Guard Duty

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you. (I Timothy 6:20-21)

           Yesterday, I watched an interesting video that was described as deep and profound. In it, a Gray (large-headed alien) was interviewed. It turned out that he was not from another planet, but from thousands of years in Earth’s future. He had traveled back to our time, either to see what it was like or to warn us (or both.) He was what Humans evolved into after a nuclear war, and he seemed rather sad about that. In addition, he tried to explain to us a few bits of insight that his people had gained about life, the universe and everything. There is no God. There is no death. We all just experience each other’s life.  

          The most disturbing part of this is the fact that the person who shared it is a Christian. I’m sure her point was about the nuclear war destroying our world as we know it. I saw more. The first thing I noticed was very sad news indeed. A being from several thousand years in the future maintained precisely the philosophical views that are being propounded today. There is no God. There is no death. They understand the nature of life, but it has no meaning. Zero philosophical development in thousands of years, meaning that what is being taught now is correct. How sad, and yet, how realistic – since most of our philosophical progress seems to have orbited around the same ideas for the past three thousand years at least. 

          However, while philosophical progress has been at a dead stop during those thousands of years, physical evolution has proceeded at a pace millions of times faster than in billions of years preceding it. It took at least 2.2 million years for us to evolve (supposedly) from Lucy to us, but in several thousand, we become Grays.

That brings me to the part that is both sad and exciting. In several thousand years, after we claw our way up out of the rubble of the nuclear war, we discover the secret to time and space travel, making it possible to travel many lightyears and several thousand years into the past (in addition to discovering other secrets of the universe and life.) In other words, we finally make The Leap. We finally have the means of conquering the vastness of the time space continuum. Why did it take them so long? Consider the technological advances in the past thousand years. Two thousand years. Three thousand years. The Grays apparently had some access to the knowledge from before the war, so they didn’t start as primitively as we supposedly did, so it really doesn’t say much good about them that they took so long.

         The thing that is saddest is that this is the picture of the future that we seem to accept. We don’t hold to what Scripture tells us. We don’t discard the video as being a piece of poorly executed post-modern propaganda. What the Gray says is described as deep and profound. In today’s passage, Paul told Timothy to guard what has been entrusted to his care. There may be other things, but that would have included the truth, God’s Word, and the people of his church.

There are pastors who don’t do this, and we stand by. There are Christians around us who don’t do this, and we look the other way. We don’t do this, and we pat ourselves on the back for being relatable. We need to guard God’s Word in our own lives, to reject that rejects the truth found therein.

          Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life (Proverbs 4:23) Don’t let others pollute your well