The Writing is on the Wall

Sermon Transcript

From the playground bully who never seems to get caught to the dictator who finances his life of luxury on the backs of his poor citizens, the bad guys often seem to prosper. And what’s that tempt us to do? If you can’t beat them, join them. Do whatever the rich and powerful say to get on their side so that their power works in your favor instead of working against you. Or, try to get that power for yourself! As Denzel Washington’s character said in the movie Training Day: “It takes a wolf to catch a wolf.” But then, of course, you become the very thing you opposed. In your opposition to the proud, you exert your pride. The sad history of this can be seen in the way many revolutionaries set out to topple one oppressive regime only to then institute a new one in its place—think of the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, or more recent efforts by communist dictators like Castro in Cuba or Maduro in Venezuela. We want to see perfect justice, but in the name of creating it, we end up creating new injustices.

 

So also God’s people throughout their history have found themselves under the rule of proud tyrants, from Pharaoh in Egypt to Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who we will meet later in the book of Daniel, to many more. Between those two, though, today we meet Belshazzar, a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon through the first four chapters of Daniel. And to varying degrees, as long as we are in exile on earth, away from our heavenly home, we will see the wicked prosper. What are we to do? Assimilate to them? Try to topple them? Left to ourselves, those might be our options, but we’ll see in this passage today that we aren’t left to ourselves. In this passage we’ll see once again that there is a God in the heavens, he is our God, and our God will judge the proud. How does that judgment play out according to this passage? First, the proud mock our God. Then, our God convicts the proud. Then, our God sentences the proud. And, finally…our God executes the proud.

 

The proud mock our God

 

Our passage today begins with this new king Belshazzar throwing a great feast for a thousand of his lords, a feast at which wine featured prominently. But after he’d had a few, the implication at least is that he began to be intoxicated, and he called for the vessels from the temple in Jerusalem to be brought so that he and his guests might drink from them. We first encountered these vessels in chapter 1 of Daniel where we read that the Lord himself delivered these vessels into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem. So Nebuchadnezzar took them, but Nebuchadnezzar still treated them like they were the vessels of some deity. He didn’t drink out of them. His successor, Belshazzar, goes a step further here. He takes the golden vessels, and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them.

 

And then they go another step further still. They didn’t just drink from them like you and a few friends might have a glass of wine with dinner—verse 4 tells us they drank wine and praised the gods of gold and sliver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. Wine was associated with worship in many ancient religions, including Israel’s, although in Israelite worship instituted in the Bible, the wine was not drunk by the worshipers; it was poured out with other offerings as a drink offering to the LORD. In other religions, however, the wine was drunk to the point of excess, and drunkenness was itself seen as a kind of divine possession or pathway to connecting with the divine, not unlike how some today use psychedelics to achieve a spiritual sensation. That seems to be the sort of thing happening here, and then we read that the gods they worship are gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which would be figures carved out of these materials to whom they then bow down.

 

Worshiping gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone is an obvious violation of both the first and second commandments that God gave to Israel when he gave them the Ten Commandments as a summary of his will for their lives: You shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make for yourself any carved image to which you bow down. Nebuchadnezzar did something similar when he made a golden image and demanded that all nations bow down to it. But again, there’s another step here: Now Belshazzar is enlisting the vessels that were previously devoted to our God to do it. In this he also violates the third commandment, in which our God tells us not to take his name in vain, the full import of which includes taking anything devoted to him and using it for some end other than his glory. In the book of Jeremiah, for example, we see God referring to the temple as the house that is “called by his name” (Jer 7:10-11). So also its vessels are his—it’s as though they have his name on them. And now not only is Belshazzar putting them to a common use—drinking with a few buddies—he’s putting them to idolatrous use: The worship of gods made by human hands.

