Unseen Watcher
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forth with terrible distinctness; and now with bated breath the people
listened while the aged prophet declared:
“This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered
thy kingdom, and finished it. Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances,
and art found wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to
the Medes and Persians.”
In that last night of mad folly, Belshazzar and his lords had filled
up the measure of their guilt and the guilt of the Chaldean kingdom.
No longer could God’s restraining hand ward off the impending evil.
Through manifold providences, God had sought to teach them rev-
erence for His law. “We would have healed Babylon,” He declared
of those whose judgment was now reaching unto heaven, “but she is
not healed.”
Jeremiah 51:9
. Because of the strange perversity of the
human heart, God had at last found it necessary to pass the irrevocable
sentence. Belshazzar was to fall, and his kingdom was to pass into
other hands.
As the prophet ceased speaking, the king commanded that he be
awarded the promised honors; and in harmony with this, “they clothed
Daniel with scarlet, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made
a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the
kingdom.”
[531]
More than a century before, Inspiration had foretold that “the night
of ... pleasure” during which king and counselors would vie with
one another in blasphemy against God, would suddenly be changed
into a season of fear and destruction. And now, in rapid succession,
momentous events followed one another exactly as had been portrayed
in the prophetic scriptures years before the principals in the drama had
been born.
While still in the festal hall, surrounded by those whose doom
has been sealed, the king is informed by a messenger that “his city
is taken” by the enemy against whose devices he had felt so secure;
“that the passages are stopped, ... and the men of war are affrighted.”
Verses 31, 32
. Even while he and his nobles were drinking from the
sacred vessels of Jehovah, and praising their gods of silver and of gold,
the Medes and the Persians, having turned the Euphrates out of its
channel, were marching into the heart of the unguarded city. The army
of Cyrus now stood under the walls of the palace; the city was filled
with the soldiers of the enemy, “as with caterpillars” (
verse 14
); and