Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeier.

If you were to ask Christians whether or not the Catholic Church makes an appearance in the Bible, you're probably going to get two answers.

Non-Catholic Christians, like Protestants, are going to say no; the Catholic Church didn't exist at the time of the New Testament.

So either we don't see any appearances of the Catholic Church in the Bible, or if we do, it's in prophetic passages warning us about the Church of Christ.

You know, for instance, the Whore of Babylon in Revelation chapter 17. Catholics, on the other hand, are going to say no, that's not true.

The Church is found all over the pages of the New Testament.

It's just going to be a few decades before the Church of the New Testament starts being known more popularly as the Catholic Church.

But what if I were to tell you that both Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church are actually prophesied in the Old Testament in a passage that many Christians overlook?

And what if I were to tell you that this passage is actually the key to settling some of the biggest theological controversies between Catholics, Protestants, Seventh-day Adventists, and Mormons?

So today, I want to introduce you to that passage, and then I want to consider some of the ways that this passage is misread as the prophecy is misunderstood by modern skeptics, by Mormons, by Adventists, and by dispensationalists.

So without further ado, what prophecy am I talking about?

I'm talking about the prophecy of Daniel chapter 2. Now, as a little bit of a refresher in case you don't remember it, King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, and this dream is hard to interpret.

His own men are unable to interpret it; they don't even know what the dream is.

Daniel is able to successfully interpret it, and the dream is of a statue, something like an idol, and an idol in which the top part is gold, and then silver, and then bronze.

Those of you who just watched the Olympics, this may feel very familiar.

And then the bottom part is iron and then iron and clay.

As Daniel explains, the head is of fine gold, the breast and arms are of silver, the belly and thighs are of bronze, the legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

Now, he then explains that this refers to four successive kingdoms.

The first one, he tells us what it is: it's King Nebuchadnezzar's own kingdom, the Babylonian Empire.

And then it's going to refer to the successive kingdom, a kingdom that will arise after him—that's the kingdom of silver—and then a third kingdom of bronze and a fourth kingdom of iron.

Pretty straightforward, right?

So what does this mean?

What are these four kingdoms of Daniel chapter 2? Well, the first one, as I say, has already been given to us, and the ancient Jews and the early Christians had no trouble figuring out who the other three were.

As John Bergsma and Brant Petrie point out, since the time of the Second Temple period—so this is around the time of Christ, a little before, and then up to 70 AD—that's the Second Temple period, the four kingdoms symbolized by the metallic image in Daniel 2 have been interpreted as four consecutive empires: Babylon, the Medo-Persian Empire (this is the Medes and the Persians kind of co-ruling), then the Greeks, and then the Romans.

Significantly, they mention that this is true also in what's called Jewish apocalyptic literature, like 4th Ezra and 2nd Baruch—other prophetic texts, ones that we don't consider canonical but are still important because they give us insight into how Jews of the time were understanding what Daniel 2 was about.

They pointed towards Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, with Rome being the fourth empire.

This is going to be really important for reasons that will be clear in a few moments.

So those are the empires: the Roman Empire is the empire of iron and clay.

Now, Lorenz Di Tommaso points out that this identification was consistent throughout late antiquity in both rabbinic Judaism and patristic Christianity.

So during the Second Temple period, this is how people understood it, and then a little bit later, as you have the beginning of what's called the rabbinic period of Judaism, the Temple's destroyed, and then you start to have rabbis who are really influential.

They're interpreting it the same way.

The patristic period, meaning the early Church Fathers, the early Christians, they interpret it the same way.

So it isn't just like up to the time of Christ this is how it's understood; it continues to be understood that way.

In fact, Steve Mason points out that during the Greco-Roman period, it was interpreted unanimously as referring to these four kingdoms, with the fourth kingdom being Rome.

I mention this because modern skeptics, including Mason himself, are going to think this is actually a misidentification, but we'll get into why.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem is one of many examples who says this kingdom is that of the Romans, meaning the fourth kingdom is that of the Romans, and that this is how the Church has always interpreted it.

He says that in about 350, but he's pointing to the fact that he's not the first to interpret it this way.

