The Message of History: Kiss the Son
by Matthew L. Chancey, August 3, 2006
Now therefore, be wise, O kings; Be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little.
Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him (Psalm 2:10-12).
History fascinates me. Ever since I woke up and realized that the world did not begin with my birth, I have sought to unlock the puzzle of my own place in the world. Why am I in America? Of all the places in the world, I am in this place. Why? How did I get here? Why do I believe the things I believe? Why do I have the friends I have? The more I dug to find answers, the more questions I unearthed.
My love of history began with biographies. Most of my heroes growing up had long been dead. I felt sorry to have been “born late.”
The first biography I read was the Bible, because, after all, the Bible is the authorized biography of God and man. But more than simply a book of history, the Bible provides the grid, so to speak, of how to view all of world history. Unfortunately, most history books don’t use this grid. History in those books is nothing more than stories from the past — utterly irrelevant to anything in the present. Our pop culture fascination with the present emphasizes the here and now — not the life and times of the dead and gone.
But God has always preserved a remnant: historians who have sought to tell “His-Story” from the perspective of the Author Himself. And it was the opportunity to hear from a collection of these historians that recently drove me to Hampton, Virginia, to the Vision Forum Ministries’ History of the World Mega-Conference. Over one thousand history buffs and truth-seekers joined me, and for one week we drank from a fire hose.
The only problem with the conference was that I could not attend all the presentations. At the most, I got a snapshot of the entire conference, which itself presented only a snapshot of the history of the world. But even this snapshot of a snapshot felt like the feast of Ahasuerus.
It’s impossible to do justice to each speaker or presentation in these few lines. But there was one theme that stood out in every single presentation, no matter what the subject pertained to or who was speaking. That theme was “Kiss the Son.”
Every presentation, whether it dealt with the history of mathematics or the Mayan civilization, or the battles between the Greeks and the Persians, supported the main theme of the conference, which is the incontrovertible reality of Christ’s lordship over all creation and all time.
In Genesis, we read of the fall of man. Adam and Eve were assured that the Redeemer of mankind, the very Son of God Himself, would be born through the woman and crush the head of the serpent. A war was thus inaugurated, the battlefield the soul of man. Every culture throughout time contains a record of the battle between the serpent and the Son.
Every nation has to make one of two choices: kiss the Son or serve the serpent. The whole of history is an account of which nations kissed the Son and which nations served the snake — and what happened as a result.
Those of us living in the present are faced with the same decision. America has long since passed the crossroads and has chosen the pathway leading to destruction. There are many parallel examples from history of nations just like ours, that took the blessings of God and exclaimed like King Nebuchadnezzar, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30). But national repentance begins with personal repentance.
America, kiss the Son, lest He be angry....