Daniel 6
RileyDaniel 6:1-28
DANIEL’S OF ’S VISION Daniel 5:1 to Daniel 6:28WE invite the attention today to the 5th and 6th chapters of this prophecy. We have considered already, “Daniel—a Dream of a Lad;” “Daniel, the Interpreter of Dreams;” “Daniel, and the Doom of World Governments;” “Daniel’s Brethren, or the Victory of Faith;” and “Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Great Tree.”This chapter introduces a new name,—another king.Evidently a considerable period of time elapsed between the close of the fourth chapter and the opening of the fifth. The old king Nebuchadnezzar was dead, and Nabonidus, his warlike son, coming to the throne, shared the same with Belshazzar, the heir apparent; and, as Vice-regent of the Empire, Belshazzar is called “The King.”The opening sentences of this study provide another illustration of the sins and swift living to which the children of special privileges and power are both surely and sorely tempted.Our first introduction to Belshazzar finds him the host of a great “feast to a thousand of his lords”, and the whole setting of the same is thoroughly Bacchanalian.Three words will well-nigh compass the content of these two chapters. These are Sensualism, Supernaturalism, and Supremacy.Sensualism was expressed by the flowing of wine!“The king * * drank wine before the thousand”. “The king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank”. Wine-drinking has always been the curse of kings. Solomon could not forget his own experience, nor yet disregard his observation, and from the place of the throne he wrote,“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise”. And again this inspiring Sage of the ages declared,“It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: “Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted” (Proverbs 31:4-5). If there is any one thing upon which the wise of the earth have agreed for four thousand years, it has been the deleterious effects of strong drink; and if there is any one thing to which the foolish of the earth, from the king on his throne to the most forlorn tramp begging bread at the back door, have been addicted, to the degradation of each, it is this same strong drink.The United States is experiencing what is called by some “the noble experiment” of attempting to abolish, by law, strong drink. Whether this endeavor succeeds or not, her government has already enjoyed practically fourteen years of freedom from the accursed saloon traffic, a traffic that was destructive alike to the bodies and souls of men.We discuss in America questions of employment, and are constantly debating what we shall do for the unemployed, but we know that, with very few exceptions, the statement of Mr. Lloyd George, England’s first citizen, applies to “the down and outs” of this land who drink, as perfectly as it did to that.“They are unemployed because unemployable. The stamina which should be theirs was lost because of drink. They are only a sort of weak vegetable—too weak for the serious uses of the world.”It is related that at a wedding the young bride declined to pledge her husband with wine. When her father remonstrated with her, she replied by holding up a wine glass and saying, “The color and sparkle mock me, for there I see a debauched brother, a broken-hearted mother and a saddened, darkened home—our home!” Ten thousand times ten thousand her statement would have applied to other homes as well; and the house of the king was not exempt.The words of Isaiah are: “Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink. * * As the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust” (Isaiah 5:22-24).Let kings hear it!
Let the self-supposed cultured of the earth give audience to it! Let the great and the rich as well as the degraded and the poor, ponder it—strong drink and sensualism are synonyms!Sensualism is represented in the character of the women.
We have no detailed description of these women beyond the statement that they were the king’s wives and concubines; but one does not need much more. The wine-room witnesses to the character of its own patrons.Some years since Chief of Police Delaney ordered a raid of the Denver resorts. In a few hours forty young women were behind prison bars. Some of them were daughters of elite homes; others of them stenographers, milliners, cashiers, waitresses, etc. It was a night of weeping! Indignant parents protested that their daughters were young women of good reputations and should not have the treatment of criminals; but the consistent chief replied, “The frequenting of these wine rooms will very shortly convert your so-called respectable girl into a subject of the Market Street tenderloin.
