Daniel Message 10

Fourth and Fifth Kingdoms – Daniel 2:44-49

We want to keep in mind that the book of Daniel is primarily a wisdom book, not primarily a book on prophecy, though it has the world’s most famous prophecies in it. Primarily it’s the story of a young Jewish boy who was able to survive in the court of Gentile politics. And it becomes a model for all time on how a Christian ought to survive in the world system. Daniel faces one crisis after another; every chapter is a crisis in Daniels life. Daniel at this point, the time that he received the most famous vision that has ever been given to any member of the human race, apart from the person of Jesus Christ, was only 17 years old or thereabouts, a very young person. It demonstrates that a young person with a lot of the Word of God, any teenager that has been raised properly, who has applied the Word of God diligently, can understand any doctrine.

It is not necessary to have a doctorate after your name, it is not necessary to go to college to learn the Word of God. The Word of God can be mastered by any member of the human race who is cooperative with the Holy Spirit’s illuminating ministry. And Daniel is a case in point, though he was one of the best educated people in his time at 17 years of age, nevertheless, he was a man who was young and relatively inexperienced. Yet Daniel’s witness and his testimony should encourage you, it shows you what can be done. He didn’t have any parents around checking on him, his parents were probably a thousand miles away because Daniel had been taken forcibly from his home as a political hostage. He had only three of his teenager companions with him, and he ran with a group of boys that were stable, that evidently were very spiritually mature. They weren’t goody-goodies, but they were people who were stable in the Word of God.

And in chapter 2, don’t forget in all of the courts of this big vision of the king and the gold and the silver and the bronze and the iron, don’t forget how chapter began; it didn’t begin with the image. Chapter 2 began with Nebuchadnezzar and his jam, and Daniel becoming involved in the jam because Nebuchadnezzar wanted to decree damnation upon the educational system of his time. It goes back to a vital lesson that we have to learn as a human race every once in a while, that when people operate on human viewpoint in a culture for some time period, eventually the assets run out because the only thing that is in the area of our education, in the area of daily wisdom, that pays off is that which lines up with the Word. So the more apostate a culture becomes the further removed from the Word of God it becomes, the less it functions on the momentum incurred from its spiritual past. The Puritan heritage, for example, in America is just about zero now.

As a culture deteriorates the fallacy of human viewpoint shows up and becomes more and more clear, and Nebuchadnezzar, in 603 BC dreamed his dream, and it undercut his entire human viewpoint scheme, because God the Holy Spirit so worked in Nebuchadnezzar’s life to attack him at his weakest point. This story is also a story of how God the Holy Spirit worked on nonbelievers to bring them to faith in Jesus Christ; it’s an excellent example. Nebuchadnezzar’s weakest point, as one building his life on human viewpoint is he has no knowledge of the future. Human viewpoint can never give you knowledge of the future; the future is in God’s hands and God alone knows the future, and that’s the lesson of chapter 2, that divine viewpoint is superior to human viewpoint; divine viewpoint can produce an attitude of confidence. You can face crises, disaster, all sorts of pressures because we know the future, at least we know details about the future because the God of the future has told us those details.

If, however, you are committed to some sort of an evolutional philosophy of the universe, then you cannot know the future, you cannot even be sure that tomorrow evolution will be going upward and not downward. How do you know for sure whether is progress is always inevitable? How do you know that progress might not cycle backwards, like the Hindu, where you have the untwining of the rope and the twining of the rope and the cycles and pattern of history? How do you know that isn’t the real story? You don’t and you have no way of knowing because you can’t take a time machine to the future to find out. There’s only one way of knowing, that if the Bible is correct, and if the God of the Bible is there, then it’s in His hands that the future rests, and He alone is the qualified spokesman.

So Daniel 2 has been God disturbing Nebuchadnezzar enough to give him a dream, and then to permit Daniel to give witness to him. Last time we ended at verse 43, and we know certain things about this chapter. We’ve noticed points of interpretation. These are vital, so we be careful that we not go beyond the text of Scripture. A lot of interpretives would make much of the toes and the legs of Daniel’s image. We’ll discuss that but basically when Daniel goes to interpret the image he isn’t pointing to the legs and toes, Daniel is pointing to only two things; he sees this image, whatever it looks like and as the Holy Spirit reveals what that image meant, then Daniel goes to Nebuchadnezzar and he says you saw this kind of image, you saw the head made of gold, you saw the chest made of silver, you saw the loins made of bronze; you saw the legs made of iron, didn’t you Nebuchadnezzar? Yes. All right, here’s what it means, and Daniel proceeds to give an interpretation. And from study of the word usage in these interpretations we see what Daniel uses to interpret the statue and what he doesn’t use.

