⁶⁸ “You kept on looking until a stone was cut out not by hands, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and of molded clay and crushed them.

Daniel 2:34, 35.

69. What does that mean for all human rulerships?

⁶⁹ The fulfillment of this dramatic part of the prophetic dream is immediately ahead of us. According to this, every vestige or trace of the political world powers of human history, including the Eighth World Power, the United Nations, must forcibly be dissipated beyond reconstruction. All subsidiary kingdoms and human rulerships must likewise be cleared off the earth.

70, 71. By what agency does Jehovah bring about that worldwide destruction?

⁷⁰ That is God’s word, not man’s. It is not the work of the anointed remnant of spiritual Israelites, neither the work of the “great crowd” of fellow worshipers of Jehovah. The agency that the Almighty God Jehovah will use in bringing about that worldwide destruction was pictured in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as a “stone” that was cut out of a mountain without the aid of human hands. Hence, the “stone” must picture something that is produced by the Creator, the Sovereign Lord Jehovah. What the “stone” symbolized He inspired Daniel to explain, saying:

⁷¹ “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be brought to ruin. And the kingdom itself will not be passed on to any other people [as successors]. It will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, and it itself will stand to times indefinite; forasmuch as you beheld that out of the mountain a stone was cut not by hands, and that it crushed the iron, the copper, the molded clay, the silver and the gold.”​—Daniel 2:44, 45.

72, 73. (a) What is the “mountain” from which the “stone” is cut without hands? (b) The “stone” itself represents what, and what is taking place in connection with it now?

⁷² As the “stone” pictures a kingdom that the God of heaven sets up, the “mountain” must picture the source of kingdom power and authority, namely, the Universal Sovereignty of the King of Eternity, Jehovah God. The stonelike kingdom thus becomes a subsidiary part and agency of His universal sovereignty. It is his Messianic kingdom in the hands of his only-begotten Son, who became the Lord Jesus Christ. (Daniel 7:13, 14)

In reaching the climax of his account of the dream “image” that pictured the succession of political superpowers of world history, from the Babylonian Empire to the Anglo-American Dual World Power of today, Daniel went on to say:

“You kept on looking until a stone was cut out not by hands, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and of molded clay and crushed them. At that time the iron, the molded clay, the copper, the silver and the gold were, all together, crushed and became like the chaff from the summer threshing floor, and the wind carried them away so that no trace at all was found of them. And as for the stone that struck the image, it became a large mountain and filled the whole earth.”​—Daniel 2:34, 35.

2. What was symbolized by that “stone”?

² There can be no other explanation of the matter. That “stone” symbolized the Messianic kingdom in the hands of the anointed Son of the Sovereign Lord of the universe, Jehovah God.