Shattered

"My king, as you were watching, a colossal statue appeared. That statue, tall and dazzling, was standing in front of you, and its appearance was terrifying. The head of the statue was pure gold, its chest and arms were silver, its stomach and thighs were bronze, its legs were iron, and its feet were partly iron and partly fired clay. As you were watching, a stone broke off without a hand touching it, struck the statue on its feet of iron and fired clay, and crushed them. Then the iron, the fired clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were shattered and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors. The wind carried them away, and not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. – Daniel 2:31-35

The king has a dream which he could not remember. He called for his counselors to come and tell him both the dream and the interpretation. Only one man, Daniel, was found who could do this. Daniel begins by describing the image and the events of the dream. He goes on to explain that Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom is the golden head of the dream statue. Other kingdoms will follow Babylon in history, not evolving, but becoming weaker and baser over time. In the end, a relatively worthless empire represented by clay will dominate.

The kingdoms of this world are not getting better but worse. There may be temporary spikes – as America was for the first 150 years or so – but the trend is downward. The statue, for one thing, is upside down. The heaviest element, gold, should be the foundation. As it is, it is top-heavy and inherently unstable. I noticed this while watching The Dark Knight. At one point, as the Joker is giving his speech to Dent in the hospital, my wife turned to me and said, “You know, a lot of the stuff he says is right.” The world is full of the false, of things that make no real sense, of the upside down. We’ve gotten used to looking at it this way. We have come, to a great extent, to accept that this is way things are. Thus we sometimes cannot figure God out. We don’t understand what He is doing or why because it runs so counter to the ways and means we have come to accept as reality.

In the dream a stone is cut from a mountain without hands. A stone? Not only is it nondescript, it is worthless even compared to the fired clay. It is not, by the world’s estimation a precious stone – just a piece of rock. Yet it comes rolling toward the statue, strikes the image in its feet of clay. The whole structure falls and is completely shattered to pieces small enough to be blown away on the wind.

That rock is Christ and the wind is the Holy Spirit. The rock began to grow, to fill and overwhelm the vision. That’s the Church, the Bride of Christ.

God reminds us that what the world disregards and counts as inconsequential are the real and the true and the eternal. It will outlast gold; it is worth more than silver. It is more resilient than brass and stronger than iron. Unlike clay, it is a firm foundation.