Thursday, February 5, 2015


“An Enemy Hath Done This”
By Lois Kullberg 2-5-15

The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a computer which had good words written in it, and good emails sent from it. They were likened unto the good wheat seeds that a writer wrote about. But while men slept, his enemy came from cyber space and sowed bad words into the writer’s computer.

There was a Trojan Horse virus and 36-thousand spam advertisements. They were like unto tares sown into a wheat field. The writer had seen many rolling hills covered with growing wheat as he drove his car along a route from The Dalles to Maupin. He wondered how in the world he could ever extract 36-thousand spam emails from such a large field of words??

He went to his Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) website. The writer thought he would have to go into the field of words and delete the tares, even though he could only pull out 15 at a time. He went to work slowly performing the task but the huge rolling hills containing the tares seemed endless. In an hour he had only removed one-thousand tares, because the subject lines had to be examined to make sure they were not wheat emails. And the Trojan Horse kept interrupting the work telling the writer to purchase a program to cleanup the virus. Then the owner of the ISP said, “Gather ye together first the tares and bind them into bundles, but gather the wheat into my Inbox.” So the ISP provider told the writer to gather the tares under the title of “show all” followed by “toggle all.” This put a checkmark before each tare. Then the ISP told the writer to remove the checkmark of each subject he wanted to keep, which was much fewer than even one-hundred. Then the ISP clicked on “delete” and all 35-thousand tares were removed except for the wheat words the writer wanted to keep. Then the ISP provider was able to locate the trojan horse virus and delete it. He even tuned up the computer to work better and faster and set the security program so it could protect the computer in the future.

Elder James E Talmage, in his book Jesus the Christ, explains the parable of the wheat and the tares:

“...the sower was Himself (Jesus) the Son of Man; and, as the condition of wheat and tares growing together was one that shall continue until ‘the end of the world,’ those who were ordained to carry on the ministry after Him are by direct implication also sowers. The seed as here represented” is not ...the gospel itself, but the children of men, the good seed typifying the honest in heart, righteous-minded children of the kingdom; while the tares are those souls who have given themselves up to evil and are counted as children of the wicked one. Inspired by zeal for the Master’s profit, the servants would have forcibly rooted up the tares, but were restrained, for their unwise but well-intended course would have endangered the wheat while yet tender, since in the early stages of growth it would have been difficult to distinguish the one from the other, and the intertwining of the roots would have caused much destruction of the precious grain.” Matthew 13:24-30

In the case of the computer, the good words are written and sent by the writer who was not expecting an enemy to sabotage his computer. The tares are those souls who caused the disruption of the writer’s work and represent evil people who extort money from their victims. As we carry on the ministry of our Savior, we can become sowers of good seeds, but we may expect evil persons, either intentionally or unintentionally, to disrupt our work because it is part of Satan’s plan. We know too that this interference will continue until ‘the end of the world.’

The story is true as a modern-day parable, but the method is as old as the world itself, and before.

No comments:

Post a Comment