The Course of Empire

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and we are in Daniel 2 today.

I shocked Greg a moment ago by singing “Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes” with the words “Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.” I didn’t expect that to be a shock. I mean you work at a Christian school.

I teach teenagers, not small children.

And they don’t like to tell you everything that they know?

They’ve never told me that one. You want to sing it so people know what in the world you’re talking about?

[singing] Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, Greece and Rome. Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, Greece and Rome.” That’s all there is.

Okay. I will ask them in the future whether or not they’ve ever heard that because this is a chapter, or the heart of the chapter is something that I come to in almost every Bible class and in history classes because it is so useful for setting up your understanding of ancient history, but also for establishing eschatology, so that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Cool. So King Nebuchadnezzar having a dream is where this starts, and it reminds us of Pharaoh.

It does, and at some point I’m sure it reminds Daniel of Joseph and Pharoah.

Nebuchadnezzar dreams a dream and his spirit is troubled and his sleep goes from him, so he commands all the astrologers and magicians and Chaldeans and such to come. He says, “I’ve had this dream. I need you to interpret it,” and they say, “Great! Tell us the dream and we’ll tell you what it means,” and he says, “The thing is gone from me.” In other words, “I’m not telling you. I don’t remember.”

“I’m having a hard time recalling. Maybe you could jog my memory.”

“You tell me the dream and then interpret it for me, because you’re clairvoyants.”

“…great magicians and such.”

Yeah, and they say, “Um, no, your majesty, that’s not the way it works.”

Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will shew the interpretation of it.

“This is how it works. You should know this.”

“This is how it’s always worked.”

But Nebuchadnezzar is not a great idiot. He’s gone down in secular history not only as one of the greatest generals in the history of the world, but also as a superb architect and builder. He himself valued his re-creation of Babylon more than he did his military conquests, so he’s a thinking man and he’s got these guys down. The moment he hears the excuses he knows what they are and he’s wondering, “Why are these guys on the payroll?” He says –

I know of certainty that ye would gain the time, because ye see the thing is gone from me.

“If you make known to me the dream, then I’ll know that your interpretation is valid. In other words, this is way too important. This isn’t just one of those weird dreams that everybody has now and then. This is God speaking to me, or the gods, or something beyond my experience. It’s obviously a communication and I need to know and I need not to be put off or deceived here, so you tell me the dream and then I’ll know you know what you’re talking about.” They say, “It doesn’t work that way.”

There is not a man upon the earth that can shew the king's matter: therefore there is no king, lord, nor ruler, that asked such things at any magician, or astrologer, or Chaldean.

“Only the gods could do that.”

Well, the king is angry and furious and commands to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. It’s a little wholesale there, because not every wise man had been invited – for instance, Daniel and his three friends had not been included. They were junior members of the council and, despite their excellence in many things, for some reason they just hadn’t been included in the original invitation.

So basically Daniel pokes his nose out the door just in time to realize that all the wise men are being rounded up and they’re coming for them. “We’re going to be executed? Whoa, slow down. What’s going on here? What’s the problem?” and the king’s captain explains. Then Daniel asks for permission to talk to the king.

Then Daniel went in, and desired of the king that he would give him time, and that he would shew the king the interpretation.

Despite his junior statesman-hoodness here, Daniel is able to get an audience with the king and able to buy time. The earlier chapter had told us that Daniel had been reckoned better than all the wise men, so when he asks he’s earned an audience. He’s earned 24 hours, not much more. The king wants this done.

Of course, we’re back to Daniel and his three friends. God has done one thing that amounted to a miracle. He enhanced their health and comeliness on a diet that should have done none of that, so maybe God will do this for them also. Besides, as you said earlier, this is looking really familiar – a king who has a dream and there’s a Hebrew servant/slave for all practical purposes on the grounds. Maybe they are here for such a time, but they don’t take it for granted and God doesn’t suddenly inspire Daniel with all the information he would like, but they go and have a prayer meeting. We’re told –

Then Daniel went to his house, and made the thing known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions…

Those are the young men we know as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but Daniel talking within his own circle uses their real names, their original names.

…that they would desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret; that Daniel and his fellows should not perish with the rest of the wise men of Babylon.

