God vs. Technology?

Our worldview influences our doctrine and our doctrine in turn influences our faith. Technology and the rate of change of data management and informatics will become so rapid that we will have no time to rethink, redo, and rewrite our doctrines. They will likely become irrelevant or obsolete in the face of a world so utterly different from that of our forefathers.

Just this week, I read in The Guardian about a new technique for measuring DNA found in the dust of a Neanderthal cave in Spain. It said:

“Scientists have pinpointed major changes in Europe’s Neanderthal population from traces of blood and excrement that they left behind in the Spanish cave 100,000 years ago.

The discovery is the first important demonstration of a powerful new technique that allows researchers to study DNA recovered from cave sediments. No bones or stone tools are needed for such studies. Instead, miniscule traces of genetic material that have accumulated in the dust of a cavern floor are employed to reveal ancient secrets.

The power of cave dirt DNA analysis is the scientific equivalent of extracting gold dust from the air, as one researcher put it, and has raised hopes that it could transform our understanding of how our predecessors lived.

Now the team have taken the technology to a whole new level by studying the exact genetic identity of the Neanderthals who once lived in the Gallery of Statues cave in northern Spain. This cave is a well studied cave in which we have clear evidence of Neanderthals having lived there for tens of thousands of years. We don’t think they buried their dead there, but we do believe that they may have butchered meat there. Occasionally, they would have cut themselves and would have bled onto the cave floor. Similarly, their babies would have deposited excrement there and so they’ve left their DNA behind.

The key point about this Gallery cave in Spain is that it’s been studied very carefully by paleontologists and archaeologists so that each layer of cave sediment has been analyzed and dated precisely. That means we can put an exact date to the samples of DNA that we’ve found in each layer. And that led to an unexpected discovery that about 100,000 years ago, the population that had been living in the cave for millennia were replaced by a completely different group of Neanderthal people. It was as if the modern human population of Europeans had been replaced by East Asians. However, we have no idea whether this was a violent replacement, or a relatively slow process.

Getting a bigger picture of how the past population of ancient humans such as Neanderthals moved around has been difficult to assess just from occasional bits of bone and the odd stone tool. However, studying DNA that they have left behind gives us an entirely new window on our history.”

What does this “entirely new window” teach us about our doctrine? What does this “entirely new window” teach us about faith? What does it teach us about God? And what about other entirely new windows of technology and knowledge that will be uncovered in the future? Our doctrine and our faith and our view of God cannot simply rest upon our past. We must be able to make it relevant and real to our present and real for our future. How do we do that? When we and what we do, is or becomes the center of our doctrine and our faith, we are resting on our past. Our doctrine and our faith, precious though it must be to many of us, must be centered on God and not upon us. This is true of all faith groups of all denominations of all communities of faith that hold doctrine dear.

Faith for the future, if it’s to be meaningful, must be rooted I propose in two bedrock principles, two ways of seeing things about faith which must be present for us to have faith that can be relevant for the future. First and foremost is that our doctrines and subsequently our faith must be rooted in God. It must be centered on God and not on us. What does it mean to be centered on God? It simply means that it must be rooted in justice, mercy, and the elements that Jesus has been talking to us about as the weightier matters of the law. It means that our doctrines and our faith need to be retooled to become timeless and eternal, not simply relevant and real to the founding fathers. Any doctrine that cannot hold up to this scrutiny and cannot be made to have God at the center has to go.

Second of all, we must look at our holy books in a new and different way. We Christians need to reread and to re study the Bible for what questions it asks of us, not what answers we want from God. The God of the Old Testament and Jesus and the apostles in the New are replete with questions for us. In story after story, when God shows up the question start; and Jesus rarely answered a question that he was asked with simple data. He would most often respond with another question, or by telling a parable. He knew that faith based on data would constantly be shifting, constantly be moving, and constantly be changing.

But the questions are timeless. They call the faithful to a personal introspection and to examine their standing before God. Seeing God as a question rather than an answer man puts a whole new and (I might still add) a timeless perspective on our view of God. Questions are timeless and they focus our faith on God and what he does rather than on what we do.

