You Are What You Trust

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, "Where is their God?" 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)   I think that this psalm, along with a couple selections from Isaiah and Jeremiah, remain some of the best Biblical commentary on smartphones.  I was struck by that fact when I came across the lines of this psalm while reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media a while back.  He was well known for his commentary on media and communication through the 60's, he even got a Heritage Minute made about him.  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.  No surprise then that little scripture verses pop up curiously here and there in his works.  Psalm 115 was one of them.  McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message."  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 "free and independent thought" might lead us to believe, he tossed out a quote from verse 8 of our psalm: "those who make them will be like them."  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.  So: we've created these smart phones with camera eyes, microphone ears, and speaker mouths, all of which do really seem to see, hear, and talk.  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—in actuality, they leave us more lonely and disconnected than we were without them.  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.  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.  In this conversation on idolatry, others have swapped the word trust and used the word "worship" instead.  That: "we are what we worship."  Or "we are what we love."  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—then our life is patterned on something dead or dying, fallen and fleeting.  Even the very best of our human relationships fit these categories.  These are idols—all of them—and they will eventually break the hearts of their worshipers.  And so the psalm invites: right off the top and through to the end—a radical shift in our trust and worship from our idols to the living God.  He is the only source of life.  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.  A life patterned on him is the only means to full and abundant life.  Because: those who place their trust in God will also become like him.  It doesn't only work with idols.  Having been created in the image of God, our life's goal is to be conformed again to our God in the image of his son, Jesus Christ.  But it starts by naming and surrendering our idols so that we might trust in him, and him alone.