| “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field” (Daniel 4:31-32). |
| “And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this” (Daniel 5:22). |
| One of the reasons why the name Babylon is mentioned so often in the Bible is that it is connected with the pride of man. As we saw yesterday, man’s pride started away back in the book of Genesis, and that pride is there all the way through man’s history. It will be the same pride that God will judge, after every true Christian has been called home at the Lord’s coming for us. |
| When Nebuchadnezzar became so proud, the Lord changed him to be like an animal, with hair that grew like eagles’ feathers, and nails like birds’ claws. (Yes, that really happened! You can read about it in Daniel, chapter 4). He also ate grass like a cow. Then, after seven years, the Lord gave him back his right mind and his kingdom, and he honored the Lord. He recognized that the Lord was the only true God, and that he, the great Nebuchadnezzar, was only a man. |
| Later on, after Nebuchadnezzar had died, his grandson Belshazzar became king, and he too was very proud. You can read about him in Daniel, chapter 5. Belshazzar was actually the son of Nebuchadnezzar’s daughter, whose name was Nitocris. Instead of learning from what had happened to his grandfather, Belshazzar worshipped the Babylonian gods, and then dared to bring the gold and silver vessels that had been taken from the temple in Jerusalem, and drink wine from them. While they were doing this, they praised all those false gods. |
| But then the Lord allowed a hand to appear suddenly, and it wrote on the wall of the palace where all this was going on. Can you imagine how frightened Belshazzar was, when that hand appeared, and wrote on the wall something he could not understand? But while he was frightened, he does not seem to have repented before God, and the Bible tells us that he was killed that very night. The Persians were camped outside the city with their army, and Belshazzar felt that they would never get into the city. But they managed to dam up the Euphrates River, and then just came under the wall where the riverbed was. All that big wall did not protect the city, when God was ready for the Babylonian empire to end! |