They’re not exactly asking that everybody be saved. They’re asking that they might be saved, because these other people, in terms of God’s law, are idolaters and unrepentant and deceivers on top of that.

And they have no connection with them. We can’t say it’s exclusively one or the other, but it seems pretty intuitive to me that they’re just like, “You know, we don’t have control over all these people, but us maybe we can deal with.”

But God is overly gracious and what Daniel and his friends do does spare the lives of the magicians as well. So they have the prayer meeting and they desire mercies of the God of heaven.

Then was the secret revealed unto Daniel in a night vision. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven. Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever, for wisdom and might are his, and he changeth the times and the seasons. He removeth kings and setteth up kings. He giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding. He revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him.

I thank thee and praise thee, O thou God of my fathers, who hast given me wisdom and might, and hast made known unto me now what we desired of thee: for thou hast now made known unto us the king's matter.

So they don’t simply say, “Wow, got it!” and rush out the door. They stop and give thanks to God for intervening on their behalf. Then Daniel is able to go in and stand before the king. He does say –

Destroy not the wise men of Babylon. Bring me in before the king and I will shew unto the king the interpretation.

So Daniel does intercede for the wise men at this point. The captain says –

I have found a man of the captives of Judah that will make known unto the king the interpretation.

Like this was his idea, but you know how bureaucrats are.

“I found him! I found him! And I deserve credit.”

“Yes, I do,” and his name went down in scripture for it too, so you know…

Daniel speaks before the king and says –

The secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the soothsayers, shew unto the king…

“Just getting this clear.” He’s putting himself in a different category from them. He is not a mage.

…but there is a God in heaven…

This is the second time he’s said God in heaven. It’s not the normal covenant name for God, but it is the name that’s often used among Gentiles – not just the God of Judah or Israel or of this mountain or this valley, but the God who rules all of heaven and everything beneath it and who is transcendent. He’s not like his creation.

…that revealeth secrets and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days.

Latter days is an expression that is used for the first time in Jacob’s prophecy over his sons. Generally it just means in the future, but the more it gets used the more tailor-made it gets to mean the days of Messiah, the end of old covenant history and what lies after the great turning point in history when Messiah comes, so that needs to be in our head as we listen.

He says, “This is not because I’m so smart or I have any great wisdom. There’s a God in heaven who reveals secrets and he’s communicating with you. It’s important. You’re rare, Nebuchadnezzar. The God of heaven has singled you out to let you know the course of history, leading up to the end of all things. That makes you incredibly special, so listen up. This is what God wants you to know,” and he describes what Nebuchadnezzar saw as a dream and what Daniel has seen in a vision.

As you said earlier in that cute little song, he sees what is a great image, a statue apparently, very tall, very terrible because of its height and glory. It’s humanoid and it’s composed of four metals.

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.

So that’s the first thing, and if you look up Daniel 2 or Nebuchadnezzar’s dream on the internet for Google images you will see all kinds of interpretations of what it looks like, and they’re all very similar because it’s a man and we see how it’s marked off with four different metals.

And as Nebuchadnezzar and later Daniel watch, they see a stone cut out without hands. Later he says cut out of a mountain without hands.

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.

Something is coming at as it were the end, at the feet, at the weak spot, and it smashes first of all the feet, the toes and all of that, and breaks 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 threshing floors; 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.

Thus far the vision, so Nebuchadnezzar is satisfied that Daniel knows what he’s talking about. “Yes, that’s what I saw,” and he’s got to be sitting there thinking, “What does it mean? I don’t get it. What’s going on here?” But Daniel received not only the same visual information, but he also has a word from God as to what it all means, and he says to the king –

Thou, O king, art a king of kings, for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

So this is in some respects a political prophecy. We’re talking about kings and kingdoms.

And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things, and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters' clay and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, 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.
Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter, and the dream is certain and the interpretation thereof sure.

Nebuchadnezzar is very excited, and we’ll talk about the last few verses and his reaction later.

What God is doing is giving Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel and us a panorama of the future, leading up to the advent of the kingdom of the God of heaven, he calls it. It’s charted out by four kingdoms. Daniel tips his hand on what the first one is. “Nebuchadnezzar, you are the head of gold,” but there will be another, an inferior kingdom, and after that another, and then finally this last kingdom. He says a few odd things about that, and then comes something.

