Phone signals today can be transmitted any number of ways. We have computer modems, wireless routers, even satellite signals that beam our calls to the most remote places on earth. We can call across the ocean with a touch of an icon on our mobile phone.
However, a half-century ago, a phone call required something we hardly think of today, a hard line. The first phone call across the ocean, directly from the Americas to Europe, was in the 1950s. A cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean, providing that connection that guided the signal across 2000 miles of ocean floor. A hard line finally connected the two continents.
However, if that cable wasn’t in place, the call wasn’t going through.
One hundred years earlier, a telegraph cable was laid in approximately the same location. It provided the first instantaneous communication in history between Europe and the New World. It worked for a month and failed. The hard line had been broken.
What about our hard line with God? What happens when it becomes broken?
Job 19:14 presents Job’s predicament. His hard lines were broken; the connections were corrupted; and the signals had become stranded in the pipeline. Job says it this way:
“My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me.”
Is that how we feel about God, sometimes? We lift our needs to heaven and feel as if God is an ocean away. The connection that was once there is missing. We are mystified, because we are doing all the right things: praying; fasting; reading the Bible. What has gone wrong?
Eventually the questions arise: Where is God? Was he even there in the first place?
The New World didn’t disappear simply because the cable underneath the ocean became corrupted. The broken hard line didn’t change Europe’s position on the face of the earth. It was the connection that was broken, not the entities that were missing.
Job mourned for his lost connections in Verse 14, yet he understood that his loss of communication was only a broken hard line. In Verse 25 he proclaims:
“For I know that my Redeemer lives!”
When our prayers come back to us unanswered, yet we know we’ve done all we should do, God has not gone anywhere. Broken hard lines don’t remove the truth of who is at the other end. God remains right where he has always been, and when we proclaim our Redeemer’s victorious triumph over sin and death, the hard line will open to us once again.
Even when the lines of communication fail, God is still at the other end.
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