For example, in Daniel 2:39 he says, “After thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee,” so the phrase “after thee” tells us that Daniel interprets the metallurgical sequence in the composition of the statue, the colossus, he interprets this as a time sequence. So that’s one principle of interpretation—time. Time runs from head to toe on this image. So there’s a sequence of materials that represents sequence of ages in history. We know this by “after thee,” Daniel interprets one theme, chronological sequence.

But Daniel also notices another thing besides chronological sequence. He notices the type of metal and so his second point is the metal type. What type of metal is involved and he makes much of this because again, looking at verse 39, it says, “After thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee,” and he bases the word inferior on the face that the metal of the second kingdom is silver, and silver is inferior to gold in value. So the monetary value of the metals and the decline in the monetary value of the metals is picked up and is an interpretation of the sequence of the kingdom. These kingdoms deteriorate, they do not progress. History is not ever upward and forward, it’s backwards and downwards as far as Daniel is concerned, that each succeeding kingdom is weaker. How is it weaker?

We concluded in verse 43 last week, and we said there’s an interesting expression that tells you how Daniel interpreted the intermingling in the feet of the statue of iron and pottery. Remember this is not iron and raw clay; if you read the King James you visualize, at least I always used to visualize it as just soft clay with pieces of iron wedged in it. But the word “clay” means pottery, it means fired clay, so the idea is pottery that is fired around the iron pieces, so it’s an iron impregnated pottery, and that’s his feet.

Now when Daniel goes to look at the composition of the feet he draws an interpretation from this. It’s not Daniel’s interpretation, God gave the interpretation to Daniel, but the connection is “they will mingle themselves with the seed of men,” he says, in other words, the heterogeneous composition of the feet and the toes is a symbol of the heterogeneous composition of the kingdom. And the word “mingle themselves with the seed of men” we found that expression in Ezra. We found in Ezra 9 that Ezra used the same word for intermarriage, and in the Bible this intermarriage looks at first glance like it’s racial intermarriage but we know that can’t be the interpretation because of the book of Ruth. In the book of Ruth you have a Gentile woman who marries a Hebrew man, Boaz. And she is exalted and lauded for it, so if the Bible teaches against interracial marriage, ala Ezra 9, then we’ve got a contradiction in the Bible, because Ruth is clearly an interracial marriage that has a blessing of God upon it.

Well how would you reconcile Ezra 9 and Ruth? We reconcile it by the fact that it’s an interracial marriage only in the sense of intermarriage of culture, that’s the issue that the Bible is looking at. It’s not looking at the physical, racial characteristic; it’s looking at the cultural baggage that is brought into the marriage relationship. Is this person of an utterly different religious background? Is this person a believer or not? And it shows you how fouled up people are when they are more concerned over people of backgrounds of different race intermarrying, that seems to be the big cardinal sin, and yet people never raise the question is so and so a believer. That’s because people don’t care about the Word of God, they’re more concerned with their own social prejudices than they are with the absolutes, the norms and standards of Scripture.

In the Bible the issue whether or not the other partner of the marriage is a believer. In Christian marriage you have this situation, some couple comes tripping in, and they want to get married, so you ask, is he a believer, is she a believer. Well, I don’t know. How long have you known the person? Three years. What have you been talking about in three years that you don’t know whether they’re a believer or not? I don’t know, we’ve just had good times together. Obviously the good times were never in the Word. So it goes back to the state that people are very slack in this area. And if somebody married from two different races then all hell would break loose, and that becomes a big thing, and the Word of God doesn’t even make an issue out of it. In fact, Moses married a colored woman, so do some study in the Scripture before you gripe about it.

So, the mixing of the seed in verse 43 is not interracial marriage, it is intercultural marriages. These are marriages between people of fantastically diverse cultures. And what it means is that this empire, this fourth empire in this Colossus, it starts out as pure iron, and as you scan down the colossus, the iron fades out into pieces, and the rest of it is kind of a pottery type thing, all the way down to the feet.

