The Rise and Fall of Nations

We trace Nebuchadnezzar’s dream from glittering statue to heaven-cut stone and explore why empires fade while God’s kingdom grows. History, politics, and daily life converge in a call to shift from grasping for control to practicing near faithfulness with durable hope.

• the rise and fall of global powers through Daniel 2
• why human effort cannot found a lasting kingdom
• political optimism versus historical limits
• small beginnings of God’s kingdom that only increase
• replacing doom-scrolling with near faithfulness
• investing in spiritual inheritance over fragile legacies
• hope that resists cynicism and persists in labor and prayer

Let us pray that you would help us to hear these things and to believe these things and to do these things

Transcript

Reading Daniel 2:25–49

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our scripture reading today is the remainder of chapter 2 from Daniel, and I'm going to invite us to stand for the reading of God's Word. This reading is a little lengthy. Beginning in verse 25, the Word of God reads this way. Then Ariak brought in Daniel before the king in haste, and said thus to him, I have found among the exiles from Judah a man who will make known to the king the interpretation. The king declared to Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, Are you able to make known to me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation? Daniel answered the king and said, No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your dream and the visions of your head as you lay in bed are these. To you, O king, as you lay in bed, came thoughts of what would be after this, and he who reveals mysteries made known to you what is to be. But as for me, this mystery has been revealed to me not because of any wisdom that I have, more than all the living, but in order that the interpretation may be made known to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your mind. You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold altogether were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors, and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. This was the dream. Now we will tell the king its interpretation. You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom the power and the might and the glory, and into whose hand he has given wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all, you are the head of gold. Another kingdom, inferior to you, shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth. And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things, and like iron that crushes it shall break and crush all these. And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms, and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever. Just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure. Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face and paid homage to Daniel, and commanded that an offering of incense be offered up to him. The king answered and said to Daniel, Truly your God is God of gods, and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery. Then the king gave Daniel high honors and many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon. Daniel made a request of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon, but Daniel remained at the king's court. This is God's word. Thanks be to God. You may be seated, and may God bless us this reading and preaching of his word. In May of 1991, a Soviet astronaut named Sergei Krikolev launched into space. And his mission was to spend some time on the Soviet space station doing experiments for a little while and then to return home. When he left Earth, the Soviet Union was a global superpower, on par with the United States. They controlled nuclear weapons, they were a permanent member of the UN Security Council. They were militarily dominant across Eastern Europe. But in December of that same year, in a turn that shocked the world, the Soviet Union collapsed overnight. And Sergei was told in space, he he knew something was going on. He heard news reports and he kept asking, like, who's in charge, what's going on. And he was told, we apologize, but you must remain in space as the country that sent you no longer exists. The astronaut was stranded for in orbit for 311 days until it could be determined who would take responsibility for him and who would pay for his return home and receive him. Finally, he was brought home and he landed in Kazakhstan, a citizen of a country that no longer existed. During the 20th century, and even in our own lifetimes, we have witnessed global empires rise and fall. And we like to imagine that we live in a world now where the dust of the major world wars has settled and the powers that now exist are stable and permanent, and that it's just going to be this way for the rest of history. But I don't know where we get this idea from. Certainly not from how history has gone up until this point. As we continue studying Daniel, we come to Nebuchadnezzar's dream, his first dream here, which is about the rise and fall of nations, the rise and fall of global empires. And in the midst of this dream, in the midst of nations rising and falling, in the dream, God sets up a kingdom that will never be shaken. Nebuchadnezzar must not forget this dream. He does end up forgetting the dream, he shouldn't. But we must never forget the dream either, because it is a dream that will come true. One of the primary lessons here in this story is that in a world of political instability, in a world where nations are rising and falling all the time, only God's kingdom endures. In a world of political instability, only God's kingdom endures. As we unpack that, we're going to look at three things about the kingdom of God as it compares to the kingdoms of men. The first is that God's kingdom comes from heaven. The second is that God's kingdom always starts small but only increases. And then the third is that God's kingdom will never end, and why that should give us a tremendous hope in the midst of nations rising and falling. So first, God's kingdom comes from heaven. We learn here that God's kingdom does not come from human effort and is not established by human effort, but it comes from God's