When I was in my formative teenage years, the Beatles were turning everything upside down, and hair was one of the great divides at the time. I desperately wanted a Beatles haircut, but I had curly hair, so covering my brow with a fringe was an impossibility and I gave up. (One boy in my year at school told me that he used to iron his hair to get it straight!) Then came the Mods, with short hair and a short fringe, so I quickly joined that style. Now my forehead is still fully visible – all the way to the back of my neck, in fact!
Hairstyles change – or fall out – but the forehead is always there, and it can say as much about us as the other expressions on our face. It can show worry, anger, fear, depression. It can show peace. But it can show something even deeper than our emotions.
He said to him, “Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all who weep and sigh because of the detestable sins being committed in their city.”
5 Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! 6 Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin right here at the Temple.” So they began by killing the seventy leaders. (Ezekiel 9:4-6, NLT)
So the first angel left the Temple and poured out his bowl on the earth, and horrible, malignant sores broke out on everyone who had the mark of the beast and who worshiped his statue. (Rev 16:2, NLT)
One day our foreheads will show where we stand. Do we weep and sigh because of all the evil that is in the world – not just at the sins that we ourselves don’t commit – all of it? Or do we revel in sin, even the smallest?
We talk about keeping our noses clean. There is a lot of muck and dust out there. If our noses are low enough to get dirty, it will almost certainly mess our foreheads, hair or no hair!
There is nothing I can do which will stop me being a marked man. The question is who will mark me?