“What is this world if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare,” writes the poet William Henry Davies. When I lived in London, I would visit the National Gallery and simply stand and stare at the great works of art.
One of the paintings I delighted in was Belshazzar’s Feast by the great Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. The story of King Belshazzar comes from the Book of Daniel. Belshazzar was king of Babylon — the most powerful empire of the sixth century BC. Mighty Babylon had defeated puny Judah. The Jews were exiled.
Belshazzar threw a party for a thousand of his lords. He got drunk. He commanded his servants to fetch the sacred vessels from the Jerusalem Temple. The king, his lords, his wives, and his concubines began to drink wine from them “and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone” (Daniel 5:3-4).
It was the height of hubris.
Suddenly a hand appeared and began writing on the wall: “God has numbered the days of your rule and brought it to an end” (Daniel 5:26). Daniel describes King Belshazzar’s shock: “Then the king’s color changed, his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together.”
Rembrandt’s Painting: A Study in Shock
Rembrandt’s Belshazzar is a study in shock: The king’s head is turned at least 90 degrees. His neck is tense. His eyes open wide in horror. He raises his left arm to protect himself. In shock, he jerks backward and sends a cup of wine flying with his right arm. The woman to the right spills a pitcher of wine like a waterfall. The man and woman on the far side of the table watch with open mouths.
That night, Belshazzar was killed. For him the writing was literally on the wall. Humpty Dumpty has a great, big fall.
Imagine ordinary people celebrating their freedom from Belshazzar’s tyranny afterward — ordinary people like the courtesan at the extreme left in Rembrandt’s painting. She is almost hidden from view. She is neither shocked nor horrified by the writing on the wall. Has she been secretly praying and hoping for this moment? Is she asking the same questions we are asking? “Who has the last word? Who is in control? When, how will it all end?”
Is history moving forward to a climactic dénouement where pain and suffering and evil will one day be no more? Or is history a cyclical succession of kings and empires that goes on and on? Are we to sing the Engelbert Humperdinck song, “Turning and turning the world goes on, we can’t change it, my friend”? Or are we to believe the nursery rhyme that Humpty Dumpty will have a great, big fall that no one can reverse?
Indic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, Chinese traditions like Confucianism and the yin and yang, and New Age religions are committed to a cyclical reading of history. That is why some of them preach reincarnation, not redemption.
But Semitic religions like Judaism and Christianity are committed to a linear reading of history. That is why we believe in redemption and resurrection.
Four Monsters and the Son of Man
That is why Daniel’s vision in Chapter 7 is central to a Christian understanding of how the world works and what the future holds. In the first year of King Belshazzar’s reign, Daniel sees four monsters in a vision (Daniel 7:1). It is like a scene from a horror movie. The beasts are a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a terrifying animal with iron teeth and 10 horns. The last beast is the worst. The four monsters are the four superpowers of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. The 10 horns on the beast are the 10 Greek kings from Alexander the Great to Antiochus III.
The worst king is the eleventh horn, Antiochus IV (or Antiochus Epiphanes). In 168 BC he defiled the Jerusalem Temple, sacrificed a pig on its altar, erected an altar to Jupiter, prohibited Temple worship, outlawed circumcision, destroyed copies of the Bible, and terrorized the Jews.
Israel is the apparently defenseless human being — a “son of Man.” But the climax to the story is when thrones are set in place and a great court sits in judgment. The judge, the Ancient of Days, takes his seat and rules in favor of the Son of Man against the monsters. The Son of Man is given dominion over the nations. The great beast (Antiochus) is killed. The other beasts have their dominion taken away — but their lives are prolonged “for a season and a time” (Daniel 7:12).
This is how history will be brought to its grand finale. The Ancient of Days and the Son of Man are ultimately in control, even though monsters and beasts seem to have provisional control over the world. Daniel 7 assures God’s people that the final act in the play is not the triumph of Antiochus but the victory of the Son of Man. For Humpty Dumpty the writing is on the wall. Humpty Dumpty will have a great, big fall.
Jesus Defeats the Monsters
The New Testament models Jesus’s ascension on Daniel’s Son of Man. On the cross Jesus dealt the deathblow to the monsters and beasts that masquerade as rulers of this world. His triumph over death and evil is vindicated in His resurrection from the dead. But that is not the end of the story.
Luke in his gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles uses language borrowed from Daniel to describe how Jesus ascends into Heaven. He is lifted up and a cloud takes him out of everyone’s sight (Acts 1:9). This is what we affirm when we recite the Nicene Creed: “He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
The problem is that we read this story as a sanitized spiritual event rather than as an earth-shattering political event. For many of us, the “Ascension” is another way of saying that Jesus “went to Heaven when he died,” write N.T. Wright. We imagine Jesus doing a vertical take-off and flying up like a spaceman to a “heaven’” located somewhere “up there” or “somewhere over the rainbow.”
But “at no point in the gospels or Acts does anyone say anything remotely like, ‘Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.’ They say, rather, ‘Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete,”’ Wright notes in his book Surprised by Hope.
Jesus has gone to Heaven because that is God’s control room for Earth. He is the new CEO that has taken charge. Jesus is already ruling the rebellious world as its rightful ruler and king. The world is a mess, but the monsters are living on borrowed time. For them, the writing is on the wall. Humpty Dumpty will have a great, big fall. History is moving forward to its climactic dénouement.
So what do we do in the meantime?
Fighting the Good Fight
We do what the apostles did in the book of Acts: We stop gazing into Heaven. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11). We are not to be stargazers; we are to be witnesses going to the ends of the earth. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). We are to stop thinking of the Gospel as a private religious experience or an inward-looking therapeutic spirituality and start thinking of it as a political earthquake that has rocked the world. We are to submit to Him and summon others to submit to Him in obedience.
This is precisely what the apostles were doing in the book of Acts. They were subversively proclaiming Jesus as the new King under the very nose of kings like Herod Agrippa I, Herod Agrippa II, the Roman governors Felix and Festus, and the Roman emperors Tiberius Caesar, Caesar Claudius, and Caesar Nero. Paul and Silas were accused of sedition because they were “acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7). But Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall. Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
In his book Civilisation, Niall Ferguson tells how the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was tasked with discovering how the West, having lagged behind China for centuries, eventually overtook it and established itself in a position of global pre-eminence. At first, said the scholar, people thought it was because they had more powerful guns. Then they concluded it was because they had the best political system. Then they realized it was the economic system. “But in the past 20 years,” the Chinese scholars finally said, “we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.”
Not merely at the heart of our culture, but at the heart of a new world is a new Lord offering a new life under a new ruler. Can you see the writing on the wall? Jesus is Lord of all, or He isn’t Lord at all.
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