 

The technical term for this is sacrilege, or desecration—taking what is sacred and devoting it to an idolatrous end. All sins are deserving of condemnation, but some sins are more heinous than others, especially the more flagrant they become. It’s one thing to take God’s vessels, it’s another to use them like a common wine glass, and another still to use them in the worship of false gods. Belshazzar isn’t simply ignoring God or falling a bit short of loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength—Belshazzar is mocking God. He’s taking what was devoted to God and devoting it to an idolatrous end. I’m reminded of an infamous photograph of a Ku Klux Klan meeting with the banner “Jesus saves” hanging above it, the way crosses and signs using Jesus’ name were mixed with images from Norse mythology by the January 6 White House protestors, or the way alt-right leaders today will reject core Christian doctrines but still claim to be “culture Christians,” as though the name and cause of Christ could be co-opted for their political ends while Christ himself is rejected. We could also think of churches that still call themselves Christian but are now using the name of Christ and even the buildings they own to promote the affirmation of homosexual activity and transgenderism. In each case, we’ve gone from the simple act of committing sins like racial partiality or sexual immorality, to approving of such sins, to boasting in such sins, to even using the name of our God to promote such sins.

 

Theologian Carl Trueman has written and spoken in recent years about the desecration of man in particular, he has a forthcoming book set to be released in 2026 by that title, and he points out in an essay on the topic that the roots of desecration are right there in the first sin in Genesis 3. The first humans bore God’s name in a unique way. Though God made everything, only they were called the image of God. They were created sacred, for unique devotion to God, but what did they do? They devoted themselves, not only to a common use, but an idolatrous one, as they served a serpent, rather than our God, when they obeyed his word and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And as many Christian commentators throughout the centuries have pointed out, behind this first transgression was the sin of pride. Behind all sacrilege or desecration is pride.

 

Because what does pride do? Pride resists any boundaries, and pride devises its own ends. Part of what it means to be images of God is to be bounded and directed to some end—to be an image of God means we have incredible worth and abilities as humans. As Psalm 8 says, God has crowned us with glory and honor. And yet, because we are images of God, and not God himself, we are bounded by the fact that we are not God, and directed to an end beyond ourselves: The glory of God. We ought to reflect his image, not assert our own fabricated image. That is not a bug of our humanity; it’s a feature. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was meant to test this feature: Will you accept a bounded existence, will you live as the image of God, or will you try to break through the boundary and be God? Pride inclines us toward the latter, and the problem with it is it never stops. It began with eating a piece of fruit in Genesis 1. By Daniel 1 it was taking God’s vessels from his temple. By Daniel 5 it’s using them to worship other gods. And by Romans 1, written centuries later after the coming of Christ, listen to where it had reached: “29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29-32).

 

Here’s how Trueman describes the phenomenon in his essay: “Desecration is exhilarating. Breaking through the limits and creating our own ends gives us the feeling of being gods ourselves. As it is God who determines reality, so our usurping of that task brings a godlike high. Augustine articulates this powerfully in Book 2 of his Confessions when he describes his intense pleasure as a youth in stealing pears—bitter, inedible pears—from a neighbor’s garden. It made him feel like God. A less well-known but perhaps more striking analysis is the description Dostoevsky gives of a fellow inmate during his time in a Siberian prison. Today we would use the term “serial killer” for such a person. Dostoevsky was fascinated by the inmate’s apparent need to kill, and he drew the following conclusion: The first man he killed was an oppressor, an enemy; that is a crime, but understandable; he had a reason; but then he kills not an enemy but the first man he meets, kills him for fun, for a rude word, for a glance, for a trifle. . . . It’s as if the man is drunk, as if he’s in a feverish delirium. As if, having leaped over a line that was sacred to him, he begins to admire the fact that nothing is holy for him anymore; as if he feels an urge to leap over all legality and authority at once, and to revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom, to revel in this thrill of horror, which it is impossible for him not to feel.” Trueman concludes: “Desecration, in short, is fun and addictive.”

