused was to be taken from him, and that he himself was to be punished. He had lifted himself against God, Who had warned him in the experience of Nebuchadnezzar, ‘in Whose hand his life was, and Whose were all his ways,’ and so the time of his reign was at an end, and his power would pass into other hands.

IV. The message fulfilled.—That very night the city of Babylon was taken by Darius and the Median army, and this scornful prince was slain (Daniel 5:30). While he had been pursuing his sinful course, the instrument of his punishment, found in this Median army, was being prepared. When the culminating point was reached, the instrument was ready and at hand to do its dreadful work. It is ever the same with sinning individuals or sinning communities that slight the Divine warnings and resist the light that is given to them.

Illustrations

(1) ‘Revelry, always out of place, is especially ill-timed when, as here, there is an enemy at the gates. One who was in Paris during the siege of 1870–1 tells us that in a shop a few yards off from a bursting shell he saw a child that had been sent out to buy a pack of cards. To revelry was here added very daring profanity. To drink wine openly out of the Temple vessels that represented so much of the mutual love of God and His people, vessels that were wont to be handled and guarded so tenderly, was to defy to His very face that great God of Israel Whose fame had come to all peoples.’

(2) ‘In a thousand ways we are all numbered and weighed every day. People, as we say, take our measure; they figure us up; they reckon us of more or less account, as men that come up to expectation and rise to our opportunities, or as “bad ha’-pennies,” disappointing, not to be trusted, found wanting. Every one of us is written all over; there is something in our faces, our eyes, our mouths, our voices, our hands, our writing, our walk, our desks, our houses, that “brands us of whose fold we be.” Thus the Clerk in Tennyson’s “Sea Dreams” pursued his master down the street, and far away

“Among the honest shoulders of the crowd,

Read rascal in the motions of his back,

And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.”

But it is, after all, a small thing to be judged of a man’s judgment. What does God say and write about us?—that is the question. And it is a fearful thing to be tried by Him and found wanting, to be stripped by Him of our bishopric, and to see our work and our talents and our opportunities given to others. “Let no man take thy crown.” ’