The chapter of Daniel we undertake to study here concerns the Antichrist government, its apparent glory, its temporal nature and ultimate judgment into oblivion. We are invited to believe in the eternal rather than the temporal, urged to cast off our faith in man’s government in favor a living faith for the eternal pure government of the kingdom of God which is to come. The faith which we are led to acquire is the faith on exhibit by Daniel, one of miraculous deliverance from the hands of unreasonable men and the government of this world at the hand of the providence of God. Daniel serves us as the archetype end-times believer and the kind of faith for the miraculous protection of God which would be required in the last days, just before the return of Christ. The temporal nature of the Antichrist kingdoms and the faith needed for deliverance from its deceptive and unreasonable hands are the prime revelations of chapter two of the book of Daniel.

King Nebuchadnezzar was frightened by a dream from God because it showed the vanity of man’s great works ‘under the sun’ and the futility by its fading existence, no matter how brilliant or glorious the work may seem at the time. Nebuchadnezzar had built a great empire and a majestic city with ‘wonders of the world’, then God showed how fleeting it all was, in the same fashion that he had shown Solomon the vanity of all of man’s laborious endeavors. He was angry, depressed and agitated in spirit. I guess we can all identify with him, who wouldn’t be depressed?

The Bible tells us that a day is as a thousand years with the Lord, and a thousand years as one day. We can gain great wisdom from this passage of scripture if we will regard it and take it seriously. God’s perspective on time is entirely different than ours. We sit on the inside of time like figurines in a glass bubble looking out; God is everywhere -inside and out – everywhere, even on the outside of time peering in, seeing all that is, and all that has been, knowing what will be because he has been there, was there, is there. Time is merely a blue-print used by the omnipotent architect, a spade in the gardener’s hand, a group of files on the desktop of eternity. Time is very small compared to infinity. Infinity has no end or beginning and is ever expanding, not confined by time or space, where the Holy Ghost presides over all, where The Son is, full of love and light, which is infinitely powerful, in eternity both before and after the now, love and light are the actual, true, real, solid, definable dimensions themselves, of which someday we shall become, not only aware, but an integral part of ourselves. (See last two chapters of Revelation).

The Antichrist Kingdom will be returned to dust
Logically, every empire and government on earth, no matter how marvelous and eternal they may seem – as the Roman Empire or the United States of America – is destined to a prescribed end. Their story written and filed long ago, before the dimension of time ever started to tick. No empire or government is on par with God and the infinite government of his power. They are a very small pea in the vast eternal. The only eternal is that of God and there shall never be a government of man to co-exist with God’s just and true reign of righteousness because man cannot produce a righteous government to compare with the righteous ways of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is a ridiculous thing to even think so for one tick of the clock or one moment in time. The chapter of Daniel now under review declares that the earthly man-governments of glory, though glorious in our eyes, are very small; the temporal nature of man’s oppressive and frightened rule of man and the ultimate, total victory of the kingdom of truth to be administered by Love itself – this is in the infinite and is the one big thing in eternity that is taking place on this earth. The work of redemption of man and bringing him into the kingdom of God is the main thing being done on this planet. The one thing that will be carried from this earth into eternity, when even the earth, after a thousand year rule of Christ on earth, is swallowed up by time, rolled up like a Hollywood stage set, and time shall be no more.  “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord” are the words spoken by “great voices in heaven” in chapter eleven of the Book of Revelation. Heaven’s outburst of joy, comes right after the seventh angel has blown his trumpet to initiate the final ‘Woe’, which is the great and terrible day of the Lord. ”And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.  And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God. Saying, we give thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned.” Rev. 11:15-17

God’s seizure of earth’s government at Jesus’ Second Coming is one of the major events in the history of the world and mankind. Chapter two of Daniel gives the end-times saint an uncluttered, simple statement about the promise God has given his saints for the reign of His perfect government on earth and into eternity. It details the evolution of world empires and prophecies of the climactic and electrifying moment described above when the ever-growing kingdom of Christ will be established for those of mankind who have entered safely into Love’s eternity.

