"Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. Then the king's color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together.
Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting" - Daniel 5:5-6, 27
One of the all time favorite activities is doodling. Ya know, while you're supposedly listening to someone else, you're drawing stuff on paper. Doodling.
I knew this guy in college who was constantly doodling crosses. All kinds of crosses. One cross looked like a scales; ya know, scales--the ancient way of weighing things, where you put something like a piece of silver on one side and a supposedly honest measure on the other to see how much the silver weighs. The key words being "supposedly honest" because the merchants used to cheat people all the time.
Like King Belshazzar of today's Bible verse. He apparently cheated his people all the time. So God sized him up and, through Daniel, told King Belshazzar, "you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting" (Daniel 5:27).
The "writing was on the wall" (Daniel 5:5-6), which is where we get that old expression from. We get it from the Bible. It's as if God is doodling crosses that look like scales and, like King Belshazzar, "the writing is on the wall" for all of us. And "we have been weighed in the balances and found wanting."
Uh oh. Unless, something happens to change things, we'd all be doomed.
And fortunately, God makes something happen. God sends his Son, Jesus Christ, to take on a very plain cross, with nothing fancy about it. It's a wooden post down into the ground and a wooden post going cross ways.
The writing was on the wall. We were going to perish because we'd been weighed by a fancy cross, a scales, and we'd been found wanting, lacking, falling short, not measuring up to the righteousness required for fellowship with God forever. The writing was on the wall, and we were on our way to hell.
But praise God that "God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son," that whosoever believes in His forgiving work on that plain old cross, would not perish, but have eternal life.
So now, for all who believe in Jesus, there's a new writing on the wall. Life forever with God.
So if we get bored at all today, maybe we could doodle that! And may God be praised as we do.
Praise God!
Pastor Chris
"The gospel is the story of Jesus [what God's only Son has done for us that we can't do for ourselves], spoken as a promise." - Robert Jenson
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