There’s a strange thing that happens in the wilderness. You can feel completely safe, totally at ease, right up until the moment you realize how wrong you were. I’ve had trips like that. One in particular still sits in my memory. We were hiking a stretch of trail that followed a ridge above a small chasm. The ledge was a slight incline of rocks. I had traversed them before, but not like this. They were covered in snow. I thought, “This can’t be much harder. It’s just snow.”
But as I started to move along the sloped walls, hand over hand, foot over foot, I found out the hard way that beneath the light, fluffy snow was a sheet of ice—snow that had melted and refrozen. I tried to find something firm to grab onto, but everything was slick and wet. Suddenly the whole world tilted. My feet shot out, and for a split second I had no control. Nothing but air and gravity and the sickening awareness that danger had been under me the whole time; I just couldn’t see it.
I caught myself—barely. But that moment stuck with me, the way fear has a way of doing. Not because I got hurt, but because of how quickly things turned from comfortable to dangerous. One second you’re confident. The next second you’re reminded how small you are, how fragile you are, how quickly everything can shift beneath you.
That’s the feeling Daniel 5 gives you if you let it. Not just “wow, crazy story,” but that deeper feeling in your gut that says, “I am not as secure as I thought.”
And before we step into the scene, let me introduce the man at the center of it, because Belshazzar isn’t a name most of us grew up hearing. He’s not a hero. He’s not a prophet. He’s not even one of those tragic figures you slowly sympathize with. He shows up suddenly, loudly, and he’s gone just as fast.
Belshazzar is the last king of Babylon. He’s the man sitting on the throne at the very end. He’s also the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, and that matters, because Nebuchadnezzar learned—painfully—that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of men. Belshazzar grew up in the shadow of that story. He knew what happened. He knew the warning. And Daniel 5 is what it looks like when someone knows the truth about God and still refuses to humble himself.
Belshazzar lived his whole life without that wilderness awareness. Daniel 5 is a story about a man who thought he was safe because he mistook comfort for security. It’s the story of a king who partied while his kingdom burned, who convinced himself he was untouchable because the walls were high and the wine was flowing. It’s the story of someone who kept the music loud enough to drown out the truth: danger was already sitting at the door.
When we open Daniel 5, that’s exactly where we find him. A great hall filled with nobles. Gold shining. Torches lit. Thousands drinking, laughing, boasting. The vessels stolen from God’s temple in Jerusalem passed around like trophies of war. It’s all confidence and bravado. But beneath that noise, beneath that effortless arrogance, the clock is already running out. Judgment is already on the way. His security is a mirage, and the desert winds are rising.
Before we unpack what’s happening in Babylon, I want to let Jesus interpret the human heart for us, because He tells a story that names this kind of false confidence with surgical precision. Luke 12:13–21 is the parable of the rich fool. A man’s land produces abundantly, and he decides to build bigger barns. He tells himself, “You have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” And then God says, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you.”
Jesus isn’t condemning the man’s wealth. He’s exposing his delusion. His fatal mistake wasn’t abundance; it was presumption. He believed he had more time. He believed he was in control. He believed nothing could touch him. And he discovered too late that the one thing he had never accounted for was the God who held his breath in His hands.
Belshazzar is the Old Testament version of that man—a king who believes his walls are thick enough, his throne high enough, his power stable enough to secure his life against the God of heaven. But Daniel 5 shows us something that echoes throughout Scripture: no kingdom is too strong to fall, no wall too thick to crack, no human power too stable to escape the sovereignty of God.
Last month, we saw three young men stand in the fire because they trusted God more than the outcome. Today, we see the other side of reality: what happens when a person trusts the outcome more than God. Daniel 5 shows us the danger of a heart that refuses humility, refuses to listen, refuses to bow—until it is too late.
Before we unpack the handwriting on the wall, we have to understand the room where it appeared. Daniel 5 is not simply a story about a drunken king. It’s a historical moment—a hinge in world history—when God brought down the world’s greatest empire in a single night. And everything about the way this night unfolds is soaked in arrogance, blindness, and spiritual defiance.
