Big epic olden day battle movies. Scenes of battles and fortress sieges. Good verses evil …and good triumphs. And, I love the old testament stories. Here is an interesting snippet:
Next Abimelek went to Thebez and besieged it and captured it. Inside the city, however, was a strong tower, to which all the men and women—all the people of the city—had fled. They had locked themselves in and climbed up on the tower roof. Abimelek went to the tower and attacked it. But as he approached the entrance to the tower to set it on fire, a woman dropped an upper millstone on his head and cracked his skull. Hurriedly he called to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and kill me, so that they can’t say, ‘A woman killed him.'” So his servant ran him through, and he died. When the Israelites saw that Abimelek was dead, they went home.
Judges 9:50-55
Don’t you love that… a woman takes out the big dude and the soldiers all go home. But the interesting aspect for me is the Strong Tower.
The city was under siege. The walls gave way and crumbled beneath the onslaught. When the city was lost, the people fled to the Strong Tower. There was nowhere else to go. This was their last place of refuge.
Imagine that your life is like that city. Just as the city built walls to protect it, so we too build walls to protect our life. Many of us have material walls built up out of our riches, money, wealth, homes, investments and the type of car we drive. Proverbs identifies this:
The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it a wall too high to scale.
Proverbs 18:11
We also find our being in the type of career, or job we have, or even the titles we are afforded. We often think ourselves safe behind the walls of relationships – spouse, children, friends.
But what happens when a wall is scaled and our city has been breached?
When Wall Street, an interesting name in context of this discussion, collapsed in 1929 and recently in 2009, how many men suicided when they lost their fortunes. How many people are devastated and react crazy when their relationships fail – like in recent news where a woman was stabbed, doused in petrol and then set alight at a Bayswater Service Station. And how many times have you heard of a person dying of a broken heart after the loss of a loved one?
In each of these sad stories we find people had nowhere to run to. No safe refuge. No strong tower. All was lost and in desperate abandonment resorted to end it all through suicide or death.
So what are your walls? Think about it for a moment. Take anything you consider yourself secure in and ask the question, “What would happen if I lost it?” Consider your career, positions, investments, home, money, friends, a spouse, children… If it could be lost, even though it may seem absolutely impossible to you that you could lose it, it can never be your strong tower but simply a wall to your city, your life.
So what is your Strong Tower?
For me, once I realise what were all the walls in my life, I discovered:
The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.
Proverbs 18:10
I came to this realisation: Jesus is my Strong Tower.
What is your Strong Tower?
Where will you run to, should the walls of your life be breached?