“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.” Daniel 5:1-4
Basically, Belshazzar and his homies were kicking it, when the party got lit in his drunkenness and he asked the vessels from the temple be brought. And the thought occurred to me that sometimes when we are drifting away from God’s will we will cling to an outward token or symbol of faith of God’s presence to compensate for God’s absence from our lives in order to ease our conscience. So we continue to praise the other “gods” in our life instead being unbothered. And the more we drift from God the more we may pretend we are not until we are so deep in our self-deceit regarding our spiritual state that God has to do something drastic in order to get our attention.
God gave Belshazzar a wakeup call by writing on the wall. “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 legs became weak and his knees were knocking.” Daniel 5:5-6 I think it is interesting that the text goes out of its way to say the writing was next to a lampstand. Lampstands played a very notable role in the tabernacle and in Revelation 2 we see Yeshua in the mist of the lampstands speaking to the different Messianic communities addressing their spiritual state.
The temple references are very important because the Messiah is still at work in heaven. “…when the Messiah appeared as cohen gadol of the good things that are happening already, then, through the greater and more perfect Tent which is not man-made (that is, it is not of this created world), he entered the Holiest Place once and for all. And he entered not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus setting people free forever.” Hebrews 9:11-12
However, in order to benefit from the atoning work of the Messiah on our behalf we must be willing to acknowledge our sins and repent, which won’t happen if we are too busy avoiding the truth about ourselves by finding distractions from our faults in entertainment, relationships, work, or anything else. So let God crash your party. Don’t get so caught up in pleasure or businesses you ruin your future. “Come near to God, and he will come near to you. Clean up your lives, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you people who can’t make up your mind.” James 4:8
