GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
DANIEL 2:40-43
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40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, as strong as iron, since iron breaks and smashes everything. And just as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and smash all the other kingdoms.
The fourth kingdom, furthest from Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, is Rome. It is fitting for Rome to be described as iron, with all of the military strength of iron, breaking and smashing and crushing all the other kingdoms. But remnants of Babylon, Persia and Greece lasted long into the Roman period, just as the statue remains a whole statue until the coming of the divine rock, Christ, to smash everything all at once.
41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom. It will have some of the strength of iron in it, since you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 And as the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with shards of clay, so the people will mix themselves with other peoples, but they will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
Daniel makes three observations about the Roman empire. First, the toes are divided and not a cohesive unit (compare this with the hands and fingers, which were not even mentioned but were unquestionably one piece with the arms of the second kingdom). The Roman empire was split into many parts: Spain, France, England and Germany came out of Rome. In many cases, the original firmness of iron was retained.
Secondly, the toes are both iron and clay, the clay a potter would use. The word is even used for dried fragments of pottery, “shards.” But muddy and mirey or baked, brittle and broken, clay is inferior to iron in its strength. And so Rome would be sometimes weak and sometimes strong. Some of the leaders of Rome in its Italian days such as Julius and Augustus Caesar were strong and powerful and made good laws. Others were often weak, murderous, or freaks of perversion and arrogance. The same was true of the later Holy Roman Emperors, which had its Charlemagnes and Ottos, but more than its share of weak and ineffective tyrants as well.
Thirdly, there is a reference to alliances and marriages, people mixing themselves with other peoples. The intermarriages were not universal throughout Rome, but only a few here and there locally, and they did not secure peace or unity. This is made more clear in the image if iron, which does not mix with clay at all. When Romans intermarried with German and Slavic peoples, bringing their wives and children back to Rome and the Italian peninsula, it did not galvanize the empire as some hoped. As Professor Gerhard explains: “The last part of this kingdom is going to be much weaker than the first part and the emperors are going to become related by marriage to kings who will no longer be part of the Roman Empire; hoping in this way to restore the past majesty of the empire. However, those affinities are not going to be firm but will give opportunities for greater hostilities and rivalries.”
But what truly brought about the end of the empire was Christianity. When the Romans began more and more to put their faith in Christ, they gave up those amoral and wicked ways that in a certain sense had given them some military strength. They were brought down from within, and what remained was Christianity. More about this when Daniel interprets the stone cut away from the mountain.
There are some who focus on the unspoken detail of the number of toes. The numeral “ten” does not occur in the this chapter, but some make elaborate points about ten as the symbolic number of completeness, and that all of the various minor kingdoms that sprang up after Rome are caught up in that number, since “ten” does not need to be taken literalistically, but spiritually as a complete group. The trouble with this is that there is no mention of the number of toes in this chapter. And while there will be ten horns later on in the parallel vision of the four beasts (Daniel 7:20, 24), there is no number here to judge, whether spiritually or literalistically. It is probably unwise to judge a thing that is not there.
What surely is there is the promise of the downfall of each of these kingdoms and the coming of Christ at the end of it all. God showed Nebuchadnezzar something that the king of Babylon would never have thought to ask on his own: When will the Messiah, the promised Christ, arrive? And here the answer presents itself, flying out of the sky to destroy what remains of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Still more details, down to the very number of years, is yet to come (Daniel 9:24-25). We stand in awe, thankful to God for his message of grace and fulfillment.
All of this is about our sins, and the end of the curse that was made in the Garden of Eden. To display his glory, God reveals more and more of his plan as the day of Christ’s first coming drew closer and closer. Satan was powerless to stop what he did not understand, and out of the great mountain of the Old Testament church, a stone was cut, not by the hands of men, that brought about the fall of kingdoms and nations, but that raised up a godly kingdom to bring pardon and peace to all mankind.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Something extra
Listen or watch Bible classes online. https://splnewulm.org/invisible-church/
Archives at St Paul’s Lutheran Church https://splnewulm.org/daily-devotions/ and Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: www.wlchapel.org/connect-grow/ministries/adults/daily-devotions/gwfy-archive/2025
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Daniel 2:40-43 Toes of iron and toes of clay