The Mosquito Machine

Excerpted from a speech given at the local Rescue Mission, where my father was a regular speaker until recent years. 

May 2010
We called it the Mosquito Machine, for its sound mimicked that of a mosquito in close proximity to one’s ear canal.  As a boy in my bed at night, I would listen to the Mosquito Machine’s sound emanating from the depths of the scrubby forest that surrounded our Florida home.  Sometimes, the sound pierced a night so black that it seemed a wonder it penetrated the oppressive blanket of humid Florida air.  At other times, the screech was borne on white moonlight that fought its way through the oaks overhead to cast jigsaw puzzle pieces of light upon the walls and floor of the bedroom where my brothers and I slept.

To say we slept in that bedroom is, perhaps, overstating.  For we were poor and, though we lived in Florida, we did so without the benefit of air conditioning.  So it was that during the warm months – and there were many of those – bedtime was a sweltering experience, spent anxiously awaiting the arrival, through the screen of a nearby open window, of any possible puff of breeze – there were not many of those.  And while we lay there, willing our body temperatures lower, we listened to the sounds that came through that screen with greater regularity than any breeze.  There were crickets always, unless there was rain.  And sometimes, there was the incessant call of a whippoorwill.   There were the occasional muffled sounds, mixed with splashes of light, of automobiles that made their way down our country road and eased around the curve in front of our land.  Sometimes, leaves rustled nearby as a cat or opossum made its passage through our wooded property.

One sound, however, occupies a more exalted place in my memories, towering above those of crickets, cats, and cars.  The Mosquito Machine was my dad’s invention.  Its existence was kept a secret by my family, for it allowed my father to profitably perform a specific task that others in his industry found prohibitively frustrating.  Secret or not, anyone approaching our country home would have known from the high volume screeches emanating from the shed at the end of a footpath behind our home; something unusual was afoot.

My father, you see, was a piano technician by trade, spending his workdays tuning, repairing, and rebuilding these complex musical instruments.  I believe that in his day, he was, in fact, the most skilled artisan of his trade within the Central Florida area.  He would depart our house each morning to go to his employer, where he would spend the day breaking old pianos down, replacing all of the rotten, worn out parts, and slowly reconstructing them from the ground up in “like new” condition.

In addition to being a skilled artisan, he was also a faithful provider.  He had mouths to feed, and he had no intention of neglecting that duty.  He took extra jobs, like tunings or small repairs, on weekends and evenings to make ends meet, and although there was never much extra in the way of money, there was enough.

He had a very active mind.  He wanted to be able to read the Bible in its original language, so he taught himself Greek… and not just a surface understanding of Greek… he became fluent in it, and could often be found sitting off by himself somewhere reading a Greek New Testament.  He also memorized whole books of the Bible, I don’t now recall which books, except that I know that at one point, he memorized the book of Romans.

One product of his active mind was a continual string of inventions that he created.  A number of the tools that he used to do his job were tools that only he had because he invented them, and it was this inventive characteristic of his nature that gave birth to the Mosquito Machine:

I was a very young child, and my father had not been in the piano business for very long when he noticed a little niche market, an opportunity to make some extra money.  Everyone knows that the keys of a piano are black and white.  You probably also already realize that most of a piano key, the part that you don’t usually see, is made of wood.  With the black keys, the part you see is an extra piece of black plastic or black-painted wood that is glued to the top of the wooden key.  In the case of the white keys, it is thin pieces of white plastic (in the old days it was ivory) that are glued to the top and front of each key.

When a piano is rebuilt, these key coverings have to be replaced, because even if all of the guts of the instrument are brand new, the piano won’t look right with old key coverings.  One would not restore an old automobile to mint condition but leave a big rust hole in one of the fenders.  Neither would a piano technician rebuild a piano but fail to recover the keys.

What my dad discovered about recovering keys was that, in the piano repair industry, no one liked to recover keys because no one had a good way to do it.  No one had any tools that worked very well for the job, and it was, therefore, very difficult and time consuming to do the job in a way that made the final product look good.