If she is decent and desires to remain so, let her desist!”The man has not yet been born who can make constant associates of lustful, wine-bibbing women, and maintain his royal standing.Andrea Delsarto was an artist of such high ideals that he gave to the world a face of Christ, never equalled. But the woman he chose to share life with him, by the charms of her personal beauty and the criminal tendencies of her low ideals, carried him to such depths of dishonesty and deeds of degradation as to compel him to confess his craftsman hand “low-pulsed.”Goethe said, “Tell me with whom thou dost company, and I will tell who thou art.” And Goethe’s women associates dragged him to moral depths more godless even than was his atheistic philosophy.Solomon writes it down as a proverb,“The lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: “But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. “Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” “Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house: “Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel” (Proverbs 5:3-5; Proverbs 5:8-9). Again, the sacrilegious use of the sacred vessels was sensualism. Belshazzar must have known what sacredness attached to the golden and other vessels brought away from the Temple—the House of God—which was at Jerusalem. And when he called for them, and with them served his princes, his wives, and his concubines, the spirit of sacrilege was with him, and when, while they were drinking, they praised the “gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone” consciously and intentionally he offered an insult to Jehovah—the very God concerning whom Nebuchadnezzar, his grandfather, had made a decree that “every people, and nation, and language” should worship Him.And yet Nebuchadnezzar’s sin is not an antiquity. It is the very same mistake into which Kant fell when he concluded that “two things there are, which, the oftener and the more steadfastly we consider them, fill the mind with an ever new, an ever rising admiration and reverence—the Starry Heaven above and the Moral Law within.”The modern theologian is more disposed to worship the stars than he is to worship the God who made them, and to trust his own inner consciousness than the Holy Ghost who quickens and renews; and the praise goes to the creation or creature rather than to the Creator. As in the old day a king sat on the throne who knew not Joseph, nor yet regarded his God, so now Belshazzar is alike ignorant of the greatest Prophet of the realm, and the very God for whom Daniel stood.This sensualism, this sacrilege, were alike an insult to God, and resulted in the writing on the wall.The sight of the hand was its first expression.“In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. “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”. What is the interpretation of this report? Let the Rationalist answer; and he will tell you Daniel had delirium tremens, and will cite many instances from history to prove that when men drink wine they experience visions. But the vision is wholly subjective; in other words, no hand ever appeared. Belshazzar only imagined he saw a hand.Then perhaps this same Rationalist will tell us how it happened that Daniel interpreted this vision so correctly, that that very night his interpretation became history.The longer one lives the more is he impressed with the fact that the most credulous company of people on earth are the critics of Sacred Scripture —the opponents of the supernatural. Let me illustrate what I mean. There is an old and unscientific opinion to the effect that the vibration in every building and structure of wood or stone or other material has what is called its “key note;” and if a fiddler can only find that, he can play down the biggest bridge that was ever built; and they even claim that historically the first iron bridge built was at Colebrook Dale, and a fiddler did play until he struck the key note and the structure swayed so perceptibly that the workmen compelled him to stop.Now upon that basis a recent writer, who boasts himself an exponent of modern thought, speaking of the falling of the walls of Jericho in articles published by a leading magazine, says, “It is not in any sense robbing this story of its miraculous element to say that God was making use here of one of His own laws and that the shouting of the people caused vibrations serious enough to topple the walls.” Some shout!It is strange how deniers of supernaturalism swallow with ease a greater supernaturalism.
Bishop Wilberforce had such teachers in mind when he spoke of those who are “borne on the wings of a boundless skepticism into the bosom of an unfathomable superstition.” If a man believe in God at all he must believe that the walls of Jericho could come down before His breath a thousand times more easily than they could crumble at the shout of man.Bettex, the great German believer, says “with his accustomed superficiality the man of the world treats miracles either disdainfully dismissing them as ‘silly stuff’ or ascribing to God and His Son a few smaller and easier miracles, as a well-known Berlin professor does, but energetically protests against the greater and more difficult ones. Confounded he sits before Lot’s wife and Balaam’s ass, like one who has never seen an egg, and now takes one, opens it, and exclaims, ‘What!
Am I to believe that simply by virtue of a certain degree of warmth in the incubator there will come forth from this slimy white and yellow fluid a perfect animal that can walk and fly and cackle? Why, whence shall feathers, and feet and claws, and the hard bill come? I shall never believe such stuff. For in the presence of this fact, as well as of thousands of others, science as a whole is as helpless as in the presence of the miracles of the Bible. But we wise people consider the miracle quite simple and natural that is repeated daily, and deny it if it occurs only once within a hundred or a thousand years.”T. Dewitt Talmage has been too shortly forgotten by the generation he served, and the land in which he won his fame.
No man of modern times thought more clearly nor spoke more forcefully; and Talmage reminded his auditors of the fact that God makes no special regulation for the graduate of Harvard or Princeton, and asserts that “the scorn and criticism and anathemas of the modern man can in no wise change the fact that we have an infallible Bible, a supernatural religion, and a Divine and all sufficient Saviour!”The record says, “The king saw the part of the hand” and Daniel interpreted it as a supernatural revelation. Who can dispute either the historical fact or its prophetic import?Supernaturalism was also in the content of the sentences.
The “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”,was “Numbered, Numbered, Weighed; Divided!” Our report is a somewhat free translation: “MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians”.That this was God’s word concerning the king and his kingdom, history immediately demonstrates. Your telephone rings; you take up the instrument and put the receiver to your ear; you hear a voice, but you see no face. The language is clear, the idea conveyed is perfect; will you deny that it is a message to you because you cannot see the spokesman? Will you be indifferent to its import because it comes to you over a long distance?Some years ago there was a hard controversy raging between Mr.
