The events of this chapter occurred during the year that
Babylon fell to the Persians whose king, Cyrus, would allow the exiles to
return to Israel. Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t
strictly the father of Belshazzar but rather his predecessor as the footnote
states. His arrogance and disregard for
the things of God would be extremely offensive to the Jewish exile community in
taking the vessels from the temple for this party. Praising then the “gods” of the vessels
themselves, gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone would multiply the
sinfulness. The fingers of a human hand
then appeared and wrote on the plaster and while the king could not read the
writing he recognized immediately that this wasn’t good news and greatly
feared. Once again, like in Egypt, the
magicians and wise men of Babylon could not read this writing but the queen
remembered a man who must now have been quite old for the times, who had proven
himself the greatest of all the wise men in the land and, once again, after a
long period of not being in the spotlight, the man Daniel was summoned.
After a long period of time when there were no prophets in
Israel, a period of waiting and divine silence that had lasted four hundred
years, an angel appeared to Zechariah, a child was born to he and his wife, and
that child began prophesying about the kingdom of God coming. Now, the one to whom John pointed begins to
minister in power and authority and the people don’t know what to make of Him
but the demons do. They want to keep
Jesus right here, for themselves, but He says the mission for which He was sent
requires Him to move on, proclaim the kingdom in all places in Israel. That proclamation was accompanied by powerful
demonstrations of healing and exorcism which pointed to not its imminent
arrival but that it was a present reality in Jesus.
John makes a powerful statement here: “For everyone who has
been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome
the world—our faith.” Our faith has
overcome the world? It certainly doesn’t
look like our faith has overcome the world.
In many places Christians are persecuted and killed, like in Iraq and in
other parts of the Middle East. In the
United States and other places in the west the secularization of societies is
leading to businesses owned by Christians being sued into bankruptcy for
failing to get in line with the secular agenda.
What is the basis of our faith? It
is the cross, hardly a symbol of victory, a man dying there in futility,
powerlessness to the world that opposed Him.
The resurrection gives power to the cross, it is the power that exposes
the illusion of worldly power. The illusion
now has no power because we know it is coming to a close, that there is the
power of life that the world can neither give nor take away. We can live by the same power, the power of
faith that this isn’t all there is, there is a greater power than any king, no
matter how desperate and hopeless it seems to us at the moment. Lift up your heads to the coming King, bow
before Him and adore Him, sing, sing!
No comments:
Post a Comment