A farmer has fallen foul of the local authority, and has felt the full weight of government bureaucracy. An inspector from Berkshire County Council identified the lack of width on a public pathway because barley had been allowed to grow on a part of the path that crosses his land.
The inspector told the farmer to spray this area to ensure that the following year the path was the right width. The pathway has been on the farmer’s land for generations, and apparently this is the first time in 83 years he or his forefathers have been reprimanded. With local government resources stretched to breaking point, one would have thought that something more urgent would have been their priority, but 10cm is 10cm and the law is the law and you can’t buck that!
Similarly, but different, a pilot was disciplined for flying too low. Whilst he was in his Phantom jet over a Scottish town he breached the low-level flying regulations. He lost 18 months seniority for flying about 145 metres over Broughty Ferry. He was 460 metres too low – just a tad more than 10 cm!
Flt Lt Contradi, the pilot, was convicted under section 51 and 52 of the Air Force Act 1955 for illegal low flying and causing annoyance to the public. The navigator, Flt Lt Wells, was found guilty of breaching section 69 of the Act, which relates to good conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, by failing to warn the pilot that he was flying too low.
The pilot was convicted soon after the event, the farmer’s field could have been infringing the law for years, but no one noticed. That’s the trouble with sin, (that is what breaking the law is), some sins are obvious and some unobserved. It depends on who knows the law, who catches up with the culprit and the date the law was enacted, since some laws can be challenged because they are out of date. Others are dateless, as a Mr. Massued Cohen recently found out.
Israel’s rabbinical authorities refused to marry him and his
partner because of a sin allegedly committed by the woman’s ancestors about 2500 years ago. The reason given was that the Haddad Family (woman’s name) who emigrated from Tunisia might have been descended from a Tunisian Jew expelled from the priestly cast in 580 BC for marrying a divorced woman against the religious law.
The unfortunate offender of antiquity is said to have been a priest who fled to Djerba, in Tunisia, after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. To this day Cohens, or members of the traditional priestly clan, are subject to much more rigorous laws of ritual purity.
The Bible says, “be sure your sin will find you out,” (Numbers 32:23) and it eventually will, if not in this life then in the hereafter. A little girl had a rag doll that was stuffed with straw, and she lost it. It fell into a ditch, was covered with soil, and that was the end of that! Next spring the straw sprouted and there, in the hedgerow, was the shape of a doll growing through the soil. Whatever we sow we reap.
The continuous TV documentary of the current Iraqi war showed a prison, where thousands of people were tortured and killed. The American soldiers were thumbing through the records, which they found, with photographs of the alleged offenders. The local inhabitants, now free from oppression, gave a running commentary of what had gone on, as they had been incarcerated themselves, and could speak from experience.
God has got his records, and He misses nothing. There is a vast difference between 10 cm and 145 metres but sin is sin, whatever the infringement, but small or large, He will, one day, rule in equity and justice. Today, as perhaps in every age, people excuse the 4 cm and highlight the 145 metres, and this is mankind’s attempt at self-justification.
