Opus 2024-383: The Game of Telephone

One of the trails that my mind chases down is the different people that God has had conversations with throughout scripture.  I would venture to guess that we do not have a record of every person He has spoken to or every conversation with the ones we know about.  That would be way too much to write down as I think John says in his gospel about Jesus.

But we see at the beginning there were only two people and he went and actually walked in the garden with him.  We have Him speaking to Cain after he killed his brother and eventually speaking to Noah.  Anyway, it seems that God tends to talk to people one at a time and let them speak as prophets rather than speaking to everyone all the time.  Yes, we have the Bible.  Yes, the Holy Spirit does speak to us in our hearts and minds.  But God has very few open, direct and verbal conversations with people anymore.  I think He stopped that long ago.

Why?  If He is capable of communicating with the entire world one on one why has He refrained from doing so?  I’m thinking that one of the reasons is illustrated by the game of telephone.  I’m sure most of us have played it even if we don’t remember.  It’s where you sit in a circle and the first person will whisper a short sentence to the person next to them.  Then that person turns and whispers it to the person next to them and so on around the circle.  When you get to the other end of the circle the message that you started out with is almost totally unrecognizable.  Even assuming that everyone in the circle is playing fair, and not just making up a totally new sentence, it gets destroyed.

Imagine God talking to everyone and the disagreements between them about what He said.  It’s bad enough now when we have just one Bible.  We argue about the original languages and minor variations in the text.  We argue about which translation is best.  We have the Calvinist and the Wesleyans and the Catholics and the Orthodox and the ones who believe they are the only ones with a true word.

So I think God has stopped talking to everybody simply to make it easier for a simple human beings to know what His words really are.  They are written out and don’t change based on the direction of the wind.

homo unius libri