Chess – “The Game of Dictators”

I’ve been thinking about the game of Chess lately. As I was thinking about it, it suddenly hit me how much this game is like dictators and their people. As I was doing some research about the game, I came across a website that said it has sometimes been called “The game of Dictators”.

For those of you who do not know much about the game let me try and explain how the game is played. It is a strategy type game played on a checker board. There are two players and each player try to capture their opponent’s king to win the game. The two players start off with an equal number of pieces to play with. Each piece can only move in specific directions and can capture opponent pieces in specific ways. Some pieces are considered more important than other pieces because of their power. Next to the king, the queen is the most important, the pawns are least important.

Here is what struck me about how this game is much like dictators and their people. In the game, it is just as important to protect your own king as it is to try and capture your opponent’s king. Every piece is expendable. Everyone, even the queen, can and will be sacrificed to gain the upper hand against the opponent, or to protect your own king.  

With dictators, the same is true. Every member under the dictator’s control is expendable even those closest to them. If it is prudent to eliminate someone, the dictator will do everything in his or her power to make that happen.

In the United States of America, our forefathers understood this and tried to design our government to help prevent us from ever having a dictator in control. They were smart to separate the three branches of government, Judicial, Legislative, and Executive. They also saw the value of ALL people. Abraham Lincoln said it most beautifully when he wrote ‘The Declaration of Independence’. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights (See note below), that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This idea is the soul of our US Constitution. We have made some steps over the years towards this end but we have a long way to go and there are always people who make us go backwards, our present president included. 
Note to above: The original version said that all men had certain inherent natural rights. When it was changed to 'endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights', it was meant to exclude slaves because slaves were considered property.

In this present world of dictators, the most important person under the dictator (king) is just as expendable as the least important. We fight and do all the evil things we do to each other for what reason? To keep dictators in power or to try and become dictators ourselves? It makes no sense. We will all be judged by the things we have done in this life.

I have said this many times and will say it again. Our Heavenly Father and Jesus are so different and worthy of our adoration. If I were to put Them, Father God and Jesus, in a chess game, here is how it might look. God, our Father would be the One playing the game, Jesus would be our King, and we the playing pieces. God would sacrifice King Jesus in order to save us, game over.

Our Heavenly Father's desire is that there were no chess games at all. Instead, that there would be peace on earth. But, we are too stupid to achieve peace on our own or even to desire it.