Last Tuesday morning, TV celeb Julia Louis-Dreyfus received a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Well known–okay, she’s famous–as Elaine on “Seinfeld” and starring in the current hit “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” Julia had arrived, she thought (as she arrived?).

But then she noticed something. The star had her name misspelled.

Whoever had made the star had her name as “Julia Luis Dreyfus.” No hyphen and “Louis” was missing the “o.”

Julia called it “a great metaphor for show business. Right when you think you’ve made it, you get knocked down.”

“(It’s) how this business works,” she laughed.

I read somewhere that the celebrity or his/her supporters have to shell out $10,000 for the privilege of receiving one of those stars. So it’s not quite the honor it appears to be. And then they get your name wrong.

It’s no fun being humbled, particularly in public.

I’ve told on these pages how as a new pastor in Charlotte, NC, nearly a quarter of a century ago, I had the church purchase a nice ad to tell the city of our Sunday services (as well as, ahem, our new pastor). We laid it out, the newspaper’s people assured us it would be done just as we said, and all was well. The brand-spanking new pastor would be suitably announced and welcomed.

Saturday’s paper came and I eagerly turned to the appropriate page. There was our ad. It was indeed attractive. But wait–are my eyes deceiving me? Can this be right?

Underneath my picture, the ad read, “Dr. I. M. Pastor.”

I’m not making this up.

It turned out that this was a little in-house joke the advertising department played when laying out an ad. For a banking ad, the line would read, “I. M. Banker,” that sort of thing. But they always changed the line before it went to press. Except this time they didn’t.

On Sunday, my congregation was not sure what to think. Most had not seen it, and those who had were puzzled. Some said, “Our pastor has this quirky sense of humor.” He has that, I suppose, but he also has enough insecurity about himself not to pull such a self-deprecating stunt.

It was a tad funny, a good bit embarrassing, and completely humbling. An inauspicious beginning to what turned out to be the most difficult three years of my life.

I was reminded of the role humility can play by something that happened this week when someone asked a question about Bible prophecy.

I had brought a noontime talk to a business group of 20 or 25 at a local cafeteria. My subject was prayer, the topic was “Think of Prayer as Reminding God” (based on Isaiah 62:6-7), and at the end, I was taking questions.

A man in the back raised his hand. “What is your take on the state of current affairs in the world regarding the end of time, what’s going on in Israel, that sort of thing?”

I told him I had no new insight on this. “I am convinced of this: as we move closer and closer to the end, evil will get worse and worse while good gets stronger and stronger. They will co-exist side by side.”

God’s people must not despair over the surging strength of the dark side, but rejoice in the power of all that is good and of God.

On the subject of Israel, I suggested we proceed with caution in our pronouncements over what anything means prophetically. Some of our brethren thought the Balfour Declaration of 1917 establishing a homeland for the Jews set in motion a promise from the Lord that “this generation will not depart until all these things come to pass” from Matthew 24:34.

Then, when Israel became an independent nation in 1948, practically every prophecy-addict thought that did it! Surely, this was the beginning of the end.

Apparently neither was.

There is a myopia involved in our interpretations of prophecy. What happens in our lifetime looms larger in our minds and seems far more important than all that has gone before.

When “Desert Storm” came about in the early 1990s–the U.S. sent troops into the Middle East to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and back into Iraq–speculation among God’s people ran rampant: “Is this the beginning of Armageddon?”

Think of that. On the grand scale, that was not exactly like a world-war, and yet many of our people were ready to call it the battle to end all battles.

I told the Wednesday group, “How many people died in World War II? Over a hundred million? Can you imagine how prophecy-addicts must have gone ga-ga over that? Surely that event must figure into Bible prophecy somewhere. But it didn’t.”

Even that was not the end.

A little humility is in order any time we come to interpret Bible prophecy, I suggested to them and suggest it now to our readers..

“Take the matter of the Antichrist,” I told the Wednesday group. “In my lifetime, he’s been identified as Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger (!), Guru Maharaj Ji, and a thousand others who occupied the world stage for their 15 minutes. It was none of them.”

Some today are even calling Barack Obama the Antichrist.

We shake our heads in wonder at such antics, such nuttiness.

