Keeping Up to Date

by John Comer

Yesterday I accompanied my wife on a trip to the ophthalmologist’s office. One thing I learned. Though our HMO may be paying its CEO a multi-million dollar income, it’s certainly not wasting our hard-earned insurance premium payments on waiting-room reading material.

The U.S. News and World Report I was thumbing through just didn’t sound right as it reported on the Middle East, the U. S. Congress, and the American economy. That’s when I noticed the article about the 200 billion dollars the Federal Reserve Board had in its vaults to usher in the new millennium. This seemed a good time to check the date on the magazine cover. December 27, 1999. I was reading this in June, 2001.

Nothing is quite so old as old news. The magazine also had an item about the then-President and his goings-on with you-know-who. Some things you’d just rather forget, and I have at least done you the courtesy of not mentioning either his or her name.

As I continued reading this year-and-a-half old “news,” it was impossible not to be aware of the already dated perspective from which it was written. Any of this material that finds its way into history books will be written from an entirely different point of view.

God presents information to us in a timeless way. This is not to say that the men who recorded it were not creatures of their own age who saw things from their own perspective. But God used them to preserve his message in such a way that it still rings true.

Take our present generation as an example. We have had over two hundred years of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Scientific instruments let us view the birth of stars. Living creatures are cloned. The very chain of life is traced out in detail. From our present viewpoint, does God have anything to say that is still timely and relevant to our world?

Long ago he began having material recorded which he wants us to know, and the first verse in the Bible is a good place to start finding it.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . .”

And, as the verse says, that   was just the beginning. There’s much more. It’s timeless. God’s great truths and principles are just as vital today as they were when he first had them written for us.  And, as the verse says, that   was just the beginning. There’s much more. It’s timeless.