There are a bunch of interpreters going back to at least Hippolytus in the 100s who interpreted it in the same way.

So why does this matter?

Well, it matters because God makes special promises for what He's going to do during the time of the fourth kingdom.

What are those promises?

In the vision, it looks like this: as Daniel recounts to the king, a stone cut out by no human hand smites the image on its feet of iron and clay and breaks them into pieces so that not a trace of them could be found.

The stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

That's the prophecy that a stone not formed by human hands is going to come and establish a new heavenly kingdom—that's the idea—and this kingdom will be worldwide.

He explains in the interpretation in verse 44: In the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sovereignty be left to another people.

It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.

Now, it doesn't take an interpretive genius to understand that during the time of the Roman Empire, we see this fulfilled.

We see the stone not formed by human hands come into the world.

We see the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and He in fact sets up a kingdom, entrusting this kingdom to St. Peter in the giving of the keys.

This kingdom, the Church on earth, is kind of the key to the Kingdom of Heaven, spreads throughout the whole world, and lasts forever.

It will never be destroyed and will never be left to another people.

This is a pretty clear interpretation that points both to a very specific time period—during the time when the Roman Empire is controlling Judea—when we’re going to see the Messiah come into the world and establish the Kingdom of God on earth, and that it will spread worldwide.

That’s the prophecy, which, as I say, is a prophecy both of Jesus Christ and of the Catholic Church.

So given how clear that seems to be, given how obviously that seems to point to the Catholic Church, you might wonder, well, how do non-Catholics interpret that?

How do they avoid coming to these very Catholic-sounding conclusions?

I want to look at several of the major ways.

The first, and almost certainly the most popular, is the way skeptical scholars do.

Now, they make this prophecy not about the Roman Empire, as everybody understood it in the past, but instead about Greece.

Robert Gurney points this out.

Now, Gurney is one of these people who thinks it refers to Greece.

Nevertheless, he says radical authors always identify the four kingdoms as Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece.

Notice there, rather than the Persians and Medes being treated as one empire, this move splits them up.

So the Medes become the second empire, and the Persians become the third empire, the bronze one, and then Greece becomes iron.

That’s the idea; that’s the move.

Whereas conservative authors—and you’ll notice they’re supported here by the consensus of ancient Jews and ancient Christians—identify it in the way that I described.

I want to give a really good example of this, but before I get there, Gurney explains one of the reasons why these radical scholars tend to settle on Greece rather than Rome is because they believe that Daniel isn’t really from the time of Daniel, that the Book of Daniel is actually from the 2nd century BC, and that the author isn’t actually predicting anything.

He’s instead describing current events.

The reason he’s able to describe things accurately and in great detail about the events of the Roman Empire is because he’s living through them.

Now, I just want to make that extremely clear: the presupposition behind this is that Daniel isn’t really a prophet.

He couldn't be a prophet because prophets don't exist, as this skeptical theory goes.

Therefore, if we see these accurate predictions of the future, they must not be predictions of the future; they must actually be descriptions of current events or of the past.

That's the move.

It's presupposing that prophetic literature couldn't possibly be what it claims to be.

A good example of this is the German theologian Katharina Bracht, who says Daniel's four world eras consist of the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece.

So she was very clear: the fourth kingdom must be Greece.

Now, why must the fourth kingdom be Greece?

She points out that the earliest Christian commentators, like St. Hippolytus, interpret it instead as Rome, and she takes it for granted that Hippolytus actually knows it should be Greece and is just making it about Rome, even though everybody—Jewish and Christian—thought it was about Rome.

Everybody secretly knew it was about Greece; that's her argument.

She says he’s faced with the challenge that the contemporary world empire—that is, the Roman Empire—does not appear within the sequence of kingdoms which the editor of the Book of Daniel had in view.

And how would he know this?

Well, on the basis of modern historical-critical exegesis, we know the Roman Empire could not have been in view because the final redaction of the Book of Daniel took place at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, around 164 BCE. In other words, she’s assuming, number one, that Daniel was finally composed or redacted in about 164 BCE, to use her language; number two, that therefore it can't have anything to say about the Roman Empire because that hadn't happened yet, and how could anyone possibly be a prophet?