As my father built his skills as a piano technician, he mulled over the problem of recovering keys, and eventually, in a shed behind our house, he invented and built the equipment he would need to do this job easily.  The Mosquito Machine was the most complex of these inventions.  It was a saw that ran on tracks and made very precise cuts to the key plastic.  It also made a very loud noise, similar to a mosquito in flight, but millions of times louder.  Soon, piano repair companies from all over the United States were sending piano keys to my dad, rather than doing the recovering jobs themselves.


Eventually, in a shed behind our house, he invented and built the equipment he would need...


None of these efforts made my parents rich.  They still barely made ends meet, but I believe that you can see from what I’ve told you so far, what our family had, we had because my father was a very remarkable man.  You can probably also tell that he was a very busy man.  Well, you don’t yet know the half of it.  Let me tell you the rest.

My father was very concerned with the mental, emotional, and spiritual stability of his wife and his children, and he believed that he played an important role in the maintenance of those things.  He didn’t believe in quality time, he believed in quantity time.  The best quality time a father can give his children is lots of time.  Period.  That’s how he saw it, and frankly, he was right.

Here’s something else you should know about my dad.  He had a very simple, strong faith in God.  When he was a young man in the Air Force, someone introduced him to Jesus.  He didn’t have a lot of difficult questions he needed answered.  He didn’t spend years wrestling with his conscience.  He simply heard the gospel, it made sense to him, and he placed his faith in the shed blood of Christ.  After that, he remained convinced that the Bible was, without exception, the most important thing in life.

There are lots of fathers who believe in spending time with their families, and there are plenty of men who think that the Bible is the most important thing in life.  What made my dad different?  The answer to that question is a simple one:  What made my dad exceptional was his faithfulness.  Proverbs 20:6-7 reads, “ Most men will proclaim each his own goodness, but who can find a faithful man?  The righteous man walks in his integrity; his children are blessed after him.” (NKJ)

 Every morning at breakfast and every evening after dinner, he read the Bible to his family… and when I say every morning and evening, I really do mean every morning and every evening.  I have more fingers on my hands than the number of times my parents missed a Bible reading during the time that I was growing up.  If we were travelling, we read in the car.  If one of my parents was away from home, the other one read.  If we had visitors, we read anyway with the visitors there in the house.  If we were overnight guests in someone else’s house, we found a way to escape long enough to read the Bible.  My parents started with the first book of the Bible, and they read to the end of the last book of the Bible.  Then, they started again at the beginning.  By doing this every morning and evening, my parents read the Bible to me, around 50 times, cover to cover, by the time I left home at 21 years of age.

I’ve just described to you a pretty incredible man.  How did he have time to get it all done?  The answer to that question is that he simply didn’t have time.  After the day job, after the Bible reading, after “quantity time” spent with his wife and his three sons, after the various chores of running a household… after all of those things were done and his family was in bed… he would then go out to the shed behind our house and recover piano keys.

As a boy, the Mosquito Machine’s nightly, high-pitched squeal emanating from that shed was just a noise, a part of what life was like for our family.  Now, with my perspective as an adult and a father, I view the Mosquito Machine much differently, for I now know that the squeal was the sound of a father who was faithful, who sacrificed for his family, and provided for their needs.  The screeching told me that I was loved and valued by someone who was creative and intelligent and would not let me down.

The Mosquito Machine was the most complex of these inventions.  It was a saw that ran on tracks and made very precise cuts to the key plastic.

My father worked hard for his money, and no matter how hard he worked, his life remained financially difficult.  He used to joke about the harshness of life.  Frequently, when he would see an old man who looked particularly broken down… perhaps pushing a shopping cart down the road… or driving an old, beater car with smoke pouring from the tale pipe… he would say, “There goes an old piano tuner.” 

Well, my friends, my father is still alive, and I now know a bona fide old piano tuner.  The blue collar tough guy has been replaced by a small, stooped old man who shuffles when he walks.  The great mind that once learned Greek, memorized books of the Bible, and invented things, is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.  He can no longer make a living.  The Bible, which he so loves, is now difficult for him to read.  At first glance, he’s just a broken down old piano tuner.

