A Convicting Thing To Contemplate

Last night we were watching the last episode of this DVD called "In The Dust of the Rabbi". Its done by a Ray Vander Laan who leads tour groups in Isreal while giving sermons at the same time. So really its just this camara man who follows him and the tour group around. (My Grandparents actually went on one of his tours about 5 years ago) So onto the main subject......Mr. Vander Laan (hence fourth Mr. VL) was leading this group to the remains of a HUGE Roman Temple for Apollo. There were 110 stone collums with intracit designs on them that used to stand 6 storeys high-thats not even counting the the stone roof. Mr. VL said that people would walk for 500 miles to get to this temple and offer sacrifices to Apollo then ask advice of him. As an exaple he used this pretend family (who I shall call the Whites). So when the Whites first arrived at the temple they washed in this "holy under-world" water. Then after waiting around for a priest of apollo for a few days they finally got to tell their request to the "ambasador" of Apollo. They said that they had found large amounts of marble on their land and, since it would mean changing their God, wondered if they should start a new trade in the "arts" of marble. And would it make their old God angry if they did? And would the new God except them? After the Whites and many others had made their requests the priest went back into the temple and down into a certain area. There, an old woman would have sat on a pendolum suspended in the air above a fire with incense burning in it, which, Mr. VL said, would have smelled like glue. The priest would then tell this wise or demonic or gifted or liar of an old woman (we don't know qwite what she was) the peoples problems. She would then tell the preist the answer. He would write it down and it would eventually be put into poetry. Finally, sometimes monthes later, the Whites would get thier answer. Which was (fansifully) that they could switch trades/Gods if they gave lots of sacrifices to their old God as well as the new God and Apollo......
Now that we've had our nice little story its time for the convicting part. You know those 6 storey stone pillers I was telling you about? Well, by doing a little math you can figure out that each piller costs 40,000 dinaries. The individual stone cutters were paid 2 dinaries a day (the average was 1 dinarie a day). That means that a stone cutter worked on his piller for FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS (thats not counting holidays). Thats how devoted he was to the temple, to this little old lady that didn't know a thing and to a fake God that couldn't do a thing! And here we have a living, breathing all-powerful God and we won't get up 10 minuets earlier to read a verse in the bible!!! That stone cutter worked his entire life for his un-living God and do we work all our lives for our awesome God who died for us?