Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
Deported from his homeland by the superpower of his day, the prophet Daniel was a great statesman and observer of international affairs. His personal experiences and prophetic visions combined to give him an unrivalled perspective on world history. In this message, given at Greyfriars' Classical Service on 22 March 2009, Rob Yule explains how Daniel's visions locate the coming of God's kingdom in a succession of world empires, and describe its humane character in contrast to their oppression and barbarity.
The Bible is unique in world literature. No other book presents an outline of world history, predicted many years before it happened, which has proved to be so accurate.
Biblical prophecy doesn't give a general history of the world's empires and civilisations. There is no reference in the Bible, for example, to ancient Chinese civilisation, or to the Aztec and Inca empires. Rather, the Bible gives an outline of world history in the light of God's eternal purpose to overcome sin and evil, injustice and oppression, and establish his kingdom on earth.
Daniel was the right man at the right place at the right time. He was a Judean exile in the court at Babylon, capital city of two world empires - first the Babylonian then the Persian.
Daniel was from a noble Jewish family - possibly of royal descent (Daniel 1:3). He was taken as a youth to Babylon in 606 BC, twenty years before the destruction of the temple and the deportation of the population. He had exceptional ability and intelligence. He rose rapidly to become an advisor to King Nebuchadnezzar - as Joseph had earlier done in under the Pharaoh in Egypt. After the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC he was made supreme administrator of the Persian empire.
Daniel was a man of outstanding integrity. He was wise and capable, a man of uncompromising faith. There was no divorce between his public and private life, between his personal intercessions and his public service. Throughout his long life - he lived into his nineties! - he never wavered in his commitment to God, despite many attacks on his life and reputation. He was cast into a den of lions when he was in his eighties!
It was to this statesman-prophet that God chose to reveal the course of world history as it related to the coming of God's kingdom and the triumph of God's purposes.
The book of Daniel sets the coming of God's kingdom in the context of world history and the succession of world empires. This was first indicated in a dream of Nebuchadnezzar's that Daniel had to describe and interpret for the king. The dream was about a giant statue made of different metals. A rock 'cut out, but not by human hands' struck the feet of the statue and destroyed it. The feet were the fourth part of this composite statue comprising four metals. Daniel explained that the rock represented God's eternal Kingdom, which would appear at the time of a fourth empire in a sequence of major world empires. 'In the time of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure for ever.' (Daniel 2:44).
The same sequence of four oppressive empires reappears in Daniel's later vision of four terrifying beasts (Daniel 7) - with God's kingdom likewise being established during the fourth (or Roman) empire, as the following table makes clear:
| Sequence of human empires | ||
| Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue (Daniel 2) | Daniel's vision of beasts (Daniel 7) | World empire |
| Gold head | Winged lion | Babylonian |
| Silver torso | Bear | Medo-Persian |
| Bronze abs and thighs | Leopard with four wings and four heads | Hellenistic: - Seleucid (Syria) - Ptolemaic (Egypt) - Macedonian (Greece) - Anatolian (Turkey) |
| Iron legs, iron and clay feet | Horned beast, with iron teeth and ten horns | Roman empire |
| Little horn, which uprooted 3 horns, 'had eyes like a human being', spoke boastfully, & waged war on the saints (7:8) | Imperial persecutions | |
| Arrival of God's kingdom | ||
| Rock 'not quarried by human hands' (2:34) | Jesus' divine origin | |
| 'In the time of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that… will endure for ever' (2:44) | '… an everlasting dominion that will not pass away' (7:14) | Inaugurated by Jesus' birth under Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1-7) |
| 'One like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven' (7:13) 'all nations and people… worshipped him' (7:14) | Consummated by Jesus' return at the end of the age | |
Daniel's imagery suggests the oppressive nature of human institutions and of human history.
Let us consider first the symbolism of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream (Daniel 2). The statue is a colossus which dwarfs and demeans the people who have to look at it, like the statues of Lenin which once dominated the town squares of the Soviet Union, or the portraits of Mao which were hung in places of public assembly in China. Indeed, Nebuchadnezzar's head seems to have been turned by the suggestion that his kingdom was greater than all those which would follow (Daniel 2:36-39). Intoxicated with power and pride, he built a massive gold statue like that in his dream and decreed that everyone throughout his empire should bow down and worship it (Daniel 3:1-7).
