Thursday, October 2, 2014

First Step away from Electricity: Abandoning the Gods for Jesus

A Quick Historical Review
In Genesis 1 we learn that Yahweh created earth, seas, and sky. He then filled them with every manner of living creatures. He created this cosmos teeming with life to serve as the perfect context for human creatures. To his way of thinking, this vital context would best allow us to share a relationship of freedom and love with him, one another, and all these other creatures.

We learn in Genesis 3 that this perfect context did not last long. Following the rupture in our relationships with Yahweh, one another, and the rest of creation, our days of conviviality ended. The Old Age of Dominant Powers of Evil, of our dreary slavery to six false Olympian gods, began.

We may further divide the history of our bondage to the gods, and of Yahweh’s relationship of freedom and love with us despite it, into different periods. After our rupture with Yahweh, we have the Old Age of Dominant Powers of Evil but also the first shorter period of our history: the Age of Olympianity (beginning in 4004 BC).

The second period, the Age of Yahwism, begins with Abraham’s response to Yahweh’s call to leave his Olympian world in 1921 BC.

With the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in AD 1 (or 4 BC), we have the end of the Old Age of Dominant Powers of Evil and the beginning of the New Age of Victorious Jesus Christ. A third historical period, the Age of Christianity, also begins in AD 1 with Christ's birth.

A fourth period, the Age of Islam, begins in 634, two years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, when Muslim armies pour out of Arabia and begin their rapid conquest of southern Olympia.

A fifth period, the Age of Exuberant Olympianity, begins in 1648. In that year a Christendom utterly exhausted by 130 years of civil war abandons its commitment to Jesus and embraces the six conventional Olympian gods with renewed zeal.

This zealous devotion to the gods of Olympianity eventually led to the establishment of the Global Technological System (GTS): the most significant brute fact of the age. This GTS represents the pride and glory of the Olympian gods. It embodies all their dreams as the six destructive gods of the religion of power.

Today’s Call to Freedom
As the embodiment of Olympian dreams, the GTS bears a parasitic relationship to both humankind and to the rest of Yahweh's good creation. The vitality of the GTS depends directly on the daily exploitation of billions of human creatures and the systematic destruction of so many other species of creatures and their habitats.

God alone finds all of this objectionable. Jesus seeks daily to affirm the vitality of every human being and of all creation. To do this, he seeks daily to free every one of us from our devotion to the six conventional but destructive Olympian gods. He seeks daily to free each of us from expressing that devotion through all the ways we use to maintain or strengthen the GTS. Most concretely, we may understand Jesus calling each of us, today, to transition away from our reliance on electricity.

We may clearly understand that our freedom from electricity and for creation will be possible only by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us also clearly recognize that our goal of freedom from electricity will be severely criticized by our Olympian neighbors. Sadly, we may count on being hated even by other Christians for merely suggesting it.

So the first form of our freedom from electricity, from the energy powering the GTS at the expense of Yahweh’s good creation, will be our freedom from the gods represented by and embodied in that GTS. Good-bye to the gods—especially Vulcan, god of technology!

Bet that, like Pharaoh, the gods will resent and resist this liberation of slaves from their grasp. Thanks be to God that Jesus will daily walk with us to see it through.

Copyright © 2014 by Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.