Could We Turn Back Time…

COULD WE TURN BACK TIME…

2 Kgs. 20:8-11

INTRODUCTION

A. HUMOR: BLIND MAN SPINS DOG

1. There was a blind man at Wal-Mart the other day. He had a seeing-eye dog with him.

2. He seemed to be doing alright until he grabbed his seeing-eye dog by the hind legs and swung him around his head in a circle.

3. The sales lady ran over and asked, “Can I help you?” To which the blind man replied, “No thanks, I’m just looking around.”

B. TEXT

8 Hezekiah had asked Isaiah, “What will be the sign that the Lord will heal me and that I will go up to the temple of the Lord on the third day from now?” 9 Isaiah answered, “This is the Lord’s sign to you that the Lord will do what he has promised: Shall the shadow go forward ten steps, or shall it go back ten steps?” 10 “It is a simple matter for the shadow to go forward ten steps,” said Hezekiah. “Rather, have it go back ten steps.” 11 Then the prophet Isaiah called on the Lord, and the Lord made the shadow go back the ten steps it had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.

C. THESIS

1. There has been discussion as to whether God turned back time when He made the sun go backwards. I don’t think it can be proved one way or the other, but it’s an intriguing thought!

2. If we could really turn back the hands of time, would we? Why would we? Would it be ethical? Would it be wise to do so?

3. We’re going to look at the development of this concept, reasons people would like to go back in time, would it be good to change the past, and what the Bible says about our future.

4. Title: “Could We Turn Back Time…”

I. COMMON THEME IN MOVIES

Many science fiction stories not only have people jumping across vast areas of the galaxy through wormholes, but also going through or close to a sun and going forward or backward in time.

A. H.G. WELLS, THE TIME MACHINE

The grand-daddy of all time travel is probably H.G. Wells who wrote his classic The Time Machine in 1895! It’s an enthralling story of a scientist who goes backward and forward in time, trying to save his fiancé who is killed in a car accident.

B. STAR TREK SERIES

1. Captain Kirk, Bones, and Spock regularly go back in time either accidentally or on purpose. In “Star Trek: First Contact,” the Enterprise crew meet the man who invented warp drive, Zefram Cochrane.

2. In “Assignment: Earth” the Enterprise travels back in time to 1968, where the crew encounters the mysterious Gary Seven who claims to be sent by advanced beings trying to help Earth.

3. In “Tomorrow is Yesterday” the Enterprise is hurled back in time to the year 1969, where the US Air Force sights it as a UFO. The crew must find a way to erase evidence of their visit before trying to get back to their future home.

4. Throughout the different “Star Trek” series, there are some 40X when people travel into the past.

C. THE TERMINATOR SERIES

1. In the “Terminator” series featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, is entirely built on the motif of future robot assassins coming back into the past to kill a man, John Connor, who led the resistance to overthrow the rule of machines over the world.

2. There are 3 movies each having different robots targeting Connor or his family.

3. Many other science fiction films contain this same literary/ cinematic motif. So we’ll quit with these examples.

II. REASONS FOR WANTING TO GO BACK

A. WHY TRAVEL BACK IN TIME?

An online question asked “If you could travel back in time just once, what would you do?” Responses included

1. “Stop 9/11,”

2. “save Kennedy,” or stop some person’s death.

3. To hug a person we’ve lost.

4. Some would alter the outcome of some wars which turned out badly. DO YOU HAVE A REASON YOU WISH YOU COULD TURN BACK THE CLOCK?

5. I’ve heard many older people say that if they could, they’d like to go back and live their life over again.

B. IS BACKWARD TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?

1. In a Live ScienceTech article entitled, “You Can't Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say” by Sara Goudarzi on March 7, 2007.

2. Why do most physicists rule out backward time travel? Because time is a dimension much like length, width, and height. When you travel from your house to the grocery store, you’re traveling through a direction in space, making headway in all the spatial dimensions—length, width and height. But you’re also traveling forward in time, the fourth dimension.

3. “Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu. “In this four-dimensional space-time, you’re only able to move forward in time,” Liu told LiveScience.