The Hands of God

Daniel 2:44-45

Dear friends of atonement, twice in my life I had the privilege of standing at the base of the Statue of Liberty. And I loved it. I just wanted to soak it in, to be looking up at this majestic, dazzling monument towering over me, standing guard over New York Harbor. I just didn’t want it to end. When I compare my times there twice on Liberty Island, looking up at that statue to the dream of the Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar described here in Daniel chapter two. A dream in which he saw a dazzling statue, enormous and awesome in its splendor. A very memorable and disturbing dream for him. I asked myself, did he feel that same kind of wonder? Like I felt there on Liberty Island looking at the Statue of Liberty. Is that how Nebuchadnezzar felt in his dream? And I asked myself two other questions. What were the hands doing? The hands of the statue. You know because the Statue of Liberty obviously holding up that torch as a guiding light here welcoming to a new life of opportunity and dignity, welcoming the poor, the exiles, the huddled masses longing to be free like Emma Lazarus describes it in her poem engraved there at the base of the statue. That’s what she’s doing with her hands. But what about that statue that Nebuchadnezzar saw? What were its hands doing? Because the statue he saw in his dream represented mighty empires. Not freedom for the oppressors, but mighty freedom for the oppressed, but mighty oppressors one after another after another. What would the hands of a statue like that be doing? Maybe shaking his fist saying, we are our own gods now. Or maybe it’s hands out like this. Everything you thought was yours belongs to us now. Or maybe reaching for a sword. Or maybe putting the crown on its head. But whatever the hands of that enormous statue were doing they weren’t doing for long because, by the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the statue was destroyed. An entire mountainside smashed into it and pulverized it into dust. That’s the second question I ask myself. What was that like? Watching that. Right, because I know the feeling of standing at the base of a majestic monument. But then to see it destroyed right in front of your eyes. What would that feel like? And there’s so much I would love to talk about with these verses, this whole chapter. I’d love to talk with you about how that statue, its four parts, represented four mighty empires over the Middle East. And then the mountainside that smashed it to bits represented another empire from heaven, the kingdom of our savior. And I’d love to talk with you about how that statue and that dream told the next 600 years of human history, told the future, and even told when the savior was gonna be born. I’d love to talk with you about how this dream and the statue shows us our God. He’s the only God who can tell the future and shape the course of empires. I’d love to talk with you about, I’d love to talk with you about the goodness of our God and how he could take four empires worth of war and brutality and transform it into the perfect preparation for his plan of salvation. Or to talk about how really the Roman empire did begin to fall the moment those shepherds found the baby sleeping in the manger because they saw that God was not on the side of the mighty and the conqueror and the emperor and the money holders. God was on the side of the nobody. The weak, the victim, the needy. I’d love to talk with you about how Daniel’s words here remind me of Luke chapter 10 verse 42. Remember where Jesus has to say, Martha, Martha, you’re worried about so many things but Mary has chosen the one thing you need and nobody will ever take it away from her. And so Daniel says here, this new kingdom, this kingdom that’s about peace and love and being right with God, this new kingdom, it will never be destroyed nor will it be left to another. Once you have this king in your life, once you are part of this kingdom, just like Jesus said to Mary of Bethany, it can never be taken away from you. Once Jesus is the emperor of your heart, no one else gets to be. But what I’d really like to talk with you about this evening is that line about the rock that smashed the statue that it was cut out of a mountain but not by human hands. But not by human hands. That makes me think of the virgin birth and here was a king who needed no human father to be born. But it also makes me think about, well, there were human hands. There were two little human hands grabbing for a teenage mother there in the stable. There were two little hands and yet they are so different, huh, from whatever the hands must have been doing on the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Because those little hands of Jesus never reached for a crown, never smashed people into the dust. In fact, when all the splendors of the kingdoms of this world were offered to Jesus, he turned away. Those little human hands, there were human hands, but all they did was serve and heal and love and bring back the lost until finally those hands were pinned to a cross. And there, there was the death blow to the power of the Roman Empire because their most fearsome instrument of torture was transformed into a badge of honor, into victory, salvation, and freedom. But he never reached for a crown. No, buried in a tomb, the father raised him from the dead and put a crown of life on him. Truly, this new kingdom, this fifth empire, the kingdom of our Savior Jesus, wasn’t made by human hands or seized by the hands of the greedy. But I also think about that line, this new kingdom, huh? Not made by human hands. I think of that as a great comfort when I am praying for that kingdom to come, when I am about to speak to the people I love at garden homes, and I’m praying, I’m praying that Jesus would take charge of their hearts and take charge of their lives and take charge of my words and give them wings. When I’m standing on a hundred different porches every month trying to reach my neighborhood and I’m ready to knock on that door, and so often I pray, “Your will be done. “Your kingdom come.” And to know that that kingdom, if it comes to this particular house that I’m knocking on, it isn’t gonna come because of my charisma or because I know just the right words to say or because I have just the perfect church for everybody to come to that I’ve led as the great pastor. No, not by human hands, huh? That I have the kind of Savior and God who can come into this house and whoever thinks they’re in charge of this house or whatever thinks it controls the people in this house, it’s no match for Jesus. And he can smash it into dust. And once he grabs their hearts with his love, no one else ever can. Amen.