Ozymandias

"All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers and the flower falls away. But the word of the Lord endure forever - 1 Peter 1v:24-25

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Thus wrote Percy Shelly in his sonnet Ozymandias. Ozymandias is another name for the Great Pharaoh Ramses II who ruled Egypt for 66 years in the 13th century B.C. Ramses had a statue built to his own glory, and had engraved on it the words ‘King of kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.’

Many indeed consider Ramses the Great to be one of ‘greatest rulers’ who ever lived. His accomplishments are astounding. This led him to believe that no one could ever match his glory. And yet, three thousand years later nothing remains but his own glorious words in the sand. Shelly’s friend Horace Smith wrote a sonnet on the same topic that boldly makes a modern day application –

‘We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.’

What better picture of the truth of James 1v24-25? Every man, even the rich, famous, and powerful Ramses II is like the grass that fades away. After a reign of 66 years many thought that he indeed was a god because that lifespan was extremely unusual. But the day came when he died and withered away, just like the flowering grasses in a field.

Today we can build our own mini-Egypts and erect our own mini-statues as tributes to our own glory, but one day it is all going to fade away. I think it just barely feasible that we spend far too much time on that which fades away and far too little time on the one thing that does endure.

The word of God endures forever. It still stands. It stood in Ramses day and it is still living and abiding today. Ramses mighty kingdom could not endure the passage of time, but the word of God has.

So what are we going to do? Are we going the construct our own Ozymandias statue to all the great things we have done? Or are we going to construct our lives around the only Thing that lives and abides forever?