Weekday Devotion WithPastor Chris

I have the great good fortune to be married to a wonderful preacher.  This past Sunday, Bonnie spoke of a trip we made last summer to the United Kingdom, and our encounter there with the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum.

     The Stone is 3’ 8” high, 2’ 5.8” wide, and some 11” thick.  It is a fragment of a larger stone that is believed to have been about 6½ ' tall.  It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds, and it bears three inscriptions: one in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphs (used for religious and monumental purposes); the second in the Demotic script (used for business and literature); and the third in Greek (used by Egypt’s administrators following Alexander the Great’s conquest one hundred and thirty five years before).  All three are versions of the same decree which was issued in Memphis, Egypt in 196 BCE. 

     It is thought that the stone was originally displayed in an Egyptian temple until the 4^th century CE when the temple was destroyed.  Later, it was used as building material to construct a fortress wall for the Ottoman Empire near the village of Rosetta.  There it remained, stuck in that wall, until 1799, when Napoleon’s army was looking for building materials of its own.  One of Napoleon’s officers, a French engineer named Pierre-Francois Bouchard, noticed an irregular slab of stone sticking out of one of the old walls.  Seeing the three scripts inscribed upon it, he immediately realized the stone’s historic value and reported it to Napoleon himself.

     The Rosetta Stone offered the first Ancient Egyptian multi-lingual text recovered in modern times, and it aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher hieroglyphic script.  No one had ever been able to translate hieroglyphs before.  Lithographic copies and plaster casts of the stone immediately began circulating among European museums and scholars.

     When the British defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, they took possession of the stone.  Even though it hadn’t been deciphered, it was considered important enough that it was specifically written into the Treaty of Alexandria.  The first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803.  Nineteen years later, Jean-Francois Champollion announced the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts.
 
     Once deciphered, the stone proved the key to the translation of other ancient hieroglyphs.  Similar Egyptian multi-lingual inscriptions have been discovered in the years since, but it was the Rosetta Stone that first provided the key to our modern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and civilization.  As a result, the term Rosetta Stone has come to be used of any essential clue in a new field of knowledge.

     What Bonnie went on to suggest, and the reason why I chose this for our devotion this morning, is that Jesus is a kind of Rosetta Stone for both Scripture and life.  He is the lens through which we encounter Scripture, and even more, through him we gain a new perspective, a new understanding, of what this life of ours is all about.  Jesus offers us that interpretive key which helps us unlock its meaning and purpose.  It is when we study him – what he said and how he lived – that all the other pieces of this life start falling into place.

“Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil. 2:9-11)