This note is interpretation, not translation, and the reading in it is Jon’s. Scripture describes two rules over the whole earth. One God sets up, and it is given. The other is built by people or handed over by the Slanderer, and it is taken. This note sets the verses side by side, so the difference can be seen in the texts themselves.
The kingdom God sets up. Daniel saw a stone cut out, not by hands, strike the image of gold and silver and iron, and it became a great mountain and filled the whole earth (Daniel 2:34–35); and the interpretation: in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed … it will crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it will stand forever (2:44). In the night vision the rule is given: to one like a son of man was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him (7:14), and then to the people of the holy ones of the Most High (7:27). The psalm says who installs the king while the nations plot: I have set my King on Zion, my holy mountain (Psalm 2:6). And Isaiah says who does the work: of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, the zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this (Isaiah 9:7; 9:6 in the Hebrew).
This book says it the same way. At the seventh trumpet the voices in the sky announce it as done: the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Anointed, and he will reign into the ages (11:15). It is announced from the sky, not built on the earth. When He comes, He comes Himself: the sky opens, the rider is called Faithful and True, he judges and makes war in fairness (19:11), and on his robe and on his thigh he has a name written: King of kings and Lord of lords (19:16). And those who reign with Him are given it: judgment was given to them, and they came to life and reigned with the Anointed (20:4). The note on the thousand years states what that passage says and takes no side on how it is to be understood; on who sets the kingdom up, the passage is plain.
The rule built from below. The first one is Babel: come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and let us make a name for ourselves (Genesis 11:4). God’s own comment on it is look, they are one people, and they all have one language … and now nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them (11:6), and He scatters them. The second is offered to Jesus by the Slanderer, from a very high mountain: all the kingdoms of the world and their glory … all these I will give you, if you will fall down and bow to me (Matthew 4:8–9); Luke adds for it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish (Luke 4:6). Jesus refused it. The third is in this book, and it is the same offer accepted: the dragon gave it its power and its throne and great authority (13:2), they bowed to the dragon, because it had given its authority to the animal (13:4), and it was given authority over every tribe and people and language and nation (13:7). The kings join it of one mind and give their kingdom to the animal (17:17).
Who drew the borders — Jon’s reading. God divided the nations and set their borders, so He is the only one with the right to rule across them. The Song of Moses says it: when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided the children of Adam, he set the boundaries of the peoples (Deuteronomy 32:8). The verse ends differently in the manuscripts — according to the number of the sons of Israel in the Hebrew, of the angels of God in the Greek, of the sons of God in the copy among the Dead Sea Scrolls — but on every reading the one who sets the borders is God. The Greek’s word for His dividing them, diaspeirō, is the one Genesis uses when He scatters Babel (11:9). Paul says it in Athens and gives the reason: he made from one every nation of people to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live, so that they would seek God, and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:26–27). You have set all the boundaries of the earth (Psalm 74:17); he makes nations great, and destroys them (Job 12:23); he removes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21).
And when He does rule across them, He does not erase them. Before the throne stands a great crowd … from every nation and tribes and peoples and languages (7:9); in the city the nations will walk by its light (21:24), and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (22:2). At Pentecost the crowd was confounded, because each one heard them speaking in his own language (Acts 2:6): God brought them together without taking their languages away. The verb is the one the Greek of Genesis uses for Babel’s confusion, synechēe (Genesis 11:9), though Luke does not draw the line. Babel tried to be one people with one language on its own terms (11:6); the one who gathers every tribe and people and language and nation under a single rule in this book is the animal (13:7). The nations are healed under His rule, not merged under another’s.
The difference — Jon’s reading. A one-world rule that people build, or that the Slanderer hands over in exchange for worship, is the counterfeit; the real one is set up by God and given. The marks are in the verses: one is cut out not by hands, the other is the work of let us build; one is given, the other is received if you will bow; one is announced from the sky, the other is raised up from the sea and the earth (13:1, 11).
So who sets it up? He does, and believers are never told to build it. They are told to pray for it: your kingdom come (Matthew 6:10). To proclaim it: this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come (24:14). To live as its citizens while they wait: our citizenship is in heaven, from which we eagerly wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus the Anointed (Philippians 3:20). And not to take it by force: my kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would be fighting (John 18:36). Daniel’s stone is the picture of all of it: the kingdom that fills the earth is the one no hand cut out.
Where this stops. The verses describe who sets the kingdom up; they do not give a date for it, and this note does not either. It names no present government or movement. Whether any modern plan for world government is the rule of 13:7 is a different question, and an answer to it would be a reading of history laid on the text.