Riches to Rags

One night King David stood out on the porch of his palace, scanning the night sky, feeling quite small and overwhelmed. David wrote about the experience in Psalm 8: “O Lord, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”

Yet, as soon as David sensed amazement at his own smallness, he remembered how important people are to God. God made humans a little lower than the heavenly beings. God has crowned us with glory and honor. He created a fantastic world, and we’re the culmination of it. What’s more, God gave us dominion over everything he made—the whole animal kingdom. Wow!

The author of the book of Hebrews echoes David’s amazement that God thinks so highly of us (Hebrews 2:6-8). But then, Hebrews brings in yet another angle. He says, “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to humans.” That’s a euphemistic way of saying humanity blew it. God gave us everything on a silver platter, and we messed it up.

We went from riches to rags. We’re the opposite of those admirable souls who go from rags to riches. We’ve lost our way and can’t get back home. The Prophet Isaiah describes us like this: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” (Isaiah 64:6)

You’d expect God would hold humanity in contempt for how badly we’ve have done. Yet, Hebrews adds another twist to the story, saying, “But we do see Jesus.” If nothing else, at least we see Jesus. We see Christ’s humanity, his compassion and his grace. We see his obedience  and his suffering as the pioneer of our salvation. We see his  triumph over sin and death.

A few weeks ago, I joined a crowd at Pilot Rock to hear a geologist from the Sanford Museum, Mark Anderson, talk about its history. For countless centuries, Pilot Rock was a guidepost for Native American travelers. Later, it was a reliable marker that helped pioneers navigate through the frontier in their covered wagons. If you could see Pilot Rock, you knew where you were. It was known as “a lighthouse above an ocean of grass.”  

We all need a spiritual marker to guide us as we struggle to find our way through the wilderness of the world. That’s what God has given us. We see Jesus. We can’t find the place where we belong without him.

During the Civil War, some settlers started carting off chunks of Pilot Rock to use as construction material, to lay foundations in Cherokee. Someone out east, in New Jersey, read about how the rock was in danger of being destroyed. He bought the land around it to protect it from further excavation. It’s a good thing he did.

Once we find our place in God’s kingdom, we might be tempted to take away from our rock—Jesus. We might stop honoring him or think it’s okay to use him for selfish purposes. We might think we don’t need him anymore, that he’s served his purpose. But we still need Jesus. Without him, we’ll get lost again in a spiritual ocean of grass.

And the people who follow us need him too. It falls upon us to make sure the rock is there for them. We need to show them where it is, because for others to find their way they need to see Jesus too.