Let me use an example. It’s personal to our faith community. It’s related to the doctrine of the Sabbath, and how it has influenced our faith. I think non Sabbath keepers too will see the relevance of the illustration. Seventh Day Adventists have, since their beginning, seen the Sabbath as a defining characteristic of their faith. They argue about the correctness of the day of worship and argue about the way in which they must worship. Mostly, the doctrine of the Sabbath is centered around what we do or what we don’t do.

A blog from many years ago said:

“The subject of the Sabbath rest recurs throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, from the creation of this earth to the creation of the New Earth. The emphasis throughout, especially the emphasis placed on it by Jesus, is not on the day of Sabbath but on the meaning of the Sabbath. By making sacred time instead of space, God forever removed man’s control over the designation of what is sacred. Man can control space, but man cannot control time. But like grace, Sabbath is a rest, a gift of God to all mankind. We cannot hasten the Sabbath, we cannot delay the Sabbath. We cannot manipulate it, modify it, move it, control it, contain it, advance it, retreat it, or alter it in any other way. All we can do is enter into that sacred rest.”

Like grace, it is everywhere. It is available to all and it is always for free. It comes every seven days, like a downpayment of grace. To enter into it is to enter into God’s presence, to lay down one’s burdens and to study war no more, as the old spiritual song puts it. Life is a war, a daily contention among and within ourselves and even sometimes with God. It is to change our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hooks. But the Sabbath rest is not just physical. Primarily, Jesus told us, it is rest for the soul:

 “Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is comfortable, and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Also like grace, which we tend to want to control and use for our own selfish advantage, we cannot in fact do so with the Sabbath. We cannot possess the Sabbath; it can only possess us. When we place ourselves and what we do or do not do at the center of the Sabbath, instead of letting the Son of Man who was Lord of the Sabbath be the center of the Sabbath, then we are in danger of making the Sabbath into an idol and worshiping it instead of worshiping God.

References that Jesus makes to the Sabbath are as frequent in the gospels as his references to grace. Make no mistake about this: Our reverence (that is, Seventh Day Adventists who have reverence for the Sabbath) does not make us special in God’s eyes. He is the God of all mankind. If God wanted uniformity of worship or correctness of doctrine, he would have spelled it out more clearly and given the details of how to relate to him.

But herein lie two related pitfalls: First, that the more God lays down rules, the more we place emphasis on our own work to keep those rules. God knows that since we ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we are hardwired to seek discrimination for our work. But second, if God gave rules to one group only, that group would use the rules to suppress everyone else. Even now, every religion and sect claims to speak for God and to seek to subject everyone else to their view of his rules.

I believe that God has revealed elements of his truth to people everywhere, that every great faith and every great denomination has some identifiable insight into some element of truth, which they then rightly emphasize. For us, one of those elements is the Sabbath. When we talk and we teach and we share, we all have something to contribute to a discussion about what it is that God would have us see about him. Like grace, the Sabbath rest must not be hoarded. It is a gift that must be shared, but not as a doctrine or something simply to be justified or proven. It must be shared as a gift, just as it was given to us. To disconnect from our daily pace and to connect with God and to enter into physical, emotional, and spiritual rest is a very special opportunity, one to be cherished and shared with everyone.

It has been said that the Sabbath of the Old Testament became obsolete, that it was a tool used by God for Man’s recreation. But it is not Sabbath rest, which like Grace is eternal, that is obsolete. What is obsolete is the notion of a Sabbath controlled by Man, with his rules and prohibitions at the center of it. How we apply the eternal gift of Sabbath rest to ourselves is between us individually and God. As a church, we must share how, what, and why it means something that is important to us. But we also must share how we use it ourselves individually, and demonstrate it in terms of our relationship with God. But we must do so with great humility and without sanctions or judgment.

