B. CRAIG GRAFTON - EXODUS: 21:17

​Author is a retired attorney having practiced for 35 years in Illinois who now lives in Texas and started writing stories about a year and a half ago.

 
 
                                                            Exodus: 21:17
 
      There was an angel named Zacharias who worked for God. His job was to see to it that the minutes changed to hours, the hours to days, days to weeks etc to etc.and that time marched on uninterrupted as it had for millenias upon millenias here upon the face of the earth.
    Now some learned people of the planet earth got together and formed a club and called themselves the Lords of Science. And these Lords came to the conclusion, in their infinite wisdom, that man’s time, here on earth anyway, was about to run out.
      “Man has destroyed the environment of this good earth of ours by his own greed and stupidity and there is nothing we the learned can do to fix it for you,” one of elite proclaimed. “This planet is long over due to be hit by asteroids and be destroyed,” shouted another.  “Global warming will fry the earth and everything upon it,” hollered still a third member of the club. And with that said they all  announced in unison, “The world will end within one hundred years from today.” And they repeated this mantra over and over. But the people did not believe them.
      So the Lords of Science created their own version of time to back up what they had just said. And their version of time wasn’t the same as God’s. For they had created the Doomsday Clock to prove their point and set the minute hand thereon a few minutes before midnight. Or was it high noon?  It didn’t matter anyway for it symbolized that when the clock struck twelve, life here on earth, as we knew it, would end.
     The people looked at the clock and became frightened now and shrieked,  “What should we do? Where should we go?” And they prostrated themselves before the Lords of Science seeking answers.
      So as to not let a crisis go to waste, and again using their brilliance, the Lords of Science came up with Plan B to live on Planet B. They thought this play on words was clever and that it validated their innate geniusness. Their plan was a simple plan: Move. And they told the people of earth of their plan. But secretly the Lords of Science had no intention of taking the people with them when they left.
     Now God became angry and upset with such foolishness and conceit by these men. For he deemed it an attempt by them to upstage Him with Science as their god. God meant for mankind’s time here on earth to be eternal and never to be ended by man himself. So He sent  Zacharias, in a human form, to earth to deliver a message of warning to these so called learned pharisees.
       But these learned ones laughed at Zacharias when they saw him and said unto him, “We do not wish to hear what such a little uneducated man as you has to say for we already know what is best for mankind and have figured it all out.” And with that said they shredded the memo from God without even looking at it and sent him away. And this they would live to regret.
     Then the Scientists proceeded with their plan to move and they built a special rocket ship and filled it with all the best and the brightest of the dna of all the species of flora and fauna, animals and insects, and the different races of man so that they could reproduce them all again on Planet B but only in a better, higher and more intelligent life form. And they drew up plans and loaded up materials to build magnificent aerated bubble pod cities to live in on Planet B because the atmosphere there would not support life as they knew it. And since there was no beauty of nature on Planet B, only a lifeless dull gray dust and rock setting, they would recreate God’s beauty of nature in a pod there too but on a much more grander and more beautiful scale than God had done here on earth. And they prided themselves in these their plans of creation.
    Then they set the Doomsday Clock at one minute before the stroke of midnight, or high noon, or whatever time it was suppose to be, and then they left earth forever. But before did so, they had already set in motion three earth destroying catastrophes to make sure that the world would end just as they had predicted. For if it did not, then they would look foolish and their work would have all been in vain and vain people cannot can not accept results such as foolishness and failure.
     Now God knew what the Lords of Science had planned. For God knows all that goes on in the minds of his children and He sent Zacharias to earth again. This time with the knowledge and instructions how to thwart the plans of these evil men. For God too had a plan.
     First the Lords of Science had employed teams of men all over the world to use giant jack hammers on all the fault lines of earth so that the earth would open up and split apart and all of mankind would be swallowed up therein and die as a result thereof. So Zacharias went to the places of the giant jackhammers and told the men there that he was from the Lords of Science and that their instructions were wrong and instead of jack hammering the earth apart they were to drill into the earth for oil. This made more sense to these men. So they began to drill for oil and God made oil bubble forth from their drilling, enriching not only them, but all of mankind with lower gas prices.
     Second the Lords of Science had built and sent into space a giant asteroid and programmed it to collide with the earth destroying the entire planet. So Zacharias went to the military generals of the earth and told them this and the generals sent forth powerful missiles and destroyed the asteroid thousands of miles above the earth's’ surface blowing it into a fine powdery dust. And God blessed that dust and had it settle on the ozone layer above the earth destroying the ozone layer and thus saving the earth from the deadly greenhouse effect.
   Third the Lords of Science had built an artificial drone sun with nuclear heating powers and had sent it high above the earth to heat the earth to the point where the oceans would boil and all life forms on land would be charred. So Zacharias went to the Temple of Science, found the controls for the drone, and shut it off. Then God had Zacharias reprogram it so that the atmosphere could be mildly heated or cooled whenever and wherever it best suited man and had Zacharias program the artificial sun to produce wind and rain patterns over certain areas on earth that were presently unproductive so as to make those areas fruitful and that crops could be grown thereon. And all of mankind benefited greatly from the reprogrammed artificial sun.
     All this was unbeknownst of course to the Lords of Science who were thousands of light years from earth at the time as they made their exodus through the vastness of space.
     Now while doing so they came upon an asteroid storm and God saw it and parted the asteroids for their ship to pass through. But when the ship reached the eye of the storm, God closed the asteroid storm around them, and rained down his wrath upon these men, destroying them and all their learning.
     And God thus having accomplished His plan, He drew Zacharias back up to Heaven with Him. And Zacharias went back to work making sure that time marched on, just as it always had, for millennia upon millennia, world without end. Amen.