The Handwriting on the Wall

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. Are we in the life or the universe or the everything for this one, Greg? I claim every week that we talk about life and the universe and everything, and I just want to be sure we’re on track with our topics.

No false advertising?

Right.

Well, we talk about God and man and God’s ways with man, and obscure things like plants and ducks and food, so I think we’re hitting everything.

Okay, just checking. Specifically today in Daniel 5 we’re talking about reading the handwriting on the wall. Is this going to be a lesson in how to read the handwriting on your wall?

Only if you have small children and you gave them markers.

Do not recommend.

So we’re talking about Belshazzar and Daniel. I always find this confusing because Daniel’s Babylonian name is Belteshazzar, which sounds very similar if you say it really fast to Belshazzar.

But how many people do you know who call Daniel Belteshazzar?

That’s true, which is funny because Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah are also called Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – or Rack, Shack, and Benny if you grew up on Veggie Tales.

I skipped that part. I was a little old.

It had some catchy songs.

So time has passed in our story. Nebuchadnezzar came to faith in the God of heaven and told the world so, but this was toward the end of his reign apparently, and he has gone on and Babylon passed through a number of hands rather quickly, but ended up in the hands of Nebuchadnezzar’s son-in-law, who secular history knows as Nabonidus.

The Bible doesn’t mention him except kind of inferentially. He had a little tiff with the priests of Babylon. He worshiped the moon god and they did not approve, and so he took his own religion and a large segment apparently of the Babylonian bureaucracy and moved down into the wilderness of Timon on one of the caravan routes that he thought would prove very profitable, and he left behind his son Belshazzar as regent.

In the language of scripture, if you’re running a city you’re a king, so there’s no contradiction with history. There are just some things that the Bible does not tell us flat-out, but there are one or two hints that this is what was going on.

Meanwhile, the Persian empire was growing to the north. Cyrus had managed to unite the Medes and the Persians, related groups, kissing cousins and all that, and he himself was of both bloodlines but he called himself Persian. Now he’s been stomping about claiming all the land, all the territory round about that had been Babylon’s. As our story opens, his armies are pitched outside the city of Babylon. Nabonidus is on the run, but Belshazzar is holed up in the city.

Babylon is a great and glorious city. It has walls so thick that chariots can pass each other. It has the river Euphrates flowing through it, so it has an endless supply of water. It has fields that can produce crops. It has stores and such that can last 50-70 years or more. At this point, all they have to do is keep the city locked up and make sure that everybody is happy, and they can wait out a siege, as far as they know. So the story opens –

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.

He’s showing off how comfortable and relaxed he is. He has to emanate the image of, “I don’t care. We’re safe. Let’s party.” And as he does this, he gets an idea. We’re not told where it comes from or why it struck him right now, but he knows that about 70 years earlier his father Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the Jewish temple, and before that looted it and brought into Babylon a great many of the temple vessels.

Some of these vessels were just things that were used for the show bread and the show wine and things like that, or for serving from the altar the peace offering, so there were plates and there were bowls and there were goblets and such. Belshazzar thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to just draw attention to how great Babylon is compared to other gods, particularly Yahweh.”

Why he had that little bee in his bonnet we’re never told, but when Daniel comes to speak to him, Daniel points it out. “You’ve got a problem here. If you had wanted to commit sacrilege against any other god attacking the other god, no one would care. But you deliberately went after Yahweh, after Jehovah. There are consequences that come with this.”

Another thing is that from the first chapter of Daniel we see the temple vessels brought to Babylon and we see the young men brought there, and there’s a deliberate parallel between the temple vessels and the vessels of the young men’s bodies. Both are set in Babylon. The temple vessels are put in the temple of Marduk or Bel, their chief god. The idea is Jehovah has been defeated. His instruments will now serve Marduk, and Jehovah by implication will serve Marduk. Jehovah didn’t have an image, that was weird, so they used what they could. It looked like the Babylonian gods had won. The new world order had succeeded.

