I’ve been thinking about some things lately, regarding how the modern generation can use the Internet to spread the Gospel and the benefits afforded us using such technology. Tomorrow I’ll post a blog entry on the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel. The post I was working on was getting long, and I thought I’d split it in half and focus on just this one thought I’ve been having after using social networking like Google+ and I was noticing a verse that mentioned the following,
Verse 45:
So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.
What feast? The Passover feast. What did he do there? Made a whip and flipped over some tables (John 2:13-22). The way John frames his account, the only public things Jesus has been seen doing so far, was making a excessive amount of wine at a wedding (2:1-12), flipping some temple tables over and snapping a whip, and baptizing some people on the other side of the Jordan where John the Baptizer was (vv 3:22-30); made a convert in Samaria who was outside of the correct tribe or you could say like a lower class citizen (John 4:1-43).
One thing that is worth trying to remember, despite the fact we ourselves live in the information or digital age, and communication is different by two millenniums, is to keep in mind this was a culture that didn’t necessarily read. The average citizen didn’t have books. It was the trained religious leaders and the wealthy upper class who may have had access to written material, in the form of things like scrolls, and not books like we are used to understanding.
So that being said, we remember as well that the Gospel accounts, and Paul’s New Testament letters, were written decades after Jesus walked the earth, and in the case of the Gospel writers, they are written entirely based on recollection. Theirs was a culture of repetition and memorization. Therefore, when we read any of the four accounts we have, keep in mind of the ones that were actual disciples who are writing from first hand experience (Matthew and John), they are clearly writing parables and teachings that maybe they heard over and over and deemed important to be included in their Gospels. This is probably true when we realize different events and teachings occur before and after some parables in different Gospel writers’ accounts, much to the elation of atheists and enemies of God looking to find contradictions in the Bible to discredit it.
Remember at the end of John’s Gospel he mentions;
Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25)
So this means that nothing in the account is wasted space. There are no throw away verses. Everything he shared was carefully decided upon, and he included things in the order he did for the reasons he did.
The Characters Don’t Know What the Audience Knows
One of my favorite TV shows to have ever enjoyed watching was Lost. You’ll have to Google for yourself what it was about, but one thing those of us who were into it were privy to, was the extensive way that each episode in the early seasons would delve into the back story of various characters who had crash landed on a deserted island.
This helped fill in details and motivations taking place in the present time of the story telling. However, often times, the audience got to see ways in which different characters’ lives were interconnected prior to having gotten on the same plane and wound up crashing together. This made for some interesting revelations and story advancements as the viewer knew things the characters didn’t. Or at least, some characters knew but others didn’t.
In the Bible times, they didn’t have television, internet, email, or the printed press or any of the other things we take for granted for spreading and receiving information. Nothing Jesus did was recorded on YouTube and then went viral. When Lazarus was raised, nobody snapped a photo on their camera and uploaded it to Twitter to share with the online community. Most of the ways information spread about him was through word of mouth and accounts being retold or shared of his miracles, healings, and teachings.
So then, we have to understand Jesus didn’t have a website up where he put up his itinerary with all his speaking engagements, helping people locate where he’d be at and then go follow him there trying to touch his garment. If people knew where he’d be at any given moment it was from either assumptions, rumours, or just plain he showed up nearby and word spread immediately and people dropped what they were doing to encounter him.
People didn’t know what Jesus necessarily even looked like. They hadn’t seen a picture of him in the news paper. There were other ways they KNEW it was him; the miracles he performed, the way he preached with authority, and the testimony of previous people who’d encountered him and vouched “here he is, that’s him!“ Of course these are just guesses of mine as well to be honest.
Will Going Viral Close In On The End Time Harvest?
In my previous post, Mobile Web & Third World Necessities, I remarked how even here in a developing nation like Peru, kids have cell phones and many of them are increasingly starting to have internet on them. In England alone, about a year from now, there will be more of the population with smartphones than those with just normal cell phones1. In that post, I also remarked that many of the unreached people groups are unreached for a reason, and many of the languages that don’t yet have the Scripture translated into their languages tend to maybe not have the gadgets and devices that are becoming an integral part of many societies. But 5 billion people of the world’s population around the world have cell phones, whereas only 1.8 billion have internet in their homes. It’s taken nearly twenty years of the internet being ‘mainstream’ to get to that figure, but with mobile web, it’s going to dwarf that figure and reach it faster and more exponentially: I’ve read that by 2015, more people will be using the internet on their phones than will be using a laptop or a desktop computer.
I get excited thinking of all the ways I’m able to stay in contact with people the world over using Facebook, podcasting, blogging, etc. But I’m constantly reminding myself of a quote by the late Leonard Ravenhill about how the early church didn’t have the technology we have today (in his day when he said, he died in 1994), but yet they were electrifying. We have all these gadgets and tools but yet we’re dead and ineffective. I’m convinced the different things we have access to are just tools to be used, but are not the answers in and of themselves.
Friends and saints, we can use these internet tools to reach people, but what good is that if what we’re reaching them with is powerless to transform lives? We may have the ability to post something to the internet and watch it “go viral” and spread like wildfire around the world, potentially, but what good is that if it’s not marked by the fire of His anointing? What good is being ABLE to reach far and wide, if what we’re spreading is dead and weak?
Just some thoughts to challenge with – the early church didn’t have access to the things we take for granted today, and yet they turned the world upside down. Why aren’t we?
- See “Smartphones Head To Tipping Point” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/11/ios-android-blackberry-smartphone-data [↩]
