Daniel Lesson 16
Babylon and its Guilt – Daniel 5:5-16
Daniel 5 is the famous section of Daniel with the handwriting on the wall. Daniel is the book written during the exile. The exile period of history teaches many doctrines. There are two great truths that the exile teaches. One is that God is a big God and He’s the sovereign God over the Gentiles as well as over Israel. The Jews had seen God work in their own backyard. They had watched God answer prophecies in Israel. Beginning with the book of Daniel the Jews had a completely new experience in history. They never saw this happen quite like this before. They had the experience of watching God work not through them but on the Gentiles independently of the Jews, that the God of Israel was not just the God of Israel, He was the God of Israel and the God of the Gentiles. And this is a smashing new revelation of the exile; how big is the God of Israel. He controls world history, and this was a new truth, a truth that is emphasized time and again in the book of Daniel.
Along with that truth is the fact that God’s revelation is prophetic; it is the only revelation, the only religion in history that dares to make specific predictions of the future, and can present skeptics with hundreds of fulfillments of prophecy and therefore claim… see, our religion is different; it’s different because of this fulfilled prophecy, that fulfilled prophecy, and so on. So the bigness of God is the theme of Daniel. Daniel is written to guide believers living in a human viewpoint world in the kingdom of man. You can’t live for long in the human viewpoint world, in the kingdom of man, without having to trust in a very, very big God, because if you view of God is emaciated and weak, you’re going to fall down and fail; you have to have a big God in order to survive.
So Daniel becomes extremely important for us today, yet many people, when they come to Daniel look at it through the blinders and traditional fundamentalist eyeglasses that considers the minutia of prophecy only, that Daniel is only known for the ten-toed vision or something like this. But Daniel ought to be known for more things than just the details of prophecy. God intended that the book of Daniel, along with the other books written in the exile, be revelations of His whole character, and He wants us to look at this and He wants us to trust Him on the basis of what He tells us about Himself. When believers don’t do this they become vulnerable. An article in Time Magazine December 30 recognizes that in the study of the Bible there are two completely different presuppositions. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying for so long, the are two presuppositions and you clearly come to the Bible with one or the other; that’s what you must understand and cause the people with whom you’re conversing to understand. No one is neutral; no one ever came to the Bible neutral. Well, I’ll consider it, maybe… if… nonsense, you have already decided in your own mind that the Bible is and what it can be and what it can’t be; before you even open it you’ve already made a presupposition.
So there are two presuppositions and Time specifies these two; clearly it says, “There are two sets of assumptions that work in Bible criticism. Like a Missouri Synod mother,” the Missouri Synod is a very conservative arm of the Lutheran Church, many valiant saints are in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, “Like a Missouri Synod mother who insists that God (quote) ‘would not give us a book with errors,’ (end quote). The literalists trust that an omniscient and loving God would give the world an absolutely inerrant Bible,” and that’s precisely the issue, precisely the point, “because the Bible is who He claims to be, therefore His revelation must be inerrant.” Time is right in mentioning this. Time is also right when quoting the President of the Missouri Synod, “because of the way Jesus referred to Jonah’s sojourn in the fish, Dr. Preus insists that the Jonah tale is history.” That’s exactly right, very important point. “Not only do the literalists accept Scripture because of the essence of God, because of who God is, therefore Scriptures must be of such and such character.” That’s one line of argument, that’s one part of the literalist’s presupposition. But Time is also right when they state the second point, and the second point; and the second reason why we accept a literal Bible is exactly what Time says when they quote Dr. Preus. “Because of the way Jesus refers to Jonah, therefore the Jonah story has to be true.”
And that’s the line of reasoning found in John 3:12, Jesus says if I tell you things on earth and you don’t believe, how are you going to believe if I tell you about things beyond empirical perception, the heavenly things. You can’t; you have no way of telling whether your sins are forgiven, you have no way of telling whether Jesus is going to come again tomorrow; you can’t tell those things unless you trust His character and if His character isn’t trustworthy in the areas that you can test, how can you dare to trust Jesus as an authority where you can’t test it? That’s precisely the point and Time is quite right, though I doubt Time understands what Dr. Preus says. At least they’ve an accurate reporter, and the accurate reporter does reflect what Dr. Preus has been claiming, that if Jesus said it’s true then it must be true, because if Jesus said it’s true and it isn’t true, that makes Jesus a liar, or it makes Jesus one who accommodates Himself to culture, and if that’s the case how do we really know that all this talk about sin and blood redemption in the Bible isn’t but an accommodation to first century psychology? How do we know that, say in the 21st century men won’t really discover there’s no such thing as sin, that was just the way we used to talk about it? You have no answer against that unless you accept Jesus as THE authority and accepting Jesus as the authority requires us to accept Jesus’ authority over the Bible.
The second point in this literalist’s presupposition that time brings out is very important to you, you can use this quite effectively. If someone comes up to you, they ask, what do you believe about the Bible; the quick answer is I believe exactly the way Jesus believed about the Bible. You hide behind Jesus; to attack your position means your opponent must attack Jesus and it’s an uncomfortable position to be in.