Quick Scan of World History in a King’s Dream
The King of Babylon’s prophetic dream and its divine interpretation given to the prophet Daniel is intended to be an anchor for our belief so we can know that the full victory of the kingdom of God will come, but not until man’s government has been given a full chance and proven to fall short of real truth and righteousness. This requires a full and complete historical evolution and process, a history which can be studied and reviewed by surveying the course of what is commonly referred to as Western Civilization. God wants to inform the end-times saint that victory over the influence of the world and its governing power will not come without personal struggles of faith and hard won spiritual battles while overcoming persecutions, exploitation and spiritual oppressions of “The Beast” (the ‘Beast’ being the collective spirit and power of the empires of the West until they finally evolve into the fullness of the ‘Beastly’ Empire of the Antichrist at the end; as revealed in the course of Daniel’s history.) But even while living in the midst of the Beast, God was faithful to deliver Daniel out of all his troubles and trials so that he could minister faith and pray for the people of God.

Daniel and the Wise Men Escape Certain Death
Typical of man and his government, the king of Babylon made an incredibly unreasonable request of his advisors and ministers that included a death threat upon them if they could not solve the king’s problem. Daniel was included in the number of ‘wise men’ who were to undertake the impossible task and once again Daniel found himself in a predicament from which only faith in God could deliver him. The situation was utterly hopeless from a human standpoint. The all powerful Nebuchadnezzar was extremely agitated by a troublesome dream which he suspected had been given him by the ‘Most High God’. Afraid that his magicians, astrologers and Magi priests would deceive him with a purely concocted interpretation of the dream he concocted an unreasonable scheme to insure the integrity of the interpreter and the validity of the interpretation. He refused to tell his dream to any of the court ‘wisemen’ or counselors, demanding instead that the dream be told first, and then he could be sure that the interpretation was a valid one. Naturally, no one could come up with the dream. As the wise men of Babylon said, “It is a rare thing that the king requireth, and there is none other that can show it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.” The king, being all powerful, but not always reasonable, became infuriated. Summarily, he decreed that all wise men in the kingdom should be put to death. Panic gripped them. The only way to stay judgment would be if someone could tell him his dream and give the interpretation.

The number of the doomed included Daniel and his fellow Jewish courtiers, Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego and the rest. It was a hopeless position. There must have been a lot of wise guys booking passage on the first caravan out of town. But in hopeless situations, where there is nothing a man can do, in weakness, when all hope is gone, God can do great things to deliver us. This, it would seem, is the sort of faith God would like to grow in his servants and saints in these fading days just before Christ’s appearing in the clouds. Daniel is a prototype for us, a true spiritual archetype, standing in for us to show us how to react when we have life threatening situations pressed down upon us. Often situations come down upon us without cause or rational explanation or in fairness, situations in which we are pressed, in turn, by the grace of God to ask for, and believe for, His miraculous deliverance. He will give his end-times saints understanding and knowledge about the wisdom of the ages and the boldness to tell it to those to whom they are sent. Telling the mysteries of the ages and such things as prophetic truths may even be a matter of life and death, if not for those saints themselves, for others who will be saved by the telling of it. As was the case in all the lives of the courtiers which were saved through Daniel’s asking God for the dream and the interpretation, and his subsequent boldness to tell it all to the king (though its interpretation was not flattering or hopeful to the king and could have easily incurred his wrath). Daniel was forced into a great act of faith by circumstances created by the hand of Providence. The prophet, in the role of prototype end-time saint, asked for a little time, but he had to believe that his God would, and could, do the impossible. He and his friends prayed together that God would reveal the secret of the dream to him. Of course God heard the prayer of his faithful servant and answered it revealing Nebuchadnezzar’s dream word for word, picture by picture, to Daniel in a “night vision“. Daniel thanked God saying, “(God) changeth the times and seasons: he removeth kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: he revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him“

The lesson for the end-time saint is that we, like Daniel, can be privy to the secret things of God by faith 1 Cor. 2:10, and that we should believe that no government or leader rules, including communist, atheist, fascist, or any other, unless God allows it. That God can do all things, even change the way things operate. All timing is in His control. In short, the end-time saint can bank on the truth that there is nothing that is out of God’s total dominion or power. The way God chose to have Nebuchadnezzar withhold his dream, and then have Daniel come up with it and its meaning, was done to prove to us that nothing is hid from Him, including the future or intentions of man. This, when understood and believed, should create a change in the way we approach our relationship with society and politics and the faith we hold in them for bringing salvation to the world. Should it not?

