n nothing by example.
Nebuchadnezzar's fate might have taught his successors what came of
God-forgetting arrogance, and attributing success to oneself; and his
restoration might have been an object-lesson to teach that devout
recognition of the Most High as sovereign was the beginning of a king's
prosperity and sanity. But Belshazzar knew all this, and ignored it all.
Was he singular in that? Is not the world full of instances of the ruin
that attends godlessness, which yet do not check one godless man in his
career? The wrecks lie thick on the shore, but their broken sides and
gaunt skeletons are not warnings sufficient to keep a thousand other
ships from steering right on to the shoals. Of these godless lives it
is true, 'This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve
their sayings,' and their doings, and say and do them over again.
Incapacity to learn by example is a mark of godless lives.

Further, Belshazzar 'lifted up' himself 'against the Lord of heaven,'
and 'glorified not Him in whose hand was his breath and whose were all
his ways.' The very essence of all sin is that assertion of self as
Lord, as sufficient, as the director of one's path. To make myself my
centre, to depend on myself, to enthrone my own will as sovereign, is to
fly in the face of nature and fact, and is the mother of all sin. To
live to self is to die while we live; to live to God is to live even
while we die. Nations and individuals are ever tempted thus to ignore
God, and rebelliously to say, 'Who is Lord over us?' or presumptuously
to think themselves architects of their own fortunes, and sufficient for
their own defence. Whoever yields to that temptation has let the 'prince
of the devils' in, and the inferior evil spirits will follow. Positive
acts are not needed; the negative omission to 'glorify' the God of our
life binds sin on us.

Further, Belshazzar, the type of godlessness, had desecrated the
sacrificial vessels by using them for his drunken carouse, and therein
had done just what we do when we take the powers of heart and mind and
will, which are meant to be filled with affections, thoughts, and
purposes, that are 'an odour of a sweet smell, well-pleasing to God,'
and desecrate them by pouring from them libations before creatures. Is
not love profaned when it is lavished on men or women without one
reference to God? Is not the intellect desecrated when its force is
spent on finite objects of thought, and never a glanc