A Brief Note Before I Begin This Post
If you’ve been following along here, you may have noticed I’ve been quiet for a couple of weeks. Health doesn’t always cooperate with deadlines, and mine has been reminding me of that fairly loudly. I have been struggling with heart issues for a couple of months now, and had oral surgery early last week. Between recovering from that, scheduling further tests around the heart concerns and arguing with insurance people, and navigating some other life complications I’ve been managing, the screen and I needed a little distance.
But, as any long time reader of my writing (at any of my platforms) knows, quiet doesn’t mean still. At least, it rarely does for me.
During that time I found myself returning again and again to what I’ve been watching unfold in the world — the negotiations, the headlines, the pieces that keep moving in directions that feel less like coincidence and more like pattern. I’ve been praying. I’ve been reading and studying. I’ve been sitting with Daniel often in the early hours when sleep wasn’t cooperating, asking the same question I suspect a lot of you are asking:
Lord, is this it? Is this what it looks like?
I also published something earlier today before writing this, a post I’ve been working up to for a while now, about the papacy and what Scripture has to say about it in the context of end times prophecy. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d encourage you to do that first, because what I’m about to share connects to it. I’ll link it again at the end.
For now, I’m writing again, I’m paying attention, and I have something I want to walk through with you.
What Just Happened
On April 17th, news broke that the Strait of Hormuz had reopened after Iran signaled willingness to negotiate with the United States, responding to pressure from the Trump administration and a firm deadline.
For context: roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil supply moves through that narrow stretch of water between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran has wielded the threat of closing it as a geopolitical card for years. The fact that they are now standing down — negotiating, capitulating — is not a small thing.
Although I couldn’t help but scoff at the takes of people who don’t clearly see the difference in the way the strait operated prior to this moment, seeing it only as an “open-closed-open again” moment and disregarding what to me is an obvious and meaningful global shift, my first response to that headline was not political. It was spiritual.
Something shifted when I read it, the way it does when a piece of a larger picture clicks into place. I have been watching the Middle East carefully for years, tracking what I believe are prophetically significant developments — not as a hobby, but as someone who is genuinely convinced that Scripture has something specific to say about where we are in history. If you have read my primary end times post, you already know where I stand.
This morning I came across a teaching by Ross at NewNews that gave language to something I had already been feeling in my spirit. He connected this specific geopolitical moment to the second chapter of Daniel, and when I sat with it, prayed over it, and took it back to the text, I kept thinking: yes. This. I have been seeing this.
What follows is my own walk through Daniel 2, informed by what I have been studying, what Ross laid out, and what I believe the Holy Spirit has been showing me for a long time now. I want to share it with you, and then I want to invite you to go read it yourself.
Daniel 2: A Dream Worth Understanding
The second chapter of Daniel opens with a king who cannot sleep.
Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon and one of the most powerful men in the ancient world, has had a dream that shook him. In fact, it shook him so deeply that he called in every wise man, magician, and sorcerer in his kingdom and demanded they do something that had never been asked of anyone. He did not just ask them to interpret the dream, but to tell him what the dream was. He refused to describe it himself. He wanted proof that their interpretation was real, not invented. No one could do it, and Nebuchadnezzar ordered them all executed.
Daniel, a young Jewish man serving in the king’s court, heard what was happening and asked for time. He went to his friends, and they prayed. God gave Daniel both the dream and its meaning.
What Nebuchadnezzar had seen was a great statue — enormous, terrifying, and built of different materials from head to foot. A head of gold. Chest and arms of silver. Belly and thighs of bronze. Legs of iron. And feet made partly of iron and partly of clay.
Then, in the dream, a stone was cut out of a mountain, not by human hands. It struck the statue at the feet, and the whole thing collapsed. The gold, the silver, the bronze, the iron, the clay — all of it crushed together and scattered like dust. And the stone became a great mountain that filled the entire earth.
That is the dream. And Daniel’s interpretation of it is what I ask you to sit with.
This was not a vision meant only for Nebuchadnezzar’s time. It was a map; a broad, sweeping overview of Gentile world power from Babylon forward, with an ending that was never in question. I have read this chapter many times over the years. But I will be honest with you: reading it now, in this moment, with this particular news cycle, it does not read like ancient history. It reads like a current events report.
The Four Kingdoms
Daniel’s interpretation of the statue is precise and deliberate. He does not guess. He speaks with the authority of a man who received his information directly from God.
He begins at the top. You, he tells Nebuchadnezzar, are the head of gold. (Daniel 2:38) Babylon was the first and greatest of these Gentile kingdoms. It was wealthy, dominant, and sovereign over the known world. The gold is fitting. Babylon was glorious in its power, and Nebuchadnezzar was its crown, but every kingdom has a successor.
The silver chest and arms represent a kingdom that would rise after Babylon, inferior in glory but expanding in reach. History confirms this as the Medo-Persian Empire, the same Persia we encounter in the books of Esther and Ezra, and identified more specifically in Daniel 8. The two arms suggest a dual power. The Medes and the Persians joined together under one banner.