Jesus taught very few rules about the Sabbath. In fact, if you look at the Gospels, only three principles stand out in Jesus’s teaching on the Sabbath. Number one is that it is a day to worship God. Number two, it is a day to set aside business as usual. And number three, it is a day to do good for others. We must rethink and re-explain all of our doctrines—the doctrines of the remnant, the Second Coming, the health message, doctrines of the state of the dead, you name it—so that they have some kind of centeredness on God. They cannot be meaningful just by being meaningful to my parents, or to the founding fathers who thought them up.

There was a time when Sabbath meant that you never turned on the radio that day. You didn’t turn on your television. You didn’t read the newspaper. My folks didn’t even eat, they didn’t even open their mail. But nowadays, the iPhone is full of notifications, text messages, emails. What does keeping the Sabbath mean with a digital device? A digital device for many is now as important to communication as is talking. How can the future of faith be centered on God so that it can be timeless? Because he is timeless. What are your thoughts about the future of faith? And what about the influence of technology, data, and informatics, and new ideas on our doctrine and by association, on our faith?

David: An article in MIT’s Technology Review newsletter reports that on May 18, Google announced an AI system called LaMDA that can chat to users about any subject. It plans to integrate LaMDA into Google search, voice assistant, Gmail, and more. It will provide a conversational interface that allows people to retrieve any kind of information—text, visual, audio—across all Google’s products just by asking.

LaMDA is what’s known as a large language model (LLM)—a deep-learning algorithm trained on enormous amounts of text data. (Some of you may recall that we met one of them, GPT3, a couple of months ago.) The article said, and I quote:

“Studies have already shown how racist, sexist, and abusive ideas are embedded in these models. They associate categories like doctors with men and nurses with women; good words with white people and bad ones with Black people. Probe them with the right prompts, and they also begin to encourage things like genocide, self-harm, and child sexual abuse. …they easily confuse people into thinking a human wrote their outputs, which experts warn could enable the mass production of misinformation.

In December, Google ousted its ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru after she refused to retract a paper that made many of these points. A few months later, after wide-scale denunciation of what an open letter from Google employees called the company’s “unprecedented research censorship,” it fired Gebru’s coauthor and co-lead Margaret Mitchell as well.

It’s not just Google that is deploying this technology. The highest-profile language models so far have been OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3, which spew remarkably convincing passages of text and can even be repurposed to finish off music compositions and computer code. Microsoft now exclusively licenses GPT-3 to incorporate into yet-unannounced products. Facebook has developed its own LLMs for translation and content moderation. And startups are creating dozens of products and services based on the tech giants’ models. Soon enough, all of our digital interactions—when we email, search, or post on social media—will be filtered through LLMs.

Unfortunately, very little research is being done to understand how the flaws of this technology could affect people in real-world applications, .… As Google underscored in its treatment of Gebru and Mitchell, the few companies rich enough to train and maintain LLMs have a heavy financial interest in declining to examine them carefully. In other words, LLMs are increasingly being integrated into the linguistic infrastructure of the internet atop shaky scientific foundations.”

China has created an even bigger LLM called PanGu, named after the creator of the universe in ancient Chinese legends. These LLMs are capable of insinuating worldviews into people, especially the children we allow our iPads to babysit. We are going from a Babel of worldviews to a handful of worldviews controlled and manipulated by corporations and governments. Even without LLMs, we’ve seen how Russian and Chinese trolls successfully managed to influence US voters’ political views. How easy would it be to influence their religious views? Maybe the ultra-orthodox Jews are right to ban cellphones that do any more than just make plain old phone calls.

C-J: It scares me so deeply because it is going to be so influential. Just a few years ago, I could Google something and get different perspectives on it. Now, Google makes a decision about what I’m going to be able to have access to. It infuriates me. I went into a store the other day that I hadn’t been into for almost two months. One of the assistants greeted me by name. Was this face recognition? The assistant couldn’t possibly remember who I was.

I see so clearly that the choice of free thinking is ultimately going to become so shrunken, so focused on an agenda. And I don’t even think they know clearly what that agenda is; they’re just working towards who gets there first. How many pods are we going to be breaking people into, and who gets to win and who gets to lose? I feel that so much in my own little city here. It really scares me. And I’m glad I’m old—I would not want to be raising children in this society. It’s no longer just America. We are so interconnected, we will not be able to breathe.

