I have had a keen interest in computers for many years. In fact, I wrote my first computer program in 1969. That was a long time ago by anyone’s standards, but in terms of computer development it was way back in the early days! To put it into perspective, there was no internet, no such thing as a PC and Microsoft did not exist. In fact Bill Gates was only 14 years old.
I cannot remember what the program was for, but I do remember that the programming language was Algol and that each line of the program was punched by me sitting at a kind of typewriter, onto special cards – one card for each line of the program. The cards went into a reader which the computer then accessed. I had to carry the cards to the reader and I was very aware that if I dropped the cards I would have to sort them all out into the correct order or the program would not work properly. The computer itself was the size of a house. I remember seeing the computer’s hard disk: it was a sheet of metal about 5 feet in diameter.
It is all very different today, I’m glad to say, and I am sure that a modern mobile phone is far more powerful than that machine. We have the internet, and we don’t have to write our own programs. We don’t even need to know how the programs work. They just do. Sometimes we don’t even realise that there is a program working – we just get what we need or want. This page you are reading – it’s just a page on the internet, and that is all you have to know.
But it is all programmed. The picture at the top of this post is just a wee bit of the code for this page. Right-click on this page and select View Source and you will see the lines of code which tells your computer to display the page the way you see it. Hundreds of lines, and even more than you actually see, because there are more lines of code being accessed through links in these lines. But you don’t need to know that!
Some people look at the Bible that way. They look at the pages and all they can see is lines and lines of words, codes that mean nothing to them.
For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes – so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them.
But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. I tell you the truth, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but they didn’t see it. And they longed to hear what you hear, but they didn’t hear it. (Matt 13:15-17, NLT)
Because you believe, you can automatically translate that “code” that changes the Word of God into a wonderful picture of hope and knowledge. Your eyes are blessed, so they see. Take delight in using them, and have a thought for those who are not so blessed – pray for them!