Begin 2025 with the fear of the Lord

“What is past is prologue.” These words are inscribed on the statue known as Future that stands in front of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. The quotation is taken from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Act 2, Scene 1, Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, tells Sebastian, the brother of the King of Naples, “What’s past is prologue.” Antonio was trying to convince Sebastian to kill his brother Alonso and take the crown, as Antonio had killed his brother Prospero. The idea here is that the past sets the context for the present and the future. Who our ancestors were and what they did establish the setting in which we move and have our being in the present. Our actions, attitudes, beliefs, and wishes will also make up the setting for the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.

The year 2024 is now past. A new year dawns. It is hard to believe that we are saying goodbye to 2024. I was born in 1969, and for 30 years, the 21st century was a figment of my imagination. Now, this century is nearly a quarter of the way completed. What happened?

One of the great 20th-century champions of Western civilization, Richard Weaver, wrote in his book Ideas Have Consequences that the past comprises all our knowledge, the present is a thin line ever advancing, and the future is what we imagine about the days to come, made up of a composite of images from our past playing on the screen of the mind. As I write these lines, it is 6:52 p.m., George Winston’s album December is playing in the background, and my family members are in the house, all nursing the effects of bad colds. Every second that ticks by is becoming the past, while the present is steadily advancing into what a moment ago was the future. Now, the time is 6:55, and the line of the present continues its inexorable march.

We often think of history as an abstraction. We look at old photographs of people who are now dead. They often seem to stare back at us with expressionless faces. The dead seem so distant from us, inhabiting a world so different than our own as to seem almost unreal.

But history is not abstract. History is made up of real people who lived in real places facing real circumstances at real times. Those now dead once laughed, worked, loved, hated, played, planned, hoped, feared, lived, and died. They had the same nature as we do, and all of us will face death one day, just as they did. History is real, and it is ultimately about human beings—what they did and thought. History matters a great deal, not because “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Guess what, we will repeat our mistakes of the past, no matter how much knowledge of it we possess. History matters because those who inhabited past times had a nature like ours—on the one hand, possessing great dignity as divine image-bearers, and on the other hand, fallen in sin.

The Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs took human nature seriously in the way he thought about history. Human nature, he said, is not half good and half bad. Rather, it is a mixture of real dignity and real fallenness, which when mixed together makes a third thing. “In mathematics, with its rigidly fixed and immobile numbers, 100 plus 100 makes 200; in human life 100 plus 100 makes another kind of 100,” wrote Lukacs. When we think about the dead, we have to remember that they were complex, and casting them in simple good-versus-evil narratives does little to give us real understanding.

Some people find history irrelevant. Some find it entertaining. Others think it’s a dull exercise in memorizing dry-as-dust details like names and dates. But we should love the study of history because God made each of us with an awareness of our place in time. A person may not enjoy every historical subject, but who doesn’t love to tell stories about how they met their spouse, how they became a Christian, or what they did on last summer’s vacation?

Historical thinking is central to who we are as divine image-bearers. Adjacent to the statue Future in front of the National Archives is the statue Past. That statue is inscribed with the simple exhortation, “Study the past.” As one year dies and another is born, let us remember that we who live today will die tomorrow. Therefore, let us examine ourselves. Study the past to gain knowledge and wisdom, which begins with the fear of the Lord.