When I got my receipt in the store, it had my full name on it and the last three digits of my credit card. I was furious that my entire name was on there. Every day I lose my privacy and my ability to make a different choice. Maybe I used to think this, but now I think that. Does that mean that I don’t have clarity to begin with, that I’m not capable of making the right decision? As has been noted, we can’t control time. We can only control the information that’s given to us and then to ask if it is good information, accurate information, and to make those decisions.

But getting back to the idea of faith in its purity (if there is such a thing): It goes back to relationship and has a context. It has a formula to whatever line we’re standing in, whether it’s Seventh Day Adventist, or Muslim, or Jewish, or traditional Judeo-Christian. But if that line is erased, if they start tinkering with those lines, what are we going to have but our soul, for lack of a better word? Will our soul still be able to hear God’s messaging that’s in our DNA, if you will; something that transcends genetic code, something the creator put within us so that we would recognize that voice in darkness? When I get lost, if I still myself, I’m not looking for a formula—I’m looking for that voice that I recognize or identify as God.

Donald: Fundamentally, if we are Christians, and we believe in creation, we also believe in God who created us and has a plan for us. I want to believe that God is actually in control. Google and the other large tech companies can create a lifelike AI that is going to influence the way we think. But put that in the much larger context of the meaning and the purpose of Sabbath. Unfortunately, we probably narrow that to the point where we’ve made it a very highly organized religion. And I’m not sure God would be grateful for that. I don’t know that it needs to be as tight as Adventists think that it needs to be. But if the Adventists feel comfortable putting it in a box, there’s no reason anybody has to say they’re sorry for that.

I keep going back to the Great Commission to preach the gospel. We do it in the context of doctrine and faith and becoming a member “of” and that’s confusing to me. But Don’s description of the essential value of the Sabbath is very rewarding. Adventism is built upon numbers: The seventh day, 1844 and so on. I’m not sure that that aligns itself easily with mercy and justice.

I too am glad I’m not young. It’s getting getting to be a scary place. I wonder if that’s what our parents thought, or think, too? Is it just that we want the good old days back?

Don: In every age, the technology of that age has been scary to the people of that age, whether it was the invention of reading and books or whether it was invention of automobiles or airplanes or you name the technology. It was frightening to those who were there. The question I think is: Have we reached some kind of tipping point where the technology is so advanced that it begins to outstrip something that’s human, and if so what implication does that have for faith?

C-J: Once, when we were talking about faith and community, Kiran said it can be lonely. I heard that loud and clear. Choosing a faith, especially if it’s not the dominant faith where you reside or in your culture, we have an expectation of the Creator to reveal that relationship to us, then I never feel lonely. I may feel confused, because I’m caught up in my own head and time and place. It can be lonely. I think that is the litmus test: If I feel lonely, I’m not in the right frame of mind, I’m not in the right place spiritually, I’m not in the right place in my humanity, because if I am in the right place, I am at peace, and I don’t feel I’m walking it alone.

With AI, we are disconnected but have the illusion of being connected. We’re being manipulated. I don’t think when we’re in relationship with the divine, we’re manipulated. I think we’re in fellowship, as God intended us to be. Then we have to go out in humanity, in stewardship of the planet. But what scares me is that you have to take the technology, there’s no other option. If you want access to this, you have to do it this way, in everything.

For someone my age, what is required of me in order to get access is to learn how to use the tool. And this tool has so many layers to it, it’s really a struggle for me to understand the new language, how many layers there are to get in. It’s so complex for me, but every time I try to learn it, I realize there goes another piece of privacy, there goes another part of my identity.

Don: You need an eight-year-old granddaughter.

C-J: Some people have said, “Going to church for me is when I’m out in nature.” I think that’s what we need to do more of to clear our heads and find God in nature again, to make us whole.

Donald: Do we think that God’s in control, though?

