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Silly images



Daniel 3:1

King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits and its breadth six cubits. He set it up on the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon. 

Thought for the day – Images of folly

London is famous for it’s football clubs, and for those in America that’s soccer. Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Quens Park Rangers, Millwall, Chelsea and Fulham. All of them have statues out front of famous players or owners but in 2011, Fulham FC made the headlines because it’s owner Mohammed Al-Fayed unveiled a 7.5-foot-high statue of Michael Jackson who had died 2 years previously. It was meant to be a tribute to Michael Jackson but was universally lampooned. It only stood for 2 years. Before it was moved to the Football museum in Manchester. And it got me thinking about the idols we build and how we fight tooth and nail to keep them up.

In our chapter today, Nebuchanezzar builds himself a 27.5m high statue of gold and commands everyone to bow down to it. The passage doesn’t state who the statue looks like, the assumption is always it was modelled after himself, but any way what does it a 27m statue in Babylon, have to do with a smaller statue of Michael Jackson. Maybe nothing other than it was a reminder for me about how silly people can be. And how those people who have the means and power to do these silly things and enforce them on others.

Contrast the spectacles of the statues with the spectacle of Jesus’ crucifixion. While the statues were objects of folly meant to have meaning, the cross is truly an object of horror that has eternal meaning. Maybe not all spectacles are pointless and silly.


This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

 

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