The third statement Time brings out on the literalists presupposition that is exactly true, it’s quoting C. S. Lewis, “the fact that Biblical critics pick and choose among the supernatural events,” Time is pointing out what C. S. Lewis has said. C. S. Lewis said look, if you go through the Bible with a pick and choose methodology, in other words, this passage of Scripture teaches “thou shalt love thy neighbor” and you like that, that sounds so nice, but then when you come to the passage that says believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, there is only one name under heaven whereby men must be saved, oh, that’s too narrow, I don’t accept that. That’s the “pick and choose” methodology. You pick out of the Scripture what agrees with your presuppositions and drop what doesn’t agree with your presuppositions. That’s the pick and choose method and C. S. Lewis is a very, very acute thinker, and he point out the fallacy of this higher critical approach. Time picks this up from. C. S. Lewis and says this: “The fact that Biblical critics pick and choose among the supernatural events they accepts baffles the late Anglican novelist critic C. S. Lewis. He wondered at the selective theology of the Christian exegete, who (quote) ‘after swallowing the camel of the resurrection strained at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes.’” (end quote). And obviously it’s a devastating criticism against the methodology of the critic at this point, a devastating criticism. Now if you read the Time article watch for these things, underline them, these are portions that are very valid; they are right in pointing out our presuppositions, what is Time’s big point that they’ve made? The deductive argument, the mother of the Missouri Synod who said “that if God is omniscient and He is loving the way that God portrays Him then His revelation must be inerrant,” that is exactly right. The second methodology that they have used here, Time Magazine points out that if the Scriptures are testified to by Jesus, if Jesus says that Jonah was swallowed by a while, unfortunately Jesus is a very aggravating teacher because it seems like Jesus went out of His way to quote every passage of the Old Testament that modern man doesn’t like. People don’t like Genesis 1 and 2, it’s too literal. Isn’t it too bad that Jesus grounded the whole doctrine of divorce on a literal interpretation of Genesis 2?
And then people don’t like the Jonah story, imagine, a man getting swallowed by a whale… isn’t it a tragic shame that Jesus didn’t know better and went ahead and taught that Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale. Poor Jesus didn’t have the enlightenment of the 20th century professor. So we have the second argument, that Jesus’ belief about the Bible must be our normative belief about the Bible, we have no choice; this isn’t something cranked out by the fundies in the 19th century, this was something cranked out by Jesus in the 1st century.
Then we have the argument of C. S. Lewis, that the liberal theology is a pick and choose theology and it’s very, very arbitrary, go through the Bible and pick out what you want to pick out. One of the most clever group of students ever to go through Texas Tech were a group of boys that took a course entitled Modern Religious thought, and they got so tired of hearing this pick and choose methodology that the professors of the course were advocating that they decided they would pull a trick. What they did was take the same methodology, pick and choose, and they went through and constructed a new theology of the Bible, called [can’t understand word, sounds like: exor theism, exor] is the Greek word for hate, and the thesis of this theology is that God really is the God of hate, He really hates people, He doesn’t love them. So they went through the passages using the liberal methodology of pick and choose, and they picked out all the passage where it says that God is angry, and they dumped all the passages that said God is a God of love, those were just put in there by later read actors that couldn’t stand the truth that God is really a God of hate; so therefore God is really a God of hatred and He comes across in the Scripture as a God of love simply because man couldn’t stand it, and they presented the paper at the end of the course, and after they read the paper there was dead silence in the classroom because there was no way to criticize them, they had simply used the professor’s own methodology back on the professor; it was an excellent way of doing it.
Now Time is also correct when they say there is the other set of presuppositions, and they state it quite frankly. They say that “the faith that such liberal scholars affirm reflects the endemic doubts of modern man, child of the enlightenment, reading his faith largely in the light of reason.” In other words Time says quite clearly that the enlightenment, that era of history in Europe characterized by what we call rationalism; rationalism doesn’t mean that they were the first people to think rationally; man has always thought rationally, no man would ever think irrationally. You either think rationally or you don’t think. So you do think rationally at all times but rationalism doesn’t mean to think rationally. Rationalism is the belief that I, with my finite understanding, can legislate what must and must not be of the universe; I with my finite data can decree what God must and must not be; I decide what is morally possible and what is not morally possible. That’s rationalism. Everything comes out from man; Descartes’ famous saying, I think, therefore I am. You start from yourself and work outward. The trouble with rationalism is it’s grounded on finite data and is always limited, but rationalist never seem to see that weakness.
So Time goes on to describe the rationalist presupposition behind the attacks of Scripture. “The giants of Biblical criticism who have emerged in the 19th century Germany basically believed the Christian message but they carried over from the enlightenment the emphasis on the Bible as a human work. Their aim was to find the historic core of Scripture by confronting it with an entire range of scientific discipline, linguistics, archeology, anthropology, comparative religion. There were other influences too; Hegel’s philosophy of history characterized [can’t understand word] school of criticism which saw the New Testament as a synthesis of competing thesis in the early Christianity ….” The whole point is that if you’re going to start out with man, man decrees what must and must not be true, in which case you wind up in the modernist camp. Time, of course, doesn’t call them liberals, they’re called moderates. But those of us who are conservative in the article, we’re the wooden literalists. So obviously the vocabulary of the article is programmed to set you with a bad taste in your mouth against the literalist’s position. But read the article because our opponents are doing this and we might as well get some skill in working with them.