Meanwhile, the vessels of the young men – these young men were put through Babylon University with an attempt to gently brainwash them and bring them over to the dark side and offer them whatever they wanted, if they would just rethink their position. The question is who wins this battle?

We’re told at the end of Daniel 1 that Daniel endured the first year of Cyrus the Persian, so we’re told up front who wins. Daniel survives the entire reign of the Babylonian kings and lives to stand before the next emperor, Cyrus the Persian. The question is how is that going to work out, and that’s what we’ve been seeing so far.

Now we come to the end and there’s been no mention of the temple vessels, but now they’re coming out. This is sort of like chaining up your worst nightmare behind iron doors and then saying, “Hey, let’s bring them out to play,” because these are the things that represent the God of heaven. They’re not magic. They have no power in themselves, but God sanctified them to his use and God’s been waiting, and here comes the moment.

Belshazzar brings out the gold and silver vessels from the temple, with the goal that the king and his princes and his wives and his concubines might drink therein.

Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

Something I’ve noticed in the fiery furnace incident is that Daniel sometimes likes to repeat things over and over, lists especially, for comedic effect or ironic effect, as the case may be. He’s told us now three times what’s going on.

The interesting thing for me though is when he comes to name the gods, he doesn’t say Bel and Marduk and whatever else, Ishtar, he says the gods of gold and silver and brass and iron and wood and stone. He’s quoting the Psalms. The psalm that he’s quoting says something along the lines of -

They have mouths, but they speak not:

Eyes have they, but they see not:

They have ears, but they hear not:

Noses have they, but they smell not:

They have hands, but they handle not:
Feet have they, but they walk not:

Neither speak they through their throat.

They that make them are like unto them;

So is everyone that trusteth in them.

He’d been through Babylon University. He had passed his Comparative Religion classes. He knew the names of all of these gods. He doesn’t care. It’s irrelevant information. He wants us to think of them for what they are.

On one level, yes, there are demonic forces in the background, but in terms of the statues they’re just pieces of iron, of gold, silver, stone. They are nothing, and this is what people have been worshiping, and you become like what you worship.

As they do this, something odd happens –

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace…

Something that’s very important here that I missed for years and years and years was the definite article, because it is in the Hebrew, or Aramaic at this point – the candlestick, the lampstand. We don’t know whatever happened to the Ark of the Covenant, unless Indiana Jones was onto something, but we now know what happened to the menorah. They took it and they brought it here and they brought it to light the party.

Words fail for the stupidity of this, and the arrogance of the sacrilege involved. They are going to light their drunken party to defy the God of Israel by using his own lampstand, which itself is an image of the work of the Spirit through the Word of God and the prophetic ministry. So in the light of that you want to call a prophecy from God? You asked for it, you get it.

In the light of the menorah, a hand comes out of nowhere and begins writing with its finger in the plaster, presumably the hand of God. There aren’t many times in scripture where the hand or finger of God is spoken of in this sense, in the sense of writing something – the Ten Commandments, Jesus writing in the dust of the temple in the account of the woman taken in adultery, and the magicians of Egyptian speaking of, “This is the finger of God,” or Jesus saying, “A finger of God, that’s the Holy Spirit.” It’s very clear that God does not have hands, but he shows us things like this – well, Jesus does, though.

And he gave us hands because we’re made in his image.

Yes, because we have to be able to control and manipulate things, as he does, and exercise dominion.

Anyway, we should remember all this, and it’s in plaster so the stone tablets and the dust of the temple seem to be nice connection points here. And it writes words. As the king watches this, he is upset.

The king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed and his knees smote one against another.

Interestingly enough, all the commentators I’ve read on this pretty well agree that it means he lost control of his bowels at this point. He was scared to the point where he lost control. Isaiah in describing Cyrus’s approach to kingdoms said that, “He will loose the loins of kings.” Here it’s true that Cyrus’s are outside and there’s a slight connection, but this is the fear of God. This is the terror of the holy, and he is frightened.

Speaking of embarrassing – speaking against Yahweh.

Yes.

