Amazing Facts

Doug Batchelor: We are going to be talking about one of the most amazing prophecies in the Bible, Daniel chapter 2 verse 28. This is all taking place in the kingdom of Babylon. But there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and he’s made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your dream and the visions of your head upon your bed were these.

As for you, oh king, thoughts came to you while you were on your bed about what would come to pass after this. And he who reveals secrets has made known to you what will be. Verse 31, you, oh king, were watching and behold a great image. And this great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you and its form was awesome.

The image’s head was of gold, its chest and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. You watched while the stone was cut without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.

Then the iron and the clay and the bronze and the silver and the gold were crushed together and they became like the chaff from the summer threshing floor, and the wind carried them away so no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

Now let’s look at what that dream is all about. Daniel is brought before the king and he’s rehearsing what he dreamed and he’s giving him the interpretation. What two principal objects does God say the king saw in his dream? Daniel tells him. First of all, it says in Daniel 2:31, you were watching and behold a great image.

An image for a Jew, is that a good thing or a bad thing? What’s the second commandment? Thou shalt not make unto thee any image or the likeness. The pagan nations as far as the Jews were concerned were separate from them because they worshipped many gods and they prayed to idols. One of the commandments is you shall not make an image, you shall not bow down. In Babylon, they were praying to all these images.

So this image represents the religions and the kingdoms of the world that would stretch from the time of Nebuchadnezzar to the time of the second coming of Jesus and God’s kingdom filling the earth. You’ve got the image is one thing and it says you watch until a stone was cut out without hands.

Now there’s a difference between the image and the stone because the stone ends up crushing the image. It’s obliterated and pulverized and it blows away and the stone grows into a great mountain that fills the whole earth. Mountains in the Bible are symbols of kingdoms. Israel was called Mount Zion and different kingdoms called themselves different mountains. Often their capitals were built on hills.

And so God’s kingdom is pictured on a mountain here. And it starts with a rock. What is it that Jesus compares his message to? The wise man builds on the rock. What did David use to bring down Goliath? A rock. What were the Ten Commandments written on? A rock. The word of God, written by the finger of God on stone. This stone is a symbol for the commandments of God, the true worship. He was amazed.

All right, now we’re going to go through the interpretation. This is where it gets really interesting. What does the head of gold represent? Daniel told the king what the dream meant. He said, you are this head of gold. Babylon was a great royal kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar was the greatest king. It’s speaking not just of Nebuchadnezzar but he’s saying Babylon, the kingdom of Babylon, was a glorious kingdom.

There was gold everywhere. It was a very wealthy kingdom. You read in chapter 5 about the feast of Belshazzar and they had a banquet hall a mile long. The place was so fabulous. One historian, Herodotus, tells us that it was 15 miles on each side of the wall. The Euphrates River, they directed it so it created a moat all the way around the city. It looked like it was impregnable.

And they were collecting taxes from the whole Middle East at that time. And they just had mountains of gold. Nebuchadnezzar tried to rebuild the Tower of Babel. The ancient stones were still in existence back then according to some of the ancient historians and he built this great ziggurat pyramid with an altar on top. And gold was glistening everywhere. It was the golden kingdom, the golden age you might say.

I told you about the walls of Babylon, so wide you could ride five chariots abreast on the walls. And it looked like the city was impregnable against assault. It was irrigated by the Euphrates River. They had enough food in the city to withstand a siege of 20 years. Again, I’m just quoting from some of the historians. So the Babylonian kingdom lasted from about 606 to 539 AD.

But it did not last forever. Number seven, would the Babylonian kingdom last forever? No, that was part of the dream that Nebuchadnezzar did not like. Daniel said, and after you, another kingdom will arise inferior to yours. Inferior in that silver is not as valuable as gold. But you’ll notice there’s a difference as we progress through these different kingdoms.

The kingdoms that follow, the metal is less valuable but it is harder. Gold is softer than silver and silver is softer than bronze and bronze is softer than iron and you sharpen iron with stone. And so there’s a transition that’s happening and this is what happened historically too. So what’s the story? Babylon fell to the Persians.