But the biggest blunder of the article, and one which I’m afraid few people see, is in the last few paragraphs. After presenting very beautifully these two presuppositions, carefully going over the data, showing that what the fundamentalist has been saying all along is that “if you approach the Bible with your own set of presuppositions, the product is a reflection of yourself,” it’s not coming out of the Bible, it’s coming out of you, the Bible is but a mirror, it’s just reflecting you. So the picture you’re getting is a picture of yourself, it’s not a picture of what’s there, it’s a picture of the reader, not a picture from the book, whereas if the fundamentalist is correct, you go to the book and you subordinate your criteria of judgment to the Scriptures. The Scriptures become the final standard, not experience, not reason, but Scripture. So if Scripture is the final, final standard, you go this route. If you in turn accept that experience is the final, final standard, you go the liberal route, it’s a watershed and every man has to decide for himself.
But notice, if you take the enlightenment view to its logical conclusion you wind up in a position called nihilism, a position which is total skepticism, no morals, nothing, absolutely total skepticism, I can’t be sure I know anything; that’s the problem of evolution. The fatal flaw that no biology professor ever seems to think of is that if the evolutionary premise is really true, if we’re really, really serious about it, and everything has evolved, I have no basis to know that my own data hasn’t evolved, and therefore the truth of evolution itself can’t be true. Evolution cuts the ground out from under itself; if all truth is set in an evolving universe, then the truth that I say is truth itself is evolving, so how do I know that evolution, therefore, is true, when truth itself is evolving. So no that basis everything winds up in nihilism.
But no man can live nihilistically; no man can live without morals somewhere; even the prostitute will object if you steal her money. So therefore every person needs morals in some area, they’ve got to have morals. So no one likes to take this position to its logical conclusion; somewhere along the line you always find this of your non-Christian friends, who proudly proclaims his unbelief against Scripture, as arrogant as he may seem, as intellectually solidified as he may be, always at the end of the line, after all the discussion is said and done, after all the criticism is passed down, with a quick slight of hand, everything about morals, and happiness and joy is stolen and slipped across from Christianity to beef up non-Christian. Non-Christian is parasitic; it lives morally and ethically off the Christian system. The proof of it is that when Christianity dies out of a culture the culture disintegrates. Who wrote situation ethics? Joe Fletcher. What is situation ethics? In any given situation do what you think is of most benefit to most people. How can you object to Watergate once you accept situation ethics? Didn’t the people that broke in think they were doing what benefited most of the people? But now the critics of Watergate who never cared before for Christianity come 60 mph over to the Christian camp, quick, we’ve got to pick up morals, and then zoom back, and they steal morals. They have no basis whatsoever except in a literal Bible. So there’s always this dishonesty, this stealing, stealing what we like from Christianity after we’ve tried to say that the whole thing is false, one hand slips over and grabs everything we want and say yeah, but we like this.
And sure enough you can observe this by reading Time magazine. They go through the article and you can tell very clearly by the vocabulary which side of the fence the author is really on and so coming down to the end of the article he’s got to prevent himself from skidding off into nihilism; he’s got to prevent himself from winding up with no laws and no truth whatsoever, so guess what he does? The hand reaches across the wall and pull off some of the things we like after all, and here’s what he says at the end: “There are other levels of Biblical truth that today believers and nonbelievers alike can share. A pure and more accurate text, for example, closer to the original [can’t understand word] scholars and laymen have enjoyed since antiquity; a more accurate understanding of its meaning,” which we would agree to.
But then he comes to this last sentence, “the erosion of literalism may have put the Bible’s poetry in sharper relief; with a literal wail out of the way, readers can appreciate the splendid parable of Jonah, the story of a stubborn man trying to avoid doing good for an enemy. The Jonah parable goes beyond the humanist dimension …” etc. Now there’s a very obvious question to ask. He likes the truth taught by the Jonah story but he doesn’t like the facts of the story. What he is saying is that whether Jonah’s story is really true or not it’s a sweet thought and we like the sweet thought, so therefore we read Jonah, all the time, of course saying it’s not really true, it’s not really true, it’s not really true, but it’s a sweet thought, it’s a sweet thought, it’s a sweet thought. So we keep the thought and dump the history underneath it, and that is a dishonest game and that’s where you’re called upon as a believer in witnessing situations to slap their wrists, make them take the whole thing, with all the nihilism, or make them take the fundamentalist position. But you can’t have this middle of the road thing as this author tries to have. Who cares about the sweet thought if it has no base? What does it mean to me, the sweet thought of Jesus’ resurrection, if there wasn’t really a literal grave, it’s just a sweet thought, that’s all, it’s not real. What you’re arguing in the final analysis on this base is we would rather have fantasy than fact, and ideas that are fantastic and fanciful are more potent than ideas that are factually correct. That’s the whole point.
