I’m not sure why but I’m intrigued by tattoos. I’ve even thought about getting one. I have a friend who has many tattoos and every time I see them, I think of the story that they tell. Like the dog-tags on his arm that tell the story of his love for his dad and brother who served in the Army and Air Force. Or the many tattoos of his favorite college sports teams. They each have a story associated with them. It’s like he has marked his story on his arms to let others see who he is and what’s important to him.
His tattoos remind me of a story about three boys. They were kidnapped by an evil man. They were forced to change their names to give them a new identity. They were then brought into a society that liked to brand or mark their captives with a special marking to show that they were no longer who they used to be. They were marked to give them a new identity.
This story is the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the Bible. You may know them better by the names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. You see they were captured by the King of Babylon and given new names. He renamed these boys, trying to make them part of his society. He even had a practice of placing special markings on his captives, but what he didn’t take into account was that they had already been marked. They were marked by God as one of His children.
We live in a day when kidnapping people greatly frowned upon. We have amber alerts and other emergency response systems set up to alert people to an event such as this. While we’re not taken captive by an evil ruler, we’re constantly bombarded by people and situations that try to mark us. We are marked by our fears and by our failures. Often we’ll be marked by our anxiety and by our hatred of other people just for being different from us. There’s an evil that is present in the world that tries to rename us and give us a new identity as the king of Babylon did to those three young men. This evil tries to call us by a new name and mark us as not valuable, worthless, despised, not-good-enough, even rejected. This evil is the Devil. He wants us to believe that we’re failures and that these failures define who we are. He tries to mark us with his names for us in an attempt to make us forget God’s names for us.
As baptized followers of Jesus, we were marked. We were marked in the waters of baptism. These waters marked us as children of God. We were marked with the sign of the cross on our forehead and heart. We were marked to remind us that we were set apart for something great. The names that Satan tries to put on us are overpowered by the names that God has already given us. Names like valued, precious, child, loved, forgiven, and the list goes on.
These names are ours because of Jesus. You see Jesus took on himself marks that were meant for us. The bible teaches that the marks of the penalty for sin are punishment and death. But instead of allowing these marks to be placed on us, he took them on himself. The bible teaches that Jesus was marked for us. He was beaten, bruised, wounded, and tortured. He was marked with death that we might be marked for life.
Now you and I carry a mark that Satan can’t take away from us. It’s a mark of God’s forgiveness and love. It’s the mark of God’s grace and mercy. We carry on our hearts and lives the mark of Jesus who died and rose for us. You have been marked. You’ve been marked as one dearly loved by God. You are marked not with ink or tattoos but with the death and resurrection of Jesus. That’s a story that you carry in your words and actions. It’s a mark that enables us to be the very presence of Jesus where we live, work, and play.
You have been marked as one redeemed by Christ the crucified, and that’s a story worth wearing!
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