Good Morning Friends,
“King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a
thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. While Belshazzar was drinking
his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that
Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the
king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they
brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in
Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from
them. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of
bronze, iron, wood and stone. Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and
wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The
king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so
frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way.” (Daniel
5:1-6)
Usually God is quite subtle in the way He
speaks to people. God rarely forces Himself on people in such a way that they
have to sit up and take notice. But occasionally God breaks that pattern and
startles those whose attention He wants to get. Such was the case with the new
king of Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar was dead and his son, Belshazzar,
had taken the throne. Belshazzar forgot the lesson that Nebuchadnezzar had
learned the hard way. He ignored God, even ridiculed Him by using the items
from God’s temple in giving praise to his own false gods. And like his father before
him, God got Belshazzar’s attention in a miraculous way!
The hand writing on the wall of the banquet
hall is a demonstration that God will break in to the ordinary progression of
the world to accomplish His will. He may not do that very often. In fact, the
rarity of such acts of God is one of the things that makes them so powerful. But
the truth is that sometimes God does break in to the normal progression of the
world in miraculous ways. Those instances are evidence that God loves people
enough to surprise them sometimes in order to get their attention. But the
primary lesson from God’s visit to Belshazzar relates to the people of Israel. God,
through His surprise visit, was working to protect His people. God cares about
His own people so much that He watches over them and intervenes for them.
He still cares about those who are His that
much – including you and me!
His, by Grace,
Steve
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