The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spake and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing and shew me the interpretation thereof shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

There’s a bunch of stuff going on there. First of all, we have seen this before. We’ve seen it twice in Daniel – in Chapter 2 the dream of the great metallic image smashed by a stone cut out without hands, and in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great tree that humbled him – and of course we can go all the way back to Pharaoh, who also could not come up with an interpretation.

Pharaoh was much more humble and was willing to take the word of this Hebrew who he had just brought out of prison. Nebuchadnezzar listened the first time, hesitated the second time, but in the end listened. Belshazzar we’re going to find out knows all about Daniel, and he does not consult him. Once more we have the asset that will explain everything, and we don’t use it.

Almost like we don’t want to know.

We don’t want to know. We don’t want to hear. We’re hoping that there’s some alternative that will get us around what we’re deathly afraid is the truth. So much for neutrality. And the wise men are unable.

The reward he offers is of course great promotion, wealth, and third ruler in the kingdom. There’s the hint about Nabonidus. Why third?

He can’t offer the second.

The second would be his own, and he’s not willing to resign. Nabonidus is first, Belshazzar second, and Daniel would be the third, so it fits in with the real history of the time.

The secular history.

The secular history, I’m sorry.

Then came in all the king's wise men, but they could not read the writing nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.

We’re not sure exactly what they couldn’t do. The letters were probably Aramaic, and they probably recognized them. How they were arranged might have complicated things, but even if they got the words – “I see what the words are. They don’t mean anything to me.”

Have you ever had that experience where you’re like, “I know all the words in the sentence, but I don’t know what the sentence is saying.”? But in one form or another they did not know what was going on here.

Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astonished. Now the queen…

This would be the Queen Mother, because we’ve already been told that all of his wives and concubines were present, so the only other queen would be the Queen Mother, who possibly for reasons of faith, because she does speak well of Yahweh, may have absented herself, but now she comes in and says with respect, because Belshazzar may be her son, he is the king –

Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house and the queen spake and said, O king, live forever: let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed: There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods…

Or again, depending on how you read it, the Spirit of the Holy God (Elohim), which can be singular or plural, depending on context.

…and in the days of thy father light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father [grandfather, ancestor] the king, I say, thy father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers…

The interesting question is why isn’t he still? One of the kings along the line obviously demoted him, but they didn’t get rid of him. As we read through the other chapters in Daniel we find that one of his later prophecies actually said, “During the reign of Belshazzar.” Belshazzar didn’t fire him, but he moved him far away. He moved him to Shushan, to the province of Elam, which was what would quickly become Persia, which may explain some things.

He was not willing to fire Daniel, either because Daniel’s really good at this ambassador stuff or, “Yeah, I don’t want him and his religion, but I don’t want to offend his God,” so for some reason he’d been kept on the payroll, and right now he’s come. Of course, he didn’t want to come to this party either, and probably wasn’t invited, because that would be kind of a wet rag on things. So the Queen Mother is saying –

Forasmuch as an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and shewing of hard sentences, and dissolving of doubts, were found in the same Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar [master or interpreter of dreams], now let Daniel be called, and he will shew the interpretation.

It’s important to remember that Daniel is a very old man at this point. He may have been around 70 when he went into the lion’s den, and a lot of years have passed. He’s very old. He’s at that point of age that even without his faith he’s probably at the age where he doesn’t care, but his faith redoubles that of, “I so don’t care, but God apparently has a mission for me.”

“Call him in.” You notice how she presents it as, “Maybe you don’t know, maybe you don’t remember, but there’s this guy named Daniel,” and she fills in all the biographical details. Later, Daniel is going to say, “You already knew all that. You know exactly who I am, and you know exactly who Yahweh is.”

At this point it’s like, “Okay mom, you’re right. Anything goes at this point,” so he calls him in, but he adopts a very condescending attitude.

Art thou that Daniel, which art of the children of the captivity of Judah, whom the king my father brought out of Jewry? I have even heard of thee [no kidding!]…

“You’re the captive. You’re that Jew. You’re from that nation my dad blasted to pieces.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard of you.”

