“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Matthew 6:21, also Luke 12:34
“Fan” is short for fanatic, which is apt when it comes to my attachments to old television series and musical acts, especially those from the 1960s. Although I’ve yet to dress up as any one of my favorite characters and swan about a convention of like-minded souls, I have been a fan of time-specific pieces of modern popular culture.
Before someone comes in pointing out that anything from the 1960s are going on 60 years old, I counter that the 1960s, and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s, are the basis for a majority portion of the culture of the third decade of the 21st century. There are three series based on the original Star Trek in production as I write this, and to this day, The Beatles are still the one musical act by which all others are measured in terms of popularity and skill at popular songcraft.
Perhaps in reflection of the aging demographic of Facebook, my feed is full of On This Day in Music/Movies/1960s TV/Beatles History. I waste a lot of time reading about John Wayne and other old school actors and how they dealt with difficulties that came up when they were filming any given motion picture. As for what I’ve retained, I’ve long been able to tell anyone who wants to know when filming started for the first pilot for Star Trek (27 November 1964) and the last day of filming for the series (9 January 1969), and which scenes were being shot. I know the beginning of the end for the original Star Trek came the day Desilu Studios was bought by Paramount Pictures, though I couldn’t tell you the exact date on that, only that it was in 1967 when the cast and crew were nearly halfway through filming the second season.
Likewise, I can tell you the dates most of The Beatles’ albums were originally released, but I can’t seem to remember when it was in 1967 that Brian Epstein died, which was, by all accounts, the beginning of the end of the band. It’s enough that I know John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s birthdays, and so many anecdotes about how a lot of their songs were written and recorded.
With these disclaimers out of the way, let’s talk about God. We’ll pause here for a moment while the scoffers and cynics head for the exits.
Are they gone? Good. Because I want those with eyes to see and ears to hear to consider Our Heavenly Father, the Creator of the Universe, the omnipotent and omniscient being so incomprehensibly vast and powerful, people can’t help putting their favorite (or, often, most hated) parts of Him in a box and leave out the rest.
If our God is bigger and better than any slice of modern popular culture—it should go without saying—then why can’t I name all of the books in the Protestant Bible, with the Catholic apocrypha as a side note? Why can’t I tell you the timeframes in which these books were written and what the historical context was at the Why can’t I explain why the books left out of the Protestant Bible were omitted? What’s up with the Book of Enoch? How many other missing books of prophetic testimony are mentioned in the Bible, and what are their names? How many times is Christ, His ministry and sacrifice, foreshadowed in the Old Testament? What’s the most quoted Old Testament scripture in the New Testament? What are all the Old Testament references in the New, and how are they applied?
One could cheat and simply ask an Internet search engine to answer the questions. To be fair, such a search that included each question might be a good starting point, especially if it was indexed to each of the answer’s appearance in the Bible.
The overall point is that fandom trivia is just that, trivia. The Bible, for whatever problems the text presents to people, is the Word of God. And if you’ve read the first chapter of the Gospel of John, you know that Jesus IS the very Word of God made flesh, and that when I write, “the Word of God,” I mean the very Word that spoke the entire 13.75 billion light-year across universe into existence. This is the most important thing to learn. Scripture is the flesh of Christ we must consume, the living water we were promised. We die unto our trivial, sinful natures and awaken to life in the incomprehensibly vast universe of the Word.
To know every book in the Bible, to know how many chapters each book has and what happens in each, to discern what message was being conveyed in each event—that is bigger than any one of those read-the-entire-Bible-in-one-year programs. It’s more than collecting choice verses to fire off for the appropriate situational cue. It’s wrapping oneself within the mind of God Himself.
Yes, and that means all of those stories of human iniquity in action that causes the atheists to screech and strain to imply that, because the bad thing happened, God approved of it. That means all those “hard sayings” we strain to rationalize behind, “Well, that’s the way it was way back when.” For me, the worst are the occasional lists of genealogy or other statistics. Whatever there is in Scripture that bothers us we need to confront with the understanding that God’s ways are way above ours, so far up there we can neither see nor comprehend. As I see it, it’s the scoffers who have to answer for the supposed contradictions. God owes you, nor me, nothing. That’s why we call it “grace” when God is good to us. Grace is undeserved love expressed upon the undeserving.
There are many things we won’t know until the very coming of Christ’s kingdom on Earth, but there is much that will be far better appreciated, if not fully understood, when we fully immerse ourselves in the Fandom of God.
The science is settled, then. It’s time to Unlike and Unfollow all those nostalgia pages. Besides that I already know most of the stories told and when they happened, they’re relevant only inasmuch as it’s a way to thumb my nose at the depredations of what passes for popular culture today. As much as I love The Beatles and Star Trek, there is no mistaking that much about them both contributed to what is going on today, especially the tolerance of the degenerate, ugly, and evil. As I keep saying, everything that is now is because of what went on then. Nothing went “off the rails.” It’s a straight shot from “Be tolerant of _________,” to “You will disavow your history and culture and God, and offer your children as sacrifices before the poor, oppressed demons who rule you now.”
If I don’t repudiate The Beatles and Star Trek outright, it’s because I also remember great songs and episodes and the legitimate grievances they were rebelling against. Those are stories for another time. Meanwhile, I need God. I need Jesus. I need Their Holy Spirit. I’m not waiting for New Year’s Day to begin reading the Bible in its entirety.
As I like to say, you either smell the brimstone or you don’t. Right now, it’s getting increasingly hard to breathe in this world for the sulfuric stench going up. For the rest of you who see this as Glorious Progress, well, bless your hearts. Such as they are. I know what I have to do.
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