Daniel 2:31 Commentary and Bible Study

First Daniel does what the wise men of Babylon were unable to do, and he relates the dream. As far as we know, although greatly disturbed by what he had seen and impressed with the awesome significance of it, Nebuchadnezzar had told the dream to no one. It was in his mind alone, and as the Chaldeans had said, ‘there is none other that can shew it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh’ (verse 11). That was their way of saying that God alone knows the secrets of a man’s heart, and yet here was Daniel, telling the dream. There was no doubt that he had received a communication from heaven. That was what resulted in the king’s overawed response, for he was well aware of this. Danile had passed his test, a test which proved the utter genuineness of his powers. He was no a phoney like the Chaldeans but one who was truly in touch with his God, a prophet of the Most High.‘Thou, O king, sawest’ – as if Nebuchadnezzar was just an observer. He was not responsible for the image, but saw something presented to him by God, and indeed it was awesome. It was vast and dazzling and he found it terrifying, a vision of such power. Certainly, those world empires were terrifying – they were ruthless and there was none on earth that could deliver out of their hands. It was an image of an enormous statue of a human form; we see that as it goes on. And it had to be, because it represented world empires, human government. It represents the flesh, the power and ingenuity of man. The description begins at the top. The image’s head, the most precious part of the statue, was of the very purest gold. As you moved down the statue the material was of less value. ‘His breast [his chest] and his arms of silver, his belly [his abdomen] and his thighs [or sides] of brass, ³³ His legs of iron,’ – immensely strong, but not as valuable as the higher parts – ‘his feet part of iron and part of clay.’ The feet were made of elements that are tough – part of iron – and elements that are brittle – part of clay – so the feet were dangerously weak. ‘Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands.’ This is such an important verse: a stone cut out, a quarried stone, but not by human hand. To begin with it is relatively small. The suggestion is that the statue represents what is made by human hands. It’s the very kind of thing that emperors make to their glory, though nothing like this had ever been seen or heard of before; whereas this stone, this mere stone, obviously represents something divine, because it was cut out without hands. The statue is human power and ingenuity, human government and control; the stone is something mysterious, something divine. So the stone strikes the feet, and then an extraordinary thing happened in the vision: the feet disintegrate. The disintegration process goes on. It passes up from the feet through the legs up through the thighs and the abdomen and the chest to the head up to the most precious parts, the gold, and everything break down. And it disintegrated so much that it became ‘like the chaff of the summer threshing floor’, and these millions of bits were carried away by the wind, ‘and no place was found for them.’ The empires were broken and eradicated entirely, whereas the stone that smote the image ‘became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.’ So thorough was the dispersal that all trace of image was gone. What had seemed so significant and impossible to resist had completely disappeared. Curiously the stone which struck it grows to become a great mountain filling the whole earth. Nebuchadnezzar was left with the dream and it was obvious that it was about things of the utmost importance for world history, but he could not decipher it.