“Your name has been tossed around once or twice in my presence.”

I have even heard of thee, that the spirit of the gods is in thee, and that light and understanding and excellent wisdom is found in thee.

“Then why haven’t you been using me more?”

And now the wise men, the astrologers, have been brought in before me, that they should read this writing, and make known unto me the interpretation thereof: but they could not shew the interpretation of the thing. And I have heard of thee, that thou canst make interpretations and dissolve doubts. Now if thou canst read the writing and make known to me the interpretation thereof, thou shalt be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about thy neck, and shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom.

Once upon a time he was pretty-near second ruler, and again, he so does not care. Belshazzar is offering everything he can, short of giving him his kingdom, of letting him be king in his place, and Daniel is unmoved. He survived the whole communion issue. He survived the lion’s den.

Are we past the lion’s den?

I’m sorry, he’s about to survive the lion’s den. That’s the one thing left, isn’t it? But he’s been here for 70 years and he has not compromised and he doesn’t care. He is not afraid of the face of men. This is great faith. It’s not just stubbornness. We’re all prone to that, and also when we’re old we’re prone to how stale, flat, and tasteless are the things of this world.

This reminds me of Jack O’Neal in Stargate SG1 when he becomes the Brigadier General. He’s still a member of the Air Force, he’s still part of the system, but he’s like, “No, if I’m here I can do whatever I want. I will take that job, sure – for a short time before I retire and actually do what I want.”

Daniel is more of the mindset of, “I know where this is going.” He’s read the prophecies of Jeremiah and Isaiah. He’s probably met Cyrus. He knows the Medes are the ones destined to destroy Babylon, and the Mede-Persian army is camped outside. He knows that Isaiah has promised that a man named Cyrus will order Jerusalem rebuilt and the temple restored. More than any prophetic teacher of our generation, he really does know what’s coming.

Again, even if it were real, even if, “Okay, I tell you this. I’m really going to get this and enjoy my life, and God’s going to give me another 100 years,” he still wouldn’t care, because this is not what’s important to him – wealth, position, fame, the praise of men. None of this matters to him. This is what he says about it –

Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Let thy gifts be to thyself, and give thy rewards to another; yet I will read the writing unto the king, and make known to him the interpretation. O thou king, the most high God gave Nebuchadnezzar thy father a kingdom, and majesty, and glory, and honour. And for the majesty that he gave him, all people, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. Whom he would he slew, and whom he would he kept alive, and whom he would he set up, and whom he would he put down.

“In other words, you don’t measure up to your granddad. You’re nothing compared to him. I saw a real emperor. You’re not him.” But even this guy, this king who thought he could do what he wanted –

But when his heart was lifted up and his mind hardened in pride, he was deposed from his kingly throne and they took his glory from him and he was driven from the sons of men, and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses. They fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till he knew that the most high God ruled in the kingdom of men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will.

In case we didn’t read chapter 4, that was chapter 4. Daniel just confirmed it as real history. “It’s not a myth. It’s not a legend. This is really what happened, and you – little smarty pants – should have learned from this. If God could do it to a man like Nebuchadnezzar, he sure enough can do it to you.”

And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this.

It was one thing for Nebuchadnezzar, who thought he had everything, had won every battle, accomplished anything he had set his mind to, and had all the power there was. It was one thing for him to question the God of heaven, and yet every time God intervened he backed down, until he finally repented.

Belshazzar had seen all that played out. He had no excuse. He knew there was a God who was way beyond anything that Babylon had to offer, and he just thumbed his nose at that God, and Daniel is so unimpressed. Daniel had respect for Nebuchadnezzar. He has no respect for Belshazzar.

But hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven, and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines have drunk wine in them and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone…

And here he quotes the rest of the psalm…

…which see not, nor hear, nor know. And the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified.

You were asking earlier – “Life, the universe, and everything?” All your ways I think counts. All of Belshazzar’s life, universe, and everything was in the hand of God right at that point, and God was not happy with Belshazzar.