The Dream of the World’s Empires
The dream was given to Nebuchadnezzar because he had wondered what the future held for his kingdom and the kingdoms which were to follow on this earth. It was a simple dream beginning with the picture of a colossal and glorious statue. Daniel, by God’s mercy was given precisely the same dream. The great statue had a head of gold, body of silver, legs of brass, and feet made of a mixture of iron and clay. In the dream, a stone “made without hands” descended from the heaven and crashed down on the feet of the statue breaking them to pieces causing the image to crash to the ground where it immediately dissolved to dust and was blown into oblivion by the wind. The stone which had hit the image then suddenly grew until it became a mountain and covered the entire earth. Daniel then told the king the interpretation.

“This is the dream; and we will tell the interpretation thereof before the king.   Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory.
   And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou [art] this head of gold.
   And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth.
   And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdues all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.
   And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.
   And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, [so] the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.
   And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.
   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.
   Forasmuch as thou sawest 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.”   verses 36-45

In telling its meaning, Daniel says “the interpretation thereof is sure“. History and time have proven Daniel to be 100% correct. And its fulfillment is one of the means by which our faith can be bolstered to know that God’s kingdom, known as the Millennium is certainly coming.

THE KINGDOMS OF WORLD-SPIRIT

Babylon: Head of Gold
Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, the kingdom that God used to judge Israel, was the first great world power of God’s quintessential history and the one in power at the time of the prophetic dream. This kingdom was called the ‘hammer of the whole earth’ by God and its rule was harsh and oppressive. It had an extensive system of law, religion and economy that held political sway and military authority over the entire Mediterranean from Tyre and Jerusalem, Egypt to Carthage and Spain. Babylon desired to rule over the souls of men as well. It tried to force its subjects into idolatry and wherever the spirit of empire was to go thereafter Babylon remained an integral part by way of its influential spirit and the precedents it set for the empire. 

(More spiritual history on Babylon)

Persia: Arms of Silver
Persia followed on the heels of Babylon when it took over the reins of empire in 538 B.C. The transition from Babylon to the second empire came to pass during Daniel’s lifetime and must have given him even greater encouragement that the prophetic dream was true. The city of Babylon was magnificent. As the capital of the empire, the city of Babylon had walls 15 miles square, 350 feet high and 87 feet thick. It had room on top of the walls for six chariots to ride side-by-side. To Daniel, or any contemporary, it must have been unthinkable that Babylon could ever be conquered. The abrupt end and judgment by Persia’s conquest of “the head of gold” is told later in Daniel. The Media-Persian army entered the impregnable city of Babylon by damming up the Euphrates River which ran through the center of it and entered through an open aqueduct gate and began a two hundred year imperial rule of the West. Naturally, the Babylonians had made no provision for attacks inside their city fortress. The army went through the city unimpeded, killing the defenseless people along with Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson-son King Belshazzar. Persia’s most significant addition to the Empire was its government organization (as arms of silver) reaching out into every province and locale with a strict bureaucratic control over its subjects. In this essential way Persia fulfilled its prophetic role in the evolution of World-Spirit Empire. (More Persia)

Greece: Belly of Brass
It took 200 years before the next part of the prophecy would be fulfilled and it took Alexander the Great (more is told about him later in Daniel) of Greece to conquer the Persians in 332 B.C.. With 40,000 cavalry and infantry Alexander made one of the most improbable advances in history conquering the hundreds of thousands strong Persian forces and extending the Greek world into India and Egypt and fulfilling in dramatic form the prophecy of Daniel concerning the Greeks. The Babylonians had brought idolatry into the soul of the empire, the Persians had brought strict bureaucratic controls, and Greece now brought the spirit of humanism and leadership by a single Antichrist figure, Alexander the Great.