So read the article and go through it, it’s a kind of kingdom of man reasoning that Belshazzar had. In Daniel 5:5 Belshazzar basically differed little from Time Magazine. Both Time and the Babylonian intellectuals were autonomous thinkers. They both worked out from themselves; they both depended upon the sufficiency of man, sufficiency of man’s reasoning. And Daniel 5 is one of the most graphic pictures of the collapse of this kind of thing, the collapse of Time Magazine and Babylonian type thinking in a disastrous political destruction.
Daniel 5:5, “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. [6] Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another. [7] The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spoke, 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. [8] 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. [9] Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astonished.
Verse 10, “Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house: and the queen spoke and said, O king, live for ever: let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed,” this is his mother that comes in, the Queen mother, her name is Nitocris, and she stomps into the palace and it’s very sweetly said here in the King James; this is not the way she said it at all, she said “live forever,” that was a greeting, but then she said stop letting your thoughts trouble you, stop letting your countenance be changed. [11] “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; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, the king, I say, thy father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers; [12] Forasmuch as an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and showing of hard 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.”
Daniel 5:5, “In the same hour” is the fateful day of October 12, 539 BC. That day the armies of Cyrus had surrounded the city of Babylon. Nabonidus, who at the time was the king of Babylon, had lost his key general, Gobyras; Gobyras was in charge of the eastern command. He had defected to the Medo-Persians. Cyrus promptly put General Gobyras in charge and he then surrounded the city of Babylon. Berosus who was a Babylonian priest wrote about this, and this is one of the advantages of this, now we’ve gone through the Bible historically, now we’re up into the era of history where we can get a lot of extra-Biblical checks, extra-Biblical amplifications of what was going on. And Berosus wrote about what happened; this fragment of his writing is preserved in Josephus. (Quote), “In the seventeenth year of his reign Cyrus advanced from Persia with a large army, and after subjugating the rest of the kingdom, marched upon Babylonia. Apprised of his coming, Nabonidus led his army to meet him. He fought and was defeated, whereupon he fled with a few followers and shut himself up in the city of Borsippa.”
Now he left his son in charge; his son is Belshazzar. There are problems here because Belshazzar is also said to be the son of Nebuchadnezzar. There are two solutions to the problem and after looking at all the data I see a much easier solution is simply to say Belshazzar was the real son of Nebuchadnezzar and his wife, Nitocris; she was one of the most brilliant women in the Ancient East. There were several outstanding women of history and it would do well to study the biographies of these great women. One was a famous Egyptian queen, Queen Hatshepsut, she was outstanding, an absolutely outstanding administrator, she brought peace and production to Egypt like no Pharaoh ever did before her. There was another famous woman in history, Deborah in Judges, and there’s this Queen, Queen Nitocris. Nebuchadnezzar and Nitocris were married; they had a son, Belshazzar. Nebuchadnezzar died and apparently Nitocris remarried Nabonidus. He did this to gain royal favor with the court; remarrying Nitocris made Belshazzar his foster son, this way he’d have a claim to royalty, and he left Belshazzar in charge of the palace. Now you wonder, why if this is really true, if it’s really true that just outside the wall you have this tremendous army gathering, why is it that the Babylonians are having a blast inside when they’re just about ready to get conquered.
Here’s why. A report from the first book of Herodotus: “The Babylonians encamped outside their walls awaited Cyrus’ coming. A battle was fought a short distance from the city,” which is apparently the same battle I just read to you from Berosus, “in which the Babylonians were defeated by the Persian king, whereupon the Babylonians withdrew within their defenses.” Now here’s why the Babylonians could afford to have a party while their city was surrounded. “Here the Babylonians shut themselves up and made light of Cyrus’ siege, having laid in store provisions for many years in preparations against this attack. But when they saw Cyrus conquering nation after nation, they were convinced that he would never stop and that their turn would come at last.”
So within the great massive walls of the city of Babylon, they had a double wall, Herodotus tells about it, a lot of this was done by Nitocris, she was the woman convinced this was coming and she prepared her city, so that the city of Babylon had these massive walls around it, double walls. It’s said by some that you could ride a chariot down the top of the walls, four horses abreast. It was a massive thing; the Tigris-Euphrates River went through the city; there was a gate and the walls were built over this, sort of like a castle with the moat going through the wall, and then to add later protection Nitocris decided that if the enemy ever did come down the river she was going to have the inside of her city protected, and so she had sections of the city built along the side of the river.
