LIKE CLOCKWORK

                                                                        Like Clockwork

The Glasgow Subway is affectionately known as ‘Clockwork Orange’, presumably because the colour scheme of its bone-rattling wagons on their dizzying circular circuit through its fifteen stations, and reference to the 1972 futuristic movie, ‘A Clockwork Orange”. It’s anachronistic to say that the Glasgow Underground was based on a design of a clockwork train set my older brother got as a kid one Christmas. The track was about the size of the outer edge of a large dinner plate. After being wound up with a key, the engine would pull a coach around and around until it needed rewinding. It was the opposite of exciting to watch!

Some believe that the whole universe works like clockwork. Around and around. However, God did not wind up the universe and hand over the controls to entropy. The eternal God is the One who keeps the stars on their courses by His command. And, if God ceased to be, everything, including you and me, would vanish. In the beginning the Triune God spoke and things that were not became things that are, including invisible things. “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3a.

You cannot get blood from a stone or something from nothing. That’s why the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And God had a plan and a purpose. He is the I AM, the God of the past, present, and future. If time were a train, then God is pushing from the back, He is on the outside, He is in the inside, and He is pulling from the front. And it is all going like clockwork. ‘But when the fulness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law’ Galatians 4:4. And how to get blood from a stone? How about the shed blood of Jesus, the stone the builders rejected?

God’s plan and purpose is all about Jesus. The very first act of creation is all about Jesus. God created space, time, and matter for Jesus. ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist’ Colossians 1:15-17.

The world is not going to end. It’s all going like clockwork, thanks to Jesus. God gives us many reminders of this. ‘I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth’ Genesis 9:13. Yet, some, instead of praising God at the sign of His promise, would think only of water droplets refracting light! However, God says, ‘While the earth remains, seedtimes and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease’ Genesis 8:22. And, ‘’Thus says the LORD: “If My covenant is not with day and night, and I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth…’ Jeremiah 33:25. Yes, it’s all going like clockwork because of God’s covenant promises.

All of us are on a journey, a circular journey. We boarded the ‘Clockwork Orange’ with nothing. And we get off with nothing. But, ‘Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place’ 2 Corinthians 2:14. Diffuse that fragrance at every station on the circle.