Daniel 5 - Introduction

SERMON NUMBER FIVE

BELSHAZZAR, THE PLAYBOY OF BABYLON

Text: Daniel 5

INTRODUCTION

I.

BELSHAZZAR REALLY LIVED?

A.

For many years unbelieving critics of the Bible insisted that since there were no historical records (discounting the Bible as historically accurate, of course) that such a person as Belshazzar ever lived, the Bible is filled with myths

B.

But archaeological discoveries made about 1850 uncovered clay tablets in the region that was formerly Babylon and on these clay tablets was the name Belshazzar; both the names of Nabonidus and Belshazzar on another; one in which oaths were taken in the name of Belshazzar and Nabonidus indicating that they were co-rulers; subsequent work in this information showed that Nabonidus spent a great deal of his time in Arabia, which shows the reason for the raising of Belshazzar to the position of ruling monarch

II.

BELSHAZZAE HAD EVERYTHING THE WORLD COUNTS VALUABLE

A.

He had riches; Babylon was probably the richest of the four great world empires

B.

He had power; he had at his command the power and wealth of the capital city

C.

He had opportunity to indulge himself in every sensual pleasure

III.

BUT WHAT DID BELSHAZZAR CONTRIBUTE TO THE BETTERMENT OF MAN?

A.

He would not even be remembered if it were not for this account in the Bible

B.

None of the playboys of this world have ever contributed. They are too busy getting, thinking of self

DISCUSSION

I.

THE PLAYBOY AT WORK

A.

Feasting, and Fornicating

1.

The text does not describe his sexual escapades, however, it speaks of his wives and concubines engaged in drunken revelry.

2.

Anyone who knows about drinking parties that involve people knows what goes on as a consequence of drinking.

3.

Alcohol lowers the moral resistance of anyone

B.

Blaspheming

1.

When the wine was beginning to have its inebriating effect and supplying that pseudo-boldness and courage which is characteristic of its intoxicating ingredients, this debauched monarch commanded that the holy vessels of the Jewish Temple be brought so they might be used in their drunken feast to toast their idols.

2.

Leupold points out that this was a deed unparalleled in the records of antiquity.

3.

This was plainly an act of open defiance, calculated to insult the God whose Temple stood in Jerusalem.

C.

There is another playboy like Belshazzar (perhaps many millions)

1.

Hugh Hefner: started Playboy in 1953 with $600 of his own money, $60,000 in borrowed funds, and a photo of Marilyn Monroe in the nude.

2.

Parlayed his editorial mixture of sex and the good life into a $70,000,000 empire whose magazine is second in reading only to Reader's Digest in Western Europe

3.

Playboy is far more than a girlie book. it is a point of view.

4.

That point of view is hedonism, which teaches that pleasure is the sole good in life and that moral duty is fulfilled in the gratification of pleasure-seeking instincts.

5.

This is not new; it is as old as the Greeks at least, and even goes back to Belshazzar.

6.

But pleasure-seeking is a treadmill never-ending. Someone has aid pleasure sought is pleasure lost. Hedonists are left with only themselvestheir frustrations, their weaknesses, their greed, their desires.

7.

Playboy magazine makes it clear through its photographs of nude women, its articles and its cartoons and party jokes that females are to be exploited, used whenever and wherever possible, as long as it's all in good clean fun and the girl goes along with the gag. That it is a gag, and that the joke is usually on the girl and ultimately on all mankind, is certain! Whether you want to be the one who uses a woman as a thing, or whether you want to be the woman who is willing to be used as a thing, it is all the same. This might be adequate for animals, but it falls a bit short for human beings.

THE BASIC PHILOSOPHY IS, I-'M FOR ME, AND EVERYONE ELSE IS A POTENTIAL ITEM ON MY MENU. THE BASIC LAW IN THIS KIND OF JUNGLE IS SELF-FULFILLMENT. AND WHO WOULD ARGUE THAT THERE IS ANYTHING MORE SELF-FULFILLED THAN A TIGER, CROCODILE, OR PYTHON THAT HAS JUST FEASTED ON ITS PREY?
II.

THE PLAYBOY AWAKE

A.

It is all very well to live it up, scoff at God, indulge self, exploit other people, as long as there is no God,

1.

This is what Belshazzar thought.

2.

All this talk about a Jewish God who has powers supernatural, fooey!

3.

Belshazzar was god! He would do as he pleased!

4.

But, lo, God thought it expedient to openly and dramatically reveal His supernatural character to this arrogant hedonist.

