The Game is Afoot

“In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.”  (Daniel 1:1–2)

Daniel lived in perilous times–times when man seemed big and God seemed small. Jehoiakim, good Josiah’s son, is dead. His lifeless corpse, hurled outside the walls of Jerusalem to rot in ignominy (Jer. 36:30), was a perennial reminder of the folly of rebellion against Nebuchadnezer, that little-big man who seemed to hold the whole world in his hands. 

Imagine the confusion in young Daniel’s mind as he watched Nebuchadnezer march into the hallowed precincts of God’s house, and with his filthy, pagan hands, steal God’s holy cups as common booty. God had killed men for much less, but despite his audacious profanity, Nebuchadnezer seemed only bigger and more alive. Facts of history are stubborn things, and these facts tell the story of a resurgent Babylonian pantheon side by side with the seemingly rather unathletic, arthritic and ineffective God of Israel. 

At least, this was the appearance of things, and as is always the case, it takes the eye of faith to see beyond and beneath such earthly happenstance. As Isaiah foretold, kingdoms rise and fall by the hand of God and not mere men. “Scarcely have they been planted, scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth than He blows on them and they wither away” (Isa. 40: 24). Jerusalem fell in 605 BC, and again in 597 BC, and at last in 586 BC, not despite God’s faithfulness but because of it. As Dr. D. Ralph Davis, my Old Testament professor at RTS liked to say, “Boys, God is faithful and He will kill you!” It wasn’t the little-gods of Babylon that gave Jerusalem into Nebuchadnezer’s hands; it was the rather strange God of heaven and earth. Why is this strange? Well, because YHWH would rather appear weak in the eyes of men than appear to tolerate sin in the lives of His people.

Daniel, this young teenager, saw this and it gave him a firm place on which to stand amidst the falling fortunes of his earthly homeland. Like Joseph in Egypt over a thousand years before, it was this worldview–the worldview of a sovereign God–that gave this young man the theological fortitude to hold it all together as rough, godless hands wrenched him away from his parents, his homeland, and all he held close and dear to his heart.

Like Daniel, our times are surely no less perilous. All across the world, little-big men are at work. Russia has its Vladimir Putin, China its Xi Jinping, and Ukraine its Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They are playing chess for the lives of nations while other world leaders seem content to play checkers, tiddlywinks, and Jenga– simpler games, to be sure, but no less consequential.

While the world burns, our Western elite takes turns at civilizational Jenga, weakening the tower of “Christendom,” by removing one foundation stone after another. Just like in Jenga, with each passing turn, the tower grows both taller and weaker in equal measure. These world leaders are not removing wooden blocks or stones, you understand, but ideas that have served our civilization well for two thousand years– ideas like: “You can’t be free, good, or even live without God,” “Men matter and so do women for dolce vita (the sweet life),” “Sexual chastity harnesses a nation’s energy in fruitful directions while profligacy wastes it.” “Human life is precious in all its stages, ages, and forms,” “Strong families form the building blocks of a strong nation,” “The borrower is slave to the lender,” “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” In our impossible search for freedom in the bondage of autonomy and life in the graveyard of truth, all these ideas and more have been cast aside.

One slogan justifies this madness: Homo mensura (Man is the measure). In this brave new world without God, meaning, and purpose, we have made man the measure to be sure, and a fine kingdom we have given him to boot. We have made ourselves the measure of nothing and have traveled far and fast in our journey to nowhere.

The game is afoot. When it will end is anyone’s guess, but where it will end is not hard to divine. One last, clumsy move will be taken, and when it is made, the tower will collapse. It really is only a matter of time. We dangle by threads of mercy and patience.

The Church is not immune from this madness. At one end of the spectrum, too many churches buy into the “Man is the measure gospel,” the “Man is the measure worship service,” and the “Man is the measure church.” Listening to their schtick, a visitor might be forgiven for thinking, “God’s chief end is to help us enjoy life, for ours is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.” 

At the other end of the spectrum, in the Reformed Church, too many of our pulpits are filled with painted fires that just don’t burn, with men whose greatest ideas are verbally correct but spiritually cold, and whose greatest achievement is to read fine, lifeless sermons that bore people with an unfelt Christ.

What God will do in response to such man-centered idolatry, is anyone’s guess. But surely He will do something– a national catastrophe, a natural disaster, financial collapse, a great reset against our liberty, a famine for hearing the word of the Lord (Amos 8:11), who knows? But whatever happens on earth, you and I must never forget that He is the One doing it from heaven. “For from Him and through Him, and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever and ever” (Romans 11:36).

Let’s take the worst and, I hasten to say, the most unlikely of possible outcomes: you and I awake tomorrow to the fifteen-minute warning. Putin, to teach the West a lesson, has just launched an intercontinental ballistic missile at the small but not inconsequential city of Greensboro, North Carolina. Is your worldview big enough to see behind the appearance of things and to say, “It is the Lord; let Him do as seems fit in His sight” (Amos 3:6)?  If not, then you and I need a bigger worldview and a bigger God, one great enough and good enough to obliterate all we hold dear in order to save us through the flames. Or does your doctrine of providence only allow devastation in other people’s cities?

If this doesn’t happen tomorrow, I tell you, it is a miracle of divine grace, and one more glorious display of divine patience–one we should not take for granted. The game is afoot, and we dangle by threads of mercy.