Now what is this gradual phasing over from pure iron into pottery mixed with iron? What is this gradation? Well, Daniel interprets it as a deterioration all within this fourth kingdom. Then he says, and before we start with verse 44, which is the fifth kingdom, we now have to raise a question about the two views of Daniel 2. These are views you ought to know about and then we’re going to choose between them on the basis of the evidence of the text. We spent two sessions going through the difference between amillennialism and premillennialism. Just in case some of you might have forgotten what the two views are, in amillennialism you have the cross of Jesus Christ, you have the Church Age, and you have Christ’s Second Advent and the end of history; that’s amillennialism; “a” just means no, no millennium. Premillennialism says that you have the cross of Christ, you have the Second Advent, and then you have a thousand year reign on earth and then the end of history. It’s “pre” because Christ comes pre or prior to the millennium.

Now obviously when we come to the fourth kingdom we’re going to have to make a parting of the ways; we’re going to have to choose between these two positions. Daniel is going to have to steer us on one road or the other road. And it all has to do with the fourth kingdom, because beginning in verse 44; we have first kingdom, second kingdom, third kingdom, fourth kingdom. The first kingdom was Babylon; the second kingdom was Medo-Persia; the third kingdom was Greece; the fourth kingdom was Rome. And that Rome shades off into verse 44. Now let’s look at verse 44.

Daniel 2:44, all the time keep in mind we’re going to have to interpret this in the amillennial sense or the premillennial sense, postmillennialism being a variant of amillennialism. Verse 44, “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. [45] Forasmuch as thou saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.”

Now what is verse 44 talking about? It says God, “in the days of these kings” the first problem in verse 44 is who are the kings. It says “these kings” and “kings” is plural. “These kings,” now are the kings the ten toes? No, the kings are not the ten toes because the toes have not been mentioned as far as their numbers are concerned. Nowhere yet has the legs and the toes been used as anatomical pieces. The only thing Daniel has spoken about as far as the legs and the toes are concerned is the metal involved, the composition. He hasn’t said that those ten toes are ten kings.

Now for those of you new to Bible interpretation and you haven’t been through this before, the reason there’s a big hassle about the toes is this: the fourth kingdom, the Roman Empire, everyone is agreed it starts out with the Roman Empire, everyone except the liberals and that’s their problem, but the fourth kingdom is the Roman kingdom. Everyone is agreed that’s what it starts out as. But where the disagreement enters in is what does it shade off into. What do the two legs represent? What do these feet represent? And in Daniel 7 where the fourth kingdom is presented again, before this final climactic kingdom comes from God of heaven, there are said to be ten kings. There are said to be ten kings in Daniel 7. And so people read that and say aha, the ten toes of this statue therefore are the ten kings of Daniel 7. Now it’s true, as many cases go, where God gives a symbol and turns out in the final analysis as history goes on, that that symbol is richer than it first appeared. That’s true.

But here we have to be careful because what usually happens is the people interpret this as the east and the west breaks of the Roman Empire. You have the eastern empire, the western empire, the western empire finally falls, becomes the Holy Roman Empire, and controls…the great Charlemagne and so on, and then the eastern empire becomes the Greek Orthodox Church into Russia. And that may be true, that may be what the fourth empire is doing, but that’s not what the text says. That may be an inference that we can draw today, having looked back on history, but let’s distinguish carefully our inferences from what the text dogmatically states.

Now the problem with making the ten toes the ten kings is that compels you to say five of those final kings are going to come out of the eastern side and five are going to come out of the western side; you may be saying too much, the ten kings may come off of just the western side, we don’t know. And I think it’s for that reason that God the Holy Spirit doesn’t talk about ten kings here; He talks about ten kings in Daniel 7. The concept of ten kings as the Roman Empire just kind of dissolves in history and then reappears prior to Christ’s return, and appears in this ten-fold way, that is sound, nobody is questioning that. It’s just that we’re being picky about these details, these anatomical parts of this colossus. And I think there’s a reason the Holy Spirit has not pointed the ten kings out here, He had the opportunity but He didn’t choose to do so until Daniel 7. So that’s the reason for the ten toes here.

That’s why we’ve got to, when we come to the word “these kings,” is where the kind of person that has already concluded in their mind that the ten toes are kings, we’re going interpret kings here in verse 44 as those last kings of the fourth empire, “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom,” but if we use the primary rule of Bible interpretation, and go back and look at the context for the word “king” or “kingdom,” the only plural that we can get out of the context is the four kingdoms. “In the days of these kings,” meaning the kings of the four kingdom, in their day… dot, dot, dot, God will do this.

But now we’ve got a problem. Haven’t we just said that those four kingdoms come after one another in history? Haven’t we just said that first you have the Babylonian kingdom, then you have the Medo-Persian kingdom, then you have the kingdom of Greece under Alexander, and then you have the Roman Empire? Haven’t we just said they are chronological? Then how can we interpret verse 44, “in the days of all four kings,” when all four kings didn’t exist together? All right, that this is shown clearly by the statue, before we go too much further, let’s look back up a ways and look at the original vision of the smashing.

