Daniel 5: The Writing is on the Wall - Tim Horman
There is an army camped outside your walls. Your soldiers have already been cut to pieces in open battle. The enemy is quietly damming the river so they can walk in under your defences, and everyone in the city knows it. What do you do with the last night you have?
Belshazzar, the king of Babylon, threw a party. A thousand nobles. The wine flowing. The sacred cups from the temple in Jerusalem hauled out and passed around. And in the middle of it, a hand appeared and started writing on the plaster wall.
This week Tim Horman preached from Daniel 5 as part of our series Resisting Babylon. It is the chapter that gave the English language the phrase "the writing is on the wall", and it is one of the strangest, most cinematic scenes in the Bible. You can watch the full message in the video above, or listen to the audio version below.
A party at the end of the world
Tim began by setting the scene, because the timeline matters. The events of Daniel 5 happen roughly seventy years after Daniel was first dragged to Babylon as a thirteen year old. Daniel is now an old man, well into his eighties. Nebuchadnezzar is long dead. And the empire that once looked unshakeable is hours away from collapse.
The Medes and the Persians have massed outside the city. They have already destroyed Babylon's army in the field. They are working to divert the Euphrates so they can use the dry riverbed to slip beneath walls that would otherwise be impregnable. Nobody inside knows exactly what is coming. Mercy? Slaughter? Slavery? Fire? They only know it is something terrible.
Tim compared it to the band on the Titanic, still playing on deck as the ship goes down. Babylon is sinking. And Belshazzar is hosting a banquet.
It is also worth reading chapter 5 as the flip side of chapter 4. In Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar sets himself up against the God of heaven, God humbles him, and at his absolute lowest point he lifts his face to heaven and repents. Chapter 4 is essentially Nebuchadnezzar's own conversion testimony, written for his whole empire to read, holding nothing back, including his worst moments. It ends with a line that turns out to be a warning shot for everything that follows: those who walk in pride, God is able to humble.
Belshazzar is Nebuchadnezzar's grandson, possibly great grandson. He knows the story. And he does the opposite.
Why the party was really an act of worship
Tim pushed past the obvious question. Why throw a party when there is an invading army at the gate?
Commentators offer a few options. Maybe Belshazzar has simply given up and decided to go out in a blaze of wine and song. Maybe it is political, a distraction to keep his nobles from staging a coup and offering his head as terms of surrender. But Tim argued that the most likely explanation is religious.
In the ancient world, warfare was understood as gods fighting gods, and the god with the most worshippers, the most honour, the most adoration, was usually the god who won. So this may well have been one last enormous offering, a thousand participants strong, designed to get the gods of Babylon to notice and intervene. The wine, the food, the harem brought out of seclusion: all of it belonged to the pattern of pagan worship in the temples of that city.
And into that offering, Belshazzar folds one more gesture. He sends for the sacred cups looted from the temple in Jerusalem, the ones mentioned all the way back in Daniel 1, and uses them to toast the gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood and stone. It is a deliberate, public humiliation of the God of heaven, the God his own ancestor had bowed to.
Tim's read on the motive is worth sitting with. Perhaps Belshazzar thinks the God of heaven has failed, not strong enough to hold off the Persian gods. Or perhaps he thinks the old gods turned on Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar abandoned them, and the way back to greatness is to put this so-called God of heaven firmly in his place.
If the aim was to get a god's attention, it worked. Just not the god he had in mind. Tim pointed to Paul in Galatians 6: God cannot be mocked, and a person reaps what they sow.
The sin Daniel actually named
When the wise men fail and the king comes apart, the queen mother arrives and tells her son to pull himself together. She remembers Daniel. So Daniel is summoned, offered gold, a purple robe, and the position of third highest ruler in the kingdom, which is a strange thing to be offered by a man whose kingdom has hours left.
Daniel's answer is blunt to the point of comedy. Keep your gifts. Give your rewards to someone else. He will read the writing anyway.
