Battle Lines: It Was Right There the Whole Time

By: Lt. Colonel Allen Satterlee

What I was asking for mystified the people in our Information Technology Department (IT) because it was clearly there already. As for me, I looked but could not find it. I asked, and they answered. Several times they answered. With pictures and instructions. They even circled the little button I was supposed to push that I said wasn't there. Each time, they repeated the instructions because, as it turned out, the only way for me to get what I wanted was to follow the steps they kept telling me to follow, that I kept telling them I could not do. Then, lo and behold, I followed the instructions. It was miraculous. A whole new world opened to me. I immediately wrote a letter of apology. It was all right there the whole time.

A couple of thousand years ago the Magi figured it out. With only a star to guide them and the remnants of Scriptures left behind centuries before by the Jews when they were captive in their land, they made their way. As they approached Jerusalem, they surely expected the place to be abuzz with excitement. Here, right where it all was happening, where the Scriptures had been written, the very place they talked about, they were surely aware of what was happening. But the place was asleep, dully napping, blissfully unaware. The star blazing overhead was little more than a nightlight; the Scriptures no more than pretty poetry.

Finding their way to the palace where all royal things should transpire, the veil of ignorance was impenetrable. Herod didn't like what he heard, summoned the ones who should know, found out that all these things were happening a mere seven miles away in that know-nothing village of Bethlehem, and began to plan corrective measures. It was clearly there for them to know; they just didn't get it.

Jesus as the answer to the world's problems is not hard to find, yet there are people looking, groping, thrashing around in all the wrong places, claiming they just can't find Him. Worse yet, they are filling in the blank with wrong answers because they can't bring themselves to admit it can be Him. Not Jesus. Please. Not Jesus, they say.

But like my IT problem, you can't get around it as the only right answer. There is only one way that it will work. Jesus said it clearly: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). It's been right there the whole time. It remains so. He will always be the only answer.