Sometimes, one important key can open the way to many keys. A dream God gave to a pagan king is one of those keys. I call this key “Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is our overlay.”

The king was Nebuchadnezzar. But he wasn’t just any king. This was Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the king of the vast Babylonian Empire. 

The dream came to the king when he had been thinking about the future. He saw a huge statue shaped like a man. It had a head made of gold, a breast of silver, a belly of brass, legs of iron, and feet and toes of iron and clay. As the king was watching, a stone struck the statue at its feet and shattered it into dust. Then the stone grew to become a great mountain and filled all the earth (Daniel 2:31-35). 

This dream provides us with many important keys to unlocking the strange images in Bible prophecy. The reason for this is that God Himself provides us with the correct interpretation of the king’s dream. This is a great help to us when we try to interpret the other images that follow. 

The statue represents the four major Gentile kingdoms, beginning with Babylon, that will oppress the children of Israel before Christ comes the second time to establish His eternal kingdom. Jesus referred to the period of time represented by the statue as the “times of the Gentiles (Luke 21:24). And the stone that destroyed the statue and grew into a mountain represents the Messiah and His coming kingdom to Israel. 

When we look at history, it’s amazing to see how accurate the king’s dream has already been. It’s commonly accepted that the head of gold represented Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian Empire. Its silver arms and chest represented the less powerful Medo-Persian Empire that followed. The belly of brass was the even more inferior Greek Empire. And the iron legs were the Roman Empire. 

It’s also commonly accepted that the feet of iron and clay will be a revival of the old Roman Empire and that the toes will be a 10-nation alliance that will rule over it.In Part 2 of this book, I will show how this is all now happening with the nations coming together in the European Union. 

The importance of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, then, is that it gives us many keys to unlock the images that follow. God not only gives us the correct interpretation of these prophecies, but actual history can now be used to see how God fulfilled them. 

This is helpful because these images from Daniel show up again in the book of Revelation. This means we can use the image of the statue as a kind of overlay to help us stay on the correct course when interpreting those prophecies. For example, since we know that the statue represents real earthly empires and their relationship to Israel, then we know that the coming Kingdom of the Messiah will also be a real kingdom – the stone that becomes a mountain. So if our interpretation does not lead us to a literal restoration of God’s promised kingdom to Israel, then we have gone wrong somewhere.