So far in this series we’ve been talking about what it means that God created the whole world, that he owns the whole world, and that all of it is not just from him but for him. We’ve also seen that God made humanity in his image, that we are meant to reflect him in the world, and that God rules over his creation by sending humans out to rule over it under him — to cultivate it and to spread his glory throughout it.
Now I want to put technology into that picture. Technology, like every other aspect of human work and human culture, is part of the task God has given to humans. As the human family invents and develops and discovers new things across the whole story of history, we are meant to exercise wise, careful rule over God’s creation. It is supposed to be for his glory, and it is supposed to reflect him. So this is a talk about how God works through human labor — through farmers and bakers and sailors, and yes, even through Bitcoin.
A world still under the mandate
Of course, human sin mars all of this. Our rebellion mars our technology and our culture; it makes them ugly; it bends them into something they were never meant to be. Our tools are not always used to honor God, and they are not always used to care for our neighbor. Later in this series we’ll talk about how the Christian doctrine of sin helps us understand so much of what we see in human technology. But the remarkable thing is that the calling itself never goes away.
Think of Genesis 9, when Noah comes off the boat after the flood. We are now in a world marked by sin, a world under God’s curse on humanity and on the ground. And yet God reiterates the very same creation mandate. He gives Noah and his family the same task he gave to Adam and Eve before there was any sin in the world: go out into the world, exercise dominion over it, spread my name and my glory across the whole earth. So even today, even though we live in a world where technology is so often used for sinful purposes and even to rebel against God, our technology still can be — and still should be — one of the ways we obey God in this world.
In a sense, our technology is our own creation, and so it is a kind of image of us, just as we are God’s creation and bear his image. The things human beings make reflect them. Our technology reflects us and extends us, for good and for ill — in much the same way that God’s creation reflects him, and in much the same way that, through his creation, God extends his own rule. So you see what this means: God rules his world not in the abstract, but by appointing humans to rule under him. God rules the world through human beings ruling over the world. And one of the ways we rule the world is through our technology.
Walking through Psalm 104
Psalm 104 has a great deal to say about all of this. (If you want to go deeper, we’ve put out a separate video where we walk more slowly through this psalm and how God works through our work.) The first ten verses or so are about how God created the whole world, but most of the psalm is about how he cares for that world after he has made it. And what we discover is that God’s ongoing care for creation — what theologians call his providence — is itself a kind of continuing creation. He is not making things out of nothing anymore, but as verse 30 will show us, his sustaining of the world is one of the ways he keeps on being the Creator.
Listen to how the psalm describes God’s provision:
You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man’s heart.
Psalm 104:14–15
Notice what is being claimed. God gives us wine and oil and bread — and yet, of course, it is bakers who bake the bread. It is farmers who grind the grain. It is people who crush the olives into oil, who smash the grapes and ferment them into wine. Human beings do these things, and they use all kinds of technology to do them. But the psalm insists that these are gifts from God. God is using people, in their work, to care for his creation. He brings the plants out of the ground; he sends down the sunlight; he has placed all the resources into the earth, and indeed throughout the solar system, for us to find and use and transform — so that his creation might be brought into better and better conformity to who he is.
The psalm goes on to say that God takes care of human beings precisely so that they can go out to their labor:
Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.
Psalm 104:23
The creatures are God’s wealth
Then the psalmist breaks out in wonder at the sheer variety of it all:
O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
Psalm 104:24
That word translated creatures is worth pausing over. In Hebrew it is not used only of the things God makes; it often refers to things that God owns. It can describe the possessions a person holds. So here is one more angle on creation: the creatures are God’s possessions. They are his wealth. They are the things he has made for himself.
And then the psalmist looks out at the sea, teeming with creatures, and delights in what God is doing there — and his eye lands on something human:
Here is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it.
Psalm 104:25–26
“There go the ships.” The psalmist watches the vessels moving across the water — and ships, of course, are a form of human technology. Over the centuries humans developed better and better ships, better and better ways to travel the seas, and they used them above all to carry trade across the world. And the psalmist looks at that commerce, that trade, that technology, and he says: this is part of how God is caring for his creation. He does not look at human trade and human commerce as something icky or gross, something too worldly for spiritual people to delight in. Just the opposite. He tells us we should delight in human commerce, in human technology, as it develops over the years.
