[AI translation] The story read is that the king of Babylonia, Belshazzar, had a magnificent, huge feast for his officials and friends. Imagine a sumptuous oriental feast and a host of guests. Babylonian society enjoyed the delights of the abundant food and drink. The king, with his wives and harem girls, sat at a separate table, and in his exuberant, intoxicated merriment brought out the sacred vessels of the temple in Jerusalem, the golden cups which his father had brought as spoils of war when the temple in Jerusalem fell. The debauched party seized the sacred vessels and now continued to drink the wine from them. Drink, song, music intoxicated the merry party, and the burst of merriment reached its climax when suddenly a ghostly hand appeared on the greyish wall opposite the king's candelabrum. The music died away, the laughter on the faces of the guests was contorted into horror, and the king's golden scroll fell from his hand, trembling and staring wide-eyed at the ghostly hand. In the sudden, deathly, chilling silence, the fingers of the hand moved, the movements made letters appear, and the hand disappeared again. Three words remained on the wall: Mene, Tekel, Ufarszin.Daniel, the man of God, deciphered the mysterious handwriting, saying to the king, 'This is the meaning of these words, Mene, that is, God has taken account of your kingdom and will bring it to an end. This is the end of thy kingdom, and it is ended. Peres, that is, thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians." (Dan 5:26-28) The terrible judgment is recorded to have taken place on the night of the feast: a few hours later the Chaldeans entered the palace and killed King Belshazzar, and his kingdom was taken by Darius the Mede (cf. Dan 5:30-31).
At the end of a year, every man gets a very tangible taste of transience. Like the days of the year behind us, the days of our lives will one day roll by and the Mene-Tekel-Ufarszin will become terribly topical in each of our individual lives! I always have the feeling at such times that the gate of the new year, through which we will step in a few hours' time, is also inscribed: Mene, Tekel, Ufarszin! I don't know where you spend New Year's Eve, whether in silence or in noisy company, at home or elsewhere, but wherever you are until the New Year, it would be nice to see everywhere the words that an invisible hand writes on the wall, on the table, on the side of a wine glass, on the forehead of your partner: Mene, Tekel, Ufarszin! Let these three words appear before us now, and let us try to decipher what they mean to us.
1) So, the first word: Mene. Daniel explains this to the king: "God has taken account of your kingdom and will bring it to an end." (verse 26b) It is always a shocking thing to come to the end of something, to know that God has brought it to an end. No more, the road is gone. Once in a company we were talking about the most miserable feeling in the world. One said: suffering from an incurable disease. Another said: to know that someone you love very much is dying before your eyes, beyond saving. But the most profound impression was made by this answer: to see the good opportunities that have passed unused in our lives and which can never return.
It is a terrible thing when, at a turning point in one's life, one sees how much precious time and opportunity one has wasted. Such must be the feeling of a man who suddenly begins to realise that he has lost his way, that he has made a mistake once upon a time, that he has mislaid his life, but it is too late, it is too late, he cannot bring back his youth, he must now pull on the yoke that will not fit him. It is even more painful when you stand beside the coffin of someone you have wronged, someone whose cold heart is forever frozen with grief, someone you will never have the chance to apologise to again. Oh, if only he could meet her once more! But no more: the days of redemption are numbered and God has ended it! Such a feeling is so painful because it is a foretaste of the torment of hell. The hell is also the hell of the fact that all possibilities and opportunities are gone forever, there is nothing to make up for, nothing to atone for, time has run out!
Those who have escaped from some serious life-threat say that the moment their existence hovered on the razor-sharp line between life and death, their whole life flashed before them in the blink of an eye, like a crazy film reel. Something like this always happens when God counts down a time and ends it. Then, all at once, long-forgotten sins, precious occasions, omissions, squandered opportunities are projected before us and terribly accused. Gerhard Hauptmann has a famous dramatic figure, Jedermann, who is summoned by Death to prepare for his reckoning with God while he is having a great revelry. Jedermann, desperate, sweating blood, begs Death to give him just one more week, or if not one more week, then just one more day, or at least one more hour, to atone for his mistakes, to make up for his failings, the weight of which has now fallen so fatally on him.
Now, as we say goodbye to this year, I am reminded of the well-known saying that every goodbye means dying a little. In other words, we die to the past, we are powerless over the past, we cannot change it. We die a little now. We are dying to the passing year, we are dying to what happened in 1949. God has numbered our days against what happened in the year 1949. God has numbered our days and is now ending a whole year. But I would have had many opportunities to do good, to love, to forgive, to talk to someone's soul, to write a letter, to wipe away a sore tear, to pray, to repent, to make amends, to deepen my faith or repent, to accept Christ, to offer myself to His glory, to give myself to God's free grace. And behold, the opportunities and chances given in 1949 have once again run out, written over the gate at the end of the road: Mene, that is, God has taken stock and put an end to it. Oh, how many gates has this been in your life, who knows if it will be the last? The days are numbered, the time has passed, the year is past, the missed opportunities will never come back! Unless God gives you new ones!
