From Lennon to Lennox

When I was a teenager, the Beatles were a big deal for us baby boomers.John Lennon sang a song called “Imagine.” It went something like this: “Imagine there’s no heaven. . .no hell below us. . .above us only sky. . . no religion too. . . imagine all the people, living life in peace. . .. . . you may say that I’m a dreamer; but I’m not the only one. “ I was a dreamer too; but I was also a working man. I was working, helping to build a quarter-mile-long bridge, the Linn Cove viaduct. near Grandfather Mountain in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina.

One December morning, while our rodbuster crew were tying rebar in a huge work shed, our foreman, Rod (funny that: Rod, foreman of the rodbusting crew) came in aand told us that John Lennon had been shot dead in New York City. It was a moment I’ll never forget. . . not quite the JFK-in-Dallas memory of ’63, but close. My g-generation’s loss of our prophet, John Lennon was a terrible, tragedy. By the time of Lennon’s demise, I had been following a different prophet—actually a whole heavenly host of prophets—those found in the ancient book. In that literary collection of prhistorical and prophetic documentation, we learn of several more “Johns”. There was John the Baptist, thenn John the apostle who wrote a gospel account of Jesus’ life, death and Resurrection, and later, the book of Revelation. A fellow-traveler of John’s gospel-spreading project was the apostle Paul, who wrote, in his letter to the Romans: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.” For me, part of that “doing away with” included admitting that John Lennon’s dream of world peace and harmony was —as the saying goes—a “pipe dream”—especially if, in the pipe, the smoke was cannabis, as so many of us boomers were doing at that time, ’60’s, ‘70’s . . . but I digress. . . Now today, I was watching a youtube discussion between John Lennox

and David Perell, in which the Oxford scholar was explaining to the young interviewer the difference between gospel truth and everything else. They had gotten into some heavy topics. Lennox was talking about the human genome, DNA, a code that is 3.4 billion letters long; he was making the point that any code of such complexity, length and extremely long historical longevity could only have been written by God, theCreator of the universe.

In my life journey, roundabout 1977, I had decided to affirm John Lennox’ world view—the gospel one— by expositing the fact that his biblical explanation far surpasses the world view that I and John Lennon had, back in the day. I mean, John Lennon was a great musician and poet. Who knows? Maybe I’ll meet him in heaven. I’m not the judge of such things. I’m just one ole guy pecking away on a laptop, trying to figure it all out. Boomer’s Choice