Belshazzar opens the chapter hosting a lavish feast for a thousand of his nobles. It’s the kind of scene ancient empires staged to display stability, legitimacy, and power. But what the text doesn’t mention outright, and what history fills in for us, is that this feast happens while Babylon is already under siege. Outside the massive walls, the Medo-Persian armies are tightening their grip. They’ve already defeated Babylon’s forces in earlier confrontations. They’re already diverting the Euphrates River. Babylon’s fall is not a distant threat; it is happening that night.
The defenses of Babylon were legendary. Ancient sources speak of enormous walls—fifty, sixty, even eighty feet high, wide enough for chariots to ride on top, stretching for miles. The Euphrates River ran directly through the city, flowing beneath the walls through fortified gates. In the ancient world, Babylon felt untouchable. No one had ever taken the city by direct assault. Belshazzar knew this. Everyone knew this. He wasn’t throwing a party because he was careless; he was throwing a party because he was convinced the city could not fall. His confidence was built on stone and water and history. But false security is still false, even when it looks impressive.
This is where Daniel 5 starts to feel uncomfortably modern. The king’s confidence isn’t rooted in the character of God. It’s rooted in engineering, architecture, wealth, and the illusion of control. Babylon feels permanent. But permanence is an illusion when God withdraws His hand.
Then comes the centerpiece of the feast. Belshazzar calls for the vessels from Jerusalem’s temple, the gold cups that once belonged to the worship of Yahweh. These weren’t souvenirs. They weren’t just expensive containers. They were sacred objects forged for holy purposes, handled only by priests, consecrated for worship. When Nebuchadnezzar carried them off decades earlier, Israel learned the bitter taste of God’s judgment. But Nebuchadnezzar never used those vessels like this.
In the ancient world, bringing those vessels into a pagan feast was not casual irreverence. It was a public act of spiritual defiance—a deliberate statement of dominance over the God of Israel. Kings often displayed sacred artifacts taken from conquered nations to show that their gods had been humiliated. Belshazzar is making a statement. He is saying, “Your God lost. Babylon won.”
He doesn’t just misuse the vessels. He weaponizes them. He fills them with wine and lifts them in the presence of idols, praising gods of gold and silver and bronze and wood and stone. This isn’t generic paganism. This is mockery, a deliberate taunt, a declaration that Yahweh has no power here.
But the reader knows something Belshazzar doesn’t. God has been patient, but not absent. And the arrogance of this feast exposes a king who doesn’t understand his place in the story at all. Later in the chapter Daniel tells him, “You knew all this”—you knew what God did to Nebuchadnezzar, how He humbles kings, how He raises up and tears down. “And yet,” Daniel says, “you did not humble yourself.”
That’s where the tension builds. The world Belshazzar believes is safe is already collapsing. The river is being diverted. The Persian troops are approaching the gates. The kingdom he boasts in has already been numbered, weighed, and found wanting—and yet he cannot see it.
Historically, Belshazzar isn’t even the sole king of Babylon—he’s the co-regent. His father Nabonidus had spent years away from the city chasing his own religious interests, leaving Belshazzar to rule in his place. So Belshazzar sits on a throne he didn’t build, in a city he didn’t secure, under a God he refuses to acknowledge, and he assumes he can never lose it.
Daniel 5 opens with an empire feasting on the edge of a cliff. The king believes he is secure because the walls are tall, the wine is flowing, and the music is loud. But this is Babylon’s last night. The city that once conquered Jerusalem is about to fall without a recorded battle. The river will drop. The gates will be exposed. The Persians will march in.
And in that moment—when arrogance blinds a king to the danger pressed against his walls—God interrupts the feast.
When the hand appears, everything in the room stops. The musicians freeze. The laughter evaporates. The king’s face drains of color. Daniel says Belshazzar’s knees knock together—a detail so vivid it almost feels comedic, until you remember that this is the moment a man realizes that the God he mocked has come to collect what belongs to Him.