In other words, she had walls so that if enemies finally did get into the river they could have the streets protected, the enemy just couldn’t pour out into the city. They had a system of drawbridges across. Nitocris had a big basin built miles and miles upstream from the city of Babylon, and she had her engineers divert the river into this basin. And while the river was filling up the basis obviously the bank ran dry, and she had another team of engineers she organized so that just as soon as the water died down and the banks became dry, these engineers began to line this entire thing, through the whole city, with tiles so that it became a tiled canal. Then on top of the tiles they laid abutments for bridges, and they made each one of these bridges drawbridges, so that if an enemy penetrated these drawbridges could be withdrawn and the enemy might penetrate the river but they couldn’t get into the city. Then to add further protection, the city was sectioned off, like the hold of a ship; all these holds so each one could be independently defended. It was a fantastic, from the human point of view, invulnerable city.
And therefore the Babylonians had every reason under the sun, except one, every reason to say huh, so what, Cyrus and his army are outside the walls, what’s he going to do; we’ve been preparing for years, let him stay out there. And of course they were right in a sense because Cyrus’ army had to live off the land but all the farmers were inside the city on stored grain. And so Cyrus’ army had to import all their food, and obviously the logistics problem would have conquered Cyrus after while. So this is why the night of October 12 they are having this fantastic party.
Daniel 2:5, there “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,” now you have thousands of people invited to this party; these are the men and all the call girls in Babylon. There are no decent women here, these are the girls that are involved in this massive orgy that’s going on, and during the middle of this thing the attitude is let’s ridicule the God of Israel, everybody’s half stoned and this sounds like a good thing to do. See, they had all the idols of the other gods, but there’s only one God in the world that doesn’t have any idols, this funny God of Israel. So they say well, who’s that God; he let us capture the Jews so he can’t be very powerful, let’s get his vessels out and desecrate them. So Belshazzar ordered his men in and they got these tremendously valuable gold taken from the Jewish temple and they began drinking out of them, passing it down, everybody was having a nice time until verse 5.
nd you can imagine the scene, using a little imagination. The room was a giant room, we’ve discovered the room, archeologists now can give you the measurements of it, it’s 173 feet long and 56 feet wide, it’s part of the Hanging Gardens, there’s a diagram of it in Robert Koldewey’s Excavations at Babylon, chapter 15, page 103. And this room has been found and not only has it been found, and not only has it been found but the entrance way has been found and opposite that entrance the wall is offset into a nitch, and in front of this nitch is an elevated platform that was apparently being used on October 12 by King Belshazzar, because it says in verse 1 that he was drinking in front of everyone; so he had a few of his administrators up here and everything else was going on at the tables all through the entire hall. Then back of the nitch there is a plaster wall and the neat thing about it is there were pieces of plaster still there when the excavators discovered it. So the Bible is very, very accurate here when it talks about this plaster wall, and apparently on this table was a gigantic candelabra, a tremendous number of candles, so the light is shining back like this, and probably the light is real poor while this is going on, except the light reflects off this plaster wall.
And then… Belshazzar probably doesn’t see the hand, he’s looking out at his party, this is going on in back of him. And all of a sudden this hand comes down and starts to write. You can imagine these people, half inebriated, what’s this going on, thinking it’s a trick, until all of a sudden Belshazzar turns around and see it, and then you have his reaction in verse 5. It says “the king saw part of the hand,” see, “the fingers of a man’s hand” were seen, and they “wrote over opposite the candlestick upon the plaster wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” The Aramaic word for “part” means the palm of the hand, it just means up to the wrist. So all Belshazzar observed when he turned around was just the palm of this hand; apparently it wasn’t a large hand, it was just a normal sized hand, but there was no body on it; that was the weird thing, and this hand just kept on writing, apparently in Aramaic. We’ll go on and I’ll show you what the hand wrote, we can tell from the text. The hand wrote these consonants on the plaster, much like a crossword puzzle, apparently wrote them vertical. And this hand kept writing, and took about… maybe 20-30 seconds for this hand to continue to write.
Daniel 5:6 is the good old King James way of saying he was shocked, “Then the king’s countenance was changed,” you can imagine it was, “and his thoughts troubled him,” or alarmed him. Now there’s a tremendous principle in verse 6 that will be true for every believer out of fellowship and true for every unbeliever. When we are in a state of disobedience against the Lord, when we are no negative volition, our conscience is giving testimony to our heart of disobedience. I don’t care how effective and skillful we are at oppressing it, and as you get older you get very skillful at suppressing it, but no matter how skillful you are at suppressing this guilty conscience, no matter how skilled, you’ll find yourself… you look at the soul and you cans see what happens. The conscience is never blotted out; the mind can be.
And when the mind says no to the conscience then things are dumped into the unconscious, they’re suppressed. And the soul becomes like a trashcan, just collects all this stuff. And under normal conditions we don’t have a fear reaction until some precipitating incident occurs. Normally the conscience says you are guilty, not a general statement but you are guilty over this point, you are guilty over that point, over that point, over this point, you have violated God’s law here, you have violated God’s law there. And as good healthy sinners we just turn the other way and reject the message of the conscience. So the conscience, not being able to be destroyed by us simply sets up a system whereby all this conviction is buried down here in the unconscious. Sigmund Freud was right on one thing, when he found the fact that the man’s mind is like an iceberg, very, very little of our mind is conscious, a lot of it is subconscious and it’s in there when all this stuff circulates and circulates and circulates until something happens, and there becomes an agitating experience. It can be the death of a loved one, it can be the sudden financial loss, automobile wreck, some close encounter with death, something that will suddenly make us God-conscious, we suddenly look to God because now we are aware of eternity. See, either terminal illness, death of a loved one, being close to death ourselves, some agitating experience comes into our life and suddenly we realize that hey, my life is just a little bit, here’s eternity.
