The History of the World Foretold - Daniel 2:31-45

31 “You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening.

32 The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze,
33 its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.
34 As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces.
35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
36 This was the dream. Now we will tell the king its interpretation.
37 You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, and the might, and the glory,
38 and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all—you are the head of gold.
39 Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth.
40 And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things. And like iron that crushes, it shall break and crush all these.
41 And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay.
42 And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.
43 As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay.
44 And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever,
45 just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.”  Daniel 2:31-45

One of the first questions we need to answer about this prophecy is why it was given to an unbelieving king like King Nebuchadnezzar rather than to Daniel. One reason was to show this king of a powerful, ungodly kingdom that the true God was the only one who could foretell the events of earth’s future. This is one of the greatest signs that the Bible is real and true – only Someone who knows the future in complete detail can prophecy those details hundreds and even thousands of years in advance.

A second reason was to bring King Nebuchadnezzar to be a believer in Creator God. While this did not happen immediately, it was certainly a part of all that God did in his life to bring him to faith in Himself. As we, too, come to Jesus by faith, we soon begin to recognize the plans He had for us which directed us along His path to bring us to Himself.

A third reason is that it brought Daniel to a high position which would affect history hundreds of years later. We will talk about this in a later lesson. We will see Daniel’s promotion in the next lesson.

A fourth reason, as we will also see later in this book, was for us, today, to see the truth of God’s plan for human history and lead us into deeper faith in Himself. Jesus told His disciples in Matthew 24 that He gave them (and us) information of things that would come in the future so that when we see them happening, we will believe Him more completely and our trust in Him would grow.

The dream foretold of six government systems that would rule the earth as attempts to revive Babel, (Genesis 11) which God dispersed. Only the last of these listed will truly accomplish that goal. As we read in the verses in the last lesson, those one-world governments are:
*Babylon under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar
*Medo-Persian Empire which defeated and succeeded Babylon
*Greece under the rule of Alexander the Great
*Rome under the Caesars
*A revived-Roman Empire ruling the whole world in the last days
*A “stone” that would crush all the other governments and fill the earth

The first four of these one-world governments are described in our history books which confirm the details from this chapter. More details of these four kingdoms are also prophesied in the book of Ezekiel. The fifth will receive far greater detail and explanation in later chapters of Daniel as God tells him more. And the “stone” is Jesus Christ, foretelling His description as the “chief cornerstone” in Ephesians 2:20 and other passages. We will study this kingdom more later as well.

People around us may insist that everything is by chance, but God makes that argument void as He tells us what will happen in the kind of detail that only comes from someone who has “seen” those events. God, eternal and not limited to time as we are, knows the “end from the beginning” as He states in Isaiah 46:10.

*Memorize: Isaiah 46:9-10 – Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand.”