But if this is so, why all the continued trouble? This is again in fulfillment of prophecy. For just as a contractor must remove an old structure from a building site before he can build a new skyscraper, so with God. He must first remove Satan’s present corrupt systems before they can be replaced with His Kingdom of blessings.

In Daniel 2:31-35 Daniel interpreted a prophetic dream of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. It pictured four empires that have dominated the world and their removal – Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.

“You saw, O king, a great image…The head of this image was of fine gold [Babylon],…its breast and arms of silver [Medo-Persia]…its belly and thighs of bronze [Greece], and its legs of iron [the Roman Empire, East and West], its feet partly of iron and partly of clay [picturing the Church-State systems of Europe with the ten toes symbolizing the nations of Christendom].”

“As you looked, a stone was cut out without human hands, and it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces, and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. Then the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:31-35 RSV).

This prophetic dream is another picture of the removal of Satan’s present corrupt systems — the symbolic heavens and earth — and replacing them with God’s Kingdom that will fill the whole earth with blessings.