Maybe we haven’t thought about the question seriously for months or years and we suddenly start thing about it, and when we do, all this stuff is released because now the conscience is acting instead of being suppressed and this stuff starts to come up, and often times the way it comes up is it comes up in tremendous emotions and particularly the emotion of fear; it can come up also as the emotion of depression. But particularly it can come up as the emotion of fear, intense fear. And this is why verse 6 is divided into two parts, because the Bible doesn’t treat man like the Greeks, man isn’t just immaterial and material, but man is a unity; he is both material and immaterial in one person, the soul. And so the soul has the spiritual side and the soul has the material side, and because the body has a central nervous system, anything over here in the spiritual side is going to be transmitted and overtly affect the body.
This is one of the great truths of Scripture that the Bible has said for years, that men only now are beginning to wake up to psychosomatic illness, the concept that all these organs of the body can be affected by your mental attitude. You can cause yourself to die by giving up; you can also have people who have the will to live that survive what would kill people. Many terminal illnesses can be survived for years by this proper mental attitude; not that it’s a panacea but the mind has fantastic power. And conversely people can go in the hospital with an earache and wind up dead because they get infection here and infection there and they don’t want to live any more and they give up, give up, give up, and finally they don’t move and they get pneumonia because the lungs fill up with liquid, they won’t cough, they won’t cooperate with the medical staff and finally they die because they’ve had no will to live; their mental attitude has killed them; medically they have committed suicide.
So the emotions can influence and that’s the picture here in verse 6, it says “his thoughts troubled him so that the joints of his loins were loosed,” the loins of a person in the Bible are the hips, the thighs, the general areas in the lower abdomen; it is the area of reproduction, it is the area of most of the key organs of the body, it is also the center of gravity and that’s why in the Psalms when it deals with fighting in combat in hand to hand combat they’re using both their hands and feed, and when you’re in this kind of a situation, psychologically you don’t center yourself here, you center yourself down here because that’s your center of gravity; if you’re kicking, punching, using swords, spears, etc. you’re off balance, your head isn’t the center of you any more, down here is the center. And so the loins became a very, very important part, and it was this place where the emotions showed up. Now if you’ve ever been terribly afraid you have had the same experience because you can feel fear in your body; you can feel it when you’re very, very afraid. And that’s what he does here, “and his knees smote one against another.” And it’s kind of humorous because that tells us there wasn’t any table cloth on that table up there, it was an open table and Daniel was apparently seated down here and he just watched his knees shake. So even that observation tells us something about how that party was going on.
So the king saw this and he called all the men together, and notice in verse 7 he tries what the kingdom of man always does, cover up one thing with another thing, try the gimmick way out, try to bribe somebody, try to buy somebody off, see if we can get the answer that way, and he offers a third rulership of the kingdom. And they came in in verse 8 and they couldn’t read it, and I’ll tell you why next week. They couldn’t read the thing, “nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.” And it says in Daniel 5:9 “Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled,” the word for “troubled” means alarmed, he has run out of gimmicks. He faces God’s judgment; when the handwriting comes on the wall there is no further room for Belshazzar; he personally can respond to the Lord Jesus Christ but he can’t do a thing to save his kingdom, it’s gone. That hand, when it writes on the wall, writes doom; it is judgment.
It’s the picture of every man facing judgment before God, the believer at the bema seat, it’s also a picture of the unbeliever at the Great White Throne judgment. When God judges, His judgment is final, irrevocable and nonnegotiable; there are going to be no debates at the judgment seat. God’s judgment will greatly terrify and greatly trouble, there will be no excuse, it won’t be oh Lord, I had other things to do, I didn’t want to study the Word, I was busy, etc; it doesn’t make any difference. God’s judgments will be true; it will be the most powerful thing that any man will ever face, God’s judgment. So Belshazzar faces God’s judgment and he is alarmed; he’s alarmed because that fifth column, the Trojan horse inside his soul, the conscience, that he has been suppressing and suppressing and suppressing all the time, suddenly it blows open and all this stuff that’s been collecting in his soul, the louse mental attitude, as well as the over activity but mostly mental attitude sins, come pouring through and he knows he has no confidence before God.
There’s a passage in the New Testament that describes the mechanics of this, you’ll see something about fear it’s very interesting; 1 John 4:17-18, this is one of the key passages on fear. If you’re working with fear with your children, fear with yourself, fear with loved ones, remember this passage, also remember, associated with this, the odd thing that the opposite of fear is not courage. Normally we’re used to seeing that as antonymic word pairs; we normally think of the word fear opposite courage, love opposite hate, but in the Bible the strange thing is that the antonym for fear is love. And here it is, “Herein is sour love made mature, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world.” That is the confidence in the day of judgment because of our position in the Lord Jesus Christ. There is, verse 18 says, “There is no fear in love,” now you’d think there’d be no fear in courage, but it isn’t, “There is no fear in love,” and then it goes on to say “but perfect” or mature love “casts out fear,” that’s a principle.
