How do you tell the boss he’s about to lose his business? How do you tell the king of kings that in a very short while his empire would crumble? Very courageously and without stroking his ego, and get ready to be fired.

Then the king gave orders to call in the magicians, the conjurers, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. The king said to them, “I had a dream and my spirit is anxious to understand the dream.”

Daniel 2:2-3

The great King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream and it was so terrifying it woke him and robbed him of sleep.

We also have to consider that the dream was also embarrassing to him. How could the ruler of the world tell anyone what he saw when it looked like his certain demise? His advisers would be hard pressed to ask him if he was certain about what he saw. They would be sure to say “No, your majesty, that’s not going to happen to you”.

King Nebuchadnezzar sure seems to have lost it. Whether he was factually robbed of his memory or was simply incredulous about his fate, we have to realize that his terror was real. He believed that the content of that dream was something that the wisemen and the soothsayers would be able to tell him, and he wanted from them both the dream and what it meant.

Your steely term ends

More than a few of rulers think of themselves as golden and immortal heads. Truth be told, all are bound for a collision with the stone of God. Since Nebuchadnezzar was king of kings nations have deteriorated into cheap metallic identities. There followed Persia, Greece, and Rome, identified respectively by silver, brass, and iron. Monuments and memorials are futile attempts to keep alive dead people. We are far better off paying attention to the heroes that are alive. There are not many. Real heroes are rare. There are certainly no Nebuchadnezzars, Dariuses, Alexanders, or Caesars because the gold, silver, and bronze are gone. All that is left is iron, and iron mixed with dirt. The Brits and Americans can hurl a lot of steel around kick up a lot of dirt but fewer and fewer people are buying the promise of a land that flows with milk and honey and lasts forever.

Every cookie crumbles. The flows of people into Europe and North America are historic: the flow of people has thrown migration for a loop, and empire means nothing today except a technological and virtual drama played out in situation rooms. The next move is up to the hardliners, those who think that they have a destiny to rule the world by demanding worship and threatening death. Utopia gets fried in its own rhetoric of greatness.