END OF DAYS, PART 1: BEAST EMPIRES

Daniel 2 (NASB)
David Bruce Linn, Pastor-Teacher
1 October 2006
All Rights Reserved

War has come to the world. Islamic extremism has begun to reach a critical mass where small numbers of people in many countries have shaped the hatred of entire nations against Israel and its primary ally, the United States. Vast sums of money, increasingly advanced weapons, and deadly methods of terror war have left the world wondering who will be next as nations on every continent are attacked and some are taken over.

What are the prospects for peace in such a world? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran in 2005. Joel C. Rosenberg, in his book entitled Epicenter, writes: "Upon taking office, Ahmadinejad undertook a series of moves that sent shock waves through world capitals, rattled global markets, and drove up the international price of oil. He told associates that he believed the end of the world was just two or three years away. He said he believed he had been chosen by Allah to become Iran's leader at this critical hour to hasten the coming of the Islamic messiah known as the Twelfth Imam or the Mahdi by launching a final holy war against Christians and Jews. He publicly vowed to annihilate the United States. He vowed to wipe Israel 'off the map.' He also dramatically accelerated Iran's effort to build, buy, or steal the nuclear weapons necessary to bring about the end of days, in accordance with his Shiite Muslim theology" (Tyndale, p. x). One might ask why this war is not also against Hindus and Buddhists. The New York Times reports that in a recent trip to the United Nations Ahmadinejad spent about forty minutes "questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened" (9/21/06, p. A1).

The recent war between Israel and the terrorist faction Hezbollah was conducted in southern Lebanon but funded and supplied across the common border with Syria. Tens of thousands of rockets were fired at Israel during this conflict. There is a common understanding that Iran fed Syria with weapons obtained from Russia. Then Syria provisioned Hezbollah with war material. Syria is identified as a state sponsor of terrorism by the US State Department because, among other reasons, it has long been home to Islamic Jihad, source of many terrorist mass murders in Israel. For years terrorist training camps have have turned out jihadists near Damascus who then attack Israel through the West Bank and Gaza. One must wonder, what does Syria have against Israel?

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has an unquenchable hatred for Israel and has repeatedly fired Scud missiles at them. He did everything in his power to develop weapons of mass destruction which he tested on thousands of his own people. Many suspect that the bulk of these were moved across the border into Syria before the Second Gulf War. Hundred of tons of yellowcake uranium were removed from Iraq by the International Atomic Energy Administration which would not have been necessary for electric power in a nation awash with oil. Hussein spoke of being the new Nebuchadnezzar and sought to rebuild Babylon. He trained international terrorists in a facility called Salman Pak where a commercial jet fuselage was used to practice hijackings. Today Iraq is an unstable mass of armed factions, nearly all of whom hate Israel and the United States. It is too early to count this powerful nation out of the gathering storm of world war. Where do we look to make sense of this apparently senseless hatred of Israel and America?

1. THE ANCIENT BEAST EMPIRES

Daniel had a vision of empires raised up by Satan against Israel and God's people depicted as beasts (ch. 7). Since the Devil is himself portrayed as a beast in Revelation thirteen, students of prophecy have taken to calling this succession of world kingdoms "beast empires." As I have restudied the Lord's word to his people through Daniel I am wondering if we might very well be in what the Bible calls the end of days. The prophecies given to Daniel describe what we are seeing with startling clarity, and they also tell us what we should expect to see next.

One of the foundational visions found in Daniel's second chapter describes these beast empires in what we call the "times of the Gentiles" when Israel would be trampled underfoot by one despotic empire after the next. The background to the book of Daniel is that in the year 586 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonian Empire, had overrun the remaining southern kingdom of Israel and carried the Jewish people off into captivity where they became his slaves. Daniel was one of these, but because he was very smart, he was chosen to work in the king's palace. The northern kingdom had been similarly carried off a century and a half earlier by the Assyrians and has never been seen again.

Nebuchadnezzar had a disturbing dream one night and he demanded that his wise men, in order to prove their claims of great wisdom and knowledge, tell him both the dream and its interpretation. The king called their bluff and they were exposed as fakes when they could not deliver. So the king commanded that all the wise men be executed as worthless, which would have included Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Daniel pled with the king to give him time to seek the Lord for both the dream and its interpretation. Daniel and his friends went to prayer.

