A young lady named Annie Ellsworth loved to study her Bible carefully as she watched events unfolding around her. Her father was a friend of a Mr. Morse, whom you know about. Annie’s father, the head of the U.S. Patent Office, had been Morse’s classmate at Yale.
As Annie studied her Bible, she was particularly taken with the words of Balaam. That devious prophet had been hired by King Balak to curse Israel. But God’s blessing upon Israel was so strong that Balaam could only bless Israel and not curse. While speaking God’s prophecy, Balaam asked this question: “What hath God wrought?” (Numbers 23:23).
To her father’s friend, Samuel F.B. Morse, Annie Ellsworth recommended that phrase as the first message to be sent through Morse’s new invention: the telegraph. And so, on May 24, 1844, Morse sent that message from the Supreme Court chambers in the U.S. Capitol. To his assistant, Alfred Vail, in nearby Baltimore, Morse tapped out the words, “What hath God wrought?” Seven days later, Morse wrote a letter to his brother in which he humbly exalted the Lord twice more with those same words: “What hath God wrought?”
As Morse prepared to retire from private life, his employees honored him with “Samuel F.B. Morse Day” on June 10, 1871. At the end of the day, the employees asked Morse to send a farewell message via telegraph. Morse tapped out these words: “Greeting and thanks to the Telegraph fraternity throughout the world. Glory to God in the Highest, on Earth Peace, Goodwill to men. S.F.B. Morse.”
Pause for a moment to consider what the telecommunications industry has become since those first dots and dashes. The telephone and the Internet are the descendants of the primitive telegraph. But, by and large, what has the world done with what God has wrought?
Many of you are reading these words on a webpage or social media. Some of you are listening to these words spoken over live streams. We rejoice over the way that we can communicate the message of God’s Word today through telecommunications. But how far we have come since those first few taps from Samuel F. B. Morse? We would have to admit that the world, the flesh and the devil have largely coopted much of the telecommunications industry. Following Balaam’s advice (Numbers 31:16) Midian seduced Israel. And so this corrupt world system has seduced mankind to rebel against the King of kings and Lord of lords.
But remember, the Most High God still rules over the kingdoms of men. For more about this message, see “King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” Click here.
Samuel F.B. Morse https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3a40045/