Don’t sleep in!

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to sleep in. You have never heard of Elisha Gray, right? Well, if he had been a few hours earlier, or his horse drawn cab had been a little faster, his name might have gone down in history as the inventor of the telephone. If Alexander Graham Bell had not invented the telephone, somebody else would have. The telephone was an idea whose time had come. Ten years earlier, in 1866, Joshua Coppersmith was convicted of fraud because he claimed he could transmit speech by a copper wire.

By 1876 many were in the race and on February 14, 1876 a patent was filed at the Washington patent office. A few hours latter Elisha Gray came into the same office and filed an application for a speaking telephone. It was too late!

On the evening of March 10, a transmitter was set up in Bell’s workroom, using acid cups to generate electricity. His assistant, Thomas Watson, was in the bedroom and pressed his ear to the receiver. Those historical words were uttered, “Mr. Watson, come here! I need you!” That message has been immortalized as the birth of the telephone.

The first ones were crude and awkward. You had to listen and speak into the same piece. By 1880 the telephone had become a status symbol. By 1905 women were ringing with requests like, “Oh, central! Ring me in 15 minutes so I won’t forget to take the bread out of the oven.” Or “Say central, I have put a receiver in the babies cradle, if he wakes up and cries, call me please.”

The telephone did not become part of our culture without opposition. Many were uneasy. Hearing voices without seeing them, reminded them of communion with spirits, or the mentally insane. Many were convinced that so strange a device was somehow connected to the powers of darkness. They could never have imagined the addiction to mobile phones that would come in the twenty first century.

On the other hand, many hailed it as a symbol, and maybe they were right. The telephone was the beginning of a global network of communication that was to include: radio, Television, satellites, and the internet. All this and more would make communication instant.

All this was in God’s plan, remember Daniel 12:4 which talked about “the time of the end, when many would run to and fro and knowledge would increase.” While this is primarily talking about knowledge in the book of Daniel, it also points us to a world where running to and fro is a physical reality. I always marvel at the number of cars on the road. Everyone seems to be going somewhere. The speed of transport and communication is amazing. For thousands of years humanity could only travel as fast as a wheel dragged by a horse. Then they added steam to the wheel! Now we have traffic jams in the air and space flight is ho-hum.

They say that knowledge is now doubling every 7 years. The last 100 years has seen a flurry of inventing, and there is no end in sight. The things we read about or see on the internet stagger the mind. Missiles that can’t miss, computers beyond comprehension, technologies that devastate the mind. I tell my kids at school that when I was their age the electronic calculator had not been invented yet. I did my math’s on a slide rule or used Log tables from a book. I can remember the first black and white TVs and the popularization of Videos in the 70’s. Now videos, CD’s and DVD’s have been relegated to history. I must be getting old.

And things haven’t slowed down. The invention explosion continues to blow me away.  But the world is in dire straits. The same passage in Daniel 12 talked about a time of trouble such as this world has never seen. Jesus quoted the passage in Matthew 24:21 in his sermon on the end of the world. In v13 of that sermon he had referred to the importance of understanding Daniel’s prophecies.

Amidst our media frenzie it seems that the world is even now, turning to the ultimate dream – that somewhere beyond this world there is a force that can help us. There seems to be a constant stream of intergalactic superhero movies, as if they will accept help from anywhere. Let me assure you, there is only one way of escape from this planet in rebellion. Jesus said, “I am the way…” There is no other ‘way.’