GOD IS A HACKER!

  With the advent of new technologies, a culture has been created in our world that celebrates and supports the ongoing technological endeavors with its associated processes and knowledge to make our lives easier. Our world has encountered a major shift with the development of hand held devices that allow us to collaborate, network, infoshare, and carry our social community around in our pockets.  It has also caused many industrial era jobs to just disappear.  It also now forces us to examine where are the jobs in the future markets created not only by our new social media habits but emerging virtual worlds to come created by emerging hologram technology.  All these devices are designed to make our lives less stressful and enable us to cocoon in our own self-created worlds.  Our Ipads, smart-phones, and home computing  make it possible for us to never leave our homes.

We don't have to go to a library anymore

We don't have to go to a store anymore

We don't have to answer our phones anymore

We don't have to go to the office anymore

We don't have to go to school building anymore

We don't have to go to a doctor's office anymore

We don't have to go to a mail box anymore

We don't have to go to the bank anymore

We don't have to go out for entertainment anymore

We don't have to go engage people outside our homes anymore

and soon we will be able to visit places around the world without leaving our holodeck rooms.

I love all this new technology.  It allows me to stay in contact with people I love all around the world.  It allows me to accomplish things I would have never dreamed of with hitching up the horse to the buggy, cranking up the model T, or having to wait for the radio or TV broadcast eat up the time that is most important to me.  We can bank online, go to school online, date online, watch movies online, talk to our friends face to face worldwide online, and do business online... it's an amazing digital world.  In fact, I am now convinced that anyone, anywhere, can create their own reality and their own new digital kingdoms.  Gaming, virtual reality, robotics, and holograms will empower a whole generation to live in worlds that will give missionaries whole new worlds to reach.  With all these exciting new technologies there are a few theological and scriptural perspectives we need to explore which will help us redefine our relationship to God and one another.   

With the advent of the creation of virtual worlds we are often left alone, without face to face, without personal touch. Digital natives are faced with the need for more Interactive relationship to ensure that they give others a place to challenge their lives, their thinking - relationships which hold them accountable to God and one another.  Genesis 1:18 states very clearly that human interaction was designed by God to deal with our ability to live in our own little world by ourselves.  It says "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is right for him."  

      I love exploring new perspectives of scripture and how they may apply in new cultural contexts. With all these new emerging worlds of robotics, holodecks, and virtual reality games... It is important to recognize that we have a great capacity to disappear into those worlds and live in the unreality of aloneness.  Robots, holodecks and online gaming will always get disrupted by God.  He ensures that we will always be called out by others- out of our own little small minded worlds.  Why?  Because Proverbs 18:1-2 says "A loner is out to get what he wants for himself.  He opposes all sound reasoning.  A fool does not find joy in understanding but only expressing his own opinion.  

      One thing for sure, my wife and kids keep me grounded in reality and likewise I disrupt their self-created worlds.  God could have left Adam to his own devises in the Garden of Eden... and he could have stayed in that little world and never explored the entire planet God created.  However, God ensured that he devised a "hacker" of sorts called "woman" who would continually call Adam out of himself.  Likewise, Adam was forced to contend with this "Hacker" who opened up whole new worlds to him because of her curious nature.  As a result, Adam and Eve would so learn God is God and I am not.  Isn't that what "Being Human" means?   God's creativity opened up new opportunities for both Adam and Eve to be challenged out of their delusions, deceptions and ability to live in unreality.  God has designed "humans" to be forced into reality of the real world... because He wants us to interact with Him. One day when the Internet goes down and it breaks down as everything else has - whole groups of people will be forced out of their own little self-created worlds and forced to interact with "real" others to fix what went wrong.  But it will never stop God from hacking the system.

One of the main reasons I see God as a hacker is due largely to the attractional, propositional, and colonial nature of the anti-Christ spirit that prevails in the use of technology.  At the creation of the "Tower Of Babel" in Genesis 11 humanity explored how  to create a world of "conformity" by introducing new tower technology to advance their own self-definition.  We too can become gods.  Remember, God is God and your not!  So God saw this new technology advance through a new architectural design not seen before, examined its purpose and use and said "Let's go down and mix up their language so that don't understand each other."  That's what hackers love to do... mix up their software language so that it's dysfunctional. In this passage, the tower was attactional, the call to the entire city was "propositional", "let us build a city (virtual world) for ourselves, and  make our world colonial (conformity).  So God hacked in and messed it up.  Why?  Because God called us to be missional, relational, and he wants to incarnate himself in our world.  God loves to walk in our gardens. Romans 12:2  states "Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."   The conforming nature of technology results in "self-created" worlds whether it be online, in our homes, or our churches.  The word "church" takes on new meaning in that the Greek word for Church, "Ecclesia,"  means to be called out of... into a corporate experience.  As the people of God, we need to ensure that we do not get isolated by all these wonderful technologies, flee corporateness, or live in virtual (addictive) worlds that keep us from experiencing and "church-life."  Church  life deals with our own self-delusions and challenges us to become better at life and relationship.  God hacks into our world through giving "helpers" (both our families and the Body Of Christ) to call us out of ourselves.  So when God invades MYspace, or I'm facebooked by a friends because they want to engage me in relationship I need to understand that God is attempting to incarnate himself in my world.  I need to accept that he gives me the gift of other human beings to keep me from my own self-centered dellusions and opening myself up to self-seductive voices calling me to be my own God.

A friend of mine recently told me he didn't feel like going to church.  Suddenly the Lord said to him, "Well, I didn't feel much like going to the cross either, but I did!"   God is calling you, he's calling me, and He's hacking into our world to explain to us that "social media" is our new opportunity to build our lives relationally with him and others.  It also gives us new frontiers to share the good news of Jesus Christ with those who would have never heard of him.  We are called to join God in his mission and invade this new virtual reality and introduce others to the reality of a loving God who sent Christ to die for them so that they don't end up stuck in the self-life.   As I see it, nothing has changed... God is still God and he will always be the hacker who will invade our gardens even when we are trying to hide under a bush and cover ourselves with leaves.  Thank God he cares enough to invade our world and works to incarnate himself in our story.