Embracing Grace: Navigating Faith, Forgiveness, and Technology

We are commanded in Scripture to do what we cannot do. So, we are commanded to repent and believe when we don't have the ability to repent and believe. "I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me. It was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of thee." [00:25:21]

Yes, yes, I mean, the devil's greatest guile and victory is to lead us to deny his existence. The New Testament is clear about the reality of Satan and the demonic, but we are prone to make two really big mistakes. One is to sensationalize this, as if we have the ability to see what isn't given to us to see and thus to go around diagnosing demonic activity when biblically, according to a biblical theology, we know the source of evil. [00:28:09]

Scripture says that the blood is life, and therefore if Jesus is to be our substitute, He must take the penalty of the curse, which is death. So, there's that part of it. I'm always deeply suspicious of questions that begin with, "Could God have … ?" and however that goes. And the answer is that we have Scripture, and we must trust that what Scripture says is the only way that salvation can be possible. [00:07:39]

I admire that, and I don't want to detract from that, but the fact is that God doesn't forgive until you repent. So until we have a new heart we are children of wrath, even as others. I would make a distinction, and have made, between a willingness to forgive and actually conferring forgiveness, which I'm not sure what that is, and sometimes that goes into the realm of some kind of mystical rite. [00:12:46]

I think it's our immaturity and our sinful nature that asks God to show me something, to demonstrate something, to show up, and to give me a sign. It doesn't really show that sort of trust. We're called to ask, and to seek, and to knock, and to continue to ask, and to seek, and to knock, to continue to go before Him. [00:17:52]

If we are called to a certain profession then we, I think, represent our Christian testimony and represent our being both in the image of God as Creator and in the image of Christ as Redeemer, by doing our job, by applying our self fully to our job. If we're using company time, as it were, to literally steal from our employer when we should be doing our job and instead evangelizing, then that's not necessarily a martyr's consequence or a noble thing to lose one's job for. [00:23:02]

The academic world has always been the leading edge of social and intellectual change. The social and intellectual change in our country has been trending on campuses for more than two generations now in an aggressively secular way. That is now at a velocity to where the liberals and the hippies of the 1960s and 70s, and the baby boomers, who thought they were very liberal, they are now scared of their own students, who are shutting down even people who are on the left, because they're not on the left enough. [00:27:06]

Modern people, including modern Christians, tend to have a reflexive naïveté about technology. We live in an age of technological marvels, where things are happening so fast that we tend to forget that throughout even most of Christian history, there was no printing press. We live in an age in which when we're talking about technology, especially communication technology, we have no idea what we will be talking about eighteen months from now. [00:44:54]

Of course the biblical worldview with Genesis 3 reminding us constantly of the pervasiveness of sin, will remind us there is no opportunity that does not come without an opportunity for sin. And so, we have to understand that every technology we have is a stewardship. By the way, there are some technologies that are just evil. And so, there are technologies that have a greater danger of evil and a lesser danger of evil. [00:45:40]

Jacques Ellul, a very significant French Christian philosopher of the last century, you know, just pointed out that a part of our essential Christian stewardship is an understanding of how our use of technology reveals our souls and shapes our souls. That's a very good word, but without hesitation we use these technologies to proclaim the gospel. Right now theological education, just to give you an example, theological education has jumped over the great firewall of China. [00:47:30]

There are people right now who are able to avail themselves. There are people who otherwise would never be able to have access to the teaching, either of Ligonier Ministries, or of Southern Seminary, or all of our churches and institutions. And no firewall can effectively keep them out. So, there's something to appreciate here, a stewardship to exercise. But we can never be technophiles. We can never be those who love technology for technology's sake, nor are naïve about what technology can bring. [00:48:03]

He went in Acts 17 to Mars Hill, where there was constant idolatrous nonsense. We are told that those who were there wanted nothing but to hear something new every day. And Paul didn't say, "Well, I'm not going to go there, because the next speaker could get up and espouse idolatry." Because the next speaker undoubtedly did, but the Apostle Paul went, and he preached Christ. [00:48:49]