We look back upon history and what do we see? Empires rising
and falling. Revolutions and counter-revolutions. Wealth accumulated and wealth
disbursed. Shakespeare has spoken of the rise and fall of great ones that ebb
and flow with the moon. I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, 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 announce to the world the
establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I’ve seen a
murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite
of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more
enlightened than Ashoka. I have seen America wealthier and more powerful than
the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired
they could have outdone 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
dominated for some three decades. America, haunted by fears of running out of
those precious fluids that keep her motorways roaring and the smog settling,
with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and the victory of
the Don Quixotes of the media, as they charged the windmills of Watergate. All
in one lifetime. All gone.
Quoted from:
Deliver us from Evil – Ravi Zacharias pg. 164-165, 1997
Thomas Nelson Publishing
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