We’ve been building a picture across these talks: God is the Creator who made the whole world out of nothing, and we are his image-bearers, sent out into that world to cultivate it for him. Now I want to bring all of that to bear on something more specific, and to say it as plainly as I can: technology is never just technology. Anything human beings do in this world is never something that simply stands on its own. It is never something that’s supposed to point only to us and to the things we’ve made by ourselves. Everything in this world is from God and for God — and that includes technology.
So technology is never morally neutral. It is never religiously indifferent. It is always either helping us draw closer to God or moving us further away from him. And money, it turns out, is one form of human technology. That’s easy to forget, precisely because money is so common and so important. We use it all the time, in all kinds of relationships and in all kinds of work. But money really is something humans had to come up with. We had to invent it, and we’ve had to keep reinventing it — finding better ways, or recovering old ways, of doing it. And because money is a kind of technology, what it is and how we use it should reflect God and should honor him.
Everything is ultimately about God
We talk a lot about Bitcoin around here, and sometimes people in the Bitcoin world get really excited. They look out at the problems in the world and they see them merely as technological problems, or merely as political problems. But the Bible is always drawing us back and showing us that, deep down, everything is ultimately about God. The deepest problems in human life and human society are problems precisely because they are drawing us away from him.
If money is a form of technology, then it should do what all of God’s creation is meant to do: it should show us who he is and point us back to him. Our money should share many of the same characteristics God himself has — he speaks the truth, you can depend on him, he keeps his promises, he does not lie to us. Good money should reflect those things. But money should also lead us to God. We should never simply be content to have a lot of money, even if it’s very good money with all kinds of good attributes. Ultimately our money should point us beyond itself. The best things in our lives are gifts from him, and the gift should never stop us from going to the giver.
Scripture shows us this in more than one place — how human technology, human innovation, and human culture are meant to reflect God and to be about God. I want to look at two examples that sit right next to each other, like two sides of the same coin.
The Tower of Babel: technology used to defy God
Think first of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. God has recently cleansed the whole earth with a flood. He has saved Noah and his family, and Noah’s children have spent a long time multiplying again across the earth. And then Genesis 11 tells us that humanity decides to gather together and build a great tower:
Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
Genesis 11:4
Now, the tower itself is a piece of technology. People had to figure out how to build things in certain ways — what kinds of bricks work best for building something really tall. And in and of itself, that’s not the issue. The problem with the Tower of Babel is not that people built a tower, and not even that they built a really tall one. The problem is what they were using it for. It was something built to defy God. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” they said — they wanted to detract from God’s name and exalt their own. It was an act of human self-worship: taking something that was, in itself, just bricks stacked on bricks, and using it not to honor God but to dishonor him.
And God says that is not okay. You can build a great tower — you can make it strong, make it tall, make it beautiful — but if you are using it to draw people away from me, then I am opposed to it, and I will bring it down.
The tabernacle: technology that reflects God’s beauty
Here is a different example, pointing in the opposite direction. Technology is not only meant to point us to God; it is also meant to show us things of God — to reflect him in his goodness and his beauty. Think of the tabernacle. At the end of the book of Exodus, God tells Moses to build him a tent. But not just any tent — a beautiful tent, one that would echo the Garden of Eden. This is where the people of Israel would gather to worship God as they wandered through the wilderness.
And God does not say, “Just do whatever you feel like; as long as your intentions are good, I don’t really care.” He gives Moses very specific directions:
Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.
Exodus 25:9
He tells Moses to go back down to the people and take a contribution from them — and he names exactly what he wants: gold, silver, and bronze. The most valuable metals, with the best properties of beauty and scarcity. God says, in effect, build my tabernacle with these. And then, in Exodus 31, he tells Moses how it will be done. He will take certain craftsmen from among the people and fill them with his own Spirit:
And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.
Exodus 31:3–5
Why gold and silver and bronze? Because they reflect light — and in Scripture, light points us to something of God. God himself is described as light. He is the one who “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16). Light is bound up with the idea of God’s glory, his beauty, his majesty. So God says, in effect: I want my tabernacle to be splendid, something that reminds people of me and draws them to me as they take in the beauty of the craftsmanship and the architecture.