These four kingdoms fill up this human shape. They are human kingdoms. They belong to human history. They arise out of the history of our planet, of God’s providence over the affairs of men, but they’re not angelic, they’re not divine, they’re very human, and there’s going to be a two-way change.

In terms of glory, these kingdoms become less and less glorious. Silver is not as glorious as gold, brass is not as glorious as silver, and iron and clay (ceramic) is not as impressive as brass. On the other hand, if you’re going out and hitting things, like people, gold is not a great weapon. Silver is not much better. With brass you’re getting someplace, but iron can crush and mangle and smash, although the ceramic is kind of an odd element there that he says is going to weaken things a bit.

So these kingdoms will come, and then in the days of that fourth kingdom God himself will set up a kingdom. It comes from outside of history. It’s cut out of a mountain, completely separate from this humanoid figure. It’s cut out without hands – that is, God himself is the one who does it – but from the law Daniel would probably recognize stones that aren’t supposed to be touched by human hands, those are altar stones, so there’s something of that going on here. It comes in and smashes the image about the feet and knocks it over and tumbles it, but then it grinds in pieces everything.

There’s a strong suggestion that although these kingdoms succeed one another, they are part of the whole thing. He does not for instance portray four separate human images. It’s the same thing. There’s a continuity here.

As you read through scripture but also through the secular histories of the time, there’s kind of a general assumption that Persia took over Babylon, Greece certainly took over Persia, and Rome just kind of came along and assimilated everything. It was a little more of an iron “we smash you” approach.

When we study history in school it’s often, “Next chapter – Medo-Persia. Next chapter – Greece.” Very distinct, very clear breaks. Just as one odd fact, we think of Roman roads and how far they went and how straight they were and the engineering, but those were Persian roads by and large, at least in the east. Rome came along and perfected them, and then Rome extended them out into the west.

This was a single humanistic man-centered culture that continued to develop. On one level the glory declined, but on another the sheer power and toughness of the thing increased. Rome was much larger in the extent of its empire than Babylon. It was much crueler, more forceful, more successful.

On the other hand, Nebuchadnezzar is about to become a God-fearer and he’s going to be charged with writing scripture, something that no other pagan king has ever been allowed to do, so there is the true glory of the image of God in him.

The Persians come along and Cyrus, the first Persian emperor, and God calls him “my shepherd, my anointed, my messiah, the one who will do all my pleasure even to rebuilding Jerusalem and the temple.”

Alexander at least left everything alone. He read the prophecies of his conquests and offered a sacrifice to Yahweh, then went along his way and didn’t do much else, although Jerusalem was sort of under his protection. The kings who followed him generally treated the Jews well until Antiochus Epiphanes came along.

Then Rome just came along and picked up the pieces. It left the Jews alone mostly, except when they were being annoying. They didn’t try to force them to convert to Roman ways or anything until the final Jewish rebellion. So there’s a drifting away from a self-conscious acceptance of the roles that these empires were supposed to play. They were supposed to look after God’s people.

Nebuchadnezzar understood that fairly well. Cyrus and Darius and the first few Persian kings got that. Alexander – Josephus said he had a dream in which the Jewish high priest invited him into Asia, so he understood too apparently that he had permission and a calling from whoever this God person is. Rome – not really. They didn’t care. They just wanted to maintain their peace, but they did it evenhandedly enough that they were initially a source of protection to the early church.

You read the book of Acts and Rome is not generally the villain. Rome is the one that keeps stepping in a sort of impartial way to say, “Wait, why are you beating up on these people? What’s going on here? Stop that. You don’t have the authority. We’ll decide and you just go away,” so that’s what’s going on here, but it’s leading to a point. It’s leading to the coming of this kingdom from outside history.

Daniel says the God of heaven will set up a kingdom in the last days. Since it’s the kingdom of the God of heaven you could call it the kingdom of God or you could call it the kingdom of heaven. And when we get to the New Testament and we open the historical gospels we find that John the Baptist comes preaching, followed by Jesus, and they both say, “Repent! The kingdom of God is at hand,” or “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” so we pretty well are assured what these four kingdoms are, and there are other prophecies in Daniel that help us fill them in.

