Eternal Empire

 

Consider the Roman Empire, so vast and “eternal.” At least it would have seemed eternal to a Roman citizen living in it. At its height it stretched from Scotland to North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to Iraq. Imagine yourself as a Roman citizen living in the year 200 A.D. You would have considered the Roman Empire (your empire) to be something that would last forever. It had already lasted 600 years, and in fact it would continue on in one form or another for another 1200 years. It was all you had ever known. You would not be able to conceive of a day when the empire no longer existed.

It was the world’s first superpower. It was militarily dominant. It exported its art, culture, and values to most of the known world. No one could remember the last time they ever lost a war. They even survived some incredibly bad emperors. I am talking: Nero, Domitian, Caligula, etc. These guys should not even have been allowed to run a tavern, let alone an empire. Yet even with these incompetents, the empire survived and even thrived. How could the empire possibly ever fail? Yet we know it did.

The same thing could be said for the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Macedonian Empire, etc. All of these empires seemed indefatigable at the time they existed.

It is hard for us to conceive of a time when our nation will just be a footnote in somebody’s history book (maybe not as hard as it used to be). But that’s the way the Romans felt, and the Romans lasted a lot longer than we have.  It is the way we are built. Not only are we resistant to change, but we tend to think big things won’t change or won’t change very much. We feel the same about the human race. We are not going to go extinct, right? After all, we have been around for a million years. But, the dinosaurs were around for 100 million years, and they are now gone. Success, does not guarantee future success. In fact, endings are inevitable.

The things that we understand well are the things that we can touch, feel, see: the material world. But nothing in the material world is eternal. The only things that are eternal are the things we cannot understand very well.

Star Liner