The Man Who Was Bigger Than God

The Man Who Was Bigger Than God

After his classmates made fun of him, Howie threw away his hearing aids. He lived the rest of his life with an incessant ringing in his ears. It nearly drove him insane. When his prayers for relief went unanswered, he set his credo for life: if you can’t depend on God, you have to be your own god.

Fearing the bacteria that bred in the dampness of Houston, his hypochondriac mother sent her son to live in dry Southern California. There, he discovered the two loves of his life: Hollywood and aviation. Lost in the magic of a movie, he forgot the ringing in his ears. Soaring high in an airplane, it stopped altogether.

Then his parents died, making him the world’s wealthiest orphan. Howie boasted, “I’m richer than God!” He became the king of Hollywood, producing a string of films. Along the way, he engaged in sexual affairs that led to incurable syphilis. But that didn’t stop him from becoming king of the skies or from building history’s largest airplane. The world was stunned when he flew to Paris in half the time it took Charles Lindbergh—and then flew around the world in three days. He made a fortune in World War II as the biggest supplier of airplane parts. After he purchased shares in Trans World Airlines, he became the first multibillionaire in history. Howard Hughes now bragged that he was more powerful than God.

Yet his bravado masked his spreading syphilis. His old fear of germs returned with a vengeance. He moved to Las Vegas for the clean air, purchased a hotel and casino, and lived like a hermit in a sanitary bubble on the top floor. His agents bought up the surrounding casinos to extend his safe zone. He spent millions bribing the president to stop nuclear testing in Nevada, lest he be exposed to radiation. He funneled a fortune to the CIA to stop Russia from unleashing biological warfare. Howard Hughes was now the ultimate control freak.

Toward the end, he was downing hundreds of pills every day. He would eat little besides green peas, and he had each one measured so he wouldn’t choke to death. He kept a team of doctors on full-time alert, wore surgical gowns, used Kleenex boxes for shoes, and wouldn’t allow anything to touch his exposed skin. If a flu or cold epidemic hit the area, a private jet would quickly whisk him away.

In spite of all his precautions, he fell into a coma when he was seventy and died in transit to the hospital on April 5, 1976. He was the richest man in the world, but his six-foot-four-inch frame had been starved down to ninety pounds, his body covered by filth and his arms riddled with holes. X-rays showed broken needles lodged under his skin. The autopsy revealed a brain eaten by syphilis. He was so unrecognizable that the FBI took fingerprints to confirm his identity. The story of a man who thought he was bigger than God screams a warning to all of us who try to control our world. We might relax more if we remember this:

Worries don’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it.

Cast your burden upon the LORD and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.

Psalm 55:22, NASB