intervention. The two most important features of Nebuchadnezzar's dream are a statue and a stone. What's clear is that the statue represents real historical earthly kingdoms. There's a lot of wonderful scholarship on exactly what who these kingdoms represent. There is some debate, and I have a position, but it's not necessary for me to get into that. But the exact identity of these kingdoms is debated, but it doesn't matter much exactly who they refer to because the big points are the same and the end result is the same. Not only are they earthly kingdoms, real historical kingdoms, but they are also global kingdoms. They have dominion over all of the earth. Look at verses 37 and 38. It says, You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, the might, and the glory. Kind of sounds like the traditional ending to the Lord's Prayer, Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Nebuchadnezzar at this point has the kingdom, power, and glory, and into whose hand he has given wherever they dwell, the children of man and the beasts of the field, and over all of it, ruling over them all. That language, it reminds us of God's blessing to Adam and Eve in the garden, that they should be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the whole earth. It reminds us of the traditional ending to the Lord's Prayer that it is God who has dominion over the whole earth. But the language describes a worldwide dominion. These are kingdoms that have this global dominion, and they also follow after one another, and they replace what came before. In verse 39, it says, another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze which shall rule over all the earth, and then we have the kingdom of iron that crushes everything that came before. So the dream is really about the rise and fall of what we would call global superpowers. The rise and fall of global superpowers. And though each of these kingdoms is different, they're all made of different materials, they have different um they have different characters, they are all cut from the same cloth. They're all part of the same statue, they're all iterations of the same thing. They all represent the best that human effort can accomplish. This is the best of what mankind can accomplish when we all get together to try to do something, just like at the Tower of Babel in this dream is happening here in Babylon. This represents the best of human effort. In the midst of everything that mankind is doing with the rise and the fall of the kingdoms, God sets up a kingdom. But it is not one more kingdom that's in the line of earthly kingdoms. If you look at verse 34, it says, as you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. So the stone does not come from within earthly kingdoms, it's not part of the statue, it's something completely different. It comes from the outside and it strikes the statue and it destroys the statue, and the statue's gone, it's blown away like chaff, and the stone remains. It reminds me of David's small stone that felled the fearsome Goliath, a stone that comes from heaven and takes down the kingdoms of man. The broad point here is that the establishment of God's kingdom on earth cannot be accomplished by human effort. It must be accomplished by God. Only God can establish his kingdom on earth. And there are both political and personal implications of this. And I want to start just by thinking politically for a moment, but ultimately I'd like to land this in the arena of personal responsibility. So consider another illustration from Soviet history. This is Soviet Sunday, if you didn't know. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the the uh Tsarist Russia, the Russian Empire, was was a deeply unequal society where a small group of elites held enormous wealth while millions of Russian peasants struggled to survive. And there were revolutionaries, and the revolutionaries believed that they had identified the problem. Lenin argued that society was broken precisely because it was run by elites: managers, business owners, administrators, people they believed had inflated salaries, and who were basically glorified bookkeepers and accountants and didn't represent any real skill that justified their high-paying salary. It was a job that any ordinary person could do making workers' wages. So when the revolution came, they removed all of these bureaucrats and all of these elites. Of course, they had to do that violently, so they, because they weren't going to go willingly, so they imprisoned many of them. In some cases, they executed them. And their thinking was simple. It was once we get rid of these elites, once we seize control and remove the problem, then finally society will work like it's supposed to. So they did that. But within a short time, within just a few years, the nation was facing economic collapse. Fuel shortages, food shortages, constant uprisings, peasant uprisings. And even Lenin eventually admitted that the country could not function without the very people that they had removed and imprisoned and executed. The problem was not just bad leadership. The problem was deeper. It was a problem, a problem that we can't seem to remember historically. We keep making the same mistakes. It was a problem of arrogance, a problem of overconfidence in what human government is able to accomplish, assuming that we can do far more than we're actually capable of doing. And being an atheistic regime, the Soviet regime believed that human effort alone could fix what was broken in the world if we just banded together and enacted the right policies and did the right things. And the very best intentions, their intentions were to create a just and equal society, created instead a fearsome and a brutal idol. Zoran Mamdani has a Carhartt jacket that he recently made some appearances in, which is honestly, it's pretty fire. But it has stitched on the neckline his slogan. He recently said with enthusiasm, there is no problem too large for government to solve. And this represents a profound optimism in human abilities. And it's, you know, it's no wonder that he's a charismatic figure and he's very popular. It's a very optimistic message. But I fear that both history and scripture suggest the opposite. That there is no