I’m sure you’ve read stories about this in the paper, from time to time you’ll see it, a mother may be out in the street and her little kid walks into the street or something and a car suddenly starts to roll toward her baby and that woman will go out there and because of he love for her child she just blocks that car, stops it from moving and under normal conditions she would be physically incapable of doing that, and yet for some strange reason, adrenalin all flowing, she stops that car from injuring her child. There’s an example of love overpowering fear. And it’s the same concept; the concept of fear is basically self-centered. People who are afraid, and this is illegitimate fear, obviously there’s things to fear, Jesus Christ didn’t walk off buildings just to test God. We’re not talking about that, we’re talking about the illegitimate mental attitude fear when it shouldn’t be there; that kind of fear is a self-centeredness that is asking the question and answering it, what is going to happen to me, me, ME, always me, whereas the love looks out from self, looks toward someone else, it looks toward what Jesus Christ’s will is in that situation toward another person. In that case the mother loves her child and she loves her child more than she loves herself and is willing to risk herself in front of that car to stop that car, prevent it from running over her child.
So John has a very sound principle, “perfect love casts out fear.” How do you think that Christians made it in the second and third centuries when they were being fed to lions? When they would literally sing hymns to Jesus Christ as their loved ones were chewed up, as they were chewed up? As the great martyrs of history burned to death and they had very, very easy ways of torturing believers. See the way to torture a person is to burn them with a very low flame; an intense flame will shock the body and you’ll just pass out and then fry, but a small flame or a flame that covers a small area of a flame that is very low in intensity is the worst way to burn someone to death. This is why in torture, in interrogation, they use branding irons and so on, with this kind of thing you can torture someone, but in presenting them with say napalm from head to toe actually suffocates them, it doesn’t really burn them, their body is burned but they died long before their body ever was burned.
So “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” It’s talking here basically about our love for the Lord, about His love for us and so on, but the principle is there. Now turn back to Daniel 5 and you see a man afraid. He’s afraid because he has no confidence; he has gone on negative volition toward grace. Belshazzar is not a grace oriented believer. He is a man who is on his own, like Time Magazine, the autonomous man who decides what and how the universe will run. He decides what kind of a God it is that’s really there, it’s the kind of god that fits his mental categories, always his criteria is the final standard and not God’s criteria. That kind of a man always has a problem. In counseling you will find that up to 85% of believers with severe mental problems are people who deny eternal security. Isn’t that an interesting correlation? Do you know why? Because Arminian theology rejects grace. And people who reject grace are never stable people; if you’re going around all day worrying about your salvation, holding on with your fingernails, you are not a stable person; you will be upset, you will be unable to face adversity and you’ll be a person who is basically very afraid like this man.
All right, he panics, “and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were confused [astonished].” The Aramaic word here is confused, they’re all in a state of panic, the entire kingdom of man has got to the point where no one can do anything. They’ve run out of gimmicks. Now comes the queen; verses 10, 11 and 12, the completion of this episode, is the rise of the Queen mother, Nitocris. She shows tremendous stability, she is a model of what some of the great women of the Bible always are pictured as. When you deal with Abigail in 1 Samuel, when you deal with Nitocris here, when you deal with Deborah, when you deal with the great women of the Bible you find them inevitably pictured doing the same thing. Do you know what it is? They usually face some man that’s falling apart, that’s the usual context. And here’s the man out of it. And along comes the woman and she is able to give the man divine viewpoint at the crisis time. She doesn’t preach to him but she presents to him effectively and solidly the Word of God. Now there’s a reason for this.
Why, when you pick the great women of Scripture, and almost 90% of time the Holy Spirit portrays them doing exactly the same thing. Remember Abigail; David was ready to go down and slaughter her husband who was called the fool, Nabal, and she told David yeah, he’s a fool and an idiot and his name fits him; he had conducted a crime against the state and David was going to go down and slaughter him and she said no, David, you’re greater than that, you’re a greater man than that, and finally David was so impressed by Abigail after her husband died the sin unto death he married her. Abigail was a picture of a woman functioning correctly in a marriage relationship. And so at the time when her husband needed her help because the woman is a help and the Bible says a help meet but it means a helper fitted for the man; the man has the calling, like Adam, and Eve was created as his helper in that calling.
Now what happened with Eve? Adam faced a test. Did Eve help him? No, she caused him to stumble. So the woman has had in history a tremendous effect on the men. Let no woman ever say that she has no influence; women have had a phenomenal influence in history, and they can have a lot more influence if they use their influence skillfully. A woman doesn’t have to wear pants to have influence; she doesn’t have to dominate the situation ostensibly. She can give stability to a home, she can give stability to a marriage by taking in the Word of God and not preaching it but living it out and then when the crisis comes she’ll be there with that word, when her husband is out of it, when he falls down as every believer will do, she won’t fall with him. The worst thing about marriage is if one of you get out of fellowship, the other one gets out of fellowship. That’s not the way it was meant; it’s supposed to work so that if one gets out the other one helps to restore the one that’s out of fellowship. That usually doesn’t work.