The hand writes on the plaster of the wall—words visible to everyone, but readable to no one. Most ancient Near Eastern kings didn’t read or write themselves. That was the work of scribes, priests, and trained officials. Belshazzar may be the most powerful man in the room, but in this moment he has no power at all. The writing is right in front of him, glowing in the lamplight, but he cannot interpret it. It is a message he cannot escape, but also cannot understand.
This is a central theme in Daniel: the world may have power, but only the faithful have clarity. It is the exile—not the king—who understands what God is doing.
The king calls in his wise men, the astrologers, the enchanters, hoping their professional expertise can decipher the writing. But the issue is not that the words are too mysterious. The words themselves are simple Aramaic. The problem is that the message is from God, and only someone who knows the God of Israel can explain it. The wise men have nothing to say because their gods have no voice here. Revelation belongs to Yahweh alone.
Then the queen mother enters the hall. She hasn’t been at the feast. She hasn’t been drinking. She has perspective. And she speaks with a kind of calm clarity: “There is a man in your kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods.” She remembers Daniel—the man who interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, the man whose wisdom outlived administrations, the man who has served faithfully through regime changes and national upheaval.
By this time Daniel is likely around eighty years old. He has been in Babylon longer than most of the nobles in the room have been alive. His hair is gray. His body is worn. But his clarity, his faithfulness, has not dimmed.
Belshazzar summons him and, in a display of sheer arrogance, offers him purple robes, a gold chain, and the third-highest position in the kingdom.
But Daniel doesn’t need rewards from a man who won’t survive the night. He says, with quiet strength, “Let your gifts be for yourself, and give your rewards to another.” It’s not rudeness; it’s discernment. Daniel is not for sale. He speaks truth not because it’s profitable, but because it’s right.
Then Daniel delivers what might be one of the most courageous rebukes in all of Scripture. He reminds Belshazzar of Nebuchadnezzar—how God gave him greatness, how pride led to his downfall, how he lived among the beasts until he learned humility. And then Daniel delivers the indictment at the core of the chapter: “But you, Belshazzar… you knew all this. And you have not humbled yourself.”
This is not ignorance. It is defiance. Belshazzar isn’t judged because he didn’t know better. He’s judged because he knew better and refused to bow.
And then comes the most devastating line Daniel speaks: “The God in whose hand is your breath, and all your ways, you have not honored.”
Belshazzar’s downfall doesn’t begin with wine or idols or golden cups. It begins with forgetting whose breath he is using to mock God. The lungs that draw in the air to shout praise to Babylon’s gods are receiving oxygen as a gift from the very God he refuses to honor.
That is the heart of Daniel 5. God isn’t simply judging a king. He is revealing the truth that every human life—every kingdom, every breath—stands accountable to Him.
Then comes the interpretation of the writing—a masterpiece of prophetic poetry and divine verdict.
Daniel explains that the inscription is built from three Aramaic weight units: Mene, Tekel, and Peres. It’s as if God has stamped ancient coins onto the wall—weights every Babylonian merchant would recognize. But there is more going on than units of money. Each word carries a verb and a verdict. Mene means “numbered.” Tekel means “weighed.” Peres carries the sense of “divided,” or better, “handed over.”
God takes the vocabulary of the marketplace—the language of scales and measures—and applies it to a human life and a human kingdom. Belshazzar has been placed on the scale of heaven, and the results are in. This is not guesswork. It is measurement. Judgment is not arbitrary; it is precise.
Daniel spells it out plainly. Mene: God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. Tekel: you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Peres: your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and Persians. Peres isn’t just a prediction that things might someday fall apart. It carries the idea of a completed transaction. The kingdom is already gone. God has already transferred it to another. The decree is final. Heaven’s verdict has moved from warning to execution.
With the verdict spoken and the interpretation complete, the story accelerates toward its climax. The feast is still happening. The torches are still lit. The wine is still spilling. But outside those massive walls, the river is dropping. The gates beneath the city are exposed. And the new empire ordained by God is already at the doorstep.
