“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Pet 3:10).

Let us backtrack: Soon after Eden was lost, man found himself having to find purpose and meaning among the thorns and thistles of his fall from paradise. As the centuries wore on, although it was clearly the nature of rebellious man to exploit what he had been given, he still had enough nascent sense to connect to the larger rhythms around him, a sobering thought which momentarily snaps me to the present to interject: Do men know anymore who set these rhythms in place? (see Job 38-41) Do they care?

I speak in generalities, but early in our nation’s history we knew to look to sun, moon, and distant stars to make our way through the seasons, planting and harvesting, all in accordance with their positions in the sky. We were small compared to nature and seemed to know it, living gratefully with our simpler things against the backdrop of almighty things. Over the ensuing years, regrettably, we got full of ourselves. We began to take nature’s rhythms—the very handprints of God—for granted, and devised first mechanical and then technological means, not to steward creation with an eye toward God, but to wrest control from it. “All in the name of progress,” we lied. Responding to the urgent and neglecting the essential became our way of life. Which brings us to today—modern times, we call it—where the bots and bytes of technology influence our morality and hold our attention far more than God does.

But do we really want such progress? When it costs us our souls?

Many do. For selfishness is not easily deterred. So onward to the future we plow, adding insult to injury when we invent our latest greatest with equal parts greed and naiveté, charging ahead and fooling no one that this will be the year we beat back our fallenness and forge our own paradise. Little wonder, we have been overtaken by the unintended consequences of our indulgence—more frenzy, more sadness, less love.

We ignore God and His solutions, and press life to the trivial. Oh, our souls! Look at the signs!

To be continued…

Kevin Murray
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