Then he tells Belshazzar exactly what is wrong, and it is not the thing you might expect. Using the temple cups was offensive, certainly. But that is not where Daniel lands. He lands on verse 22: you have not humbled yourself, though you knew all of this.
That last clause is the whole indictment. Nebuchadnezzar's pride was, at least at first, the pride of ignorance. Belshazzar has no such excuse. He had read the testimony. He knew what happened to his ancestor and why. And knowing it, he doubled down.
The writing itself is a set of weights and measures. Mene, numbered: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end. Tekel, weighed: you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Peres, divided: your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
That very night Belshazzar was killed, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom.
The God who cannot be bought
One of the most striking observations in the message was about the contrast in that room. Belshazzar is dressed in every symbol of power he owns, and he is shaking so badly he can barely stand. Daniel is an eighty-something exile with no army and no title worth having, and he is the most composed person present.
He looks more kingly in this moment and more composed in this moment than Belshazzar ever could, though he is dressed up in all of his fine robes.
Tim connected this to Daniel's name, which means God is my judge. Daniel can speak the truth without apology, even at the cost of his life, because he already knows the only verdict that will ever matter. There is literally nothing Babylon can offer him.
What happens next is almost pitiful. Belshazzar rewards Daniel anyway. Purple robe, gold chain, third in the kingdom. Tim suggested he is still hoping that money and status might buy God off, might bribe his way out of the judgment he has just heard read aloud.
It does not work. Tim was direct about it: no amount of power or status or wealth or achievement, and not even your good works, will ever be enough to impress God. God cannot be bought.
From there he drew a line to another scene, another man of God standing in front of another ruler who thought he held the power of life and death. Pilate asks Jesus whether he understands who has the authority to free him or crucify him. Jesus tells him he would have no power at all unless it had been given from above.
You have nothing except what has been given to you. You own nothing, nothing.
And one day, Tim said, all of it will be stripped away and you will stand before God. What will commend you then?
Taking holy things for granted
This is where the sermon turned from Babylon to us, and it landed uncomfortably close.
Tim's concern was not that we are staging drunken banquets with communion cups. It is subtler than that. It is that we can start treating the holiness of God as something ordinary. We can take what is most sacred for granted. We presume on grace, and our worship quietly goes half hearted, lukewarm, apathetic. And if we are honest, he said, worship offered like that starts to look less like devotion and more like mockery.
He read from Annie Dillard, who once described churchgoers as tourists on a package tour of the absolute, wondering aloud whether anyone in the room has the faintest idea what power they are casually invoking. Her suggestion was that instead of Sunday best, ushers should be handing out crash helmets and life preservers and lashing the congregation to the pews, in case the God we address actually turns up.
C.S. Lewis was the other voice in the room. Lewis called pride the essential vice, the utmost evil, and said the other sins on display in Daniel 5, the drunkenness and greed and unchastity, are mere fleabites by comparison. His point was that other vices can at least bring people together, but pride always means enmity: between people, and toward God.
If pride really is the root of most of the misery in the world, then the antidote is humility. Tim was careful to define it, because the word gets misused constantly.
Humility is not grovelling. It's not hating yourself. It's not making yourself less than.
Humility, in his framing, is simply recognising that there is a power above you and greater than you, a God who made you, and that because he is your Creator it is only in him that you will find your true home, your meaning, your peace, your healing.
It's not because God needs anything from you. It's because you need everything from God.
And humility does not shrink you. Look at Daniel. He is the model of it, and he radiates confidence and moral courage. Tim's contrast was sharp: humility says I will build my life on God alone, I will trust God to be my Saviour. Pride says I will build my life on myself, I will trust myself to be my Saviour. But if you build on yourself, what holds you up when your strength fails, when you grieve, when you make a mess of things, when everything falls apart? Belshazzar, for all his wealth, is shown to be a man without substance. Pride gives the appearance of strength and fails every time it is tested.
From the wall in Babylon to the dust in Jerusalem
Tim finished with an image borrowed from John Lennox, and it is the reason this sermon does not end in judgment.