He also tells Moses to work patterns of plants and designs of angels into it — because all of these point back to Eden, the place where there was gold, and fruit, and every kind of plant, and where angels would later stand guard. God wants the tabernacle, as a piece of human technology that he himself is teaching them to build, to reflect him and to point people beyond this world to the world to come — the restoration of the garden.
Now, God doesn’t hand us blueprints today. He doesn’t give us exact directions about how to invent things, or how to build things, or how to write code. But there is a principle here for us. We should strive, as best we can, to create and invent things that reflect who God is and point us to his beauty and his goodness — whether it’s music, or coding, or writing. God wants all of these things to reflect him, not merely to be tools we offer back to him.
Good money, bad money
So when we think about money as a form of technology, we have to understand that — just as there can be ugly tents and beautiful tents, just as there can be strong towers and faulty towers — there can also be good money and bad money. There is money that reflects God: money that shows us more and more of what he’s like, that behaves the way God behaves in his world. And there is bad money: money that hides God, that does not reflect him, that is false, that deceives us and leads us away from him.
And we have to hold two things together. A good piece of technology can be used badly. Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that the Tower of Babel was a genuinely excellent, beautiful tower — it was still used for evil. In the same way, good money can be worshipped idolatrously. We can take something good, like Bitcoin or gold, and use it in a very bad way.
But it also works the other way around. It’s possible to have bad money and still use it well. Modern fiat currency is, I’d argue, a bad form of money — it is built on deception, on inflation, on slowly robbing the poor and slowly robbing future generations. It does not reflect God well. And yet, if your employer pays you in fiat currency, as most people are paid today, God still wants you to use that money well — to dedicate it to his purposes and to his glory. So you can have good money used badly, and bad money used well. But of course what we should be striving for is good money used well: money that in itself reflects God and his attributes, money that we then offer back to him for his glory.
The image of God is still unfolding
Here’s why this matters, and why I keep coming back to it. We can and we should be striving for better money — because God’s works are manifold and varied. He works in all kinds of ways across the whole story of the human family. And the image of God in us is not something static. It is something that unfolds across the entire human story as people go out into God’s creation to cultivate it for him.
I keep leaning on Herman Bavinck here, and let me tell you why. Christians can sometimes become so nostalgic for the past that we assume there’s nothing left to be done — that there’s no hope for human beings to reflect God any better than we already have, and so we simply sit and pine for the way things used to be. But listen to how Bavinck describes the image of God:
Just as God did not reveal himself all at once at the creation, but continues and expands that revelation from day to day and from age to age, so also the image of God is not a static entity but extends and unfolds itself in the forms of space and time.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics
Think about it. When God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden, presumably there were no kangaroos hopping around and no blue whales in the river nearby. Over time, people went out and discovered them. We are still discovering new creatures today, still finding new beauties in the skies above us and in distant galaxies. God did not reveal all of his glory in one instant at the beginning. He keeps unfolding it, age after age. And the same is true of his image in us.
So we should be considering how to bring our money — and our other forms of technology — into a fuller reflection of who God is. We should be looking for ways to take better money and put it to work for his glory. We should not be content merely to look backward, longing for the way things used to be, when the world has changed so significantly around us. There are new forms of technology now — the internet, computers, digital information — and the answer is not to throw up our hands and say we shouldn’t think about any of it, or that we can simply retreat to the old ways. No. God’s image unfolds across the whole human story.
Open hands, watchful hearts
None of this means we should be naive. We do need to be careful that we don’t worship new technology, that we don’t place our hope in it, that we don’t assume nothing can go wrong with it or that we’re somehow immune to the dangers human beings have always faced. The Tower of Babel is a permanent warning. But the right response to those dangers is not to write off all new technology. It is to receive it the way we’re meant to receive everything in God’s world — with open hands and watchful hearts.
So, Christian, don’t write off all new tech. We should be genuinely open to new forms of technology, and to new forms of monetary technology like Bitcoin, as things that can reflect God’s character and be used for his glory and his kingdom. In the next talk we’ll press into exactly that: how good money — and Bitcoin in particular — can reflect the very image of God, sharing the attributes of the God who made it possible.