Last night I watched in amazement as Michael Phelps snatched victory from Serbia’s Milorad Cavic in the 100-meter butterfly. Facing almost certain defeat, Phelps took an extra half-stroke, and reached to touch one one-hundredth of a second ahead of the Serbian.  To most people watching it looked like Cavic had won. Even Phelps’ mother thought her son had lost.

Electronic technology, however, accurately reflected Phelps’ win.  Phelps matched Mark Spitz’s record as the only other Olympian to win seven gold medals—and Phelps still has a chance for one more. The Serbians initially protested, but relented after viewing video confirmation of Phelps’ touch. Looking frame by frame—at increments of one ten-thousandth of a second—it was clear that Phelps touched first.

What amazed me is that I was able to watch along with the rest of the world, as it happened.  Although we take it for granted, technology accomplished some remarkable feats so that I could watch.  First, a camera converted continuous images of visible light into radio waves, which were sent to a relay station and converted into microwaves, which were sent to a satellite or two, sent back to earth, picked-up by my cable television provider, converted to optical light, converted back to radio waves, and finally converted back to visible light so I could see Michael Phelps win “live” and in high definition.  All of this happened in a moment, at the speed of light, at 186,282 miles per second.

Wow!

It turns out that visible light is only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves were discovered in 1888, and we have developed technologies to use them like television, radio, and the telephone over the last century. What I find interesting is that this spectrum exists at all. The world worked fine without knowledge of radio waves for most of human history—and yet the spectrum always existed. God created the whole spectrum, and it allowed me to see Michael Phelps win his seventh gold medal at this Olympics—live. How cool is that?

When John wrote The Revelation of Jesus Christ, he probably was not briefed in about the electromagnetic spectrum, and yet he described an event that could not have made any sense without such knowlege to scholars throughout the ages. According to John, God will empower two witnesses to prophecy 1,260 days.  At the end of their time, they will be killed and their bodies will be left in the street of a great city to be seen by the peoples, tribes, tongues, and nations for three-and-a half days.

The electromagnetic spectrum makes almost all of our modern technologies possible. I can watch the Olympics live, and all the peoples of the world can watch, with derision, the dead bodies of God’s witnesses, live and in high definition.

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