What of the Future?
©2015 Stan Hallett
Ever used one of these? It’s what I watched TV on just fifty years ago! That may sound like a long time ago to some of you, but when you are 60+ you will realize that it is not. It was just a little while ago.
Just fifty years before that was when electricity was just starting to be added in homes. Most people still rode horses and used horse drawn wagons and buggies to get about.
Daniel 12:4 says that in the last days knowledge shall be increased. Man has been here approximately 6,000 years, but we’ve only had cars and electricity for a little over 100 years. Before that most of us carried water from wells, streams, or ponds in buckets. Most of us used outhouses or chamber pots, we heated our homes with wood or coal, and we lighted our homes with candles or oil lamps.
Children’s toys were minimal. Girls might have a doll, and perhaps a ball and jacks, or a jump rope. A boy may have a ball, or a toy gun carved out of wood. Most children had chores, and many of them. Most people lived in the country and raised most of their own food. There were eggs to collect from the chickens, and cows to be milked at the crack of dawn.
Girls were often helping mom in the kitchen as everything needed to be done by hand. There were no electric stoves, no microwaves, no coffee makers. The biscuits or the bread for the toast were made by hand and baked in the wood stove’s oven. The bacon came from the pig that dad slaughtered last Saturday. The milk and eggs were just collected that morning at 4 a.m. It was 6 o’clock now as we all sat down to breakfast. There was not a lot of time to waste, we needed to get out the door by 6:45 if we were going to be able to make the three mile walk to school and be on time.
Mom made a lot of our clothes, and a real treat when was when grandma knitted us a sweater or mittens. Mom washed our clothes in a wash tub by using a scrub board. They were then rinsed in a tub of clean water and the wrung out in a wringer that was turned by hand. Then they were all hung out on the clothesline outside to dry. Once they were dry it was ironing time. An iron (made out of real iron) was used that was kept hot by keeping it on the wood cooking stove in the kitchen.
People did not have treadmills in those days, or rode bikes or jogged just for exercise, nor did they belong to a gym. We did not have all of these machines that did everything for us. When they took the labor out of everything with all the labor saving devices, they also took the exercise that kept us slim and strong with it. Now we sit at a desk or on a sofa a stare at a screen. We sit in a car that takes us to where we are going, and ride elevators or escalators if there would be too many stairs.
I find it ironic that we now spend the money we earn being immobile for memberships and machines to keep us slim. It used to be that earning money or simply providing for our needs kept us slim and fit.
Knowing all this as well as God’s Word, anyone would have to conclude that surely we are in the last days. Unfortunately while knowledge has greatly increased, wisdom has not.
2 Timothy 3:1-7
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
How much further will we “progress”? I can see a cashless society coming very
soon. This has me very concerning regarding the time in which we find ourselves. Anti-Christian rhetoric is everywhere.
I am reminded of 1 John 2:15 which says; “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
We need to be careful for the days are short. We need to keep ourselves from being caught up in what the world would use to distract us from what is important, and from our task at hand in serving the Church of the living God.
Solomon had great God-given wisdom, yet in the end he was caught up in what the world and flesh had to offer. Let us provoke one another to good works, redeeming the time which is short and the days which are few.
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