Daily devotion – weighed and found wanting
Daniel 5:
1 Many years later King Belshazzar gave a great feast for 1,000 of his nobles, and he drank wine with them. 2 While Belshazzar was drinking the wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver cups that his predecessor, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem. He wanted to drink from them with his nobles, his wives, and his concubines. 3 So they brought these gold cups taken from the Temple, the house of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. 4 While they drank from them they praised their idols made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.
5 Suddenly, they saw the fingers of a human hand writing on the plaster wall of the king’s palace, near the lampstand. The king himself saw the hand as it wrote, 6 and his face turned pale with fright. His knees knocked together in fear and his legs gave way beneath him.
The events of Daniel 5 happened some years later than those of chapter 4.
King Belshazzar was coregent with his father Nabonidus, which explains why Daniel was named the third ruler see Daniel 5:29, in the kingdom.
The king may have been new but the sin was old. Pride and self-confidence. Darius the Mede was at this moment in time, besieging the city; but so certain was Belshazzar of his city’s defences that he mocked Jehovah and praised the false gods of Babylon.
You will remember from our last devotion that God had given Nebuchadnezzar a year to repent, but with Belshazzar, God judged him that very evening!
The king had not learned from those who had gone before, and Daniel told him so – Daniel 5:17-23. But it was too late!
The self-confident sinner had better beware and so should a proud world that says, ‘peace and safety’.
In Noah’s day and in Abraham’s day, judgment came when people least expected it.
It will happen again….