The Bible Study Podcast, episode 216. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of Daniel with Chapter 5.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. Today we get into an episode in Daniel 5 where the King of Babylon sees the writing on the wall, and you may have wondered about that expression, since your mother, like my mother, probably never let you put handwriting on the wall, but that is, in fact, what happens to the King of Babylon. And once again, he calls upon the one who can interpret things, Daniel,

who's been given that power by God. King Belchazar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his

nobles and drank wine with them. While Belchazar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver

goblets that Nebuchadnezzar, his father, had taken from him in Jerusalem. So that the king and his nobles,

his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the gold goblets that had been

taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem. And the king and his nobles and his wives and his concubines drank from them.

As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone.

So to set the scene here a bit, Nebuchadnezzar has died, and you may remember that in the previous chapters,

Nebuchadnezzar has learned some lessons in humility and has learned some lessons about the power

of the God of Israel. So even though he has defeated Israel, he learns that the God of Israel is not defeated, that the God of Israel is the one

true God in the words of Nebuchadnezzar, or the one high God, I think is what he calls him.

So part of the thing we need to understand here is so many different countries had their different

gods that the way you determined whose God was

stronger was who won in battle. And so it would be common to believe that the gods of Babylon

would be stronger than the gods of Israel because Israel was defeated. But Nebuchadnezzar learns

otherwise. He learns otherwise when he sends three

Israelites, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedigo to the fiery furnace, and they're joined by an

angel of God, and they are not killed. And then he learns again when he gets kind of full of

himself and has to spend part of his life then off in the wilderness mad as a

beast. So even though he has learned that lesson, he has apparently not passed that on to his

son because his son is doing something here that God may find offensive. He is taking the

...