My 10-year-old son informed me last week that some nameless, Italian dental genius invented false teeth in 701 B.C., soon after the far away kingdom of Israel was crushed by Assyrian armies and just as those same armies besieged the kingdom of Judah’s capital city of Jerusalem.
That’s the sort of fun fact you might expect to hear from a kid raised by two history nerds – that is, by me and my wife. It won’t surprise you, then, that my wife and I took the opportunity to indulge our nerdiness before the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent annual meeting by visiting New Orleans’ fantastic World War II Museum.
Little had I realized, before visiting the museum, how desperate was the attack on Normandy during the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. Should the storming of Normandy’s beaches fail, the Western Allies had no contingency plan. D-Day meant doom: If all things went well, doom for Nazi Germany. If not, doom for Western civilization.
Reflecting on this reality, it struck me how often such doom has fallen on human society, how often throughout the course of history people have endured the end of the world they knew and loved. “For the end of the world was long ago,” poet G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “when ends of the world waxed free.”
After all, consider the many crises of the past: The kingdom of Israel was crushed by the Assyrians in 722 B.C., and the kingdom of Judah was subdued little over a century later by the Babylonians. The Babylonians themselves were conquered by the Persians, the Persians by the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Greeks by the Romans. Rome demolished Jerusalem and its majestic Temple in 70 A.D., but the Western half of the Roman empire itself collapsed 400 years later. Time and time again, the world as people knew it came to an end, and new worlds rose from the ashes. The epic battles and catastrophic casualties of the two great World Wars of the 20th century continued this age-old story.
“The war creates no absolutely new situation,” Christian author and Oxford don C.S. Lewis told university students during the Second World War. “It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.
“Human life,” Lewis explained, “has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. … We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil … turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.”
Despite these alarms, Lewis added, people have refused to abandon their pursuit of truth and beauty in order to ensure their “material welfare and security.”
Instead, as historian Herbert Butterfield similarly wrote in 1949, people are always “plucking beauty out of dangerous crags and crevices, and making sure that there should be music somewhere though apparently the world was generally near the edge of the abyss.”
In Lewis’ words, “They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.”
Apparently, as my son tells me, they even invent false teeth amid the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires.
More significantly, God’s Word stands firm despite the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. And the gospel has been preserved and handed down to us through the many crises, controversies and cataclysms of history. For, as the Book of Revelation makes so clear, Jesus Christ – the Lamb of God and Lion of Judah – is also Lord of history, and He will fulfill His purpose for creation.
Therefore, amid the cultural conflicts and crises of our own age – especially, the fight to protect both unborn life and godly views of marriage and the family – we can do no better than what one old hymn declares: We should “crown” the Lord Jesus “with many crowns.”
We should “crown Him the Lord of life,” since He has declared every human life as sacred, from conception to the grave. We should “crown Him the Lord of love,” since He alone defines love in His truth and holiness. And we should “crown Him the Lord of years,” since He created all space and time, since He sustains the universe by His power and since His “praise shall never, never fail throughout eternity.”