The Lord then gave Daniel not only the vision from the king's dream but also its interpretation. Daniel gave all the glory to God for what he was about to relate, and then he said: "You, O king, were looking and behold, there was a single great statue; that statue, which was large and of extraordinary splendor, was standing in front of you, and its appearance was awesome. The head of that statue was made of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. You continued looking until a stone was cut out without hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were crushed all at the same time and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them was found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth" (Daniel 2:31-35).

Daniel did not give the king a chance to respond at this point but Nebuchadnezzar must have been stunned to hear the exact dream which had caused him so much distress. At first it may not seem that this strange dream could have anything to do with the storm of war surrounding Israel and the US today, but the night vision which the Lord gave Daniel begins to explain more: "This was the dream; now we will tell its interpretation before the king. You, O king, are the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, the strength and the glory; and wherever the sons of men dwell, or the beasts of the field, or the birds of the sky, He has given them into your hand and has caused you to rule over them all. You are the head of gold" (Daniel 2:36-38).

The first thing we learn is that the top section of the colossal statue represents Nebuchadnezzar and his rule. Some earthly superior characteristic in that rule made it best represented by gold. Daniel continued his explanation: "After you there will arise another kingdom inferior to you, then another third kingdom of bronze, which will rule over all the earth" (Daniel 2:39). The chest and arms of the statue in the dream were made of silver, a soft metal which tarnishes easily and is worth less than gold. The kingdom represented by that metal was in some way inferior to that of Nebuchadnezzar. The belly and thighs of the colossus were made of bronze, a metal even less valuable than silver, though harder. Though ruling all, this beast empire was worth less than the one before it.

Daniel continued: "Then there will be a fourth kingdom as strong as iron; inasmuch as iron crushes and shatters all things, so, like iron that breaks in pieces, it will crush and break all these in pieces. In that you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it will be a divided kingdom; but it will have in it the toughness of iron, inasmuch as you saw the iron mixed with common clay. As the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of pottery, so some of the kingdom will be strong and part of it will be brittle. And in that you saw the iron mixed with common clay, they will combine with one another in the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, even as iron does not combine with pottery" (Daniel 2:40-43). Like iron, the fourth beast empire depicted by the iron legs had tremendous strength. This fourth empire, as seen in the feet and toes, goes through some sort of transformation into a mixture of iron and clay so that parts of the empire will be very strong and parts brittle and prone to crumble.

One might think that it would be hard to identify kingdoms so ancient, but the march of empires through the region surrounding Israel is actually well documented. And before we go further it would be well to note that there were, of course, other strong empires of history, but the focus is on Israel as the geographic epicenter of the Lord's work on the earth. And because these are beast empires owing their strength to Satan, they are implacably opposed to Israel as the source of the coming Savior of the world, Christ Jesus.

The head of gold on the colossal statue is clearly identified as the Babylonian Empire. The silver chest and arms of the colossus represent Medo-Persia. The bronze belly and thighs represent Greece, and the iron legs represent the Roman Empire. We are left not knowing the identity of the empire made of mixed iron and clay.

2. THE BEAST EMPIRES TODAY

What might be the current state of the beast empires today? While prophetic identifications are fraught with danger, we must not lose the reason they were given. Surely the Lord wants us to identify the fulfillments of his prophecies well enough so that we can see his omnipotent hand shaping the course of human history and give him glory. That is what we propose to do.

The Babylonian Empire was ruled from modern day Iraq. The deposed dictator Saddam Hussein who sought to rule ruthlessly with an iron fist like Nebuchadnezzar saw himself primarily as a secular heir to the Babylonian Empire. He was not primarily an Islamic extremist. And while the nation, rich with oil, has been fractured by two Gulf Wars, there is still great power there which could easily rise again to oppress Israel and seek the destruction of the United States. If the time for the fulfillment of this prophecy is drawing near then the US will not be able to help a peaceful democratic nation form in Iraq.