Bible scholar and political commentator Lance Lambert says,
'World history provides evidence of many attempts to provide mankind with a new and just order of society. In theory they have appeared good and desirable, but in practice they have proved to be impersonal, inflexible and inhuman systems, often becoming monoliths of bondage and despotism. They have no heart. Man always creates a colossus which in turn enslaves him, then robs him of his individuality, originality and dignity, and, having reduced him to being no more than a cog in the economic or political machinery, ultimately destroys him.' (Till the Day Dawns: the Relevance of Biblical Prophecy, Eastbourne, Kingsway, 1982, pp. 92-93).
From Nebuchadnezzar's statue in Babylon, to the World Trade Centre in New York, or even the Sky Tower in Auckland, these great edifices symbolise the political and economic values of their societies.
Secondly, the imagery of the beasts in Daniel's vision (Daniel 7), is also a very appropriate description of the character of these great world empires. Beasts symbolise what is subhuman or dehumanising. They roam freely, cause fear, attack, tear people's flesh, maim, and kill. The imagery of beasts symbolises empires built on warfare and force, regimes that are oppressive and militaristic. The four savage beasts symbolise the true character of world history, hidden behind the statue's refined and sophisticated facade. Lambert remarks:
'Beneath the veneer of civilization with its vaunted ideals, education and social standards is the nature of a wild beast. The annals of human history provide abundant evidence for the bestiality of man's fallen nature, and its pages are filled with the stories of his savage butchery and inhuman cruelty…. The history of this [the 20th] century alone provides sufficient evidence of the continuing cruelty and wickedness of man. In fact, it would suggest that the bestiality of man is growing in intensity. The evidence for that is to be seen in the two world wars in which approximately 55,000,000 people died, apart from many local and civil wars, ethnic strife, and terrorist atrocities perpetrated on innocent people during this century.' (Till the Day Dawns, p. 93).
By contrast, the image of 'one like a son of man' being presented to 'the Ancient of Days' and raised to supreme authority (Daniel 7:13-14), speaks of the exaltation of a human being - a humble, humane ruler. Jesus' reign is gentle not aggressive, compassionate not cruel, humanising not heartless.
The prophetic visions of the Bible therefore present a genuine hope for the oppressed. It is a gentle lamb who prevails over the savagery and cruelty of human history. It is the Lamb of God who triumphs over the ravenous beasts of Daniel's vision, and over the fearsome dragon of the book of Revelation. Historian Christopher Nugent says, 'The antidote to the wolf of man is the Lamb of God.' (Masks of Satan: The Demonic in History, London, Sheed & Ward, 1983, p. 190). Christ is the difference between salvation and savagery, peace and violence, civilisation and barbarism, light and darkness, heaven and hell, God and Satan.
God's kingdom is eternal, indestructible, multicultural, and truly international. 'In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed . . . . It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever; just as you saw that a stone was cut from the mountain not by hands, and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold.' (Daniel 2:44-45). To the son of man 'was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.' (Daniel 7:14).
From humble origins God's kingdom expands to fill all the earth, outlasting all opposition and triumphing through suffering. Like Jesus' parable of the mustard seed, which became a great bush that the birds of the air found a home in (Mark 4:30-32), God's Kingdom grows from small beginnings until one day it will fill the earth.
So the prophecies of Daniel foreshadow the amazing history of the Christian movement. Small and obscure when it began - with Jesus and twelve followers - it overcame the power of Rome in just three centuries. The early Christians, it is said, outloved, outlived and outdied their opposition in the Roman Empire, till - in what has been described as 'the triumph of the meek' - the persecutions ceased and the empire itself formally became Christian with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 313 AD.
Today, according to Christian statistician David B. Barrett, the world Christian movement numbers exactly one third of the world's population - 2.11 billion Christians in mid-2008, comprising 33.3% of the world's total population of 6.69 billion (International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 32, No. 1 [January 2008], p. 30).
Growth through opposition has been the experience of Christians many times throughout the centuries, and will be even more so in the great tribulation of the last days. Barrett's mid-2008 figure for Christian martyrdom is 175,000 per annum. Today there is terrible suffering for Christians in countries like the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, the central Asian republics, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Whatever our situation, whether financial uncertainty because of the international economic situation, or fierce opposition because of persecution for our faith, our hope is in Jesus Christ and his enduring Kingdom. Though the currents of evil seem so strong and invincible, God's Kingdom will endure and prevail. Unassuming and unspectacular, unnoticed and unsung, the tide of Christian devotion runs stronger than all the currents of opposition. The wickedness and cruelty of the beast is only for a time; God's purposes are for ever.
Rob Yule, 22 March 2009
© 2009, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
