Overload

Though the producers and editors of the fourth installment of the ‘Indiana Jones’ series got so many things wrong, there is certainly something they were very successful in conveying. At the climax of the film, the female antagonist Russian interrogator barges into the chamber of crystal skulls where the alien consciousness is fusing into a single entity and portraying and manifesting its full potential of imminent existence and knowledge. It is at this moment that she seeks to grapple with and ascertain what she has been frantically chasing all along: full knowledge and understanding. For just a moment she is seemingly in existential bliss and euphoria with a wonderful compilation and semblance of knowledge immediately afforded to her. However, as more and more knowledge rushes in - presumably without wisdom or real understanding - the feeble antagonist is slowly overwhelmed with the cascade of revelation she receives. She begs for the influx of knowledge to stop until, in a crescendo of hardware failure - as the software is orders of magnitude beyond what she can handle - her eyes explode in a fiery eruption and she is consumed in an inferno of knowledge, metaphorically as well as quite literally. This was a very potent display that is similar in type yet severely less in magnitude to the the crushing weight of glory one would feel if God attempted to give them full and pre-imminent knowledge (in fact it is infinitely less, because the difference between one and infinity is infinity, just as the difference between one thousand and infinity is still infinity…let that sink in!). We could not even begin to process the quadrillions of things going on between just a few molecules in our body, let alone the virtually infinite number of things God is doing in the material and immaterial world, governing all by his guiding hand. We would explode, implode, be decimated, be destroyed, and be pulverized all simultaneously under the immensity of the crushing weight of just an inkling of the knowledge God has. Thankfully, he is king and knows that we are but human, and thusly limited and gives more grace. He mostly gives us just what we can handle, regarding knowledge, and sometimes gives us just more than we can bear regarding weight or burden, so that - in his grace - we know, or at least begin to know, that we truly need him. Sometimes He gives more in knowledge, like Job being shown all the great creatures and caverns of the deep, and admitting that he spoke of things too wonderful for him - and that was just the material world. Or like Ezekiel being shown the interlocking gyroscopic wheels of the throne of God and being overwhelmed and unable to adequately describe what he saw. But most closely, we should resonate with Isaiah, when seeing God’s glory said “Woe is me! for I am undone…”