Alexander’s vision was of one-world, a so-called ‘brotherhood of man’, a spiritual revival of the Tower of Babel, where men had gathered together to oppose God and forge their own destiny apart from their Creator. It could be said that Babylon had given the kingdoms of this world soul, Persia had given them body, and now Greece had given them the spirit of antichrist. Its leader was certainly the forerunner of the Antichrist who looms ominously on the horizon as we enter the 21st Century. (More Greece)

Rome: Legs of Iron
Rome is the fourth, and most celebrated, of those kingdoms of the West designated by God as the conglomeration of kingdoms which would form the construction of the World-Spirit, called Beast. Together, formed by Rome’s induction, into one Empire they stand in direct opposition to the coming ‘stone’, that Rock of God. Daniel was shown this Empire as representing the Empire’s evolution into a mighty and powerfully dominant force on earth.  Starting in 168 B.C. Rome gradually engulfed the world and by the time of Christ held an iron grip over the nations of the West, having turned the Mediterranean Sea into a ‘Roman Pond’.

Rome is important the same way an answer to a mathematical problem or equation is all important: it is the summation of the spirit and soul of all the preceding kingdoms and holds its aspirations and life’s blood within its own makeup. It represents Satan’s hopes and will and actually embodies the efforts and tactics of Satan’s army of spirits and their principalities and dominions presiding over the nations of mankind. Rome incorporated the antichrist characteristics of Babylon, Persia, and Greece and honed them to a razor sharp precision with iron clad power. Rome is the symbol of the legs of the Empire because it was used to ‘walk’ the spirit of empire into every hemisphere and onto every continent of this earth where they embedded them into the political life of all nations with a Western heritage. The fact prophesied by Daniel, that Rome’s feet are of clay, partly strong and partly weak, and always weakened by division, history has proven. Whenever the empire has grown too big so that it might try to unite the entire world before God’s timing, it has fallen prey to infighting or been beleaguered from outside forces, as with the Muslims and Turks. (More Rome)

Prophecy affords us the advantage of the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It allows us to see clearly into the truth without doubt or reservation, without the obstruction of man’s confusion and limited, myopic vision. Even a scant look at history lets us see clearly how incredible and accurate the king’s dream was and how perfect Daniel’s interpretation. The historical reality of these kingdoms, that they were seen by the king of Babylon in a dream 2,500 years ago, interpreted and recorded by a man of God, are intended to give the end-times saints faith that no matter what things look like, God knows all. His kingdom will win out, just as He has promised. We should have courage to put our faith on the winning side and forsake hope or faith in the affairs of the governments of this world no matter how enticing the temptation to rely on man’s righteous sounding government may be.

And The Kingdom Shall Not Be Left To Other People
“… and the kingdom shall not be left to other people” are just a few words from chapter two that easily can be overlooked. Sandwiched in the middle of a single verse they are nevertheless words with great implications for the end-times believer. Though their meaning might seem obvious at first, they are wonderful reassurance for the end-time saints, as well as a tip-off. And God knows, we need to be reassured and educated from heaven in these last days.

Kingdom Not Left Behind
It is said, you can’t take it with you, but in Christ, you not only can take it with you, if you are wise you will be doing everything you can to store up treasures in heaven. Of all people, the Christian is most blessed, but only if that Christian hopes and dwells in the spirit in heavenly places pinning their hopes on the life to come and not in this transient world in which we are only pilgrims and sojourners. As the apostle Paul puts it, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable”. We who know Christ know this instinctively. But many of us can miss this blessed way of life if we don’t acquire faith in it and one of the primary ways to acquire faith for it is by the Word of God, the prophetic Word to be specific. People in the world, even great men such as the genius Nebuchadnezzar who ruled the world, work their whole lives building and creating kingdoms of their own and in the end they must leave it behind for they can carry nothing with them. We the pilgrims, who are called to work and labor for Christ, can work in a kingdom which we shall not have to leave to other people. We can work for eternal treasure. The preaching, teaching, good works, distribution of God’s love, etc. in any way, is work that is going toward lasting and eternal things. That is what Jesus meant when he said, “Store up treasure in heaven where moth and rust doth not corrupt.”

Daniel saw in the dream a stone (Jesus) come down from heaven and strike the image in its feet (Rome) and the image was shattered into dust and blew away. Daniel saw the stone turn into a giant mountain which filled the whole earth. The interpretation was this: “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.“

As we labor in the kingdom of God we should know that we are working for the winner and for eternal things. We are working for things that will last. The prophecy in chapter two of Daniel tells us that we can take it with us because we shall not leave the kingdom to other people, but we must have our hopes in the world to come and not in the deceptive world of men’s politics and their vain promises of justice and utopia.