Deconstruction: The Living Room – Technology Cannot Love You - Tuesday
Today’s Verse
Genesis 1:31
God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. (NIV)
We’re talking this week about things that are significantly better than looking at computer screens. Here’s today’s advice: Go outside. Enter a world jam-packed with the glory of God. Seriously, it will take your breath away. From trees, flowers, mountains, and thunderstorms to sunsets and snowfall on a cold January morning, God designed it all for you. As Paul David Tripp writes, “He did it to tingle our glory sensors.” Or, as Eric Samuel Timm says, “Creation is the vocal cords of God speaking each day through the colors of the sunrise, the vastness of the night sky, the teeming of life in the ocean, the majesty of the mountains.” Hmmm, in the meantime, we will settle for TikTok.
I was reading this week about spiders. There are 48,000 species of them, you know. One article I read talked about a spider called an orb-weaver. It’s quite skilled at capturing fireflies. First, it catches one in its web, then manipulates the firefly’s glowing bulb to catch many more. Spiders are so adept at manufacturing their webs that, in most cases, their prey has no chance. And did you know that some of them like to travel? It’s called “ballooning,” in which a few web threads, lifted by electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, carry them far and wide on nothing more than a light breeze. God must’ve had fun with that one.
Then there’s R136a1. It’s the brightest star (thus far) found in the universe. It’s roughly 255 times larger than the sun and 10 million times brighter. Coincidence? No…Creation. The universe, by the way, is immeasurable. It contains around 10 billion galaxies, each containing about 100 billion stars. That means the whole universe contains something like 10,000 million million million stars.
God also shows off in many other ways, like meteor showers, snow-capped mountains, glaciers, and the Grand Canyon. Did I mention rainbows? How about Permafrost? Google it.
Francis Collins, retired from leading the NIH (and also the guy who mapped the human genome), says this about God’s creation: “As a scientist who’s also a believer, the chance to uncover the incredible intricacies of God’s creation is an occasion to worship. To be able to look, for the first time in human history, at all three billion letters of the human DNA—which I think of as God’s language—well, it gives us just a tiny glimpse into the amazing creative power of the mind of God.”
REFLECTION
So, just walk outside, look around, and up and experience God! It’s infinitely better than screens. And guess what? You may even sense Him smiling.
