DANIEL’S VISION
‘My vision by night.’
I. Forty years after Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the prophet beholds in vision the same series of kingdoms.—The king saw a graphic representation of their strength and splendour declining from gold to iron; the prophet beheld emblems of their rapacity, destructiveness, and hostility towards God and His people. Nothing could more graphically set forth the essential characteristics of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, than the emergence of these four beasts from the Mediterranean. In the first, eagle’s wings are added to the lion, to indicate the rapidity of its conquests, while their removal, and the substitution of the man’s nature for the beast’s, indicate the milder and more rational policy on which the Babylonian Empire rested in its later years. The bear raised up more on one side, symbolises the preponderance of Medes over Persians; the leopard’s four heads signify the division of Alexander’s kingdom among his four generals; for the most part the fourth beast is identified by reliable commentators with Rome.
II. From disputed points of interpretation, we turn to that clear vision of the judgment of the Ancient of Days, Who bestows on the Son of Man kingdom and glory.—This prediction was referred to by our Lord in His answer to the solemn adjuration of Caiaphas in St. Matthew 26:64; and what a glimpse is afforded of the awful conflict which must go on between the saints of the Most High and the great world-powers which desire to wear them out! But as we have seen recently in China, the judgment sits, and the dominion of the persecutor has an end. We are now witnessing the judgment of God which is being executed on the nations of the earth. Let it not be forgotten that Great Britain is standing at that bar!
Illustrations
(1) ‘The very forces of man himself built up great empires, tyrannies under which human life, manhood, was a thing of no account: its blood was shed like water in ceaseless war; the labour of its countless multitudes was piled into pyramids and palaces for the glory of its rulers; there was no sacredness of human person, human life, human right. Go and see them within the walls of the Assyrian or Egyptian rooms at the British Museum, those mighty hunters of men, those iron war-lords, those fishers who took up men wholesale with their angle and caught them in their net, and gathered them in their drag: and therefore (so says the prophet) sacrificed to their net and worshipped their drag—and went on continually to slay the nations. Could words express more strongly the character of an age when the world-forces seemed to be not human thought, and conscience, and will, but the talons and teeth of beast-like empire-powers? And behind them were seen the figures of gods whom they glutted with the sacrifices of spoil and blood to keep even the powers above on their side as they trod down the unnumbered and unpitied lives of men.’
(2) ‘Different interpreters have put forward many different interpretatations. The more generally accepted in olden time was: Gold, the Babylonian empire; silver, the Medo-Persian empire; brass, the Grecian empire; iron, and iron and clay, the Roman empire. A view that has had more acceptance in later years gives the order as the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, and the Grecian. But all this is quite apart from the great truth clearly taught in Daniel, of importance to us all, that, while the four world-powers (four is the symbolic world number) may have temporary success against God’s sway on earth, the power of God’s kingdom shall have final triumph (Daniel 2:44-45). In confidence in this truth let us work and hope, thanking God and taking courage.’