C-J: I don’t see it that way. We think of God in the sense of who we are as people but without form or shape perhaps, or maybe it does look like a picture that you have in your mind. But I think God is nature in perpetual motion. I think it ebbs and flows, but the relationship spiritually is always going to be filtered through my humanity because I use language and context and my own experience.

So I’ve taken this giant thing without form or shape, this energy with a consciousness, and I try to manipulate what my God should look like, and the dynamics and the rules of the road. But in truth, I think God is like an atom: If it gets pinged, it’s going to go in a different direction. It’s like a parent and a child: “Don’t do this honey”…the child does it…the parent says, “Now we got to go back and look at this again.” You can really break it down to something like that out of our human experience, but I think the energy that’s pinged around and cause and effect and how things change. Neanderthal DNA is in humanity today. I don’t think we can begin to fathom what’s really happening with what we cannot see or comprehend in that force. We need to have order in our lives, predictability.

Michael: Where does the AI learn all of its biases, its sexism and racism, from? It learned them from us. Because we humans, throughout our cultures, are biased and racist. It learned from us; it didn’t invent it all on its own. So I’m not sure what’s different.

C-J: It manipulates us. It says, “I’ll let you see this but you have to talk to me this way” and it erases those gray areas. “This is truth.” It is leading us to choose a “truth.” That’s what I hear.

Michael: We inflict our biases upon our children. My parents, my culture did that to me. This has been going on forever.

C-J: The beauty of the internet was that it brought new ideas, new opportunities, new ways of being and creating. But now it seems like it wants to take us back and control us. A thousand years ago you never left your village, and this was your truth in your village, and this is how you lived in our village. It worked then because everybody knew the rules of the road. There’d be no conflict, or minimal; the community would make the adjustment to bring them back into the fold. But when you have to do tolerance, it makes life tricky.

David: Those rules were laid down by parents and parenting has been raised in class today

In 2016 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran this:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews Must Choose Between Obedience to Their Rabbis – or to Their Smartphone

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbis realize that smartphones are here to stay and not every follower obeys the rules. So they’re offering a new deal: a forbidden smartphone won’t get you shunned, but it will deny you certain rights.

Yair Ettinger, Feb. 20, 2016

… “Dear Jews, I am saying this to you in pain and with a broken heart, and in the name of hundreds of hurting families who have lost the head of their family,” the rabbinic leader [the Admor of Vizhnitz] said.

“Young children are roaming depressed and neglected in the most terrible way because their fathers have left them on their own. Parents are weeping over their sons who have deviated from the straight path amid the chain of generations cut down by the thrust of technology’s blade.”

As the rabbi put it, “I urge you, those of you who are with the Holy Name, come to us! Anyone who has a connection to the corrupting devices should know that he is losing all connection to us, removing himself from the camp of those who fear and are in awe of the word of G-d!!”

Jay: The crux of the issue for me is: Is God in control or not? In the end, that’s what faith is all about. Even as faith progresses, it will always come back to this common denominator of “Is God in control?” We have to keep in mind that if we have faith that God is in control, then he does what he wants. When we don’t like what happens, that’s when we get this yucky feeling, this lack of faith, as we wonder “How can that be? What should happen?”

The other bias I think we all carry with us is the belief that the past was always better than the future. For some reason, the glory days when I was growing up were always better than what the future holds. Actually, I am pretty happy that I did not live 300 years ago. I enjoy the technological advantages that have come down to me over the course of the last 300 years. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Maybe that has drawn me away from God instead of closer. But I think it’s a blessing. The average life expectancy is now in the late 70s and not in the early 40s. I think that’s a blessing.

We so quickly want to demonize the progression as we move forward. What I’m interested in is how does it shape us moving forward? It’s not that it’s horrible and we’re on this downward, devastating course. If God is with us, if God is in control, and if God is a God of love and grace, what’s the problem? What is the problem? The problem is, we don’t like it. That’s the problem. We don’t like the way things turned out. We don’t like what happened to us. We don’t like what happened to our family. We don’t like it.

