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

In the story about the writing on the wall I noticed that when the hand wrote on the wall the king was terrified.  As I read the passage, he was not frightened just by the disembodied hand, but by the writing itself.  So, he knew the message was bad before he even knew what it said.   Which brings me to something I realized a few years ago.  We often say that someone left some place before things there went wrong because they “saw the writing on the wall”, referencing this story.  However, in this story, it was too late for King Belshazzar when he saw the writing on the wall.

Then we have the story of Daniel being thrown into the lion’s den.  Daniel’s political enemies could find nothing wrong in his actions.  So, they changed the rules to make his religious practices illegal.  They presented the change in a way which made it seem like it was innocuous and disguised the fact that it was aimed at Daniel.  When the new law was passed, Daniel made no effort to hide his now illegal worship of God, nor did he make any effort to make a scene.  He continued to worship God as he had always done. I want to note that Daniel had no need to “make a scene” about his worship of God because he had always done so publicly in a manner that anyone who knew him knew that he did so.  Let us strive to live such lives that when our enemies look for something to “get us” on, they must make faithfully serving God illegal.  I will say that I believe we see such things happening in the world today.  Perhaps not yet by passing laws, but more and more our society is declaring being faithful to God to be “beyond the pale”.

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