(P)Review Bible Study: Isaiah 35:1-10 .... GPS and Absolute Truth.

        Do not trust your GPS if you are traveling around the back roads of West Virginia.  That should almost go without saying, but the fact to the matter is that there are roads in the back country of Appalachia that barely show up on old paper maps let alone fancy GPS based electronic ones.  
    Once upon a time my wife and I were traveling down a fairly major road in West Virginia, placidly following the directions of the GPS like normal.  As we traveled down the road the GPS lady in her lovely clipped British accent (I keep my GPS set to the British accent because it sounds more polite, I always feel like the American voice is nagging me a bit) chirped in and told me to turn left.  So, I turned left onto an almost as well traveled two lane road. The road twisted and turned into the hills, as is normal in WV, until I noticed that it shifted over to a gravel road.  OK.  That isn't very unusual in Appalachia, and I have driven down quite a few gravel roads in my life, so what could go wrong.  Then the gravel road became two dirt ruts... then the "road" ended at locked metal gate. Now the GPS wanted me to keep going, but let me pass this bit of wisdom along to you.

If you are ever deep in the hills of Appalachia and you find yourself on a dirt trail with a locked metal gate...run, don't walk, away.  The last thing you want is to bump into this guy's grandchildren...because they are not distilling moonshine any longer, now days they grow their product, and they don't like outsiders any more than grandpappy did when folks stumbled on his still. So, needless to say, we quickly returned to the main road and ignored the GPS from this point forward.  
    Having grown up in the halcyon days of technology when we all were new to computers and they were new to us I feel like we actually took greater pains to actually learn how the machines worked.   OK, maybe it was just me taking programming classes and upgrading my CPU by installing better RAM.  But, I really cared about how all those wires and boards worked.  I am always shocked when I learn that folks who rely on their gadgets for day to day life don't actually know how their gadgets work.  

    Take GPS, or Global Positioning System, for instance. Lots of folks use it, but a surprising number of people don't know how it works. Did you know that the US military launched the satellites that make the system work in 1973.  It took a good few years to work all the kinks out of the system but the US military was getting GPS directions decades before the rest of us.   Russia, China, Japan, the European Union, and India all have their own satellite based navigation systems separate from ours. But, the principal is the same for all the systems:  a satellite broadcasts a radio signal. That signal is tied to a specific location that the satellite transmits based on it's rotation around the Earth and then the device that detects the signal, whether it is a GPS unit or just a phone, calculates the distance based on Doppler calculations.  All of this together and your position can be calculated to within a few feet of your location. 
    Of course all of this is only as good as the map that all of those locations are plotted onto.  In the case of the West Virginia back-roads the maps themselves are inaccurate, so when the GPS says "you are here" the problem isn't the computer, it is the human who failed to correctly label the map.   GPS works because the satellites are miles above the Earth's surface and from that perspective, outside of the geographic distractions of hills, valleys, rivers, and roads, they are able to accurately decide your position based on a constant, objective standard.  They are able to see the truth of your position without the distractions of your surroundings.  All of this keeps even a fool from (mostly) going astray. 
    Navigation is not new.  Coming up with safe ways to navigate is also not new.  Longing for safer ways to navigate is as old as travel itself. When Isaiah prophesies the coming of the messiah he talks about it in terms of changing the fundamental laws of nature including how fools can properly navigate:

Isaiah 35:1-10The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you." Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;  then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.

Burning sands become nice places to swim.  The sandy, desolate, dry places where jackals live will become swampy havens for rushes and reeds.  Best of all, fools who travel will be given a road that even they can't mess up on: The Holy Way.  Did you know that early Christians did not call their religion "Christianity"?  They called it "The Way".  The Way is created by an act of God in the creation of his Kingdom.  The Kingdom of God is the place that the fearful are made brave, the weak are made strong, the blind are given vision, and the deaf are given the ability to hear.  The Way is such that even a fool cannot go astray, because the road is not laid out by human hands. God's perspective is so far above our own that the things that change and shape our world view into the distorted shapes that they become have no effect on God. And boy can we twist and turn the way our lives go into some convoluted shapes. The maps of our lives make it easy to get confused and turned around down the wrong path. 

The truth is that we rarely know what the truth is...at least seen from the limited perspective or our human lives.  It is simply a perspective problem.  Truth cannot be dependent on our point of view when our point of view is in constant flux. When Jesus tells his disciples "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me" he is making it very clear:  He is the road from Isaiah that keeps fools (all of us) from going astray.  He is the one who sees the truth outside of our mortal distractions. He is the fixed point above us that serves as our one and only objective, constant, and reliable truth.  This Advent season reflect for a moment on all those variable truths that we hold onto (or try to) as they shift out from under us and speed away from us.  Now ask, how is life different if we allow The Way to be our only way, The Truth to be our only truth, and The Life to be our only source of life.  Even a fool can't get lost off that path.