Robert Blatchford, the atheistic editor of the Socialistic paper in England, and Mr. G.
K. Chesterton, the brilliant Daily News staff writer; and in that discussion Mr. Chesterton said some things that ought never to be forgotten by the advocates of Christianity, and among them this,—“The strength of Christianity lies not in the fact that it is eloquent or successful, or well represented; it lies in the incidental fact that it is indispensable. By indispensable I mean this: It is, to all mortal appearance, impossible for men to attack Christianity without eventually ending up in positions that no sane masses of men have ever held; in positions which would horrify a decent pagan or an unbaptized savage. Schopenhauer ends by saying that life itself is a delusion. Nietzsche ends by saying that charity itself is a delusion.
Mr. Blatchford ends by saying that human goodness and badness are delusions.” “Christianity does not answer: a few of her apologists answer, and generally badly.
But she is silent, for she is old, and has seen so many paradoxes. She knows the path you are on, and has seen many on it; she knows that on it are delightful hypotheses and luxurious negations, and that that way madness lies. She knows that as soon as you want any conceivable human reality, if it be only to say ‘Thank you for the mustard,’ you will be forced to return to her and her hypotheses, where she sits, guarding through the ages the secret of an eternal sanity.”Certainly; and if any man believes that he can visit the wine room and make consorts of strange women, treat sacred things with sacrilegious hands, and not see a hand writing on the wall and read in the finished sentence his own doom, the end to which he will come will compel him, as it compelled the king, to call for God’s Prophet, to hear God’s truth, and endure God’s judgment.Supernaturalism was in every sentence of Daniel’s interpretation. “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it”. “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. “Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians”.This was not history; it was only prophecy as yet. If Daniel’s interpretation is not supernatural, if these sentences themselves are not from God, nothing will come of it. But if God wrote the declaration, and God inspired Daniel’s interpretation, then history will run into the mould of this prophecy.What does history say?“In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. “And Darius the Median took the kingdom”. And that is not biblical history only; that is world history as well.There is many a man upon whose sins sentence is already passed. His doom is a divinely determined fact, and yet he does not know it. Laughter may fill his lips, wine inflame his brain, false friends may regale him with flattery, and yet in the eternal counsels of God, judgment is already pronounced, and the Executor of the same is at hand. The fact that he does not appreciate his danger in no wise detracts from its awful reality!Some years ago a mine near Pottsville, Pa., caved in. Three miners were entombed. The rescuing gang worked strenuously for hours until at last they reached them, and lo, the men for whose lives they had feared, sat calmly about their dinner pails, eating with relish.
They knew not that anything had happened. The silent rush of sand and clay had given them no notice that they were cut off from the outside world and buried alive.Ignorance of facts and lack of fear in no wise saves men from doomed estate. Oh men, look up from your wine! Cease from the prattle of consorts; take your eyes off your gold vessels and cups of silver; see the hand writing on the wall! God’s hand is still capable, and His fingers can frame the sentences of judgment and His power is adequate to the execution of the same.But we pass to the sixth chapter, and to the last word: Daniel’s interpretation affected his political preferment. Belshazzar commanded that Daniel be clothed with scarlet, and that a chain of gold be put about his neck; and made a decree concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom. But he never lived to see it done.Darius, the Mede, in organizing the kingdom to which he had suddenly come “set over it an hundred and twenty princes * * and over these three presidents, of whom Daniel was first”, and “this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes, because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king thought to set him over the whole realm”.How like the history of Joseph, this! And yet, that is only another way of saying, “How like the custom of God!” The man that Joseph befriended in prison, once liberated, forgot him. God never did! God never forgets the man who is loyal to Him; and God is able, when He will, to take him from behind prison bars and put him in the place of power.Moses may be determined upon as a victim of Egyptian wrath against the Jew, and the life of this weak, wailing infant can only be protected by the false pretenses of an affectionate mother.
But God can pick him out of the cradle of rushes and pitch and put him in the palace for training and equip him to become a greater than the king. David may be looked upon by his fellows as nothing better than a ruddy, beautiful lad, and even treated by his elder brothers with contempt, and his very life may be sought by the mad Saul; but when God makes up His mind to set David on the throne, nothing can stand in the way.
And when did God ever do other than He did with Daniel, viz.: exalt the loyal man, put sacred trusts into the hands of the trustworthy, and bring to the place of power the man He had perfected?Daniel’s trials simply demonstrated the Divine favor. The jealousy of the princes landed him in the lion’s den. The method employed in doing it was a true measure of the men engaging in it. They held a secret session. It is commonly so with officials who propose to undo God’s anointed.In my lengthy career I have scarcely known a company of men, members of a church and occupying official position, to remove a pastor from the pulpit by open session and frank and fair discussion. The report of these presidents to the king was false.