Believe me, when you have a disease that robs your mind of the ability to think clearly, that’s when having been a faithful husband and father pays off.  So I have this to say of the man who, though it meant late nights on the Mosquito Machine, read the Bible to me 50 times, cover to cover:  Even if his mind fades so much that he does not know who I am, even if he cannot take care of himself, much less earn a paycheck… So long as the inventor of the Mosquito Machine walks in this world, he walks as a giant among men.   

As you might imagine, it is enormously frustrating for someone like my dad to see his great mind fading away.  It makes him feel useless, alone and confused.  But I know that while he may frequently be confused, he will never be useless or alone.

The Bible uses the word “Father” 852 times.  That is frequently enough that usually, if you open the Bible anywhere, you’ll find “Father” written somewhere within your line of vision.  God obviously considers fatherhood important, and if God considers fatherhood to be important, the experience of having had a truly great father like mine must be of value for understanding the things that God wants understood about the world he has created.  God has given us human fathers because he wants to use it to show us the kind of relationship he wants with us.  Because I have a great earthly father, when the Bible refers to God as our father, I think of wonderful things.  When the Bible says that God is our provider, I know about a good provider because I’ve heard the Mosquito Machine.  When I think of God the creator, I know what it is like to have an inventive father.  When I read in Galatians chapter 4 that God has given us the adoption of sons, I know all about that because, even though I was not adopted, every day my dad chose me.  And in Matthew 3, when God the Father says of Jesus, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”  I recognize the sentiment because that’s the sort of thing my father has frequently said of me.

My dad could be quite an intimidating person sometimes.  If you talk to him now, he smiles all the time, but when he was younger, he could be quite austere.  He sometimes forgot to smile, or he simply refused to smile just to make those around him feel comfortable.  I remember my mother telling him that people were scared of him because he didn’t smile very often, and he needed to practice looking more pleasant.  I was sitting in the back seat of the car when my mother told him this as we pulled out of our church parking lot.  I remember thinking, “My dad scary?  How silly.  There’s nothing scary about my dad!”  (Don’t get me wrong, he could be a little scary if I’d done wrong.)

Now we all know that God the Father can be a little scary.  If it is true that he is all powerful, all knowing, and morally perfect… If it is true that he spoke the universe into existence… And if the Bible is correct that he gets very upset when we do wrong… Then, yes… God the Father is a pretty scary thing to think about.  But listen to what Romans 8:14-16 says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.  For you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.  The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:”  (KJV) 

Abba is the Hebrew word for daddy.  It is the term a small child would use for a father that he loves and trusts completely.  Because of the example of my Father, it is easy for me to understand that God the Father, who seems so intimidating to others, is happy to have me call him my daddy.

Good fathers are actually pretty rare in our culture.  They are rare enough that I’m guessing that there are a number of men in this room who did not have good fathers. 

Do you have no Mosquito Machine in your past?  In other words, do you not have something that you can point back to that proves for certain that your father was there for you?  Was your father, perhaps, not around?  Or was he around and you wished he was not around?  Does your life always seem to be missing something because the man that matters most never said of you, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased?”

If you never had the advantages that a good father gives, I’m so sorry that you missed out.  To not have the example and training that a father can give is a big disadvantage, and I certainly wish you could experience a stamp of approval from the man who gave you life.  I’m sorry that when you hear about God the Father, you do not have good human examples with which to associate that concept. 

But I’m not trying to tell you I had a great father, and if you didn’t, you missed out.  I’m telling you that I serve a great God who is in the business of fixing things that are hopelessly broken.  Let me repeat that:  God is in the business of fixing things that are hopelessly broken.

Psalm 27:10 says, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.” (KJV)

Hosea 14:3 says that in God, the fatherless finds mercy.

Psalm 103:13 reads, “Like as a father pities his children, so the LORD pities them that fear him.” (KJV)

How bad does God want you be a part of his family?  Well, there are three ways into a family.  You can be born into a family.  You can be adopted into a family.  You can marry into a family.  Those are the only three ways into a family, and God so much wants you to be a part of his family that he invites you into his family all three ways.