Real faith, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, says: God is in control and even though I may not like what’s happening I acknowledge that such is the case. Do the doctrines keep my faith from doing that? Do the doctrines keep my faith from being able to say “Yes, God, you’re in control and what happens will happen and I acknowledge your control in this world and in my life, even though it seems I don’t understand it and it seems like it’s bringing pain, it seems like it’s bringing suffering.”

Do our doctrines get in the way of our ability to have that mindset? It’s a pretty liberating mindset. If you can get yourself to the point where you accept what is happening in the world because you believe that God is in control, and that God is a God of love and grace, and he loves you, that can be a liberating place. If you can’t get there, you can turn into a pretty depressed and isolated person pretty quickly. Will technological advances make us think more that God isn’t in control and that we are in control? And how is that going to affect how we think about God?

Carolyn: At the Tower of Babel God just took control when everybody in the community thought they could build a great edifice to reach Heaven. God said, “I’ll take control, and I’ll take care of it.” And that’s why I feel we have to have faith that he is in control.

Jay: I think the Tower of Babel is a great example. Here is a society believing that they are getting to the point where they’re in complete control and something happens to break that up. I would guess that the people right after the Tower of Babel were pretty messed up. All the commerce was messed up. People no longer spoke the same language with one another. All their support systems have been wreaked havoc on. There’s dissension, this group against that group, what’s going to be the primary language, and all of that must have happened right after the Tower was destroyed. Do you suppose that was a great time to live through? That everybody was happy? That life was easy? No, even though it was God in control.

Donald: My whole life, the Sabbath has been something that I just do. My Saturday is not like my neighbors’: We do life a bit differently. I take it for granted that we’re just not turning it into another day. It’s a unique day with unique activities that should surround itself in the concept of peace, it seems to me, to bring you back to the center. To me, that is very important in the context of this conversation. If you don’t have anything to bring you back to the center, you’re out of control. We think we’re in control? Just pull the plug and let’s see how much we’re in control. All this stuff operates on electricity. It doesn’t take much for us to be out of control. Think the gas pipeline cyberattacked last week. We think we’ve got everything going. No, we just need to relax a bit. And it seems that God’s got a plan.

C-J: I believe in spirit, in grace, and in the intervention of God. I’ve seen it in my own life where things could have gone in a very different way, and that God has a plan, intention, and purpose for each of our lives in time and place. But I think it was Stalin who said religion is the opiate of the people. It can lull us into a sense of thinking we have the truth, whatever group that may be. But spiritual connection and relationship I think is always the intention of religion which comes out of ritual. Religion is belief coupled with ritual, whether it’s do this or don’t do this on a particular day or time of the year.

But I do believe in something divine, something that’s guiding the ship, but I’m not sure as to when this energy is shifting, or making sure all the balls go in the right pocket on the table. I think God the divine has given us free will to ask the big questions and to say “This far and no more.” We can set boundaries for ourselves and for others.

But you do not have productivity when there’s chaos or great trauma, loss of headship, spiritual headship in our own families, headship in a country or business. There’s just so many layers to it that to say “This is truth” is just one piece in a puzzle. There are so many considerations. Faith is a very personal thing. And what we line it up with or what we consider important aspects of faith, what must be in the recipe in order for to qualify as relationship of faith, is very personal.

Jay: I agree God is in control. Whatever happens in the future, whatever chaos arises, God eventually will come through to help his people and to preserve this world. The challenge for us in the future is not much different than the challenge of people in the past. God led the Israelites, his chosen people, with his presence, yet still temptation came to them and some fell away. Before that, the world was out of control and God only saved Noah and his family. So the challenge is pretty much the same. Whatever the advancement of technology in the future, God is going to take care of us.

Reinhard: The point I like about technology is that it will accelerate the spreading of the gospel to the ends of the earth as called for in Matthew 24. The good news will spread faster now. Maybe that’s the sign Jesus mentioned, that once the gospel has been preached to the ends of the earth, then the end will come. I think we have to watch out for that.