For instance in Daniel 8, Daniel sees a vision of a ram, and he’s pushing westward and northward and southward and no animal is able to stand up to him. He has two horns, but one comes up after the other. And as Daniel watches, a he-goat comes zipping along as if his feet are not even touching the ground and attacks the ram and destroys him.

Fortunately, God explains this. He says, “This ram that has the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia.” First there was Media and it existed for a long time, but in the days of Cyrus – Cyrus was a Persian, the head of a new up and coming clan, and he takes over and unites the Medes under the Persians, thus the second horn is higher.

So we’re told here what the next kingdom is, and it’s not Media followed by a Persian kingdom. Some commentators try that tact. The silver is Media and the brass is Persia. No, we’re told pretty clearly here that this one political military force is the kingdom of Media-Persia.

After that the he-goat with one great horn is the king of Greece, Alexander. So we’ve got the first ticked off pretty clearly, and we come to the New Testament and there are Jesus and John saying, “The kingdom of heaven is here.” And we’re told in all the historical prologues of the gospel, “and Rome is ruling the world,” so the Bible interprets itself. The Bible tells us what’s going on here.

Nebuchadnezzar thus has his answer. God has planned out the history of the world. The world is not an independent chaotic force that’s moving ahead, steamrolling on its own without controls, without guidance. It is something that God has mapped out and planned, and it culminates in this kingdom that God himself will set up. It will come from outside of history, but it will come into history because it replaces these other kingdoms who, we must remember, are political, military, financial, and cultural.

It picks up the strands of all of them. It doesn’t just encounter the feet or toes, because we’re told in verse 35 –

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 threshing floors; 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.

When the kingdom of God arrives, there are still strands and elements of all of the kingdoms there. Babylonian astrology survived. Persian dualism survived. Greek philosophy survived. The Roman approach to life survived, and each of these found a place in the next kingdom and found its own cultural expressions.

So when the kingdom of God entered the history of the ancient world, it had to deal with all this stuff, all this garbage, but Daniel foresaw that the kingdom of God would be triumphant. It would displace these things, grind them to powder, and it would grow slowly and fill the whole world – become a mountain on its own. It comes from a mountain outside of history. It comes from God’s providential kingdom, his eternal reign over the universe, but he comes into history as a redemptive kingdom. Remember the idea of the stone cut out without hands as an expression of the worship of God through blood sacrifice. This is the gospel. This is the coming of Messiah.

As Daniel particularly will look at this, there are probably some things that would surprise him. For one, there’s no kingdom for Israel. Babylon is the greatest and the kingdoms that follow are lesser, so that can’t be Israel. But this kingdom that the God of heaven sets up, there’s no reference to Israel at all, not to say that she won’t have some part in this, but she’s not the highlight. It’s not that God will now establish the Jewish kingdom you’ve all been waiting for. It’s something totally different, something that is not of this world, as Jesus will tell Pilate, but it will have effects in this world because it will deal with very real historical cultural social artifacts and impacts of these kingdoms that have gone before.

It’s enough of a kind with the human kingdoms to destroy them.

Exactly. If it was just sort of a ghosty-like thing it might just zip through them and grab some things along the way and go its merry way, but this is something that destroys and displaces these things, and yet since it comes from outside of history and is not of this world, we should begin to suspect that the way it works will not be the way normal kingdoms work. Daniel does not explain this. It’s not explained to him.

This is something of what Pilate was up against when he interviewed Jesus. “Are you the king of the Jews?” and Jesus has to ask him, “What do you mean by that? Sayest thou this thing of thyself or did others tell it thee? Are you asking as a true seeker, a God-fearer seeking after the nature of the Messianic kingdom or are you simply acting on reports that you as a Roman bureaucrat have received and need to do something about?”

Pilate sneers, “Am I a Jew? Your own people, your chief priests have delivered you to me. What have you done?” He’s still thinking politics. And now Jesus can answer. “You have said that I am a king.” In other words, the words are right, kind of like you said it, but it’s not quite that. It’s not yes exactly. It’s like Inigo Montoya, “Those words do not mean what you think they mean.”

“The words are correct, but you don’t even begin to understand what they are. My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world then my servants would fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews.”

