“King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, sixty cubits high and six cubits wide, and set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.” Daniel 3:1
What if you were to be catapulted into the future a mere one day before your demise and asked to do one simple thing…write your own history. Yes, a rather odd hypothetical, but I ask you to stop here and think deeply upon the question. If you were allowed to look back completely upon your many days walking this earth and all of the varied experiences upon it, how would you pen your own history? How would you treat your triumphs and victories in life? I’m assuming those would receive prime page time and maybe even be the bulk of your content. How would you treat the happy joyous moments in your life? I’m assuming your precious sweet memories would also receive appropriate treatment and prominent placement within your textual collection. But you probably figured it was coming and here it is, what will you do with the colossal failures in your life? What will you do with the many moral failures and sinful incidences that you readily desire to be swept under the rug, hopefully to remain there for all time? Will they make your autobiographical history or be carefully omitted? You see, there is quite the conundrum that exists when we consider our own histories. When man writes his own history, it is often on the verge of perfection, yet when God writes our histories, a much different vision is seen.
The early chapters of the book of Daniel show us just exactly how king Nebuchadnezzar is preparing to write his own history. You see, our histories are not written at the end of our lives, but during every day that we live. The king, being the most powerful man in the world at that time, couldn’t help but believe his own hype. So he builds a massive golden statue to himself and demands that all that encounter it bow down and worship him as the god he has declared himself. Yet shortly after the statue is erected, a dream terrorizes his psyche and he, desperate in his search for the answer, finds its meaning in the Godly given definition of Daniel. And the history book that God sees of the king’s life versus the one that king Nebuchadnezzar is writing about himself, are very different indeed.
It’s really all about perspective. That is, how we view ourselves reflected in God’s righteous mirror of right and wrong. We humans tend to be a very strict judge of everyone but ourselves. Yes, it’s true, when our gavel drops upon others, a guilty verdict is easily and readily found against them. Yet when that same gavel is turned towards ourselves, well, we have a very gracious, forgiving nature towards ourselves. Yet as you are so ready to dismiss your seemingly insignificant white lies, your blatant mistreatment of others because they ‘deserved it’, and the countless others wrongs that are worthy of a guilty verdict, you must at some point stop and no longer continue reading your own version of the story, but God’s. You see, to judge perfectly you need a perfect judge. And there has only been one perfect judge to ever walk this earth, the Lord Jesus Christ. Friends, when Jesus sees our sin, there is no defense you can offer, there is no clever speech to talk yourself out of the guilty verdict. Jesus simply sees that there are two ways, the perfect righteous way He and His Word demand, and all others that fall short.
But take heart. Because of God’s great love for all in this world, He made a way for all that believe upon Jesus’ work upon the cross to have their history rewritten. You see, at the end of our lives when we all approach the throne of Christ for judgement, our own self-written histories, no matter how clever, will not please Him. But praise be to God, for all that have called upon Jesus as their Savior will have a much different history book presented. Instead of the countless sins and blemishes that we will all bring to the throne, God will only see the perfect righteousness of His only Son, Jesus. In fact, that is the definition of a big church word, propitiation. Propitiation means that as Jesus hung upon the cross He bore the penalty for all our sins for all time. Your sin, even just one, deserves eternal separation from a perfectly righteous God. Yet because Jesus atoned and paid for those sins as the perfect sacrifice, your history will not be one of separation from Almighty God in hell, but one of union with Him in Heaven through His Son Jesus Christ.
Today, stop penning your own history but instead look into God’s mirror and see it as it is. A sinner separated from God with no way to repair the connection…without Jesus that is. Call upon Christ today and see your history forever rewritten.
Dios te Bendiga ~ Dan
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