Progress Versus Things That Will Never Change

Progress is a marvelous thing to observe. For example, when computers first became a prominent part of modern-day life in the 1960’s, they were extremely large objects that took up entire rooms. The storing of data was on paperboard punch cards and reels of magnetic tape. It was then thought that this method of storing data would never change. Today, we have digital tablets that can process information many times faster than any laptop acquired just a few years ago. However, progress in other fields has been at a much slower pace. For example, in the field of medicine — smallpox and polio have been eradicated, measles and mumps nearly so, but we still can’t do much about the common cold or the recent outbreak of the Ebola virus.

Sometimes old things and new things are incompatible (Luke 5:36-39). For example, a well-worn cloth can’t be patched into new material. New wine, in which fermentation is just beginning, can’t be secured in aged and brittle wineskins. In the computer field, programmers call it “backward incompatibility” — when files from a previous version of a program do not work with the upgraded version. The fact that something is “new” doesn’t mean it’s better. For example, meat, cheeses, and fine wines are aged to gain character and flavor. Literature and music have their classic compositions that have not been superseded by more recent works. And generally speaking, attempts to update the classics or recast them in modern style are miserable failures at best. Sometimes, the old is definitely better.

We hear much clamor these days in the religious world for “new” innovations in religion — new methods, new worship styles, new approaches to the Scriptures (i.e., “new hermeneutics“). Now not everything “new” is bad, but we cannot alter the unchanging and unchangeable word of God in an attempt to appeal to the Athenian mindset, which rejects everything “old” and seeks only that which sounds like “something new” (Acts 17:19-21). All too often, the cry for the “new and different,” is merely an attempt to avoid responsibility for the “tried and true.”

There’s no question that time will march on (unless the Lord comes again), and technology will advance — but as Solomon correctly observed, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10). The sins that condemned men and women to hell in the first century, will still condemn them in the 21st century, and God’s plan of salvation remains the same.

—Mike Riley, Gospel Snippets