The Stone

Nebuchadnezzar's dream has been told up to the feet. But the dream does not stop there. There is a final image, and it is the image around which the whole statue turns.

"You watched," Daniel says to the king, "until a stone was cut out, without human hands; and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were broken in pieces together, and became like chaff on a threshing floor in summer; and the wind carried them away, so that no trace of them was found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth." (Daniel 2:34–35)

Three things about that stone, and each of them is a knife.

The first: it is cut out without human hands. That is no detail about geology. It says: this kingdom does not come from the row. It is not the next human power displacing the previous one, not an eighth kingdom that climbs up the same way as the seven before it — with armies, with intrigues, with a grasp. It is of another order. It does not come out of the sea of the peoples; it comes from above. No man hews it out. God does it.

The second: the stone strikes the feet. Not the head of gold, not the breast of silver — the feet, the iron-and-clay, the last divided form. The decisive blow falls at the close of history, not in the middle. Only when the iron-and-clay stands there — when the ten toes are present, when the risen head stands upright — only then comes the stone. Whoever expects the stone before the feet are present is looking too early. But whoever thinks the stone never comes forgets where Daniel let the image end.

The third, and the sharpest: everything shatters at once. Not one kingdom after another, neatly in order. At the moment the stone strikes the feet, the iron and the clay and the bronze and the silver and the gold fall apart at the same instant. Evidently, at the end, the essence of all four kingdoms is still present in that last one — the gold of Babel's idolatry, the silver of Persia's administration, the bronze of Greece's culture, the iron of Rome's violence, all compacted into the end-time colossus. And it goes down together. At one stroke. And what remains is not even rubble. It is chaff, which the wind blows away until no trace of it is found.

That is the measure of all power that raises itself against Him. Three thousand years of empire, seven heads, a chimera of iron teeth and bronze claws — and it ends as chaff on a threshing floor in summer. One summer gust of wind.

The stone has a face

Daniel does not yet name the stone here. But a few chapters further on, in the same menagerie where the four beasts climbed out of the sea, He comes — and now the stone has a face.

The courtroom is opened, the books are opened, the fourth beast is slain and given to the fire. And then: "I kept looking in the night-visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven came One like a Son of Man [...] To Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away" (Daniel 7:13–14).

Over against the four beasts that rose up out of the sea comes One out of heaven. The kingdoms had the form of animals; the Kingdom of God bears the face of a Man. Here is the stone, now with eyes and a voice. And it is the same One who in this book is called the Bridegroom, and in the first book the last Adam.

But everything hangs on one verb, and it is the hinge between the two books you hold in your hands. Of the Son of Man it is written: "To Him was given dominion." Given. Granted, received, out of the hand of the Father. Not grasped.

There they stand, at last, side by side: the two ways of coming to a throne. This whole book is named the grasp — the hand that reaches out for a throne not its due, from the serpent in the garden to the beast out of the abyss. And the whole first book is named the gift — the Son who was in the form of God and counted grasping no robbery, but emptied Himself, became obedient unto death, and precisely therefore received from the Father the Name above every name. The one grasps and falls. The Other lets go and is exalted. The one takes a crown and holds it one hour. The Other lays the crown down and gets it back forever, with a Bride besides.

The beast and the Son of Man want exactly the same thing: the throne, the kingship, the worship of all peoples. The difference does not lie in what they want. The difference lies in how. And that one difference separates the two kingdoms as far as heaven from the abyss.

One mountain, two claims

And they both reach for the same mountain.

The beginning of this book already showed it: the center of the end is not an event, it is a place. The mountain where God provided Himself a lamb, where the temple stood, where atonement was made — the mountain from which the true King shall reign. Each of the seven kingdoms has grasped for that mountain. And today there stands, upon the rock itself, a golden dome with an inscription in mosaic that denies the first pillar of the gospel: that God has a Son (Qur'an 4:171; 19:35). The claim of the grasp, in gold, over the holy rock.

But beneath that dome lies the same rock where Abraham laid his son upon the altar and where a voice said: God will provide Himself the lamb. The older claim lies underneath. The counterfeit has occupied the place, but not changed it. And the man of lawlessness will, at the height of his grasp, sit down upon precisely this mountain and have himself worshipped as God (2 Thessalonians 2:4) — the last, highest, most brazen execution of the very first grasp.

It will succeed for him one hour. And then comes the stone.

For the stone that strikes the feet does not remain a stone. It becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. The counterfeit mountain, occupied with gold and lie, is wiped away; and the true Mountain fills the earth, and the Son of Man reigns from Zion, and the Bride reigns with Him. The stone hangs at this moment above the feet of the statue like a deferred sentence. There is no army, no network, and no god of any nation that can hold Him back. The statue is, from the first dream, built to fall.

The question of history has never been whether the beast falls. The question is only on which mountain you are standing when the stone falls.

But before the stone falls, the risen head plays its role to the last. And it does not come as a monster. It comes, as all great lies do, as a savior.