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Doing technology is Kingdom work!
By Rosie Perera | December 29, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I came upon a recent wall post on the “Christians in Technology” Facebook group: “For ‘Caesar’ I do server maintenance. For God, I am a Sunday School teacher.” I couldn’t let that go by without a comment.
I believe that whatever we do in the world we do for God. Kingdom work is more than just “Christian ministry.” Doing God’s work with our technology skills means more than just using them for the church or missions, or to make money to send to church/missions, or as a platform for evangelism to our co-workers.
“For whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Cor 10:31). We serve the Lord when we serve people, and we serve people when we help them solve their problems with our technology know-how. We aren’t working just for Caesar, but for customers, users, individuals, newbies with computer phobias, bosses and teammates with families they need to feed. Think of them whenever you work.
We are made in the image of a Creator God, which means when we use our inventiveness to create technology, we are imaging God. When God saw what he had made, he called it good. We are of course fallen creatures, and not all that we make with our technology is put to good purposes. But an awful lot of it is, and should be recognized as such. It’s OK to look back, on our Sabbath day, at what we have made during the week and offer it up to God as a good and pleasing gift to him. He did, after all, give us the creation mandate, to take care of this earth, which involves creating tools and techniques with which to manage it and develop its fruitfulness. The root word of ‘culture’ and ‘culivate’ is the same. When we create human culture (including technology) we are cultivating the earth. Notice that while the Bible begins in a garden, it ends in a city, the New Jerusalem. In the final consummation of the Kingdom, all the nations of the earth will bring their gifts, their glory, honor, wealth, yes I believe even their technology, to the New Jerusalem. (Rev. 21).
Finally, we are using our God-given gifts when we create and use our technology. According to the Old Testament, humankind is “ordained to work, keeping always in mind the sanctity of the Sabbath.” (Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, 112) The engineer, like Bezalel, is “filled…with the spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts.” (Ex. 31:3, NIV)
I used to feel a conflict between what I did for my work (software engineering, which I was good at and had fun doing) and the “higher calling” of doing work for God’s Kingdom. But I no longer believe in a two-tiered system of God’s work and worldly work. All work is Kingdom work, when done in the spirit of cultivating God’s creation to be pleasing to him and to be of service to the people he created and loves.
To paraphrase Eric Liddell in The Chariots of Fire: “When I program, I feel God’s pleasure.”
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