The Sovereignty of God over the Nations
from the Book of Daniel

• We see unmistakable evidence of the Creator in the work he has left behind, namely the entire creation. Creation is God’s fingerprint.
• He created human language and speaks to us in it. That is why we have the Bible. The production of Scripture was under the active oversight of the Holy Spirit keeping it from error.
• He has revealed himself by coming into human life through his Son. All the other ways of revelation are verified by the appearance of the Lord Jesus. That he is the exact image of his Father makes him God’s basic revelation of himself. (Hebrews 1:1-4). God not only made things and said things, he showed up here on earth.

The Holy Spirit is active to keep these ways of God before us. Within these three ways, God’s words and actions are often combined. We learn that God is sovereign because he has told us so in Jeremiah 27:5. We learn that God is sovereign because he shows it to be so in what he does. Such rich revelation is so common it is easy to miss. It is like describing everything in a garden while overlooking the soil!

For some reason, a bad one, we often miss that God deals with nations. That he made individuals to be his servants is common knowledge to Christians, yet the large amount of specific Scripture that speaks of nations is often overlooked. Attention to nations is not often the subject of sermons and articles. We may claim that we believe the Bible from cover to cover, but many pages between the covers are ignored. To miss nations in Daniel requires that we be asleep while we read it.

In Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, a stream of chapters are devoted to messages about nations in contact with God’s people Israel. If we count pages, I find in my Bible 11 pages in Isaiah on neighboring nations; 11 in Jeremiah, and 10 in Ezekiel. Much more is interspersed throughout those books, such as Ezekiel 38 & 39. And elsewhere, can anyone overlook the Philistines? Egypt receives much attention in Exodus, even being mentioned within the Ten Commandments! Nations rise and fall, because God makes them rise and fall. This puts the providence of God on a platform for all to see, and God exercises his providence because it is his right to do so, and thereby we have the doctrine of sovereignty.

The first chapters of Daniel dwell on God’s dealings with Babylon, but then it keeps going without breaking stride with later world powers. Thus four chapters are related to the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, and one for Belshazzar his grandson; followed by King Darius the Mede, and Cyrus the King of the Persian Empire. After Daniel’s day more empires were to come such as Greece.  The plan of God was to take Daniel and others to Babylon from their homeland and have him spend the rest of his long life in a hostile Gentile environment. This was, of course, God’s sovereign plan. Alien nations were all around him. Daniel is a very political book with much attention to national rulers and the nations they led.

The prophet was removed from his own wicked country to live in a wicked land of other people. With a fiery furnace and a den of lions, death threats were common in the setting he lived in, yet God’s children flourished in that dark environment. A nation was preserved in the belly of a lion. God used Daniel to announce God’s agenda for that time and for centuries to follow. Information about the future is a major element in this prophecy. With proper respect for Nebuchadnezzar’s royal position (4:19), Daniel even rebuked him and later King Belshazzar for their sin (4:27; 5:23), as God swept away one empire to replace it with another (2:39,40). Soon wicked Babylon was gone, while Daniel remained to serve in the next one. To this we must add the large place given to the only kingdom which will never pass away (v.44), the kingdom of God with Christ as ruler (7:13,14). After Daniel’s time vicious murderers would rise seeking to wipe out the people of God (7:21,25). That is how this age will end. However, the ones really wiped out will be those who try (7:22, 26).  Hostility continues but only till the Lord comes.

God’s sovereign grip on the world is seen in the words Nebuchadnezzar later confessed. God can humble anyone including the world’s king most proud.  

Do not miss that when God has decided to act, as in bringing a nation down, he may act very suddenly. The Assyrian army was dead the next morning (185,000 soldiers, Isaiah 37:36), and “that very night Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed” (5:30) – two sudden downfalls in a row. When our Lord returns, the judgment he will bring will be swift and terrible (2 Thessalonians 1: 7-9). The Lord says of the current world system: “For in a single hour your judgment has come” (Revelation 18:10). In Daniel 2:34, 35, the image was struck, and the entire thing was destroyed. I believe that means that in the end the entire world structure with all its parts will be wiped out with one strike at the feet of the image.

The first six chapters of Daniel are easy and interesting reading. So for your own profit sit back, read, and enjoy. What we read there is closer to our situation than any other book in the Old Testament, because Christians everywhere live in “the times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24). We should not be surprised when force and hostility come against us. Peter speaks to our present situation: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:12,13).

Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; one really got his attention. I suppose that he remembered it and simply feared that his paid advisors would only guess what it meant. He was in no mood to be fooled. The dream scared him. If the magicians, enchanters and sorcerers could really say what it meant, they should also be able to say what the dream was. This brought his clever advisors into utter dismay, because the king threatened death for all of them if they were unable to declare the dream itself.

These experts argued that there is not “a man on earth” who could tell the king what was in his mind. They were right in that. Later when Daniel appeared before the king he told Nebuchadnezzar that “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (v.28). The Holy Spirit wants us to meditate on the difficulty of man to know, and the complete ease God has to know what is going on. Of course God knows the dream the frightened king had; it was God who had planted it in his mind.

Daniel 2 does not leave out the terror about to fall on all the professional advisors, poor souls who could not make up a meaning for a dream they did not know. The king was so angry he decided all these smart men were to die, including Daniel. But Daniel went to the king and asked for time, then right off to his brothers to ask for their prayers, and then (perhaps at the same time) to the great God of Israel to ask for mercy. They prayed for the mercy needed to answer for a very upset king.

