ANOTHER INTERESTING CONVERSATION I HELD HERE IN MAINE—and indeed there are many—is with a beautiful woman who had become somewhat acquainted with “the doctrine of Flat Earth” over the last year. Our discussion on the matter revealed that she was well-churched, her past service to that institution was of the highest devotion, her understanding of Scripture was well regarded, and there appeared to be no cognitive dissonance between what the doctrine states in accordance with what her lifelong readings of Holy Writ readily implies. Another words Flat Earth was not beyond her realm of belief. And then as we were talking the matter over something terrible happened.
She gazed into the abyss.
No-no, not a horizon always rising to eye-level or the expansive surface of water without a convexed arch to it, or a moon clearly giving forth her own light, or the constellations which fill our sky remaining fixed as they always were since the Creation week; she had already looked for the curve and knew it couldn’t be found, not even in the Bible. The darkness she saw with her own eyes was THE LIE itself, it seems—most notably everything that came with the lie. If terror filled them, with disparity quivering in her tone of voice, it’s because something about the LIE was magnetically attractive to her—the comforts otherwise offered too beautiful to turn away from, even if it be in the bosom of the kingdom of darkness. The world itself, the woman let me know in so many words, she loved.
She finally said: “If what you say is true—if the Earth is flat, as the Hebrews believed—then there’s no one left to trust—nowhere left with goodness to turn.”
I said: “You can trust in God. And you can turn to the Bible to meet Him.”
She looked at me, with that deep and terrible abyss filling her eyes, and she said nothing.
We parted company like that.
What this Flat Earth doctrine confirms, the reason I believe the Spirit is lavishing His Company upon the remnant Saints and filling their lamps with midnight oil is because we are witnessing a separation, if you will. Perhaps it is the wheat and the tares which Jesus spoke of in Matthew 13:24-30, I can’t say. If we brush off God’s testimony with an air of mockery as something which doesn’t need second thought, or if we do contemplate the matter but reject it wholly because the wisdom of this world and all the comforts which it can afford seems better, perhaps even more profitable, what does that imply of us? I am not the judge of a man’s soul, nor does a man need to be right about every doctrine or even made aware of it in order to be saved, but if there’s one thing which this doctrine illuminates upon a dark place, it’s what the rejection of Flat Earth so regularly confirms. Where we place our trust and our hope and our faith, it’s often in almost everything but the Lord.
She was right about the wickedness of our world. Indeed, Satan is deceiving a great many, and hell is far from filled. Man is not worthy of our trust, if they should counter what the Lord testifies as true or worse, conspires against Him. The Bible makes this case transparent. God Himself should be our source of everything—especially our adoration and praise. Whatever Earth that beautiful woman from Maine chooses to remain on, flat or one with curvature, my only hope is that she does so because her faith and her hope and her ultimate comfort is not in the institutions or profit of man, which will fade and be forgotten from our memory, but in the eternal embrace of our Lord.
“Seek the Lord and His strength, seek His face continually.” 1 Chronicles 16:11 (KJV)
Maranatha from Bar Harbor, Maine!
Noel
