Dreams of Paradise by Robert W. Field

When we fell in the garden, paradise was lost and could never be regained through any of our efforts. It is not that we don’t try. … Even the Christian sometimes passes into that dangerous sin of building a home for himself in this world. … Yet God has warned us never to be content here, nor to think of this unrestored place as home. … How does He point us in the direction of true paradise? He begins by showing us the hopelessness and emptiness of the place in which we live. Here in this fallen world there is no lasting joy or peace. We have tasted its finite pleasures, but they have left us miserable, lonely, and dissatisfied. Sin has corrupted everything. The city of man is collapsing and will be destroyed; hence, we are compelled to flee the wrath that is coming and to seek the restoration of God’s eternal home. … How does a Christian journey to the final paradise? Every day he wakes up in this world as a warrior pilgrim, fighting the temptations to root him here while pressing on to his eternal reward. On this voyage, he draws close to his Savior through prayer and Scripture. He dresses himself with the armor of God in order to face his conflicts. He finds fellow pilgrims who are heading in the same direction and loves their fellowship along the way. He keeps his eyes on the eternal and does not become trapped in the finite. He takes the members of his body and uses them for righteousness. Though he sees life decaying all around him, including his own mortal body, he has the hope of resurrection and life in the new heavens and earth. Here he finds everything changing. Friends pass away, circumstances make life unpredictable. Yet in himself he sees the seed of new life springing up in hope. He stores up treasures in that paradise that will never rust or decay. In essence, he lives here in this finite world as if he were already living in that holy paradise. His blessed Savior gives him a foretaste of what is to come, a peace that passes understanding, a joy that does not fade, and a love that is eternal. …

Entire article.

D.A. Carson on Technology

Scarcely less important than speed of access is the Internet’s sheer intoxicating addictiveness—or, more broadly, we might be better to think of the intoxicating addictiveness of the entire digital world. Many are those who are never quiet, alone, and reflective, who never read material that demands reflection and imagination. The iPods provide the music, the phones constant access to friends, phones and computers tie us to news, video, YouTube, Facebook, and on and on. This is not to demonize tools that are so very useful. Rather, it is to point out the obvious: information does not necessarily spell knowledge, and knowledge does not necessarily spell wisdom, and the incessant demand for unending sensory input from the digital world (says he, as he writes this on a computer for an electronic theological journal) does not guarantee we make good choices. We have the potential to become world citizens, informed about every corner of the globe, but in many western countries the standards of geographical and cross-cultural awareness have seriously declined. We have access to spectacularly useful information, but most of us diddle around on ephemeral blogs and listen to music as enduring as a snowball in a blast furnace. Sometimes we just become burned out by the endless waves of bad news, and decide the best course is to turn the iPod volume up a bit.

From Themelios, Volume 33, Issue 3, December 2008