THERE are two scenes, dear reader, which I wish to bring before you—scenes of similarity, and of contrast. Both took place at night—one in a palace with its monarch; the other in a prison with its jailor.
Danl. 5., describes the former, and Acts 16, the latter.
THE KING had given a banquet to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before them; when, at the same moment, there was an invading army laying siege to the city. The royal but impious company heeded not the enemy’s attack, and added to their guilt by drinking to idols from vessels hitherto used for holy purposes in the temple of God. Suddenly the gay and thoughtless throng are aghast; dismay seizes upon them at the mysterious appearance of the fingers of a man’s handwriting upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
Instantly his gaze is rivetted; his face, just now flushed with wine, has become deadly pale; his knees smite one against the other; his whole frame shakes with agony, and his mind is filled with alarm and consternation. Terror-stricken, he calls aloud to his wise men to read and interpret the writing, with the promise that he who did so, “should be clothed with scarlet, have a chain of gold about his neck, and become the third ruler in the kingdom.”
But offers, rewards, and promises are of DO avail, “for they could not read the writing, nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.” Of course they could not! How can unconverted men, be they ever so wise or learned, interpret the writing of the finger of God? However, “there was a man in whom was the spirit of the holy gods,” and from him we learn the inscription and its meaning.
“And this is the writing that was written; Mene, mene, tekel upharsin, and this is the interpretation of the thing, Mene—God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.” How solemn! How startling! “God hath numbered.” At once the profane king is introduced to God. Himself, whose glory he had insulted and despised, and who was now sounding the death knell upon Belshazzar and his proud kingdom.
You, my friend, may not boast of royal blood, having a throne for your seat, a crown for your head, with wealth and. forces at your command; but as a sinner you have lived, and gone on without God, shutting Him out of your calculations, transactions, and thoughts.
What place has He had in your heart and mind, your pleasure or business, sorrows or joys, at home or abroad? Let conscience reply, and it will bear witness to the truth of the scripture. “God is not in all your thoughts.”
What a word for thee is this: “Mene—God hath numbered!” Numbered what? you ask.
Your years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. He knows how soon the last breath will be drawn, the heart take its last beat, the pulse its final throb, and the black curtain of death fall upon the stage of your history; when thy reign of vanity, worldliness, sin, and rejection of Christ, will not only be numbered, but finished;—finished for time, but begin in eternity—Where?
“Tekel—thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” How definite and personal, “THOU!” Not another, be it friend or foe, near or distant, parent, husband, wife or child. There is no plural nor wholesale term here. It is coming straight to the person and the point. This is how God speaks. Hearken to His servant’s message to the king of Moab: “I have a message from God unto thee” —and his word to David when he had sinned: “Thou art the man!”
How many object to this close and personal dealing! They prefer being addressed in general, or with a crowd. Is it so with thee, beloved reader? Hast thou never had to do with God individually and alone? If not, O! have to say to Him now, as you read this paper, for face Him you must, and that for yourself, either for salvation now through the blood of the cross, or for damnation hereafter at the great white throne.
Remember it says, “Thou art weighed,” not “shalt be,” but “art.” The weighing day is over; the balances have been hefted; man has been tried, and proved guilty, “weighed and found wanting.” The scales have been lifted and the result obtained; — “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” How conclusive! Yet some would fain persuade themselves that the Day of Judgment will be the time for weighing their good deeds (so-called) in one scale, and their bad ones in the other, and the turn of the scale decide for heaven or hell. Blinding delusion of Satan! and flat contradiction of the word of God, which declares that every mouth is stopped, “and all the world become guilty before him,” whether Jew or Gentile, king or cottager, moral or degraded, fool or philosopher; none are excepted from the sweeping statement.
Job, in his pride, said: “Let me be weighed in an even balance.” So he was, and then said: “I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” He was “weighed in the balances and found wanting.”
“Israel is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand.” (Hos. 12:77He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress. (Hosea 12:7)). Not so are those in the hand of “the righteous Lord who loveth righteousness;” His are true and righteous altogether; and in them, poor Christless worldling, thou past been “weighed and found wanting.” No amount of praying, weeping, hymn-singing, reformation, or morality can make up the deficiency; all put together are lighter than vanity in the question of the soul’s salvation. Your pressing, immediate, and everlasting need is Christ: possess Him, and you have everything; without Him, you are wanting here, and will be to all eternity where wants are never met.
And now the fatal blow is struck for boastful, rich, and wicked Babylon. “Peres” pronounces the doom of the Chaldean king and his monarchy. “Peres—thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” He was now to be handed over to his enemies, to become the prey of his merciless adversary.
Is this to find its antitype in thee? Thy years numbered and finished, weighed and found wanting; are you to be delivered into the hands of your wily and malicious foe—that old serpent the devil and Satan, to be his dupe and victim in the depths of an everlasting hell? Beware lest it be so! With rapid succession these things followed in the train of this royal worldling, “Numbered and finished, weighed and wanting, divided and given.”
