Today’s Scripture Reading (August 8,
2013): Psalm 135
I have been
using computers in some capacity for about the last thirty years. And I have to
admit that I like computers. I enjoy writing on a computer more than I ever
enjoyed writing with a typewriter (I make way too many mistakes to be
considered a typist.) I like that I can carry around with me all the files that
I really need on a small stick (there was a time when carrying just the files I
needed for the day meant taking two or three large briefcases with me.) And, I
admit that I enjoy playing games on my computer in those moments of the day
when I just need a break. My very first computer was a Commodore 64 with a tape
filing system – which meant that you actually used cassette tapes and a tape
recorder (almost unknown technology today) in order to save your files. And the
64 in the name indicated the available RAM – 64 KB. A few years later Commodore
released an extravagant product called the Commodore 128 which had 128 KB RAM. I
had a conversation with a good friend the other day and he was telling me that
his first computer (way back in the early 1980’s) had a 3 Gig hard drive. He
meant a 3 Meg hard drive – although I admit I could not convince him of that. A
1 Gig hard drive in 1980 was the size of a refrigerator and weighed 250 kg
(around 400 lbs.) And it had a $40,000 price tag. But it is hard
to get our heads around the fact that the total storage capacity 30 years ago
was only a few megabytes when today the smallest hard drives are around 500
Gigabytes. Things have changed. And few of us would really want to go back to
using the Commodore 64 in daily life – except for possibly nostalgic reasons.
Our old computers pollute our landfills – they have been thrown away as useless
pieces of garbage.
One of the
original commandments was that we are to build no images of God. There is to be
nothing that we can point to and say “that is our God.” And there is a very
good reason for that – things that can be made can be broken. And what is it
that you are supposed to do with a broken god. Most of the man-made gods that
existed even as the Psalmist wrote these words – and well over 1000 years
following God’s giving of the commandment to Moses – are gone. They have
decayed and been destroyed. And any images of the gods that do exist from that
time period are in bad shape. Time has a way of wearing everything down – and
man-made gods have a way of being superseded.
So God’s
instruction to Moses was “do not build an image of me to worship.” The Lord your
God will never be decrepit, decaying and out of date. He does not have unseeing
eyes and unmoving hands. He is the God that sees you where you are – and is
able to come and rescue.
This was a
message that became very important during the days of the Babylonian Captivity.
The people needed to continually be assured that the God with seeing eyes was
already on his way to help – and that his truth was already being spoken to the
captives in a place far from the sacred spaces of the their ancestors – and of
their youth.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm
136
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