That would be, you know, miraculous or something.

And Hippolytus and early Christians must realize this, right?

They must be familiar with modern historical-critical exegesis.

Now, you might notice this is, on its face, kind of an absurd view.

It's presupposing its conclusion; it's presupposing Daniel's not a prophet.

None of this is real, and then arriving at a conclusion that it couldn't possibly have gotten the future right.

Now, you'll see people do this with the New Testament all the time.

Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and so they say, well, therefore later disciples must have made this prophecy up, and it must have been made up after the Temple was destroyed in the year 70. Now, As others have pointed out, I think Father Dwight Longenecker actually has an article about this.

Even if Jesus weren't a prophet—which is a ridiculous starting point—but even if He weren't, it wouldn't be shocking that someone in the 30s might foretell, you know, Hey, once before when we rose up against the imperial power dominating us, they destroyed our temples.

I see a lot of zealots wanting to rise up against the Roman Empire; I wonder if they'll destroy our temple.

It's not shocking to envision that, right?

A creative author, a smart person, a person who can read the room, can maybe make an accurate prediction of the future, even leaving aside the supernatural element.

But notice this is presupposing the falsity of Scripture.

It presupposes Scripture is not true; the prophetic text couldn't possibly be prophetic, and then working from there.

So that's one level of critique: to accept the kind of Greek theory, you should realize that people arguing for it are presupposing the falsity of the Bible.

That's not something they're proving; it's something they're assuming.

Either the book is actually ancient and accurately foretells the future, but if you can't accept that, then you have to invent that it must be much more recent, and you have to invent that the four kingdoms end with Greece.

But there are additional problems with the skeptical view.

The skeptical view doesn't make sense of Daniel itself because, remember, the skeptical view says the four kingdoms are: number one, Babylon—everybody agrees on that because Daniel says it outright; number two, the Medes; number three, the Persians.

Why is that a problem?

Because in this view, you treat the Medes and the Persians as two separate kingdoms, two separate empires.

Look at Daniel 8. In Daniel 8, there's another prophetic vision.

This one's of a he-goat going up against a ram with two horns.

Now, it's very explicit in Daniel 8, verses 20 to 21, that the ram with two horns is the kings of Media and Persia.

Notice it's not treated as two kingdoms in Daniel; the Medes and the Persians are treated as one two-headed kingdom.

Hope that makes sense—that the two horns are two horns of a single kingdom, and they're facing off against the he-goat, the Greeks.

Additionally, there are some other details that are going to be helpful.

In Daniel 8, this he-goat, which we know to be the Greeks, came from the west across the face of the whole earth.

Remember that language because in Daniel 2, the third kingdom, the kingdom of bronze, is described as ruling over the whole earth or ruling over all the earth.

In other words, the same language is used to describe the Greeks as the third kingdom, so we can compare Daniel 2 and Daniel 8 and realize that these skeptical scholars are just wrong here.

The fourth kingdom couldn't be Greece because the Medes and Persians are treated as one kingdom—the two-horned ram of Daniel 8. That's the silver kingdom.

The Greeks are treated as the bronze kingdom, which will rule over the whole world in both Daniel 2 and in Daniel 8. That means that the fourth kingdom, the kingdom of iron and clay, must be the kingdom that comes after the Greeks, which we know historically is the Roman Empire.

Now, I will say this: what this gets right, at least, is it acknowledges—like the skeptical scholars—the kind of academic crowd that doesn't believe any of this is true at least recognizes the basic point that this is a prophecy about four kingdoms.

Now, that may not seem like much, but wait till you see some of the other ways the text gets misinterpreted.

Let's look to the second misinterpretation.

This is about making it about Europe or maybe America and then adding some extra kingdoms.

This is sort of the Mormon interpretation.

The president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Kimball, in the 1970s, presents an interpretation of Daniel 2 that this is all actually not about the coming of Jesus during the time of the Roman Empire, but about the coming of Joseph Smith in the 1830s in America—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints restored in 1830. Now, you might notice a few problems with that interpretation.