As Seventh Day Adventist Christians we believe the day of worship is very, very, very important. Jesus said the Sabbath is made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. I think it helps us to identify as God’s people. I myself and my family experience a kind of joy in our hearts when the Sabbath approaches. We are reminded of our Creator and this gives peace and serenity in life.

Whatever the future holds, as long as we remain part of God’s remnant people, I don’t think we have to worry. God will take care of us. God’s in control. We don’t have to worry about things being out of control if we are firm believers.

Kiran: The point that any doctrine centered on Man not God is a really good point. Sabbath was a very difficult thing for me in the beginning days of my Adventism. It was hard. It centered a lot on what I did. A part of my loneliness and depression during those years was because, even though I came into the church through a simple explanation of grace, I thought that no matter how much I did, it was not enough to deserve it. The simple concept of grace that brought me into the church disappeared—lost in translation.

People say: “Read The Steps to Christ. That’s the best book to figure out grace.” To me, it’s not—it is one of the hardest ways to figure out what grace is. The last half of Martin Luther’s letter to the Pope, translated as The Freedom of the Christian, is what helped me really understood what grace meant. Phillip Yancey wrote in What’s So Amazing About Grace? that he grew up as a Christian in the church, went to Christian college and all that, but he hated the church and the religion because he found very little grace there.

So he left the church, but he found no grace at all. So he came back to this really broken, imperfect system of religion because at least there was a little bit of grace in it. So I’m not angry with religion, organized or not, because without that, I would not have gotten the heap of grace that I’ve got today. But I see so much fault in our church and many other churches that give up the main truth of grace and then teach everything else that is not essential. That causes so much pain.

When people really find out what grace is, how liberating it is, they become to others what Christ has become to them. They feel graced to do for others what Christ has done for them. That’s their only only burning desire. In fact, we’re all painfully wondering “Why is my life like this? When am I going to overcome this? Once saved is not always saved.” These phrases are not supposed to be in a Christian’s life.

So I feel I could have avoided all this heartache for years in the church. But at least, because I was committed to it, at least I found some sort of grace. I always thought that as the soil in the Parable of the Seed, I have to do something to turn myself into good soil. But then I thought: How can soil fix itself? It can’t! It’s the farmer’s business. It is God who fixes me. It doesn’t matter where I am. It’s his job to nourish the soil. If you center that parable on God, it’s so liberating, so peaceful.

Chris: Over the last year of COVID-19 pandemic I’ve needed to be brought back to center a lot. The tool that helped to bring me back to center was the Sabbath, which helped me to refocus on essentially two things: Loving God and loving my fellow Man. These past 15 months or so of pandemic have been some of the most trying times in my life at work, with both the the residents we serve in our facilities and the employees and what they’ve had to go through.

Without some sort of structure or organization. without some sort of tool, I don’t know how this year would have ended up for me. So I do believe there really is true value in tools, and God understands the tools that we need. He also understands that one tool in one person’s hand is good but not good in another person’s hand. He understands that. So I don’t want to limit him. And second, through this last year, I’ve seen technology evolve. When I hear of advancements in technology, I get more excited than disturbed or scared.

Ultimately, if we trust that God’s in control, then technology development is something that can be used to accomplish what God would have accomplished. It has the potential to show love to God and show love to your fellow Man. Technology can go can go either way. The new technologies David mentioned could do some great things in the care of residents in nursing homes, transform the way we interact with them, and provide value to the employees who are caring for them, trusting that this technology is being developed because God is in control.

It can be used for good, it can be used to show love to one’s fellow Man, it can be used to show love to God. So for me, ultimately, it’s the lens you wish to look through in order to make a determination on things. Sometimes that is a very difficult thing for us to do. We’ve been told that we’re not always looking through a lens clearly. God has told us this. And that’s where we then have to trust, ultimately, God and what is occurring, because if he doesn’t want it to happen, and we say he’s in control, it’s not gonna happen. Ultimately.

He has shown us multiple times that he can snuff things out. He brought a flood to the entire world and saved one family and snuffed out everything else. Reboot, restart. So ultimately, if we have faith and trust that God is in control, I see unlimited potential. And for me that can be liberating and exciting.


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