One subject that has always been a fascination for a lot of people is the idea of time travel. To list all the books that have been written on this subject, and all the movies that have been made, would be far too time consuming and take up too much room here, but I am sure most of us could think of many right off the top of our heads. (“Back to the Future”, “The Time Machine”, “Dr. Who”, etc.)
The idea of being able to go back in time, either out of a feeling of nostalgia, to a time that seemed better in our memory, or to correct some bad decision or action from our past that had negative consequences.
I think it is natural and normal for us to get a little nostalgic at times. It is good for us to think back to pleasant times in our lives. It gives us hope, especially if we may be going through a difficult time in the present. Being thankful is a good way to make use of our memories. It helps to put things in perspective. All good and all bad that we experience in this life is temporary. As the old saying goes, “this too shall pass.” We do, however, often seem to have selective memory. We should not be in the habit of idolizing the past, and remembering a distorted version of it that does not line up with reality. Growing middle-aged, with the balding head, chubby belly and stiffening back, and constantly reliving the glory days of high school or college sports, or “good times running with the pack”, keeps us suspended in time and oblivious to the challenges of the present. (Think of the movies and TV programs produced glamorizing the “good old days” of the 1950’s, when girls wore pink skirts, guys slicked their hair back, and things were simple and fun, blah blah blah. It was great, unless you were the stereo-typed skinny nerd kid whose black rimmed glasses were inevitably broken and taped in the middle.)
In the Old Testament, we read of the time when Moses was leading the Israelites out the bondage and slavery of Egypt into the land God had promised them. They began to complain about their hardships, with a distorted memory of their past. They gloried in their past, eating meat in Egypt, but seemed to readily forget that they were beaten and overworked as slaves! (Numbers 11:4-6)
The flip side of the time travel coin is the desire to fast forward into the future. If we only knew what was going to happen, the long term consequences of what we are doing now. We could change the things that might not turn out so well if we could only know ahead of time. Knowing the future would also give us the advantage over others who do not have that knowledge. Think of the money to be made in the stock market!
Fortune tellers and seerers have been around, in one form or another, since the beginning of time. There is great money to be made in pretending to be able to read the future, and cater to people’s desire to control their outcome. Con artists and charlatans have always existed and been more than willing to profit from human narcissism.
There is only one problem with the whole time travel thing. It is not real. We can’t live in yesterday. Yesterday is gone. It no longer exists. You can’t go to what isn’t. Imagine for a moment if your house caught on fire and burned to the ground. You were forced to move to a new home. Then, after being there for a few months, one of your children said, “Dad, I don’t like this house, why can’t we move back into the one that burned down?” Our past has “burned down” in a sense. You can’t return to something that doesn’t exist.
Just as the past no longer exists, the future does not exist. You can’t travel to a place that does not exist.
Jesus said, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow , for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:25-34)
When we worry about the future, we sometimes worry about things that never happen. We fear something that does not even exist, and may never exist. That does not mean we should not plan for our future, but when we do, we should plan with the understanding that there are many things that may happen in the future over which we have no control, and we should always plan knowing that ultimately God controls all things, so we do everything for His glory and praise, seeking, first His kingdom and His righteousness in all things.
We live in the now, not yesterday or tomorrow. God is in the eternal “Now”. Mortal humans are (temporarily) bound in linear time, which we cannot change, regardless of fanciful science fiction ideas. The problem with regretting yesterday, or worrying about tomorrow is that doing so often blinds us to what is right in front of us in the here and now. We need to be engaged in life. Life is NOW.
God confronts each of us in the NOW. The Scripture says, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion…” (Hebrews 3:7-8).
And, “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called TODAY, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” (Hebrews 3:12-13).
Think of the significance of this: TODAY is all that really exists. Yesterday does not exist. It is gone. Tomorrow does not exist yet. When God speaks to you, He always speaks TODAY. If you think in your heart and mind that you will put off obeying God until tomorrow, you will never obey Him because there is no such thing as tomorrow. When tomorrow arrives it is no longer tomorrow, it has become today. As silly as this sounds, I learned this from Bugs Bunny at an early age. I can’t find it now, but in one episode, he said something along these lines: “Yesterday, today was tomorrow, and tomorrow, today will be yesterday.” So…, all that exists in reality is always NOW. The future is like the horizon. The horizon is not an actual thing, it is a perception. As you move towards the horizon, the horizon moves, so you never get there. As we move toward the future, it becomes now, so what we think of as the future is always a target that moves away from us, like the horizon.
There are two opposite ways people responded to Jesus, when He walked the face of the earth:
“As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him. When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. (Mark 1:16-20)
The first response is immediate obedience. Jesus called, they left all and followed. No questions asked. No excuses, no arguments. Many other examples as the above could be cited.
The second response represents delay: Come back at a more convenient time:
When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:18-22)
Some people might reason that Jesus’s response to the second man seems harsh. Aren’t we commanded to “Honor your father and mother”? Isn’t burying your father honoring him? The point is that some things take priority. When God shows up and tells you to follow Him, immediate obedience is what is required, nothing else, even something good and honorable such as burying your father. We have probably all heard the phrase “delayed obedience is not obedience”.
There comes a time in every person’s life when God is calling. That does not mean that Jesus is going to show up on your doorstep in person and ask you to follow Him. That does not mean God is going to split the sky open and speak to you in an audible voice (although He is certainly capable of doing that if He so chooses.) What it does mean is that there are times in our lives when the Holy Spirit puts the hard questions to our hearts and minds. “Why do I exist? Why does the world exist? How did it get here? What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of my life? What is this book called the Bible that people have been reading for so long all about?” etc. Those times should be the beginning of our search for answers to these questions.
God is calling you when you stand in awe of a glorious sunset, or some other visual wonder that makes you feel that simply explaining things in terms of evolution is inadequate. Life is too complex for such a simplistic answer.
God is calling you when you attend the funeral of a loved one, and you are reminded of your own mortality, and you realize the brevity of your own life, and wonder if there is more to life than just living and dying.
God created us with the faculty of contemplative thought. He uses that to speak to us. When we struggle with things like what I have mentioned, and we choose to just ignore them, or stuff them down inside and not deal with them, in essence we are saying “NO” to God. We are saying, “Not now, Jesus. Let me go bury my father. Let me go back to work and try to make a living for myself and not be bothered by all this. Let me go have my fun, and then I will get back to you tomorrow.
Tomorrow never comes! Answer Him Today, because Today is all there is.
Danny's Stump 