I John 5:1 says, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God…”  There are many other passages as well that speak of us being born again when God takes us into his family.  When I was born, my father didn’t choose anything about me.  He didn’t choose whether or not I’d be a boy or a girl.  If he had had his choice, he would have probably picked someone taller, better looking, and smarter than me.  But he didn’t get to chose.  In a manner of speaking, you could say that I chose him, even though my existence in the first place was because of him.  Being born again is a result of your choice.

But birth is not the only way God wants to take you into his family. 

Gal 4:4-5 says, “     But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.” (KJV)  Eph 1:4-5 also says that God has chosen us for adoption.  As does Romans 8:15, which I’ve already read.  An adopted child is chosen by his parents.  Not only are we born into God’s family, we are also adopted in as well because God chooses us.

Not only are we born into God’s family, and adopted by God, but the church, which is those people who have been born and adopted into God’s family, is referred to as the Bride of Christ.  Marriage is a contractual arrangement entered into by two parties who both chose each other.

So God stands ready to bring you into his family in every way it is possible to come into his family, through birth, through adoption, through marriage, because you choose him, he chooses you, and you both choose each other.  God must really want you in his family!

As I already mentioned, my father could be a little intimidating because he sometimes refused to smile.  Well, one time when I was a child, our church did a fall festival, and someone had the idea of asking my father to dress up as a sad clown.  The idea was to have a contest to see if anyone at the festival could get my dad to smile.  Anyone that got him to smile at any time during the entire evening would win a prize.  I guess it seemed like a good idea to the person that dreamed up this idea.  I don’t know for sure, but it probably did not seem to my father like it was a very good idea.  But somehow, some way, somebody managed to talk him into it. 

The reason the contest was not really that great an idea was that if my father didn’t want to smile, he simply didn’t smile.  No one had a chance of winning the prize.  There was no antic, no joke, no silliness, no threat or promise that made my dad crack even the slightest smile that evening.  No one won anything off of my dad that night.  He just put on his best unhappy face and left it on all evening. 

Toward the end of the evening, I saw that my father was standing off by himself… still, of course, not smiling.  I walked up to him and I said, “Will you smile at me just because I’m your son?”  I didn’t expect it to work, because nothing anyone else had tried that evening had worked.  But to my great surprise, when I said that, my father broke into a huge smile… just for me… just because I was his son. 

My friends, there are a great many people who flit through life, trying figure out what antic they can produce that will get God to throw a smile their way.  Perhaps you are one of those people, feverishly dancing about, trying to win God’s favor.  Wouldn’t it be better to simply know that your heavenly Father smiles upon you because you are his son?

I am going to explain precisely how you can become a child of God.  The Bible describes a transaction that needs to take place.  If that transaction takes place, you become a child of God from that moment forward, with all of the rights and privileges associated with that status.  This transaction is frequently referred to as being saved or born again.

Let’s consider this transaction from the standpoint of adoption.  There are laws that govern the process of adoption here on earth, and in the spiritual realm also there are laws that govern the transaction of adoption as well.

The first law is that God will not break the rules.  This rule is important since God is the creator of all laws of the universe.  If God breaks the rules, there are no rules.  Breaking God’s law is called evil or sin.  God does not sin.  Without this law, none of the laws that follow make any sense.       2 Timothy 2:13 says, “If we believe not, yet he abides faithful: he cannot deny himself.”  (KJV)  Titus 1:2 says that God cannot lie.  You may say wait a minute, I thought God was all powerful.  If he is all powerful, why can he not lie.  He cannot because he will not.  He will not violate his own nature.

The second law is that God cannot, will not, tolerate sin in anyone else.  The book of Habakkuk tells us that God’s “…eyes are too pure to look on evil” and he “…cannot tolerate wrong.”  God is so pure, in fact, that James says that anyone.  Who keeps the whole of God’s “…law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.”  So, according to the Bible, no one can claim to have met God’s standard of perfection.