Is he humbled at the message? Does he bow in the dust before this thrilling warning from the throne of God? Does he sue for pardon or peace? Does the cry for mercy come up from his sin-stained heart? Alas! no, and the inevitable result followed, for “He that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck shall SUDDENLY BE DESTROYED, and that WITHOUT REMEDY.” “And in that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans slain.”
Oh! what a night was that, never to be forgotten; when the bold rejecter of God and His messages was borne by the swift hand of death from the splendors of his magnificent palace, into the blackness of darkness forever.
THE JAILOR.
From that night scene in the imperial palace, turn your thoughts to a prison in Macedonia, and a picture of bright contrast will meet your eye. Hark! what is that? Sounds of praise to gods of gold, silver, brass, wood, and stone?
No; but prayer and songs of praise to the living God, from two men whose backs are bruised and bleeding, in the darkest dungeon the building affords. As their voices rise, their fellow prisoners are awakened in the dead stillness of the night by such strains as they never heard before. A few minutes more, and there is the rumbling of a great earthquake; the prison is shaken to its foundations, and staggers like a drunken man; the cell doors are thrown open; the felons’ shackles drop off, and the consternation and alarm is as great here as at Belshazzar’s feast.
The jailor, who had been fast asleep, suddenly awakes, and supposing that the prisoners had escaped, drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, when he hears a voice saying, “Do thyself no harm, for we are all here.” Who was it that spoke? The same that wrote upon the wall in Dan. 5, though using His servants’ lips. But who could know that he was on the point of committing suicide, all alone and in the midnight darkness? The omniscient God, to whom the darkness and the light are both alike. “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight, for all things are naked and open, unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” Adam hiding among the trees; Achan and Gehazi with their raiment and money, gotten by stealth, are striking instances of it. David says: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up to heaven thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there; if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” This the jailor too has discovered. Being arrested by the power of the Holy Ghost, terror-stricken he “called for a light, and sprang in and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out, saying, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
There is a man thoroughly laid hold of and in earnest. He not only trembles, as Belshazzar did, but he goes further; he falls down a self-judged, repentant, inquiring soul. Do you see, my reader, any analogy between the two men at this juncture? They both tremble because God has broken in upon the darkness of their guilty souls. But here the king stopped; he had convictions, but stifled and drowned them. How many are like him! May be you are one whom, in times past, the Spirit of God has aroused to a sense of your true state as a perishing sinner; one who has had the light of eternity flung across your Christielss path, plowing up your conscience, and showing your sins, long forgotten, of secret and public, of thought, and word, and deed; and you have seen that to die as you are is to be lost forever in the lake of fire, and yet you have resisted Him, and stifled His blessed influences in pleasure, or drowned them in gambling, drink, society, and the like. Not so the jailor. He is convicted, and owns it; is lost, and feels it; is guilty, and expresses it; and the instant that he asks, “What must I do to be saved?” the blessed answer is borne to his trembling soul: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” Gladly and at once he welcomes the joyful tidings, and that night rejoiced in the salvation of God. How quickly these things followed one moment he is fast asleep in his sins, the next he is trembling because convinced of his utter ruin, and, the same night, rejoicing, believing in God.
Yes, that night salvation was his. “But how sudden!” you remark. True; but, thank God, not more sudden than real. It was not flippant tongue-talk and lip-confession, but a real work of God the Spirit.
Are you willing to accept a present salvation?
How long did it take the bitten Israelite to look at the brazen serpent? Or how long for the dying thief to gaze at his crucified Lord?
So quickly, dear unsaved reader, you may pass from death unto life through faith in the blessed Son of God.
The foregoing was the substance of an address given at the M— Hall, one Lord’s Day evening in the spring of last year; many were present, the meeting was drawing to a close, the destiny of immortal souls seemed trembling in the balance. The speaker, feeling the solemnity of the moment, expressed his belief that this was the last time that some present would hear the Gospel; the preaching was over, and the audience dispersed. The following Friday, a man working at a brewery in the town fell into a boiling hot beer vat, from the effects of which he died the same night. The next day, another, walking down one of the main thoroughfares, broke a blood vessel, and, in a few hours, passed beyond the reach of time. Both were at the meeting referred to; may the judgment-seat reveal that they had departed “to be with Christ.” Has this no voice to thee? Hear you not that verse: “Beware, lest he take thee away with his stroke, then a great ransom cannot deliver thee.” Ere you put this pamphlet down, the Bridegroom may have returned, the door of salvation have closed, and the day of grace have passed away forever. Let me urge you then, beloved friend, to immediate decision for Christ. Look not at difficulties neither friends nor associations can stand surety in the day of fast-approaching judgment. Oh! be warned, and let the uncertainty of life, the brevity of time, the nearness of Christ’s second coming, and the horrors of everlasting companionship with the devil and his angels, constrain you NOW to say,
“My heart is fixed, eternal God,
Fixed on Thee,
And my immortal choice is made,
CHRIST for me.”
Whose portion will you have, the King’s or the Jailor’s? With whom will you spend eternity, the prison keeper or Belshazzar?
A. M.