The Writing On The Wall
Dear Friends,
God is the ultimate graffiti artist.
What Banksy does, to no small effect, on the walls and gable ends of buildings overnight, God’s been doing for centuries. He paints out on the more expansive canvas of our history the messages which people need to know: slipping in, while most have fallen fast asleep, and writing on the plaster walls of decadent societies His timely, terse one-liners.
Ask Belshazzar! Stupefied by self-indulgent drinking and an arrogant disdain for any sort of sacredness in life, he was shaken awake by the sight of an unseen Babylonian ‘Banksy’ doing His stuff: God Himself, the great graffiti artist, spelling out His message on the splendid throne-room wall, for all the world to see.
Four short words. Three, if you don’t count repetition. Mene. Mene. Tekel. Parsin.
Four short words which drained the blood from king Belshazzar’s countenance, had his knees both knocking hard together, and took the legs from under him. The writing on the wall. Graffiti art from God Himself. The message very simple. Finito.
Time’s up and your days are numbered. You’ve been weighed on the scales and you don’t measure up. Your kingdom’s divided, your moment of prominence gone.
Four short words. Pointed. Punchy. Plain as plain can be.
The Word keeps writing words across whatever sort of surface He can find: and that includes the canvas of contemporary life. And so I wonder if there’s writing on the wall now for us, too? The tell-tale signs of God’s discreet graffiti art writ large across the landscape of the so-called ‘western world’?
The days of a nation are certainly numbered, their ‘time’ most assuredly up, when certain troubling ‘watermarks’ appear throughout that people’s life: not least the two-fold, foul phenomena of the blurring of distinctions, on the one hand, and the birthing of divisions, on the other, in society.
Division. Long before the days of king Belshazzar, when Babylon was Babel, but when ancient men and women showed the same defiant, self-indulgent, self-assertive spirit in antipathy to God – there, in that now infamous endeavour to construct a soaring tower as a statement of their God-usurping arrogance, there you had another graphic statement of impending doom. Some further great graffiti art appearing overnight.
Division. The people left suddenly scattered, divided, confused. At odds with one another. No longer speaking the same single language as once they had done. No longer at ease and at one with each other. No longer united at all. But scattered, suspicious; dispersed and divided.
Another great one-liner on the plaster walls of history. Defiance of God births divisions in society. Always. And division in a kingdom brings decline, defeat, disaster, and in the end will render such a kingdom quite defunct.
Isn’t that what happened in the Bible’s solemn narrative of Israel’s kings?
There was much in Solomon’s reign as Israel’s king which drew the crowds and earned the rapturous plaudits of the watching world: impressive building projects; eye-catching displays of opulent wealth and all the latest trappings of an economic boom and of a vulgar, vogue prosperity; some notable literary accomplishments; and global recognition in the fitful volatility of the politics of the time.
But the seeds of demise were already being sown in the many subtle ways in which the king’s perverse defiance of the living God emerged. His affluence, indulgence, and his all too casual carelessness about the Word of God: a discreet, but definite defiance of the living God. The cracks all papered over by the stunning, outward rigmaroles of liturgy and their state-of-the-art worship centre: but cracks there certainly were, and that subtle, secret spirit of defiance on the part of Israel’s king was one which trickled down and permeated every farthest aspect of the nation’s life – so that subsequent to Solomon, defiance birthed division, and the break-up of the kingdom very rapidly ensued. The ten northern tribes going out on a limb: Judah and the smaller tribe of Benjamin remaining true to David and to David’s line.
The nation fractured. Divisions apparent. A process of ingrained disintegration had set in: and over time division brought decline, defeat and ultimate demise. That moment in the history books when north and south divided in the aftermath of Solomon’s reign – that was another great ‘Banksy’ moment, God’s overnight graffiti on the plaster of their politics. The writing on the wall.
Division. Occasioned by defiance: and resulting in decline, defeat, demise.
Divisions in society are God’s own inbuilt warning lights which flash across the dashboard of a people’s life to indicate that something has gone wrong: and if the fault is not addressed, the thing may simply die on you.
Isn’t that what we’re starting to see more and more these days? Divisions in society.
There’s always room for healthy disagreement in a people’s life, as iron thus sharpens iron. But it’s not to such disagreement I’m meaning to point. It’s rather to the deep-seated, chronic divisions which are starting now to proliferate – it’s to them that I’m seeking to point you.
