The Romans Are Coming!

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Daniel chapter 2 tonight. Daniel chapter 2. Some months ago when, I remember when I was listening to the news on the radio and kept hearing, really for the first time, kept hearing people talk about ISIS.

And I was thinking it was the Egyptian false god, ISIS. And I had to go look it up because they were talking about ISIS causing all this trouble in the Middle East. And I thought, ISIS is not real. So I had to go look that up. And then not too long after that, they were talking about ISIS killing all the Yazidis.

I had to go look up what the Yazidis were too, because I had not heard of that word. And it turns out the Yazidis, if you remember back the story, the siege of Sinjar, excuse me, that’s kind of a tongue twister, siege of Sinjar, where they had taken the Yazidis and Christians and they had sort of cornered them on a mountain. Do you remember this story from the news from, I don’t know if it’s been a year, a year and a half, Sometime back, they had cornered them on a mountain, and we were trying to airlift supplies into them and trying to help them and somehow break the siege before they broke through and massacred all these Christians and Yazidis.

I had to look up who the Yazidis were, and it’s a group in that area of the world. It’s an ancient religious group, an ethnic group mixed into one, kind of like the Jews are a religious group and an ethnic group together. The Yazidis have been there for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

And come to find out, you know, we think of the whole Middle East as being Muslim, or, you know, with a few Jews and Christians scattered in around here. But when you look at it, there are a lot of minority religious groups in the Middle East today. There’s the Yazidis, there’s the Zoroastrians, there’s the Samaritans.

You know, there are still Samaritans around today, And they are still worshiping on the mountain that the woman at the well asked Jesus about. There are numbers, and I was going to bring you more than three, but some of the names I couldn’t pronounce. There are multitudes of these religious groups in the Middle East that are small, and a lot of them have been around since the time of Christ. Many of them have been around for hundreds of years.

A lot of them have been around since the time of Christ, and some of them are even older. Some of them go back to the days of Daniel in the Persian court. And there are all sorts of religious leaders that people follow.

And they may have a following of a few hundred people years after their death. But a lot of these religious movements we have never heard of. And that’s not just because we’re sheltered Americans.

Most people outside of their little immediate area have not heard of these religious movements or their founders. and yet Christianity went from starting out with 11 faithful men who fought well even to call them faithful they at times doubted didn’t they Peter and Thomas but these 11 basically faithful men who followed Jesus in the middle of nowhere out in the wilderness between Galilee and Jerusalem they went from this tiny band of 11 men and Jesus to there are now over a billion and some people say almost as many as 2 billion people in the world who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. Now, we would look at those and say, okay, you don’t even claim to be born again. We would differ about what the definition of Christian is.

But there are somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people in the world on every continent, in every country, some in grand cathedrals and some in underground churches. There are billions of people today who claim the name of Jesus Christ. And I would submit to you that part of that is because out of all those religious leaders, we’re the only ones whose founder had a credible claim to have risen again from the dead. But another reason why Christianity spread like wildfire across the planet, when all of these others are just really limited to a tiny corner of the Middle East with a few followers, Another reason for that is that God for hundreds of years was orchestrating the affairs of human history to make them conducive to getting the message out.

In this Sunday night series on historical events from the Bible, one of the points has been to help you see how everything sort of points forward to Jesus Christ and to his coming and to God wanting to get the message out there. And tonight what we’re going to look at really focuses on that last big push up until the time of Christ. That last big, and that’s not to say that God wasn’t intervening at other times in the affairs of mankind, but those last big events that God orchestrated where God moved entire nations and world empires to bring about the conditions for the spread of the gospel.

Last week I talked to you about the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who for no apparent reason, from a human standpoint, for no apparent reason, looked at this one religious minority in his empire, the Jews, and said, you know what, they need to go back and rebuild their temple and rebuild their city and start their worship up again, and I’m going to foot the bill for it. And those kind of things did not happen in that day. We’re going to go back just a little bit before that tonight and look at a span of about 400 years.

I promise I’ve never preached for 400 years. But a span of about 400 years where God made some incredible things happen in order to prepare the world for the coming of Christ. And we’re in Daniel chapter 2, and because it is such a long chapter, I’d encourage you to go back and read this for yourself later on. Don’t just take my word for it.

I’m just going to summarize the beginning part of it, and then we’ll really get into the meat of the verses toward the end of it. But really in the first 30 verses of this chapter, we have something going on where Daniel, who has been one of the ones taken captive by the Babylonians, and I told you weeks ago that God allowed Judah to be overrun by the Babylonians. They carried back the best and brightest of the Jewish society back to Babylon to serve in their court.