The lampstand in the banqueting hall eventually burned out, and the writing on the wall was swallowed up in darkness. But the hand that wrote in Babylon that night would write again. Next time, in the dirt, in Jerusalem.
John 8 opens with religious leaders dragging a woman caught in adultery and throwing her in front of Jesus. They have read the writing of the law, written by the finger of God, and they know what it says. They expose her to the light of it, hoping to trap Jesus into contradicting it.
And Jesus gets down in the dirt with her and starts writing with his finger. John never tells us what he wrote. Tim wondered aloud whether it might have been mene, mene, tekel, peres.
Then he stands, looks them in the eye, and says: let the one among you without sin throw the first stone. And he bends down and writes again.
They walk away one by one, beginning with the oldest. Tim's observation, following Lennox, is that they had just stepped unknowingly into the presence of a far stronger light than the light of the law, a light that reached into consciences they thought were safe. They could not bear it, so they went back into the darkness.
The woman stayed. She was no less exposed than they were, no less guilty. She could have run too. But she could see that Jesus had protected her. And when he finally asks where her accusers have gone and she says there are none left, he tells her he does not condemn her either, and sends her out to a different kind of life. He did not condone what she had done. But from that moment the energy of her life came from the fact that she had been forgiven.
That is the same light, Tim said, and it is still doing the same work today.
His most personal moment came right after, and it is the sentence worth carrying home. Reading the story this week, he realised he is the woman caught in adultery. He is also one of the men standing there with a rock in his hand, ready to kill for religious reasons.
I'm also Belshazzar. And so are you.
Until we admit that, we cannot receive what Christ is offering. And that forgiveness, though it is free, was never cheap. It cost Jesus everything. God has always been a God of judgment and a God of mercy, and for those two to meet, someone still had to pay. Someone had to pay for Belshazzar. Someone had to pay for the woman. Someone had to pay for the men holding the stones. Jesus did all of it.
Hebrews says people are destined to die once and after that to face judgment. Tim quoted that early in the sermon and deliberately stopped halfway. At the end he finished the sentence: Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many, and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
One way to live it out this week
Pick one thing you have started treating as ordinary. It might be communion, or the Bible on your bedside table, or the fact that you can pray at all, or a specific rescue in your life that you have stopped being astonished by. Sit with it for ten minutes this week and deliberately remember what it cost and what it would mean to be without it. Then say so out loud to God. Belshazzar's problem was not that he did not know the story, it was that knowing it changed nothing in him. The antidote to a lukewarm heart is not trying harder. It is remembering, honestly and specifically, that you did not earn any of this.
A short prayer for your week
Father, we confess that we have handled holy things carelessly.
We have taken your grace for granted and called it familiarity.
We have built quietly on ourselves and called it faith.
Forgive us for the pride we have not wanted to name.
Thank you that the same hand that wrote judgment on a wall
knelt in the dust to defend a woman nobody else would.
Make us humble enough to receive what we could never earn.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
Belshazzar knew the story of Nebuchadnezzar and it changed nothing. Where in your own life do you already know what God has said, and simply have not acted on it?
Tim described humility as recognising that you cannot make your life work without God. Which part of your life are you still trying to make work on your own?
What sacred thing have you started treating as ordinary, and what would it take to see it clearly again?
Small Group Discussion
Read Daniel 5:1 to 12 together. What stands out to you about the timing and the atmosphere of this banquet?
Why do you think Belshazzar specifically chose the temple cups? What was he trying to say by using them?
Daniel names pride, not sacrilege, as the real problem in verse 22. Why do you think that is the deeper issue?
Compare Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 4 with Belshazzar in chapter 5. What made the difference between them?
Daniel refuses the king's rewards. What does that tell us about where his security came from, and what would the equivalent look like for us?
C.S. Lewis called pride the complete anti-God state of mind. Do you agree that it sits underneath the other sins? Why or why not?
Tim said he is the woman caught in adultery, the men with the stones, and Belshazzar all at once. Which of those three is easiest for you to identify with, and which is hardest?
Where does your group most need humility right now? Share honestly, then pray for one another about the specific things named.