Guess what I received in the mail! Nope, not the Publishers’ Clearinghouse check for a gazillion dollars. Evidently, I’m now part of the Nielsen Ratings for TV watching. (I can just sense a collective fearful shuttering coming from Hollywood…right.)
One of the questions on the form was about the number of TV’s in my home. Only one, but it’s actually a bit on an outdated enquiry since you can pull up just about anything on any computer or mobile device.
And I’ve now the next form regarding which television shows I actually watch. One (of the few that I bother with) is called Timeless. I enjoy history, and this is a show about time travel back into particular events, sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious, that manifestly molded our current society.
The running theme is about two groups of people, each with a time machine, traipsing through our past like bulls in the china shop. One team is trying to re-form history into their own likeness while the other is trying to stop them and fix what has been changed.
Makes me consider two very special trees that God put in the Garden, (no, neither team has tried to travel back quite that far yet…)
“…In the middle of the garden he placed the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
I can picture our unfortunate fore-mother, Eve, meeting the serpent coiled around a branch in the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That’s the fruit she tasted and shared with her husband, Adam, “and their eyes were opened”, but not in the way for which they (and we) were created. Now the burden of figuring out this life was no longer on God, but on themselves.
And we’ve been mucking about in this confused and deluded state ever since. Just turn on the news. (Not one of the shows I usually watch, considering the Neilson Ratings I mean.)
There are those who posit our expulsion from the Garden at this point in history was an act of mercy, and I agree. Some say if we been left there to eat of the Tree of Life, we would have been left in our sinful state for eternity, or something like that.
I’m no theologian, but even just watching a show like Timeless gives a glimpse of how much more of a mess we could have made if eating from the Tree of Life had included things like power over time (which it very well may have.) Any science fiction geek can tell you what a fascination the human psyche has for time travel; how many of us would travel back to change certain things if we could? Gag! Can you imagine?!?
Which is what Timeless does, and gives a pretty good description, perhaps without meaning to, of what a mess it would make not only of history, but of the human heart.
More importantly, this restriction gives me another clue to the grace and sovereignty of God, to His creative purpose, in that I have only a limited power over time, and it’s just in a forward sense.
“I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.”
And I don’t need a time machine for that.
Genesis 2:8; Philippians 3:13,14 Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
INSPIRATION with an ATTITUDE 