January 2, 2022
January 1, 2022
Daniel 2:27-45
27 Daniel replied, “No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, 28 but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. He has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in days to come. Your dream and the visions that passed through your mind as you were lying in bed are these:
29 “As Your Majesty was lying there, your mind turned to things to come, and the revealer of mysteries showed you what is going to happen. 30 As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because I have greater wisdom than anyone else alive, but so that Your Majesty may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind.
31 “Your Majesty looked, and there before you stood a large statue—an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. 32 The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. 34 While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.
36 “This was the dream, and now we will interpret it to the king. 37 Your Majesty, you are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; 38 in your hands he has placed all mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds in the sky. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold.
39 “After you, another kingdom will arise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. 40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
44 “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces.
“The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy.”
Today, I want to jump in by looking at a very familiar and overarching Prophetic Passage from the book of Daniel. As you may know, the book of Daniel has many Prophetic images and ties greatly into the Prophecies found in the book of revelation.
Daniel was a young man who along with many others was taken from Judah when Nebuchadnezzar besieged the city of Jerusalem in 605 BC. Though the city was not completely destroyed at this point (that would come later in 587/586 BC) Nebuchadnezzar did carry off many articles from the Temple as well as people including “Israelites from the royal family and nobility.” Daniel was one of these people.
We don’t know why God chooses certain people at certain times through whom He reveals His plan of what is to come; but Daniel was certainly one of those individuals. Daniel received revelation concerning not only his own time and the immediate future of the Nations of his time; but also, of events that would come much later and of those that are still being fulfilled.
Daniel chapter 2 is the first of those Prophetic revelations and stands as a general table of contents of prophetic events up to and including the last days.
One of the first things that Daniel Chapter 2 reminds us about Prophecy is that God does reveal his plan to his servants so that we can know the beginning from the end and what is still to come and that we might stand firm in His purposes. We see through Daniel’s actions that prayer and a relationship with God are key to understanding Prophecy. We also learn that, no matter what earthly power may seem to be in control, it is God who is sovereign
4 KINGDOMS
MAN APART FROM GOD
THE CONTINUED DEGRADATION OF SIN
THE ROCK
A MIXTURE
Leave a Reply