Daniel 2:34-35, we look at verse 34-35 we notice something added. As you recall when I read this over I said watch out for it, we’ll be talking about it later, and here’s where we’re talking about it.

Verse 34, “Thou sawest until a stone was cut out without hands, which smashed the image upon his feet,” so the impact point is on the iron and the pottery; so the image is smashed at the legs, the stone rolls up against this image at the legs, so it’s clearly smashing up against the fourth kingdom section of the Colossus. Yet, in verse 35 it says, “Then were the iron and the clay,” that’s the fourth kingdom, then it goes up, “the brass [bronze],” that was the third one, “the silver” the second kingdom, “and the gold, broken to pieces together…” together it says. So whatever this smashing action is on the fourth kingdom it somehow has repercussions on the third, second and first kingdom. But didn’t we just say that the first, second and third kingdoms were simply erased from history by the time of the fourth kingdom? How can the rock, if it’s going to smash Rome, smash the Greeks, smash the Medo-Persians, and smash the Babylonians when they’ve already kind of disappeared from the stages of history. What’s going on here?

All right, apparently what is said is that these kingdoms are going to be cumulative, that is that you will have the Babylonian Empire which is the gold, that Babylonian Empire, yes, it will disappear from history, that’s correct, chronologically it’s over with, but it has a residue which is then propagated into the Medo-Persian Empire. We know some of this residue. If you want an exciting story of what that residue was read Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons. This is a story of the fact that there were tremendous practices, it was the mother-child cult that was passed on, various religious cultists, and occultic practices were passed from the Babylonians into the Medo-Persian empire, and from there the Greeks, when Alexander conquered the area the Greeks absorbed this, and the Greeks absorbed some things from the Persians.

In history books you always read the Greeks are the heroes and the Persians are the villains, actually the Persians had a much better culture than the Greeks. The Greeks were a very degenerate group of people and the only thing that saved them was the fact that they were so far isolated from their enemies. But the Greeks were progressively deteriorating from the Medo-Persians. The Medo-Persians had a high level of culture, they developed algebra quite extensively, in technology they were very, very good; the Greeks were kind of crude when it came to technology. Then the Romans; the Romans didn’t do anything creative except for the fact they had one good thing going for them, they had law and authority. And Rome has been known for her law, but basically that Rome had that was creative she got from Greece. Who were the great teachers? Even the Roman poets, Virgil and others, they used their content from prior writers and authors.

So these kingdoms are all cumulative; you go this way, there are Babylonian elements in the Medo-Persian Empire, the Grecian Empire has parts of the Babylonian and parts of the Medo-Persian, and the Romans have part of all four in them. So basically it is cumulative. Now the statue is apparently in the shape of a man, and there is a unity about it. All these metals that you read about, the gold, the silver, the bronze, and the iron are man-made. They are refined by man, so when we read about the “stone cut without hands,” what is the contrast? The contrast is between what God does and what man does? So when we see the statue, all of these kingdoms, it’s not knocking all of human culture, but the kingdom of man orientation of all these four great eras of history, that is what is satanic.

Now let’s look further in verse 44, “in the days of these kings,” so even though it’s going to be in the time of the Roman Empire or its successive states in history when this smashing occurs, whenever this smashing occurs it is going to do away not only with Rome, but it’s going to do away with the cultural residues that have been passed on from these previous kingdoms. So, “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven” notice, “the God of heaven” that He is called, there in verse 44 is the origin of the New Testament expression, “the kingdom of heaven.” “The kingdom of heaven” literally means the kingdom from heaven.

To see how effective Daniel 2 was in the thinking of people for centuries and centuries, turn to Matthew 3:2, John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness, and in verse 2 he says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Notice the title that John uses, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Now where and why did John use that title, why didn’t he just simply call it the kingdom of God? Well, they are synonyms in spite of what people like to draw between them. The kingdom of heaven is used in Matthew; Matthew 4:17, “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5:10, “Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So the “kingdom of heaven” is the New Testament call sign for that fifth kingdom. The fifth kingdom of Daniel comes over into the New Testament as “the kingdom of heaven.”

