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Daniel 2:36-45
³⁶“That was the dream; now I will tell Your Majesty what it means. ³⁷Your Majesty, you are a king over many kings. The God of heaven has given you sovereignty, power, strength, and honor. ³⁸He has made you the ruler over all the inhabited world and has put even the animals and birds under your control. You are the head of gold.
³⁹“But after your kingdom comes to an end, another great kingdom, inferior to yours, will rise to take your place. After that kingdom has fallen, yet a third great kingdom, represented by the bronze belly and thighs, will rise to rule the world. ⁴⁰Following that kingdom, there will be a fourth great kingdom, as strong as iron. That kingdom will smash and crush all previous empires, just as iron smashes and crushes everything it strikes. ⁴¹The feet and toes you saw that were a combination of iron and clay show that this kingdom will be divided. ⁴²Some parts of it will be as strong as iron, and others as weak as clay. ⁴³This mixture of iron and clay also shows that these kingdoms will try to strengthen themselves by forming alliances with each other through intermarriage. But this will not succeed, just as iron and clay do not mix.
⁴⁴“During the reigns of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed; no one will ever conquer it. It will shatter all these kingdoms into nothingness, but it will stand forever. ⁴⁵That is the meaning of the rock cut from the mountain by supernatural means, crushing to dust the statue of iron, bronze, clay, silver, and gold.
“The great God has shown Your Majesty what will happen in the future. The dream is true, and its meaning is certain.”

Reflect

God revealed the kings dream to Daniel and so it was time for Daniel to tell the king. First, Daniel told the king what he had dreamed. This gave immediate credibility to Daniel. Because Daniel knew what he dreamed, he knew that God had revealed it to him and that the interpretation would be true.

Daniel then proceeded to tell the king what his dream meant. Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom was represented in the dream as a gold head because he was an absolute monarch - God’s ideal government. Nebuchadnezzar though was not God’s ideal monarch. The empires succeeding Babylon were inferior to Nebuchadnezzar’s head of gold in the sense of their centralization of absolute power. Nebuchadnezzar was an absolute monarch, the succeeding empires progressively less so. They were larger and lasted longer than Babylon, but none held as much centralized power as Nebuchadnezzar did. Eventually, God will set up his kingdom on earth and that kingdom will never end. That kingdom is represented by the rock cut from the mountain by supernatural means. That rock is the Messiah (Jesus). (See also Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 8:14, Isaiah 28:16, and Zechariah 3:9 for other references to “the stone”.)

Respond

1. What did Daniel gain by telling the king what his dream was?
2. What is the significance of the different metals used in the description of this amazing figure?
3. Why did Daniel say “The dream is true, and it’s meaning is certain”?

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