Politically very divided. Divided over Brexit. Divided over IndyRef. Split right down the middle and the tensions, like the stakes, so very high. Northern Ireland a case so very much in point, a classic illustration of precisely such division in society today. A land border with Europe. A sea border with the Union. A complex, no-win Rubik’s cube of rights and wrongs and needs and wants, compounded by the fires of fierce religious feeling on each side. Division – with, who knows, the very real potential for complete disintegration.
Culturally divided as well. A breaking away from historical roots: a stubborn, persistent insistence on cutting those ties with the past, removing the very foundations on which our society’s built, and going it alone (without any longer, I mean – without any longer recourse to resources beyond ourselves, that looking to God and His Word). And thus we find at point after point the battle lines are drawn. Progressives, intent and insistent on rolling out an arrogantly avant-garde agenda: and those whose instincts tell them that there’s something flawed and fatal in that radical departure from our roots.
Division now, far more than merely serious disagreement. A clash of two opposing worldviews – where, in days gone by, the varied disagreements all took place within a common frame of reference. A people now pulling in two very different directions: and tearing ourselves apart. And the number one virtue of ‘tolerance’ spawning, as always it does, its own pervasive intolerance.
Defiance of God births divisions in society, which themselves release disintegrative forces resulting in decline and then demise. So when you see these fault-lines of division in society, you’re back with king Belshazzar seeing the writing on the wall.
The more so when that birthing of divisions in society is matched in equal measure by the careful, conscious blurring of distinctions which are complementary, God-ordained, and integral to humankind’s true health.
You wonder what I mean by speaking of the blurring of these God-ordained distinctions? Well, unity has morphed into a harmful uniformity. Equality has come to mean that all must be the same. Defiance of God (His being, His ways, and His Word) invariably leads to this – the blurring of countless distinctions which themselves are but a hallmark of His handiwork.
His creation reflects His own being. He is indeed the one true God – “the LORD your God is one”: uniquely and eternally just so. One God: but three distinct ‘persons’. A breath-taking, glorious unity, emphatically one – and yet, just as gloriously, just as emphatically, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. United, not divided. Distinct, and not identical. Equal without being the same. One without being mere clones.
And the whole of His creation has been made by Him both to reflect and to reveal, both to declare and to display, the glory of the one Creator God.
Humanity, made in His image, in His very likeness: thus ‘male and female He created them’. Equal without being the same. One, yet not simply clones.
The same thing’s true right across the whole created cosmos – the universe, precisely because it’s not diverse, perverse or multiverse. A fundamental unity, yet infinite variety. Like God Himself. The sea and dry land: deliberately distinct, and yet so closely intertwined to form one lovely planet, earth. The ‘greater’ light to govern the day and the ‘lesser’ light to govern the night: different and clearly distinct, and yet together forming one coherent rhythm to the daily, cyclic ‘breathing’ of this world.
Creation is His handiwork. And it bears in its entirety the hallmarks of the Lord, the triune God.
Sort out your theology, first, and the rest falls into place. But ditch the Lord, and you lose the plot. Instead of that oneness, division is birthed: instead of that ‘variety’, distinctions get all blurred. And that’s surely what we are seeing these days. From the push for same-sex marriage, through the whole great gender agenda, right on to a rampant ‘universalism’ within so many parts of the modern church, where it doesn’t really matter what you may believe, it’ll be all right for everyone in the end: the crucial, God-ordained distinctions have been blurred.
Not so the teaching of the Scriptures, of course!
You’re either a woman or a man.
You’re either a sheep or a goat.
You’re either for Jesus, or against Him. You’re either in the Kingdom, or you’re out. You’re either alive or you’re dead.
Distinctions. Always these distinctions in the way the triune God has framed His universe. So when you see distinctions such as these becoming blurred across society, you’re back with king Belshazzar once again. Flashing lights across the dashboard of your nation’s life. The writing on the wall.
You’ve seen such things in the hospital wards. The up-and-down lines of the bleeping, bedside monitor, charting by its steady, pulsing, oscillating track a patient’s very life – you’re glad when you see the distinctions between the highs and the lows of its path.
And you worry when those specific distinctions then collapse. Because you know what the flatline means.
Perhaps that’s where we’re at in our land today. The writing on the wall, as God the great graffiti king, daubs across the plastered walls of our nation’s life today these ‘warning-shot’ one-liners. When the one-liner is found to be a flat-liner, alarm bells should be ringing!
May the Lord yet grant us mercy as a nation in these turbulent days, that we may both read and heed such writing on the wall.
Yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,
Jeremy Middleton