After Persia, a third kingdom of bronze would arise and rule over all the earth. (Daniel 2:39) The bronze points toward Greece and the empire of Alexander the Great, which swept through the known world with extraordinary speed and left Hellenistic culture embedded in every nation it touched.
And then there is the fourth.
The legs of iron, and the feet of iron mixed with clay. Daniel describes this kingdom differently than the others. It is as strong as iron, breaking and crushing everything before it. (Daniel 2:40) Yet it is also divided. Something in its very foundation will not hold together the way the earlier kingdoms did.
The question of which kingdom the iron and clay represent has been discussed for centuries. Rome is the traditional reading for the iron legs, and that interpretation carries real historical weight. But when I came across Ross’s teaching at NewNews and heard him walk through this chapter against the backdrop of what is happening right now in the world, I found myself sitting with something I had already felt but had not fully named.
The feet — the final form of Gentile world power before the stone falls — may be America. And I want to show you why that reading has stayed with me.
Iron and Clay: The Kingdom Divided Against Itself
This is where Ross’s post from this morning merged with my own comprehensions of Daniel, and what I believe I have been seeing in a sort of blur about America’s place in prophecy in recent years:
If Babylon was the crown of ancient power and Persia its silver successor, then we have to ask some serious questions as we reach the iron and the clay. What is the final Gentile world power? What kingdom has dominated and shaped the global order in the way the statue suggests, and what kingdom is visibly, undeniably divided against itself right now?
I believe, along with Ross at NewNews, that the answer is America.
This is not a claim I make lightly, and I want to be clear that I am not stating mere assumed facts, but inviting you to read Daniel 2:40-43 for yourself and sit with what the Holy Spirit shows you in it. That said, I want to walk through why this interpretation has not just persuaded me intellectually. It has confirmed something I have been sensing in my spirit for years.
America was founded in a way no other empire in history was. It was founded as a refuge. It was founded as a safe haven for Jewish people fleeing persecution, and for the church to practice its faith freely. America was established on principles drawn from Scripture and shaped by the recognition that its authority came from God rather than from a crown. Whether or not every founder lived up to those ideals is a separate discussion. The founding vision itself was unlike anything the ancient world produced.
That is the iron. It is real, and it is still present.
Daniel 2:40 describes a kingdom as strong as iron, breaking and shattering and crushing. Anyone watching what is happening in American governance right now can see that strength operating. There is a force in the current administration that is not making small moves. It is restructuring, confronting, and pushing back against systems that had grown comfortable with their own permanence.
But Daniel does not stop at the iron. He moves immediately to the clay.
Whereas we saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided. (Daniel 2:41) The clay here is described as miry — not just soft, but unstable, embedded in the iron. It is present at every level of the structure. And critically, it will not bond with the iron no matter how much pressure is applied.
They shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay. (Daniel 2:43)
I do not think I need to explain at length what this looks like in the United States right now. You can see it, if you view it without the blinders of what we might call “conditioned thought.” The division is not surface level. It runs through institutions, through courts, through media, through households. The iron pushes and the clay resists, and neither one is going away. This is not a political observation. It is a prophetic one, and it has been sitting in this text for thousands of years.
There is one more detail in verse 43 that I want you to notice. It says they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men. (Daniel 2:43) The phrase “seed of men” carries weight throughout Scripture. It connects to the people of God, the line through which His purposes have moved. The intermingling suggests something deeper than a political disagreement. It suggests a spiritual conflict embedded inside the final Gentile kingdom, pulling it in two directions at once.
That is where we are. And if that is where we are, then the next part of Daniel’s vision is the one that matters most.
The Stone Cut Without Hands
Daniel does not leave the dream at the divided kingdom. He keeps going, and what comes next is the reason any of this matters.
After the statue stands in all its divided, iron-and-clay complexity, something happens that no human hand engineered. A stone is cut out of a mountain, but not by human power, not by political strategy, and not by military force. It strikes the statue at the feet. Not at the head or the chest, but at the feet. It strikes at the final, divided form of Gentile world power.
And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. (Daniel 2:44)
This is not a metaphor for gradual reform. It is not a description of slow cultural change or institutional improvement. It is a sudden, complete, and total collapse of every system of human governance, followed immediately by the establishment of something that cannot be shaken.
The stone is Christ, and His kingdom is not built by human hands.
Ross connected this moment to a passage in 1 Thessalonians that I have sat with many times, and that connection is one I cannot set aside:
For when they shall say, peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape. (1 Thessalonians 5:3)
Peace and safety. I ask you to hold those words while you think about what the world is watching right now.
The Strait of Hormuz has reopened in a scenario that (I believe) few expected. Iran is at the negotiating table. Ceasefire conversations around Israel are moving through diplomatic channels. The language being used in international headlines is the language of de-escalation, resolution, and stability. To many people, this looks like progress. And perhaps in some narrow, temporal sense it is.