Daniel, along with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Daniel was one of those people. And so Daniel is now in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar.

And King Nebuchadnezzar has had a dream that really bothers him. And he wants the interpretation of the dream. And so he asks his wise men, tell me what the dream is.

And he’s gotten frustrated with his wise men. We’re not entirely sure why. But, you know, a lot of times in the scriptures, a king will call the wise men and say, tell me the dream, and they’ll have a little back and forth.

For some reason, when his wise men come in and say, well, tell us the dream and we’ll tell you the interpretation, he says, no, you tell me the dream, you tell me what dream I had and the interpretation, or I’m going to kill all of you. So, in other words, prove your magic and tell me what I dream. And they say, we can’t do it.

we don’t know what we’re all racking our brains we can’t figure out what he dreamed and they came back and they tell King Nebuchadnezzar we can’t tell you what you dreamed or what the interpretation is but Daniel hears about it Daniel hears about it and comes to King Nebuchadnezzar and says there is no one there is no one who can tell you the dream and the interpretation he says except God but he said God will reveal it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, whose country you just overran, the God whose stuff you stole out of his temple and took to use in the worship of your pagan gods, he will reveal the dream. So it’s here Daniel helping out the king, but it’s also Daniel saying, by the way, the God that you just treated like he was nobody, he’s the only one.

All your magicians and your little pagan priests, they’re not going to be able to tell you anything. the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is going to be able to tell you. And so starting in verse 31, he tells King Nebuchadnezzar what the dream is because God revealed it to him.

And what it was that God revealed to David and David told the King Nebuchadnezzar was you had a dream where you saw this giant statue. And this statue had four parts. It had a gold head.

It had arms and a chest that were made out of silver. It had a stomach and thighs that were made out of bronze. And then its legs were made out of iron and they led to feet that were made of iron mixed with clay.

And the minister says, you’re right. That’s the dream I had. And so then Daniel begins to praise God.

And gives God credit for having told him what the dream was. And he goes on starting in verse 36. to say, here’s the interpretation.

So here’s what God said the dream means. Here’s what God said is going to happen. He says in verse 36, This is the dream, and we will tell the interpretation thereof before the king.

Thou, O king, art a king of kings, for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power and strength and glory. And he says, we recognize you are a powerful king, and the reason you are is that God, again, this God who you wrote off, The God of Israel has put you in that position. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven, hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all.

Thou art this head of gold. So he says, he’s not saying here literally that you rule every man alive. But he’s saying you have a world empire.

We know what that means. There was a time in our history when Great Britain was a world empire. And then that started to wane after World War I.

And especially after World War II, the British Empire was just tired. And their colonies began to be stripped away and began to declare independence. Now they’re still a powerful country.

But then after World War II, we went into a period of time where the Americans and the Soviets were the world powers. They were the world empires. And you would say that those two countries held sway.

One of those two countries held sway with all the nations of the world. That’s sort of what he’s saying here, that God has put you in a position where you run a world empire, where everybody knows your name and they fear you, whether they’re in your borders or not. They fear you, and you’re a superpower, and God has made you that way.

And he says, Nebuchadnezzar, God has made you the head of gold. He has made you and the Babylonians the head of gold. But he says in verse 39, After these shall rise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth.

And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron, for as much as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things, and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise. And whereas thou sawest feet and toes part of potter’s clay and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided. But there shall be in it of the strength of iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.

And as the toes of the feet were part of the iron and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men, that they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. And so he sets up the idea here.

God has given him the interpretation that there were going to be four world empires in succession to each other. And each of these empires was going to be stronger than the last, but it says here they were inferior. The next one’s inferior to you, the next one’s inferior to that, and the next one’s.

. . We’re talking about the glory, the splendor, the cultural, just the magnificence of them.

And each one was going to be a little bit less spectacular than the one before it, but they were going to be stronger as they progressed. Because we go from one end to the next. Iron is a lot less expensive and a lot less spectacular than gold.

But iron has a whole lot more brute strength.

and so there was going to be a trade-off between these and God through Daniel said that there were going to be these four world empires and it was eventually it was going to go down to the silver empire was going to take over Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and then the bronze empire was going to take over that one and then you were going to get to the iron empire which was going to be full of brute strength but it was going to be split just as those two legs and then when you get to the end of it it just kind of shatters and falls apart and he says in verse 44 and in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed and the kingdom shall not be left to other people but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms and it shall stand forever for as much as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it break in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold, the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter.

