Tyrants and Conquerors | Letters to a Samuel Generation
by Rachel Starr Thomson
written April 2003
A few short days ago, American soldiers rolled into Baghdad. Headlines proclaimed that freedom had come to Iraq. Radio and TV carried sounds and images of people singing and dancing in the streets. A Shiite leader declared that the tyrant had fallen; stone images of that tyrant toppled in the streets. Posters of Saddam Hussein were torn down by jubilant Iraqis who walked across the image of their former leader's face. A man ran alongside an army vehicle, shouting that Saddam had killed his family and crying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Images like that warm our hearts. They make us glad that freedom has come to an oppressed people. They allow us to hope that the war will be over soon; that our boys will come home; and our world will become peaceful and predictable once more.
But the real story does not show a world at peace. Even now, looters continue to ransack Baghdad—and Mosul, and other cities—leaving destruction behind them. Government buildings are in flames. Thieves, both organized criminals and common people, take everything that is not nailed down. Even hospitals have been stripped of the equipment they need to function. Many people live in fear of ethnic strife and revenge killings in a country where there is no police force to keep order. The picture of life in Iraq is not a pretty one. It reminds us that though the Iraqi people have gained one sort of freedom, in another sense they are still captives.
A tyrant has been toppled, yes. But a greater tyrant reigns still over the people of Iraq; a tyrant that has ruled every people and every culture for thousands of years. It is the tyrant called Sin.
Human beings put Saddam Hussein into power in Iraq many years ago, just as human beings welcomed sin into paradise thousands of years ago. Adam and Eve threw open the Gates of Eden to sin, and it was sin that caused the same Gates to slam shut behind them. They knew the truth of Paul's words: “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” (Romans 6:16)
For centuries, men and women have tried to create a perfect world—through politics, or art, or spirituality. But their efforts have proved in vain. Their hardest strivings are ultimately futile.
“What think ye of the Christ?” Jesus once asked the Pharisees. “Whose son is he?”
When they answered that the coming Messiah was to be David's son, Jesus quoted from the Psalms:
“The LORD said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies a footstool. If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matt. 22:42-45)
You see, no Son of David, be he the greatest artist, prophet, or king who ever lived, can ever save the world from sin. Only the Son of God can do that. For centuries people have looked to other human beings for salvation, but their hopes have been dashed because the leaders they looked to were themselves slaves of sin. No man-made peace will ever last, because there is a destructive, murderous seed in every one of us. As long as the earth endures, it will breed tyrants, and traitors, and holocausts. It is inevitable, because the heart of every human being is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)
True freedom for the sons of men will not come through any son of David. Our Liberator must come from beyond this world; from outside of a race that has carried a deadly taint since Eden. If mankind is to be free, God Himself must intervene... and though much of the world is still unaware of it, He already has.
The prophet Isaiah wrote these words long before the coming of the Christ: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” (Isa.9:2)
Two thousand years ago, He who is both Son of David and Son of God was born into a peasant family in a remote Roman province in the Middle East. While the world spun on unawares, busy with its political agendas and tribal wars, one man lived a perfect life. Those who followed Him knew only that He was like no other man they had ever known; but as time passed, their eyes were opened to His true nature. They saw Him work miracles; they saw Him speak with ancient prophets on a mountaintop; they heard Him speak the “words of life.” They watched as He fulfilled the prophecies of the coming Messiah, and Peter confessed, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” (Matt. 16:16)
While He was still a young man, the Son of God was falsely charged with blasphemy and cruelly executed. What those who killed Him did not realize was that they were really carrying out a part of God's plan of conquest. There on the cross, Jesus took on the tyrant—and defeated it. As Paul described it, “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” (Rom. 8:3)
When Jesus rose from the dead three days later, the conquest was complete. Sin and Satan had been defeated. Those who throw themselves on the mercy of the Christ are delivered from the grip of the tyrant. The Holy Spirit has been given, so that those who are no longer slaves to sin might become the servants of God. Through the work of the Spirit, we are changed day by day into the likeness of the Liberator.
We are free, but all around us, the people of the earth are still in bondage. This year, as Easter reminds us of the death and resurrection of Christ, so the turmoil of war reminds us why it was necessary that He come. The tyrant still reigns over many hearts, but we have the message of liberation woven into our very souls. As the world continues to fight its battles, let us not forget the greater battle that is being fought all around us, in which we play a key part.
The world has been invaded. The tyrant has been conquered. It is up to us to take the message of liberation to the world.
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