Partying Your Way to the Judgment of God

Partying Your Way to the Judgment of God

As we prepare to think about God’s Word from Daniel 5 this coming Sunday, here is a visual attempt by Rembrandt to capture the fear of Belshazzar as a hand writes a message about his coming destruction. Even as God warns, he parties in unbelief and mocking God and His people. As Dale Ralph Davis writes:

[A]fter reading the first verse of Daniel 5 we may assume that [alcohol/drunkenness] is the problem here – nothing but a royal debauch featuring the triple trouble of wine, women and worship. But we soon realize the real trouble was not alcohol but arrogance (22-23), a bit of royal ‘struttery’. And the God of heaven wiped it out in an evening’s work. [1]

As Jesus warned in the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12:20:

But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

Rembrandt-Belsazar


Davis, Dale Ralph The Message of Daniel, The Bible Speaks Today Commentary Series (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013), 70.