God answered that prayer that night, and Daniel had a lovely time of worship and thanksgiving. The King of Babylon had agony while the young man from Jerusalem had joy in the Lord. The message of the dream appears in his praise when he said of the Lord, “He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings” (v.21). The next day Daniel would announce to Nebuchadnezzar that God would take him down and replace him. This was the kind of thing no counselor would ever dare to say to Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel brought up the sovereign rights the God in heaven has over the life of men on earth. This is also the way we Christians should think. To God belongs wisdom and might; it does not belong to Nebuchadnezzar or those he consults. All rights reside in God. He changes human schedules as he chooses; he removes, sets up, and gives as he chooses. He reveals and knows. Daniel walked into the courtroom of the king before whom men quake, and spoke the words of the Lord. The king no one ever dared to challenge fall on his face (v.46).

We say, Nations rise, and nations fall” as if there is no cause. God’s Word says, “He removes kings and sets up kings.”

After pleading for the lives of his heathen neighbors, Daniel was brought before the king. There before this most powerful man on earth stood a believer who belonged to the God of heaven. Daniel had the answer, and that answer had considerable explanation. The men who did not know the real God were absent, and the man who did (see Daniel 11:32) was there with God’s answer. Daniel had to make very clear that he was not a smart guy who somehow came up with the news Nebuchadnezzar needed. He was not a man of this world. None of those men could give the king the answer he yearned for.

Preaching today has changed little from that. God reveals, not in visions or dreams to us, but in his Word; the minister reads it and probes to understand the book he did not write or imagine. He then speaks the Word he would not otherwise know.

The king was waiting to hear, but first there was an important introduction. ¹ It would be foolish to spell out what will be in the latter days (v.28) without identifying the authority behind the prediction. “There is a God in heaven who …” With such words, many of our thoughts should begin. The ministry of the Word is authoritative proclamation. By this evil king the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem and Daniel’s homeland would soon be destroyed, yet here was the Lord speaking by the Jew in front of him of what would happen in the world, even to the end of the age. The Almighty God would speak his Word by a man with no sword or authority, standing before the king all people feared. Daniel could tell from God what the dream was, and the interpretation was sure (v.45).

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[1] Such an introduction is referred to by many theologians as a prolegomenon.

I digress for a moment. In schools where I have studied I learned of the gold head, followed by a silver chest, etc. and that these were world powers that would follow each other in time, empires from Babylon to Rome. The king’s dream was not given primarily to lay out a chronology, for that was only part of the picture. A major aspect of the dream was that this breathtaking thing was destroyed – something so big was pulverized! The second wow is bigger than the first. The downfall of the image is greater news than the description of it! The image of human power and glory was dazzling but also destroyed. It was the will of God to set it up and take it down.

A stone struck the feet this statue of a man, but no man made this stone appear. This was the action of God. More was damaged than the feet; the entire thing ended up in pieces so small no fragments would remain. It was like the chaff in Psalm 1:4. There would be nothing left to put in a museum. It was gone with the wind.

But more than gone, the image was replaced by a very different kingdom. The stone that destroyed the image replaced it. In various Scriptures the Lord Jesus is presented as the Stone that makes men stumble, as well as the Rock that saves (1 Peter 2:4-8; 1 Corinthians 10:4; Matthew 21:42-44).  “ … The stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.” If anyone wants to understand history right on into eternity, here it is: godless human power and the glory of human accomplishment will be replaced with something wonderful: “And to him [the Lord Jesus Christ] was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (7:14).

We are getting ahead of ourselves. In Daniel 2, the interpretation follows the description of the image. Right off, it gets very personal: You, Nebuchadnezzar, are the head of gold (v.38). There was no denying the glory of that king in authority, prestige, and power, but soon his pride would lead to him being humiliated like no other king (4:28-33). The reason the king had that glory and power is because the Sovereign Lord gave it to him.

Again, we might miss the severe nature of the message here. Another kingdom shall arise after you. That means quite plainly that the end of his kingdom is coming. All kings know they will die, but not all know that their dynasty will crumble. Through a captive Jew, the God of heaven was telling the man all others feared, that his kingdom will fall. And Daniel stood there without his head being removed. It is understatement that the dream agitated Nebuchadnezzar. Naturally, the interpretation was something he had to hear out; when he heard what the dream was he knew the interpretation must be right. The veracity of the message was inescapable.

So Babylon would be replaced, and the replacement would also be replaced, and on it goes till the entire structure of human government and glory would come down, being knocked down by the Lord and wiped out. The coming of the Lord draws nigh.

The fourth kingdom was the strongest and the weakest. It has great contradictions and divisions. In Babylon the king’s word was law. As I type these words, I sit quietly in the strongest nation on earth which cannot “hold together” (v.43). We have a shortage of uniting glue. We are a mixture of hard iron and soft clay. We don’t even know the difference between a boy and a girl. (True, most of us do.) It is deeply divided in what kind of nation it will be. The British Empire in which I was born exists no longer. We used to say, with great pride, that the sun never sets on the British Empire. We don’t say that anymore. In my lifetime, China has had enormous upheavals, and the communists though ever so strong lost power in Eastern Europe and the Russian motherland as well. Hitler’s Germany lasted for twelve years though it boasted of a thousand. The fourth kingdom in Daniel 2 is an assessment of our time. What many of us do not experience is that the world has great cruelty in its character. Some six hundred years after Daniel, in the time of the Roman Empire the Apostle Peter wrote, “The end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter 4:7). And such is the case because the Sovereign God said so, and he will do what he chooses. Psalm 115:3 is true every day, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”

When will this dissolution of all human government occur? Quite simply, it will come when the Lord does. The Son of God will enter human history again, this time in power and glory, but also in finality, judgment, and destruction. It will come in the days of those kings (v.44), at the end of their days.