Today we read of King Nebuchadnezzar’s remarkable dream and the interpretation God revealed to Daniel. He tells the king, “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days” (2:28). The interpretation was about a sequence of Empires, but at the climax of human rule, no empires would exist!

This is a remarkable thing. Looking back over sixty years to our youth, there were the remnants of Empires such as the British in India and the Dutch in what is now Indonesia. Empires of one kind or another have existed throughout history – but during our lifetime this ceased to be the case. The most recent empire to break up was the Soviet Union into a dozen or so nations.

The interpretation of the King’s dream shows a final time when the world will be “as you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with miry clay” (verse 43). So today we have the unique bodies such as the United Nations, which is hardly ‘united’ and the same can be said of the European Union.

The next verse is very familiar to students of prophecy, too familiar so that it loses its impact? “In the days of these kings (this totally disunited time) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to other people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (verse 44). This is the only hope for a hopeless world. But it is more than a hope, it is a wondrous light in the darkness for those with eyes to see!

God’s “stone” – Jesus – “cut from a mountain by no human hand” (verse 45) is about to destroy what Nebuchadnezzar saw. Let us make sure, by the grace of God, our faith will be such that God will preserve us at that time.