Having just reached my 70th birthday and wondering how I got here so quickly, my thoughts turned to how unusual this moment in history really is. For most of human existence, life moved at the pace of a walking person or a trotting horse. If someone from ancient Israel or ancient Greece were dropped into the year 1869, they’d recognize almost everything: farms, hand tools, animals doing the pulling, stories told face to face, days shaped by sunrise and sunset. Life had changed some, but not in ways that would totally bewilder them.
But drop that same person into the year 1969, only 100 years later, and they’d think they had stepped into another realm. Moving pictures. Voices traveling through the air. Light summoned with a switch. Machines that fly. Machines that think. Or, as a character in The Twilight Zone who was transported from the 1800s into the present said of a simple cigarette lighter: “Fire pulled out of the sky!” And on top of all that, the ability to watch a human being step onto the surface of the moon from their living room. Plop someone living 50 years ago into today and they would marvel perhaps just as much. Just say “AI.” It’s as if humanity suddenly received a new set of senses.
It’s fascinating to consider the words of in the book of Daniel, which hinted at this acceleration long before anyone could imagine it. It says in the last days “Knowledge will increase” (Daniel 12:4). I don’t take this unprecedented rise in knowledge as a countdown or a timetable. Scripture never asked me to do that. But we can’t dismiss how sharply it has risen. I’m not saying Jesus is coming back this year or next, or even in the next hundred. But I also know He could. And that simple truth invites me to be receptive and responsive to His voice, moment-by moment in this remarkable moment of history.
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