As you grab your seats and grab your Bibles, you can turn with me to Matthew chapter 13.

And as you find your way there, let me tell you that in the year 323 BC, at the age of 32,

at the absolute height of his success, or quite frankly, the height of anyone's success ever in history,

Alexander the Great wept.

Now, it had been an incredible journey, an incredible ride, a decade of domination.

To go back to when he was your age, passion age, at the age of 20, he had risen

to become King of Macedon after his father, Philip of Macedon, had been assassinated by a bodyguard.

And so now he's in this 18 to 25 age bracket, and he's the king of a country, soon to be the king of an empire.

He quickly decides that one country is not enough, and so he's going to turn life into a

real version of Risk or Catan, and he just starts sweeping the map.

At age 24, he defeats, and his army defeats Egypt, and he becomes

the Pharaoh of Egypt, and is proclaimed to be the son of God. At age 27, having conquered the

entire Persian Empire, defeating Darius III in all of his armies, he takes on the title that the Persian monarch had,

which was King of King. So if you're tracking with me, he's now calling himself King of Kings

and the Son of God, and he's not even 30 yet. He, by the way, sits on in Susa the same throne

that Esther had come before Xerxes in front of, with hoping for the golden rod.

So this is all part of his turf.

And by the way, in Susa, he could go out if he wants to and visit the prophet Daniel's grave

who's buried outside.

By age 32, he's aged out of passion, but he is not done because he has conquered more

known world, more of the known world than anyone in history before or since, and is ruling

over an empire of two million square miles. His exploits, of course, are legendary, so much so that they even make it into the pages of the Bible.

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