“But you’re a king. Say yes and we’re done.”

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

Then Pilate turns and sneers and says, “What is truth?” and walks out and says, “This man is innocent of what you are accusing him of.” They were accusing him of being a terrorist, in our words, a political rival to Caesar. But he understands that whatever Jesus is, he’s not that, and Pilate was right. He’s not that.

But what he could not see – and even the Jews really couldn’t see very clearly – was that this kingdom by its very nature is a threat to Rome, because Rome is built upon the confession that Caesar is Lord. It’s built upon a philosophy of continuity of being. All reality is one, and reality is concentrated in the State and in the person of Caesar. If you can accept that and submit to that in all of your social institutions and all of life, then we’ll get along great.

Well, the gospel rejects that up front. “No, there is a God in heaven who is not part of this creation, and he has his own sovereign claims upon it, and the way to reestablish those claims in the hearts of men is through this gospel message.”

Jesus does not specify when he’s talking to Pilate the nature of what’s going on, except to suggest that he’s not refusing to be crucified. That’s it. Jesus does not say, “No. You see, Pilate, what has to happen here is you need to have me crucified, because by doing so I will provide a penal substitutionary atonement for God’s elect, and then rise from the dead and ascend to heaven and impart the Spirit to effectually call God’s elect and thus win the world to Christ, to myself.”

He does not say any of that, and Pilate is operating blind. He does get it’s a different sort of kingdom. If you’re thinking in terms of armies and terrorism and military funding, no. That’s not it. It doesn’t come like that. It isn’t something imposed by political means, by military means, by economic means, by voting even. It’s something that has to come at a different level, and we wait ultimately to the New Testament to have it spelled out in really short simple words for us. We can think of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, for instance. “You must be born again…for God so loved the world…whosoever believeth…” and those kinds of things. But the background is here, and here the emphasis is the flow of history.

It's interesting in passing to note that with the kingdoms from Babylon to Medo-Persia to Greece to Rome there is a westward flow here. I think Barclay in one of his poems speaks of, “Westward the course of empire,” but in his mind and the mind of others the next step then was England and America, but the next step is the kingdom of God, thank you very much.

These four kingdoms end the proprietorship or stewardship or protection racket that these pagan kings were to do with respect to God’s people. They were supposed to take care of God’s people because God’s people had really screwed up the whole kingdom thing. So God doesn’t reinvent that. He does something brand new and says, “You don’t get your kingdom back. You’re going to be kindergarten students under the tutelage of these pagan empires, and they will be pagan, decreasingly godly, increasingly pagan and violent, and it’s in this context I’m going to bring my kingdom from outside of history into history.”

This is a wonderful place to introduce children and young believers and people who don’t know much about history to the flow of history from this point on. When we finish Kings and Chronicles we come to this, and we can tick off the flow of empire: Babylon (which lasts for about 70 years), then Medo-Persia, and Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi are set during that time, then the canon of scripture closes, but from then on secular history picks up and we have Alexander.

Most people have heard of Alexander the Great and his conquests. On his death, his kingdom is divided among his four generals, and one of Daniels’s later prophecies details a lot of what’s going to happen between the two kingdoms north and south of Palestine until Messiah comes.

Then there’s this other kingdom that comes out of nowhere. It’s not named because Rome didn’t really exist yet. There are a couple references to it like this.

The ceramic is interesting. What’s going on there? This would take a study of all of Daniel, which I don’t propose to do, but in later prophecies the existence of the Idumaeans, the Herods, is highlighted because the Herods were Rome’s face in Palestine. In both the gospels and Acts we run into one Herod after another, from Herod the Great who tried to kill Jesus, who killed the babies in Bethlehem and thereabouts, to the Herod who executes John the Baptist, to other Herods later on, and the Jews try to kiss up to these guys.

In fact, when Jesus is on trial they say, “We have no king but Caesar,” thus allying themselves with this kingdom of iron, but it doesn’t work because the Herods can’t hold it together. The high priests are getting in bed with the beast and they can’t hold it together. In the end that faithful alliance doesn’t really help Rome, and Rome in the end turns upon the Jewish nation and destroys it because they’re just ornery and annoying and keep rebelling. It's in the midst of all of that that the kingdom of God appears.

