Faithful Under Fire, Sermon Two: The Rock of Ages

Last week we stood at the beginning of the book of Daniel and asked a question that every serious follower of Jesus eventually has to answer: How do you live for God in a world that doesn't want you to? We found Daniel and his three companions stripped of their names, their homeland, their families, their freedom — exiles in the greatest empire the ancient world had ever seen. And we found them standing firm. Not with swords. Not with protests. But with quiet, courageous, costly faithfulness.

Two great foundation stones run beneath everything in this book. Write them down if you haven't already. The first is God's Sovereignty — the conviction, held against all evidence, that the God of Israel is the Lord of history. That Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon and every empire that struts across the stage of history does so only on borrowed time and with borrowed authority. The second is God's Fidelity — the certainty that the God who made promises to Abraham and David and all his people will keep those promises, even when keeping them looks impossible.

Hold those two stones in your mind as we step into chapter 2. Because chapter 2 is where they get tested.

— Read Daniel 2:1–6 —

I. The Setting: A King Who Cannot Sleep

Before we get to the dream, notice something that the text slips in almost without comment: the king could not sleep. The most powerful man in the world, lord of the greatest empire on earth, possessor of unlimited wealth and military force — and he cannot sleep. There is something in the night he cannot control, cannot command, cannot buy his way out of. Something has gotten into his dreams, and it has shaken him to his foundations.

He summons his counselors — the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, and astrologers, the best minds of Babylon. But he doesn't just want an interpretation. He wants them to tell him the dream first. He's testing them. If they truly have access to the gods, if their wisdom is real and not mere performance, let them prove it. Tell me what I dreamed.

The counselors are reasonable. They ask for the dream itself. But Nebuchadnezzar is immovable. And so begins one of the great dramatic crisis points of the book: the wise men of Babylon, every one of them, are condemned to death. Which means Daniel and his three friends — who had just distinguished themselves above all the wise men of Babylon — are condemned along with them.

Enter Daniel. And notice what he does first. He doesn't panic. He doesn't plot. He calls a prayer meeting. "He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery." (2:18) There is a whole theology of prayer compressed into that verse — and we will need it before this series is done.

The answer comes in a vision of the night. And Daniel's response is one of the great doxologies of the Old Testament: \"Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might.\" He knows something Nebuchadnezzar doesn't know: the God who gives dreams is also the God who interprets them. The answer doesn't belong to Babylon. It belongs to heaven.

Before we hear the dream, one more note about the architecture of chapters 2 through 4. These three chapters form a deliberate trilogy, and they share a single obsession: the image of the colossus. Chapter 2 gives us a colossus-sized dream-statue. Chapter 3 gives us an actual colossus-sized golden statue that Nebuchadnezzar builds — perhaps, we will suggest, in direct response to what he dreamed in chapter 2. And chapter 4 gives us a colossus-sized tree that fills the earth. The king of Babylon is fascinated with enormity, with structures that reach toward heaven, with monuments to human greatness. That is not an accident. We know this story.

Going back to the very roots of Babylonian civilization — back to the plain of Shinar — the people of the plain were interested in rising to the heights. They built a tower to reach up to heaven and sought to make a great name for themselves. God did not permit that reach. Man never knows God by ascending a tower, by climbing by his own efforts up to the divine. Man knows God only by grace, only by God coming down to meet us with his mercy.

"Abram, time to go…" And now Abraham's descendant Daniel is back in Babylon, ready to deal with another tower — the tower of human empire building, the Kingdom of Man that exalts itself as a substitute for the Kingdom of God. Augustine called it the City of Man against the City of God. It is the oldest rivalry in the world.

— Read Daniel 2:31–47 —

II. The Statue: Power Built on Sand

"You, O king, are the head of gold." Power. Prestige. Prominence. If you are Nebuchadnezzar, this is the part of the sermon you like.

The statue Daniel describes is staggering in its imagery. Head of gold. Chest and arms of silver. Middle and thighs of bronze. Legs of iron. Feet of iron and clay. And Daniel, standing before the most powerful man in the world, proceeds to tell him that he is looking at the entire future of human empire — and that every empire that comes after Babylon will be less glorious and more brutal than the last.

History bears this out with uncomfortable precision. After Babylon came the Medo-Persian Empire — silver, mighty but less dazzling. After Persia came Greece, under Alexander the Great — bronze, fast and fierce. After Greece came Rome — iron, crushing everything it touched. From head to toe: decreasing splendor, increasing cruelty. The dream is not flattering to human civilization.

Consider Alexander. He conquered the known world by the time he was thirty-two years old. He wept, the ancient sources tell us, because there were no more worlds to conquer. And then he died — in Babylon, of all places — at thirty-two, of fever and, most likely, excessive drinking. Before he died, someone asked him to whom he would leave his kingdom. His answer was famous: "To the strongest." Those two words set off two hundred years of violence. His generals tore each other apart. His family was destroyed. His empire fractured into warring pieces. That is the way Empire works. That is the City of Man. The strongest inherits. And then someone stronger comes.

The great English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley saw this clearly. In his sonnet Ozymandias, he imagines a traveler in an ancient desert land who comes upon the ruins of a colossal statue — shattered, half-sunk in the sand. On the pedestal are words carved with magnificent arrogance:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

And around the pedestal? Nothing. "The lone and level sands stretch far away." The works of Ozymandias are gone. The empire is gone. The king is gone. Only the boast survives, and it survives only to mock itself.