But Nitocris was that kind of a great woman. Herodotus describes the fantastic things that she did, and she even had a humor, that shows her stability too because basically humorous people are stable people. When she died she decided top play a joke on the men, and she realized a lot of the men around there were very materialistic, and she had been involved in some construction, but apparently for the welfare of the city, but she realized during her lifetime that all these men that would rule the throne were very materialistic, so she decided to play a joke on all the rulers. So, “it was the same princess,” Nitocris, Herodotus says, “by whom a remarkable deception was planned. She had her tomb constructed in the upper part of one of the principle gateways of the city, high above the heads of the passers by…. So she had her tomb up here so everybody had to see it; you went down the street and there’s Nitocris’ tomb, “with this inscription cut upon it,” and here’s the sign she had placed where she had a tomb: “If there be one among my successors on the throne of Babylon who is in want of treasure, let him open my tomb, and take as much as he chooses—not however, unless he be truly in want, for it will not be for his good.” That was the end of the sign.
Herodotus says: “This tomb continued untouched until King Darius came to the kingdom. To him it seemed a monstrous thing that he should be unable to use one of the gates of the town and that a sum of money should be lying around idle, and moreover inviting his grasp, and he did not seize upon it? Now he could not use the gate because as he drove through the dead body would have been over his head.” See, he didn’t like that idea of driving under this dead woman, so he decided to do something about it. So “he opened the tomb, but instead of money he found only the dead body and a note, and a writing which said: “Had thou not been insatiate of treasure, and careless how you got it, you would not have broken open the tomb of the dead.”
So she was a very humorous woman and she apparently had skill working with men and they kind of enjoyed her and she had tremendous effect here because she walked in without invitation, and this shows her authority. Daniel 5:10, “Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house: and the queen spoke and said, O king, live for ever: let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed.” The word “house,” the banquet house is literally drinking hall, the King James kind of faked out here, but it’s the drinking place. And the queen walked in, she wasn’t part of the call girls, they had hundreds of the call girls there and she was a lady and she wasn’t going to be part of it, so she walked in with authority, with poise and stability, and then she confronted Belshazzar directly. She said, “O king, live forever; stop letting your thoughts trouble you and stop letting your countenance be changed.”
Daniel 5:11, “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; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, the king, I say, thy father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers; [12] Forasmuch as an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and showing of hard 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” and the interesting thing in verse 11 as she goes through the story and ends with verse 12 is how she calls Daniel. Do you notice by what name she calls him? All through this story Daniel has been called Belteshazzar, except by the Jewish people, because Belteshazzar was his Babylonian name. This woman knew enough doctrine, apparently taught to her by just watching Daniel teach Nebuchadnezzar, that she picked up the name “Daniel,” Dan, he has judged; El, Elohom, God has judged and so therefore she says you go call Daniel; she doesn’t say call Belteshazzar, she says call Daniel, he’s a Jew and you use his right name. So we’ll find out what Daniel is going to say and Daniel is going to make a key issue to Belshazzar.
The point of Daniel 5 up to verse 12 is this: that in spite of Belteshazzar and Time Magazine God’s literal Word invades history and is the final authority. Now there’s an equation that’s being learned here and I want you to see the issue so you can apply this truth in your own life. We’ve gone through a historic story, we’ve gone through something that’s centuries old. But there’s a truth in that that applies today; many truths but here’s one of the key ones. Here’s the truth that Daniel is trying to get across; that the God of Israel whose cup could be desecrated so easily, oh let’s get the God of the Jews, bring a cup here, I’ll desecrate him, show you what I think of him. The God of little Israel, apparently just a local deity, apparently just another god among the other gods, suddenly you touch His vessels and the kingdom is destroyed. The God of Israel is the God of the world; that is the lesson, the real revelation in the book of Daniel, that God is not just like the other gods; you could desecrate their idols and nothing would happen; the moment you lay your hand on the vessels of Yahweh, God of Israel, the hand writes judgment. No grace any longer, judgment! A miraculous omnipotent invasion of history in response to desecrating His vessels.
So as the Babylonians sit smug behind their double walls, remember the situation, double walls, from the human point of view its impregnable, the defense is the most powerful defense the ancient world has ever seen. Cyrus said I have never seen anything like this, my armies have never come upon a defense so perfect as this city. And so we’re at a crisis; October 12, 539 BC the world that men have built, like the walls we build in our own souls that keep out God’s judgment, these walls stand there, the armies stand outside, held at bay, but inside the announcement is made, your kingdom is gone. And we’ll see how the kingdom is gone. Fortunately a man was there who observed it, besides the text of Scripture, and he wrote about it, and we now know how the city fell, in a most miraculous way.