problem too large that the government cannot make worse. That's some one of the lessons of history. And this is also true on an individual level. So political problems aside, all of us face many personal problems that we're dealing with: strained marriages, wayward children, difficulty making ends meet, trying to find work, whatever it might be, we're all facing our own personal problems. And the same principle is true for us. Often, the more that we try to seize control of our issues, the more that we try to control all of the variables and the outcomes, the more we do that, the more we make matters worse. We're just, we're not very good at controlling things. We try to seize control, but we we we just make matters worse. What we need to do is not to give up and to put forward no effort, but what we need to do is to be humble with our efforts and to put our faith and our hope in God. Just look at Daniel. Daniel, throughout this story, is consistently giving glory to God. In verse 27, Daniel says, I cannot do what the king asks, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. In verse 37, Daniel says to Nebuchadnezzar that it is the God of heaven who has given Nebuchadnezzar dominion over all the earth. And in verse 30, Daniel says that the interpretation was made known to him not because of anything special about Daniel, not because of his wisdom, but because the God of heaven had mercy. All of us tend to overestimate what we are able to accomplish by human effort. And we tend to underestimate what God alone can accomplish. The kingdom of God will be established on earth, just like the dream says, but it will be established by no human hand. So how is it then that God's kingdom comes and how can we join in what God is doing? Let's turn to point two. God's kingdom always starts small but only increases. While the most impressive efforts of man are doomed to fade, God's kingdom starts small but only grows in glory. Another comparison that we can make between the kingdoms of men and the kingdom of God is that this the statue depreciates and diminishes with each new iteration. It starts with gold and then it goes to silver and then to bronze and then to iron and then to iron mixed with clay. So each new iteration is a depreciation and a diminishing of what came before. While God's kingdom starts small, but it eventually grows to cover the whole earth. So they're sort of the exact opposite of one another. Nebuchadnezzar is the head of gold, but after him will come a lesser kingdom of silver, which is likely the Medo-Persian Empire, who we will meet later in Daniel. They conquer Babylon. Silver is not as precious as gold, and then after them will come a kingdom of bronze, which is still less precious, and so on and so forth. As history progresses, glory diminishes. As history progresses, the glory of man diminishes. The creations and institutions of man tend to deteriorate in quality over time. I'll just provide a few examples. All of us know that cars are a depreciating asset. And I bought a new car back in 2020. I'm glad that I did, but they begin to lose value the moment you sign the paper and you drive the car off the lot. You just lost two or three thousand dollars just by leaving the lot. All of us know that, but it's bigger than that. Because think about it like this, too. Julie and I have been slowly remodeling our kids' bedrooms, and as we do that, we get them new furniture. And what we used to do when we were younger is we used to buy IKEA furniture. It made sense at one time, but today the cost of IKEA furniture has gone up so much and the quality has gone down so much. We're being hit by inflation on both ends. The quality has gotten worse and it's gotten more expensive. It no longer makes sense. So we've been what we've been doing is buying antique and vintage furniture pieces from estate sales. And recently we got a dresser that's about 200 years old. And as I went to pick it up and bring it back to our house, it struck me, you know, someone made this piece of furniture 200 years ago, and here it is today, and it still has value, and we're still using it. And it struck me that I'm not sure that we are making anything today that will be around 200 years from now. Anything, nothing, not a piece of computer technology, not a piece of furniture. I made this pulpit, and it could be that this will be around 200 years from now because it's a historically significant pulpit. But I can't think of a single thing that we're making today that will that will last for longer than a few decades at best. Um we simply don't make things like we used to, and our culture now is in many ways, and not just American culture, but globally, our culture now is in many ways far less glorious than our grandparents and our great grandparents. This doesn't mean that we haven't made certain improvements in our culture, but in many ways we are less glorious. To provide another example, can let's think about it from on an institutional level. Consider a place like Princeton Seminary. Princeton Seminary, founded in 1820. To train ministers. Throughout its decorated history, it has boasted some of the most important American theologians of all time. But over 200 years later, now it is a very different place than the time of its founding. Today it has almost completely abandoned Christian Orthodoxy. And it basically teaches, if you look at its curriculum, it basically teaches progressive political activism instead of theology to ministers in training. And this change did not happen overnight. But it happened gradually and slowly over time as leadership changed and as pressures from outside, cultural pressures shaped it. And it's not alone. All of the great classic seminaries have gone that route. But Princeton University and other in Princeton Seminary and other institutions like it teach us that at an institution's founding, whether it's a denomination or a university or a seminary, whatever it might be, at an institution's founding, it is the most biblically faithful that it will ever be. At its founding, it is the most biblically faithful that it will ever be. And it might hang on for a hundred years or a hundred and fifty years, but eventually it will go the way of all flesh, and its glory will