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Last Word - Bugging
The newspapers, radio, television and so on are full of reports and discussions of “bugging” which, as a word, considering the meaning it is being given, is rather odd. A “bug” used to be, perhaps, still is to some people, an insect, a flea, even a fly. In the context of its present use it is a device (or its use) to record what some person or persons are saying, without them being aware that their conversation is being recorded.
There is nothing new in all this. Some years ago, the fear was that telephones were secretly being listened to as part of what was referred to as “industrial espionage”. Official warnings were also given that foreign powers might be intercepting telephone calls to gain confidential or secret information.
The modern concept of interception arose out of the Second World War. By then, the mere transmission of a few words by radio was enough to reveal the whereabouts of convoys of merchant ships and their naval escorts. The irony was that ships bristling with the latest radio equipment could not use it. They maintained radio silence e.g. in Atlantic waters until the convoys were approaching the British port where the cargoes were to be unloaded.
But espionage, in one form or another, goes back many centuries, whether in war or peace. Turn to the second chapter of the book of Joshua, where the scribe writes ‘And Joshua, the son of Nun, sent two men secretly from Sittim as spies saying, “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” Read further and you will find that the woman who housed them in Jericho bargained with the spies to save her family form the Israelite army who eventually captured the city of Jericho and massacred its people.
We are now approaching Easter when another overwhelming force again came, this time from Jericho to Jerusalem to conquer the city; not by espionage or by an army, but by one man riding on a colt, the foal of an ass. We know, because the story is recorded for us in the Gospels, that a form of espionage was used by Caiaphas who, in the tradition of spying, paid well for the information he needed to bring charges against Jesus and to have Jesus found and arrested.
This is the greatest example of all the espionage and betrayal in history and of the abject failure of those who employed bribery and spying to rid themselves of, to them, unacceptable truth. Without knowing it, they helped to promote the truth they sought to destroy into a truth written in letters of fire in the skies of eternity.
Bob Mclean
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