Further, Belshazzar ‘lifted up’ himself ‘against the Lord of heaven,’ and ’glorified not Him in whose hand was his breath and whose were all his ways.’  The very essence of all sin is that assertion of self as Lord, as sufficient, as the director of one’s path.  To make myself my centre, to depend on myself, to enthrone my own will as sovereign, is to fly in the face of nature and fact, and is the mother of all sin.  To live to self is to die while we live; to live to God is to live even while we die.  Nations and individuals are ever tempted thus to ignore God, and rebelliously to say, ‘Who is Lord over us?’ or presumptuously to think themselves architects of their own fortunes, and sufficient for their own defence.  Whoever yields to that temptation has let the ’prince of the devils’ in, and the inferior evil spirits will follow.  Positive acts are not needed; the negative omission to ‘glorify’ the God of our life binds sin on us.

Further, Belshazzar, the type of godlessness, had desecrated the sacrificial vessels by using them for his drunken carouse, and therein had done just what we do when we take the powers of heart and mind and will, which are meant to be filled with affections, thoughts, and purposes, that are ‘an odour of a sweet smell, well-pleasing to God,’ and desecrate them by pouring from them libations before creatures.  Is not love profaned when it is lavished on men or women without one reference to God?  Is not the intellect desecrated when its force is spent on finite objects of thought, and never a glance towards God?  Is not the will prostituted from its high vocation when it is used to drive the wheels of a God-ignoring life?

The coin bears the image and superscription of the true king.  It is treason to God to render it to any paltry ‘Caesar’ of our own coronation.  Belshazzar was an avowed idolater, but many of us are worshipping gods ‘which see not, nor hear, nor know’ as really as he did.  We cannot but do so, if we are not worshipping God; for men must have some person or thing which they regard as their supreme good, to which the current of their being sets, which, possessed, makes them blessed; and that is our god, whether we call it so or not.

Further, Belshazzar was carousing while the Medes and Persians were ringing Babylon round, and his hand should have been grasping a sword, not a wine-cup.  Drunkenness and lust, which sap manhood, are notoriously stimulated by peril, as many a shipwreck tells when desperate men break open the spirit casks, and go down to their death intoxicated, and as many an epidemic shows when morality is flung aside, and mad vice rules and reels in the streets before it sinks down to die.  A nation or a man that has shaken off God will not long keep sobriety or purity.