“The Temporary and The Eternal” Daniel 2:31-49

INTRO> I got to live for a period of time in the same town that my parents grew up in, Kennett MO. I remember them telling me stories of what the town looked like when they where kids. Dad always talked about “Tummies Drive-In” Theater. He said it would be packed with 300+ cars each weekend, people riding in the trunk lol! Here is what “Tummies Drive-in” looks like now (PIC)

CONTEXT> That’s a lot like our passage today. We are studying Daniel who is in exile in Babylon, Babylon was THE greatest power in the world at the time. Here is a 3D digital remake of what scholars think the city looked like (PIC). Here is what that area looks like today from google maps (PIC). Dust, ruble and sand. That’s what we see about the interpretation of the dream, we see that Daniel tells King Neb this profound truth.

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Big Idea> All other kingdoms will crumble because only God’s kingdom is final.

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APPLICATION> That’s a tough truth to comprehend and I admit, even sounds confrontational. But think about it, if all of this is true, there can’t really be a tie for 1st place and there? God doesn’t want second place, plus he doesn’t deserve it. But lets go further with that, think about your life. The life that you are working so hard at right now, the house the family the job, all of that stuff? What’s it gonna be in 20 years, 50 years, a hundred years…. I mean our nation, our great nation is only 242 years old!

• • • • “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.” – 1 Peter 1:24-25

1. All other kingdoms are fragile.

• • • Now we have to do a little work here, there are a lot of thoughts and opinions about this dream and the image in the dream.
    • v29 “The dream is about “after this” and “what is it to be”  We know that this dream is about the future.

Here is how a lot of scholars break down the image in the dream:

• Gold Head = Babylon v38
• Silver chest and Arms = Medo Persia 536 B.C.
• Bronze = Greek Empire 330 BC
• Iron Legs = Roman Empire 27 B.C.
• Clay feet = End Times

APP> Now that’s great… a lot of people agree with that and it seems logical but there is a problem… where is that in the text? where is that in the bible at all? “It is important to notice, however, that the passage itself gives us virtually no data about the specifics of any of these kingdoms, because it intends to give a philosophy of history rather than a precise analysis of history ahead of time.” – Iain M. Duguid, Daniel, pg 37

1. 1. Humanity is obsessed with power. – Do you see what God is telling us here and what is is telling King Neb? Humanity is constantly trying to climb the ladder of success, it’s like a cosmic battle of “king of the hill?” *ILL> In the movie “The Amazing Spider Man 2” Jamie Foxx plays a character called “Electro” He starts out as a nobody, but he envies Spiderman, in fact in the movie he says, “ “I wish I was like him, the Amazing Spider-Man!” ―Max before becoming evil
   2. Humanity is crumbling as it’s evolving. Notice that there is a digression in this image of a man, it starts with Gold and ends with clay… MOST valuable to LEAST. Man started out in the garden and is constantly falling away. “This is saying something important to contemporary readers about the pattern of human history: on the whole history degenerates; it carries its own germ of disintegration that becomes increasingly apparent. There is then no progress gene implanted in history womb that ensures some sort of infallible upward movement.”- Dale Ralph Davis, pg 47 *ILL> Sure we have technology but we can’t stop a school shooting. Sure we can go to the moon but you can’t save your marriage?

2) Only God’s kingdom is final.

• • • • v34 “ As you looked a stone was cut out by no human hands…” There is this stone that comes and smashes this

statue and abolishes it, it’s not made by any human hands.

• • • “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush[b] your head, and you will strike his heel.” Genesis 3:15
    • “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”  The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” Luke 1:34-35
    • “Jesus looked directly at them and asked, “Then what is the meaning of that which is written: “‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’[a]? 18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” Luke 20:17-18

APP> The stone that crushes all other kingdoms is Jesus Christ.

v44 “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom…”

God’s kingdom is:

• • • Unchangeable.
    • Unforgettable.
    • Uncontrollable.
    • Unstoppable.

Close> Malcom Mugridge (PIC) was a british journalist, a very famous one, he reported major news and lived during WW2, he wrote this in 1980 looking back on all of the empires and everything he saw:

“We look back upon history and what do we see?Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”

In one lifetime I have seen my own  countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”

I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.

I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.

England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.

America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

—Malcom Muggeridge, “But Not of Christ,” Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 29-30.

When Ravi Zacharias quotes a version of these memorable words from Muggeridge, he often adds his own appropriate postscript:

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life.”