What about this kingdom of heaven. Here’s a basic decision that we’re going to have to make. Let me outline the two ways this is handled, the amill and the premill, in the details of the kingdom of heaven, then we’ll go back to Daniel and try to decide between the two. In the amill, and postmill for that matter, they interpret it this way, that the kingdom of heaven is the Church, and therefore the kingdom of heaven smashed the fourth empire from the time of Jesus Christ, on up to say about 500 AD, when finally Christianity triumphed over the Roman Empire. And that’s their interpretation of the smashing, that the smashing occurred over a long, long time period, gradually and brought Rome to her knees. That is, the preaching of the gospel destroyed the Roman Empire. That is the amill and the postmill interpretation.

The premill interpretation is something else; it says since the kingdom of heaven is not the Church, we say that Jesus Christ offered the kingdom. When John the Baptist came and he said “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” he was saying you Jews, to whom this kingdom was promised, if you will accept the Messiah now, the kingdom will come to pass. And Jesus would say the same thing, “the kingdom of heaven is here,” why? Because the King is here, and if you will accept the King, then you can have the kingdom. So we say that the fifth kingdom could have come in the days of Jesus and John the Baptist, but in fact when the people rejected both John and Jesus the kingdom of heaven was postponed; the kingdom of heaven was put off and was reserved for a future time when Christ will return and set up His thousand year reign; that is the kingdom of heaven, that is the kingdom of God. The Church is an intermediate linkage to that time, but the Church itself cannot in any way be identified with the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. That was put off because of the nation’s rejection of Jesus Christ. It was a legitimate bona fide offer being made, when Jesus says that this kingdom was at hand, it was just there ready to break into history but it never did because the people rejected their Messiah.

Those are the two ways of handling this breaking and the smashing. How are we going to look at Daniel and try to tell between these two views? Basically there’s only one way we can do that, and that is look at Daniel 2 and ask a question. What does the symbolism of Daniel 2 connote; does it connote something gradual or does it connote something catastrophic and sudden? Second, does it connote a phasing out of a political entity or does it connote a complete discontinuity of history. Is it this kind of thing, where the Roman Empire gradually shades off and the Church gradually picks it up? Is it that kind of a transition, or is it a sudden collision between one kingdom ending and the fifth kingdom beginning. Is there a continuity or is there a discontinuity in history, because if the amill and the postmill is correct, this smashing has already happened, it happened in the age of Constantine, when the Church was declared as the kingdom on earth. It happened, and Augustine will talk about it in his The City of God, this kind of thing. Is it that or is it something yet to come to pass? We have to go back to Daniel and look further.

It says in Daniel 2:44, that God will “set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people,” now that tells you how the kingdoms were destroyed; the first kingdom, the second kingdom, the third kingdom, the fourth kingdom were all destroyed by the next kingdom. They were all destroyed militarily, they collapsed internally, they had economic problems, they had social problems, the kingdoms all fell and all of these kingdoms were social, political and physical entities. They weren’t just spiritual entities, they were actual living political things; you could take pictures of them and see it.

So he says God’s kingdom, when it is “set up”, it says, it will established, it will “never be destroyed,” or “left to another people.” So the fifth kingdom will be the last kingdom in history, there will be no supplanting of this kingdom, once it has been established it will never be removed. The question is, has the Church so thoroughly established itself in history that it can never be removed. Now the amills to some degree comes back on us and says yeah, but your millennial kingdom isn’t permanent either, it’s only a thousand years long, how can you claim the thousand years fulfills the fifth kingdom? Because the thousand year millennium is the first stage of this fifth kingdom and then finally it goes into the eternal state. We consider the millennium and the eternal state together as fulfillment of this fifth kingdom, it goes on and on and it will not be left to another people.

Now notice the rest of verse 44, “it” that’s the fifth kingdom, the kingdom from heaven, “it will break in pieces,” and literally in the Hebrew, “end all these kingdoms.” “It will break in pieces and end all these kingdoms,” and “it shall stand for ever.” Now the question: has the Church ended all of Roman culture? Has the Church ended all of Greek thought? Has the Church ended all of the superstitious religion and the cultic rites of Babylon? And we premills would say not at all, not at all! The smashing is yet future because when the smashing occurs it will end all these kingdoms. And we still see the kingdoms influencing us today. There’s not one systematic theology that you can pick up that isn’t influenced by Plato’s thoughts. So therefore we would argue that the kingdoms have not yet been smashed.

Now we have a further control. The word “break in pieces” is the Hebrew word, daqaq, and it means to pulverize. Now this word it turns out is used in some very interesting contexts in the Old Testament, contexts which appear to decide the issue quite clearly. Turn to Isaiah 41:15-16, you’ll see the word used exactly in the same kind of context, and lo and behold, what do we notice? We’re looking up daqaq, “Behold” God tells Israel, “I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small,” and “beat them small” is daqaq, and shalt make the hills as chaff. [16] Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them; and thou shalt rejoice in the LORD, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel.” Here in the imagery of Isaiah the mountains are the kingdoms of the world, and how are they smashed? By and through Israel.