 

How vividly do we see here the drunken delirium Dostoevsky described? Here we have a literally drunken king who can’t get enough of leaping over the lines that were once sacred. This is where pride leads: To a flagrant mockery of all lines, and ultimately to a flagrant mockery of the God from whom such lines flow. We can easily point out ways our society is engaged in this, but can you see the beginnings of pride in your own heart? You too are an image of God, and though you may look at a Belshazzar or a Klansman or a rainbow-flag-draped pride marcher and be tempted to say, “God, I thank you that I am not like them,” the seeds of those very sins are present in our hearts as well. Don’t water them. Where is pride tempting you to push the boundaries God has put in place? Where is pride tempting you to take what is devoted to God and put it to some other use? Whether in the case of Augustine or our first parents, it starts small, with some forbidden fruit, but then the thrill of it sets in, and you need more. It starts with pushing the boundaries: “I know the Bible technically forbids this, but nobody really takes it that seriously.” It starts with redirecting the ends: “I know this verse doesn’t really mean that, but I can use it that way to accomplish a good goal,” like making Christianity a means to some other end, even a better society. With such small beginnings you water the plant of pride, and when it is fully grown, it looks like the celebration of sin and the use of what is devoted to God for idolatrous ends.

 

But thankfully, the mockery of God is not the final word, because we see next that our God convicts the proud.

 

Our God convicts the proud

 

In verse 5 we read that immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. Now what do you think that would do to you if you were Belshazzar? You’ve just been getting drunk and worshipping false gods using the very instruments devoted to the true God, and now you see a human hand appear and start writing on the wall. This is, by the way, the story from which the phrase, “The writing is on the wall” originates. And we don’t have to speculate about what it would feel like to see this happen: In verse 6 we read that the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. Some commentators think the language here suggests he actually peed his pants, or worse.

 

And that is a picture of the conviction of sin. When you start crossing the boundaries and enjoying the trill of living as though you are God, you are constructing for yourself an unreal world, and that unreality can only last so long. At some point, God snaps you back into reality. Often it happens when you get caught. You’d been leading a secret life online, but then someone you know somehow discovers your profile. You’d been rationalizing a sin in your mind, but then the pastor clearly names it as sin in a sermon, a brother or sister directly confronts you about it, or even in your own Bible reading you come across a condemnation of it that you just can’t deny. Other times it happens more internally. You wake up after a night of drunkenness and realize, “Wow; what did I do last night? How did I get to this point?” You cross a line you never in your wildest dreams thought you’d cross, and it hits you: Something’s not right here.

 

So Belshazzar gets a good jolt from this handwriting on the wall, but he can’t understand the handwriting. Neither can the best and brightest of Babylon, whose impotence in these matters we’ve seen before. So the queen tells him to bring in Daniel, and Daniel clarifies the conviction. In any just legal system, the case against the accused must be stated before the conviction can be finalized. You have to be charged in order to be convicted. So what was unclear in the hand writing on the wall Daniel begins to make clear in verse 18. He begins by recounting the story of Nebuchadnezzar from chapter 4, which Mark preached on this past Sunday. He reminds Belshazzar of how Nebuchadnezzar was humbled by God when his heart was lifted up and his spirit was hardened so that he dealt proudly. He was brought down from his throne, stripped of his reason, lived with donkeys, ate grass, and got wet with the dew, until he knew that the Most High God rules the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom he will, until he accepts his limits, in other words, and lives according to his created end.

 

And yet, Belshazzar did not humble his heart, though he knew all this, verse 22 says. Don’t let that be true of you. The story of Nebuchadnezzar and the story of Belshazzar are in scripture so that you will know where pride leads. Don’t think that you’ll be the exception. The Bible doesn’t just tell us the stories of moral heroes; it also tells us the stories of hardened sinners, not to glorify their sin like a modern movie might, but to reveal its ugliness, and especially to show us where it ends. This is part of the reason to share your own life experiences honestly with others. Tell others where sin actually led, even though it can look so pleasurable. Parents, as your kids age, tell them those stories, and especially stories like this one that God has given us in the Bible. Kids, learn from those stories. Don’t think you’ll be the exception.