5.

Belshazzar began to tremble until his hips went out of socket and his knees knocked together and those at the feast could see his face grow ashen gray with the pallor of death.

B.

Such an awakening has come to many a playboy or playgirl:

1.

Very often it is not connected with any miraculous manifestation of God such as Belshazzar had.

2.

Usually it is just the simple conscience of man telling him he stands guilty before his creator of exploiting other people for selfish ends.

3.

Though still many more will never awake to their peril until they meet the holy God at the judgment and they are banished to the realm of darkness, impurity and evil, lies and abominations.

4.

Some of Hefner's girls have awakened to the fact that he is merely using them to serve his own selfish purposes. that they are nothing more than things he uses to satisfy himself and he does not care one bit for them, they have exposed him in magazines.

5.

IT IS THE DUTY OF EVERY CHRISTIAN, YOUNG AND OLD, TO USE THE POWERFUL WORD OF GOD TO GUIDE THE HELL-BENT, SELFISH, SENSUAL-MINDED WORLD BACK TO TRUE HAPPINESS IN GOD'S WILL.

III.

THE PLAYBOY WEIGHED

A.

What brings on this playboy attitude?

1.

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.

2.

... you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron 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.

3.

Wm. Banowsky says in It's A Playboy World, When men lose their sense of established standards, they tend to fall victim to an urge for pleasure or a lust for power. And when the loss of standards occurs during a period of peril, men seem to prefer pleasure to power. It is one of the sad facts of war that the specter of danger and death causes many soldiers to want to spend the evening before the terrible battle with the prostitute rather than the priest. It has been said that there are more brothels in Saigon, today, than in any other city of comparable size in the world.

4.

We have lived in years of war for decades now and the easiest anesthesia to deaden the constant ache of emptiness is proving to be the simple pursuit of pleasure.

5.

Frank Sinatra has been quoted as saying, I-'m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, pills, or a bottle of Jack Daniels.

6.

D. H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterly's Lover, says, My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong with our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says is always true. The real way of living is to answer one's wants.

7.

Affluence, unbelief, uncertainty all bring on the popular idea that the answer is to be found in pleasure with its two indivisible components, sensuality and immediacy.

B. Playboyism has been weighed and found wanting.

1.

Many pleasure-seekers in our modern world have been driven to the desperate conclusion that it is impossible to achieve and, therefore, the pathway to pleasure is in the grave.

2.

Ernest Hemingway write in Death In The Afternoon, There is no remedy for anything in life, Death is the sovereign remedy for all our misfortunes.

3.

The very rich, beautiful, and famous often learned that pleasure is a hard master, an appetite that grows on what it feeds. It is a physiological fact that a stimulated muscle reflexively demands greater stimulation, and people become enslaved by their passions in much the same way. With each overindulgence, the level of physical and emotional expectation gradually rises so that an increasingly greater thrill is required to satisfy the urge. Eventually, the thrill begins to diminish but the hunger for stimulation is ever present, now stronger than ever. Without finding full satisfaction, the hunger need settles into the monotony of filling and emptying. One beings by seeking pleasures to fill his boredom and ends by being bored with his pleasures. As Shakespeare said, If all the years were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.

CONCLUSION

I.

PLAYBOYISM BRINGS TRAGEDY

A.

It destroys the image of God in man.

1.

Belshazzar allowed himself to become as an animal.

2.

He served no human or spiritual purpose except to glut himself on sensual pleasures;

3.

So, God took away his existence.

B.

Enslaving oneself to the passions of the flesh takes away freedom.

1.

The philosophy of playboyism is aggrandizement of the self, with all its accompanying disorders of arrogance, exaggerated self-importance, and unrealistic self-expectation.

2.

Ayn Rand, praised by Hefner, author of Atlas Shrugged, and The Virtue of Selfishness, writes, Man exists for his own sake, the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others nor sacrifice others to himself.

3.

What is necessary for the sake of survival itself, as well as for the sake of the moral life, is a more realistic understanding of the terms of genuine freedom. Freedom is something to be earned, and individual responsibilitydiscipline at the personal levelis always the price of freedom at the corporate level.

4.

We take an important step forward when we realize that, like it or not, we are going to be governed by something.

5.

Only when individual men are free, because they are disciplined, can the society of men be free. Edmund Burke said, Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

6.

NO MAN IS FREE WHEN HE IS A SLAVE TO HIS FLESH. Seneca

II.

