Hold it in the Mirror!

“These maps are worthless!” Cesare Borgia said, laying current maps of central Italy on the table before Leonardo da Vinci. “I have no way of knowing the exact distance between cities. Can you do better than this?”

               “I can try,” Leonardo promised.

During the next few weeks Leonardo da Vinci mapped all of Tuscany and Umbria, using an odometer he designed himself. It consisted of a wheelbarrow like device that he pushed along the road. As the wheel turned, it drove gears that operated a dial that showed how many feet the wheelbarrow had moved (3 feet is equivalent to 1 metre in this old scale.) In this way da Vinci was able to give exact distances between places on his map. His design was very similar to the odometer used in cars today, more than 500 years later.

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks were soon full of many inventions such as machine guns, submarines, diving bells, and helicopters. He designed an anemometer to measure the speed of the wind, and he was the first person to design a clock that could indicate hours and minutes. He invented a jack for lifting weights, much like car jacks used today. He outlined a hydraulic pump and built a parachute that worked.

When he died Leonardo left behind nearly 7,000 pages of drawings with instructions about how to construct inventions of all kinds. The only problem was that no one could read what he had written because it appeared to be done in a kind of code. Then it was discovered that everything was written in mirror image. By holding it up to a mirror, the message became perfectly clear!

God’s plan for Planet Earth may sometimes seem as confusing as a page from da Vinci’s sketchbook. Life seems a puzzle and little makes sense. Why does God allow bad things for instance? Why are there so many churches? Why aren’t all our prayers answered? And so the questions flow.

Try holding up life with all its puzzles to the mirror of God’s Word. You’ll be surprised at how much clearer things will get! For instance, have you noticed that the last three chapters of Revelation are a mirror in reverse of the first three chapters of Genesis. Genesis begins with a new creation, the arrival of the devil, then the entry of sin and rebellion. Revelation 20 ends with the destruction of satan, Revelation 21and 22, the end of sin and rebellion and the recreated new earth. The seven last plagues and the seven trumpets do the same thing – they count the days of creation backwards – they are describing de-creation. The whole of Scripture moves in a beautiful golden circle. You may like to enroll in my revised, verse by verse, SMS series “Reflections on Revelation. It covers the entire book. This will begin soon.