Looking in the Wrong Direction
The other day, our local Straits Times showed a rather ironic picture of people standing along the esplanade at Penang’s Gurney Drive looking out towards the sea. And what were they hoping to see? Signs of a tsunami when the Penang authorities had issued a tsunami alert warning following the mammoth 8.1 richter-scale earthquake that had rocked Sumatra the day before. When they should be clearly staying away from any possible tsunami onslaught, there they were almost waiting for entertainment to happen, not quite fathoming perhaps that they would have been the cast members if a tsunami did come along.
Were they so deadened to warning signals that they treated such with sheer disregard? Or were they merely blase? Or super-confident that no disaster would befall them? In stark contrast, somewhere in the text of the lead article on this page concerning the devastation in Sumatra, the writer quoted a farmer who said that the moment he realised that the earth under his feet was shaking, and ran home in search of his family, he found that they had “flown to the hills”.
This immediately brought my thoughts to the verses in the Bible that talk of the devastation of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ second coming. “Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains and let those who are in the midst of the city depart, and let not those who are in the country enter the city…”. (Luke 21:21) This piece of warning appears in 3 of the Gospels (the others being Matt 24:16 and Mark 13:14), and if that’s not a significant warning, I don’t know what is.
And will we be caught looking in the other direction ourselves, ignoring the signs of the times? Bible says in the last days, “men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God”. That’s quite a litany, and isn’t that quite an apt description of what’s going on in the world these days?
Ploughing into Mark 13, I discovered that in verses 33-37, the words “be on the alert” appeared no less than 4 times, once in each verse, starting with v.33 in which the writer says “Take heed, keep on the alert, for you do not know when the appointed time is”.
And from there, the Holy Spirit led me to consider Jesus’ parable of the 10 virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. The 5 prudent ones took extra oil along with them for their lamps, whilst the foolish took their lamps, but no oil. The bridegroom having been delayed, the virgins had fallen asleep when suddenly at midnight there was a shout for the girls to go out to meet the bridegroom. In desperation, the 5 foolish ones sought the wise ones out for a share of their oil , for their lamps were going out, but the latter wisely declined, saying that there would not be enough to go round for all of them. Having no choice but to go to the dealers to buy their oil, they were away when the bridegroom arrived and thus got locked out of the wedding feast that the 5 prudent ones gained admission to, because these were ready. And Jesus ended this parable with these stark words, “Be on the alert, for you do not know the day nor the hour”.
This parable is a graphic reminder to me not to be distracted by the pulls of the world and to lose sight of what is of eternal consequence – that truly the fields are white with harvest. For one who is readily inclined to help those who seek help, I have to tell myself that I need to stay focused on doing the Lord’s will, and not be sidetracked by the frivolous, the tempting and even the salubrious causes that come along, if they are not in the Lord’s game plan for my life. And so I need to train myself to be looking in the right direction, and not foolishly, like those people at Gurney Drive, seek that which is vain, futile, and worse, destructive.
