THE PROPHECY OF THE IMAGE

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THE PROPHECY OF THE IMAGE



Daniel 2. 31-45

31 ¶ Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.

32 This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,

33 His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

34 Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

35 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

36 ¶ This is the dream; and we will tell the interpretation thereof before the king.

37 Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory.

38 And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

39 And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth.

40 And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

41 And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.

42 And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.

43 And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

44 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 for ever.

45 Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.



The dream of the Image was perfectly fulfilled according to Daniel’s interpretation:

Gold The Neo-Babylonian Empire, from 606 BC

Silver The Medo-Persian Empire, from 538 BC

Brass The Greek (Macedonian) Empire, from 331 BC

Iron The Kings of the North and of the South merging into the Roman Empire (two legs North
with East, South with West) from 282 BC

Iron and Clay The two blocs, West (with South) and East (with North) develop into two-
party states



This prophecy is duplicated, but with added details, in Daniel 7. There the four successive Empires are shown in the vision as four beasts:



Lion The Neo-Babylonian Empire

Bear The Medo-Persian Empire

Leopard The Greek (Macedonian) Empire

Beast The Kings of the North and of the South merging into the Roman Empire



On the merging of the Kings of the North and of the South into the Roman Empire, see the section titled The Vision of the Fourth Kingdom



In the Image dream, the final arrival of the Kingdom of God is symbolized as the Stone cut without hands. In Daniel’s interpretation (verse 45), the Stone is said to represent the REVELATION (VISION) AND ITS INTERPRETATION, that is, its sureness and reliability (rock-like solidity): “45 Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.” Likewise in the beast vision of Chapter 7 of Daniel, the arrival of the Kingdom of God (in the person of the Ancient of Days taking His Judgment Seat) is accompanied by the Opening of Books, that is, with the revealing of divine secrets or mysteries. Also in Chapter 12 of Daniel, Daniel is informed that the revelation of what the vision means is “sealed up” till the end-time. The difference in Chapter 12 is that Daniel is then given an exact date for the termination of the sealing, that is, for the revealing of the previously-sealed secrets: the revelation will be 1290 days from the time of the placing of abominable filth on the desecrated Temple site. A blessing is then invoked on him who waits thereafter till the 1335 days. This shows the opening of the sealed revelation is not the conclusion of the matter, but is followed by a time of blessing for the faithful, watching believer. So reverting to the dream of the Image, we understand that the Stone, being the revelation and its interpretation, surely to be fulfilled, is the coming of the REVELATION OF THE PREVIOUSLY SEALED SECRETS AT THE END-TIME. This is the Rock on which Christ promised He would build His Church. (Matthew 16. 18: the Rock is the REVELATION of Who Christ is, as given by God the Father to Peter.) In other words, the arrival of the Kingdom of God begins as the arrival of the REVELATION given to His people. It then GROWS INTO A KINGDOM WHICH COVERS THE EARTH AND SUBDUES EVERY OTHER KINGDOM. This is so, because the revealing of the Word is the revealing of Christ Himself, Who is the Word.

Thus, Christ’s Coming is in TWO PHASES, FIRST, the REVELATION (Greek apokalupsis) OF CHRIST, then SECONDLY, His PHYSICAL PRESENCE (Greek parousia). Accordingly, in the New Testament (King James Version), there are two different words translated “coming” with respect to the Coming of Christ at the end-time. One is apokalupsis, the “revealing” of Christ, and the other is parousia, the “physical presence” of Christ. (Apokalupsis is translated “coming” in I Corinthians 1. 7, and elsewhere in I Peter 1.7 “appearing”, I Peter 1. 13 “revelation”, II Thessalonians 1. 7 and I Peter 4. 13 “revealed”; parousia is translated “coming” in Matthew 24. 27, 37 etc. passim.) We find in Luke Chapter 17. 30 that Christ promised The Son of Man (Christ Himself) would be revealed (same word as in apokalupsis) at the end-time, as He was in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah. That is, just before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God was revealed in the form of a man, whom Abraham called Adonai (Lord, God), and Who revealed the thoughts of Sarah in the tent, out of sight. (Genesis 19.) Abraham knew by this, the man was God Himself. Jesus promised the same would be repeated at the end of the present age.

