Thoughts
"As
I walked through the wilderness of this world,
I lighted on a certain place where was a Den,
and I laid me down in that place to sleep:
and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream."
(Pilgrim's
Progress,
part 1, by John Bunyan)
"Now a
thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof.
In
thoughts
from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,"
-Job
4:12,13
The Rolling Bottle
I sat in the back of a bus, the seats all filled and near a dozen or so
standing. There was a person-less hole in front of me, and through it I noticed
a glass bottle rolling around as the bus floor swayed. It began to roll toward
the feet of a girl, moving quicker as it went. As it tapped against her ankles,
she looked at it with a combination of annoyance and a mischievous glint to her
eye, and kicked it away. As the minutes passed I watched others kick
absentmindedly or gleefully at it. I couldn't help but wonder why the thought
didn't occur to them that it might break and cut them. Isn't this is also
our way when it comes to sin? We playfully kick at it, never thinking
of the danger we're in without Christ. One turn of the bus will bring the bottle roughly
against our ankle, imbedding the shards into the exposed man. Would we continue
to kick a landmine? We are really playing with destruction as if we were immune to God's
justice. "A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the
simple pass on, and are punished." -Proverbs
27:12
The Broken
Watch
I bought an old-fashioned pocket-watch while I was in England during March
2002. It was somewhat faulty, the chain came off, and sometimes the second hand
would stick to the minute hand, making the gears grind to a halt.
Yesterday I was winding it, felt it slow and then heard it snap. As I
tried in vain to wind it I realized I had broken the winding mechanism. I
can hear it ticking as I type this, but very soon it will stop forever.
Aren't we like this watch? The day rolls on, one less 'revolution' we will ever
make, one less "go 'round" till the final halt.
Mice
There's a farm behind our property which has a lot of cats, so we had never had
a mouse before. Recently we started seeing evidences of a mouse, and went
out to buy mousetraps. On the first day, I put them in various places with
little bits of Swiss cheese as bait and came down the next morning to find out
what had happened. The mouse had been pretty crafty, and managed to eat all
the cheese out of the three traps without springing one.
In light of this, I used my Grandpa's bait of choice: Peanut Butter. A night
passed again, and in the morning I carefully peered in to check the first two
traps. To my amazement, he had managed to eat all the Peanut Butter off of the
two... But I checked the last one. Lo and behold, there was a tail and legs
appearing as I slowly opened the drawer.
His death had been humane because he had not seen it coming, and the trap had
snapped his neck, killing him instantly. But it brought me to think about
Proverbs 14:12,
"There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways
of death." The mouse had eaten three pieces of cheese from traps designed to
kill him... then two pieces of Peanut Butter from two of the traps... and as he
went to the third one, he must have really trusted the trap, never thinking it
would bring him death.
Aren't men and women like this? As sinners, we all go on pursuing life without
God, thinking that such a life cannot be "the ways of death" because we have
repeatedly been rewarded for our evil. The boy that cheated in high school was
never caught and went on to a good college. The girl that spread rumors about
another girl and then was able to "steal" her boyfriend. The lawyer that made
technicalities and loopholes his bread and butter to free the one he
knew
to be guilty, without a pang of conscience. Or more to the point... the man who
pretends to honor the Lord of heaven and earth and yet does just as sinfully as
before.
Have we not all licked up our cheese and peanut butter from the trap? "...as a bird hasteth to
the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life." -Proverbs
7:23
The whole of
Proverbs chapter 7
speaks to this.
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