We hold ourselves up to ridicule with short-sighted pronouncements on these matters.

Some years back, we had a church member who loved to teach Bible prophecy. According to veteran staffers, she had God’s agenda worked out and the charts to prove it. A leader said, “Don’t give her a class, preacher. She will kill the attendance.”

When she came to me, her new pastor, to request a class in which to share her knowledge of Bible prophecy, I told her we would be glad to do this on two conditions:

“One, we’ll give you a room to teach it. You can announce it and promote it and teach it. But you’ll have to build your own class from those who want this.

“And two, at the end of every session, I want you to make this statement: ‘This is how it seems to me; I could be wrong.'”

I may as well have asked her to renounce her faith. “Oh no, I couldn’t do that! That would be undermining everything I tell them.”

No, I assured her. It would be emphasizing the difficulty of the subject. It’s always a good thing to bring a humble spirit to the interpretation of prophecy.

She wanted no part of such a restriction.

I was not surprised.

Remember the line from I Corinthians 8:1 about “knowledge puffs up”?

It does indeed, and in no area more than Bible prophecy. (At this point, I typed in the name of a certain television preacher who feeds off the public’s mania for this and then thought better of it. Every generation produces a new crop of these guys.)

Something hit me the next day about Bible prophecy which must be the ultimate come-down for “the greatest nation in the world today.”

The United States of America is nowhere to be found in Bible prophecy.

How could God have committed such an oversight?

Aren’t we the richest land in the world, the last of the superpowers, the oldest democracy still standing? Haven’t we been the most generous of the world’s citizens, the most faithful of the world’s Christians, the most mission-minded of everyone?

(Whether we are or are not is not the issue here. There is no doubt that this is precisely how many feel.)

Try as we may, the U.S.A. cannot be found in even the most bizarre interpretation of prophecy.

Personally, I have no problem with that. From the perspective of eternity, the 235 years this country has existed is a blip on the screen. As Isaiah puts it concerning the self-important nations of the 8th century B.C., “Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales; Behold, He lifts up the islands like fine dust. Even Lebanon is not enough to burn! Nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before Him, They are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless” (Isa. 40:15-17).

God is not impressed by our bigness, our wealth, our self-importance.

Preacher, God is not impressed with your attendance, the new buildings you have erected with His money, the sign you’ve had installed near the highway to tell everyone how to find you, the fence you have placed around the cemetery.

(One of our Baptist state weeklies was telling where a preacher was leaving his church for a new pastorate. The article listed only one accomplishment from his last ministry: “During his years in this church, a new fence was built around the cemetery.” Whether to keep the dead in or the living out was not mentioned.)

Consider this a call for humility, the shining star of all Christlike virtues.

Nothing becomes a child of God like sweetness of spirit and a sense of perspective in heavenly matters. “He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust” (Psalm 103:14). Whether we know it or not is the question.

Even if I had never read a word about the Jehovah’s Witness cult and their doctrine, I would not believe a thing they say for one huge reason: the adherents of this religion whom I’ve talked with over the years have had one thing in common–pride. They were insufferably obnoxious in their smugness over their interpretations. They were right and you were an idiot for believing anything else.

Not only do they infect their members with this ungodly attitude, but they seem to ruin them forever from belonging to a normal Christian church.

In one church I pastored, a young woman who had dropped out from Jehovah Witnesses would come by for the occasional counseling session. When their prophecy of the Second Coming for 1975 or 1976 had not panned out, untold thousands–some say millions–had become disillusioned and quit going to their local kingdom halls. But that does not mean they started attending “normal” churches. This sect’s false doctrine had so poisoned them against basic, biblical Christianity, they had no confidence in anything any more.

Nothing I said or did in our counseling seems to have gotten through to that young wife and mother. She carried her sadness about Christianity like a pregnancy that would refused to end.

I’m not sure who all is responsible for that, but if I know anything at all, someone has a lot to account for at the Judgement.

We who follow Jesus Christ are torn between two forces: the need to be dead certain about living certainties, and the absolute necessity to be humble in our certainty.

None of us have arrived yet. Paul testified that he hadn’t (Philippians 3:12).

We are all still “seeing through a glass darkly” (I Corinthians 13:12).

Humility is in order.