X Marks the What?

Did you ever take a quiz or survey on Facebook? Since anyone can make up any quiz on any topic, the range of topics seem almost endless. There are several quizzes designed to test Bible knowledge. I took them and found all, but one, to be easy enough for a typical teen Sunday school student to pass. There is even one entitled "How bad of a baptist are you?" Since many of my baptists friends will be reading this, I won't say how I scored, but the questions seemed like they were made up by a disgruntled former independent fundamental baptist. I have thought about putting together a Facebook quiz on the tabernacle, but I don't think anyone would take it.

I once took the Facebook survey to name my five favorite movies of all time. Selecting the first four were easy, but selecting the fifth was difficult. It was a toss up between The Gladiator (2000) and the Back to the Future trilogy of movies from the 1980's. I do not see many movies. I rarely get excited while watching one. Sometimes I pay eight bucks for a movie, and just fall asleep. But when Maximus removed his helmet (in The Gladiator) and turned around to face Commodus and said My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next, I leaped from my seat...and I was watching the movie all alone in the dark in my living room!

The Back to the Future movies centered in a fictional town in California named Hill Valley. A somewhat modified nuclear-powered DeLorean was used for time travel. The main characters travel back and forth 30 years, back and forth 100 years, forward and back 30 years, etc. while trying not to disrupt the 'space time continuum' (whatever that is). It is always interesting to see the consequences of ones actions, decades later. In reality, though, we travel through time at a constant one second per second. We cannot speed it up, slow it down, or reverse it.

After struggling for was seemed for minutes with my decision, I picked The Gladiator as my number 5 favorite movie of all time.

What if we could travel back in time? Back further than 30 years, 100 years. Back further than the time of Roman empires and the gladiators. Back to about the year 1,400 BC and half way around the planet to the Sinai? Or what if we could get Google satellite imagery from then? What would it be like to travel back in time when the Israelites were traveling in the wilderness?

From a far off and a relatively high altitude, you might notice an X in the wilderness. Could it be buried treasure from some ancient pirates on the Red Sea? Nah, from the size of the X and based on your distance from it, you quickly surmise that this is a very big X. It must at least several miles big. Could it be incidental? Like an overgrown crop circle X in the wilderness?

As you approach, you notice that the X shape is actually made up of tents; drab gray canvas tents. There must be tens of thousands of tents (or maybe even a hundred thousand). As you take this all in, you realize you made a mistake. The shape is not an X, but the shape is a cross...a cross in the wilderness. A hundred thousands gray tents making the shape of a cross in the middle of the wilderness. Your thoughts immediately turn to Jesus ...who, subsisting in the form of God, did not esteem it an object of rapine to be on an equality with God; but emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form, taking his place in [the] likeness of men; and having been found in figure as a man, humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, and [that the] death of [the] cross. Phil 2:6-8