The desire to be in control, to make a mark, to make ourselves indispensable: these are all drives that are universal within fallen humanity. Our worlds may be smaller, the damage we do somewhat more modest, but our ambitions are in their own ways just as absurd as his

Seeing Colonel Gadaffi clinging desperately to power in Libya has rather taken my mind back to my childhood. You see, the Colonel and I have one odd thing in common: we were both taught English literature by the same man, an upper-class Irishman with a passion for Yeats and Joyce by the name of Joe Brennan. Joe taught the Colonel at an institute of education in Benghazi, and me at the local grammar school amidst those blue remembered hills of a Cotswold childhood.

Other than that, as Paul Levy would tell you, Muammar and I have nothing in common: one of us went on to be a much-despised misanthropic megalomaniac with a highly-trained all-female bodyguard protecting his office; the other has managed to rule Libya with a merciless iron fist for over forty years.

On a serious note, seeing the insane ramblings of Gadaffi as he desperately tries to cling to the wreckage of his power, my mind goes not only to the land of lost content but also to the words of Isaiah 40:6-8, the biblical passage which most pointedly bursts the bubble of humanity’s self-importance.

Indeed, if so many were not paying with their lives, there would be something comical about this Oz-like figure wildly demanding that people pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Yet here we are again, brought face to face with futility of a man’s desire to make himself god.

Money is clearly not enough: he could presumably fly out of Libya today and live comfortably on the interest on one of his secret bank accounts. No, the money is incidental. He needs power; he needs recognition; he needs to be indispensable.

And as we shudder at the sight of this lunatic rambling on our television screens, it is worth remembering that Gadaffi is only an extreme example of that which dwells in each of us. The desire to be in control, to make a mark, to make ourselves indispensable: these are all drives that are universal within fallen humanity. Our worlds may be smaller, the damage we do somewhat more modest, but our ambitions are in their own ways just as absurd as his.

Shelley put it well, in a poem which old Joe Brennan himself taught me (though, if he taught it to Muammar Gadaffi, one can only assume the Colonel was daydreaming that day):

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

Behold ourselves as in a mirror. All flesh is as grass. The grass withers, the flower fades. But the word of our God will stand forever.

Carl R Trueman is Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is editor of the IFES journal, Themelios, and has taught on the faculties of theology at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen. This article is reprinted from the Reformation 21 blog and is used with their permission. http://www.reformation21.org/blog/