"Only the breath of God gives life. Your earthly body grows old and will eventually fail, but the words that I speak to you are filled with God’s breath and are life."
--Jesus
My cousin regularly gives updates on his mom's rehab progress. She suffered a stroke recently. I appreciate his gentle encouragement and care for his elderly mother, she is the last living member of the family from whom we cousins entered this world. But the truth of the matter is her body is failing. There will be a moment when she leaves the God-breathed clay tent of her earthly body and, because of God's redemptive revelation in Jesus Christ collaborating with our faith and will, she can enter into the God-breathed life of an eternal, celestial body.It takes an act of the human will to accept the words of Jesus as authoritative, real and true. But there has always been competition for humanity's faith and allegiance. Today's penchant for trusting in technology to bring heaven to earth is no exception.
Diabolical Distraction or Dazzling Destiny?
"Imagine that you could live indefinitely in a world in which all poverty, pollution, and scarcity has been vanquished. Imagine that there existed no limitation to what you could do or be, except for those limitations that you imposed yourself.
This scenario may sound like a cross between Thomas Moore’s Utopia and Christopher Marlow’s Doctor Faustus, but according to Ray Kurzweil it is our real and fast-approaching future. It will come about as the result of an explosion in our technological abilities. We will incorporate more computer-based processes into our biological functioning until we transcend our crude, earthly bodies entirely and become machine-based, virtually immortal. This coming period of rapid technological progress and its miraculous effects will occur within the next 50 years and is what Kurzweil refers to as the Singularity.
The concept is both startling and optimistic,but it immediately provokes certain philosophical concerns. If nanotechnology allows us to create any object, will any object ever again be valuable? What role will responsibility, temperance,and discipline play in a world where any urge can be gratified at almost the same moment it is felt? What will pass for morality when there is no mortal consequence to any action?"
--Patrick Tucker, Asnt Ed,THE FUTURIST
An engineer from GM visited with radio host Glenn Beck recently discussing the fact that by 2030 self-driving vehicles will replace our need to drive ourselves. Beck asked how willingly people will accept that proposition since the automobile symbolizes our own autonomy and independence. The engineer responded that we are already accepting it with our growing dependence on "smart" devices, while Amazon, Google and other giant tech companies create more and more convenience that we hungrily accept, unaware or unconcerned that we are surrendering more and more of our own autonomy.
Follower of Jesus, the allure of the world and its technological advances (technology, by the way, born in the mind and heart of God as another of mankind's blessings) is as strong as it ever was. Now more than ever it is our responsibility to live out the God-breathed words of Life:
"There is but one plan of salvation and that is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ; that is, to take Him for what He is -- our Master, and His words as if He meant them, which He assuredly did. To do His words is to enter into vital relationship with Him, to obey Him is the only way to be one with Him. The relationship between Him and us is an absolute one; it can nohow begin to live but in obedience: it is obedience."
-MacDonald, The Truth In Jesus
If you realize how powerful the media is in selling the Futurist Vision of a Technological Utopia, how much it affects each of us even now, and how the next generation shrugs its collective shoulder in integrating this worldview into their everyday behavior it may give pause, perspective, courage and hope to the Apostle John's encouragement:
"Greater is He that is in you
than he that is in the world!"
Publishing this on SuperBowl Sunday highlights a truth that only superior opposing forces are worth competing for the time and attention of the public. The Truth of Jesus' words are the only Superior force capable of opposing the corruption and domination of this world's system. Their force is felt in and through His followers living out His God-breathed words daily!