A couple of things as we work toward the end here. There aren’t really Christian bookstores around anymore, at least in my part of the world, but it used to be that there were Christian bookstores and you could go in and find the prophecy section, which was always large, and in the prophecy section there would usually be at least one book that’s really large and just fill of tables and pictures and charts and diagrams.

I don’t know if it was always the same one, but it may have been, I don’t know. But you could open it up and you could see this picture taken from Daniel of the statue, and it was really great down to someplace around the feet. Then the toes, of which there are ten, were drawn out so as to cover all of the intervening centuries to the return of Christ, which was assumed to be at hand in our generation. So here’s this picture of a guy who looks really well-proportioned except for his super-elongated toes stretching over an entire page.

The reason for this is Dispensationalism – and they’re extreme but they’re not alone – which has trouble looking at this picture of the kingdom of God coming and displacing the kingdoms of this world and says, “Well, but that didn’t happen, so that’s something for later. That must be the millennial kingdom that Jesus will set up when he comes again.”

The keystone of classical Dispensationalism – I don’t think any famous well-known Dispensationalists hold this anymore, I hope not, but the idea was that all of God’s prophecies stopped when Jesus went to the cross or sometime shortly before, that the Old Testament prophets had not foreseen the atonement, they had not foreseen the crucifixion, and that the prophecies of Israel being great and ruling the world were all in place, but the Jews rejected Jesus and so God stopped the clock, as it were. He called time-out, threw a flag on the field, and introduced this parenthetical thing called the age of grace in the New Testament church.

The church would just percolate along winning souls to Christ by this method that was not exactly foreknown or foreseen, but there would come a time when God would be done and he would go back to that original plan. He would rapture the church out of history and pick up exactly where he left off, which meant the temple had to be rebuilt. And what some people forget is that the Roman empire would have to be restored, and thus these elongated toes.

The Dispensationalists looked at the nations of Europe and said, “That was Rome and someday it’s coming back. The anti-Christ will be the ruler of all of that once the church is raptured, and then we can pick it up. Then the stone can come and smash the Roman empire in the future and fill the whole world, and that’s Messiah.”

The number of problems with this are very large. First of all, sorry but it’s stupid, which you get just by drawing it out and showing these toes. Cutting the toes off and then putting a time warp in-between them and having the very tippy toes of the toes 2,000 years later really is not going to help here.

It’s a lot of added interpretive work that doesn’t seem necessary.

Yeah, it just doesn’t work. We have to go back and re-invent everything, restore everything including temple worship and the priesthood and the sacrifices on the altars, all of that which Jesus abolished. And in order to do that, as a background we need the Roman empire in place, as if the New Testament church and the gospel of Christ are historical irrelevancies. “Yes, they saved some people, but largely in the end were a failure.”

Now the reason for this in the original Dispensational scheme was because they wanted an imminent second coming. The people who invented the system were just disillusioned completely with the church. The church has failed. The state churches were apostate. All the other churches were going liberal. Nobody saw things the way these people saw things, so obviously the end was near. But imminent means nothing else has to happen, no other signs.

When they said the second coming could happen at any moment, they literally meant it. They didn’t have to have the temple rebuilt or Rome restored. All of those things would happen and would kick into motion the moment the church left the earth. Until then there was nothing to do except preach the gospel until God blew the whistle. God had that under control and we don’t.

That original system did not allow for saying, “The rapture is getting nearer,” only in the sense that the church has failed, but it could go on failing for a long time. They did not know how long. There was nothing else. There were no signs in the sky or the recreation of the Roman empire through the European Economic Union or Israel back in the land.

None of that was necessary literally, because none of it was prophesied. As soon as the church was gone, then everything would revert and all of that stuff would unfold real fast. Israel would be back in the land. The temple would be rebuilt. Rome would be revived. It would all happen just almost overnight to get things going for the last seven years of human history before Christ returned and set up his millennial kingdom.

