Click this link to hear an audio version of the below text narrated by SOTH member Jerry Rhinehart:
Daniel 2:31-35, 44-45 (NIV)
31 “Your Majesty looked, and there before you stood a large statue—an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. 32 The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay. 34 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. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces 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.
44 “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces. “The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy.”
This dream, given to the king of Babylon and interpreted by the Israelite prophet Daniel, depicts a series of kingdoms that will ultimately be destroyed by an eternal “rock” that will grow into a mountain. As Daniel says, that rock was not “cut out” by human hands. The problem that the Israelites had was they believed that God’s ultimate victory would be to reestablish the Israelite nation through political and militaristic means. They did not expect God to be going after an even greater kingdom, the kingdom of death and the devil. Where does your hope lie? In a political party? Military strength? A great education? Or maybe a bigger retirement fund? Jesus is the only “rock” that is not made by human hands and his kingdom is the only one that will last for eternity. Is that where your hope lies?