The first is, how are you possibly getting from Babylon, Media, Persia, then came the interpretation that Nebuchadnezzar represented the king of kings, a world power representing the head of gold?

Another kingdom would arise and take over world domination.

The interpretation included the domination of other kingdoms: Cyrus the Great with his Medes and Persians to be replaced by the Greek or Macedonian kingdom under Philip and Alexander, and that world power to be replaced by the Roman Empire, and Rome to be replaced by a group of nations of Europe represented by the toes of the image.

Having delineated the history of the world in brief, now came the real revelation, and Daniel said, And in the days of these kings, that is, the group of...

So notice that a couple of things happen for the Mormon view.

First, you introduce a fifth kingdom; you make the toes into a kingdom, or really a set of kingdoms, like maybe ten different European nations.

And there are a lot of exegetical problems with that.

First, how do European world powers have anything to do with the situation of Israel?

In Daniel 2, these are successive kingdoms that rule over the Jewish people, that rule over the Israelites.

And so there's an obvious sequence from the Babylonians to the Perso-Medes or the Medo-Persians, to the Greeks, to the Romans, because one after another rules over the people of God.

What does any of that have to do with European world powers?

If you're not on the right continent, you're not in the right time period.

Also, Daniel 2 is about the coming of the Messiah, the stone not formed by human hands.

How does that refer to Joseph Smith?

Now, I know he sometimes calls himself, for instance, in his own biography, he calls himself a rough stone rolling coming from on high, but he seems to stop just short of claiming he's the messianic figure Daniel 2 is describing.

Additionally, even if you're going to say the toes are a group of European nation-states or something, we don't really know why these—what, ten?—are

we talking about?

How are you getting from the Roman Empire to later European kings?

You've got a 2000-year gap you're trying to span there.

Well, Joseph Smith doesn't actually come from Europe, so where are you getting to America?

So you can see a few issues here.

Notice you're adding a bunch of other kingdoms.

This is going to be a common theme of people misinterpreting the text.

You have to add a bunch of kingdoms to make it not about Jesus and not about the Catholic Church in Daniel 2. Though in verse 40, notice it says, There shall be a fourth kingdom.

It never says there shall be a fifth kingdom or ten more kingdoms or anything like that.

It says there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron.

And then he says, And as you saw the feet and toes partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom.

That is, the fourth kingdom—that the Roman Empire—the fourth kingdom will be a divided kingdom, which of course it was.

It was constantly in a state of political flux.

Even though it was externally this fierce, powerful force that was like a kingdom of iron dominating the whole world, internally it was plagued by constant infighting.

You have massive civil wars and all sorts of divisions within the empire, most famously the division between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, but by no means is that the only one.

So that's Daniel 2, verses 40 to 41. But then the other problem is, as I mentioned in verses 34 to 35, it says that a stone was cut out by no human hand; it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.

How does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do that?

Did it arise in Europe?

No. Did it overtake the whatever European empire we're imagining existed after the Roman Empire?

No. There’s no sense in which the prophecy of Daniel 2 is fulfilled.

But what’s more, if you think about this prophecy of the four kingdoms as going: Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece, Rome, and then you randomly are adding ten European nations—you’re not enumerating which ten—and then saying somehow you’re then getting to America and Joseph Smith, what was the point of the prophecy?

It was clearly not about four kingdoms; then it was about dozens of kingdoms we don’t know how many, and then none of those kingdoms matter.

The kingdoms ruling Israel have nothing to do with this; the European powers have nothing to do with it.

The real action is taking place in America, which doesn’t appear at all in the prophecy.

That’s a very strange misinterpretation of Daniel 2. And while many Protestants aren’t going to be sympathetic to the kind of Mormon misinterpretation, a great many Protestants make a very similar set of misinterpretations.

So the last kind of category of misinterpreted texts I want to look at are the ones that say this is not about Jesus Christ coming into the world, and it’s not about Him establishing the Kingdom of God on earth in His first coming.

Rather, they make it about the second coming of Christ and remove any reference to the Church.

I want to look at a few examples of this.

This is pretty clear in the official Seventh-day Adventist Bible commentary.

