PERES means that your kingdom has been divided and given over to the Medes and Persians.”PERES: your kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.”PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.PERES; thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
3 sermons cite this verse
… a prophecy against him, and finished it. You've been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes, the Persians. That very night, Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain, and Darius the Mede received the kingdom. Like that. In a single night, all of these promises of condemnation and judgment came true. Less than a century after, God utters them. It's what the author of Hebrews says. It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God. Babylonians fell into the hands of the living God. Much of it because of what they did to the Israelites and to so many others. God did not ignore their injustice. And you can better believe God does not ignore or turn a blind eye to the injustice that you are experiencing in your life. God sees it. Look at verse 13. This is basically what happens is Habakkuk responds. He's, because we're going to find out he's a worship leader. He's not a pastor. He's a worship leader. He responds to all of this pain and suffering, this heaviness with creativity. …
found wanting. [See Sermon #257, Volume 5—THE SCALES OF JUDGMENT] Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians." O Belshazzar, stop your feasting! Look, the shaft of God! The death-shaft is whizzing through the air! It has pierced his heart—he falls dead—and with him great Babylon falls! That feast was a feast of death! It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of such "feasting" as that! Here is a melancholy proof of the assertion I made, that most of the terrible calamities that have ever happened to men have happened in "the house of feasting." Here is another house. I have read your record, O mistress of the house! I say, Woman, I have read your record and it is enough for me—I need not cross your threshold! I do not want to see your magnificent temple. I never wish to sit in your splendid halls. Rather would I sleep nightly in my shroud and sit on my coffin—and have my gravestone in the wall of my study and live in a vault forever—than I would enter that "house of feasting." O God, may I be kept from sinful mirth! May I be kept from the house of sinful feasting! May I never be tempted to cross that threshold! O young men who are enchanted by its gaiety, charmed by its music, stay away, stay away, for every plank in the floor is rotten, every stone that is there is dug from the quarries of Hell! And if you enter into that woman's mansion, you shall find that her house is the way to Hell, going down to the chambers of death! "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting"—the house of sinful feasting. …
… finished it. You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting, and your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and to the Persians. And we read at the end of the chapter, and on that night, Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans. was slain. We don't know how it happened. We don't know how the Persians conquered Babylon, but the secular historians of the period say that there was an underground stream that went under the wall of Babylon that supplied the water to the city. And the Persian commander understood that and dammed up the river upstream. So that as soon as the water stopped flowing, this big, huge viaduct under the wall became passable. And while the feast was going on that night, the Persian army walked unimpeded under the the walls of Babylon and surprised the king and his nobles while they're in a drunken stupor and conquered them. This is the story of the providence of God who bestows kingdoms and takes them away, raises kings up, brings kings down. …