‘But when his heart was lifted up and his mind hardened in pride’ – those two lines are worthy of careful consideration. Not only was his heart lifted up in self-confidence and self-esteem, but his mind was hardened in pride. That is an important statement just on its own: ‘Hardened in pride.’ Pride is hardening. Pride has that powerful setting cement in it. It gets into us, and we think well of ourselves, and we begin to think we are so important, but it's not something you can dismiss in a moment or recover from overnight. It sets hard. Even if you repent of it, it doesn't want to go away. It takes strong treatment and imploring of God and anxiety and concern to get rid of pride once it has entered. But when he reached this state, he was deposed – there was that extraordinarily real but symbolic deposing from his power, that spell of madness – ‘and they took his glory from him.’ You knew about that, says Daniel: the humbling of the greatest Chaldean emperor ever, and yet you never learnt from it. Belshazzar knows this full well but despises it, and now it is recounted to him.
Today we have the open ridicule of Christian truth on media; that was not done fifty years ago. But the God of Israel sees and knows every word and thought, and in his time he will judge all the arrogance of man.