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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

Technology for God's Glory

“Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens,…’” What advances in technology! The whole of the earth, uniting together to create a city with an extraordinarily massive tower in the center. Built with bricks, not stones; bitumen instead of mortar! When the natural earth would not provide the necessary resources, these ancient humans developed the necessary technology to build their city.

It is on this part of Genesis that I have been reflecting these past days. I think it is fascinating that such an endeavor, to build a tower that reaches to the heavens, was even viable considering the rudimentary technology. Was it not incredible innovation to develop the necessary tools to work towards this project? And yet: “…so that we may make a name for ourselves…” Leave it to sinful man to conflate their good, God-given capability for developing technology and for building wonderful things with their own ego-driven self-aggrandizement.

It is not that precise conflation toward which I am driving, but rather a more generalized view of how there is a sinful proclivity toward bending good things inward for our satisfaction; the idea of incurvatus in se that Pastor Justin discussed. How we can use social media and online interaction as a substitute for real relationship because it is easier, safer. How we can use our phones, designed to bring the world to our fingertips, to take ourselves into far away places instead of being in the same room as the people that we should be with.

William Blake wrote a poem, a few lines of which read:
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye

I think that Blake hits at the core of this problem; life becomes distorted when we allow our tools to reign instead of using our tools to glorify Him who reigns. Our sinful proclivity will always be to use God’s good gifts for our personal edification, but we must be conscious about our use of God’s tools, whether our intellect, technological innovations, or our five senses, that we are using them to glorify Him rather than being used by them to glorify ourselves.

~ Josh Spare

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