Those of us who aren’t Dispensationalists or don’t have any sympathy for at least the classical approach to all that can say, “Well, that’s dumb. That’s not biblical,” and very few people actually believe anymore in an imminent second coming in that sense, because pick up any book on prophecy and signs of the times. That wasn’t the original Dispensationalism. There were no signs, but the newer interpreters constantly are pointing to this anytime something huge happens in the Middle East or worldwide news about how this is a sign of the end. Original Dispensationalism didn’t allow for that, so that’s kind of gone.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make in all of this is that Dispensationalism was not alone in being disillusioned by the coming of Christ. It started with the Jews. They didn’t like the kingdom he was talking about, a kingdom which you could not see until you were born again, a kingdom for the meek, the humble, those who thirst and hunger for righteousness, who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, a kingdom which to enter into you had to become as a little child, a kingdom that would grow like a mustard seed until the end, or like leaven would slowly influence things.

They wanted it here and now. They wanted the grandeur and the glory and the power. They wanted Rome kicked out of power and Israel put in power overnight. That’s what they expected, sort of an amplified exodus where God just opens the resources of heaven and sweeps away all the bad guys and sets them up in power, and that’s not what Jesus did.

The Jews couldn’t deal with that, and ever since the church has had a real time dealing with it too, but the keys were here. It grows slowly. The stone cut out with hands was a stone, not a mountain, and it progressively ground in pieces the remnants of the statue.

In Daniel the Lord used the figure of a threshing floor, and this is something that John the Baptist used too. “Messiah is coming. His threshing fan is in his hand. He’s about to start dividing the wheat and chaff,” but it’s a progressive thing. It continues to happen through the age.

He doesn’t snap his fingers and find the wheat separated from the chaff.

No, he’s not some big purple alien. He has a different sort of way. Daniel’s prophecy does not explain all of it, but there are hints. First, it’s a different kind of kingdom. Secondly, it has something to do with worship through sacrifice. And third, it grows slowly. It will fill the whole earth, but slowly so, not overnight.

This is not a prophecy of the second coming. This is a prophecy of the coming of Christ in his first advent, and the gospel writers everywhere assume that. They are picking up the language of Daniel. The God of heaven is setting up a kingdom. “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent!”

If it’s a political power bound up in military might, supernatural miracles and such, what need is there for repentance?

Yeah, attitude has nothing to do with it.

And the Pharisees and Sadducees were shocked to think that they had to change something. They were children of Abraham. They were Israel. God was on their side. So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You have to be born again, and God loved the world,” they weren’t ready for that. It was not the kind of kingdom they wanted or planned on.

Dispensationalism has struggled with that, but a lot of even Reformed commentators have struggled with that. They will not wrestle with 1) the slowness, 2) the fullness, and 3) that it actually does deal with the cultural/social/political aspects of the former kingdoms – a kingdom in men’s hearts, and therefore a kingdom that must change all of society and all of history, because out of the heart are the issues of life.

There’s no conflict here between some kind of Gnostic dualism between a kingdom of the heart and a kingdom in the world. When Jesus has his hand on the steering wheel of everyone’s lives, they’re going to live differently in every aspect of their humanity, but it will take time. For modern Americans, oh, if it didn’t happen yesterday it’s already taken too long. We just cannot deal with that. Some stand-up comedian once made a joke, “We take our instant potatoes, put them in the microwave, and time goes backwards,” because we just really expect this.

I remember my former pastor doing a Bible study talking about how long this process might take, and one dear lady who didn’t know much about theology said, “Oh, you mean like hundreds of years?” and he said, “No, I mean like thousands of years,” and she was dumbfounded. It’s already taken 2,000 years and we’re a long way from where we need to be.

“But doesn’t history end with us? Aren’t we the last generation? Aren’t we what it’s all about? Aren’t we the most important people who’ve ever lived?”

“No.” Chew on that for a while. No, we’re not.

B.B. Warfield in one of his articles concluded with the lines, “Maybe the church at the beginning of the 20th century is the primitive church,” because he foresaw in terms of scripture what God had promised to bring about and realized we’re nowhere near there.

So rather than seeing ourselves as the last generation, maybe we need to see ourselves as baby Christians in a baby church which still has a lot of growing to do, which is in a way kind of nice because it means we play a part in the story that has a long way to go. And though our parts played may be but slight, a faint touch here, a little nudge there, over 1,000 years or 10,000 years can have real meaning. The work we do now in laying the foundations for what’s to come is important work.

