05/31/2024 – God Weighs the Heart
Daniel 5: 27 “TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; 28 PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” 29 Then Belshazzar gave the command, and they clothed Daniel with purple and put a chain of gold around his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.”
God weighs each of us. It is very telling that the Hebrew term in the Bible to define the glory of God is the term kabod. It has the root meaning of weight or heaviness. Weight is an indicator of potential impact. Even at rest, the glory of God has greater value than all the power of the devil in action! The glory of God is magnificent in its display of majesty and power. But it’s much more than that. A small amount of gold can be stretched so thin that it is amazing what skilled people can do with it. Appearance can be deceiving. But when you put gold on the scale, the true value is revealed. God weighs according to how people and situations manifest His glory. If you have the potential to glorify God, it does not matter where you are or how much you have. But if you are not glorifying God, then you are worth nothing. God is not even calculating the weight of his sin. The lack of the glory of God is sufficient to condemn him.
When I ask people who do not study the Bible about their eternal future, most are convinced that entry into heaven can be achieved by good works outweighing their sins. It is as if God has a scale that can measure the weight of good and evil. There is an incorrect concept that God will weigh our works in the end. The Bible indeed reveals that God weights the spirit of man. Proverbs 16:2 says that our ways seem right to us, but God weights the spirit. Humans have developed amazingly accurate instruments to measure what we consider valuable. What is valued gets measured. Time is more measured than perhaps any other asset, and rightfully so. We do not want to waste any of it.
In this moment in history, we find two men face to face. One was a captive Hebrew, the other, king over the greatest empire on earth. Important truths are revealed at this crucial moment in history. It’s supremely unusual for special revelation to be given even to those in communion with God. You recall that the people had to remain at a distance and only Moses witnessed the finger of God writing the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone. But here, special revelation is given to sinners during their debauchery. Yet no one there can understand any of it. God speaks in a way that only those in communion with Him can understand.
God’s monitoring of our spiritual weight is continuous. He does not wait until the end of our lives as most people believe. There is a limit He will not allow us to exceed.