(2) The second mysterious word that appeared on the wall of the royal banqueting hall was Tekel. It was explained by the prophet Daniel: "You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting" (verse 27). Or for example, when you are short of the money you have been entrusted with. There is something of it, but not the whole of it, and if even a single penny is missing from it - though it is much more in the divine reckoning - then it is a matter of fatal evil, then there follows a very serious calling to account, in the course of which the further it goes, the more the thing is in disrepute. Something of this sort is, 'Thou hast been tried ... and found wanting'. It's a raid, in which you can't account for large items. Or you could translate the word here as 'found wanting'. It's like when someone's clothing is incomplete, not just not regulation, but incomplete: torn, tattered, tattered, holey, showing the ugliness of nakedness, not covering, not covering, not protecting, but revealing.
In the New Testament, Jesus speaks of a man with such a lack of clothing, who appeared in his rags at the wedding supper of the king's son, not in the wedding garments given to him by the king. And we know what became of him: the servants took him and threw him out into the outer darkness, where "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth", as Jesus said! (verse 27)
"You have been weighed... and found wanting": this means, on the one hand, that God knows all about you, as Psalm 90 says: "You have laid our iniquities before you; our secret sins before the world of your face." (verse 8) You don't even know what God knows about you. What your surroundings don't even suspect, what those closest to you have never noticed about you, what you would rather hide from yourself, because you would die of shame if it came out, if it came to light. Surely you would not be able to count the sins of the past year, how many tears and pains you have caused, how many promises and vows you have failed to keep, how many plans you started the New Year with and how many failures you are now ending it with, how many times you have fallen into the clutches of Satan's temptation in word, in feeling, in deed. And who can list them all, all of which are now before the face of God? Oh, but there is an awful lot that God would seek in you! "Thou hast weighed... and were found wanting." Do you think it is only your sins that make up this lack? Try to measure your virtues, your good qualities, your faith, your love, your good intentions, by the Word of God. Well, according to the Word, these are your own rags, through the cracks of which the ugliness of nakedness always shows: vanity, selfishness, conceit, self-indulgence, pride. My good intentions, my good deeds, my merit is my own dress, for which that one guest was thrown out of the great feast into the outer darkness. For a long time I thought the King was too severe on this guest, but then I understood that it is the most outrageous arrogance to imagine that one can appear before the King in one's own clothes, that one can be worthy of being a guest! Such a man's life has the most glory in the measuring. So it is as true of you as it is of me: 'Thou hast been measured... and found thou wanting". So it is not your sins or your virtues that have weighed you down, but you, as you are, as you are now, at the end of the year 1949, with all that you have lived, here you are, you yourself, weighed down and found wanting, virtuous and sinful!
Oh, if we could take this seriously now! If this were not just a rhetorical turn in an ancient line of thought, but if we really believed seriously that in every trial, even this one, we are found wanting: we would begin to see the world, and in it the troubles, sufferings, failures, and distress of our own little lives, in a different light! If we could be so truly hurt by this finding ourselves in the wrong, then many of the question marks from the past year would disappear, many of the "why's" would be dissolved, many of the troubles in our hearts would be quieted, and we would wonder and marvel at how merciful God is!
Now, after all the fame we have found, let us say: after what we were in 1949, we really did not deserve the fate we are in, but a much, much worse one! After all, it is not a miracle that there are problems, that life hurts here and there and that life is tight, but that it hurts only so much and is only so tight, and no more than we deserved! How many sighs have been uttered in the past year alone, that God is not just, because if God were just, he would be, and should be, this way and that way. Well, if it is true that you have "weighed... and found wanting," then no more terrible tragedy could be imagined for you than that God should deal with you one day according to His perfect justice!
3) There, on the wall, the third word was Upharsin, which meant, in paraphrase, that after all this, divine justice will prevail!
But that was terrible! How awful divine justice is, you can see it most clearly at the place of the greatest shame, Calvary. So horrible that even the Son of God dies and sinks into the depths of hell under the burden! This is what that third word on the wall after Mene and Tekel means! So damnation, eternal death, hell! And all because you were found wanting in the test! He wants to make up for this lack with the merit of His obedience, suffering and death! The drops of blood that fall from the cross make up for every deficiency and every lack. Yes: Jesus Christ has suffered the punishment, made up for the omission, made up for the shortcoming, fulfilled God's righteousness on our behalf! Do you know what is the news of your life? The merit of Jesus Christ! That is what is missing!
I proclaim this with great joy, but with fear! Gladly, because it is true, but fearful lest someone rejoice too soon! It is true that on the cross Jesus Christ received God's scathing judgment, and so through the cross grace and forgiveness flow. But let only those rejoice in this who are in great pain at being found wanting in the test. Without repentance there is no forgiveness! And I am afraid to preach forgiveness because we would want to share in it too easily, without the pain of being found wanting.
"And this is the writing which is written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Ufarzin! And this is the sense of these words, Mene, that is, God hath taken account of thy kingdom, and will bring it to an end. Tekel, that is, thou hast been weighed in the balances, and hast been found wanting. Peres, that is, thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians." (verses 25-28)
Let us be still and pray that God Himself will interpret to us by His Holy Spirit what these words mean to us above the gates of the Old Testament!
Amen
Date: 31 December 1949 (New Year's Eve)