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“Too Big to Fail”
One of the headlines that have ruled the news media in recent months is “Too big to fail.” It has usually referred to mammoth financial institutions in the United States. So, we had the recent financial bailout of some of our banks. The idea is that the American taxpayers have too much to lose to allow certain enterprises to go belly up. So we step in and rescue them.
A variation on this theme is one of the recurring themes in history. The idea that something or someone is too big to fail is a common story line in the Bible. Start with the story of creation in Genesis. The Creator makes a beautiful Garden of Eden. It is a place of apparent perfection. It seems to be failsafe. But there is one little glitch in God's creation. He made it just barely short of being too big to fail. Before they knew it Adam and Eve had…you got it…failed and got thrown out of Eden.
Skip along through the Bible and you see the pattern emerge. Remember the man who was too big to fail? His name was Goliath. He towered above other warriors and caused them to quake in their sandals--too big to fail? Nope. All it took was a shepherd boy with a slingshot and five smooth stones. David brought him down with a huge thud.
Samson and Delilah come to mind. He the first super hero of the big hair seemed too big to fail. But his hair was bigger than he was. Delilah and her shears snipped him down to size. I recently learned the lesson of Samson and the hair. In order to maintain my humility, I bought some barber's clippers last month and my Delilah has now got me under control. She zips those things over my head and I no longer even dream about pushing down the pillars of power in my world.
Of course, you recall Pharaoh and the Egyptians. Archaeologists will forever be excavating the ruins of that “too big to fail” kingdom. When the waters of the Red Sea closed in upon the pursuing Egyptian soldiers thereby allowing the Israelites to escape slavery, Pharaoh discovered he was not too big to fail.
Then there are the empires of history. Too big to fail? The Roman Empire eventually plopped flat as a pancake. The British Empire is now mostly a memory reduced to pomp and ceremony. And whatever happened to the Soviet Union? Some believe the United States of America is too big to fail.
It seems futile to expect that the human family will ever learn the great lessons of history. Always there are those who believe they or their nations or their ideologies are too big to fail. And they are too eager to try and work their will over the dreams and aspirations of others. They are doomed to take their places in the dust of the archeologists' spades. So, what's a world to do about this? I think the solution is to learn the lessons of the Bible. Boiled down to its essence, the Bible teaches that only God is failsafe. And God is not failsafe because God is big but because God is good. God has a vested interest in what God has created. God loves what he has made and does not want it to perish.
Christians rest their hopes and dreams in God. When we are tempted to believe ourselves either too big to fail or too small to win, we turn to this simple message: “God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.” God is able to do this.
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