Jeremiah 51:20, another use of the word daqaq. Remember Isaiah and Jeremiah were read by Daniel, Daniel studied Jeremiah for years, he was familiar with Jeremiah’s vocabulary in particular, as well as Isaiah, so when Daniel uses the word daqaq we would expect him to be using it the same way that his teachers used the word. The Lord says, “Thou art My battle-axe and weapons of war; for with thee…” with thee, “for with thee I will break in pieces,” there’s the word daqaq, “I will break in pieces the nation, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms; [21] And with thee I will break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee I will break in pieces the chariot and his rider; [22] With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee I will break in pieces old and young; and with thee I will break in pieces the young man and the maid. [23] I will break also in pieces with thee the shepherd and his flock, and with thee I will break in pieces the farmer and his yoke of oxen; and with thee will I break in pieces captains and rulers. [24] And I will render unto Babylon and to all the inhabitants of Chaldea all their evil that they have done in Zion in your sight, saith the LORD.” So here’s an interesting context; among Daniel’s own teacher for the use of this very vocabulary word.

Turn to Micah 4:13, here’s another context for the word daqaq, and again, when did Micah live? He lived before Daniel; Daniel read Micah, Daniel studied Micah, so it would appear logical that Daniel would be using the word daqaq in the same way, with the same flavor that his teacher used the word. “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion; for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass, and you will beat in pieces many peoples; and I will consecrate their gain unto Jehovah, and their substance unto the Lord of the whole earth.”

Finally, one other context, in a man who came after Daniel, so we can’t argue that Daniel altered the use of this word daqaq. Zechariah 12:3, now Zechariah comes after Daniel and we have to ask the question, has daqaq changed, has the context been changed by the way Daniel used the word? Or in fact has Daniel used the word the way all the other men used it and Zechariah just simply continues the same usage of the word. “And in that day, will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone,” ah, another element that we see in Daniel’s vision, “I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all peoples; all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, through all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” The word “cut in pieces” is daqaq.

Now what does this tell us? How does this support this whole concept of daqaq? It tells us that that fifth kingdom, the stone cut without hand that smashes in pieces, that smashing is visualized as a military conquest. It is violent, it is sudden, it is not gradual and it is not spiritual. It is a violent sudden smashing of the kingdoms of the world.

Now there are some more elements to this whole thing. There’s another problem, what do we do about this expression, the “stone cut without hands?” What does the stone cut without hands mean? To see this we have to go to Exodus 20:25, that is a technical word, it just didn’t happen in Daniel, it has a lot of meaning and all you have to do is know your Bible to see where that expression was used before; test it, see we make sure that we understand what’s happening. Here’s the context for that clause, “a stone cut without hands.” After the Ten Commandments were given there was an instruction to build a special kind of an altar; in the ancient world the religions would cut stones, they would quarry granite or some of the other valuable stones and after they’d cut them they’d arrange them into a very, very elegant altar. God’s people, to a great contrast, were told don’t cut the stone, don’t cut them; don’t make Me an altar like that. God says in verse 25, “If you make Me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone, for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, you have polluted it.” So whenever the Hebrews were to make an altar they were to just to take the rock as they found it in the field, they were never to tamper with it; leave it the way God created it and then build it. God cannot be worshiped with man’s works; he must be worshiped out of his own creation. And to get that point across when they had the instructions on how to build an altar, it had to be made of natural stone, unhewn, uncut.

So the same imagery in Daniel 2; what is Daniel 2 talking about? A kingdom that is represented by a stone cut without hands; it can only mean one thing, that the stone cut without hands is a work that is supernatural, that it is a result of God alone doing the doing. Now if you take all these characteristics and add them up together, I think we’re going to have to argue that this has not been seen in history. What the Church has been able to do in great degree in eradicating some of what Rome gave us and some of what Greece gave us is still incomplete. It wasn’t that the Church did not enter into a violent military confrontation with Rome, and besides all these promises of daqaq are given somehow involving the nation Israel. And Israel wasn’t even in existence in the fourth and fifth century, unless you want to make the church (quote) “spiritual Israel.” But then you allegorize the whole thing.