 

So the first charge of which Belshazzar is found guilty by God through his prophet Daniel is that he knew where pride led, but he didn’t learn from it. He indulged it anyway. The next charge for which Belshazzar is convicted is taking the vessels of the Lord of heaven’s house and drinking from them. If our God was just one among many gods, a local deity bound to Jerusalem, perhaps Belshazzar could have gotten away with drinking from his vessels. But that’s not who our God is. He’s the Lord of heaven, who saw Belshazzar’s sin with piercing clarity, and who therefore would not let him get away with it. If you are nurturing some secret sin, if you are even hiding it under a profession of faith in Christ, do you really think the Lord of heaven doesn’t see it? At some point, you too will be charged and convicted for taking what is called by his name and profaning it.

 

And finally, Belshazzar is charged and convicted of praising these gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways, you have not honored. Now again, think about this: Belshazzar, to the degree he even believes Daniel’s god exists, is just thinking of him as Daniel’s god. That’s how many polytheists, those who believe in multiple gods, thought of gods in the ancient world. Yeah sure, this people group or this land has a god, but why should I honor that god if I’m not living in that land or part of that people group? I’ve got my own gods to honor.

 

But here Daniel says that our God is not just one among many. He’s the only God in whose hand is Belshazzar’s breath, and whose are all Belshazzar’s ways, and therefore even though Belshazzar is not a Jew living in Israel, Belshazzar ought to honor the God of the Jews. He ought to worship that God, and so also ought you and I. The average human takes 17,000 to 30,000 breaths in a day, and what this verse is saying is that every one of them is in the hand of our God. If he should choose to close his hand and withhold the next breath, you will drop dead very soon thereafter. Not only that, but this is the God whose are all our ways. In other words, our outcomes in life, our path, depends on what he chooses to do with it. Remember that what Nebuchadnezzar had to learn was that the Most High God rules over the kingdom of mankind and sets over it whom he will. That means not only Belshazzar’s life, but his reign, his kingdom, is in God’s hand, and at any moment God can remove him and set up another. And this is no less true of us. Jesus tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from our God; how much more are our lives and days in his hands?

 

If this is the case, if our every breath depends on him, and if our future is ultimately determined by him, doesn’t it behoove us to honor him? Notice that Daniel doesn’t go to great pains to argue this point to Belshazzar, to convince him that his God is the one true God, the one who holds his breath and whose are all his ways. Our God has revealed himself in the things he has made, so that even though there are plenty of good arguments for his existence, deep down we all know he’s there and that we ought to honor him. None of us have a good excuse not to.

 

If you are here today and you are not a Christian, you may live a basically good life relative to other humans. You may be kind to your neighbors, you may generally tell the truth in your speech, you may be involved in charitable causes and seeking the good of others, you may try to do to others what you’d want them to do to you, all of which would be good things. But do you honor the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways? The late pastor Tim Keller used to share the illustration of a woman who adopts a child from off the streets and gives him everything: A home, food, an education, a safe neighborhood, opportunities to play sports, develop hobbies, develop friendships, and so on. When he grows up, he leaves, goes off to college, and goes on to have a successful career. He’s honest, he works hard, he gets involved in community service, he even gets married, has kids, and raises them well. But he never calls home. Though this mother gave him everything, he ignores her. Does that seem right?

 

So also even if you are living a relatively good life, if you do not honor the God who has given you breath and every good thing, you will be charged and convicted by him. Perhaps some of you are feeling the conviction now. Whether you’re a Christian or not, when our God does convict you of sin, don’t let that pass. His goal in convicting you now is so that you will repent before you face the final judgment. Belshazzar expresses a kind of worldly fear when he sees the hand writing on the wall, but now that Daniel has read him the charges and convicted him, we see no indication going forward of any attempt on his part to repent. Don’t let your heart reach this point. When God brings conviction, turn. When a brother or sister confronts you, don’t dig your heels in. Repent. Kids, when your parents try to correct you, don’t launch into self-defense or excuse-making mode. Receive their correction as God’s grace to you, running after you to rescue you, to keep your heart from reaching this Belshazzar level of hardness, and repent.

