Remember those phones? In a time, long, long ago, they were the ‘normal’ thing. That is how I got to learn to use a phone. You pick up the receiver, you stick your finger in the hole with the right figure, you turn the dial until you can’t go any further because of the metal placeholder, you pull out your finger, the dial goes back to the starting position and then you repeat the procedure with the other figures of the phone number.
My kids – now grown men – did not grow up with these dial phones. We were once visiting with friends that still had one. My youngest son wanted to place a phone call, and the friend said: “sure, there’s the phone, use it!”. My son walked over to the phone and stood there, glazed eyes, not knowing how to use this ancient thing.
The thing with these dial phones is that they never, ever go ‘kaput’. Probably, if you stick one from 1960 into the phone socket (if there still is a phone socket around), they’ll still work. But they have become obsolete, because we all have push buttons nowadays, either ‘real’ buttons or – more likely – digital buttons.
There are more things that still work just fine but are obsolete anyways. ‘Planned obsoleteness’ is a real thing in our consumer society. In 2011, I bought an iMac computer with a 27-inch screen. In 2018, I updated it with an SDD disk and in 2023 it still worked as a charm: fast and furious.
But Apple thought differently. They decided for me that a 2011 computer should be replaced. They stopped issuing updates for the operating system and before long I got messages, saying: “This computer is too old; you can’t update the operating system anymore.” That was the beginning of the decline into obsoleteness.
Then I started to get messages saying: “Your computer is in danger for viruses, because your operating system can’t scan for viruses anymore.” And then user software started saying to me: “you can’t use this software anymore, because your operating system is not valid anymore.” Now it was my turn to stand by my good, old, working iMac with glazed eyes, not knowing what to do.
When people brought a woman to Jesus who was caught in adultery, we read this:
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again, he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” John 8:7-11.
With Jesus, people never become obsolete. Maybe we sometimes feel that way. We lose our jobs. We get sick. We make stupid choices. We ‘lose the touch’. We get older. But there is no ‘planned obsoleteness’ in God’s economy.
God doesn’t run an Apple company. He runs His kingdom, in which people are his prime assets. And for the financials amongst us: he doesn’t depreciate them either. They keep their full value into eternity.