Saturday, December 22, 2012
Thank Christ for Facebook
At Christmastime we remember to do what we should always do, which is to remember the coming of Christ into the world and the freedom from sin we have as a result. But we were freed from a lot more than just sin.
Before Christ came, the world was largely in slavery. All over the world, darkness ruled. Tyrants abused, exploited and murdered their own people with impunity. Their evil regimes were supported by the lies of paganism which taught people to live trembling in fear of the demon-filled world around them, and to be dependent on the god-men that ruled over them and exploited them. The spread of Christianity destroyed those lies everywhere it went, and over time unleashed the creativity, industry and productivity of people everywhere it went. The spread of Christianity has been the spread of equality and freedom, and with equality and freedom comes science, industry and economic development.
That means that we should be thanking the birth of Christ for the computer you're reading this on, the Internet it's being transmitted over, and even the Facebook where many of you found this link. Just because evil people misuse those things for evil purposes doesn't make them evil. Every good gift of God can be turned to evil purposes, but they are still good gifts with many good uses. Likewise thank Christ for the heated and air-conditioned homes you live in, the cars you drive, the medicines you take, the cheap and abundant wealth you experience every single day without even thinking about it. The average person in the western world lives surrounded by wealth that would be absolutely unimaginable to Mary and Joseph in the first century before Christ.
We have this idea of gradual scientific and cultural progress over the last many thousands of years. That is a lie of modern evolutionary materialists. If you look at any ancient culture's mythology, you see instead a yearning backward to a civilization and a golden age that was lost, and gradual decay and loss of technology and culture from then up to a time of relative barbarism and ignorance. The past is usually better to the ancients. The Scriptures tell us clearly the reason for this, that as a result of sin, people lost and forgot the knowledge they used to have. Christ reversed all that, began to break the hold of sin, leading to the great abundance of wealth and knowledge we see around us today. And much more will follow.
The devil continues in his lies, trying to convince us that the technological abundance we see is a result of putting off the superstition of religion. But the opposite is true. It is religion, true religion, that enabled us to put off the superstition of paganism. And as people in this country reject God once again, we see them sliding back into the superstitious fears of ghosts and vampires and UFOs and a hundred other things; they slip back into the darkness from which Christ saved them. It must be a troubling thing for the Richard Dawkins of the world to realize that atheists are actually more likely to believe in ghosts than conservative Christians are.
So thank Christ- not just for your salvation (although most of all for that), but also for the Internet; for cars; for petroleum; for penicillin; and for all the wonderful things we haven't even seen yet, but by His grace, we will.
Before Christ came, the world was largely in slavery. All over the world, darkness ruled. Tyrants abused, exploited and murdered their own people with impunity. Their evil regimes were supported by the lies of paganism which taught people to live trembling in fear of the demon-filled world around them, and to be dependent on the god-men that ruled over them and exploited them. The spread of Christianity destroyed those lies everywhere it went, and over time unleashed the creativity, industry and productivity of people everywhere it went. The spread of Christianity has been the spread of equality and freedom, and with equality and freedom comes science, industry and economic development.
That means that we should be thanking the birth of Christ for the computer you're reading this on, the Internet it's being transmitted over, and even the Facebook where many of you found this link. Just because evil people misuse those things for evil purposes doesn't make them evil. Every good gift of God can be turned to evil purposes, but they are still good gifts with many good uses. Likewise thank Christ for the heated and air-conditioned homes you live in, the cars you drive, the medicines you take, the cheap and abundant wealth you experience every single day without even thinking about it. The average person in the western world lives surrounded by wealth that would be absolutely unimaginable to Mary and Joseph in the first century before Christ.
We have this idea of gradual scientific and cultural progress over the last many thousands of years. That is a lie of modern evolutionary materialists. If you look at any ancient culture's mythology, you see instead a yearning backward to a civilization and a golden age that was lost, and gradual decay and loss of technology and culture from then up to a time of relative barbarism and ignorance. The past is usually better to the ancients. The Scriptures tell us clearly the reason for this, that as a result of sin, people lost and forgot the knowledge they used to have. Christ reversed all that, began to break the hold of sin, leading to the great abundance of wealth and knowledge we see around us today. And much more will follow.
The devil continues in his lies, trying to convince us that the technological abundance we see is a result of putting off the superstition of religion. But the opposite is true. It is religion, true religion, that enabled us to put off the superstition of paganism. And as people in this country reject God once again, we see them sliding back into the superstitious fears of ghosts and vampires and UFOs and a hundred other things; they slip back into the darkness from which Christ saved them. It must be a troubling thing for the Richard Dawkins of the world to realize that atheists are actually more likely to believe in ghosts than conservative Christians are.
So thank Christ- not just for your salvation (although most of all for that), but also for the Internet; for cars; for petroleum; for penicillin; and for all the wonderful things we haven't even seen yet, but by His grace, we will.
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