Close to the Edge
Close to the edge | In 539 B.C., Cyrus captured Babylon. The city had years of food stored for a siege, a powerful army, and all believed they could hold out until Cyrus ran out of money.
Big mistake. While the huge city was celebrating a festival, Cyrus diverted the course of the Euphrates River. When the water was shallow enough, his men waded into Babylon. The city was so huge that large areas of it had fallen, even as the festivities were going on in the temples.
Unexpected attacks, from within or without, can destroy seemingly impregnable nations. When just one bastille fell, France fell into rule by revolutionaries. William the Conqueror took England with amazing speed. Cortez, and a few hundred soldiers, invaded and destroyed the vast Aztec Empire. A few years later, Pizarro, with his handful of soldiers, destroyed the Inca’s huge Peru-centered Empire in little more than the twinkling of an eye.
We are warned how quickly things can disappear by Jesus’s words in Matthew 24:38: “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark;”
So, what are we to do? The answer, again from Matthew in 6;19-21: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Every prayer and every help provided a neighbor makes a deposit in a bank that simply can’t break or be broken into. Such deposits may be assumed to generate the highest possible interest rates in the coin of the only realm that will last.