It’s not just, “Well, maybe we can save one or two souls before Jesus comes back,” but maybe we can change the course of history to conform to what God says it’s going to be anyway. Maybe we can be part of the plan rather than just sit back and say, “There isn’t much of a plan,” or “It’s all spiritual,” or “It has nothing to do with culture and society and politics,” all the while realizing though that the power is a spiritual power, that is to say the power of God’s Spirit himself operating through the gospel. It's not a utopian plan, not a social gospel, but the gospel of grace as it changes the hearts of men and thus shapes the course of empire.

That was great. I could listen to that all over again, and probably will. Shall we move on to recommendations?

Sure. You get to go first.

Okay. I’m on the spot a little bit, but what you said reminded me of how much I enjoyed life without a microwave. We had a series of apartments when we lived in Maryland, and I think the first one might have had a microwave, but then we had years of, “We could get a microwave and put it on our countertop, or we could just not and see how we like it.”

Now after moving this summer we have a microwave again and I forget that’s it there. So I was trying to defrost my chicken in water just to fit it in the crockpot because it was a lot of chicken, and I was like, “Wait, there’s a tool for this.” Then later David made some corndogs in the microwave and I was like, “How did that happen so fast?”

But honestly, I really like the mindset shift that came with not having instant food. I had to spend time thinking about food. I mean it’s nice when you get to be a stay-at-home mom and have no deadlines and hardly any schedule and you can just take as much time for food as you want, but it’s really made me think a lot about how food becomes part of life and culture.

The original intent behind fasting is that you’re giving up the time you would spend on food to spend time in prayer, and in today’s world where we have microwaves, it wasn’t much. It was like, “Okay, so I’ll spend five minutes in prayer instead.” No, that’s not it.

And I’ve learned to enjoy cooking in this whole process. It’s a whole lifestyle change, and it’s not really encompassed in not having a microwave, but that was an igniting factor, I guess. I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe it’s a recommendation, maybe it’s not.

I think there may be one in there someplace, if only in terms of how you think about things. I’m going to undergird that or put a foundation over it by recommending gardening.

When you have small children and you’re planting seeds for them to see them grow, they come out every day expecting to see something, and they occasionally pull things up to see what’s going on. “Is it growing? Is it dead?”

“Well, it was growing until you pulled it up, dear.”

We are impatient with things that take time. Just one thing comes to mind – we visit churches and we see a church once and we say, “Nope, didn’t strike my fancy that time. We’ll move on.” We want everything up-front right now.

I think, like cooking, gardening may help give us some perspective. So many of Jesus’ parables were agricultural. He lived in a world where people knew that things take time. Before you can even begin the process of cooking you have to grow your food. Whether it’s the sheep and calves out in the pasture or whether it’s the things in your kitchen garden or out in your fields on your farm, it’s going to take a while and it takes a lot of work and oversight and forethought and planning ahead.

Recognizing that the seeds you plant now affect the food you’ll eat next year.

Exactly, and so does the condition of the soil, and so does the weather, which you don’t have much control over. I think there probably is something in these things that reconnects us with the way God does things, because so much of the language of the kingdom of God is wrapped up in sheep and shepherds and seeds and fields and banquets and wine that’s been aged.

Just because God gives us a technology that can reach the whole planet doesn’t mean that that’s how he’s going to do it. We should not ignore the technology that God puts in our hands. We should use it, but a certain perspective I think is appropriate that God is not in a hurry.

God invented the year. He invented the week. He invented the day, arguably even the hour, and he counts these things off. In the first chapter he counts off days. He’s not in a hurry. It took him 4,000 years to send his son into this world, and we say, “Well, it’s about time!” but that was 4,000 years of preparation. That’s the beginning of the story. That’s the preface. That’s the prologue. Now what?

It may take longer than we think, and just like building a marriage, raising children, building a church, building a Christian school, or building a business, you’re not going to have it all down the first day. There are things coming that you have no control over, so faithfulness in little things over long times is something that God does.

It may be that a few less microwaves, a few less instant dinners, and a little more gardening and home cooking might help us get the swing of things. So as you say, it’s a recommendation.

It’s not a moral imperative.

No, just a thought about how life actually does work.

Yes. Thanks so much for this conversation. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

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