What would follow Greece?

“Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom [said the prophet], strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others.”
—Verse 40.

After the death of Alexander, his empire weakened and split into rival factions until finally in 168 B.C., at the battle of Pydna, the “Iron Empire” of Rome crushed Greece. God used the iron legs of the great metal man to symbolize this fourth world empire.

Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire when Jesus was born about 2000 years ago (Luke 2:1). Christ and His apostles lived during the period represented by the legs of iron. Gibbon, the 18th century historian, no doubt had Daniel’s prophecy in mind when he wrote: “The arms of the [Roman] republic, sometimes vanquished in battle, always victorious in war, advanced with rapid steps to the Euphrates, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ocean; and the images of gold, or silver, or brass, that might serve to represent the nations and their kings, were successively broken by the iron monarchy of Rome.”—Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (John D. Morris and Company), vol. 4, p. 89.

Think for a moment about this prediction from a human point of view. How could Daniel, a Hebrew living in the time of Babylon, have any idea of how empires would succeed each other hundreds of years in the future? We have a hard time figuring out what the stock market is going to do next week! And yet Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome followed each other exactly as predicted—like obedient schoolboys in a line.

Is God in control of the future? Can we have hope on the basis of His grand plan? Daniel 2 answers with a resounding, Yes! But there’s even more.