64 God’s sovereign plan and thus orchestrated every step of the way by the Father (Acts 2:23). Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The “Four Kingdoms” God’s management of history is dramatically established in Nebuchadnezzar’s historically significant vision (Dan. 2) of an image with a head of gold (kingdom of Babylon), chest and arms of silver (Persian empire), stomach and thighs of bronze (Greece), and legs of iron (Rome) with feet of iron and clay (“partly strong and partly brittle”). According to Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, “a stone cut without hands struck the image on its feet. …Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken into pieces, and became like chaff … and the wind carried them away. … But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (Dan. 2:31–35). Here, God revealed to Nebuchadnezzar His sovereign plan regarding the rise and fall of these four major kingdoms in the ancient world. The “stone cut without human hands” represents Christ our Cornerstone whose arrival concluded this period of history while inaugurating another: the kingdom of our Lord — the Church — which will “fill the whole earth” thereby ending the dominance of polytheistic religion and culture. As prophesied by Daniel and fulfilled in subsequent history, the last 2,000 years have witnessed the culmination of the blessing of Japheth via the evangelization of the Gentiles. A Western civilization — once pagan to the core but now culturally steeped in a Judeo-Christian ethos grew out of the ashes of this ancient world — providing political, cultural, and technological leadership. All of this has been accomplished by the hand of God working through people for the purposes of implementing His Gospel; it is the Lord who moves history — not blind natural causation or the mere machinations of man. Conclusion The divine mandate to subdue the creation obligates us to order the facts of our experiences in grateful acknowledgement of our Creator and His revealed will. We do not do justice to God’s objective revelation in the natural order — that is, His works of creation and providence — if we fail to attach scriptural meaning to it. For this reason, Christians must be critically discerning of secular thought, measuring all things by the yardstick of special revelation. Given the Lord’s providential governance of the universe at every level — past, present, and future — the historian
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