I am sitting the airport in Cairo, on my way home from a bucket list tour of Egypt. Today is day 16 since I left home for this adventure, and the number and sheer scale of what I have seen will take months to process. Statues weighing more than 300 tons. Temples spanning acres of land and stretching hundreds of feet toward the sky. Colorful carvings and inscriptions covering 30-foot-high walls and their ceilings. This country is rich in artifacts, history and stories. So many stories! Between the history and the mythology, you could never run out of stories to learn. Stories of the people who ordered these structures to be built and of their servants who did the building. Stories of the land and the river and their impact on human life. And if I have learned anything on this trip, it is that I use the words gigantic, incredible, mind-boggling, amazing, and fantastic far too often in my day-to-day life. When I look at these structures, which actually are awe-inspiring and fantastic, I have no words more superlative than the everyday superlatives. And the history here deserves a level of superlative all its own!

 

One thing the Egyptians are incredibly good at is the preservation of their artifacts and education about them. The last stop we made yesterday was to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, a museum that tries to teach the 7,000+ years of Egyptian history chronologically, tying the artifacts, structures and stories together in a way that gives an arc and a progression to the story. One of the areas in this museum displays all the royal Egyptian mummies that have been recovered—all in chronological order. It’s a beautifully arranged exhibit, laid out in long, dark hallways like the hallways of ancient Egyptian tombs. As visitors traverse the hallways, they come upon each mummy in a climate-controlled case lying next to a large artifact that symbolizes that reign of that monarch. Most of the mummies lie next to their beautiful sarcophagus, made of painted wood or of gold or silver.

 

However, one mummy—that of Queen Ahmose-Nefertari—lies next to an imposing 10-foot-tall statue of herself. The statue stands in the traditional royal pose of ancient Egypt, hands closed in fists and arms crossed in front of her chest. She wears the tall crown of two feathers, and she has the stylized features that represented perfection to the ancient Egyptians. In each hand, she holds an Ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life. The statue was made during the Queen’s lifetime and represented her power, her beauty and, ultimately, her deity, since she was worshipped as the Goddess of Resurrection.

 

In stark contrast, lying in a climate-controlled container next to the statue is the tiny, shriveled, blackened body of a mummy with prognathism and some hair still attached to the back of her head. She is missing her right hand. This is what is left of the physical body of that same queen of power and deity—Queen Ahmose-Nefertari.

 

Bodies were mummified in ancient Egypt so their owners could reinhabit them in the life to come, making the owner immortal. In a way, it worked. After all, I am standing here, thousands of years into the future, looking at the actual body of Ahmose-Nefertari. On the other hand, looking at the mummy, I think this is probably not the immortality they were aiming for. The goddess-queen probably never envisioned a shriveled version of herself lying in a box displaying all her earthly imperfections, sightless eyes staring back at the visitors to the museum every day. I think she envisioned herself taller, better, more beautiful than in life, commanding her followers in the afterlife. I think she envisioned immortality with all the trimmings, including power, admiration, beauty and wealth. Nevertheless, it turns out we are all the same in the end, even mummified royalty. We all have to leave our stuff behind. No matter how well the Egyptian citizens prepared their kings and queens for the afterlife—providing food, jewelry, thrones, servants and possessions—the treasures were all found when the tombs were opened, and the treasures are now being admired by modern people, rather than being used by ancient kings and queens in a royal afterlife.

 

Isn’t it still a temptation today, that drive to gain power and amass things? We want all the external trappings we can accumulate, and then we measure our worth by them. We set ourselves in power over others. We work harder and harder to gather more and more. And when we run out of space for all we have gathered, we have storage units on every corner and a whole chain of stores that don’t actually sell stuff—they only sell containers to hold our stuff! We stand as firmly over our lives as that multi-ton granite statue, projecting the image we worked to create. We wield the riches and power over the world around us to accomplish our desires in this life. At some point, though, mortality catches up with us all. And mortality exposes each of us for who we really are—destructible flesh, blood and bone that blackens and shrivels with time. Dust in the wind that blows away, regardless of accomplishments, wealth or reputation.

 

Of course, we do have eternal souls that will live in the afterlife, but what a different afterlife than the ancient Egyptians envisioned! We won’t need jewelry or chairs or mummified legs of beef (seriously, we saw this!) to support us in the afterlife. We will only need God’s presence—and we will be able to enter that presence without shame because of the blood of Jesus. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s provision for our souls in the hereafter, we don’t need to be gathering riches to support us in our eternal lives with Him. In fact, when gathering riches is our goal, we are actually working at cross-purposes with the eternal life of our own souls. We are focusing on the material and the temporary, on the stuff that is not eternal and cannot travel into eternity with us.

 

Jesus once told a story about a man who did that. We call it the Story of the Rich Fool—a judgement we pass so easily against him without realizing we are exactly like him! He had land and raised crops, like so many at the time, and he had a particularly good crop one year. His response to the good crop was anxiety: “What will I do? I have no place to store my crops!” And his solution was to tear down his barns and build newer, bigger ones. I don’t think the foolish part of this story lies in the good crop or even in having new barns. I think the man’s foolishness was in his motivation, for his next thought was, “And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry’” (Luke 12:19, NIV). His goal was his own comfort and wealth. While Jesus does not specifically condemn wealth itself, He does repeatedly condemn those who are motivated strictly by wealth, and He repeatedly warns that wealth can obscure our view of God. So it was with the rich fool. He planned to build bigger barns, store all the excess grain and be wealthy and comfortable from then on. He left God out of that equation, and he left God’s people out of that equation (Luke 12:14-21).

 

Immediately after this story, Jesus reminds us of three things: we don’t need to worry because God knows our needs and He can meet them better than we can; if we seek God’s kingdom, God will care for our earthly needs; and where our treasure is, our heart will be. In other words, when we are focused on the needs and desires of this world, we cause ourselves anxiety and care and we miss the important things of God’s kingdom (Luke 12:22-34).

 

As you go about the mundane activities of your life, check in with yourself and see what is motivating you. If you are pursuing earthly comfort or storing up treasures like you were filling Tutankhamun’s tomb, ask yourself why. You can’t take them with you anymore than King Tut did. They may be shiny and hard to look away from, but how are they affecting your heart and the world around you? Are they making you more focused on God and on the well-being of those God puts in your path? Or are they igniting more covetousness and reminding you that your barns are too small? I can’t tell you what the right size barn is for you and your family. I am still working to seek God’s perspective for myself and my own family—to meet our needs and actually free up our time for God’s work. However, I do know God makes it clear over and over again in His word that the pursuit of riches is not consistent with the pursuit of His work in the world. Given the kind of afterlife we will have, full of worship and joy in His presence, I want to pursue that which can accompany me there—that is, other eternal souls of God’s children on earth.