Daniel’s Dream Developing
Daniel’s Dream Developing
By Terry James
Of all the prophets in God’s Holy Word, to me there are two prophets that stand out as specifically speaking to these times so near the end of the Church Age (Age of Grace).
Paul speaks to the characteristics of end-times mankind through the “perilous times” descriptions in 2 Timothy 3.
We’ve gone over those characteristics many times. People will, Paul foretold, be exactly like they are today — always trending toward ungodliness. Two specific characteristics I’ve probably dissected most are “lovers of self” and “without natural affection.” In the first case, we’ve looked at the Internet, social media, personal devices, and all that points men and women, boys and girls, inward. This takes them away from thinking about God and what life is all about from Heaven’s perspective. The term “selfies” is, to me, the epitome of this inward-turning. It isn’t much of a stretch to understand how destructive this has become to society and culture in America — to the very governing documents the founding fathers gave us — under God’s guidance, I believe.
In the second case, we’ve examined the evil of shedding the blood of the innocents — one of the seven things God says He hates.
Abortion, the murder of babies in their mother’s wombs, is about the most abominable activity we who love the Lord can imagine. Yet society, as a whole, grasps onto this infanticide as a right granted people — most often used to get rid of unwanted baggage that might interfere with the lives of those who want no sexual inhibitions placed upon them by any authority — especially not by any Deity and His Bible.
Also, “without natural affection” means, in my view, the homosexual madness that prevails in this nation. Even psychologists and many within so-called clergy now embrace LGBTQ, etc., as a natural, not “unnatural” comportment.
In my view, the other prophet that is most relevant to our exact time so near Christ’s return is the prophet Daniel.
Whereas Paul spoke for the most part particularly to how things will be in society and culture as the end of the age approaches, Daniel spoke to how things will be in terms of developments in the governments of mankind.
The prophet, we remember, went before King Nebuchadnezzar to interpret his strange dream that none of the soothsayers could even describe, much less interpret, to the worried king. Daniel did this in great detail, laying out the precise order of kingdoms that would develop right up until the time Christ returns to destroy the wickedness of man-made governmental structure. He told how the entire system — the evil, Babylonian system — would meet its end.
“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 2:31–35)
The gigantic man-image represented the kingdoms that would come and go. Daniel described how a final world kingdom, represented by the feet and toes of the image, would come into being at the very last of human history. He said a massive stone would fall on the image, strike the feet and toes, and topple the whole monstrous structure. The stone would then crush it to powder and the winds of history would blow it all away as dust, completely and forever destroying all vestiges of human government.
Jesus Christ, of course, is that “stone.” He is the rock the Lord described to Peter in commending Peter for recognizing that He, Jesus, is the “rock” upon which His (Jesus’) Church would be built (Matthew 16:18).
So, considering Paul’s prophecies, we have concluded on a number of occasions that they fit our times perfectly. So we now look briefly at how Daniel’s prophecy here fits our time at this late date on God’s prophetic timeline.
The ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream-vision represent ten kings and kingdoms yet to be formed at the very end of the age just before Christ’s return. Many prophecy scholars and others have thought this might be a certain configuration of nation-states strictly out of Europe — thus representing the revived Roman Empire.
We now, with all the things that have been developing, can legitimately conjecture whether there is much more involved than merely positioning only Europe in that long-ago prophecy.
The all-consuming dictatorship of the coming Antichrist seems to congeal each day as we get reports of developments. The so-called Deep-State gyrations of wickedness, combined with other dynamics taking place across the world, makes us believe there is much, much more than surmised in our previously thought approach to this great, end-times prophecy by Daniel.
A most recent development in that regard is seen in the following.
In recent years, calls for more coordinated action in the face of China’s increasingly assertive foreign policy have reached something of a crescendo.
It is now not uncommon to hear diplomats and foreign ministers from Brussels to Tokyo asserting that unilateral responses to Beijing’s ever more muscular approach to international affairs are just not enough, and that what is needed now is a more harmonized international response. As the European Union’s top diplomat put it in 2020, in the face of China’s “more assertive – some even say aggressive” behavior, it is “important to have strong cooperation with like-minded democracies. The EU and U.S. should be at the heart of this effort, but we should also be working closely with Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and others.”
While specific proposals to achieve this enhanced cooperation are few and far between, there is one idea that seems to be gaining some traction. That is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea that the existing G7 might be transformed into a grouping of the world’s “like-minded democracies” for the purpose of checking China’s more assertive behavior.
The existing G7, of course, is an informal bloc of the seven most advanced industrialized countries. It was created in 1975 to allow its leaders to discuss and exchange ideas on a broad range of issues, including the global economy, security and energy…
The proposed renovation – first floated by the Atlantic Council back in 2008, and likely to be proposed in earnest by Johnson at this year’s G7 summit in June – would involve an expansion of the group’s membership and a refocusing of its efforts. The resulting institution, tentatively dubbed the D-10, would not be an alliance like NATO. Nor would it even be an informal strategic forum like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, a loose coalition involving Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. Rather, as currently envisioned, the D10 would essentially be an informal mechanism for the world’s 10 most important democracies – the G7 states plus India, Japan and South Korea – to cooperatively manage the rules-based international order and to address some of the challenges to that order posed by today’s China. (“The G7 and NATO won’t cut it: Why a new alliance is needed,” Andrew Latham, msn.com, 4/12/21)
The feet and toes of iron mixed with miry clay could be viewed as forming in order to build Antichrist’s final world empire this side of the Second Advent. That governmental structure — whatever its constituency — will be wicked beyond anything mankind has experienced. Forced vaccines and all other overreaches will seem as nothing when the “man of sin” takes over the reins of the final form of the Babylonian system.
Jesus will be that “stone” that will bring that thoroughly beastly rulership down in thunderous collapse.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
— Terry