And the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure. And so he had seen with this statue that a stone was going to come and shatter all of these to pieces. And he says, eventually, once you get down to the toes of the clay and iron, he said there’s going to be a rock hewn that’s going to shatter it all to pieces.

And he says that’s where the great God of heaven is going to set up a kingdom that is going to shatter and destroy all of these, that’s going to overtake all of these, and will have no ending to it. And it will be a kingdom, it will be an empire that’s never defeated. And when King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and worshipped Daniel and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet odors unto him.

And so because he’d been told the dream, he didn’t tell them what the dream was. It’d be easy, I think, to make up an interpretation for a dream. It doesn’t even have to make sense.

Dreams are weird. But if you know the dream, just make up an interpretation. By the time the king realizes it’s not real, you may be dead anyway.

Just make something up. But here Daniel proved that he’s the real deal, and God really is speaking through him because he told him what the dream was and said that now you know that the dream is certain, and he says the interpretation of it is sure. This is going to happen.

This is God’s promise. He said there are going to be these four empires. And we can look in history and we can identify these four empires that God talks about.

The goal, he already said, was King Nebuchadnezzar. King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. In the 6th century BC, Nebuchadnezzar’s son, Belshazzar, was giving a dinner when they saw the handwriting on the wall.

and the handwriting was interpreted by Daniel, and said, your kingdom has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and God is going to destroy your kingdom, and he’s going to divide that between the Medes and Persians. They laughed at Daniel. They made him third-ranking man in the kingdom that was about to be overthrown, and they laughed at him and laughed at that.

And that night, the armies of the Medes and Persians marched into the city of Babylon, killed Belshazzar, and overthrew the Babylonian government. And they fell prey to the Medo-Persian Empire, which was the second part of the statue. It was the silver empire.

It was the silver chest and arms. And the Medo-Persian Empire, the Medes and the Persians, the Medes really don’t get as much press outside the Bible. We remember the Persian Empire. We remember the glory and the splendor of the Persian Empire.

They defeated Babylon. And that’s where Cyrus comes in and says, wait a minute, we’ve got these Jews that have been scattered by the Babylonians and now they’re living under our control. Let’s send them back to rebuild their temple.

And so God used the silver empire to send the Jews back home, to send them back to a place where they would be together, where they would have the worship in the temple, where they would have relative cohesiveness and freedom. Because you come in in the days of Jesus and He taught in the temple. And he taught using the temple.

And he taught using the sacrifices. And his first outreach was to the Jewish people. We have the Silver Empire.

We have the Persians to thank for that. But God used them to send the Jews back home from this time when they were just scattered abroad. But the Silver Empire didn’t last all that long in historical terms. About 200 years later, in the 4th century BC, a man came along and overran the Persians just like he had overrun everybody else.

Now, you may recognize his name as Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was the son of the king of Macedon, and when his father died, his father had been a warrior, but Alexander really took that mantle and ran with it. He took over all of Greece.

Macedon was one of the Greek city states. He took over all of Greece. And then he took over, he went to war with Persia.

He took over Egypt. He took over the areas that are now Israel. He marched east into Persia and he conquered them.

He got as far as what’s now India. Before he was personally defeated by, I was going to say a mosquito. We don’t know for sure, but some microscopic thing that got in his blood and killed him.

But his empire lived on for quite a while. and what that did was the entire world came under what they called this Hellenistic influence, these Greeks that they brought them into a time where the whole world, the whole known world was subject to Greek culture and Greek language and there’s a reason why even though the writers of the New Testament were Jews they wrote in Greek that’s because Greek was sort of the English of its day you can go to China and people speak English. You can go to Iraq and people speak English.

You can go to parts of Africa and people speak it everywhere. In that day, throughout the known world, the Koine Greek was the language that everybody spoke because Alexander had taken them all over. And it prepared the way for the whole world, the whole known world, to speak one language where they could communicate one message clearly from end to end.

And it set the stage for the gospel to be able to be spread. Because now you’re not having to translate from Aramaic to, oh, they speak Turkish, they speak Latin, they speak Arabic. We all speak Greek.

Whatever else we speak, we speak Greek, and we can understand each other. And so God used that to prepare the world for the spread of the gospel. But the Greeks didn’t last forever either.

