The Clock as a Terrible Invention?

Do you realize that the clock might just be one of the worst machines ever invented?

Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, comments on the theories of Lewis Mumford, saying, “the clock has effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception . . . It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.”

Mumford’s theory (as summarized by Postman) is a simple one: “beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.”

If we think back to the beginning of time, we realize that God created day and night, times and seasons, for His sovereign purposes. We’ve all heard that we are to redeem the time, but what sort of focus will enable a life filled with redeemed time?

Perhaps we would do well to heed Mumford’s warning, that “with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.”

Even Postman, himself not a believer, contends that “though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment . . . the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.”

So, Christians, are we redeeming the time by giving to God what is rightly His own? Are we giving Him the first fruits of our time, not just in measured out minutes, but in wholehearted pursuit of a relationship which will last through eternity?