But, if you are reading your Bible alongside your news feed, that language should give you pause. Not because peace is bad. Peace is a gift from God. But the kind of peace the world is currently engineering — fragile, political, and built on the same human foundations the statue represents — is precisely the kind that precedes the stone.
I am not saying the stone falls tomorrow. I am not setting dates, because just as our friend Ross says, that is presumptuous, and frankly, I consider it to be arrogant. To claim knowledge of timing that belongs only to God is self-serving at best. But I am saying that the sequence Daniel described — divided kingdom, negotiated peace, sudden intervention — is not abstract to me anymore. It is unfolding in a direction I have been watching for years, and I believe the Holy Spirit has been showing many of us what this looks like before it arrives.
The Kingdom That Stands Forever
After the stone strikes the statue and the dust of human empire settles, Daniel tells us what the stone becomes. Not a ruin, and not a pause. A mountain that fills the entire earth. (Daniel 2:35)
The prophet Micah saw the same mountain.
But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall flow unto it. (Micah 4:1)
This is not a vision of defeat or of a world left in ruins. It is a vision of completion; a vision of a kingdom that does not replace the broken pieces of the statue with something equally fragile, but fills everything those kingdoms could not.
Micah 4 goes further on this, and this is where something in my spirit sat up when I heard Ross walk through it. Verses 7 and 8 speak of a remnant, of a nation that had been cast far off, being made into something strong. They speak of the daughter of Zion and of a kingdom coming to her.
And I will make her that halted a remnant, and her that was cast far off a strong nation: and the LORD shall reign over them in mount Zion from henceforth, even for ever. (Micah 4:7)
And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem. (Micah 4:8)
A nation cast far off. A strong nation. A place where the remnant was gathered and where the first dominion, the original design of God’s reign, comes back around.
Ross sees America in those verses, and having sat with them, so do I.
As noted above, America was not just founded as a refuge. It was founded as a place where God’s people, Jewish and Gentile alike, could breathe and practice their faith and exist without the weight of empire crushing them. It was the nation where the kingdom was kept alive while the rest of the world sorted itself out under the shadow of the statue.
And if that is true — if America is both the iron and clay of the fourth kingdom and the nation cast far off that sheltered the remnant — then what we are watching right now is not the beginning of the end in the way that phrase is often used, with its undertone of catastrophe and dread. It is the setup. The arrangement of pieces before the stone falls. And what comes after the stone is not destruction. It is the mountain.
Ross laid this out clearly, and I want you to hear it the way I did: the kingdom is being set up right now.
I believe that. And I find it, honestly, and because I trust and believe in Christ, comforting rather than terrifying.
A Word on What’s Coming
Daniel 2 gives us the framework for Gentile world power and its ending. But the prophetic picture Scripture paints does not stop there. There is another figure in the end times narrative who appears in Daniel, in Revelation, and in 2 Thessalonians. This is a figure whose identity the church has debated, obscured, and in many cases deliberately avoided for centuries.
I mentioned in the intro of this post that I published a post earlier today that would serve you to read alongside this one. It addresses the papacy, the prophetic case Scripture builds around it, and what I believe the Bible has to say about the Antichrist’s rise from within institutional religion. It is not a comfortable post. But I believe it is an honest and necessary one.
You can read it here: Authenticity Unveiled: When the Serpent Wears Robes
Closing Thoughts
I will close this post the way I always do when I write about something like this: Read it for yourself. I will never issue a demand that you believe what I believe, but instead an invitation to go look for yourself, and to seek God Himself, via the Holy Spirit, concerning the issue. Take it to Him in prayer.
Open Daniel 2. Read it slowly, from the beginning. Let Nebuchadnezzar’s dream sit with you. Let Daniel’s interpretation of each kingdom sink in. And when you reach the feet of iron and clay, and then the stone cut without hands, ask the Holy Spirit what He wants to show you in it. Ask Him to give you eyes that are not filtered through habit or assumption or the noise of everything else competing for your attention.
You may arrive somewhere different than I have. That is between you and God. But I believe with everything in me that this chapter is not dusty history. It is a living word, and it is speaking directly into this moment.
If you want more context for where I am coming from prophetically, I would encourage you to read my full end times post (Why I Believe We Are Living in the End Times — and Why I’m Unbothered by Those Who Think I’ve Lost My Marbles) and my companion post on the work of Jonathan Cahn (Patterns, Cycles, and Ancient Warnings: Exploring the Work of Jonathan Cahn). Together they lay out the broader framework I have been building toward, and this post is one more piece of that picture.
We are living in remarkable days. I do not share anything I do to instill fear or to frighten anyone. I share it because I believe it is true, because I believe it is the responsibility of every believer who is watching and following the instruction of God to clearly speak on what they see God doing, and because I believe the people of God deserve to be paying attention.
Until the next post, I pray that you continue to be watchful, prayerful, discerning, and blessed by God in your journey.
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