 

But alas, at this point Belshazzar was beyond that, and so next we see that our God sentences the proud.

 

Our God sentences the proud

 

What did the handwriting actually say? We find out in verses 24-28. The writing was mene, mene, tekel, and parsin. These are all Aramaic words that refer to units of weight with monetary value. Probably they were represented by symbols on the wall, which is why Daniel was needed to decipher them, or perhaps they were Hebrew words that Daniel had to translate into Aramaic. The first, which is repeated twice, is mene, which means God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought them to an end. As the Most High God rules over the kingdoms of men and sets over them whom he will, so here we see that at this point, he has decided that Belshazzar’s reign is over.

 

The next word is tekel, which tells Belshazzar that he has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. A balance is a common symbol of justice, and here the balance seems to be weighing Belshazzar’s righteousness on one side, against the righteousness God requires, and Belshazzar has been found wanting. Because of his many sins, he doesn’t have what he needs to stand before the judgment of God.

 

And finally, peres means his kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. Though Belshazzar was a Babylonian king, this predicts that not only will he die, but with his death the entire Babylonian kingdom will be defeated and handed over to what we now know as the Medio-Persian empire, the empire formed from the combination of the Medes and Persians.

 

The sentence our God pronounces is a just sentence, because he is a just God. He is slow to anger, and so when Nebuchadnezzar was first lifted up in pride, he did not immediately end his days, nor did he immediately end the Babylonian kingdom. He humbled Nebuchadnezzar, and when Nebuchadnezzar repented, he was restored. But eventually the time for repentance runs out. All our days are numbered, and the day is coming when we all must appear before the judgment seat of our God. If Belshazzar’s breath was in God’s hand, and all his ways belong to our God, but he refused to worship him, even though he knew the warning Nebuchadnezzar’s story issued, isn’t it just of our God to take his breath, and end his kingdom?

 

Sometimes people accuse God of injustice because they say he’s sending so many basically good people to hell “just because” they held different beliefs. But God never sentences basically good people to hell “just because” they got some beliefs wrong. God sentences people to hell because though their every breath was in his hand, and though all their ways were his, they did not honor him as God. It is a just sentence from a just God, and if he were not a just God, he would not be worthy of our worship. Even as fallen people, we know there is such a thing as justice, and that it’s not just some human construct. But if it exists, who’s it come from? The same one from whom our breath comes, and that means he will do justice in the end. And so finally we see that our God not only sentences the proud; our God executes the proud.

 

Our God executes the proud

 

Nebuchadnezzar’s story ended with Nebuchadnezzar’s repentance and restoration, but look where Belshazzar’s story ends in verse 30: That very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed. It doesn’t tell us who in particular struck the final blow, because the important character in the story, the primary cause of his death, is our God himself. He had pronounced the sentence that this king and his kingdom were finished, and that very night, he executed the sentence, and the kingdom was handed over to Darius the Mede, just as God had said.

 

This story began with Belshazzar mocking God; it ends with God executing Belshazzar, and that is the end for all who hold on to their pride. Nebuchadnezzar humbled himself and was forgiven, but what the story of Belshazzar shows us is that there have been, and will be some, who refuse to ever humble themselves. They may prosper in this life; Belshazzar sure looked to be living the dream at the beginning of this chapter: A party with thousands, the upper crust of his powerful kingdom, multiple wives and concubines, a big feast with plenty of wine, and enjoying the thrill of desecration with apparently no consequences. And if that’s all you see in real time brothers and sisters, what’s it tempt you to do? Join in. It’s all pleasure, no pain…until it’s not. Don’t fall for it. Or, on the other hand, it may tempt us to fear such people. They’re against us, they’re against our God, and they seem so powerful. So maybe we need to execute them! Not in the kingdom of our God; we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, however heinous their sin becomes, because we know that in the end, our God will execute justice.