If Daniel 5 were a modern movie, this is where the music would swell. The king trembles. The prophet speaks. The words are interpreted. And you might expect some moment of repentance—some sign of humility, some crack in Belshazzar’s pride.
But he gives none.
He simply orders Daniel to be clothed in purple and placed third in command of a kingdom that will not survive the night. It is one of the most tragically ironic promotions in all of Scripture—like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while the hull is already underwater. Belshazzar honors Daniel’s interpretation without honoring the God who sent it. He hears the verdict but not the invitation. And while he is dressing Daniel in the garments of authority, judgment is already walking his streets.
History tells us how that judgment unfolded. The Persians didn’t scale the walls. They didn’t batter down the gates. They didn’t starve the people out. They diverted the Euphrates River upstream, lowering the water level enough that soldiers could walk beneath the city wall along the riverbed, right into the heart of Babylon. The very thing Belshazzar trusted—the river that flowed through the city—became the entry point for his downfall. The thing he assumed made him safe became the pathway for judgment. That is often how God works. We are rarely destroyed by what we fear. More often, we are destroyed by what we trust instead of Him.
The text captures the suddenness with stunning simplicity.
Some ancient records even hint that Belshazzar may have tried to kill himself rather than be captured—a desperate, chaotic end for a man who, hours earlier, was singing the praises of Babylon’s greatness. In a single night, pride collapsed. Power evaporated. The greatest city of the ancient world, with walls thick enough to drive chariots on top, belonged to someone else. Kingdoms that look invincible in the morning can fall by nightfall when God writes the ending.
And standing in the middle of this seismic transfer of power is Daniel—around eighty years old, still faithful, still sharp, still unbent by seventy years in exile. Kings rise, kings fall, kingdoms trade hands, but Daniel remains. He outlives Nebuchadnezzar. He outlives Belshazzar. He will serve under Darius and into the Persian administration. Exile doesn’t define him. The empire doesn’t shape him. The throne shifting beneath him doesn’t move him.
Daniel doesn’t merely survive exile; he lives faithfully in it. He remains steady when the world around him loses its mind. He stays grounded in Scripture when kings drown themselves in arrogance. He reads the handwriting of God while the empire reads nothing at all. Daniel doesn’t just interpret the words; he interprets the moment. He sees God moving in history in real time. He stands unshaken because his hope was never anchored in Babylon to begin with.
This is part of the wisdom God wants to form in His people: the ability to see the difference between what is loud and what is lasting. Belshazzar was loud. Babylon was loud. The feast was loud. The idols were loud. None of them lasted. Daniel was quiet. The Word of God was quiet. The true King of heaven was quiet. Those were the things that lasted.
This whole scene—this dramatic rise and fall—sets up one of the richest biblical contrasts in Scripture: the two feasts. Belshazzar’s feast is a celebration of pride, indulgence, and blasphemy. It is a meal where sacred things are treated as common, where worship is given to idols, where everyone forgets that they owe their breath to the God they mock. The result of that feast is judgment, division, and death.
The Lord’s Supper—Christ’s feast—is the exact opposite. It is a table of humility, sacrifice, and grace. It is the place where the sacred blood of Christ is not mocked but received in faith. It is where sinners are invited, not to boast, but to repent and be healed. It is the feast where God’s kingdom is not divided but extended, where death is defeated by the One who drank the full cup of judgment on our behalf.
Belshazzar raised a cup of stolen gold and declared that God had no claim on him. Jesus raised a cup of redemption and declared that God had come to rescue us. Belshazzar died that night. Christ died in our place. Belshazzar’s kingdom was handed over in judgment. Christ’s kingdom is handed to us in mercy.
So when Daniel stands in that palace, speaking judgment over a king who refused to humble himself, he is standing in a story that is reaching forward toward a better King—a King who does not mock God but obeys Him unto death, a King who sees the writing on the wall of human sin and chooses to bear the verdict Himself.
