If you’re a chess player, you have probably experienced something of the despair depicted in this painting.
The young man on the right is contemplating chess catastrophe.
His remaining pieces are surrounded. His opponent appears to have just captured his queen.
But there’s a good deal more happening here than first meets the eye.
The painting, by the German artist Friederich August Moritz Retzsch (1779-1857), is officially known as The Chess Players. But it is commonly called Checkmate.
Retzsch was fascinated by Goethe’s Faust, the classic story of a physician who, bored with life and yearning for adventure, sells his soul to the devil. Such deals, at first, are inevitably more exciting than spending weekends watching reruns of Law and Order.
But selling one’s soul never has a happy ending.
Retzsch has captured the moment when Mephistopheles (Satan), the jaunty fellow with the red feather in his cap, is closing in for the kill.
The chessboard is on the flat slab of a tomb. Note the large spider in the foreground. The young man’s pieces represent the virtues of a righteous life. Satan’s chess pieces symbolize temptations. The latter are definitely mopping up the former.
An angel looks on forlornly, reflecting the hopelessness of the situation.
In 1861, Rev. R.R. Harrison of Richmond, Virginia, hosted a dinner party in which Checkmate played a starring role.
Harrison had gathered the local Chess Association for an evening’s entertainment. One of the guests who happened to be in town was Paul Morphy, a chess prodigy who is still regarded by many as one of the 10 finest masters ever to play the game.
Harrison, who owned an engraving of Checkmate, had decided to recreate the positions of all the pieces in Retzsch’s painting on his own chessboard.
He later wrote, “I had regarded the young man’s game as hopeless.”
Morphy, however, was more optimistic. Sitting at Harrison’s chessboard, he took over the young man’s remaining pieces in their current positions. Before the end of the evening he had beaten all the other guests, one at a time, each of whom had assumed the devil’s huge advantage.
Checkmate averted.
Your situation may also look hopeless.
You may have misplayed your vocational opportunities, train-wrecked your relationships, and surrendered to temptations you never saw coming.
But you’re not facing those circumstances alone. Here’s how the apostle Paul wraps up his letter to the church at Rome: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).
If you let a master direct the pieces on the board of your life, your game isn’t over yet.
Fortunately, just such a Master is available.
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