All These Kingdoms

“And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end.”

Years of repeatedly reading scripture have convinced me there is no misspeaking in it, no poorly chosen words or phrases. None. Everything God says through his servants is exactly right all the time. When something revealed by the Holy Spirit seems incomprehensible to us, the answer is always to wait, pray and investigate further as intellect and opportunity permit. The problem is not what God wrote; it is that we are misunderstanding him in some way.

In the end, it will all make sense.

In Search of Transcendence

Nebuchadnezzar wanted an enduring kingdom, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire over which he ruled was not going to be what he was looking for. He could probably see the cracks developing in his political power base already. If he feared, he feared with good reason; within a few short decades the Medes and Persians would overwhelm Babylon and become the dominant empirical force in the ancient world for centuries. The Chaldean king had power, honor and glory, but he craved transcendence, and the kingdom over which he ruled wasn’t going to provide that. He was looking for something no earthly kingdom could supply.

So the God of Israel gave Nebuchadnezzar a dream about a mighty image of exceeding brightness, its appearance intimidating. Its head was gold, its chest and arms silver, its abdomen and thighs bronze, its legs of iron and its feet a mixture of iron and clay. The prophet Daniel revealed to him that he was seeing the glory of the kingdoms of the world down through history. The golden head was Babylon, Daniel said, and the other body parts were inferior kingdoms that would arise one after the other later in time to dominate the world’s political landscape.

The Empires of the World

This is a familiar story, and there’s no need for me to beat it to death in every detail. It’s right there in Daniel 2 if you haven’t read it, and it sets the tone for the prophetic revelations of the last six chapters of his book. It ends with a rough stone, cut out from a mountain by no human hand, striking the image on its feet and breaking it to pieces, so that the gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay alike are reduced to fragments so small the wind carries them away, and the great stone becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth.

Nebuchadnezzar was one of the first privileged few offered a glimpse, if only in a parable, of the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ. Later in Daniel, an angel gives the prophet sufficient information that we are able to determine the silver kingdom represents Medo-Persia, the bronze kingdom Greece and the iron kingdom Rome. The kingdom represented by the mixture of iron and clay is the divided kingdom of the last days. It has some characteristics of Roman rule, but is weaker and more diffuse by virtue of its alliance with lesser world powers. Students of prophecy sometimes refer to it as the revived Roman Empire, a name that will probably do as well as any.

A Fly in the Ointment

Anyone who knows the story well and has a solid classical history background will probably laugh at me shortly. There’s a little phrase in Daniel 2:44 that always irked me, because I couldn’t see how it could be true. That’s the statement that Christ will “break in pieces all these kingdoms”.

How could that be? Historically speaking, the stone in the dream representing the kingdom of Christ struck only the ultimate kingdom. The others, I considered, had fallen years ago: Babylon in 539 BC, Persia in 330 BC to Alexander the Great, Greece by 146 BC at the latest, and Rome to the Germanic tribes of the north in AD410. Today, I thought, little of these glories remains. According to Daniel, a brutally powerful but morally and culturally poorer empire will dominate the world in that future day when Christ receives his earthly kingdom.

How then can the dream represent Christ destroying Babylon, Persia, Greece and ancient Rome — all these kingdoms — at the time he comes from heaven to reign over the whole earth? Why include the words “all these kingdoms” at all? It seemed to me the prophet might have misspoken, or perhaps a later scribe had amended his words in ways that didn’t do justice to the original prophecy.

A small issue, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, but it remained an issue for me.

A Little History Helps

My problem was that my understanding of ancient history was at a high school level. I had a vague idea that the term “Greco-Roman” had been coined to describe the ongoing influence of Grecian culture and thinking on the great empire that followed it historically. The Romans beat the Greeks up militarily, then absorbed much of their philosophy, language, culture and worldview even as they erased them politically. Naturally, they also absorbed their territory, so ancient Greece became part of ancient Rome. This I accepted without serious reflection.

I also had some idea from the Gospels and Epistles that the Greek influence was still vitally important in the first century when Christ came to his own. Our New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Latin, even though the Jews of Jesus’ day lived in a tiny Roman province called by the Romans Iudaea and by the Jews Judea. Still, I had no concept of the massive extent to which each world empire identified from Daniel actually influenced all those that followed it and continued to influence and flavor them for their entire existence and beyond, even to today. I am learning it now.

The Influence of Conquered on Conqueror

Perhaps, as a classical history buff, it was obvious to you all along, in which case I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know. But I suspect some of our younger readers are not so fortunate, and may find a few of the observations that follow mildly useful in interpreting prophetic scripture and understanding the history of human civilization more precisely.

