Soul Milk, Smart Minds

It might come as some surprise to learn than the man who campaigned to have expiry dates on bottled milk was US gangster Alphonse Gabriel Capone. Whether it was primarily because his niece fell ill from imbibing stale milk, or because he owned a firm that had the equipment to stamp the dates on the bottles, his real motives are not clear. Yet a good idea came from a bad man.

Man’s innovation, tempered and fuelled by his sinful nature, has often devised new technologies and gadgets. Whether to save the expense of hiring labour, to improve the efficiency of killing or to mass produce knick-knacks and trinkets. A great number of modern inventions which we now take for granted we owe to the Great War, that appalling carnival of industrial slaughter. As Tolkien’s Isengard:

Once it had been green and filled with avenues, and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountains to a lake. But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains, to the centre all the roads ran between their chains.

-so our earth.

At first glance, Christ’s death was the product of human invention. Someone improved that Roman whip with additional cords containing bits of bone and metal, that the scourging might be deadlier. His crown of thorns was cleverly manufactured by a quick-witted legionary with a taste for irony. Crucifixion itself was a development of the Persian method of impaling, whereby the victim suffers as well as dies, while offering grim warning to other ne’er-do-wells.

The methods might have been of man’s cruel calculation, but the gospel was God’s conception, His glorious remedy for future sin. Christ is the Lamb ‘slain from the foundation of the world’, whereby the eternal covenant was made to save people from their own rebellion. Christian redemption is no human fancy or invention, but a glorious plan forged in the furnace of divine love. 

Sour milk tastes and smells foul; unredeemed sin is more obnoxious still.

Image by artemtation from Pixabay