This Sunday we will continue our series on choosing life, looking at Micah 4:1-4 as well as various other scriptures concerning our relationship to technology.
It’s interesting to me that the first time any technology is mentioned in the Bible, it’s at the point where Adam and Eve first fully comprehend their nakedness. In response to this revelation, they stitch together fig leaves to cover over their newly exposed shame.
In eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve enacted a new way of relating to the world, to each other, and to their God. Where once shame was impossible, now they felt the need to hide their nakedness.
I would like to suggest that ever since that fateful day, humanity has engaged in the same pursuit. We are all naked. We are all exposed. We are all vulnerable, pink, soft-skinned children in a rough and jagged world…and we turn to technology still to provide the protection we need from this realization.
The prophet Micah (along with Isaiah) offers words of hope paralleling the grace God offers the original sinners in the garden of Eden. He offers them clothing fashioned from animal skins. He gives them technology better suited to their needs; more durable, more flexible, more suitable.
Micah offers a portrait of a time when technology meant for warfare is used instead for agriculture. It’s not simply the absence of violence that he’s pointing to…it’s an enjoyment of life, when all shall “sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees”.
It would do us well to sit for a time and reflect on our own use of technology. We are all naked, vulnerable, and ashamed of some aspect of our inner life. We all face the desire…actually, it’s a need on this side of Eden…we all have the need to hide our naked vulnerability from the world, from our loved ones, from God Himself.
But at the end of the day, do the gadgets we employ lead us to a fig tree, a vine, to the mountain of God to embrace the life and the creation he has given us?
Or do they lead us to bury our heads even further in the sand, wishing away our nakedness like a bad dream?
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD” Micah urges. Let us learn the ways of God, let us walk in his paths and not our own.
We hope to see you Sunday!
Preparing for Sunday 