Sermon Tone Analysis

Daniel 2:36–39 (NLT)

“That was the dream.

Now we will tell the king what it means.

Your Majesty, you are the greatest of kings.

The God of heaven has given you sovereignty, power, strength, and honor.

He has made you the ruler over all the inhabited world and has put even the wild animals and birds under your control.

You are the head of gold.

“But after your kingdom comes to an end, another kingdom, inferior to yours, will rise to take your place.

After that kingdom has fallen, yet a third kingdom, represented by bronze, will rise to rule the world.

Introduction: The Prophetic Alphabet

Last week we looked at Matthew 24; the week we will be looking a Daniel 2.

This is one of the pivotal chapters of the Bible.

Daniel 2 contains important truth about world history from God’s point of view.

You won’t learn what this chapter teaches at any secular university, yet it is entirely trustworthy.

One writer calls Daniel 2 “the Prophetic Alphabet” because in it you find the ABCs of Bible prophecy.

Many people are wondering if we are living in the Last Days.

A recent poll reveals that 45% of Americans believe that there will someday be a Battle of Armageddon between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist.

Large numbers believe he will come in their lifetime.

Given the conclusions and statics we discussed last Sunday and in times like these we need to know exactly what God says about the future.

And with that in mind, I can’t think of a better place to continue our series than Daniel 2. This chapter paints a panorama that begins 600 years before Christ, stretches across all the centuries since then, and moves into the unknown future to the moment of Christ’s return to set up his kingdom on the earth.

To make matters even more interesting, this sweeping revelation was given not to a prophet but to a pagan king in a dream.

You might call Daniel 2 a Dream of Destiny because it reveals the rise and fall of four great world empires.

I.

A Dream Forgotten

The story begins one night in Babylon when mighty King Nebuchadnezzar had trouble sleeping.

In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his mind was troubled, and he could not sleep.

So, the king summoned the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers to tell him what he had dreamed (Daniel 2:1-2).

Evidently it was one of those nights we all have from time to time.

The king took his troubles to bed with him and could not sleep.

He tossed, he turned, he had strange dreams, and when he awoke, he could not remember them.

This should not surprise us.

After all, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

Very often the common man sleeps like a baby while the man at the top finds no rest.

The pressures of life rise as we gain power, and all too often, leaders find they cannot sleep but instead lay awake solving problems, writing memos, firing workers, and wondering how to beat the competition.

High rank is no guarantee of peace, is it?

Money, power and acclaim cannot calm the troubled soul.

Though he was the mightiest man in the world, Nebuchadnezzar could not sleep.

When he awoke, he remembered his dream, or perhaps only a part of it, but he did not know what it meant.

Calling his sorcerers, enchanters, magicians, and astrologers, he commanded them to tell him the dream and the interpretation.

They replied that if he would tell them the dream, they would give the interpretation.

In this respect they were like those 900-number psychics who pry a few details out of you and then weave an ambiguous story capable of many meanings.

But the king wasn’t buying their dodge.

He ordered them to tell him his dream and then to give the meaning.

They told him that was simply impossible.

“Is that your final answer?” he asked.

“Yes,” they replied.

“Fine.

You’re all going to die.”

So, he ordered all his wise men put to death—a number that was at least in the hundreds, if not much higher.

When Daniel heard about the death sentence (which included him and his three friends plus all the other young men from Jerusalem), he personally asked the king for more time.

Then he and his three friends prayed for guidance.

God answered by revealing the dream and its meaning in a night vision.

Daniel praised the God of heaven who knows all things and who had revealed the dream to his servants (verses 20-23).

This part of the chapter reveals several important truths:

A. The inability of human power

Though Nebuchadnezzar was the mightiest man on earth, he was helpless to understand his own dream.

Money and power and worldly success may gain many things, but it avails nothing in the realm of the spirit.

B. The inability of human wisdom

By this episode the enchanters are debunked once and for all.

A thousand years of pagan religion could not produce what the king wanted.

Historians tell us that the Babylonians wrote books about how to interpret dreams, but they were utterly unable to retrieve the dream itself.

In the words of Joseph Seiss, “If these men failed, it was the laying prostrate of all the wisdom, power, and art of man.”

Write over their failure the verdict of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities.

All is vanity.”

Thus, a crisis exposes the futility of the world in the things that matter most.

It reveals the true condition of the human heart apart from God.

Without divine revelation human wisdom and power can never discover the way of salvation.

That must “come down” from God above.

C. The hunger of the human heart

We see this hunger in the king’s desperate attempt to understand his own dream.

Somehow, he knew that this dream was sent by God as a revelation of things to come.

His anger at the enchanters reveals his inner emptiness.

Does this not correspond with the “God-shaped vacuum” inside every heart?

In many ways verses 27-28 might be taken as the theme of the whole chapter: “No wise man, enchanter, magician or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries.”

Human inability is fully met by God’s almighty power.

For nothing is impossible with God.

II.

A Dream Revealed

The dream itself takes only a few verses to describe:

You looked, O king, and there before you stood a large statue—an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance.

The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.

While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands.

It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them.

Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer.

The wind swept them away without leaving a trace.

But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth (Daniel 2:31-35).

The dream is both simple and strange.

The king saw an enormous statue made of four different metals: head of gold, chest of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet and toes of iron mixed with clay.

The statue isn’t “doing” anything.

It’s not moving or speaking.

Clearly, the unique feature is the different metals.

What could that mean?

Suddenly a stone strikes the statue at the feet, shattering the entire image.

The pieces are blown away by the wind, leaving only the stone, which becomes a mountain and then fills the earth.

Pretty weird dream.

No wonder the king felt uneasy.

No wonder he wanted an interpretation.

Note two facts about the metals in the statue.

There is a progressive deterioration in value from top to bottom: Gold, silver, bronze, iron.

By the same token, there is a progressive increase in strength.