“King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone. Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking. This is the inscription that was written:

mene, mene, tekel, parsin

“Here is what these words mean:

Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and…it will end. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

Then at Belshazzar’s command, Daniel was clothed in purple, a gold chain was placed around his neck, and he was proclaimed the third highest ruler in the kingdom. That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain, and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two.” Daniel 5

“Funny bone”

Here, “funny” actually refers to the word’s “strange” rather than “hilarious” connotation. The ulnar nerve in the elbow creates a very bizarre, tingling sensation when the surrounding bone experiences a strike. Considering the fact that it does (appropriately enough) run past the humerus in the upper arm, this idiom could still have other origins.

There are parts of the book of Daniel that are compelling — and there are parts that sound funny to our modern minds. But when a human hand appears as an “apparition” — and writes a message to the king — well, this at first just sounds funny, if not compelling, but then it turns out to be frightening. Just like there is nothing funny about hitting your elbow, or your “funny bone”, there is nothing funny about seeing a dis-embodied hand telling us our days are numbered.

Thank the Lord Jesus has our backs — no matter how many days we may, or may not have left on this earth. We do not need to wait for an apparition to tell us where we are going — Jesus is preparing a room for each one of us whenever our time is up. And that promise comes through a cross — and an empty tomb.

Pastor Dave