And after Alexander died, his generals split up his empire amongst themselves, and you had four different Greek kingdoms. You had Egypt and Syria, and you just had four different Greek kingdoms, and they’d fight against each other. Well, eventually, they got swallowed up one by one by a country called Rome. And you probably know from history, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and the battle, the final battle they had with Julius Caesar, I’m sorry, not Julius, he was already dead, Augustus Caesar, Octavian.

They came in, and in the first century BC, they conquered Cleopatra’s Egypt, which was a Greek kingdom. And they took it over for Rome. And with that, they took over what’s now Israel.

And suddenly, Jerusalem is not just some little outpost somewhere in the Middle East. It’s not just some backwater place. It’s part of this empire that’s connected to Africa and Europe. And folks, it was into that empire that Jesus was born.

It was into that iron kingdom, those iron legs. It was into that empire that Jesus was born. And it was under the Romans that Jesus was put to death.

And it was using the roads that the Romans had built for trade that missionaries were able to go up into Turkey and into Antioch and down into Egypt and eventually into Rome itself. It’s because of the Roman trade routes and the peace that was brought, the relative peace that was brought by the Romans that they were able to take Christianity into Gaul, what’s now France, that they were able to take Christianity into Britain. Folks, honestly, if Christianity had not been taken.

. . America’s roots are in Britain.

And if Christianity hadn’t been taken to Britain, if Britain hadn’t been so thoroughly brought into at least Christian influence, we in this room might have never heard the gospel. You see where all of this ties back into God using the four-part statue. God using these four empires to prepare the way for his son to come.

And I’m sure the Jews and I’m sure believers at that time, in these times, thought, why are we being stepped all over by the Greeks? Why are we being pushed around by the Romans? If God really cared, why can’t we have Israel back?

Why can’t. . .

Then God had another plan. Because the Bible says that, Romans chapter 5 verse 6 says, for when we were yet without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. Now, that’s talking about in due time for us, too.

But it’s interesting that several places in the Bible it talks about Jesus coming just in due time, at just the right time. Now, God can do anything and can use anything, and he did. But if God had sent Jesus to Israel as an independent country, as this independent kingdom off to the side of the known world, who knows, but it might have been like the Samaritans.

2,000 years later, a few people following a religious leader. But instead, God, folks, don’t miss this. God took entire countries.

God took empires and superpowers and flipped them on their sides. And he shuffled them and he said, you’re going here. And I don’t care who you think you are, Mebuchadnezzar.

I’m moving him in now. And Alexander, you’re gone. And I’m bringing in the Romans.

You can only come here because I’m giving you permission. God brought kingdoms to rise and fall. God brought the superpowers of their day to rise and fall just to prepare the world for the coming of Jesus Christ and just to prepare the world to be able to receive his message of forgiveness.

So Daniel’s prophecy or Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, however you want to look at it, of the statue with the four parts was in part fulfilled. and will be completely fulfilled because the Bible talks about Jesus coming and setting up a kingdom that has no end. Going back to that kingdom of David that we’ve talked about.

Where Jesus one day will, Jesus is already in charge. The world just doesn’t know it yet. And one day he’ll step in and assert that rule.

And I don’t know when that happens. I don’t know what that looks like. But one day the world will acknowledge the rule of Jesus Christ. One day the world will bow and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, the glory of God the Father.

And when they do that, that kingdom will have no end. And that will be fulfilled. And folks, this story shows us how serious God was and how serious God still is about enabling men to hear the gospel.

About making it possible. God moved empires on or off the map just to make it possible for the gospel to spread. Do you see how serious God is about wanting everybody to hear the gospel?

God made a perfect storm of conditions for the gospel to spread. He changed the entire map of the world just to prepare the way for his son and just to prepare the way for the gospel and just to prepare the way for his kingdom that has no end. And so my question for us tonight is if God cares that much about people hearing, what excuse do we have?

Let me personalize it. What excuse do I have for not working to make sure that that’s accomplished? If God takes it that seriously that he tangled with the Romans, which for God was a snap of the fingers.

But if God did all that because the gospel is that important, What excuse do I have to treat it like it’s not that important? I didn’t bring this to you tonight to make you feel guilty. We’re bad people because we’re not out there telling the story more.

I just really want you to see this because I think it’s incredibly awesome that God cared that much. Not just about providing salvation, but that He cared that much about making sure that everybody, As many people as possible had the opportunity to hear about the forgiveness that he offers in Jesus Christ.