II.  So we have now to think of the stone cut out without hands.

Three things are specified with regard to it:  its origin, its duration, and its destructive energy.  The origin is heavenly, in sharp contrast to the human origin of the kingdoms symbolised in the colossal man.  That idea is twice expressed:  once in plain words, ’the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom’; and once figuratively as being cut out of the mountain without hands.  By the mountain we are probably to understand Zion, from which, according to many a prophecy, the Messiah King was to rule the earth (Ps. ii.; Isa. ii. 3).

The fulfilment of this prediction is found, not only in the supernatural birth of Jesus Christ, but in the spread of the gospel without any of the weapons and aids of human power.  Twelve poor men spoke, and the world was shaken and the kingdoms remoulded.  The seer had learned the omnipotence of ideas and the weakness of outward force.  A thought from God is stronger than all armies, and outconquers conquerors.  By the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, by the power of weakness in the preachers of the Cross, by the energies of the transforming Spirit, the God of heaven has set up the kingdom.  ‘It shall never be destroyed.’  Its divine origin guarantees its perpetual duration.  The kingdoms of man’s founding, whether they be in the realm of thought or of outward dominion, ‘have their day, and cease to be,’ but the kingdom of Christ lasts as long as the eternal life of its King.  He cannot die any more, and He cannot live discrowned.  Other forms of human association perish, as new conditions come into play which antiquate them; but the kingdom of Jesus is as flexible as it is firm, and has power to adapt to itself all conditions in which men can live.  It will outlast earth, it will fill eternity; for when He ’shall have delivered up the kingdom to His Father,’ the kingdom, which the God of heaven set up, will still continue.

It ‘shall not be left to other people.’  By that, seems to be meant that this kingdom will not be like those of human origin, in which dominion passes from one race to another, but that Israel shall ever be the happy subjects and the dominant race.  We must interpret the words of the spiritual Israel, and remember how to be Christ’s subject is to belong to a nation who are kings and priests.

The destructive power is graphically represented.  The stone, detached from the mountain, and apparently self-moved, dashes against the heterogeneous mass of iron and clay on which the colossus insecurely stands, and down it comes with a crash, breaking into a thousand fragments as it falls.  ‘Like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors’ (Daniel ii. 35) is the debris, which is whirled out of sight by the wind.  Christ and His kingdom have reshaped the world.  These ancient, hideous kingdoms of blood and misery are impossible now.  Christ and His gospel shattered the Roman empire, and cast Europe into another mould.  They have destructive work to do yet, and as surely as the sun rises daily, will do it.  The things that can be shaken will be shaken till they fall, and human society will never obtain its stable form till it is moulded throughout after the pattern of the kingdom of Christ.