DEVOTIONAL

Devotional for the week of  March 7, 2010
     

OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY

Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. 
He was driven away from people and ate grass like cattle.  His body
was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like
the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.

Daniel 4:33

 

The bizarre account of mad King Nebuchadnezzar reminds one of mad King George III of England (1738-1820).  When King George’s health deteriorated, he began to act in strange, often embarrassing ways.  Once he pressed his affections on Elizabeth Spencer, claiming that she was his queen and the Charlotte (his wife) was an impostor.  George gave orders to people who were long since dead, imagined that London was flooded, and on Christmas Day called his pillow Prince Octavius!  Evidence now suggests that King George suffered from porphyria, perhaps aggravated by arsenic in the medicine given to cure his seemingly insanity.  Like Nebuchadnezzar, King George eventually came back to his senses as if nothing had happened.  What the two kings shared in common was temporarily being out of touch with reality.

In one sense that’s true of all of us.  When we speak of “this life” and “the life to come,” we are talking about two radically different realities.  Even within “this life,” there are two competing realities as different as night and day.  On Pentecost when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and everyone heard them in their own language, many thought the apostles were drunk.  They had no clue about the level of reality on which the Holy Spirit operates or the sublime level of spiritual reality being proclaimed.  The message that day was about the need to move from one level of reality (this world) to a far higher level of reality (the Kingdome of Christ).  For those unwilling to acknowledge the critical difference, it can only be said that—not unlike Kings George and Nebuchadnezzar—they are temporarily indulging in the “insane.”

The maddening question is:  In which of the two
competing realities do I mostly live?