1/ Babylon

The Neo-Babylonians gave the world a new view of astronomy, the heliocentric model of planetary motion. Some scholars called this the first scientific revolution. It survived the Persian cultural upheaval to be adopted by the Greeks. Chaldean mathematicians formulated the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras. Greek philosophy, transformative in the West, owes much to the Babylonian philosophers, who used something strikingly similar to the Socratic Method, all of which passed on to the Romans and was preserved by them for centuries. That head of gold in Daniel’s image set the tone for millennia of human culture. If great Babylon appeared to me to effectively disappear after the conquest of the city for which it was named, that was an illusion. In fact, Nebuchadnezzar’s world shaped the one that followed.

2/ Persia

The Aryan Medo-Persians gave the world … dessert. Some of us are more thankful to them than others. They also pioneered crop storage, road and canal building, which the Romans adopted, the postal system and even the concept of human rights. Contrary to my previous and unhistorical assumptions, Persia did not disappear after its conquest by Alexander the Great. It continued to exist and flourish throughout the rise and fall of both the Greek and Roman Empires, though much diminished in size and inferior to the dominant world powers of the day in influence. The Persians battled the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire almost annually well into the sixth century after Christ, and Rome not infrequently paid tribute to Persian kings to keep their aspirations in check. In the seventh century, early Muslim Arabs from the south invaded Persia and, to all appearances, overwhelmed her. Yet within a generation, converted Muslim Persians dominated the Caliphate. Today, Iranian Muslims are devout Islamists in much the way Christmas and Easter Catholics are devout Christians. Persia is nominally fallen, but its influence lives on.

3/ Greece

What can we say about the Greeks that has not been said already? They absorbed the best of the cultures they conquered, refining their unique attributes and developing them further. Greece gave the world a new level of representational art, unprecedented works of architecture, democracy, complex literature, epic poetry, significant discoveries in geometry, astronomy, mathematics and medicine. The intellectual life of Western Europe owes much to the Greeks: Plato, Aristotle, metaphysics and so on. The great modern theological error of extreme determinism is simply a Christian appropriation of the worldview of Greek Stoics like Marcus Aurelius. The Greeks did not go anywhere during the period when Rome ruled the ancient world. Even more so than the Persians, they flourished during the days of the Empire, their civilization significantly outlasting the Italians in the West as the Goths assailed and finally conquered Rome in the mid-first millennium AD. We speak of Egypt during this period as a “Roman province”, but the Alexandrian influence on Egypt was ethnically Greek, not Italian. There is no way to overstate the influence of ancient Greece on ancient Rome.

4/ Rome

Finally, Rome. Rome’s unprecedented success on the world stage was largely attributable to its ability to absorb the best of other cultures and allow them to transform Roman culture in ways that improved it. The Greek pantheon heavily influenced Rome’s. In addition to refined versions of all the aforementioned advances lifted from previous cultures, Rome gave us the calendar, its alphabet, cement, mortar, indoor plumbing, engineering and construction techniques that gave rise to the use of aqueducts, bridges and amphitheaters. Rome also pioneered durable sculptural art and advanced legal theory. Most obviously, Rome gave the West the paganized and institutionalized version of the Christian faith that remains the most visible division of Christendom today. In falling to the Goths, western Rome transformed, refined and domesticated Germanic culture, giving rise to Western civilization as we know it, and as so many are determined to destroy.

5/ Revived Rome

Back to Nebuchadnezzar’s glorious image. It should be evident by now that in destroying a ferocious but brittle future version of Rome, the kingdom of our Lord and Savior will simultaneously be destroying everything Rome absorbed and exported to the world from Babylon, Persia, Greece and elsewhere. It should not surprise us that Babylon, Persia and Greece, though theoretically lost to history, still receive mention here and there throughout the apocalyptic scriptures. These influences contributed to Rome’s greatness and made it possible, but they (and later influences) also weakened it in ways that make its future devastation inevitable.

What and when is revived Rome? We in the West are probably living in it now, none of us entirely aware of the extent to which every so-called “great” movement of history owes most of its prowess and glory to the dominant features of the great powers it conquered and absorbed. The ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s image will probably reveal their identities shortly, assuming we are around to recognize them.

No Mistakes in Scripture

When Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar the kingdom established by the God of heaven will break in pieces “all these kingdoms”, he did not misspeak. Not in the slightest. In destroying the “revived Roman Empire”, Christ will demonstrate the superiority of his kingdom in every respect, not just to Rome at its cultural, scientific, artistic and military apex, but to every great civilization throughout the history of our world at its peak.

After all, it was Christ who made them all possible in the first place.