Paul in II Thessalonians 1. 7f. gives further details about this “revelation” (apokalupsis) of Christ at the end, that it would be performed in a “whipping, fiery flame” (the same words used of the pillar of fire which appeared to Moses in the burning bush). Paul also says it would be accompanied by the “angels of His power”. The angels of God’s power are covered from normal human sight in heavenly clouds (as was the Angel in the cloudy pillar at the Exodus, and as were the cherubim in Ezekiel’s vision at the River Chebar). Daniel Chapter 7 relates that One Like the Son of Man (symbolizing the “kingdom of the saints of the Most High”) came to the Ancient of Days in the “clouds of heaven”, and Paul said identically that the saints would be “caught up” (“raptured”) at the end-time “in the clouds”, to meet Christ (the Ancient of Days) in the air. The Revelation-coming (apokalupsis), preceding our meeting with the physical presence (parousia) of Christ in the air, Paul said in that first chapter of Thessalonians, will be to visit fiery destruction on those who refused to obey the Gospel. The absorbing of the divine Revelation (apokalupsis) in the heart of the believer, on the other hand, who overcomes the pressures of the last Laodicean Church Age (Revelation 3. 31), will quicken even the mortal body of the believer, as it is digested (Revelation 10. 10) and lived out, until the final moment of transformation at the Rapture and the meeting with Christ (parousia) in the air. All this is exactly paralleled in the visions of Daniel. A fiery stream went forth from the presence of the Ancient of Days in the vision in Chapter 7 of Daniel, the books were opened, and then judgment was given against the Beast to be destroyed in flames; then One Like the Son of Man was taken up in the clouds of heaven and was granted the kingdom without end. Likewise in the dream of the Image the Image was reduced to powdery chaff by the Stone, like the chaff which is burned by the Israelite farmers in the summer-time, and the Wind (of the Spirit of God) blew it away; the Stone (Revelation) then grew into a mountain which covered the earth.

Now, just as in Chapter 12 a date is set for the revealing of the secrets, here in the dream of the Image, a political situation is envisaged when the Stone (Revelation) arrives: there are ten toes at the very bottom of the Image, and it is “in the days of these kings” that the Kingdom-Revelation (apokalupsis) strikes it. “Kings” or “rulers” is the Aramaic/Hebrew word used to describe potentates and heads of state of all varieties, though nowadays we tend to use neutral words like “president” or “prime minister” rather than “king”. The time-element in Daniel Chapter 12, as shown infra, gives the precise date of the revealing of the divine secrets as February 28 1963. This was when seven angels commissioned Brother Branham on Sunset Mountain, Arizona, to reveal to his congregation in Jeffersonville the secrets of the Seven Seals which would be revealed to him first by Christ. The angels passed up from Brother Branham and formed a huge stratospheric cloud 35 miles in diameter which was photographed across several states and has not been explained by secular science to this day. In the immense halo of cloud appeared the face of Christ looking down on rich America duplicating, as it happened, Hoffman’s Head of Christ looking in sorrow on the rich young ruler. The REVELATION thus given by God at that time commenced the end-time scenario prophesied in Daniel and the Book of Revelation. Note that this was the culmination of Christ’s self-revelation at the end-time: it had already built up beforehand in the ministry of discernment of the thoughts of the heart (the revealing of the Son of Man as in the days of Sodom, Luke 17. 30) with which Brother Branham was supernaturally endowed, and which was ministered to him through the Angel of the Covenant (Christ) appearing in the form of a pillar of fire identical to that foretold as to occur at the end-time by Paul in the passage of Thessalonians. This REVELATION (apokalupsis) Coming is what strikes the Image on the feet at the time of its culmination, when ten “toes” or divisions of the Eastern and Western blocs are in existence, each under a two-party system. Accordingly, we find ten chief powers ruled the world at that time in 1963, divided into a Western and an Eastern bloc, five in each bloc, with a “big toe” chief power in each bloc (USA and USSR-Russia). The details are given below of each power.

Note in the Image dream these two legs are the old Roman Empire in its two major divisions. The Roman Empire was politically divided into two camps, the Western Latin based in Rome, and the Eastern Greek based in Constantinople. The Empire physically divided into these two divisions in the fifth century AD. The old Western division turned into the Holy Roman Empire after it was “Christianized”, with barbarian chiefs ruling by the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope of Rome, and the Eastern division fell under the power of the Greek Orthodox form of Roman Christianity, and later, when Constantinople was destroyed by the Turks, migrated into Russia, where Moscow became a new Rome for the Orthodox. Thus Roman Catholicism remained the dominant form of Christianity in the West, employing the most powerful Western leaders as its political defenders, and Orthodoxy ruled in Russia. In the twentieth century the dominant political power became the USA, and increasingly, especially since President Kennedy in the 1960s, Roman Catholicism has dominated the North American political scene. A huge proportion of the US Congress is currently affiliated to Roman Catholicism. Similarly in Russia, after the interlude of Communism, the state has now reverted to its native Russian Orthodoxy. Thus in the two major divisions of the modern world, West and East, Rome continues to have the sway, as Daniel’s vision promised it would, latterly in its ecclesiastical (“Holy Roman”) form. The wealth of the world, robbed from the people in the Middle Ages and up to the present time, is in the hands of the Roman and Russian ecclesiastical regimes. It is by their accumulated wealth in gold and investments that these corrupt, Christianized, systems control politics. (Cf. the Image’s head of gold, controlling the whole. Nebuchadnezzar, the actual head of gold in Daniel’s vision, robbed the Temple at Jerusalem of the immense stocks of gold deposited there by Solomon, who had been given his riches by God Himself. This wealth was plundered by the succeeding empires of the Image in turn till it came into the possession of Rome, and finally of the Holy Roman Empire.) The modern representatives of the Holy Roman Empire are the “iron” (ancient Roman) element persisting in the feet of the Image to the end-time. They dominate by the old Roman techniques of military and financial power. In the Middle Ages and up to the present time these powerful rulers were constantly opposed by popular protest movement backed by the humble Bible-believing, popular, preachers of the day. The popular movements are the clay element in the feet. In the early Middle Ages the clay comprised the predominantly Jewish Spirit-filled Church, persecuted and driven out by the Roman hierarchy. The ancient prophets compared the House of Israel to the clay to be smashed by the invader coming from the north (Isaiah 29. 16, 41. 25, 45. 9, 64. 8, Jeremiah 18. 4, 6, 43. 9), whilst Nebuchadnezzar was the iron (Jeremiah 28. 14). This ancient Jewish Church survived the horrors of Dark Age repression in the Alps and other out-of-the-way wilderness retreats. In the Reformation the Judaeo-Christian party became more powerful, especially after the founding of America. Through the American Revolution and the following French and Russian Revolutions, popular movements spread throughout the world, though their original Bible-believing power in the American original was diluted over time, and even eradicated in the more stringent Communist regimes.