So how are we going to pull this together? There’s only one way to pull it together, and that is to argue that in 400 AD or thereabouts, when Rome gradually broke apart, you have the dividing of the statue, and you have Western culture begin to become more and more diverse, until you have what we now call the western community of nation that somehow have held together. We have food conferences, where do we hold our food conferences? In Rome. We have the common market meet to decide economic questions, we meet in Europe. Basically the United States is considered Scripturally as an appendage of the western community of nations. And this western community of nations, Daniel foresees… remember, he is looking a long time ahead in the future, from Daniel’s point of view this western community of nations becomes gradually culturally heterogeneous. Isn’t that what we see? Culturally it’s heterogeneous? The western world doesn’t solidify together as one racial group; there are all sorts of racial groups mixed, lots of cultural groups mixed and so on. The western community is heterogeneous.

Now what is going to happen in the future is that this will go on until one point, and somehow at some given time in the future, according to Daniel 2, a “stone without hands” will violently destroy the western community of nations, or the western community of nations will be violently destroyed. Now other prophecies tell us more detail, but this prophecy just tells us the simple fact that it will be destroyed and somehow Israel will have something to do with it; the nation Israel will have something to do with the destruction of the latter day heirs of the Roman Empire. And that includes all nations that are culturally linked with Rome.

And after this time, after it breaks in pieces, “God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter,” and what shall come to pass, if you recall back in verse 35 was that that little stone that smashed into the colossus became a great mountain and it says the “mountain filled the whole earth.” Now after, somehow Israel is involved with the collision and destruction of the west and the western nations, obviously Jesus Christ is involved, that’s Revelation 19, you have a violent clash and then God’s kingdom. Now if the first kingdom and the second kingdom and the third kingdom and the fourth kingdom, with all of its deteriorating qualities are political entities, what does that argue about the fifth kingdom? That it too will be a political entity on earth. And that entity will be the millennial kingdom under the reign of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ will function as a world ruler, and under his leadership mankind will have a perfect thousand year government before the eternal state continues it. But during this thousand years, which is sort of an amphitheater to the main eternal state, during these thousand years the human race will experience certain things that are radically different.

And since this is the first time some of you are working with prophecy, let’s go to four areas where the millennial kingdom will be radically different from anything that you see today. We said when we went through premillennialism that it should not breed a pessimism. A lot of evangelicals who are premill sit around and give the whole school a bad name because they say well, I’m not going to do anything, the rapture is coming tomorrow; that is NOT the proper attitude. Jesus Christ, when He sets up the millennial kingdom, is not going to write music for men, He is not going to make art work, He is not going to do the engineering, men are going to do it. And when this millennial kingdom begins it begins with a certain amount of assets. Where do those assets come from? The assets come from past history. Therefore, anything that you do that is productive in history can become something of an asset to begin the millennial kingdom with.

Illustration: take some of the great composers of the past; do you think seriously that in the millennial kingdom, just because Jesus is here, that Bach is going to be forgotten, that Beethoven is going to be forgotten. Not at all. New and great exciting pieces of music will be composed, the like of which man has never seen, but it will be built upon a foundation of the past. The same with art, the same with technology. Do you seriously think that the technology air operations, space travel are going to be removed when Christ comes here? Not at all, they are going to be extended. Technology of the millennium will build on the technology of the present. So anything that man contributes that is a positive, solid contribution in this history, will not be lost. This is not a pessimism, it’s an optimism. You can produce knowing that your work will survive. What is good about your work will survive forever, not only on your record but also in human history. It will survive and be used.

Now what about the millennium, why will it flourish so? First turn to Revelation 20:1, this fifth kingdom. Why will it be so different; why will it be able to do what the other kingdoms were not able to do? For one thing, it says in Revelation 20:1, “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. [2] And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years. [3] And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more….” All right, the first thing about the millennial kingdom will be no principalities and powers of darkness. There will be no demonic activity in the millennium. There will be sin in the millennium from man’s own flesh, but there will be a great diminishing of evil because you won’t have the amplifying factor due to these demonic powers operating in history. It will be amazing to see what happens and what man can do when he is not constantly hindered, bound and deceived by seducing spirits. And human culture will grow miraculously. That’s one characteristic.

Another characteristic is a worldwide climate of divine viewpoint thought. In other words, like today the basic way of thinking is human viewpoint and we are the exceptions. In the millennium the basic way of thinking will be divine viewpoint and the exceptions will be those who stubbornly rebel against God’s authority. The world will be saturated with divine viewpoint. How do we know this? Isaiah 11:9; Jeremiah 31:24. Culture will be controlled by divine viewpoint; it will have its fallout in the areas of art, science, music, technology and so on, and obviously philosophy.

