Did you ever get one of those cheap mechanical pencils where you push the top eraser thing like a button and the lead drops down? Lots of little leads in those pencils; you can hear them rattle around when you shake the pencil. Trouble is the lead breaks about the time you get serious trying to write something down. Can’t blame the manufacturer though! You bought the thing (and I’ll bet you’ll buy them again).
Pencils have been around longer than most realize. Remember those cuneiform tablets with all the ancient wisdom written down on clay couple hundred million years ago? As I remember it (no not because I was there), when you look at the images they are all made up of some combination of the same symbol over and over – a wedge shape triangle. Now to my thinking, that was made by a pencil. You know, a little hand held stick with a carved wedge on the end. All the writer had to do was spin that pencil around to line up the wedge and off he goes poking that pencil deep into the clay, documenting all the important facts of life at the time. Bet you that he didn’t need a pocket full of those pencils.
Man has found a bazillion things to document over the years: the earth is flat, the earth is round, the sun goes around the earth, the earth goes around the sun, my property contains 10 acres, my property contains precisely 7.34 acres. What’s amazing is that every time I think about how, when and why things were documented, there’s always a suspicion that either it’s wrong or it’s soon to be proven wrong.
Then I think of scripture from the Holy Bible. Man, those guys were linked in, to coin a phrase. And God separated the dark from the light and called the dark night and the day light… I’ll bet you didn’t know that astrophysicists in today’s scientific community, when they boil down all their knowledge to something that you can repeat without 14 doctorate degrees, say “The universe is made up of stars and black holes.” Funny, they can’t prove scripture wrong.
Then along comes Jesus. Holy cow, I mean scripture’s been talking about this guy for 7,000 years – over 250 prophesies of who, what, when and where – and come today, not one piece of evidence that alters the facts of His life, death or resurrection! Probably won’t see any, either.
Believers don’t have a big issue with stories like the floating ax head, the deluge, the confounding of tongues, or the resurrection. But where would we be if someone didn’t take the time to write it down. Maybe the Hebrews moved to using brushes for calligraphy because the little triangle pencil thing wasn’t fun anymore. Maybe it’s because they invented paper (well, maybe the Chinese, anyway).
By all accounts, the scripture are complete. The story hasn’t changed; the promise is still there; God loves you. Scripture tells us not to add to it or take away from it. But it also says that we will overcome evil by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. So, I write with this non-typewriter in hopes that you will learn the truth, and that it sets you free, even from some little skinny pencil lead.
Warren Johnson
08 Jan 2011
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