We’ve looked at Belshazzar, noting not merely his behavior, but his mocking of Yahweh.
We’ve looked at Daniel, he has “asked and answered” the question we might have been thinking. The question, “Maybe Belshazzar did not know?” It is clear, he knew better.
We are now left to stare at God’s action. God has ended the Babylonian Empire.
As we read stories in the Bible, sometimes, some of us, cringe at God’s justice. We wrestle with what happened to Cain, and Isaac being led to an altar and almost sacrificed. We wince at God’s instructions to the Israelites as they entered the Promise Land to kill everyone and every living thing. The list goes on.
I find these thoughts to be very telling about us, about human beings. We might ask, “Why do we feel this way?
As humans we desire mercy and justice. As humans we wrestle with mercy and justice.
We wrestle because:
1. We know right and wrong. We know right and wrong because we are made in the image of God, the Author of morality.
2. We desire the world to be right. The Garden of Eden, where all was right, is deeply in each of us. We wince when we see wrong living.
3. We therefore deeply desire God to come and put the world right with His justice.
4. But then, immediately our conscious reminds us how we have not been perfect, how we have mocked God.
5. And so in the tension between desiring God’s justice for the world—we plead for God’s mercy to us.
6. Yet even when we see God’s swift and terrifying justice, we cringe, because we know that we too deserve it.
This dilemma is as old as time immemorial. Yet many don’t want to accept we are fundamentally the same as those who have gone before us.
They escape to a path of moral evolution. They say, “We stand on the shoulders of others, spiraling upwards, picking and choosing what we in our own day know to be right! Turning wrong into right. The arrogance of such a view is stunning.
Hiding in false ideas of moral evolution and random chance, does not mean it is true. As if these ideas will deliver anyone from the Absolute Unchanging Person of God.
The answer to our personal dilemma, and indeed the dilemma of the world is Jesus Christ. He redeems the world.
And from this flow five thoughts.
First, God had shown his complete justice and mercy in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. All the sin of the world was paid for on the Cross. The debt that Justice demands has been met and paid in full.
Second, we each, individually and corporately as churches and societies, are moral agents. Our moral decisions affect us, those immediately around us, and indeed in a broad way, others through time and space.
Third, we therefore must either choose to live for God, or against God. We must choose Jesus or reject Him. There is no middle ground. We, like Belshazzar, cannot say, “Gee we just did not know.
Fourth, God, who has already paid the cosmic price for sin will discipline people and churches and countries, in order that they might turn back to Him. Imagine if Belshazzar at the very moment of Daniel’s explanation tore his robe, demanded all his court to tear their robes, repent, might God’s response have been different?
Fifth, for all those with a philosophical bent, we see the world, we see human history, we see the myriad of human choices as a linear sort of “cause-and-effect”, a two-dimensional system of time and space, complete with a past, present, and future.
God sees it all in the now. There is no past or future for God. In some multi-dimensional system, beyond my mind’s capacity. God sovereignly sees everything in the now. God knows everything in the now, as we bound by space and time make our moral decisions.
He is both completely in control and unsurprised as we exercise our free-will.
God is not random or arbitrary.
If we choose to not live for and with Him, then He will decide how and when our empires, personal and corporate, will end.
The real question is, we will seriously seek to live for Him, and when (not if) we sin, return to Him.