The third law is that all sin must be punished.  Romans 6:23 says that “the wages of sin is death”, and Romans 3:23 tells us that everyone has sinned.  For this reason, the books of John, Ephesians and many other books refer to people as the subjects of God’s anger.  Colossians even goes so far as to say that the natural state of man is alienated from God and an enemy of God.  Hebrews warns, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

The fourth law is that doing good deeds in no way reduces the punishment for sin.  Isaiah tells us that God considers “…all our righteous acts…like filthy rags”.  Suppose for a moment, that I saw you walking around on the street somewhere, and I snuck up behind you, threw you into a ditch, kicked you, took your money, and insulted your mother.  I imagine after that, you’d be looking for me, right?  You’d want some justice.

Now suppose that after having done that to you, I started feeling bad about what I’d done.  Or at least suppose I was worried about the payback coming to me.  And suppose I went rooting around in a trash pile somewhere and came up with an old, dirty rag.  And then… and then suppose I approached you and said to you, “Listen, I don’t like there being bad feelings between us; so I brought you an old dirty rag as a peace offering.”  Would that get me anywhere?  That would get me in worse trouble, right?  Well, that is what the Bible says of the value of our good works toward getting out of trouble with God.  They are like filthy rags.

Laws like those first four sometimes lead people to conclude that the God of the Bible is a cruel, merciless, vindictive individual.  Thinking this way, though, is kind of an exercise in futility.  You can think that gravity is a cruel law, but it will still be the law regardless of what you think of it.

However, there’s another way to think about the situation which is more valuable.  There is a very good side to God’s moral perfection which is missed by those who think of God as vindictive.  Love, mercy, kindness, and gentleness, you see, are also a part of what it means to be morally perfect.  Twice, in the book of First John it comes right out and says that God is Love.

Psalm 145   says, “The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy.”  And 2 Peter proclaims that God is “…willing that none should perish.”

How can a God that will send you to hell for messing up just one time, when he knows that it is impossible for you to live your whole life without messing up many times, also be a gracious God of love, of compassion and great mercy?  How do you reconcile the two?  Both have to be true because both are facets of God’s absolute laws of moral perfection.

Well, there is another law in the spiritual realm that I haven’t told you about yet.  This one is absolute as well, and there is something really powerful about this law.  This law does not nullify the law the first four laws.  Remember, the first law is that God does not break his own laws.  Your sins still have to be paid for, and it is still a debt that you can’t afford to pay.  By God’s grace, however, there is a fifth law that solves the whole problem.  It enables you to get away unharmed in spite of the other laws.

This final law, I’ll call the Law of Substitutionary Payment, and here is how it works:  Punishment still has to be inflicted for your sins, but the Law of Substitutionary Payment says that if you can find someone else as your substitute to take your punishment for you, God will consider the law of moral perfection satisfied.  You don’t have to be punished for your moral failures.  You just have to find someone else to take your punishment. 

Now, that’s a good deal, but there is a real big problem with that good deal.  Who are you going to find to take your punishment for you?  If you asked me to take your punishment for you, I wouldn’t agree to it, and even if I was willing to take your death sentence for you, I cannot because I have to die for my own sins.  And since Romans says that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”, you are not going to have much luck finding someone to take your place for you.

So, God saw that if men were ever to be saved from their condition, they would have to have someone who was not guilty of any wrong doing to die in their place.  That is the role that Jesus plays in the Bible.  He is the God-man sent to earth to live a perfect life and then be punished in our place.  As God, he was capable of living a morally perfect life.  As man, he was eligible to die in your place.  As God, he is of infinite value and therefore able to pay for everyone’s sins.  And the Bible teaches that if you will believe that Jesus died in your place and if you will place your faith only in what Jesus did, God will consider your punishment paid.

Those are the 5 laws of adoption into God’s family. 

1.                 Recognize that God is morally perfect. 

2.                 Recognize that you are not morally perfect. 

3.                 Recognize that your moral failures must be judged. 

4.                 Recognize that you’re good works do not reduce your punishment. 

5.                 Take the deal that God offers… Jesus’ punishment instead of your punishment.

If the things I’ve said make sense to you, then perhaps it is time to place your faith in the Father that will not let you down.  Take the deal he offers:  Jesus’ punishment instead of yours, adoption into the family of God with all of the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, spiritual rebirth, to walk in newness of life.