Maybe you’ve seen the show Big Brother. If you haven’t where have you been living the past 5 years?, but for those who havenââ?¬â?¢t the idea of the show is simple… Watch a bunch of people live in a house, see how they act in situations and get along with other people. There are cameras everywhere. On the Internet you can watch them 24 hours a day… While they sleep, while they’re in each of the rooms, you hear them talking, watch them playing games or whatever they do.
The shows title, Big Brother, comes from a number of years ago… People thought (some still do!) that the government was getting too involved in our lives. People were paranoid that we were being monitored too closely… They thought phone calls were being listened to; medical records looked at, bank accounts checked… So, someone started the phrase “Big brother is watching”…
“You better watch what you’re doing… ‘Big Brother’ is watching…” I guess there are a couple arguments to be made here… I do really not want to discuss politics with you… But, in this case it makes sense… Some people say, “We should be watched … If we’re not doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter who’s watching…” Others say, “It’s not their right to know what we’re doing… This is a free country … If we break laws; they should find us without watching every step we take… What a waste of money to watch everyone waiting for someone to break a law…”
The REAL ‘Big Brother’ Is Watching
I’m reminded of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Bruce Almighty. God has this file cabinet with every Bruce ever did, thought about and said. And think for a second about all the jokes you’ve heard about God or someone ‘waiting at the pearly gates’ with a book to determine whether someone was allowed in heaven. Bruce Almighty is a movie, and the jokes are… Jokes. But in Job 34, we’re told there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide… God sees everything we do.
I don’t know about you, but knowing that God is watching my every move and knows all my thoughts makes me a little nervous. In every day there are things that I don’t want God or anyone else to know about, and knowing that God sees everything makes me try to live a little better life. That knowledge certainly makes my decision making process different. In the movie, Bruce wanted to see the file God had on him… I’m not sure I’d want to see that. It might be scary, it might make me feel bad, it might make me realise just how many mistakes I’ve made…
God is all-knowing… What’s really amazing to me is… Even though He knows everything I say, do and think, all the good AND all the bad, He still loves me. I don’t think of God knowing everything as a scary thing, but instead a source of comfort and extreme love for me. I hope you do too.
*** POP/PUB QUIZ TIME ***
What dystopiate work of fiction first coined the phrase “Big Brother”?
(hint, you’ll have to look back to a time before the mid 80′s)
It wouldn’t be Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’, would it? 1924 i believe it was written.
It’s a boring morning in work….
I wish there was some way of making that niose they have on “Family Fortunes”
“You said ‘We’. Is it up there?”
X
nope try again.
Now I haven’t read it since I was at school, but I believe that George Orwells 1984 had the character ‘Big Brother’. The book was written in 1949, so I don’t know if it was the first to coin the phrase as it were.
And our survey says?
You said “1984″ and our survey says…
(something that I can’t remmeber, but no doubt the overdressed Mathews family from Brentwood go mental…)
Yes, Orwell coined this one.
And just to set the records striaght, it’s ben pointed out to me (by my girlfriend) that that there’s no such thing as “dystopiate”I probably meant dystopian. And I had a feeling that the book was written in 1948 and swapping the last two digits you get 1984.
I was wondering though… Is there a difference between a God that’s “always watching” and one that just happens to be omniscient? I have no opinion, but I was just curious…
Yep, i got caught out big time.
I thought of 1984, but then forgot it was written in 1948, so i looked back a bit further.
Ooops