While standing in the lobby of R & M’s New & Used Tire store recently, waiting for a diagnosis of a leaking tire, I picked up the most recent copy of Automobile Magazine and was drawn to the article, 2014 Man of the Year: Tadge Juechter. (http://www.automobilemag.com/features/awards/1401_2014_man_of_the_year_tadge_juechter/)
You need to read the article in order to get the full story, but Mr. Juechter is the Chief Engineer at Corvette, and what captured my attention was that he didn’t merely tweak what was an already pretty tweaked-out design. Instead, according to the article, “the C7 is a top-to-bottom reimagining of what the Corvette could and should be.”
The original Corvette, introduced in 1953, was a gorgeous automobile, all 300 or so of that first production year being white with a red interior. Unfortunately the engine and transmission had a lot to be desired, and it looked as though the Corvette would be a short lived experiment until the Russian born engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov got hold of it. He transformed this beautiful design with its wimpy power train into the powerful V8, stick shift that became the C1 series of Corvettes. For better or worse, there have been a lot of iterations since, but many aficionados will tell you that there hasn’t been anything to compare to the Halcyon Days of the C1 . . . until now!
Maybe it’s my relatively recent obsession with sports cars, or maybe a couple of wires in my brain got crossed up back in my Bible College days, but as we enter into the Advent season, this makes me think of what Jesus was, and is, all about.
Bear with me.
If we go back to the very beginning when “God created the heaven and the earth”, we find the barest hint of how everything got started. The Hebrew word translated “God” here in Genesis 1:1 is “Elohim”, which is a plural word and the earliest suggestion of the Trinity, thus when God says “Let US make man in OUR image” (Genesis 1:26), I get a picture in my head of God-The-Father, God-The-Son, and God-The-Spirit sitting around the proverbial conference table planning and executing the entire creation process, which did indeed turn out to be a beautiful thing. As a matter of fact, God either said or saw that “it was good” no less than seven times during the creation process, so He was unquestionably happy with this successful beginning.
But this very successful beginning quickly went awry when the apple of God’s eye thought they were smarter than God and decided to ignore His “advise” and do their own thing; thus, the original tweaking process of the very first Great Design begins. To make a rather long and historic story short, God called a man (Abraham) who established a people (Israel) with whom a series of rather complicated rules and regulations were established, which presumably were intended to tweak this race of people back into the famous original that God had intended in the first place. By now we realize that didn’t work out so well. Then again, God being God, He knew all along that it wouldn’t, but was using the tweaking process to prepare the people for the “reimagining of what [man] could and should be”, that “man” being the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), Jesus, His Son.
Now to the theo-purists out there, please don’t confuse my crude analogy with hard and fast theology, but I do ask that you observe the parallels. The millennia of tweaking God was doing all that time was merely working mankind up to His true great imagining, Jesus Christ. While I’m certain that the masters of General Motors were never so prescient as to have planned Corvette’s tweaking years in order to prepare the way for Mr. Juechter, God’s so called tweaking years were precisely planned to prepare the way for Jesus.
God’s great imagining has been revealed, but don’t just stand at the Nativity and ooo and ahhh like you would at a car show, but let Him inside your heart . . . then fasten your seat belt, and enjoy the ride of your life!