You can read about this in Daniel chapter 5. It talks about Belshazzar who was really the grandson of King Nebuchadnezzar. While his father was off doing archaeology of all things, he had switched to the moon god. Belshazzar was put in charge of everything. He had a wild feast and he decided to mock the God of heaven because Nebuchadnezzar had turned to Jehovah.

If you read the book of Daniel, Daniel had convinced Nebuchadnezzar to believe in the true God. They were threatened by this Jew and the other Jews in the kingdom and he said, we’re going to show their gods have no power. Go get the sacred vessels we captured from their temple. Let’s bring their sacred vessels, let’s mock their God Jehovah by toasting our gods of gold and silver and bronze and iron and wood.

As they were making a mockery of Jehovah, suddenly on the plaster where everyone could see above the banquet hall, a bloodless hand began to write in burning characters these words, Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. Probably looked like the Addams Family thing, that hand by itself out there. And it began to write. The party was over at that point. Everybody froze in terror.

The king calls in his wise men. Tell me what it means and I’ll make you third ruler in the kingdom. He couldn’t make him second ruler because he was only the second ruler, his father was the king. Wise men came in, they're totally mystified, they don't know what it means. The queen mother comes in. She remembers the wisest of the wise men was still alive and still very lucid.

And it always gives me chills when I say this. She said, there is a man in the kingdom. Isn't it great that God has his man? She says there is a man and no mystery perplexes him. He will tell you. Daniel comes. You notice Daniel wasn't invited to the party, but they bring him in now and they say, can you tell us what this says and we’ll give you all these rewards?

He said, you can keep your rewards because I know what it says and you’re going to be in no position to reward anyone before the night’s over. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. He says, your kingdom is weighed in the balances and you are found lacking and it is divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. While Daniel was speaking those words, Cyrus the Persian general had diverted the Euphrates River.

Where it ran under the wall. There were two walls entering the city of Babylon. The river ran under one wall and you couldn’t get under the wall because it ran right up to the edges of the wall. But way upstream Cyrus had created another channel. They broke the dam. The water from the river ran off into this dry lake bed, the water level dropped down.

They were all having a party in the city, Belshazzar’s feast. A handful of his soldiers went in under the wall, they opened the main gates and the Persians came pouring in. They took the city almost without firing a shot. There you’ve got the tomb of Cyrus, some of the inscriptions. He’s a well-known character in history. If you go to the British Museum, you’ve got here the cuneiform scroll, the cylinder of Cyrus.

In this, when you read the cuneiform, he basically says that when he conquered Babylon he allowed the native peoples to go home that had been held captive and the Jews were among those. So this is all substantiated by history. They are represented by the silver arms in the image. You got two arms and the reason is you had the Medo-Persian. It was a Medo-Persian kingdom.

Their principal currency was silver. And it is during the time of the Persians, here you can see the expanse of the kingdom gets bigger and they last longer. But they did not have the same value as the golden kingdom of Babylon. So there's a sequence historically that matches the vision of Daniel precisely. It's during the time of the Persians that Esther becomes the queen. She marries King Artaxerxes.

Number eight, what metal would represent the kingdom that followed Medo-Persia? Medo-Persia also would pass to the next image metal which is bronze. It said another third kingdom of bronze shall rule over all the earth. And what followed the Persians? It was the kingdom of Greece. There was a young Macedonian prince, when Philip of Macedon died, Alexander became the king.

He was brilliant, he was schooled by Aristotle. He was probably one of the best-educated kings and he was a brilliant strategist and general. He grew up with his father fighting battles all the time so he understood war even from an early age. He marched his army over 11,000 miles in 11 years, conquering everywhere he went.

He went all the way from Greece and the edges of Rome down to the borders of India fighting and winning battles. His soldiers would follow him anywhere because Alexander would not just order them where to go, he would lead the charge. Some historian said it appeared that there was some supernatural hand that was watching over. Let me quote this to you from Arrian the Greek historian.

I am persuaded that there is no nation, city or people then being where his name did not reach, for which reason, whatever origin he might boast or claim to himself, there seems to me to have been some divine hand presiding over his birth and his actions. Alexander marched his army through Afghanistan and to this day you’ll find a lot of blue-eyed Afghanis and they’ve done DNA studies and they are related to the Greeks and the Macedonians.