It looks at Daniel 2:44 and acknowledges, Many commentators have attempted to make this detail of the prophecy a prediction of the first advent of Christ, that means when He came into history in the first century, and the subsequent conquest of the world by the Gospel.

But this kingdom, it puts it in square quotes, was not to exist contemporaneously with any of those four kingdoms; it was to succeed the iron and clay phase which had not yet come when Christ was here on earth.

So the Adventist argument is that you have the four kingdoms; we’re good up to the Roman Empire.

Christ comes, then—although that’s apparently not an important detail—then the feet and toes are a fifth empire, which it describes as the various nations that grew out of the fourth empire.

So again, you have four kingdoms; none of them matter.

Then you have the various nations that grew out of the fourth empire, and then at some point in the future, you have the coming of Christ’s kingdom.

So what did the four kingdoms have to do with anything?

It turned out nothing.

Daniel 2 is a prophecy about nothing.

There are going to be four kingdoms; none of them are important.

There are going to be some other kings—we don't know how many, ten toes—but it's not going to be ten kingdoms.

And then sometime after that, the coming of Christ will be with His messianic kingdom.

That’s the prophecy, allegedly, according to the Adventist view.

Now, you’ll notice that’s not really a prophecy of anything.

That just means that sometime after the Roman Empire, there’ll be some other stuff, and then some other stuff will happen after that.

It’s a totally unfalsifiable prophecy because it could be any time in the future.

There’s no window of time specified at all, other than sometime after the Roman Empire.

And so you’ll notice the coming of Christ in history is not even a factor.

Like the stone not formed by human hands has apparently nothing to do with the birth of Christ; it’s just not mentioned in this.

So that’s the Adventist view.

There’s a surprisingly similar view taken by dispensational Christians.

If you’re familiar with the Left Behind series and people talking about the rapture, that’s a sign of this movement called dispensationalism.

It’s a 19th-century vision of the Bible, and you’ll find a lot of different varieties of dispensationalists.

I’m going to give a couple of different dispensational interpretations, but I want to caveat that dispensationalists will try to read these texts as predictions of world events, and they’ll come to wildly different conclusions from one another.

So I’m not saying this is the only way dispensationalists read it, but here are three different dispensational interpretations, all of which make similar false claims.

I want to start with a very well-known early 20th-century dispensationalist by the name of Clarence Larkin.

He says the stone—remember the stone of Daniel 2—cannot be Christianity.

He says it outright: this is not a prophecy about Christianity.

The stone cannot be Christianity, for it does not fill the earth by degrees and thus crowd up the colossus, but it at one blow demolishes it.

So the breaking in the history of Jesus Christ is too gradual in his view, and so it can't be about Jesus.

In fact, he has a chart in his book where he outlines his vision of history, and he explicitly says the Church was not revealed to Daniel.

The prophecy of Daniel 2 is not about Christ coming in history, and it's not about the Church.

Instead, it's about the stone kingdom, which he thinks is going to be Israel at some point in the far distant future.

In fact, if you compare in the image, the stone kingdom is not even like at the time of any of the four kingdoms or the feet.

Remember the toes?

You turn them into extra kingdoms; that’s how you buy yourself more time.

It’s not in the four kingdoms or the feet; it’s way after that in the image.

So again, he says it can't be Christianity.

And so what is it?

Well, he claims during the wars preceding the rise of the Antichrist, the nations that will then be found in the geographical limits of the old Roman Empire will form an alliance for mutual protection.

A lot of people are going to take that as about the European Union.

You’ve got— even though the European Union doesn’t really overlap very well with the Roman Empire—nevertheless, parts of Europe, these nations will be ten in number, represented by the ten horns of the beast.

He thinks Daniel 2’s ten toes are the same as the ten horns in the depiction—there are two different depictions, one in Daniel and one in Revelation—of a beast, in one case ten horns, seven heads.

He said all of these are referring to the Roman Empire, but not really the Roman Empire—ten European nations that followed the Roman Empire at some point, thousands of years in the future, no doubt.

