Volume 2, Issue 2
1 Oct 2016
 Once Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar his dream, describing its nightmarish image in exact detail, the king knew the prophet had received divine revelation. He was therefore willing to hear Daniel's interpretation of his dream, convinced that it too would be God-given. I don't know about you, but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the throne room, seeing the astonished look on the king's face as the prophet told him his dream.
According to Daniel, God had revealed to Nebuchadnezzar, in the nightmarish image of his dream, the entire sweep of world history throughout an important prophetic period of time. This period, referred to by our Lord in Luke 21:24 as "the times of the Gentiles,” began, as Nebuchadnezzar's dream reveals, with Babylon, the world's first great Gentile world power. This important prophetic period will continue, as the dream of Nebuchadnezzar also shows, until the world's final and end-time Gentile superpower is superseded by the Kingdom of God at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
In Daniel Chapter 2, we have an entire panorama of all of human history from the time of the ancient kingdom of Babylon to today, a time when our end-time world is being led by an unprecedented Gentile superpower. Of course, the superpower to which I elude is our own country, America, the world’s only remaining superpower. Although I firmly believe that America is represented by the iron and clay feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image—a point that we will greatly expound upon in future issues of this publication—most of today’s popular prophecy pundits will vehemently disagree. According to them, if our country appears in biblical prophecy at all it is in a most insignificant and inconspicuous way.
It is easy for me to understand why so many today have a problem seeing America in Bible prophecy. They are looking for literal references to our modern-day nation in the long ago visions of God’s ancient seers. However, these ancient visions were communicated to God’s ancient prophets in signs and symbols. They must therefore be interpreted figuratively, not literally. Thus, looking for literal references to modern-day America in the ancient prophetic symbolism of sacred Scripture is definitely a foolish exercise in futility.
One may asks, as many people do, why biblical prophecy is made so difficult to understand by the fact that it is figuratively rather than literally conveyed to us on the sacred page. What might come as quite a surprise to such questioners is that the exact opposite is actually the case. God, who in His sovereignty has predetermined and preordained the future, has chosen to predict and foretell it to us in His Word by signs and symbols. He has done so in order to make it knowable to all people in all ages to whom He chooses to reveal it.
We must always remember that apart from divine revelation and the Spirit’s illumination no part of the sacred text, prophetic or otherwise, can be truly understood by the unenlightened mind of fallen man. The Apostle Paul makes this important point abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians 2:11-14.
“For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (New King James Version)
According to Paul, our understanding of spiritual things, which includes prophecy, is something that must be given to us by the Holy Spirit. It, like Peter’s magnificent confession of Christ (Matthew 16:13-17), is not something we can figure out for ourselves or be taught by others. Instead, it is something given to us by divine revelation. Only when God chooses to reveal spiritual things to us do they cease to be secrets and become ours; otherwise, they remain God’s secrets alone and unknowable to us (Deuteronomy 29:29).
In addition to being impossible to understand apart from divine revelation and the Spirit’s illumination, what man could possibly understand anything about the fulfillment of Bible prophecy before its time if it was literally rather than figuratively predicted in the Bible? For instance, what if Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image was made of placards which literally read: Babylon, Mido-Persia, Greece, Rome, and the United States of America. Who could have possibly made any sense of this incredible foretelling of world history in Daniel’s day, before Cyrus the Great rose to conquer Babylon, before Alexander the Great rose to conquer the world, before the rise of the Roman Empire, or before the birth of the United States of America in 1776? Truly, such a literal foretelling of the future would have hid its meaning from all people living before the time of its literal fulfillment.
Far from trying to make biblical prophecy incomprehensible by conveying it to us in signs and symbols, God has purposely communicated it to us figuratively rather than literally so as to make it meaningful to all people in all ages to whom He chooses to reveal it, even to those living far before the time of its fulfillment. Granted, as the time of its fulfillment nears, biblical prophecy becomes clearer. When it is fulfilled, it becomes obvious. Still, long before its fulfillment, people of old were able to understand something of its meaning, thanks to the fact that God didn’t spell it all out in ancient time in future facts or minute modern-day details. Whereas the Prophet Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s nightmarish image did not literally mention the names of history’s great Gentile world powers, it did figuratively predict them from the first to the last.
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Don Walton
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