A Thumb in God’s Eye

 

 

Treasure the people God sends you because He’s gonna want them back.

               Steven Jobs CEO Apple

 

Rev Wilbur Witt

There has to be a God because sure as hell there’s a devil! The first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century baptized us in fire. From the attack on the World Trade Center to the largest health crises since the Black Death of the Middle Ages it was shown time and time again that the more things change the more they stay the same. Just yesterday and 8.8 earthquake rocked the coast of Russia, and no, Trump didn’t do it. Tsunamis charged out to the Pacific Rim and the world stood back in awe at the raw power of nature. And yet you doubt the story of Noah that exists in all cultures.

Jesus told us this. There will be earthquakes, and wars, and rumors of wars and non-believers will tell you that there have always been these things! But of course, there have! Since we swung down out of the trees man has struggled against nature and other men but with mass communication, we now see it in real time. Jesus made real time. That’s where He lives. Do you think He didn’t know? Do you think He couldn’t see?

He could clearly see that as our perception was defined Satan would seek to confuse us. Then we would try to understand. Great minds would try to explain the origin of the universe and then a new telescope would re-explain it. How can you define something that you don’t even have a true perception about?

And in all these things we miss the one thing we can see. The most important thing. The thing we say we treasure yet the first thing we throw away as we seek “wisdom.” Each other! 

Mark Twain told a story about putting several different animals in a cage to observe what they’d do. He said that there was a bit of a squabble but after an hour or so things settled down and peace came to the cage. Then he took several people of different sects, beliefs, and denominations, put them in the cage. He again observed. Like the animals they went after each other but there was a modification. The human factor!  He explained. After a considerable period of time, they had passed the deliberations to a higher court!

And there were wars and rumors of wars. As we seek to destroy our most prized possession. Each other! The more we are different the more we are all alike. For all the political theory, psychology and science there is nothing new under the sun. Same as it ever was. We don’t “discover” anything! It discovers us! As we try to understand the six days of creation cited in the Bible we miss the point altogether. Bible thumping preachers cling to a six-day time stamp, neatly divided by twenty-four-hour days while scientist point to a bit of a much broader scale as atheists churn out incredibly long words when it could have been six days or six billion years! God had time. He created time! It was in that ping pong ball you call The Big Bang! And you weren’t there for the show. You were a thumb in God’s eye! The devil tried to tell God that. Always has been, always will be! Lucky you!

And one day you will lie in a bed alone. No matter how many are there around you, you will be alone because the journey you will take you will have to take alone. That’s the plan. The eternal appointment. And all the people around you may voice comfort and faith, but inside they are deluding themselves into believing that they will not find themselves in that bed. Something will intervene. God, science, or perhaps it’s all a matrix and they aren’t there at all. Everbody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. But in one hundred years nobody in that room will have made any difference at all. They will all be filed away in some bone yard with those who grieved for them right there beside them and their descendants will still be arguing about what the meaning of is is, while never realizing that they, too, are all still in that cage and  on the docket of that higher court.