fade. These are the things that man makes. But what about God's kingdom? How is it different? Look at verse 35. It says, The stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. So the kingdom of God starts as a small stone, but it grows to become a mountain that fills the whole earth. It's the opposite of the statue. It's cut by no human hand. It starts small, but it grows. What is man-made is doomed to fade and to go the way of all flesh, but what God establishes is destined to outlive earthly kingdoms. Nothing can stop it. And slowly but surely it grows to fill the whole earth. This is how church historian Philip Schaff put it in his summary of church history. He wrote, Christianity has thus passed through many stages of its earthly life. He wrote this in the 1800s. Christianity has thus passed through many stages of its earthly life, and yet has hardly reached the period of full manhood in Christ Jesus. It has outlived the destruction of Jerusalem, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, fierce persecutions from without, and heretical corruptions from within, and behold, it still lives, and lives in greater strength and wider extent than ever. Single denominations and sects, after having served their purpose, may disappear and go the way of all flesh. But the Church Universal of Christ is too strong for the gates of hell. And that's what Daniel is teaching us. The kingdom of God, wherever it shows up, is like David's small stone, but it is imbued with the anointing of God, and it is destined to fill the whole earth. So what does this mean for us? Well, think about it this way: we are constantly and consistently overwhelmed by media, social media, legacy media, all kinds of just conversation. We're overwhelmed with large problems that our country and that our world is facing. And I don't care where you are on both sides of the aisle, we're overwhelmed with these things, whether it's inflation or climate change or immigration or the housing crisis or what's happening in this city or that city, we are consumed with issues that, frankly, we as individuals have almost no power to do anything about. Problems that are way too, way above our pay grade. And we forget the power of God's kingdom. Let's, let's uh, just this past week, for example, I was, I went back and forth between completely deleting my social media and staying on social media, but I I chose not to ultimately not to delete it, maybe because I'm addicted, but also because of because of the fear of missing out. I don't want to miss out on important things that are happening. You've heard of FOMO, but have uh I was recently introduced to the phrase JOMO. Have you heard of JOMO? What about the joy of missing out? Okay? W what about the things that we're missing out that are right in front of us because we're focused on these big, larger-than-life problems that really there's almost nothing that we can do to address? What if we took our focus a little bit more off of the big problems of the world and we look at the smaller problems that are right in front of us, that often we don't want to look at, that often we want to distract ourselves from by looking at the big problems and we want to try to address these big things when really like we just need to, you know, pay our debts and our bills and take care of our children and help our neighbors. And there's what about the little things that are right in front of us that we tend to ignore? Raising our children in the knowledge of the Lord, helping our neighbors, helping them dig their car out of a uh out of the unforgiving ice because our neighbor is a single mom and she has no one to help her. Uh, sharing the gospel with our friends, working toward healthy churches in our neighborhoods. How about let's just make our neighborhood great again? Let's just have a focus on the neighborhoods that we live in. It's the little stones that we stack now that in the next generation and in generations to come will become immovable mountains. Don't fall into the trap of getting distracted from the little acts of faithfulness because we're so focused on big issues that frankly we don't have much control over. So put down the phone and focus on seeking God's kingdom in the little things right in front of you. Don't forget the power of small stones in the hands of God's anointed. Point three, God's kingdom will never end. Because God's kingdom will never end, we of all people should be most hopeful. No empire lasts forever. That's one of the big messages of Daniel II. Uh all of these empires that they thought would last forever, didn't. But there's the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Seleucid Empire, and then the Roman Empire, and you've probably heard of the Roman Empire, and you probably don't know that much about it. But none of them lasted. They all thought they would last forever. It's very likely that a map of the world 200 years from now, if we should still have 200 years of history left before the Lord returns, but if we could catch a glimpse of that, it would likely look unrecognizable to us. The nations that we now know would probably be gone, replaced by nations that we have not yet heard of. Consider the housing market for just a moment. Prices are high. But did you know that in the past 80 years, housing prices have dropped one time, and they dropped in 2008 during the housing crisis. But aside from that, in the past 80 years, they have consistently risen. I'm not a big follower of Dave Ramsey, but Dave Ramsey says that we should not expect to see them drop in our lifetimes, which is historically speaking, is probably true. They will only continue to rise. All of this can lead us to feeling hopeless and helpless, especially if you're on the outside of the market, if you're on the inside of the market, maybe not, but it can lead us to feeling hopeless and helpless, and a nihilism can subtly creep in and we begin believing that there is nothing that we can do to improve our situation. So why bother trying? Why bother participating in the system at all? There's nothing that we can do. As Christians, we must never succumb to a nihilism like that. Even if we're on the verge of a financial crisis in our culture, even if we even if we should find