#827

Covenant Clickbait for the Curious and Clueless

The Wall Of Weird

I watched a television show that used a character who documented the weird powers of people who got those abilities from a meteor rock. And to document it she had what she called the wall of the weird. The schtick lasted about 3 years but got people hooked on the show. However times have changed and now we have all manner of strange things to occupy our time. Add to that the wonder of the Internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi and social media and you get the fun and maybe curse of scrolling through an endless array of short video clips meant to entertain you in the hopes of getting the ubiquitous likes, shares, and subscribers for the creators. But in the Christian world it is hoped that the topics will be engaging for another and higher purpose of pointing to God and the Bible. However, those clips can devolve into less than accurate spiritual topics because of the aforementioned click bait maneuvers. I know that I use subjects and thumbnails to get eyes on my podcasts, but I try to make sure that the messaging stays focused on Jesus and getting people closer to His will for their lives. Unfortunately, people are seeing that they can have popular channels and videos if they include weird things that are, for lack of another way of saying it spiritual junk science wrapped in tin foil. In Christian circles they lead to distractions that engage you but don’t edify you. Allow me to give you the soup du jour of such distractions for now.

The Ark Of The Covenant

In an article from the Daily Mail a CIA experiment from the 1980s was used to locate the mysterious Biblical artifact, the Ark of the Covenant. Why they wanted to find it is up for speculation, but in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark the reason was for the power it gave to an army to prevail in their fight, in this case the Nazis. Keeping the Ark from them was among the main plots of the film and the hero, Indiana Jones prevailed. The Ark was then archived somewhere in the United States government, apparently just waiting to be found again. That is all fiction because the CIA would know if it was in Washington, DC all this time and not use offbeat science to find it. If you caught a sniff of this story this week you no doubt were hoping they knew exactly where it is and we can all get in a plane and go see it. If only it was that easy. Lost in all the hullabaloo and hysteria was just what the story was based on. The article tells us this:

The location of a chest believed to contain the Ten Commandments has long been a mystery, but CIA documents claims the Ark of the Covenant has been found. According to the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant was built by the Israelites shortly after they fled Egypt around the 13th century BC. Moses then placed the Ten Commandments inside. The CIA conducted experiments in the 1980s with individuals who claimed they could perceive information about distant objects, events or other people.

This “remote viewing” ability is fringe science at best, but that didn’t stop our government from using it if it gave them an edge even in wars. But the 10-year project was shut down in 1995. However one remote viewer was given the task of seeing what was at the coordinates given them. Did they “see” the actual Ark of the Covenant?

More Information

Here is what the document that was declassified in 2000 tells us as detailed in the article:

'This target is located somewhere in the Middle East as the language spoken by individuals present seemed to be Arabic,' the psychic wrote.

The psychic described nearby buildings that resembled Mosque Domes and individuals 'clothed in virtually all white' with 'black hair and dark eyes.'

'One figure I homed in on wore a moustache,' they wrote.

'The target is hidden — underground, dark and wet were all aspects of the location of the target.

'The purpose of the target is to bring a people together. It has something to do with ceremony, memory, homage, the resurrection.

'There is an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons and historical knowledge far beyond what we now know.

'The target is protected by entities and can only be opened (now) by those who are authorized to do so — this container will not/cannot be opened until the time is deemed correct.'

The person then tells us this rather fantastical tidbit:

The psychic goes on to say that time comes, the 'mechanics of the lock system will be found to be fairly simple,' and that anyone who attempts to open the container by prying or striking will be 'destroyed by the container's protectors through the use of a power unknown to us.'

Sure. Got it. That’s information we can find in the Bible, right? But I digress. The article details what we can see in pictures from the document which you can download if you like:

The rest of the report features sketches and scrawled writings that the psyching presumably made during the remote viewing session. These include drawings of what appear to be the features of a building, a mosque with a domed top, eight 'mummies' lined up beside each other, a wheel and a winged-creature called a 'seraphim.' The document also includes multiple lists of seemingly-random but ominous words, such as 'death,' 'forbidden,' 'protected,' 'scared,' 'destroyed,' 'pain' and 'anguish. 

The article ends with the proverbial tease:

'What he saw was what you find in any Ethiopian church, which is a model of the Ark of the Covenant,' Tudor Parfitt, a British historian, writer and former colleague of Ullendorff, told Live Science in 2018. Apparently, Ullendorff said that 'it didn't differ in any way from many arks he had seen in other churches in Ethiopia,' Parfitt said. 'It wasn't ancient and certainly wasn't the original ark.'

Thus, the location of this sacred chest remains a mystery just waiting to be solved.

And We’re Walking

I could give you other tantalizing stories about finding Noah’s Ark, evidence for the Red Sea miracle, a Nasa program that verifies the extra long day provided for Joshua to win the battle (see Joshua 10:12–13). And let’s not forget the hybrid race called the Nephilim which is all the rage online. You and I can spend endless hours listening to people opine about all these things and many, many more. The reels usually start with someone saying “Did you know the Bible says this?” or something like that. Trust me that I fall prey to these videos all the time and they serve to entertain me, but more than not they take away time I could be doing more important things. And while I know that there are people who do bring the focus back to getting people to see that the Bible is true, many don’t do that or don’t do it as strongly as they could. And that is why I want people who do these videos to do more with the time they get from people as they scroll and scroll and scroll through the endless array of content. If not, these topical snippets of information will tend to be more engrossing and entertaining rather than educating and edifying. And therein lies the danger of these intriguing time wasters. They distract at first, then they become diversions, and in the end they destroy any chance at witnessing at the least and at their worst they actually make Christians look like they care more for shiny objects than they do for sound doctrine. We are lumped in with all the other loony toons who talk about Atlantis, secret chambers under pyramids, ancient civilizations in the Amazon rain forests, UFOs or whatever they are called these days, and the list can go on, and on. Is there some truth in these things? Maybe, but we can’t let the tantalizing , tempting, and teasing allure of them take the place of good old fashioned study of the Bible. Trust me when I tell you that there are more than enough mysteries found in its pages to last many lifetimes. And with the great amount of ways we can communicate these days, let us stick to things that support the Bible and don’t divert from it. Let the Scriptures be the ending point and not the launching point for an endless amount of theories about the accounts found in it. It will take a lot of intellectual discipline and timely study, but in the end, let’s leave people wanting to know more about the Bible and the author of Scripture when we’re done.