We know how difficult it is to see things as they really are. Ophthamologists tell us that our eyes actually see everything upside down. Our brain then turns the information rightside up. And what we call a blue shirt is really everything but blue. Every other color is absorbed; blue is “rejected,” or reflected from the shirt. Objects which we call solid–tables and concrete blocks and your body–are mostly space, approximately the same proportion of space to matter in as the vast stellar world around us.
But it is not only the material world that is difficult to perceive aright. How easily we can be fooled by circumstances and people and our own deceitful hearts. We are warned in Scripture against “the deceitfulness of riches.” We are told to not look at “the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen.”
Even a cursory comparison between history as recorded by men and that in the Sacred Record shows a remarkable divergence of views. We could almost conclude that we were reading two different stories. Almost, but not quite.
As much as men would like to powder and paint the disfigured visage of fallen humanity, both holy and profane history agree on this: man is incorrigibly sinful. Conflict, sorrow, wars, corruption, rebellion are the rule, not the exception. The present painful chapter in the story of the American presidency is only the latest example to remind us of the corrupting influence of power–and the relentless link between action and consequence. As Senator Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) assessed the deepening crisis at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “There is no question but that the president, himself, has sown the wind, and he is reaping the whirlwind.”
All that men write, in spite of their best efforts, is written in the sand. Only God can write in the unchanging bedrock of eternal truth. I heard today that the wax figure of baseball great Roger Maris is being melted down to be made into the likeness of record breaker Mark McGwire. But his image will be set in the same malleable substance. And it’s only a matter of time….
Not only is man’s history flawed by sin and warped by our fragmentary perspective, it is transient at best, and misses the real story entirely. While recording in graphic and endless detail the wars through the ages, secular history takes no account of the Real War. The chronicles that men write tell of victors and losers, but never mention the True Champion, the Victor of Calvary’s Hill. They write of kingdoms that evaporate with the morning dew, yet leave unnoticed, unheralded, The Kingdom which shall never have an end.
Men’s history books are severely edited, amputated, eviscerated. None of the great days in history are found in the books that men publish. Creation isn’t there; it’s treated as a religious myth. The Fall isn’t there; man is getting better, isn’t he? (Now there’s a myth!) The confusion of languages at Babel, the Flood, the call of Abram, the giving of the Law, the Incarnation and the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, the Birth of the Church–none of them make it by man’s reckoning. because the great days in history are the days when God entered this world and forever changed its course.
History. We all have our part to play. And though we would not want to minimize the human government that is ordained by God, I dare say that in the end the work of a Christian mother or an assembly elder or a personal evangelist is far more significant than a president or a king.
Our part in history is often called biography. But we who watch it happen one day at a time call it life. How the passage of time fools us. It can lull us to sleep. “Brethren, the time is short” (1 Cor. 7:29). The Bible warns us that things do not “continue as they were from the beginning.” We all have a place in history, designed beforehand by God Himself (Eph. 2:10). Then let us redeem the time (Eph. 5:16). “For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed” (Rom. 13:11).