I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 5-6.

    We have two stories in today’s passage. The first one is the source for the phrase, “see the writing on the wall.” I am always amused when someone says they will take action because they can “aee the writing on the wall.” In this story, by the time the writing was on the wall, it was too late to take action. Which brings us to one of the important lessons of this story. Once it becomes obvious that our actions will lead to disaster it is too late to avoid that disaster. WE can learn a lot more from this story if we look at what was going on here. Rather than lead his government officials out to strengthen his nations defenses and prepare for the imminent attack, the king of Babylon brought them all into his palace and held a party. His idea about dealing with the rising threat of the Medes and Persians was to brag about their successful conquest of Jerusalem (and probably other nations). Rather than following the commands given by God, which might have helped them, they belittled those commands and focused on things which could do them no good.

    The second story is a favorite Bible story of many. One of those stories about facing enemies. Daniel’s faithfulness to God meant that his enemies could find nothing in what he did to use against him. As a result, they chose to make expressing his faith a crime. Notice however how they approached the issue. They neither directly outlawed Daniel’s faith practices, nor did they mandate that he follow other practices. They “merely” passed a law that for a short period of time, people had to refrain from praying to anyone, except to the current king. All Daniel had to do to avoid running afoul of this new law was refrain from praying for 30 days. Daniel refused to give in to their subtle attempt to outlaw his faith. He neither stood on the street corner decrying the law’s demand that people only pray to King Darius, nor did he make any effort to hide his expression of faith. He continued to do what he had always done, trusting in God to deal with this attack on his faith.
    The same sorts of things happen today. We do not need to challenge the attempts of the irreligious to enshrine new rights. Instead, we need to show God’s love by coming to the defense of the defenseless and warning people about the consequences of their self-destructive behavior.