The Shattering Stone Series

A man was bragging that he had saved the life of a poor

half-starved little girl who was trying to sell wilted flowers on a

freezing cold winter day. When asked how he explained: "This little

girl was hardly dressed for the kind of weather she was facing. She

wore no gloves, and in her hand she carried a few wilted flowers.

She sought what shelter she could in an open doorway, and there I

happen to see her as I passed along the street. Her lips were blue and

her legs and arms were shaking noticeably. As I passed along she

extended her hands with the flowers as a gesture asking me to buy

them. I stopped and took out a dollar bill from my wallet. I said

little girl what would you do if I gave you this dollar bill? 'Oh,

gasped the freezing child. "I would be so happy I would die from

joy." So I put the dollar bill back in my pocket and saved the poor

girls life." If you take the words of the little girl literally then he truly did

save her life, for she said she would die if he gave her the bill. Such is

the kind of nonsense that can result from taking all language

literally. I was helping Lavonne set up a baby crib she needed for

babysitting. When the frame was together and the spring was in she

said, "Throw the mattress in before you go." So I picked it up and

literally threw it in tearing a hole in the bottom in the process. Had

she not told me to throw it in, it never would have happened. On the

other hand, had I not taken her literally it never would have

happened either. So often we expect people to get our point without

interpreting everything literally.

We would die laughing if we knew all of the strange things that

result from literalism. A tribe in Africa insists that men have two,

four, six or eight wives because the Bible says be not unequally

yoked. King James of England asked the famed poet Ben Jonson to

name the gift he would like from the king. He jokingly replied, "A

square foot of Westminster Abbey." The king took it literally, and

when Jonson died he was buried in the Abbey standing up so that he

would occupy only his requested square foot.

Controversy over many passages of Scripture centers around the

whole issue of literalism. All Bible interpreters of evangelical belief

follow the rule that the literal interpretation is the best except when

it does not make sense, and is not consistent with the rest of

Scripture. The traditional interpreters of Daniel feel that there is no

meaningful way to be literal in the interpretation of this dream. The

image of the dream represents Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and

Rome. In spite of the fact that the first three of these pass from the

scene of history they are shown to be destroyed at the same time as

the last one when the stone of the kingdom of God strikes the image.

There is no way to say that Babylon was literally destroyed at the

coming of Christ. And the interpretation that it refers to the second

coming will not work either, for Jesus will not destroy the literal Babylon

at that time. There is no way to escape the need for

symbolic interpretation, and those who pretend they are being literal

by putting the fulfillment off until the millennium are being

intellectually dishonest.

Even if there was any evidence in this text for by-passing the

incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension and reign of Christ to

jump to the millennium, there is no way to take verse 44 literally and

maintain that it refers to the millennium. The kingdom referred to in

this verse is clearly an eternal kingdom, which is to stand forever.

The millennium only lasts for a thousand years, and how can a

thousand year kingdom fulfill this kind of language about a kingdom

that never ends? I can see the finite being used to symbolize the

infinite, but not the infinite being used to symbolize the finite. A

thousand year kingdom can be symbolic of an eternal kingdom, but it

is senseless to use an eternal kingdom to be symbolic of one limited to

a thousand years. Literalism here does not make sense. The

traditional view takes this eternal kingdom to be the one announced

by Jesus. It is that kingdom one must be born again to enter into,

and which Jesus made synonymous with eternal life.

The traditional view is a literal view of the shattering stone's

effect on these four kingdoms by recognizing the facts of history.

These four universal kingdoms of men were a unity. They were four