Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Neo-Babylonian empire, has a dramatic, disturbing dream recorded in the book of Daniel. Just a few years before, in 605 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem, deposed her king, and took captives from among the children of the Jewish royal family and the nobility to be trained to serve their new Babylonian master at the royal court.
Daniel was one of those young men. Along with other captives, Daniel and three of his friends were selected to study the language and literature of the Babylonians. Eventually, they were to join the other wise men of Babylon as counselors, magicians, or astrologers.
Daniel and his three friends were newly installed in the king’s service when the king dreamed a dream that he could not remember! The wise men were commanded not only to interpret the dream, but to identify its content. Impossible! they said. Despot that he was, the king commanded that all the wise men be killed for their failure.
When Daniel heard of this threat, he asked for time, and he and his three friends prayed for deliverance. And God answered their prayers–Daniel was shown the dream and its interpretation and was immediately brought before the king. The king listened with astonishment as Daniel told the king his dream and then proceeded to interpret it.
According to Daniel, the king had seen a large statue of a man, with different metals for different parts of the body. The head was of gold, the chest of silver, the thighs of bronze, and the legs of iron (and feet of iron mixed with clay). Each portion of the image represented kingdoms, Daniel said.
Daniel told the king that the head of gold represented him! But after him another kingdom would arise, then a third, and finally, a fourth. The kingdoms were to be inferior to Babylon, but stronger, just as iron is stronger than gold. The fourth kingdom of iron was to be particularly ferocious, but would eventually become a divided kingdom of iron and clay.
The prophecy points out an important truth. The earth will have four kingdoms closely related to each other, but that another kingdom, not of this world and in the form of a large stone, would smash into the feet of the statue and destroy it completely, thereby inaugurating an everlasting kingdom.
In other words, the fourth kingdom will be the last kingdom on earth! That’s quite a claim, since it was made in the 6th century B.C. The truth of this claim can be known only through future historical events. The dream was foretelling the future!
Eventually, Daniel will learn, in subsequent visions, that the kingdom of silver is Medo-Persia, and the kingdom of bronze is Greece. From our knowledge of history, we know that what Daniel is told comes true. Medo-Persia would indeed follow Babylon, and Greece would indeed follow Medo-Persia.
And after Greece would follow a last power called Rome. Did that happen? Yes, indeed! However, Daniel does not learn the name of the fourth kingdom. That identification comes from Jesus himself in Matthew 24:15-16. There, Jesus says, “When you see the ‘abomination of desolation,’ spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (whoever reads, let him understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”
Jesus is warning his disciples of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Rome, which occurred in 70 A.D. Christians at the time heeded this warning, and no Christian died in the destruction inflicted by a Roman army on the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Jerusalem at that time. We know, therefore, that Rome is the fourth kingdom in the book of Daniel.
History tells us the details of Daniel’s interpretation. Jesus was born at the beginning of the Roman empire and died on a Roman cross. After the resurrection of Jesus, his disciples gradually moved from Israel into all the world, preaching the gospel. We know that Rome persecuted Christians for centuries, until Christianity was legalized in 313 A.D. through the Edict of Milan.
At the fall of the Roman empire in 476 A.D., a power vacuum was left that eventually was filled by the Roman Church in 538 A.D. The pagan portion of the Roman empire was divided into roughly ten kingdoms of “barbaric” peoples such as the Franks. Today, we can see that the modern nations of Western Europe are rooted in those ten kingdoms and that Rome continues in its papal phase.
In other words, the Roman Church is the natural extension of the pagan Roman empire. Daniel 2 is showing us that the second coming of Jesus, the Rock made without hands, will destroy what remains of Rome as well as the entire world of rebels against God. The kingdom of Jesus will take the place of all earthly kingdoms.
We must conclude then, that the message “Come out of her my people,” an appeal found late in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, applies to those at the end of time, just before the second coming of Jesus. The warning is clear. The people of God in the false system of Romanism (which includes all her descendants–apostate Protestants) must flee from her communion lest they be destroyed when she is.
God loves all his people, and He will not allow them to be destroyed in events still in our future. The book of Daniel is an amazing gift to us living at this time.