The Spirit at work in all our labor
Toward the end of the psalm we come to one of its most beautiful passages, about how God continually cares for his world by his Spirit:
These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
Psalm 104:27–30
Think of the plants returning in the spring. Think of crops pushing up out of the ground. The psalm is showing us that the Holy Spirit is not only around to do the things we would normally call “spiritual” — making it possible for us to worship in church, bringing people to faith in Christ. The Holy Spirit is also at work all over the world, all the time, for all people, sustaining their work and making it possible, drawing forth the energy and the wealth and the resources of the earth — even as human beings, of course, are using their tools and their technology and their diligence to figure out how to do it. Underneath all of it, the psalm says, it is really God who is working.
And God means to take delight in this work — and to have us delight in it too, and not only in the parts of it we usually call beautiful:
May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works.
Psalm 104:31
The rest of the psalm has shown us that God’s works include human works. So human work, human technology, and human culture are meant to be things that are true and beautiful and good — delightful to God, and therefore things we ought to delight in, insofar as he delights in them.
Why the psalm ends with a curse
And then comes a verse that seems jarringly out of place:
Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more! Bless the Lord, O my soul!
Psalm 104:35
Most of this psalm has been a delightful frolic through all of God’s creation, surveying everything he has made and every way he cares for it. And then, right at the end, there is this curse pronounced on the wicked, this prayer that God would take all the sinners on the earth and remove them. But you can see what is happening. God’s creation becomes more delightful to the extent that the wicked are destroyed — to the extent that evil is removed from his world.
That has everything to do with our calling. As God’s image-bearers, as the sub-rulers ruling underneath him, his lieutenants, our work and our technology are supposed to honor him and to extend his rule. And they are supposed to push back against sin and evil in all the various forms they take across human history — forms that will remain deeply tragic and painful until Jesus returns and restores all things. So in our technology, in our work, in all our creations of culture and art and labor, we should be looking for ways to push back against evil, to push back against sin.
Not just farmers — finance and credit too
Remember verse 24: “How manifold are your works!” — literally, how many, how many different kinds of things God has done and made. His creation, and the ways he cares for it, are endlessly varied. There are so many facets to it, so many new angles, so many new ways God keeps taking care of his world. And he wants us to reflect him in all kinds of different ways, all over the earth, across the whole story of the human family. Reflecting God’s image is never a static thing. You never reach a point where you can say, “Well, here is exactly how we’re going to keep reflecting God’s image forever and ever, and we’ll never do it any other way.”
This is where Herman Bavinck — the Dutch Reformed theologian from about a hundred years ago whom I’ve been leaning on so heavily in this series — is so helpful. In one of his books he says that the image of God is not meant to be carried out in the same fixed way for thousands and thousands of years:
The image of God had been granted to man so that he might in his dominion over the whole earth bring it into manifestation. And this dominion of the earth includes not only the most ancient callings of men, such as hunting and fishing, agriculture and stock-raising, but also trade and commerce, finance and credit, the exploitation of mines and mountains, and science and art.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
Look carefully at what Bavinck is saying. We do not reflect God’s image only through the old, ancient forms of human craft — as good and important as they are, and as much of them as we have forgotten today, to our shame. We do not image God only by being farmers or hunters or fishermen or by raising cattle. We also reflect him in all the things the ancient world had not yet invented: in trade and commerce, in finance and credit, in mining deeper and deeper into the ground, in the sciences and in new forms of art.
There are a great many Christians today who feel a romantic attachment to farming and to traditional ways of life. I think there is a lot of good in that. There is much the modern world has lost, and much worth recovering. But we cannot spend all our time looking backward, trying to stop the clock on human discovery and development. God also wants to take the new things we are discovering and receive them for his glory, to have us use them in ways that honor him. As Bavinck goes on to say:
Such culture does not have its end in man, but in man who is the image of God and who stamps the imprint of his spirit upon all that he does. This culture returns to God, who is the first and the last.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
Everything is meant to lead us back to God
So here is where this leaves us. Technology is part of how God rules over his world, because he rules it through us. Technology is part of how God cares for his world — and not only the old forms of technology, but the new ones too. And like everything else in his world, technology and human labor and the whole human story are meant to point us to God and to lead us back to him, so that we would praise him and honor him.
Even the greatest and the newest forms of technology — the ones that make all our lives wonderful and easy — are never meant to terminate in themselves. They are never just about themselves. They are always meant to lead us to God, and we can never stop and be content with them in and of themselves.
That last point matters more than it might first appear, because it cuts in two directions at once. It guards us against worshiping our technology — but it also guards us against despising it. And that second danger is the one I want to take up next. There is a strong temptation for Christians to look at some new tool, some new invention, some new form of money, and simply write it off as worldly. So next time we’ll ask why a Christian shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss new technology — why we shouldn’t write off all new tech.