Kingdom Come

King Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the four kingdoms making up the Adversary’s continuous world empire:

• This image’s head was of fine gold, – the Babylonian
• his breast and his arms of silver, – Medo-Persian
• his belly and [developing into] his [two] thighs [north and south] of brass – Greece
• His [two] legs of iron” – (Daniel 2:31-33)
  • joins West with East,
  • is diverse from all kingdoms, 
  • devours the whole earth – controls a great amount of the world 
  • treads down and break it in pieces  – whatever it can’t incorporate, it crushes and tears apart

The presentation of two arms is obvious for the Medes and Persians. Three parts of belly and thighs is not so obvious for Greece which was split into four parts upon Alexander’s, death, but in fact did rapidly reduce “by 277, when only three major Hellenistic kingdoms stabilized in Egypt, in Asia Minor/ Syria, and in Macedonia under the Antigonids (277-168).” These three again reduced to only two, the north in Asia Minor and the south in Egypt.

So we should take the division of the fourth empire into two legs as a key prophetic identifier of an Empire that may or not function in coordination with each other.

Since the establishment of civilization at Babylon, the Western nations only became wealthy / powerful by tapping into the wealth of Mesopotamia.

Missiles fell on the capital city of Iraq. The invaders were speedy and destructive, compelling surrender, occupying much of the country. It sounds like today’s headlines, but it comes instead from ancient Rome’s 600-year struggle for world domination, one of the earliest tests of East versus West.

The Roman Empire was birthed in this bloody struggle (27 B.C.–A.D. 283) and it has never ended. Border provinces in the Near East passed back and forth like Alsace-Lorraine or the Polish Corridor would in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Rarely in the history of human conflict has a feud such as the one between the empires of Rome and Mesopotamia lasted so long and accomplished so little.

Julius Caesar’s planned invasion of Iran through Armenia was cut short by his assassination on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. Mark Antony carried out Caesar’s invasion plan in 36 B.C. but without the great military leader’s tactical skill–he lost half his men in the mountains of northwest Iran and on the harsh winter march home through Armenia. Trajan wept when his armies reached the Persian Gulf in A.D. 115 because the great soldier and emperor was too old to continue on to India. Julian the Apostate was killed in an inglorious rear-guard action in A.D. 363 during a difficult retreat and forced to spend a fortune on border fortresses and bribes to protect his rear in Persia while his main armies were conquering Italy, North Africa, and Spain.

And don’t think it was all one-sided. The barbarian tribes were likewise trying to enrich themselves from raiding and seizing land. Rome had to turn its attention north into the Balkan Peninsula to defend itself from the rising tide of marauding Norsemen and Slavs, it expanded further from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea. This area proudly claims its heritage in the name of the country of Romania.

Wait – what’s that on the top right corner. Ukraine?? and Russia? Again we see “Border provinces passed back and forth like Alsace-Lorraine or the Polish Corridor would in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.”

By convention, the Western Roman Empire is deemed to have ended on 4 September 476, when the barbarian Odoacer deposed the sitting ruler Romulus Augustus, but in fact Odoacer submitted himself to the current Eastern Emperor, Julius Nepos, and later the Eastern emperor Zeno, as his sovereign. Another barbarian ruler Syagrius also managed to preserve Roman sovereignty in northern Gaul under Nepos as his sovereign and the legitimate Western emperor.

So what actually happened at this time is that the westernmost territories, like the eastern, were fighting off the Empire’s control by perpetual warfare – without achieving independence. The boundaries and level of control simply fluctuated.

Perpetual war on every border of the Roman Empire. Of course. How hard is that to understand?

The last, but by no means least, key identifier of the fourth empire is that it imposes a new religious orthodoxy.

“And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: ” (Daniel 7:25)

There is no denying this fact, yet it seems to have escaped the attention of many ostensibly Bible-believing fundamentalist Christians.

In 313 the emperor Constantine I granted religious toleration and freedom for persecuted Christians.

In 380 the emperor Theodosius I published the Edict of Thessalonica making Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire. This is the first known secular law which includes a clear definition of national religious orthodoxy, providing for repression against “heretics”. The Edict of Thessalonica was subsequently incorporated the Theodosian Code and was the milestone of the official Christianization of the Roman Empire, In other words, barbarian tribes eager to become friends with benefits with Rome were required to enforce nation-wide conversion to Christianity as a stipulation of Rome making an alliance or accepting surrender.

The Northmen’s Odin and Thor were easily exchanged for God the Father and his son Jesus, especially as Odin sacrificed himself on a tree like Jesus. Rome’s version of Christianity was not so much focused on scriptural turning from sin to righteousness as it was similar to paganism’s making deals with the spirits for current benefits, going back to Constantine’s rise to power. 

So Rome’s Christianity was simply a veneer over a hybrid paganism.

In 610 Muhammed – following in Moses’ footsteps – leads his pagan Arab people to return to the original monotheism of the prophets Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon and Jesus with submission (Islam) to the will of God. This return to faith in Creator God’s authority over righteous daily submission – definition of islam – in contrast to the transactional humanistic version of Christianity spreads like wildfire through the next centuries, taking over the Roman Eastern and African territories.

In 1187 Salah Al-Din Al-Ayyubi—known in the West as ‘Saladin’—recovered Jerusalem. In contrast to the Crusaders’ slaughter, he granted amnesty and free passage not only to the resident Catholics but also to the defeated Christian soldiers, as long as they were able to pay a paltry ransom for themselves. He allowed the native Christians to remain and Jews who had been expelled from Jerusalem by the Crusaders to resettle in the city. Salah Al-Din also restored the rights of pilgrimage to several eastern Christian denominations who were condemned as heretics under Rome’s Theodosian Code.

The Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy during much of its existence. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the sultan sat at the apex of a hierarchical system and acted in political, military, judicial, social, and religious capacities under a variety of titles. He was theoretically responsible only to God and God’s law (the Islamic شریعت‎ şeriat, known in Arabic as شريعة sharia), of which he was the chief executor. His heavenly mandate was reflected in Islamic titles such as “shadow of God on Earth”.

The Islamic ruler was absolutely the equivalent of the Christian ruler claiming rule over the whole earth.

The western-most territory of the Seljuk Turk Empire – Anatolia – was taken from the rival Western / Roman Empire in 1081, and as with the names of the other political entities incorporated into the Turkish Empire, the name of this territory remained the same: Rome / Rum, and its ruler – as conqueror – claimed the title of the Sultan of Rum / Rome. 

Unlike Uganda’s Idi Amin’s claim to be “Conqueror of the British Empire” and “the Last King of Scotland”, the Sultan’s claim was taken seriously enough to be hotly contested for the next 250 years by Christian rivals.