Then was the part of the hand sent from him and this writing was written [which presumably was still on the wall]. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE - God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.

It’s repeated twice. If we think back to the book of Genesis when Joseph first interpreted a dream, his take on things that are repeated twice is it means it’s happening right now. It’s immediate. Also, all of these words are words for coins. Tekel you might recognize as shekel, but these others are also small common coins in the Middle East. Of course, in those days gold and silver was weighed out, so it was more a weight of gold or silver.

TEKEL - Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

“You do not measure up to God’s standard of justice.”

Peres, which I believe is the singular of upharsin, means divided, but there’s a definite allusion to the Persians who are at the gate.

PERES - Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

Does that also remind us of Peres, in whose days the earth was divided, or is that just a coincidence?

That’s Peleg.

Oh, strike that.

Although that’s an interesting question, because that was a division too. God is in the habit of dividing people who rise up against him, and that was Babel and this is Babel and there’s division.

Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

The Medes are put first because historically Jeremiah prophesied earlier when there were only Medes, and had warned of this. Now the Persians are included. Interestingly, Belshazzar keeps his promise.

Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet and put a chain of gold about his neck and made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

We’re not told how the party went after that. Probably it was a downer and people went home.

Kind of dispersed awkwardly.

We’re told –

In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.

I think next time we’ll talk about, “Wait, it’s Cyrus. What’s Darius doing here?” We’ll talk about that later. That’s a conversation in itself.

You know how many times God tells you the ending of a story before he gets to the end?

Genesis 3:15?

There you go. There are a number of other times, like Jesus predicting his death and resurrection well in advance. “I’m going here. This is what’s going to happen, blow by blow literally. I’m going to rise the third day.”

In the book of Esther there’s, “And it came to pass when the Jews’ enemies were going to have power over them, but it turned around the other way that the Jews had power over their enemies.”

Dramatic suspense just gone.

Just gone, because that’s obviously not what you’re after here. You have other things in mind. So this is more than just foreshadowing. It’s bluntly telling us where this is going. He told us that Daniel would outlive Babylon and here it is.

It’s almost like that record-scratch moment in Emperor’s New Groove. “I bet you’re wondering how I got here.”

Yeah, exactly. I’m also thinking of the grandfather in Princess Bride.

“She does not get eaten by the eels at this time.”

“What?”

“She does not get eaten by the eels at this time. I’m just telling you because you looked a little nervous.”

I was nervous. I was maybe a little bit concerned. That’s not the same thing.

That’s not the same thing. God doesn’t want us too concerned. He tells us up front and then he shows it happening. So the Babylonian empire all goes away, except it doesn’t really because Persia picks up where Babylon left off, and Greece will pick up where Persia left off, and Rome will pick up where they all left off, because none of them in the end, as a nation, as an empire, as a social entity, rejects the idea of continuity of being, the autonomy of man, and the perfectability of human civilization. “Give us enough power, give us enough time, give us enough control, give us the wealth, give us the armies, and we’ll give you a new world and everybody will be happy.”

And although there are particular men who repent – we’re going to see that Cyrus becomes a God-fearer, Nebuchadnezzar had, Esther’s husband Ahasuerus is apparently a God-fearer – yet in the long run none of these men, despite their faith, is able to move the kingdom, the course of empire away from their basic presuppositions. It wasn’t God’s time yet, and none of these human kings was set up to be the king who will change the world.

What they did for a time is protect God’s people, nurture and preserve the line of promise and the Word of God and the worship of God until Messiah should come. God has bluntly used them, and where men humbled themselves before him they reaped the blessings of that, and where they didn’t they were ground into the dust. Except for archeologists and a few people who study ancient history, their names are mostly forgotten, and the kingdom of God endures.

God gives the kingdom to who he will and sets over it the basest of men. He overturns, he overturns, he overturns until he came whose right it is, and to him he gave all power in heaven and earth. So we’re moving toward the end of ancient history. We’re about 490 years out now from the coming of Christ, and 70 years after that we’ll close out the ancient world with the fall of Jerusalem, and we will begin to see the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth, which is what this has all been about the whole time.