THERE IS NOTHING BUT FRUSTRATION AND DEATH IN THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE AND THINGS

A.

John W. Gardner, former Sec. of HEW, in his book, Self-Renewal, said, It is not unduly harsh to say that the contemporary idea of happiness cannot possibly be taken seriously by anyone whose intellectual or moral development has progressed beyond that of a three-week-old puppy. Despite almost universal belief to the contrary, gratification, ease, comfort, diversion in the state of having achieved all one's goals do not constitute happiness for man. The reason Americans have not trapped the bluebird of happiness, despite the most frantic efforts the world has ever seen, is that happiness as total gratification is not a state to which man can aspire. The irony is that we should have brought such unprecedented dynamism to the search for such a static condition. Comforts and the pleasure of good living will never be enough. If they were, the large number of Americans who have been able to indulge their whims on a scale unprecedented in history would be deliriously happy. They would be telling one another of their unparalleled serenity and bliss instead of trading tranquilizer prescriptions.

B.

What is the solution? Malcom Muggeridge wrote, how infinitely sad it is that the present moral upheaval should amount to nothing more than a demand for Pot and Pills, for the most tenth-rate sort of escapism and self-indulgence ever known. How pathetic that when the world is waiting for a marvelous release of creativity, all we actually get is the resort of any old slobbering debauchee anywhere in the world at anytimeDOPE AND THE BED.

C.

Mr. Muggeridge puts in the plainest possible words the conviction that is also deepest in the life of any committed Christian, So I come back to where I began, to that other King, one Jesus; to the Christian notion that man's efforts to make himself personally and collectively happy in earthly terms are doomed to failure. HE MUST INDEED, AS CHRIST SAID, BE BORN AGAIN, BE A NEW MAN, OR HE'S NOTHING. SO AT LEAST I HAVE CONCLUDED, HAVING FAILED TO FIND IN PAST EXPERIENCE, PRESENT DILEMMAS AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS, ANY ALTERNATIVE PROPOSITION. AS FAR AS I AM CONCERNED, IT IS CHRIST OR NOTHING.

III.

JESUS TOLD A PARABLE ABOUT A PLAYBOY

A young man who wanted to be free to do his own thing. Terribly bored with the family farm, he demanded his inheritance immediately so that he could go to the glittering city and lead his own life. But the selfish satisfactions were short-lived. Though the son surrendered himself to every pleasure, he did not find freedom; he did not find joy. Having refused to serve his father, he ended up serving pigs. When the terrible bondage of self-indulgence was complete he came to himself. He realized that even the slaves in his father's house were much better off than he. When he found the courage to go back home, to ask for a job, his father met him saying, It is not another slave I seek, but a son. What Jesus was saying is that every man must choose to be either a son or a slave; and that the greater freedom of sonship always involves the greater responsibilitypersonal discipline.

EXAMINATION FIVE

REFUTATIONS
(Answer the following by giving the argument which will correct the statement)

1.

Belshazzar was not a true historical personage. Refute!

2.

Daniel was being sarcastic when he told Belshazzar, ... thy gifts be to thyself. Refute!

3.

Belshazzar was not responsible for his actions since he knew nothing about the God of Israel's actions towards his ancestors. Refute!

ASSOCIATIONS
(Associate the persons or events of column one with the correct person or event of column two)

1

2

Belshazzar

Daniel

concubine

Nebuchadnezzar

queen

purse

Belteshazzar

Vashti

talti

authority

vessels

mistress

Mene

mother

Judah

king of Babylon

Tekel

third

chain

numbered

Upharsin

Meshach
weighed
threescore
divided

MEMORIZATIONS
(Fill in the blanks:)

And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not ________ thy heart, though thou _________ all this, but hast _________ up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the _________ of his house before thee, and thou and thy lords, thy wives and thy _________ have drunk wine from them; and thou hast praised the _________ of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which _________ not, nor _________, nor _________; and the God in whose hand thy ________ is, and whose are all thy ways hast thou not glorified.

EXPLANATIONS

1.

Explain why Belshazzar was called king of Babylon, when history says it was Nabonidus who was king of Babylon at that time.

2.

Explain the relationship of the queen to Belshazzar.

3.

Explain why Belshazzar was so terrified at the handwriting on the wall.

4.

Explain why the wise-men of Babylon could not read the writing on the wall.

5.

Explain how Belshazzar was slain that night.

CHAPTER SIX

I. LAWYERS AND LIONSDaniel 6:1-28

a. PERFIDY