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Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness. Why do the nations say, \u201cWhere is their God?\u201d Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. They have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:1-8)

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I think that this psalm, along with a couple selections from Isaiah and Jeremiah, remain some of the best Biblical commentary on smartphones.\xa0

I was struck by that fact when I came across the lines of this psalm while reading Marshall McLuhan\u2019s Understanding Media a while back.\xa0 He was well known for his commentary on media and communication through the 60\u2019s, he even got a Heritage Minute made about him.\xa0 Less well know is the fact that he was a convert to Christianity, daily reading from the Bible in all 6 or 7 of the languages he knew.\xa0 No surprise then that little scripture verses pop up curiously here and there in his works.\xa0

Psalm 115 was one of them.\xa0 McLuhan famously said \u201cthe medium is the message.\u201d\xa0 While explaining that riddle, attempting to suggest that the built world of technology in which we live has more to say about the philosophy we come up with and the lives we lead than our ability for \u201cfree and independent thought\u201d might lead us to believe, he tossed out a quote from verse 8 of our psalm: \u201cthose who make them will be like them.\u201d\xa0 In other words: the things that we build and place our trust in are the very things that we ourselves grow more and more like.\xa0

So: we\u2019ve created these smart phones with camera eyes, microphone ears, and speaker mouths, all of which do really seem to see, hear, and talk.\xa0 But while they promise to see and hear the whole world and all the people we care about, keeping us connected to all these things and people all the time\u2014in actuality, they leave us more lonely and disconnected than we were without them.\xa0 In search of life through a screen, we actually become less like the living things we are, and more like the dead things that our devices are.\xa0 We become more like the silver and gold, diodes and transistors, screens and wires that make up these lifeless little rectangles we devote so much of our time and selves to.

It is important then to account for what we build and what we place our trust in because these are the things that become our idols.\xa0 In this conversation on idolatry, others have swapped the word trust and used the word \u201cworship\u201d instead.\xa0 That: \u201cwe are what we worship.\u201d\xa0 Or \u201cwe are what we love.\u201d\xa0 If our love, trust, and worship is given to our screens, our sports, our entertainment, our identity, our career, or even our relationships with family or friends\u2014then our life is patterned on something dead or dying, fallen and fleeting.\xa0 Even the very best of our human relationships fit these categories.\xa0 These are idols\u2014all of them\u2014and they will eventually break the hearts of their worshipers.\xa0

And so the psalm invites: right off the top and through to the end\u2014a radical shift in our trust and worship from our idols to the living God.\xa0 He is the only source of life.\xa0 And, he does what he pleases: he is not subject to us nor can he be so readily controlled or manipulated like a little black box in our hands.\xa0 A life patterned on him is the only means to full and abundant life.\xa0 Because: those who place their trust in God will also become like him. \xa0It doesn\u2019t only work with idols.\xa0 Having been created in the image of God, our life\u2019s goal is to be conformed again to our God in the image of his son, Jesus Christ.\xa0 But it starts by naming and surrendering our idols so that we might trust in him, and him alone.

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