Titanic
“Rescue those being led away to death: hold back those staggering toward slaughter.” Proverbs 24:11
Titanic. It was a blockbuster movie, an award-winning Broadway show, the subject of best-selling books – and one dramatic, tragic night in history that has intrigued generation after generation. It presents an unfortunate parallel to that impacts those who say they follow Jesus.
After all we have heard and seen about the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship, there is still something about the story that catches our attention. In the early 20th century, the R.M.S. Titanic was the crowning achievement of human technology – and yet an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean sent it to the bottom in less than 2 hours.
For the seven hundred survivors – more than 1,500 passengers and crew died – the images of that horrific April night in the North Atlantic were unforgettable. The brightly lit liner sinking lower and lower … the futile flares exploding in the sky above the doomed vessel …. the ship’s last agonizing moments with her bow pointing upward, then sliding beneath the water …. and the sudden near-silence as the ocean erased the Titanic from her icy surface.
Movie goers and readers will remember those images. But of all the mental pictures none is more unsettling than what happened after the great ship had gone down. The survivor accounts tell us that there were only 20 lifeboats aboard – about ½ of what was needed. Most of them were only ½ full; some were nearly empty! As the ship was sinking many people were able to put on a lifejacket, but they could not find an available lifeboat. They jumped or fell into the ocean, left floating in the frigid waters, crying in the night for help.
HERE IS THE PARALLEL. It is not pleasant.
Again, there was room in the lifeboats for hundreds of them! That is why their fate is perhaps the most shocking human tragedy of that heartrending night when 1,500 people died. Though those in the water continued to cry out for someone to rescue them, the people in the lifeboats just kept rowing away. They thought rescue was too risky. So out of those twenty lifeboats, only one finally turned back, in time to save only 6 passengers.
Three days later when the funeral ships arrived, they were greeted by a ghostly sigh: 328 lifejacketed men, women and children, floating in water, frozen to death. And why did they die? Not because the ship sank, but because people who were already saved would not go back for the people who were not.