Whatever Takes Us Away

While flipping through the channels one evening I came across a National Geographic show on “The Lost Kings of the Bible.” I caught it after it had already begun, but Noah and I decided to start watching it (and when it went to commercial we flipped to a hockey game). Immediately after this program, which seemed mostly to be about King David, came another show about Alexander the Great. I noticed an immediate difference to how these two shows could take similar topics (ancient kings of the Middle East) and have tow very different approaches to the historical data.

With King David we have biblical data that speaks of this great king of Israel. And, in addition to this there are sources outside of the Bible that speak of this person and his “house.” Some of those on the program thought this was not enough to “prove” that David ever existed or that he was ever a king in ancient Palestine.

With Alexander the Great there are written accounts of him, and as a result of his conquests from Greece to the Middle East, much of the Mediterranean became very Greek (Helenization). Many of the written accounts we have of Alexander and his exploits come to us many centuries after the fact, but most historians take this as true as truth can be.

The juxtaposition between the two programs and the two men portrayed is this: if you were a biblical character, person, king, prophet or otherwise you probably didn’t really exist; but, if you were a non-biblical character, person, king, or otherwise you probably did exist and even if there are no archeological records or evidences of your existence you can still be proved to have existed, if by no other means than to “recreate” ancient cities virtually with computer generated graphics or cartoons. This has become our “truth” and many today believe these so-called facts to be just that, the truth. It is a sad state of affairs when the biblical accounts that we have (in the myriad of ancient manuscripts) are discounted as meaningless and without substance or truth. Likewise, it is a sad state of affairs when things such as Alexander’s tomb (of which we know absolutely nothing) are made to be of more importance and given more “truth” points than things which we do have in written historical form.

This is a sad reality of where our nation and our world are heading. We have seen Europe grow increasingly more violent towards anyone claiming to be Christian, and so many of the beautiful cathedrals built in Europe are nothing more than historical sites for tourists to visit. The U.S. is rapidly heading down that same path of truthlessness and is a place where Christianity is constantly under attack. We are supposed to embrace tolerance here, but that tolerance does not extend to Christians.

These two TV programs didn’t make me realize this, but only put a stronger emphasis on what I had already known. For those of you that chance to read this, whether you are a Christian or not, know that truth is relevant and that it does exist, you need only to look into the matters at hand to find what the truth is for any given subject. The media controls what truth has become, but at some point, they too will be subject to that same measure.