If anybody has been listening to our talks about Daniel and is waiting to know where the beasts come in and the Cobra helicopters and the nuclear exchanges, no. I started to write a little commentary on Daniel to match the one I did on Revelation. It would have been really short, and part of what we’re doing here is borrowing from it. The title was going to be, “Unto Messiah, the Prince,” because the prophecies of Daniel coalesce. They point to, they come to their fulfillment, their end in Christ.

There’s very little in Daniel that goes beyond that, except the sweeping vision of his triumph. Most of the things that have to do with beasts and such are long-fulfilled, but what continues is the spread of his kingdom, the growth of that stone that becomes a great mountain and fills the whole earth.

The other, except insofar it informs our understanding of scripture and our present condition, largely God consigned to the ashcan of history, because these kings were no rival, and their gods less so, and sometimes we need to be reminded of that.

There’s an amazing contrast there. You mentioned the continuity of being and how God stands in contrast to that, where God is not made of the same stuff, but all people are made of the same stuff. You have the prophecies of the Medes arising, and we don’t really remember the empire of the Medes. We remember the empire of the Medes and the Persians, or as we like to call it, the Persian empire.

God is not made a liar by folding the Medes into the Persians, and then having the Persians folded into the Greeks. That’s what he’s doing even today in bringing the Gentiles into his church – just keeps folding it together like making a cake. You’ve got to fold it in in the right order.

Because if you don’t, you ruin the cake.

There’s something to that. I don’t know what it is.

I think you’re onto something. We’ve had the discussion before of a digital vs an analog discussion of history, so if anyone wants to go and look that up in some very early episode you can. I think the point at the time was God does intervene in history in very visible obvious ways from time to time, but that doesn’t mean he’s absent from history the rest of the time.

God is constantly working through little things, small lives, small nations, little churches, the prayers of a handful, the sermons of two or three people, and changing the world day by day, whether through the ministry of a mom to her kids, of a dad to his family, or the pastor of a small church in some remote country town or some small corner of the world.

We want the big spectacular stuff. The whole fascination with prophecy is I think our belief that God needs to come down in fire and judgment. He has to impress us to get our attention and to make anything happen. The idea that God could work slowly through all the little things and change the world is so foreign to us.

Where is Israel in all of this? Well, Israel doesn’t exist. It’s scattered among the nations. We see Daniel, we see Ezekiel, and not too many other people, but they live lives. They had kids. They changed diapers. They served meals. They went to work.

There were 11 in this loaf of bread that we keep talking about.

And yet through that, God brought Messiah into the world, so we need to get off of this. God can send a Great Awakening. He can send a Reformation. That’s not usually how he works. So here are these nations and empires that want to do big things and be big people with big armies, and God laughs at them, and we need to learn that lesson.

We’re in a time when people – with more justification than ever, I think – are saying again, “Last days, end of the world, Jesus coming back.” It was bad enough when I was your age and younger. At least then there were prophetic markers. “Israel’s been re-born as a nation. Russia is obviously Gog and Magog,” and all these things. Now the moral quality of our society has done several dips down below even what we would have imagined.

That doesn’t mean that God has given up or that God has failed or the gospel is a failure or that God can’t continue to work one day at a time. A lot of our lives as Christians has got to be getting up in the morning, taking care of the baby, fixing breakfast, going to work or staying home with the kids, doing your job, loving your neighbor, coming home to your wife and loving her, and going to church on Sundays faithfully, and all along the way reading and praying and talking to Jesus.

That’s the primary way that God changes the world, and when he needs to call in a nuclear strike he will. In the meantime, keep covenant faithfulness in the little things, and stop being afraid of all the big nasty things. Let that be an encouragement to someone out there.