So there’s no question that he did this. He’s a historical character. But in his prime, after he conquered everything, he was in Babylon, they had a wild party and he was drinking. He woke up the next day with a fever either from alcohol poisoning, someone poisoned him or malaria, they still don’t know what killed him so young. He conquered the world but he could not conquer himself.

And Alexander died and his kingdom was now divided among his four generals. The reason that they are pictured as a bronze empire is because their armor was bronze. That was the principal metal that they used for their protection, their armor, their swords. But this kingdom would not last forever. Here’s a map. You see the Greek empire and the Hellenistic empire.

It had a broader scope than even the Babylonians or the Persians. They lasted longer but they did not have the same degree of glory. Not the same money. But Alexander wherever he went he took scientists with him, he took doctors with him, he took linguists with him and he introduced what they call the Greek culture. That’s why the New Testament is written in Greek even though the Romans were ruling the world.

That’s why there’s an Old Testament written in Greek. That was in Alexandria, Egypt because the Greek literature and their method spread everywhere. You’ve got this Old Testament called the Septuagint written in Greek. Alexander, he spread great learning because he had been taught by these philosophers everywhere he went.

Question nine, what metal represents the fourth kingdom? And here it gets very interesting. It says the fourth kingdom will be as strong as iron. The metal is getting stronger now. The next kingdom who followed the Greeks, the kingdom of Rome. Now wait, just pause. Look up for a second. I don’t want you to miss this. You’re telling us about these great empires but are you saying that the Persians and the Babylonians and the Romans and the Greeks are the only great empires?

No, no, no. You had a great Inca empire, you had a great Chinese empire, there were empires in India, you had the Mayan empires. There were other empires around the world during history. Why these five specific empires? They are the ones that had direct influence and occupied God’s people. So this vision is dealing with the empires that would be ruling over God’s people that had the oracles of truth that needed to go to the world.

That’s why it’s focusing on Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. We’re not saying they’re the only kingdoms. Is that clear? Thank you very much. So now you enter into the iron monarchy of Rome. Rome conquered the Greeks. It was a series of wars but they say that they really lost control by 168 BC. The four generals of Alexander scattered in four different directions.

So the Romans had to conquer these different areas of the Greek territory. But by 168 BC they had lost their power and now followed the iron monarchy of Rome. One reason Rome won is their military strategy and they had access to iron weapons. Where the Greeks had bronze swords and helmets, the Romans had iron and you could take an iron sword and cut a bronze sword in two.

So it got to be a little easier of a battle. And it was iron swords that killed the babies in Bethlehem and it was iron nails that pierced the hands of Jesus and an iron spear that went into his side. They were known as the kingdom of iron. Now during the time in spite of the polytheism of the Romans, during the time of Augustus Caesar they had what they call Pax Romana.

That meant the Roman peace. During that time the Romans built roads just like the Incas all over the new world. The Romans had roads. I’ve walked down some of those roads, the Appian Way there in Rome that are still in existence today. It was the internet. Travel and communication was high speed. The gospel and Jesus came during the Roman era because it could spread the quickest around the world during that time.

Even Paul, maybe exaggerating a little bit but Paul says the gospel’s been preached to every creature because the believers went throughout the Roman Empire on these roads and they preserved travel during this time around the Mediterranean. This was the map here. You notice what's happening. They didn't have the wealth of the Babylonians but iron is stronger, they lasted longer. Each one is lasting longer than the one before and it goes right to the very end.

So the Romans began to disintegrate. And it tells us you come to the next kingdom at this point. What would happen after the fall of the Roman Empire? They didn’t just fall in a battle, they crumbled from the inside out because of immorality. It tells us the kingdom will be divided as the toes of the feet. How many toes do you have on your feet, most people? Ten.

As the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay so the kingdom will be partly strong and partly fragile. Don’t forget the ten toes because in Revelation and in Daniel you talk about a beast with ten horns. The ten divisions of the Roman Empire ended up being like these ten divisions of the nations of Europe. They fell from within through barbarian wars and immorality.

Rome began to crumble and you ended up with the various nations of Europe. Many of them are in existence today. About 476 AD, Rome began to crumble, conquered by these barbarian tribes that rebelled and they lost their power. Their ancient names were the Alemanni, the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, the Burgundians, the Suevi, the Lombards, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Heruli, the Ostrogoths.

