Sermon Tone Analysis

Forfeited grace

A king found wanting

!!! /Lord’s Day 17 September 2006, 9.00am/

!!! Announcements

!!! Creative silence

!!!

The word of God in our midst

!!!

Call to worship

He is the living God and He endures forever; His kingdom will not be destroyed, His dominion will never end.

He rescues and He saves; He performs signs and wonders in the heavens and on the earth.”

(Daniel 6:26-27)

!!! Blessing

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever.

Amen.

(Galatians 1:3-5)

!!! Doxology Hymn No 635:        /“Now to Him who loved us”/            

!!! Prayer of Confession of sin and the Lord’s Prayer

!!! Forgiveness

If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.

(Psalm 130:3-4)

!!! Children’s Address

!!! Hymn:                                            /“Psalm 19 –The heavens above declare” (Tune Rejoice! 1 – 7 verses//)/

!!! Tithes, offering and dedication

!!! Prayer for others

!!! Scripture Reading                     /Daniel 5:1-31/

!!! Hymn No 562:                            /“Master, speak for I am listening”/

!!! Sermon                                          /“Forfeited grace – a king found wanting”/

 

My dear brothers and sisters in the Lord, how many times have you heard the Gospel of forgiveness in the Lord Jesus Christ?

Do you perhaps come from a family where the Lord is served by godly parents or grandparents?

You have seen the grace of God at work all around you; you heard about it; you see the effects of grace changing the lives of people as they become redeemed children of God.

But what about you?  Have you responded to it?

Belshazzar, the king of Babylon, grew up in a palace where his grandfather, once the great king of the most powerful kingdom in the known world of his time, came to know the Lord in a most dramatic way.

It changed his life and he saw to it that all of his subjects knew about it.

; Map of his kingdom.

At the end of his life Nebuchadnezzar declared this about God:

At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored.

Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever.

His dominion is an eternal dominion; his kingdom endures from generation to generation.

All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing.

He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth.

No one can hold back his hand or say to him: “What have you done?” (Daniel 4:34-35)

To which he added:  “/Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything He does is right and all his ways are just.

And those who walk in pride He is able to humble./”

(Daniel 4:37)

There was a time that Daniel, who had been elevated by the king to a high position in his kingdom and very close to the king at that time, were concerned about the king’s eternal life before God.

Daniel said to the king:  “/Please accept my advice: renounce your sin by doing what is right and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed.

It may be that then your prosperity will continue./”

By all accounts, after being humbled by the Lord for a time, Nebuchadnezzar heeded the advice of Daniel and became a worshipper of God.

The impact of this repentance of this once godless king must have been enormous, not only right through his kingdom, but also in his palace.

But fact is, the successors of old Nebuchadnezzar did not follow in his footsteps.

This takes us now to Daniel chapter 5.

Who is Belshazzar?

He was the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar dies old, and his son Evel-Merodach took over the kingdom.

His brother killed him, and took over as king.

But in a conspiracy an outsider, Nabonidus, gains the throne, marries Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter.

Their eldest son was Belshazzar.

With the Medes and the Persians about to attack the city, Nabonidus moved to Arabia, and gave his son Belshazzar the control of Babylon.

In the meantime the Medes and Persians under Cyrus were closing in.

They camped outside the city wall for several weeks.

Inside Babylon there is enough provision for years of siege if necessary.

The date is Saturday, October 12, 539 BC – and Belshazzar called a party for his officials.

In the face of sure destruction this dumb and stupid king chose to live out his philosophy:  if I worry I die; if I don’t worry, I die; so, why worry!

Let us drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!

Like the parachuter who realised his parachute won’t open.

Sure that he was going to die and that he was not able to do much about it, he decided to sit tight and at least enjoy the scenery.

In the midst of the orgy of lust and drunkenness where the officials, the kings wives and his concubines desecrated the holy objects which had been taken out of the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem when the people were taken into captivity, and at which they blasphemed the Living God of heaven and earth by worshipping the gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood and stone, Belshazzar saw a hand writing on the wall of his great banquet hall.

Like with a cutting torch, this hand wrote four words on the wall into the plaster.

One gets the impression Belshazzar was the only one to see this miracle.

And in his drunkenness he became very scared.

His face turned pale, his knees knocked together and he passed out on the floor.

The music stopped.

The dancers looked at one another, and perhaps some thought the king had too much to drink.

For a moment they thought to carry on with their blasphemies.

But the king was not hazy and unclear.

All of a sudden his mind was clear.

He knew this was something awesome and extraordinary.

He couldn’t get any sense out of his astrologers and wise men and diviners.

They were dum-struck.

His nobles were baffled – and probably scared to death, because it was the whim of kings to have their astrologers killed if they could not declare a dream.

Just imagine the picture:  the Sovereign God of heaven had the mightiest king and his nobles in the palm of his hand, scared to death with their knees knocking together.

Such is our God.

There is one thing we need to take along this morning:  God is powerful and He is Sovereign.

The Bible is full of references to the fact that He disposes kings as He wishes.

He controls the universe and He controls kingdoms.

He brings down the haughty, and He exalts the lowly.

Old Nebuchadnezzar understood that all to well.

And he knew to bow under this Sovereign God in worship.

But his grandson has this opportunity to learn slip through his fingers.

He had it in his hand, but then all was lost in one moment.

He had to learn once again from his grandmother, the queen-mother, who then made presence known in the banquet hall of the revellers, that God had gifted a man with knowledge.

She knew about it, because she saw the difference in the life of her late husband.

And now Belshazzar had to face that man who was the messenger of the living God.

Daniel walked in, now not as the young man we meet in the first chapters of this book, but as a man of well into his seventies.

He was not interested in the gifts of the King.

After all, his God had provided for him all his life, and even rescued him from a sure death in the lions’ den.

“Keep your gifts”, he said; I will nevertheless tell you what the dream means.

When Daniel spoke to Belshazzar he was not beating around the bush.

He cut straight into it.

The reason he told him about his grandfather was not to tell him something he had not known; he wanted to apply to him the truth that he had been given grace, but that God tested him and found him wanting.