 

In the 2014 Lego Movie, the bad guy throughout the movie is won in the end by the kindness of the good guys. It’s a very modern way of telling a story. In ancient stories, the bad guys get killed by the good guys; they don’t become good guys. In the early medieval story of Beowulf, Beowulf kills Grendel, then kills Grendel’s mother, then kills the dragon, and there’s no sense anywhere in that story that Grendel might humble himself and become a good guy. The ancients believed in real evil that had to be killed because it couldn’t be made good. Moderns hardly believe in evil at all. In the age of the therapeutic, Westerners tend to see what was traditionally called evil as just a disorder of some kind that with enough unconditional positive regard can be cured.

 

But the Bible, though an ancient document, transcends both of these reductionistic narratives. We do have the story of Nebuchadnezzar, the bad guy who became a good guy, not through the unconditional positive regard of other humans, but through the miraculous saving action of our God. And we have the story of Belshazzar, the bad guy who refused to repent, who gave himself over to the evil inside him, and who received the just punishment for it. These are the two outcomes possible for any of us. None of us are born good guys, and when we get to very end of the Bible’s story, we don’t find every individual eventually becoming a good guy. When we get to the end of the story, we find the ultimate bad guy behind every bad guy, Satan, the evil one, thrown into the lake of fire, along with any humans who refused to forsake him and give our God the honor he deserves (Rev 20:10-15). Our God will indeed execute the proud.

 

But as long as our God is still giving you breath, that doesn’t have to be your outcome. Not only was Nebuchadnezzar forgiven when he humbled himself under God’s mighty hand, but even in this passage look at how Daniel was exalted from his humility. In verse 17 he rejects the king’s offer of the purple clothing, the chain around his neck, and the position of third in the kingdom; he was not trying to exalt himself! And yet by the end of the story, with Belshazzar dead and his kingdom conquered, it’s Daniel who ends up standing, clothed in royal purple, with a chain of gold around his neck, and the position of third ruler in the kingdom. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you.

 

Humble yourself, first by admitting that if your righteousness were weighed in the balance of God’s justice against what he requires, you too would be found wanting. As the Psalmist says, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Psalm 130:3). Humble yourself next by accepting God’s gift of righteousness offered to you in Jesus Christ. Only his perfect life could be weighed in the scales of God’s justice and not found wanting, and yet on the cross, our God sentenced him to death, and executed him, not for his own sins, of which he had none, but for ours, so that we who have mocked God, we who have desecrated the image of God in which we were made, could be forgiven. He is the good guy, the only truly humble one who God has now exalted by raising him from the dead and seating him on the throne above all others, the only throne whose days are without number, the king of the one kingdom that will have no end, and this king is now offered to all you who hear today.

 

But like most gifts, you must be humble to accept it. For a number of years we’ve offered free easter meals to neighbors in need. One year when I went around to my neighbors to see if they’d like one, some said: “Oh, thanks for offering, but I don’t need that.” To accept the gift would have meant admitting a need that they didn’t think they had, and so it’s understandable that those with plenty of food didn’t accept the gift. Or what if someone gave you deodorant as a gift? If you were to accept it, you’d be tacitly acknowledging that there’s something wrong with the scent of your body. So also God’s offer of Jesus Christ implies there is something wrong with you that you can’t fix. You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the days are numbered until you will appear before God for judgment. Don’t appear before him that day with your righteousness, and try to offer him your resume. It will be found wanting. Let go of that, and appear before him that day with the righteousness of Christ. Offer to God Christ’s resume, and you will be exalted.

 

But don’t go try to grab exaltation today, in this world. If you are in Christ, you now bear the name of the Lord Jesus. Don’t desecrate it by then presenting your body again to sin, however attractive it may appear. Do not envy the wicked, no matter how exalted they appear. If this is the punishment God executed on the one who desecrated the cups from God’s house, “how much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Heb 10:29). Rather, in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice to God, holy and acceptable, which is your spiritual worship. At the proper time, our God will exalt you, and judge the proud who so often seemed to prosper over you.