The Handwriting On The Wall
Most of us like stories with happy endings. Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ is one of those stories. What develops is the haunting portrayal of the base side of our human nature, played out in a chilling tale of what represents the self imposed blindness of the present course we are on in our life. The protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge who had a ‘humbug’ attitude towards the joy of Christmas, and all who did not conform to his self-centered expectations, was given a birds eye view of what his future would be, if he kept going down the path he was taking. In the end he was given another chance to change an otherwise unchangeable future.
The story recorded in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament has quite a different ending however. The famous saying, “The handwriting on the wall” was derived from this historical account in 539 B.C. King Darius and his court during a drunken feast used sacred vessels stolen from Solomon’s temple, praising ‘the gods of gold and silver, brass, iron, wood, and stone’. Immediately, the king’s face turned pale, as a human hand appeared and wrote on the wall of the royal palace the words, ‘numbered, numbered, weighed, divided’. Daniel interprets their meaning: God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given over to your enemies.
What can we learn? It is evident here that God has the authority to pronounce judgment because he is God and he is just. His actions also have a broader focus, warning us of the potential consequences already built into wrong courses of action. The inherent power of this narrative lies in the sheer gravity of God’s jealous desire for our hearts, for if he has our hearts, then he is able to achieve his ultimate desire—mercy triumphing over judgment. If he doesn’t have our hearts, we will either run from him in guilt and shame declaring he doesn’t love us, or display a shameless defiance, ending up with the consequences we deserve.
The handwriting seems to be on the wall again in our day, as we see what is happening in our homes: an absence of the fear of God, undevoted hearts idolatrously fixed on the self-centered gods of personal time and pleasure, careers, and posessions. On top of that we add the lust for and stealing of that which is sacred—our neighbors husband or wife. King Darius’ desecration of the temple has its paralell here, because God calls our bodies temples of the Holy Spirit, if the Spirit lives in us. The result? The days of enjoying all that our families have meant to us are numbered, our courses of action are weighed and found wanting, our homes are divided and given to the enemy.
If we are living with a dark cloud of consequences, our only hope for, and the only means for what could be considered a happy ending has already been accounted for. But what could that be? Reason has failed, endless efforts, even counseling so often fails, the church has not adequately addressed the desperate conditions of our broken marriages, and the courts do not unify, they divide. The only means left is usually the last place we look—the Gospel. It is there we find the reason to forgive as we have been forgiven, it is there that the truth sets us free to love as we have been loved, and it is there that relationships can be reconciled, healed and renewed, as God has done for all who have received him. NT Colossians 1: 21-23
So what about our happy ending? As Ebenezer Scrooge said to the ghost of Christmas future, “why tell me these things if it is too late for me to do anything about them”? It is not too late because what burns behind the hand written indictment on the wall, is the passion of a God who loves us enough to warn us of impending misery, and to point us to a better way. To see this is not to see happiness as an end in itself, but a by-product of that way. God has already unveiled his choice and paved the way to a happy ending for ourselves and our loved ones; the legacy we leave however, will be one of our own choosing.