GOD, MAN & TECHNOLOGY
Copyright © Jules Dervaes
February 24, 2008
A Compilation of notes from the lectures of Jules Dervaes
Recorded in the Bible are the well-known stories of the Noachian Deluge and the Tower of Babel. They were examples of man’s one world order with one socio-economic system and language. Instead of these world orders being a help to further man’s growth to his real human potential, they became a hindrance, becoming the vehicle for man’s sinful ways to spread rapidly. Evil thrived and flourished in this cohesive social unit. So, God intervened, destroying the world in Noah’s day and dispersing mankind at Babel.
Today, at the ending of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium, we are coming together AGAIN as one. And it is technology that has made this possible. With the aid of computers and the internet we can instantaneously translate one language into another and have a “one world” language. Furthermore, a world banking system and economy is mankind’s attempt for another one world order man’s way. But, this time, what we are doing is far worse than ever before and far more damaging. We need to look at why OUR world order is so against God. Only then will we be able to understand why God hates our technological world.
To adequately do that we need to understand the purpose and wisdom of God’s laws. Man has always deemed them to be God’s arbitrary way to keep him in bondage. It’s time to take another look at the Old Testament and God’s original commands at creation to discern the real intent for God’s physical laws. As we will see, technology thwarts man’s ability to learn the many lessons God wanted him to learn and the way He wanted him to learn them.
The Purpose of the Old Testament
Did God waste His time writing the Old Testament? Was His purpose only to have us keep the Sabbath, Holy Days, and a few important laws (dietary for unclean meats, financial for tithing) in this modernized, “civilized,” urbanized, technological world? Does the Old Testament have lasting value in the obsolete WAY OF LIFE it portrays? Did not God train up the child in the manner He thought best? Or was He just biding His time until 20th century man came along to change things for the better? Was God hampered, unable to provide His child with the latest innovations, the newest devices?
For the first 4000 years God dealt physically with Israel. Thus, Old Testament Israel, the child, the pre-adolescent, had direct knowledge of the best way to GROW UP. That knowledge related to PHYSICAL affairs! With the Old Testament God gave first the knowledge of His PHYSICAL plan to His children Israel. As Israel was in the beginning a YOUNG, immature child, He started–with the PHYSICAL WAY OF LIFE–to teach him what to do, how to live, and why to obey.
Thus, God dealt with the physical life of His young child–the whole physical welfare. And now He required that Israel respond to His directives by performing, according to certain rules and regulations, PHYSICAL ACTIONS, physical behaviors first which were to pave the way for the later spiritual way. God rooted His Old Testament Church firmly in the physical and expected it to rise from there to go BEYOND the physical medium or else it would rot there. God wanted the outer to lead to an inner change as a father does when he is dealing with his children. At first, he can expect the child to obey because the baby has no choice. The child should be serving his father physically in every way. If the child is rebellious to the physical laws, how can he be receptive to the spiritual ones? If he is difficult to train physically, how can he be easy spiritually? If he is having to be forced to do correct physical actions, how can he be dealt with in the invisible realm? So God used the Old Testament to form PATTERNS in the mind of the child. He worked from the OUTSIDE to the INSIDE! That is the way God designed His plan; it was not faulty. It was the foundation on which He would later build the New Testament.
For thirty years of His life Jesus lived the Old Testament way of life, even while introducing the New Testament, showing man the way to at-one-ment with the Father which had been lost through sin. It was years after His death that the Catholic Church began preaching a bogus, phony New Testament, changing the teachings of the Gospels. The true doctrines were almost immediately suppressed (and only partially resurrected in varying degrees in history) for almost two thousand years; however, it took much, much longer–centuries–for the Old Testament lifestyle to completely disappear.
In this 20th century Mr. Herbert Armstrong taught for fifty years the real message of Jesus and His doctrines, which, for the most part, had been lost. But while he taught it, he lived the modern western way. Originally, at the beginning of the Philadelphian Era, the Church had its roots in the farming people of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. But, as the work grew, the emphasis remained almost exclusively on doctrines, while the right lifestyle was all but ignored. Even the agricultural program of the Church was eventually abandoned. We had accepted the doctrines in our heads but we were still living the modern way of life. As a result, we were doctrinally correct in our minds only, but our bodies were not living the truth of God.
Because Mr. Armstrong only restored doctrinal truth, not body truth, the Church did not go where it should have gone nor did it grow up. It was like a stillborn baby, having the form of a baby, but was dead on delivery. All truth grows and expands. For more than fifty years the Church has been stagnant because all Mr. Armstrong’s work was to change minds, while our bodies lived in the same false system. That’s why the doctrines don’t really stick and why we’re so obsessed with them. Keeping the doctrines in our heads without the Old Testament way of life in our bodies makes us SPLIT. So, we have a split-conversion with doctrinal, mental understanding but no necessary conversion in our bodies. We have never progressed beyond doctrine because we have not involved the whole person. Body changes were necessary to be WHOLE, moving forward and engaging the emotions, thereby assisting us to become a wholly, fully integrated human adult on our way to spiritual maturity through the New Testament.
God instituted the physical laws first because WE needed it that way so WE could grow. After He had formed the pattern in our body, then our minds, He had hoped to elevate the whole man to a higher spiritual plane which was demonstrated in the life of Christ. Even God could not create AGAPE through mere words, doctrines, and dictates. He had to show us physically, in the flesh, through the person of Jesus. If we can’t do the basic physical obedience in EVERY area, then how can we go higher to the spiritual? Under Herbert Armstrong we ran with parts of the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament, ignoring the ENTIRETY of both. First and foremost, love of God must be grounded in obedience to His physical laws through a way of life.