Two-party systems are the hallmark of the modern world, representing essentially the “iron” (old Imperial, conservative) and “clay” (Protestant, popular, liberal) factions. Note these two groups are said to “intermingle” in the dream and its interpretation, and this is explained by Daniel as by “intermarriage” (by the “seed of men”). This is the custom in the Roman system, that intermarriage with people having other forms of religion is permitted so long as the children of such a marriage are brought up in the Roman belief-system. This is an attempt to break the power of the opposing social system.



The Ten Toes:

Right Foot: U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Italy;

Left Foot: U.S.S.R., Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania.



The Conference on Disarmament (CD) is the successor to various Geneva-based arms control bodies dating back to 1960. The first of these was the ‘Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament’, comprising the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and a small balance of their Eastern European and Western allies. In 1962, the Committee was expanded to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), incorporating eight additional representatives from countries which declared themselves neutral or nonaligned in relation to both of the cold war blocs. A significant weakness in the early years was that two further emerging nuclear weapon states, France and China, remained outside the ENDC, although France had been invited to join. The ENDC was initially instructed by the UN General Assembly, and reported back to it. In 1969, it was enlarged to include eight more members, changing its name to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD). Five more members were added in 1975. In January 1979, in conjunction with decisions taken at UNSSOD I, the CCD was enlarged again, and constituted as the Committee on Disarmament. It took the name by which it is known today, the Conference on Disarmament, in 1984. Note that when the Ten-Nation Committee was formed it comprised five western powers (= five toes on the right foot), headed by Eisenhower of the U.S. (the big toe), and Eisenhower means “Iron Hewer,” and five eastern powers (= five toes on the left foot), headed by Khruschev of the U.S.S.R. (the other big toe), and Khruschev means “Clay.” These ten powers are the precise fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel 2:33-34, 41-43, in which the Babylonian Image at the end time has ten “toes” composed of mixed iron and clay. In the “days of these kings,” the Bible says (Daniel 2:44), the God of Heaven will set up His Kingdom. This Kingdom arrives in the form of a Stone hewed out of the mountain without hands (= the Virgin-born Son of God), which smashes into the feet of iron and clay and demolishes the whole image. Thereafter the Stone grows into a Mountain which covers the whole earth. The Stone is the Rock on which Christ promised He would build His Church (Matthew 16. 7-18), that is the Rock of Divine Revelation. The setting up of the Kingdom of God on earth began on February 28 1963 when the Revelation of the Seven Seals began to unfold on Sunset Mountain near Tucson Arizona. It will grow into a Mountain (Kingdom) at the Rapture which will fill the whole earth.



Right Foot:

U.S. — President (Dwight D. Eisenhower 20 Jan 1953 to 20 Jan 1961) John F. Kennedy 20 Jan 1961 to 22 Nov 1963

Canada — Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker 21 Jun 1957 to 22 April 1963

U.K. — Prime Minister Harold Macmillan 10 Jan 1957 to 19 Oct 1963

France — President of the Republic Charles de Gaulle 8 Jan 1959 to 28 April 1969

Italy — President of the Council of Ministers (Fernando Tambroni 25 Mar 1960 to 26 Jul 1960) Amintore Fanfani 26 July 1960 to 21 Jun 1963.

Left Foot:

U.S.S.R. — First Secretary of the Central Committee Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev 7 Sept 1953 to 14

Oct 1964

Poland — President of the Council of State Aleksander Zawadzki 20 Nov 1952 to 7 Aug 1964

Czechoslovakia — President of the Republic Antonin Novotny 19 Nov 1957 to 22 March 1968

Bulgaria — Chairman of the Presidium of the National Assembly Dimitur Ganev Vurbanov 1 Dec 1958

to 20 April 1964

Rumania — (President of the Presidium of the Grand National Assembly Ion Gheorghe Maurer 11 Jan

1958 to 21 Mar 1961) Chairman of the Council of State Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej 21 March 1961 to 19

March 1965

These were the latest leaders of the 10 Nations before the Committee expanded in 1962 to 18. All of them were still in power on 28 February 1963.



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