A third point about the millennial kingdom, that there will be radical geophysical changes in the climate of the earth, the physical climate not just the intellectual climate. Isaiah 11; Isaiah 65, a radical geophysical change, a change in climate; crops will be able to be grown, there will be enough grain for the people to eat on all the continents of the world. There will be, then, prosperity.

And finally a fourth category, we could go on and enumerate these but these are just to give some of you who are new a picture of what the Bible says about the millennium. A fourth concept would be that there will be world government with world law based on the Word of God, Isaiah 2:1-4. There will be world government with world law based upon Scripture. That’s the fifth kingdom. Do you see why it smashes the other kingdoms? It destroys Greece, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Rome, not just militarily; it is able to destroy their culture because now divine viewpoint saturates the whole world. In one of those verses if you look them up it says that the world will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the oceans are filled with water—fantastic situation.

Let’s turn back and see how it all ends up in Daniel 2. Remember we said that Daniel was in a jam when all this happened; Daniel was faithful as a young isolated believer, he went about problem solving. Remember the steps he used to solve his problem? The first step was he gathered data, Daniel 2:14-15. The second thing Daniel did besides gather data to solve his problem is that he had a resting confidence that there must be an answer to this problem, that God will never permit a problem in his life for which there isn’t an answer. We found that attitude expressed in the way he acted in Daniel 2:16. The third thing that Daniel did in meeting his problem is he persevered until he got his solution; God had to have a solution to his problem and he got together some of his friends and they prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed all night until finally God answered in a vision, Daniel 2:17.

Now in Daniel 2:46-49 we have his final solution and how it all came out. “Then the king Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face, and worshipped Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odors unto him.” That is not worshiping Daniel as God; this is custom we know from the Babylonian court. When Alexander the Great came into Israel, while he was invading he came down from the north to go into Egypt, there’s a story that Josephus narrates, how he was going down there one day and he was met by the high priest, and some Jews showed him Daniel chapters 2 and 7 and they said here Alexander, here is a prophecy of your victory over the world, you are the third kingdom in this book. And Alexander was so impressed by the prophecies of himself that he came to Jerusalem, stopped his whole army from going south, and they camped there for a while and he and some officers went up to Jerusalem, and he fell down and he bowed before the high priest. And while he was bowing down before the high priest, when he came back up from bowing down one of his officers said, Alexander, what are you doing bowing down to that man. And Alexander said I didn’t bow down to that man, I bowed down to the God he represents.

That was the same sense that Nebuchadnezzar is doing it here. Nebuchadnezzar now realizes that the God of Daniel, the God of the Hebrews is superior to all of his gods. He isn’t yet a Christian; you don’t become a Christian by inviting Jesus into your heart without knowing who and what God is. You parents who are trying to raise children in a godly way, don’t get too pushy about having them become Christians, just teach them the attributes of God over and over and over and when the time is come they’ll understand about sin and Christ’s finished work, then you lead them to Christ. But don’t have them go to some little club and expect that they become Christians. You become a Christian by the parents working with them day in and day out. My wife has worked hours and hours and hours and hours in the evening with our children, every night before they go to bed, thinking through some of the attributes of God, talking about it, just a little bit every night, but after a while it has the effect that God becomes real and then they believe. It didn’t happen because they raised their hand in some little group. And Nebuchadnezzar isn’t going to become a Christian by raising his hand either. Nebuchadnezzar is becoming conscious of Daniel’s God, that’s the first step.

Notice what he says in Daniel 2:47, “The king answered unto Daniel, and said, Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou could reveal this secret.” He’s not worshiping Daniel; he’s worshiping Daniel’s God. It’s astounding, look at your God, see what Daniel has done? He’s given a testimony and the result of Daniel’s testimony is not glorification of Daniel; it’s glorification of Daniel’s God, that’s the point of his testimony.

And then finally one concluding note in Daniel 2:48-49 to show you a little bit more of this 17 year old boy and his tremendous spiritual maturity. “Then the king made Daniel a great man, and gave him many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon. [49] Then Daniel requested of the king, and he set Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, over the affairs of the province of Babylon: but Daniel sat in the gate of the king.”

To go back, who was it that Daniel got help from when he was in a jam? His buddies, and he brought his buddies in and he prayed with them and they prayed with them. When Daniel is given all the glory in verse 48 he shares it with the other believers who helped him. He is not a Lone Ranger believer. He recognizes that to survive and to be victorious in the world system you must rely upon the priesthood of other believers.