Saturday, May 01, 2010

Interesting Happenings - May 1, 2010

Good Saturday morning! We do live in a world of overwork and rushing about. I seem to recall a prophecy about something along those lines in the Bible. It took a bit of looking, but the verse is in Daniel 12:4 "But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase." The last two phrases stick with me in this age of rushing about. Such a small prophecy in the great expanse of the Bible. I even have trouble remembering where it occurs. To study the end times we turn to Revelation first, but there is much to read in Joel, Ezekiel, Thessalonians, Matthew, and many other books in the Bible about the end times. In fact, according to Dr. Lahaye's guide, only four books in the New Testament do not speak of the end times. Prophecy is pretty important to God it seems.

One of the major complaints I have heard in any large organization is about the lack of communication. "You should have told us this was coming down!" was one I often heard during my military service. One basic principle of leadership was to keep the men informed. Yet in practice that didn't always happen. The same thing happens in corporations, governments and towns of all sizes. Events simply move too quickly for us all. We end up rushing about in spite of our best intentions. The New King James version translates the phrase as "run to and fro". I find it interesting that so many of our popular sporting events involve just that. You could use "run to and fro" to describe much of football, soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey, many Olympic sports, and, of course, the chosen method for many of us to get in shape. You could also describe a lot of what goes on in corporations and our getting to and from our workplace in the same manner. Truly there is a lot of running to and fro, or rushing about, in our age.

Knowledge has increased. We often see the graph of mankind's accomplishments as a slowly rising line until about the middle of the 19th century (the 1800's for those of us who always get confused by that). At that point the graph begins curving upward until it is nearly vertical now. Knowledge is increasing faster than we can keep up with. On 60 Minutes last week, they spoke to some of the students who were using, or were aware of others using, drugs made to treat Attention Deficit Disorder to improve their mental energy and focus in college. The funny thing was that many supported using chemical enhancement to improve our mental function in order to learn better and faster, and I'm not talking about the students, but the scientists and doctors. Knowledge has increased so much, but how much faster will it increase if all students start taking drugs to improve their mental function and focus?

The next generation of students might just make us feel completely ignorant and stupid (not that they don't already). What if a 16-year old presidential candidate just trounces a 60-year old candidate in every debate due to that increased mental function? Yet we know from our own experience that almost no one is fit to lead much of anything at 16; we make a lot of mistakes at that age and lack the maturity we need for leadership. I realize you are thinking that our law says 35 is the minimum age, but Mr. Schwarzenegger wants to run for president as I have noted before in this blog. He has a lot of support; if the law is changed to allow those not native-born to hold that office, someone may try to lower the age limit too. Many interesting things are going on in this world and a lot of prophecy is coming to pass right in front of us.

Trust in God, and go ahead and read those late devotionals, even on Saturday! :-)

Bucky

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