Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The ONE - Do you know Him?

The lines below are are an excerpt from one of Malcolm Muggeridge's writings in the early 1970's (1903-1990). Muggeridge was a British journalist who, later in life, became a relentless defender of the Christian faith. I was confronted with Muggeridge's words in a sermon on Colossians by Pastor Tullian Tchvidjian (http://tinyurl.com/4d5dau5). My soul was immediately stirred by the poetic nature of Muggeridge's thoughts on the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ in all things. I believe the substance of these words are worth re-visiting time and time again. Enjoy!


"We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon.
I look back upon my own fellow countrymen (Great Britain), once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that ‘the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.’
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian (Hitler) announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown (Mussolini) say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin (Stalin), acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as being wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.
I have seen America wealthier and, in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together–so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone! Gone with the wind!
England, now part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixote’s of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.
All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone! Gone with the wind!
Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of One: because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace–the person of Jesus Christ.
I present him as the way, the truth, and the life. Do you know Him?"