The Kingdom That Lasted Twelve Years

In 1934, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl released Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film designed to immortalize the Third Reich. The footage showed endless columns of soldiers marching in lockstep, banners stretching to the horizon, and one man standing above it all, receiving the adoration of millions. Adolf Hitler declared his empire would last a thousand years.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer watched it all from within Germany. He saw the spectacle, the manufactured glory, the cult of absolute power. And he knew it was a lie. From his study, and later from a prison cell in Tegel, Bonhoeffer clung to a different vision — one written twenty-five centuries earlier by a Hebrew exile named Daniel, who saw the Ancient of Days take His seat on a throne of blazing fire, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand. Before that throne, every pretender's dominion would be stripped away.

Hitler's thousand-year reich collapsed in twelve. The banners rotted. The columns scattered. Bonhoeffer did not live to see it — he was executed just weeks before Germany's surrender — but he died confident in what Daniel saw: one like a Son of Man, approaching the Almighty and receiving a dominion that would never be destroyed.

Every empire that exalts itself writes its own expiration date. Only the kingdom given by the Ancient of Days has no end.