Before I sat down to write this conclusion, I had the opportunity to visit an elderly pastor, formerly an acquaintance, now becoming a dear friend, who is struggling with Parkinson’s. After catching up on the past week, I was explaining the Tony Reinke phone article and just ended up reading it to him, noticing when I began the avoidance motives, he was dozing. With lunch time approaching, I thought it best for me to move on allowing him a quick nap prior lunch saying perhaps we’d continue from there next time.
I mention this encounter for while reading this article again, I was reminded how vulnerable we as Christ Followers are today to the nuances and functional intricacies of this pocket sized idol that has been catapulted virtually into functioning as a living organism with its intrinsic addictive programed capabilities that we lazily elevate above our God endowed gifts diminishing and ultimately mothballing them as we shift our trust from Almighty God to merely one of many latest & greatest new & shiny objects, as we become the proverbial “cooked” frog when initially only seeking its comforting functional warmth.
Note these captivating devices once given free-reign in our daily treadmill of life are soon quietly unobtrusively under-girding our thought processes, and our subsequent actions & decisions, such that we are not even aware of the shift. These phones literally can think, recall, perform, store, capture and transmit data around the world and cloud, either electronically or even by its own voice, and now with AI, to even heal itself and continually diagnose and monitor the state of our health and make its dire or life-saving predictions. The list is endless; and all this occurs without fleshly eyeballs, blood, bone, heart, or brain. Just imagine! Even reproduction is in process, be it 3 D printers or cloning.
Remember how we chuckled as children during SS or Bible School at the foreign god idols during Bible days, being merely wood, stone or cast metal; “whatever were those heathen people thinking”? And then, we were even more judgmental when the children of Israel left the True God and worshipped their neighbor’s gods!
So, what about our situation now? It seems regardless of the date in history, without Christ, our hearts continue to gravitate toward some form of idolatry, be it identity or significance; all of which nudges out our love and adoration for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ; be it a spouse, children, work, trinkets, toys, heroes, castles, social media, sexual fulfillment, kingdoms, sports, hobbies, land, humanitarian causes, fame, recognition, unique skills, etc. The list is endless, and we may snicker at the obviousness of those listed, but all that really matters in the end, is that we know without a doubt exactly what is crowding out God and His Righteousness from being front and center in our lives right now!
I’m suggesting by using this simple 9-year-old phone idolatry article that we just ponder, really ponder the significance of that one technological development, and the hundreds of generations of phones since Alexander G Bell in 1844 sent the phrase from Numbers 23:23, originally recorded as spoken from Balam to Balak “What hath God wrought?” by telegraph, the precursor of the telephone.
I remember well having the power line installed along our county road 120 in ’51 so we all had electricity, thanks to the REA, the Rural Electrification Association; a party line rotary dial phone installed in ’55, water piped into our home with a faucet in the hallway in ’56, and indoor plumbing with a kitchen sink and a bathroom in’59, but the TV got skipped until the next generation. All of these developments since the Industrial Revolution were of significance in the doors they opened and the lives they changed, but none quite compare to the impact of phones on us individually spiritually, especially when intertwined with video.
We can’t undo it or ignore it, as my father tried with daylight savings time when it was introduced. Monday thru Saturday night except for Wednesday night prayer meeting, we operated and lived on old time, standard time, not the new, or Daylight time. Both the mailman & the milkman just came an hour early and our few appointments were adjusted. Seems funny now, but I think we did it 2 or 3 summers, being normal duration then.
I also remember well our old Zenith tube radio taller than me then with its AM/short wave bands arriving several years after the electric poles were set, providing Christian radio programming such as “Songs in the Night” from the historic Moody Church, Bill Collins and the Sugarcreek Creek Gang series, Unshackled, and with three short wave bands to cruise, (surfing came later with internet), with programming all the way from Quito Ecuador, one of the few in English, and of course, our government’s Voice of America broadcasting the positive attributes of democracy around planet earth, which interestingly enough now, I have no recollections of content.
Although for some reason, I am reminded of the five words “How the mighty have fallen! It seems I am using those five words more frequently of late when pondering the current trending perspectives being floated out & about, in & around. Perhaps it’s because I just came across that phrase twice in my One Year NIV Bible reading on Wednesday May 22 in I Samuel 1: 19 in David’s lament quoting from verse 17, “David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan, and ordered that the men of Judah be taught this lament of the bow (it is written in the book Jashar): 19.) Your glory O Israel, lies slain on your height. How the mighty have fallen!” True then, true now.
For some weeks my copy of the book “A Church Dismantled: A Kingdom Restored” has been in plain sight on the top of several books, the bottom being my grandfather Gingerich’s very tattered Thompson’s The New Chain Reference Bible. A Church Dismantled was written by another acquaintance afflicted with Parkinsons, Conrad L Kanagy, whom I imagine would also echo these five words today, as he set the stage already in 2007 with his book “Road Signs For the Journey: A Study of Denominational Decline – and the Discovery of Hope in the Spirit’s Dismantling of the Church.” Isn’t that a novel perspective when the chatter today is confusingly more along the lines of “God Save the Queen?”
I mention all the above history only for perspective to awaken us to the lateness of the hour and how we of my generation are being lulled into spiritual oblivion, possibly even to our demise in our quest for “peace and safety” as espoused by our government and culture’s prior standard sources or benchmarks, which are already functionally dismantled, much as Kanagy has ascribed to the Church nearly 20 years ago.
I am very concerned for my generation, for even though we yet possess a knowledge and obedience toward the real and true God, we are fast becoming aware that individually and corporately we must up our game and demonstrate to all those in the cloud around or behind us, how exactly does our faith sometimes visibly sustain us and is witnessed by all those in our sphere of influence pleasantly exuding a NT freshness and an honesty unfortunately seldom intimately observed in & around our spiritually cultivated & anchored communities, let alone, be they ever personally encountered.
Our generation have & are witnessing historically the evolving of these intimate invasions into even how we communicate with God, and soon may have communication curtailed in our spiritual enclaves, or even more broadly, what we can communicate in or through any media at all anywhere.
Now, for those who graduated from high school in the past 20-30 years, their spiritual futures are suspect. Too many have been seriously handicapped being raised in the shadows of a glib shallow cultural institutional Christianity model sub-consciously characterized as authoritarian power based that I’ve been chief of the guilty promoting, “do as I say, & not necessarily as I do,” vividly juxtaposed with the invitational forgiveness love grace and mercy model, pervading & exemplified by Jesus as recorded in the gospels and vividly demonstrated in Acts of the Apostles and the following epistles.
Bottom Line: We are out of time! And our phones are not the problem. We are. More to come. Until then. Read. Pray. Listen. Obey. More perhaps Sun evening. Or not. Blessings on your journey through the these inner disciplines….