Although Herbert Armstrong restored the knowledge of the doctrines, he did not restore the lifestyle that God instituted. And today, THIS WAY OF LIFE IS THE BIGGEST HINDRANCE TO THE KINGDOM OF GOD, NOT DOCTRINE!
God’s Original Design at Creation
God placed Adam and Eve in a physical paradise called the Garden of Eden. It was perfect and good and had everything for their physical needs. God gave the original command to Adam to dress and keep the Garden and to replenish the earth with offspring. After the Fall, God pointed them in the right direction with physically corrective punishments. Although Adam was to still tend the Garden, it was now to be by the sweat of his brow.
Pitting man against nature and its menacing elements was the only way to ensure that man could work his way back to Paradise by coming directly under God. There would now be pressure with insects, with weather, and the uncertainty. Nature would now be bearing down on him and would be the way God could break the man. It would be through nature that God was going to teach man obedience–not by talking, writing, or doctrines. As man, connected to nature, would be more likely to obey because now God would either send rain as a blessing for obedience or withhold it as a punishment. When man is in touch with nature man learns obedience–or dies! God intended the physical to be a teacher leading to THE TEACHER. We have not–as God wanted–ruled over what He created; we have, instead, sought to overrule His creation and, thus, God Himself. What He had pronounced as “good” we say it’s not good enough; we believe we can find a better way.
Technology: A Revolt Against God’s Plan
Far from being our new Savior, technology only saves people from the consequences of their wrong ways and physical sins, but only for the time being. Miracles are supposed to come from God; but now we get miracles from our fake Savior science and technology. We have become more reckless and stupid, knowing that, if there is an accident, our medical Messiah will put “Humpty Dumpty” back together again. To say that technology harms you, causing cancer from pollutants, while TV encourages violence is self-evident. Technology is destroying us as it promises to save us. It is one of those things in the Bible that God hates. And, somewhere along the road, He will destroy it.
Advanced civilization–that’s what we have called our plan to change God’s plan. But it is really rebellion, just one revolution after another, each taking us further away from the way God intended us to live. We can’t stop this craving to make our existence easier, freer, greater. God wants us to sweat out our lives. Because we have disobeyed, life was to take its toll on us, extracting the necessary payment of pain. Sweat pain was sweet pain; it would have taught us how to live. But we would not have it. Science and technology have rescued us (supposedly) by creating inventions which made labor unnecessary. That, however, is just a shell game, for work is not saved, that is, not eliminated; it is only transferred. Physical exertion gets moved around to some other area. As someone once said, we become slaves to the machines, working for them in order to keep them running. But man was commanded to toil and sweat from working the soil. (In New Zealand on my homestead, I felt the weight on my shoulders. It was enough to send my mind into shock.)
And if man reached manly maturity, being able to provide food by the sweat of his brow, this would be a prelude to facing the ultimate inadequacy, namely, that despite his powers he was, after all, just man. After attaining the harmony of his body and mind working together as one in a united effort, what would remain for him to come to terms with would be his place in a world not under his control. He–the whole man–would be due to meet God.
Man was to find his human “worthiness” (but faulty, nonetheless) to discover his “animal” value! PRODUCTION was to be achieved (for the man, food; for the female, offspring) and it was to be of a quality to ensure success on the human plane.
AFTER!–AFTER being successfully productive, man was to realize that his worthiness was not–and could never be–anything of and by itself. While working as if it all depended on him–meaning, thereby, he had become valuable as a human being in himself–as a person to be reaching his potential–it was for him to see then that it all depended on God. Even if he were a Job he had not true value at all on his own. It was to be obvious that, as a creation, man’s worth belonged to God as to the source.
If a person believed God–really believed in the real God–he would discover his own unworthiness. He would know in his heart that as a hammer he doesn’t deserve credit for building, nor the hoe for planting. He, being only the tool made to be used by God, doesn’t get the recognition for “his” work. On being productive, man was only giving God, like the investor, his money’s worth, at the very least, with “interest,” because God expected the tool to be put to profitable use. It was in the INCREASE of the original value (1, 3, 5 talents given) that man was to receive God’s praise “Well done!”
For over fifty years Mr. Herbert Armstrong preached about the coming new world order. God is not against man being in a one world order, for His Kingdom on earth will be exactly that–one language, one socio-economic system, one lifestyle, one religion–but all are governed by His physical and spiritual laws. Anything else is a rebellion against God and will be wiped out, as man’s history has shown.
Statement of Purpose
Much more could be said about the evils of technology, from its health hazards to its ability to thwart man’s true development. So, one may ask: Why does God’s work today use technology?
Our purpose for using technology is as a means for a worldwide WARNING to bring others to an awareness of its inherent evil. We plan to take advantage of technology for only a short time, using technology to destroy technology, until nature has begun to be restored to its original state. That work is beginning now by God’s people choosing to make the decision to rid technology from their lives. To wait until one is forced when Jesus returns is to have waited too long, losing the opportunity to show faith.
Our chance to prove that we want God’s total way in our lives personally means to choose NOW, as an adult, desiring with our hearts, and demonstrating that truth in our bodies, so God’s will may be done in our lives today. The road will be hard and the beginning steps small. But together we can make the gigantic leaps needed to prepare ourselves and to prepare the way for the soon-coming Kingdom of God on earth. It’s time.
Notes 1991