Shattering the Kingdoms of the Past

In the modern church we often make reference to the imagery of Nebuchadnezzar’s famous dream and refer to the church as the “stone cut out without hands” and its destiny to fill “the whole earth.” In classes we sometimes discuss which historic empires were represented by the different sections of Nebuchadnezzar’s great image. Let’s take a look at the relationship between the stone and the image.

First we’ll review the dream from Daniel 2:31-35:

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

Daniel proceeds to interpret the dream in the subsequent verses, and we learn that the head of gold represents Nebuchadnezzar and the kingdom of Babylon, and the other body parts represent subsequent kingdoms and groups of kingdoms.

Daniel explains that the Stone cut out without hands represents the kingdom that God himself will set up in the latter-days, “which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.”

Here is the question that I have: Why does the Kingdom of God shatter not only the existing contemporaneous kingdoms, but also all of the kingdoms which fell and ceased to exist thousands of years before? Why does the kingdom of God established in the latter days destroy the kingdoms of the past?

One possible interpretation is that while the political kingdoms no longer exist, their values, philosophical and spiritual systems, and their ideals still wield influence in our world. It is easy to tie much of our modern culture, science, philosophy, and spirituality back to the ancient Roman and Greek Empires. I am not well versed in this part of history, but I suppose that one could trace the roots of the Greek and Roman cultures back through the other ancient empires all the way to Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. Thus the association of the name Babylon with the systems and desires of the world.

The Kingdom of God, established in the latter-day, rolls forth to fulfill its divine destiny to fill the whole earth and shatters the philosophical and cultural systems that our modern world has inherited from the past.