When you read later in Daniel it says a little horn comes up and three of those ten get plucked up. Those are the last three that were destroyed. The Vandals, they used to break the Roman statues in pieces and it was called vandalism. The Vandals, the Heruli, the Ostrogoths were destroyed about that same time. The modern kingdoms you recognize now, if you're Spanish, how do you say German? Alemán, right?

You got the Alemanni, the German, the French, the English, the Swedes, Switzerland, the Portugal, Italian, and Spain. These ten divisions shift but basically prophecy is telling us that kingdom would divide into other nations. But it says that the feet of the image, very interesting, are iron mixed with miry clay. Now you realize this is the last kingdom before the stone comes from the heavens and smites the image.

Iron mixed with miry clay. Do you know what the number one construction material in the world is today? Concrete. Concrete, concrete. You should have invested about 100 years ago, you'd be very wealthy right now. Karen and I were in China a few years ago and they say the national bird in China is the building crane because everywhere you look they are building and the air is full of concrete dust.

And you know what concrete is? It's miry clay reinforced with iron. It is iron mixed with miry clay. We are living in the age of concrete right now. They call these cities concrete jungles. But it says the iron doesn't really mix, it reinforces but they don't blend together like a soup, like oil and water in that sense. Now what's happening here?

You can see we're living in the time of the iron and the clay. Clay is what man is made out of. Iron was the Roman Empire. Clay is sort of religion. Iron was politics. We're living in an age where there was a mixture of politics and religion that was taking place just before the end. I'll say more about that. One of the oldest concrete buildings in the world is the Parthenon there in Rome.

I've seen it, but the day I came they wouldn't let us in because they were having a service. Used to be a pagan temple, now used as a church. It was commissioned in 27 AD, the year that Jesus was baptized. Isn't that interesting? And it still stands today. It was finally finished by Hadrian. There shall be in it the strength of the iron forasmuch as iron is mixed with miry clay.

Would these ten kingdoms ever succeed in uniting? No, they tried. They tried to get the nations of Europe and then Britain with Brexit and exit and they struggle. There was a period of time it says they will mingle the seed of men to try to reforge the power of ancient Babylon or Rome. They couldn’t do it. Kaiser Wilhelm tried to do it. Kaiser means in German Caesar.

The Tsars tried to do it. Tsar means in Russian Caesar. Adolf Hitler wanted to have a thousand-year Reich, he wanted the power of Caesar. They used to go Hail Caesar and then they did Adolf, Heil Hitler. They were doing that same thing. He fancied himself that he was going to reunite the ancient Roman Empire, they wanted to get that glory back again.

Napoleon probably came as close as anybody but at Waterloo, he lost his second attempt and he died in Saint Helena. They did not cling one to another. Then of course you’ve got World War I and World War II. You know there was one time they were so intermarried in Europe through marriages and alliances. I heard that Queen Victoria was related to just about every kingdom in Europe.

They called her the grandmother of all Europe because all of her many children were intermarrying with children or grandchildren but they did not unite. Friends, in case you’re wondering, there’s never going to be a one-world government before Jesus comes. There will be one-world religion. Those who do not worship the image of the beast will be killed.

But the governments are always going to want to maintain their unique identity. Who’s going to set up the final kingdom? This stone cut without hands comes from the heavens and smites the image on its feet. It comes to the last part meaning the toes. If you wonder where are we in this vision right now, you and I are in the toenails of the feet.

We are living right down the very end of time. And in the days, Daniel says to Nebuchadnezzar, and in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed. You see what’s happening? You’ve got all these earthly kingdoms and their idols and they crumble, they fall one to another. Each one lasts a little longer. It's like the devil's trying to perfect his world kingdom.

But finally, when you get down to the iron and clay, Christ the stone, the rock of ages, he comes, he smashes the kingdoms of this world and his stone grows into a great mountain and fills the whole earth. Righteousness is going to fill the earth. Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth. It’s going to be Christ’s kingdom. The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven and Jesus reigns forever and ever. What do we say in the Lord’s Prayer? Thy kingdom, thy power forever and ever. Amen.