Thunder of hoofbeats across the plain! A thousand horses, ridden by a thousand skillful and daring horsemen, raced and charged back and forth, their flying feet pounding the turf into trampled dust and erasing forever any mark of the site of the grave of the great Genghis Khan. So secret was the burial to be that every person met by the funeral procession was ruthlessly murdered, lest grave robbers should discover the location. As far as is known, they never did. Genghis Khan’s body has been undisturbed, and no one has found it to this day.
Perhaps his followers had heard of the burial of Alaric the Visigoth, who captured and sacked Rome centuries earlier. Dying as he marched on to Africa, he was buried beneath a river. His soldiers forced the inhabitants of a nearby town to divert the river’s course and carve a tomb for Alaric out of the bedrock. Then they restored the river to its normal bed—and slaughtered the laborers to prevent any from revealing the secret.
Where now do these mighty men of old lie?
God knows!
Right. God does know, and when the time comes that the dead, small and great, will have to stand before God, both the great rulers and the unknown laborers who were killed for their sake will have to be judged alike. The most hidden grave will not protect the person buried there. There is only one hiding place from that righteous judgment, and that is the Lord Jesus. Every soul who comes to Him in this day of grace He will hide, for He has said, “I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:99I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. (John 10:9)).
“A man [the Lord Jesus Christ] shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest,” that is, the dreadful judgment of God that is coming on all who have not taken refuge in the True Hiding Place.
“The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9).