Let that image settle. The greatest empire in history. The most powerful ruler of the ancient world. The colossus of human achievement. And it ends in sand. Every empire ends in sand. Every kingdom of man, however glorious, however ruthless, however apparently permanent — it ends in sand.

But something did remain.

III. The Stone: The Kingdom That Cannot Fall

"A stone was cut out, not by human hands." (2:34)

What can you possibly do with a little stone? Perhaps we should ask Goliath about that.

The stone is not new in Daniel's day. He has grown up on this story. He knows it the way we know our own name.

Jacob, fleeing from his brother with nothing but the clothes on his back, laid his head on a stone and dreamed of heaven — and when he woke, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." Moses struck a rock in the wilderness and water poured out for a thirsty people. God himself, in the Psalms, calls himself the Rock — "the LORD is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer." David, the shepherd boy, put one stone in a sling against the iron certainty of Goliath, and the giant fell. And the prophets — Isaiah especially — spoke of a coming one who would be a "stone of stumbling and a rock of offense" to some, and to others, the "cornerstone" on which everything would rest.

People speak today of being on "the right side of history." It is a phrase meant to settle arguments — to suggest that time itself will vindicate the progressive cause, that the arc of the moral universe bends, as the saying goes, toward justice. I will not argue with the aspiration. But I want to press on the assumption. Because the vision of Daniel 2 offers us a different account of history's direction, and a different account of who stands on the right side of it.

There is only one right side of history, my friend. The Jesus side of history. The cross side of history. The redemption side of history. The side that belongs not to the strongest but to the stone cut out without human hands.

This little stone — humble, subversive, seemingly insignificant — strikes the statue at its feet. Not at the head. Not where it looks strong. At the feet. And the whole thing collapses. Gold, silver, bronze, iron, clay — "they became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found." (2:35) And then the stone — the stone! — grows. It becomes a mountain. And the mountain fills the whole earth.

The Book of Revelation, the great companion volume to Daniel, knows this moment. In chapter 11, after the seventh angel sounds his trumpet, the elders in heaven fall on their faces and sing: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever." That is Daniel 2 reaching its conclusion. The stone has become the mountain. The mountain has filled the earth.

The third-century Roman Emperor Julian — known to history as "Julian the Apostate" because he abandoned Christianity and tried to restore the old Roman gods — waged a fierce campaign to extinguish the church. He failed. According to the ancient sources, as he lay dying from a battle wound, he looked up at the sky and said: "Thou hast triumphed, O Galilean." A hostile witness. A man who spent his reign trying to prove otherwise. And in the end, even he saw it.

Julian was right. And Julian is not alone. Empire after empire has taken its turn against the stone. And empire after empire has ended in sand. The stone remains. The kingdom grows.

That is a mountain you can trust. Moses' hiding place. The Rock of Ages. Isaiah saw it: "See, I lay in Zion a stone, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame." (Isaiah 28:16) Peter quotes it. Paul quotes it. The New Testament returns to it again and again because it is the hinge of all history.

Conclusion: Sand or Rock

There is one more thing I want to say before I close, and I want to say it directly to those of you who spend your weeks not in pulpits or seminaries, but in offices, courtrooms, hospitals, classrooms, construction sites, and living rooms — the ninety-nine percent of God's people who live out their faith in the so-called secular world.

You know what it feels like to live in the shadow of the colossus. You know what it feels like when the empire — the company, the institution, the culture, the system — asks you to bow. To assimilate. To adjust your convictions to fit the demands of the statue. You know the sleeplessness. Maybe not Nebuchadnezzar's sleeplessness, but your own kind: the 3 a.m. anxiety about whether you can keep standing where you are standing, whether the cost of fidelity is worth it, whether the stone is really going to win.

Daniel 2 is written for you. The vision is not primarily for the powerful. It is for the exiles. It is for the people who look at the colossus and feel small. It is for the people who need to be reminded that there is only one kingdom that lasts, only one empire that ends not in sand but in glory — and that you, if you belong to the stone, belong to that kingdom. You are already on the winning side of history.

The kingdom of this world — however impressive it looks, however crushing it feels — is standing on feet of iron and clay. It is already, in the deepest sense, falling. And the stone, cut out without human hands — the stone the builders rejected, who became the cornerstone — that stone is growing. Right now. Quietly. Subversively. Powerfully. Like a mustard seed becoming a tree. Like leaven working through the whole lump. The kingdom of God is not finished. It is not losing. It is growing toward a mountain that will fill the earth.

The question Daniel 2 puts to each of us is simple and ancient and urgent:

Are you building on sand — or on the Rock?

One more empire will come and go before you leave this building today. One more headline will announce the triumph of one power and the collapse of another. One more voice will tell you that the arc of history bends toward this or that human vision. And you will have to decide, again, what you believe about the stone.

The Rock of Ages is still standing. He was there before Babylon. He watched Alexander weep and die. He outlasted Julian. He will outlast whatever comes next. And he says to you today what Isaiah heard him say, and what Peter passed on to a church under pressure: "The one who trusts in him will never be put to shame."

Trust in the Rock. Build on the cornerstone. Let the empires have their moment. They will end in sand.

You don't have to.

Let us pray.