When God has something to say to us He uses a middleman called a prophet. People like Abraham, or Moses, or Jesus. That seems a bit odd at first. Surely God could have spoken directly to all mankind, in a way that we all hear Him all at once in our own language.
He could have said something like: "Alright people, listen up. I'm not happy with the way things are going. I let it pass for thousands of years, but enough is enough. So this is what I want you to do…"
Instead He just picks one person every few hundreds of years, tells him everything, and then that person has to tell everyone else! He really works in mysterious ways. But this creates one problem. Let's take Jesus for example.
I would've expected Jesus to say something to his disciples along these lines: "Guys, you don't know this yet, but across the ocean there's a huge land mass which one day people will call North and South America. I know because my Dad made it. Millions of people live in it but they're still pagans, heathens. What we need to do now is to build a boat, cross the ocean and spread the Word."
But sadly he didn't say anything like that. All those poor Maya, Aztecs and Incas had to live like pagans for another 1500 years until, finally, the Spanish arrived.
Because, you see, the problem is not just that the prophets are few and far in between. They also seem to be concentrated in a very small area of the world, Palestine.
So if God didn't want to talk directly to all mankind, couldn't He at least have sent 20 or 30 prophets here and there all over the world? That would've sped things up. Apparently He did.
Years ago I was asking these same questions to friend of mine and he said: "We know that throughout history God has sent us many prophets in different places, it's just that people didn't always listen to them."
That's right. I can just picture it. Hundreds of years ago, on the North American plains. A Lakota Native American says to his friends:
- Uhm… guys? God said we're not allowed to eat pigs.
- Pigs? What's a pig?
- I'm not sure. Some kind of animal, I guess.
- But we can still eat buffaloes, right?
- Yes. Buffaloes are fine.
- That’s lucky, given that it's the only animal around here for hundreds of miles.
Lucky indeed.