The silver part of the colossus, ancient Medo-Persia, is obviously Iran. Iran changed its name from Persia as recently as 1935, and still speaks the language of ancient Persia. The recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon was actually a proxy war with Iran. That is why, for the first time in its history, Israel did not forcefully clean house but permitted a self-harming treaty to be imposed upon it. This treaty has simply allowed the implacable foe of Israel to rebuild its Iranian-built weapons bunkers and fill them up again with Russian-made weapons. The Iranian President Ahmadinejad has forcefully pursued the development of nuclear weapons with Russian assistance and has stated repeatedly that he would like to use them to destroy Israel forever. Like the suicide bombers, he does not seem to care if he and his entire nation are also destroyed in the process.

The bronze part of the statue which we identified as Greece is actually modern day Syria. We tend to think of Greece as the boomerang-shaped sliver of land just to the east of Italy, but this beast empire actually covered all of Turkey and the land we now called Syria. Alexander the Great stormed across the known world and set up his rule in Syria. How did this ancient empire oppress Israel? Under the Seleucid dynasty, a later division of Greece, Antiochus Epiphanes arose to bring greater persecution to Israel than had ever been seen just short of wiping them out completely. He desecrated the temple and became, according to the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, a type of the final Antichrist who is to come.

Modern Syria is known to have biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and it has harbored the terrorist movement against Israel. As an aside I must say that I find it hard to believe that cash-poor Russia would not have sold at least small nuclear weapons to these beast empire nations with which it is friendly. Russian nukes are missing for certain. Who has them? I theorize that the the beast empire nations already have them even though the public position of our nation is that they do not. Perhaps the current rulers of these antisemitic nations do not yet have the stomach to follow through on their threats of annihilation. The Samson strategy of Israel means that the moment one nuke goes off in Israel the population centers of the beast nations would also be destroyed by Israeli nukes. In spite of the rhetoric one wonders how that can be a victory for Islam.

Identifying the modern version of the Roman Empire is more speculative. I believe that the mixed iron and clay of the toes and feet of the statue give us a startling picture of the nations of the European Union which comprise the area once ruled by Rome. Marvin Rosenthal writes about the EU: "It has the strength of iron because it is a union of nations with a citizenry and economy already larger than America. It has the weakness of clay because its members each want to contain their own uniqueness and culture...and therefore, do not always act in concert with the whole" (Zion's Fire, July-August 2006, p. 13).

How is the EU a candidate for being the revived Roman Empire opposed to Israel? Christianity is being wiped out in favor of Islam in many European nations. Anti-Americanism is on a dramatic rise as is antisemitism. It is possible that the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah may require the intervention of EU troops in Lebanon, poising them on Israel's doorstep. We have yet to see how this will unfold.

3. THE DESTINY OF THE BEAST EMPIRES

Daniel does not leave us to wonder what will happen to the revived version of these beast empires: "In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever. Inasmuch as you saw that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold, the great God has made known to the king what will take place in the future; so the dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy" (Daniel 2:44-45).

In the past commentators used to argue that these beast empires wiped each other out successively in history, but just as Israel was resurrected in the 1940's it seems that these beast empires are back as well. Daniel tells us that the rule of Christ himself on the earth will smash all of the beast empires at once and replace them with Christ's kingdom. This means that the prophecies of Christ's millennial rule cannot be only spiritual as amillennialism teaches. The prophecy of the colossus clearly states that Christ's kingdom will fill the earth. And this passage delivers the final death stroke to postmillennialism. No human beings are able to destroy the beast empires with their Satanic power. Christ alone can free the earth from their despotic rule.

Ancient prophecies are coming to pass before our very eyes with shocking clarity. And the God who prophesied these events through his servant Daniel, who rules and reigns over every earthly king and empire, who swats the Enemy away with just a word, will bring the rule of Christ to pass on this earth. Tell everyone! This kind of intel should shock some people out of their complacency and get them to consider believing in the Christ who will shortly be coming back to rule and reign on his earth.

Christ's followers must be people who have studied carefully and who are able to explain what our Lord is planning. We can indeed make sense of the perplexing events of the Middle East. We can warn people that Antichrist is coming. We must also be Christians who are walking closely with Christ. If, in the turbulence at the end of days, we can help people with food, shelter, and water, that is well. But it is much more important that we help them come under the protection of the Lord Jesus Christ by trusting in him for salvation.

More than ever in my lifetime it looks to me like the end of days. It is Christ himself who brings the end. Where do you stand with him? You had better make sure.