Inheriting the Earth
Steve Kryger, in his article Thank The Porn Industry?, says the sex trade has been the driving force behind innovation on the internet.
Clearly, not all of these innovations have been good (as the article itself concedes). It doesn’t take a particularly web-savvy reader to work out which of these are ‘naughty’ (in the words of the author), and which are ‘nice’:
• Online payment systems
• Spam
• Streaming content
• Malware
• Live chat
• Pop-ups, pop-unders and mousetrapping
• Broadband
• Browser hijacking
• Traffic optimisation
• Domain-name hijacking
• 3G mobile services
• Paris HiltonChristian ministry makes use of six of these twelve innovations (i.e. all of the ‘nice’ ones!).
He complains about the fact that the world comes up with the ideas (like YouTube) and the church just mimics them (GodTube). I would agree on this when it comes to our worship music and culture. But in a very real sense, this is the way God has worked in history and will always work:
“Enoch and Babylon are the first cities, but Jerusalem is the last. Jubal is the first musician, but David the “last”. The wicked get there first and do much of the work, laying up an inheritance for the just. Because they are not concerned with morality, the wicked can employ slave labour to build their cultures early, while a righteous culture takes longer to build.”1
To clarify my thought, it means we as God’s people will inhabit houses, towns, vineyards and software that we didn’t build.
1 James B. Jordan, Was Job an Edomite King?, BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 131,www.biblicalhorizons.com
