Integrity: Faith

When High Towers Fall

It isn’t supposed to happen.

Carefully, they were built to stand, to be an affront to gravity and to be impervious to natural disasters or the plots of men. But fall they have.

Ancient High Towers

Ancient history is a story of high towers that could not stand:

• the tower of Babel, stretching in ignorant arrogance to heaven itself,
• the tower of Mount Sinai, erected by God Himself, smoking and quaking when He touched it, delivering the towering truth of Old Covenant worship to His chosen people, only to crumble when wicked hearts ruled and bloody hands were raised to foreign, feeble gods, and
• military and political towers in the ancient world, Egypt, Greece, Rome, rising in strength and then collapsing in corruption.

The modern world has seen its towers of strength rise and fall:

• The tower of optimism in the last decades of the 19th century was built on confidence in science, industry, and invention only to be taken down by the relentless guns and gases of the War to End all Wars.
• The tower of American commerce rose with incredible speed in the first few decades of the 20th century before tottering and then tumbling into the Great Depression.
• The imaginary tower of a reconstructed Europe and Middle East, oblivious to the inbred evil on the Pacific Rim and the hate-filled cauldron boiling in Europe itself, fell before the schemes of cruel men who made the trains run on time.
• The evil towers of the cynical Axis powers fell before the armed forces of the citizen soldiers of the endangered world.
• Of communism’s two towers of Soviet and Red China despotism, one has fallen and lies in cold war ruins and the other, though still standing, is propped up by money and oppression.
• The insidious tower of the human spirit, rises in each of us and inevitably falls in time, unless some transforming buttress of grace is found to keep it standing.
• Finally, if the institutional church, originally founded up the Rock Christ Jesus, is rebuilt upon the sands of culture, the storms of the market place take it down with winds and waves of pragmatism.

So, is it inevitable? Must all high towers fall?

Though it would seem so, it is not.

When the Highest Tower Fell

When darkness descended at noon on a Friday outside Jerusalem, it appeared as if the tower of God’s grace and mercy was crumbling to the ground. The pierced and bleeding body of Jesus no longer drew breath and His great heart was still as His blood drained from countless wounds. Lifeless, His body was prepared and interred. His followers hid amid the rubble of the tower into which they had fled. Deep in their hearts a memory still pulsed with promise. He had said to mark the third day.

At the dawn of the third day, women who loved Him came to the tomb to find it empty and tended by heavenly messengers with amazing news—“He is not here—He has risen as He said!” At some earlier hour in the darkness of a new day, a new covenant was born. A new tower of strength rose from the ashes of the final sacrifice. The awful accumulated account of the sins of the world was settled at last. The Lord Jesus, the new tower of grace and joy, would never even shake, let alone fall, no matter how many worlds may shake or what other towers may tumble.

The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.
Proverbs 18:10 NIV

And this strong, high tower is our home. It will not fall.

Semper Reformanda!
Stephen Phifer

© 2014 Stephen R. Phifer All Rights Reserved