After our Bible conference last fall in Alcester, England, my son Jesse and I did some sightseeing in London. As we waited for one of London’s legendary double decker tour buses to pick us up, I noticed that the Ritz Hotel across the street had some pockmarks on the exterior of their otherwise beautiful building. These marks didn’t look like the kind of deterioration that all buildings suffer from age. They looked more like the kind of damage that is inflicted when something impacts the building. That got me to wondering if those marks might be injuries sustained during the Blitz of London in World War II.

Sure enough, our tour bus driver later pointed out similar pockmarks on St. Paul’s Cathedral, and confirmed that they were indeed the result of shrapnel from the countless bombs that rocked the city during Hitler’s horrendous eight-month onslaught of England’s capital.

Our tour guide said nothing further about the marks, but I began to wonder why those damaged areas were never repaired. Surely a hotel as fine as the Ritz could easily have afforded to erase the scars of the Nazi barrage. And I have to assume that at some point the Church of England could have scraped together the money to restore the flagship church of their religion, and put the memory of that horrific bombing behind them.

The only conclusion to which I could come is that they don’t want to put it behind them. They don’t want to forget the suffering they had to endure as a city. They don’t want to forget the price they had to pay for the freedom from fascism that they continue to enjoy to this day. And it’s not likely that they will forget. Those pockmarks won’t let them.

That got me to thinking of how we’ll never be able to forget the price the Lord paid to save us from our sins. The pockmarks in His blessed face won’t let us. Isaiah describes how His face was brutalized (Isa. 52:14), and He retained those scars after He rose from the dead (cf. John 20:27). We know He continued to bear them even after He ascended into heaven, for in a vision of heaven John describes Him as “a Lamb as it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6). So once the Lord raptures us to heaven, His pockmarked face will “shew the Lord’s death” for all eternity.

But “till He come,” our apostle Paul says it is important to “shew the Lord’s death” in the communion service (1 Cor. 11:23-26). If God’s people didn’t tend to forget Him, He wouldn’t have had to keep telling His people in Israel not to (Deut. 6:12; 8:11,14,19). No wonder the Lord tells us to partake of the bread and the cup “in remembrance of Me” (1 Cor. 11:24,25).

To the Reader:

Some of our Two Minutes articles were written many years ago by Pastor C. R. Stam for publication in newspapers. When many of these articles were later compiled in book form, Pastor Stam wrote this word of explanation in the Preface:

"It should be borne in mind that the newspaper column, Two Minutes With the Bible, has now been published for many years, so that local, national and international events are discussed as if they occurred only recently. Rather than rewrite or date such articles, we have left them just as they were when first published. This, we felt, would add to the interest, especially since our readers understand that they first appeared as newspaper articles."

To this we would add that the same is true for the articles written by others that we continue to add, on a regular basis, to the Two Minutes library. We hope that you'll agree that while some of the references in these articles are dated, the spiritual truths taught therein are timeless.

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