That’s a good place to wrap up and have some recommendations. I’m going to recommend making bread. I struggled for years with anything that had yeast in it. It would just always fail in one spectacular way or another, but I finally found a recipe where there’s a video to go with, so I watched the video like three times, and then I watched the video while doing the steps in the video, and now I make bread every three days or something.

You need to share. Make us some bread.

Will do.

Do you have a variety or is it all the same basic white kind of bread or brown kind of bread?

It’s like a sandwich bread, because I was looking for something to replace what we would buy from the store.

I don’t know if I’ve recommended this before, but I’m going to because it’s working well for me. Years ago my pastor visited with Dr. R.J. Rushdoony and was just asking him questions about how he learned all that he did and knew all that he did. His response was that in addition to his scholarly work, where he had a set reading list that he would work through and take voluminous notes in the book – he had a fantastic memory on top of that – he would have a book by his bedside about something else completely different.

So in the middle of an essay on the transcendence of God you might get a remark about people hunting alligators in Florida, because life, the universe, and everything. Everything connects, and sometimes weird things happen.

Like probably many of you who like reading, Emily, how many books do you have by your bedside or someplace, where you’re going to read them, you’re kind of reading them…

I have my library stack. I have my shelves full of books that I mean to read but don’t. I think I have at least two by my bedside right now.

I think I have four or five by my bedside, some of which I read – every three or four months I read a chapter – but my own take on this is a little different. The morning is always a rush for us, and I’m finally after all these years figuring out when I have to be out the door, which means I count back to when I have to be done with my shower and so on.

I have found that I can usually squeeze out about four minutes between getting my lunch ready, doing my formal Bible reading, checking email and all that, and having to take a shower. So with those four minutes I decided I would pick a book that I should have read years ago and just read from it for four minutes on those mornings when I have the time.

That’s such a good idea.

The book I chose was Cornelius Van Til’s A Survey of Christian Epistemology. For me at least, this is exactly the right time to do it, because I wrote all those articles on continuity of being philosophy and Greek philosophy, so I open the book and read like two paragraphs before I have to close the book, and I’m saying, “Wow, I should have read this a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time, because this is exactly the kind of stuff I’ve been writing, and he said it in the 1930s.”

So I’m making way through, I think about 50-60 pages, just a little bit at a time, but it is immensely profitable. His work is very dense, but I know the field well enough that I can keep the continuity from one day to the next, as long as I don’t let it go too long. It’s just that added discipline of reading something different and something in little pieces.

I’ve known a lot of people who have done this in the past. My wife does it, too. Just carry a book around with you, and when you’re waiting in line at the store or waiting to pick somebody up, pull the book out and read a little bit more.

You can’t do that very well with detective fiction, but you can do it with an awful lot of stuff – books that don’t require remembering in detail what just happened – and in the process you can work through a lot of books and stop wasting as much time, and maybe not being on your phone all the time, which might have its own advantages.

So my recommendation is get a book, put it someplace where you have a couple minutes of time every day, and read a big book, a thick book, a hard book. Just read it in bite sizes, the way you eat an elephant.

I have a great recommendation for a book that fits that description, aside from being rather short. The book is How to Talk Minnesotan. It’s written by one of the writers of A Prairie Home Companion, so it’s not an important read at all, but it’s one that you can put down and pick up. You don’t even have to read it in order. You just flip to a random page and start laughing.

Yeah, those kinds of books are useful, too.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in and hope you’ve enjoyed listening. If you’d like to get in touch with us you can send us an email at [email protected].

A big thank you also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling, getting us recording equipment and software and stuff. It’s a huge help. If you’d like to join their number, by the way listener, you can visit our website – anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion or patreon.com/haltingtowardzion. Feel free to send us your recommendations too. We would love to hear some new things to read, watch, eat, grow, etc.

Yeah, let’s hear some listener recommendations to take the pressure off us and introduce us to new things that would be interesting, fun, or edifying.

Then we could do like a mailbag recommendation.

That would be so cool. Okay, you’re all challenged. Let’s see what you’ve got for us.

Yeah, do that. See you next time. Good night.