It indicated that they had all assembled. But as Daniel was not present, nor even apprised of the meeting, they plainly lied.How many men report that “all of the officers” are of one opinion; “all of the leading people of the church” think so and so; “all the members of the board” have come to this conclusion.
A young man in a Western state was asked to resign and told that “all the people in the church felt it were better to have a change.” When he got up in prayer-meeting and asked his own people to tell him frankly what was wrong and why they so disliked him, that same people rose in wrath and excluded the two men who had made the secret report and demand.It is interesting to note Daniel’s method of meeting this indictment. He is an old man now. His hoary head is a crown of glory! I delight to watch him go into his house and then to that window in his chamber that opened toward Jerusalem, and see him kneel upon his knees three times a day and pray. What wisdom there! How much better than assembling his friends for his defense.
How much better than trying to uncover the conduct of his enemies to the eyes of the king. How much better than calling an assembly of them and charging them with falsehood and deceit, and the spirit of murder.God’s man has all the resources he needs in every time of trial; and the man who knows how to pray is the one man destined to prevail.
To him the combined forces of enemies are little more than a farce. To him hungry lions have no hint of harm.A man’s conduct is always the evidence of his creed! Campbell Morgan says two small boys on the first sharp morning of autumn, took their skates and hied themselves to a pond near by. One of them said to the other, “See, it is frozen; it will hold us up.” “All right,” replied his chum, “You put on your skates and try it.” “No, I do not want to try it; but I am sure it will hold us up; you go.” He didn’t really believe or he would have gone on.Daniel had no hesitancy at the lions’ den. Like his three Hebrew brethren he was saying, “If it be so, my God, whom I serve, He is able to deliver me, and He will deliver me, oh king. But if not, be it known unto thee, that I will not serve any other god, nor worship any other than Jehovah.”The preservation of Daniel is a precious record. His deliverance was the King’s delight; and the decree of Darius introduces another truth to which I call your attention, namely,Daniel’s testimony gave another victory to the Divine message.“Then king Darius wrote unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace he multiplied unto you. “I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel: for He is the Living God, and stedfast for ever, and His Kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and His dominion shall be even unto the end” (Daniel 6:25-26). That is the only way the Divine message of truth will ever reach men, through your testimony and mine. You have often heard that strange, sweet story of Van Dyke’s in which he tells of Christ having completed His work and returned to Heaven, and as He talked with Gabriel, that arch-angel asked Him how He proposed to have His plan of salvation reach the ears of men, and Jesus answered: “I have told John, and Andrew and Peter, and James and the others, and have asked them to bear witness.” “But suppose,” said Gabriel, “that they should forget; or suppose they are faithful, but, in the far-off twentieth century, men who know this truth should forget to tell the same, what then?” Jesus solemnly answered, “I have made no other plan.”Africa has a little light; but the greater portion of her people still sit in darkness and the only possible hope of salvation for millions and millions of the inhabitants of the black continent is with us! Are we bearing our testimony by our gifts of money, by our offers of self? China, Japan, India, the Isles, these are a part of the peoples, and nations, and languages of the earth. How are they ever to come to a knowledge of the Living God; how are they ever to know of His Kingdom, of His endless dominion, except we speak by every power at our command?Oh, the hour will break when the money we have hoarded will burn as might coals of fire; when the gold we have refused to make speak for our Master will eat as doth the gangrene, for the hour will come when we will have to stand before Him to give an account of our stewardship!What are we doing today to bring the knowledge of Jehovah to “all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth”? Daniel’s example was a worthy one.
The God of Daniel wants us to be alike faithful. We have long known something of the legend which was employed in the immortal Polish romance “Quo Vadis;” of how, under the fearful persecution of Nero the Christians at Rome went through fiery trials, multitudes of them being burned at the stake, soaked in oil, securely tethered in the Roman square. The very streets themselves were lighted at night by ghastly sights of flaming men and burning women! It was reported that Peter himself, with a little band of fugitive Christians, fleeing from the persecutions, came face to face with His Master, walking toward the city, and Peter said to Him: “Lord, whither goest Thou?” “I am going back to Rome to be crucified again because My servant Peter has turned his back to the Cross.”And Peter answered, “Not so, Lord; I will go back again and gladly die for Thee.” And so, as tradition tells us, with head down he let them nail him to the cross, trusting that his blood would be the seed of the Church and that his sacrifice would send the message of truth and salvation farther than would his living speech.There is a passage in the Scriptures which speaks of our filling “up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ”. Are we doing it, or are we so far failing to get the blessed message of His salvation to all people, nations, and languages that our very failure crucifies Him afresh and puts Him to an open shame?