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Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Another good post by Pastor Wilson, this time on giving thanks for everything good that God has given us via technology and wealth.
The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone. That temptation will say, fundamentally, that we owe none of this to God, and that we did it all ourselves. That attitude is what we call the Enlightenment. That is modernist hubris, technocratic arrogance, and purblind puffery.
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This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, man takes credit for himself. If someone else later on comes along and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little "social justice" around here -- and what a wretched little phrase social justice is -- he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don't need any extra layers.

The Enlightenment is not to be credited with Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Smith's discovery that no one man is capable of manufacturing a pin, Newton's discovery of what objects in motion tend to do, or Watts' admirable divvying up of energy into units of horsepower. God gave us all those things. We must thank God for them.

Seeing the inevitable abuses of wealth that follow after a humanistic grabbing of credit for it, and reacting away from the whole thing entirely, is simply foolish. If it is a good thing, as my smart phone is a good thing, then God is to be thanked. If it is a sinful thing, like thinking that man does things he can't do, then we should abandon our folly, repent of our sins, and return to the gospel of grace that undergirds all God's statutes and laws. And if you don't know where those passages are, you can look them up on your phone.

2 comments:

Charlie's Church of Christ said...

the more advanced and technological we get, the more we will find God archaic. I think that, unfortunately, hurricanes and earthquakes remind us of how fragile and small we truly are.

Darius said...

Yep, they certainly do. Sorry to hear about your job circumstances, my prayers are with you, friend!

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The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel The Main Thing
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
Overcoming Sin and Temptation
According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible
Disciplines of a Godly Man
Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem
When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Ourselves
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Respectable Sins
The Kite Runner
Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, ... anabaptist/anglican, metho
Show Them No Mercy
The Lord of the Rings
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an Age of Deception
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
The Chronicles of Narnia
Les Misérables


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