During the seventh-inning stretch at a ball game we traditionally sing the old favorite Take Me Out to the Ball Game. When we sang “Give me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks” it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a box of Cracker Jacks for at least fifty years. So I got one. I opened it and just like I did as a child I dug around looking for the prize. Even as a child I knew the prize was junk but now it was a piece of paper with a crummy looking picture. We’ve come a long way from the glory days of a plastic finger ring or some other worthless item. How can something that is worthless become even more worthless?
Thinking about things being worthless I remembered Ezekiel 7:19, “They will throw their silver into the streets, and their gold will be treated as a thing unclean. Their silver and gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD’s wrath. It will not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs, for it has caused them to stumble into sin.” The value of things is quite relative. Shakespeare nailed it in Richard III. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”
In Mark 8 Jesus said, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” I knew a man who was very rich and I knew he had not come by it honestly. When asked how he could do that he responded. “I am not going to heaven anyway so I better make the most of what I can now.” Worthless – oh so worthless. What a shame.
Written by Roger Bothwell on August 14, 2014
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