ourselves one day on the verge of a global war, we should not lose hope. Why not? Because we are citizens of a kingdom that will never come to an end, that can never come to an end. Look at verse 44. It says, In the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. Nations will rise and fall, leaders will come and go, movements will ascend, and then they will collapse. Institutions will be built up and they'll be pretty for a moment, and then they will decay. But God's kingdom will outlive each and every one of them, and it will still be there when the dust settles, taking new shapes and new forms, but God's kingdom nonetheless. So ultimately our hope must be not in the works of men, not in human leaders, not in nations or political parties, not in businesses or institutions, but in the kingdom of God. Not even in denominations or particular churches, but in God's kingdom alone. As a carpenter and a contractor, the most painful thing that I ever have to do is to undo work that I've already done. Does that make sense? And every contractor in here is like, yeah, that's right. That is the most painful thing. To undo work that I've already done. If I so if I spend a day installing something only later to discover that a mistake was made and we have to spend another day taking it apart and rebuilding it, that's painful. And it's painful because it's costly, but it's all it's also painful even if I'm getting paid to redo it. It's still painful because the deeper pain is the reality that all of that time and all of that effort that I put into it was for nothing. That I poured lots of time and effort into something that was all for nothing. Everything that mankind does in the power of the flesh will eventually be undone. Everything that mankind builds in the power of the flesh will be undone. So if we put our hope in man, in nations, in businesses, in our own reputation, we will quickly run out of hope. But all time and energy that is put toward God's kingdom will endure, even if everything else should fall apart, even if the business falls apart, even if the denomination falls apart, even if the nation falls apart, any effort that we put into the kingdom of God will endure. You could amass a fortune personally and you could leave it to your kids as an inheritance, and it probably will not last one generation, statistically speaking. It'll make it to your kids, but it probably won't make it to your grandkids. Or if it makes it to your grandkids, it's not going to make it beyond that. It'll be squandered. That's how fortunes work. Or you could leave your children, or you could do both, but consider focusing on this one even more. You could leave your children a spiritual inheritance, teaching them God's word, pastoring them throughout life, giving them an example to follow, and that is an inheritance that will last a thousand generations, according to the promises of God. Let's do both, but let's make sure that we focus on leaving a spiritual inheritance. So to leave us with an application, I turn to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15, 58. He says, Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. In the Lord your labor is not in vain. There's a quote often attributed to Martin Luther. I'm not sure if he actually said it, but he might have said, If I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree today. If I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree today. The world may go to pieces tomorrow. Who knows what we're gonna what we will find on our newsfeeds and and on our reels in the coming week. It may all go to pieces. So what should we do? Should we give up? Should we uh cave into the nihilism and just say there's nothing we can do and nothing matters? We should continue to abound in the work of the Lord. We because we have hope. We should be like Daniel, who continued to pray three times a day, even when prayer was made illegal for a brief period. We'll get to that story later. We should be like Peter, James, and John in the book of Acts, who continued to preach and continued to pastor, even when they were beaten and when the officials said, We forbid you from speaking in the name of Jesus. They said, We must obey God rather than men, and they continued to preach. We should be like the churches in London during World War II, who continued to meet for worship amidst bombing raids, even when everything was falling apart, continued to meet for worship and to build the kingdom of God, which still endures today and will outlast the British Empire and will outlast the United States of America. We should follow our Lord Jesus, who was faithful to the very end, and who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross. For us, in the midst of political instability, only God's kingdom endures, because it comes from heaven, not from man. It starts small, but it grows, and it will never come to an end. Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, always abound in the work of the Lord to this end. Let us pray. Father, we pray that you would help us to hear these things and to believe these things and to do these things. Help us to believe that you have set up a kingdom, that in the days of Caesar, a stone came from heaven, a stone that the builders rejected, a stone that was cut from no human hand, but it has become the cornerstone of a new creation. And we, like living stones, are being knit together as we come to Him in faith. And we are being built up as a spiritual house in which the Holy Spirit dwells. And the gates of hell will never prevail against the church that Jesus Christ is building. So we thank you, Lord, for your mercy. We thank you that you've called us to yourself, you have allowed us to be part of your kingdom, and we pray that you would help us to put all of our faith and our hope in you. We pass through earthly kingdoms, we live in the midst of earthly kingdoms, we seek the good of the nations in which we live. We pray for them, we we seek their welfare, Lord, but ultimately our hope is not in man, and our hope is not in earthly kingdoms and what man can do, but our hope is in you. Help us to figure out what that means more and more as we place our faith in Jesus. In his name we pray. Amen. Amen. Let's sing together.