He says the papal Church will play a prominent part in those proceedings; she’ll be rewarded by restoration of political power in this union of church and state, in which the Catholic Church will have control, as shown by the woman riding the beast, thus dominating it.

So even though he says that the Church is not foretold in Daniel 2, he does view the ten nations with the coming of the stone kingdom as being about the Catholic Church somehow involved in connecting these ten nations in some ambiguous political union of just, again, ten nations.

The EU has way too many; nevertheless, that’s kind of the argument, and this is somehow way in the future.

So Larkin’s view of the four kingdoms—Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece, Rome—were good so far, but none of that matters.

Christ comes into history—not mentioned, doesn’t matter.

Salvation of Christianity doesn’t matter; it’s not part of the prophecy.

You then have thousands of years—we don’t know how long—and then you have the feet and toes, which are not stressed at all in Daniel 2, but apparently are actually the key to the whole thing.

The fact that there are ten toes turns out to be the most important detail, and Daniel totally overlooks it.

He doesn’t say one word about how the ten toes represent ten European powers who are going to be confederated as some sort of political alliance orchestrated by the Antichrist Catholic Church.

That’s the whole crux of the thing, and then the stone comes—Christ’s earthly kingdom—at some point after that.

So notice Israel has nothing to do with this in terms of the reality of Israel being ruled by a successive set of Babylonians, maybe Persians, Greeks, and Romans.

Turns out that’s not important at all.

The coming of Christ in history—not important at all.

The establishment of His Church—not important at all.

Rather, some imaginary nation-state kind of geopolitical disaster that he’s envisioning is the crux of the whole thing in the future, and that’s what we should have been reading this all about.

Turns out it’s all about EU politics or European world war politics, even though there’s nothing about that in Daniel 2. So that’s Larkin’s view.

I want to turn now to a fairly popular YouTube channel called Tomorrow’s World and look at how they have a slightly different but somewhat similar kind of vision of how this isn’t really about Jesus and His Church, but instead about a whole series of scary, maybe imaginary, revival Roman empires.

Let’s start with what they get right: the fourth section of the statue in Daniel 2 was the legs of iron.

Of course, this represented the kingdom that would rise up and put down the Greco-Macedonian Empire.

This was the Roman Empire.

Okay, so far so good.

They get the first four kingdoms right, which is better than skeptical scholars.

If they just stopped here and said this is a series of successive kingdoms, one which kind of knocks out another and it gets you to the Roman Empire, gets you to Jesus Christ and His Church, it would be great.

But they can’t do that because then they’d have to acknowledge that Christ establishes a 2000-year-old Church.

So what do they do instead?

They come up with a whole series of extra kingdoms, and again they buy themselves these kingdoms with the toes.

Here they are, kind of explaining this vision: after the initial empire weakened and came to its end, there would be ten additional revivals or kings represented by the ten horns of Daniel 7. And third, of these ten revivals, seven of them would come after the emergence of a religious blasphemous system that would rise out of the Roman Empire.

So again, they’re really obsessed with the Catholic Church, but they can’t just say the Church is the kingdom established by Christ.

They have to say, actually, this is this evil empire, false church, and it is established out of the Roman Empire.

But notice that they have the feet as a revival Roman Empire, and they claim that it’s ten successive.

So notice here, whereas Larkin’s view is that it’s a coalition of ten nations that exist at the same time, Tomorrow’s World is saying it’s ten revivals of the Roman Empire.

So it’s not just adding a fifth kingdom; it’s going to add ten more kingdoms.

I’ll give you an example of two of them because they only tell us two of them.

Justinian’s restoration in 554 AD was the first of the seven horns, while the most recent proclaimed revival was under the Hitler-Mussolini regime.

This made the sixth of the seven final horns.

The last one is still to come, which brings us back to the statue of Daniel 2. The fifth and final part of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s prophetic dream was the feet and toes.

These represent the yet future final revival of the Roman Empire, depicted in Daniel 2 as the ten toes and in Revelation 17, verse 12, as ten horns.

So I want to make sure you get this because he argues that Justinian’s revival is actually the fourth kingdom, the fourth toe of the ten toes.

Now, that’s a weird way of even understanding toes.