This is where Daniel 5 bends toward the gospel. The handwriting on the wall is not just Belshazzar’s verdict. It’s ours too.
And this is where I want to slow down. Not for drama. Not for effect. But because this is the moment where a sermon like this either stays safely “back then,” or it comes and sits down in the living room with us.
It’s easy to hear Daniel 5 and keep it at arm’s length. Ancient king. Ancient empire. Ancient arrogance. But Daniel won’t let us do that. Because the God in this chapter isn’t a museum piece. He isn’t the God of Babylon only. He’s the God who holds every breath in this room.
The same God who watched Belshazzar raise a cup in mockery is the God who has watched you drive home from work exhausted. He’s watched you stare at your phone at night, scrolling, numbing, avoiding. He’s watched you do the outward stuff—keep the routine, say the right words, show up—and inside, quietly drift. Not because you hate Him. Not because you’re trying to rebel. Just because life gets loud and we learn how to survive.
Some of you are tired, and you don’t even have language for it anymore. You’ve been running for so long that “busy” feels normal. Some of you are anxious, and you’ve been trying to manage your fear with control—control of your schedule, control of your kids, control of your finances, control of outcomes you were never meant to control. Some of you are doing fine on the outside, but you know you’ve been on autopilot with God. You still believe. You still show up. But if you were honest, you haven’t really been listening. You haven’t really been bending your knee. You’ve been living like the Lord is helpful, but not necessary.
And if that hits a nerve, I want you to hear me clearly. I’m not saying that to shame you. I’m saying it because I know the feeling. I know what it is to build “walls” in my own life. Not stone walls like Babylon, but the kind of walls that make me feel safe. Plans. Routines. Backup options. My ability to stay productive. My ability to keep people happy. My ability to keep moving so I don’t have to deal with what’s really going on.
And then there are moments—quiet moments—where the Lord breaks through. A sentence of Scripture I can’t shake. A conviction that won’t let me sleep. A realization that I’ve been using God-language, but trusting in something else.
And here’s the hard truth Daniel 5 forces us to face. Left to ourselves, we are numbered. We are weighed. And on our own, we are found wanting.
That’s not just about “bad people.” That’s the human condition. That’s Romans 3. That’s the honest verdict over every heart when it stands on its own merits. And if Daniel 5 ended there, we’d all leave crushed.
But this is where the gospel meets us.
Jesus Christ steps into that verdict for us.
He doesn’t deny the writing. He doesn’t pretend the scales aren’t real. He doesn’t say, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” while the ground is sliding out from under us. He walks straight into the courtroom of God and takes the judgment we deserve.
He allows Himself to be numbered with sinners. He allows Himself to be weighed under the full weight of God’s justice. He allows Himself to be handed over—betrayed, condemned, crucified—so the verdict written against us would fall on Him instead.
Belshazzar lifted a cup in arrogance and sealed his own judgment. Jesus lifted a cup in obedience and sealed our redemption.
And listen—if you’ve ever wondered whether God is only a Judge, Daniel 5 points you forward to a cross. The Judge steps down. The King lays aside His rights. The Holy One is treated as guilty so the guilty could be treated as beloved.
At the cross, the writing changes. What once read condemnation is rewritten as mercy. What once declared guilt now declares grace. In Christ, the final word over your life is no longer “found wanting,” but “fully paid.”
So here’s the invitation, and it’s simple.
Stop pretending your walls can hold. Stop numbing your soul with noise. Stop treating God like a supporting character in the story of your life. Humble yourself before the One who holds your breath.
Because the same God who writes judgment is the God who offers mercy. The same God who weighs hearts is the God who heals hearts. The same God who brought down Babylon is the God who raises the dead.
If Daniel 3 taught us how to stand when the fire comes, Daniel 5 teaches us how to see before it does. It calls us to renounce the false security of our own walls, to humble ourselves before the God who holds our breath, and to anchor our hope in the only kingdom that will never be handed over to another.
Westerman.Blog 