Whom do we serve?
Monday 11th August
”Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power and the honour of my majesty?” This arrogant remark brought Nebuchadnezzar to his knees and his great Babylon has since become a heap of ruins.
Today we live in a bustling world bent on the pursuit of their own pleasures and their activities will have as much lasting value as Nebuchadnezzar’s hanging gardens. For a time his hanging gardens made his homesick wife happy, but she too has moldered into dust and her love for her mountains died with her. The hopes, the dreams, the goals and ambitions of mankind are as trivial as Nebuchadnezzar’s gardens, yet these things tend to completely dominate the lives of almost every human being. Only a few learn the lesson God taught Nebuchadnezzar. Belshazzar did not learn from Nebuchadnezzar’s mistakes although he knew what had happened. Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged after his reason returned to him that God lives forever and all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing and none can stay His hand, or say unto Him, ”What doest thou?” Nebuchadnezzar then praised and extolled and honored the King of heaven but Belshazzar praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know. ”The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified,” God told Belshazzar.
We may not have seen a hand, but the handwriting on the wall is plain for each of us to see. We too are being weighed in the balances. The question we must all answer for ourselves is, ”Whose are we and whom do we serve?” It is no use to say, ”All that the Lord hath said will we do” if we continue then to spend all our time and energy chasing the gods of silver and gold, of fun and pleasure, of houses and gardens, of business and industry.
The ruins of ancient civilizations testify to long hours of hard work, to dedication, to the skill of craftsmen who risked their lives to make images to heathen gods, and it was all for nought. It is not enough for us just to work hard, to become skillful in our art, or profession, or sport. It is not enough to obtain a degree or to understand the laws of physics or know how to land a man on the moon, for all the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God and we must above and before all else, learn to glorify and praise His Holy Name.
It is important that all that we do is done with the ultimate goal in view, to do all to His honor and glory. When God sends His son to fill the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord then we too shall be with him and be like him and we shall be kings and priests and reign with him while our previous contemporaries who spent their whole time only to tell or learn some new thing will be like Babylon which became heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant.
For the moment our worldly acquaintances roar like lions. Let us be sure we are not like them. This is their time to roar as did Nebuchadnezzar but the day is coming when ”God will make drunk the world’s princes, and her wise men, her captains and her rulers, and her mighty men: and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King whose name is the LORD of hosts.”