Your toes are not consecutive like that; they’re concurrent.

They’re all at the same level of your body.

So if the way the timeline is going is as a statue, you would imagine that toes would all happen at the same time.

But they’re going to treat each toe as a successive empire.

But the first three are apparently during the period of the Roman Empire.

They don’t tell us what those three are because Justinian is certainly still during the Roman period, and they don’t tell us any of the other ones other than the ninth one, which is Hitler and Mussolini as one empire—somehow, which really they weren’t, but fine.

What did they have to do with the Roman Empire?

Unclear.

Is Germany part of the Roman Empire?

Unclear.

Elfer is able to find another list that filled in what they said were the ten because, remember, you’re looking at the ten toes of Daniel 2, which are not an important feature in Daniel’s interpretation but are the critical feature if you’re going to misinterpret the text, and combining that with the ten horns of Daniel 7 and the seven heads in Revelation 17. And so the argument is that the first three horns are during the Roman Empire period, maybe.

Richard de Rittenbaugh, who is one of the offspring of Herbert Armstrong's kind of weird set of culty churches, provides this list.

They’re non-Trinitarians; I think most Protestants wouldn’t consider them Christians at all.

But you will find lists like this one.

It claims the first three groups are the Vandals, the Heruli, and the Ostrogoths.

You might notice none of those are the Roman Empire.

Then you have Justinian in 554, which agrees with Tomorrow’s World.

Tomorrow’s World doesn’t name the next several, but they have Charlemagne, Otto the Great, Charles V, and Napoleon.

Then the ninth/slash sixth is they have Garibaldi and Mussolini.

Tomorrow’s World has Mussolini and Hitler, and then conveniently, it’s always just around the corner—there’s some horrible thing about to happen where the ten nations are apparently, even though they were consecutive empires, they also represent an alliance of ten nations that maybe is the EU if you’re Tomorrow’s World, and they’re going to give their power to the beast.

A couple of questions here: number one, what logical connection do any of these things have to the prophecy in Daniel 2? I think the answer is pretty clearly none.

These are not successive world empires.

The Heruli, just to take one example, were an Eastern Germanic people originally from Scandinavia.

They raided towns in the Roman Empire, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, which I had to look up because I didn’t know who they were, scoring their greatest success in AD 267 when they captured Byzantium and sacked Greek cities.

Two years later, the Eastern Heruli were crushingly defeated by the Roman Emperor Claudius II Gothicus.

So I ask you, are they a revival of the Roman Empire?

They are not.

So the dispensational view of the four kingdoms comes down to something like this: you get the first four right—the four that are actually in the prophecy, Daniel 2: Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece, Rome—and then you just treat the ten kingdoms as like random European stuff: pagan tribes, Roman emperors, maybe the French, the Kingdom of Italy, Nazi Germany, maybe the EU. You can just put in whatever you want there; there’s no logical order.

They’re not one kingdom that knocks out another; it has nothing to do with conquering Judea or the Israelites or anything like that.

Jesus coming into the world is not important for this.

The establishment of the Church has nothing to do with this; it’s just about there being some bad thing that happens in the 21st century, just around the corner, that’s going to get clicks.

That’s just terrible biblical exegesis.

So once you recognize that Daniel 2 is explicitly about four kingdoms, not five or fifteen—fourteen, bad math there—what does Daniel 2 prove about the Church?

Well, pretty clearly that during the time of the Roman Empire, Christ will come with His kingdom.

Now, this is prophesied in other texts also very clearly.

Take Isaiah 9. This is one of those beautiful Christmas texts: For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and then it says, and the government will be upon His shoulder.

This is very clearly a prophecy about the birth of Christ, and it’s tying it with rule.

The government will be upon His shoulder, and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Don’t lose the fact that Prince is a royal title.

And then we’re told in the very next verse that of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom to establish it.

That Christ’s first coming into the world is absolutely about bringing His kingdom into the world—that is the promise of Isaiah 9. So if you’re interpreting Daniel 2 in such a way that Christ coming into the world doesn’t matter and Him bringing the Kingdom of God into the world doesn’t matter, you’ve completely missed the text.

