WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

We hear much today of everyone having a right to his opinion. Furthermore, all opinions are supposed to carry equal weight. Anything else is intolerant.
Belshazzar was king of the greatest empire on earth. He felt that his ideas and words carried weight. As far as he was concerned, no power on earth could conquer mighty Babylon and also, no power on earth could touch him. Then he saw the hand writing on the wall and trembled like a leaf before an old Jewish prophet who explained to him that the hand on the wall told Belshazzar that he was weightless. Instead of removing the prophet’s head he, in fear and hoping to win the favor of the old man, promoted him. The day before Daniel would not have been invited into his presence.
This is all told in Daniel 5. In Daniel 6 is the record of King Darius making a decree that anyone worshiping any god or man other than the king would be thrown into a den of lions. Daniel continued to pray to his God as before. He was too heavy to move, whether it was by king or empire. In Milton’s “Paradise Lost” we read of everything in heaven and earth shaking except for the unshakeable throne of God. Daniel lived close to God and His Word and as Belshazzer and now King Darius found, carried tremendous weight. Belshazzar lived far from God. He went out of his way to show his disdain for God by drinking out of the golden cups from God’s temple, with a thousand of his lords. Psalm 12:4 would have fit him well: “Who have said, with our tongues will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us”? But when judgment was past on him he was told “you are weightless and found wanting”.
If God is the ultimate Reality, then it follows that the further one is from Him, the less weight he will have. It is said of the unbelievers that they are ”like the chaff which the wind drives away” but the believer will experience an “eternal weight of glory”.
Nietszchie, although an atheist made the observation that when a society turns away from God it becomes weightless. Man has no value in himself. Psalm 39:5 reads; “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity”.
Perhaps a test of where I stand is the people I am attracted to (or away from). We read of Abimelech in Judges 9, that he hired “vain and light persons”.