You’ve completely misunderstood what’s going on.

Now, this is not alone.

When the angel Gabriel announces the birth of the Messiah to the Virgin Mary, he says, And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

The eternal Kingdom of God comes with Jesus into the world in His first coming, not His second coming.

In His first coming, this is the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God.

Now, to be sure, it expands and grows throughout the world.

In Matthew 13, He compares it to a mustard seed that’s small at first and then grows.

That’s the promise.

It’s not an instantaneous thing; it’s a mistake to say it’s an instantaneous thing.

It is an in-breaking into the world, the radical rupture when suddenly God Himself enters history.

But the growth of His kingdom is the spread of a stone into a mountain, the spread of a mustard seed into a mustard tree.

This is the message of Jesus Christ, and if you’ve missed this, you’ve missed a huge part of His message.

Literally, His first words in the Gospel of Mark are, The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.

If you’re taking the dispensational view, the Mormon view, the Adventist view, you have to say the time is not fulfilled and won’t be for thousands of years.

The Kingdom of God is not really at hand.

That is a major difference.

Or take Matthew 21, where Jesus tells the unbelieving Jewish audience that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.

That’s the warning that the Kingdom of God, already present in some way amongst Israel, will be taken and given to the Gentiles.

Where do we see this?

Well, in Colossians 1, St. Paul says to the Church, He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He apparently didn’t know that he was thousands of years off because he didn’t know about EU politics, which is apparently what Daniel 2 is really about, or about Mormonism in the 1830s in America—a place St. Paul had never been or heard about.

He thought we already had the Kingdom present on earth, that we are already transferred into it by Jesus Christ.

Silly him, believing in Christianity instead of weird misinterpretations.

And this is, of course, tied to the Church.

Now, I don’t want to say the Church simply is the Kingdom.

The Kingdom is where God reigns.

So if Christ reigns in your heart, if He’s the King, then the Kingdom of God has come among you, and the Kingdom of God can be within.

But absolutely, you can’t understand the Kingdom properly without reference to the Church.

And this becomes very clear in Matthew 16 when He says to Peter, Upon this rock I’ll build my Church.

Then He says, The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it, and then He says, I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.

This connection between Church and Kingdom is right there explicitly.

In Ephesians 2, the Church is described as members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.

He describes it as a holy temple in the Lord.

That Christ, this stone not formed by human hands, comes into the world and builds an empire—the empire of Christ, the Kingdom of God—and the keys to it are entrusted to St. Peter.

So if that’s right—and I think that’s just Christianity 101—what can we make of that?

Let’s say four things: Number one, this incoming of the Church and of Christ will begin during the Roman Empire.

Number two, the Church will be founded by a stone cut out by no human hand—very clearly Jesus, right?

Number three, it will become a great mountain and fill the whole earth.

And number four, it shall stand forever.

All of that is coming directly from a proper understanding of Daniel chapter 2. If that doesn’t refer to the Roman Catholic Church, pray tell, who does it refer to?

And if you have to invent ten more kingdoms to get there and have to add a bunch of weird European politics that has nothing to do with Daniel 2 to get there, you’ve misread the text.

Final word, unrelated to this, but I want to give a shout-out to K.H. Wilson for asking me to do this episode.

And to say, look, I’ve mentioned Patreon in a few of these; it’s wonderful if you can support that.

I know that’s not realistic for some of you, and I totally empathize and understand that.

The more you do things like comment and engage, share—like all that stuff YouTubers always tell you to do—the more it helps.

I saw this very concretely looking back at the last several months, and the best performing episode by far was the one about eight myths about Martin Luther and the Reformation.

I think a big part of that is YouTube had quarantined it for two weeks because of a copyright strike; it was stuck in purgatory.

And then when it came out, you guys were really active in promoting it and commenting and boosting the algorithm, and it made a marked difference.

So if this is something you care about, if you want a great free way to help, doing all of that obnoxious stuff—liking, sharing, commenting—is a great way for free to help make sure more people get content like this.

And please continue to give good content ideas.

If there’s an episode you really want, maybe next time it’ll be you that I’m doing an episode in response to.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeier.

God bless you!