I was sitting in church a couple of weekends ago when our pastor quoted Deuteronomy 6:4-9, a passage that follows on the heels of God giving Moses the Ten Commandments:
“Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
This is one of the most famous passages anywhere in Scripture, especially for the Jewish people, who call v. 4 the Shema (or Sh’ma), and recite it as a core expression of their Jewish faith.
Whenever I hear this passage, I’m always struck by two things. One, how seriously God takes the preservation and transmission of His commands from one generation to the next. Two, how very concrete His instructions are for helping His people remember and stay faithful to those commands. In a nutshell, He tells them to do everything possible to keep His instructions in front of them at all times, no matter where they are. For thousands of years, orthodox male Jews have taken this command literally by wearing phylacteries—small leather boxes containing key passages from the Torah—on their left arms and on their foreheads during morning prayers.
Now, I’m not Jewish. I’ve never worn a phylactery. And as a 21st-century reader of this 1400 BC text, it’s tempting to think that maybe God’s instructions here are a bit over the top. We don’t really need to be that intentional with regard to His commands and His Word … do we? After all, having Scripture in front of you everywhere you go seems impractical. Excessive. Maybe even fanatical—a value definitely not in vogue in the broader 21st-century culture.
In that moment, though, I had an epiphany: God’s instructions in Deuteronomy 6 are exactly the way many of us relate to our smartphones these days. They are, quite literally, always before us. Or, at least, they’re before us every opportunity we reasonably have to use them (and perhaps a few unreasonable ones, too).
I write here as someone who struggles with this issue myself, by the way, not as a smug, non-smartphone using Luddite. I used to hate stoplights. Now, they offer a 30-second opportunity to see what’s happening with the Ebola crisis, or the markets, or the latest poll numbers, or my favorite websites or whatever.
I’m not the only one. Sometimes at traffic lights I’ll look around, and it’s amazing how many other folks are doing exactly the same thing.
Look around a little more, and you’ll begin to notice that people use their smartphones virtually everywhere. In line at the grocery store. Walking down the street. Watching TV. Eating meals at a restaurant. I even saw a guy using his smartphone while riding bicycle a few weeks ago, which seemed like a “news of the tragically weird” story just waiting to happen. And a couple of years ago I was at a movie screening where a young woman in front of me was actually texting on two phones simultaneously, one in each hand!
On top of that, research indicates we increasingly take our smartphones to the bathroom. For many of us, they’re the last thing we look at before going to bed and the first thing we reach for when we wake up.
None of that is news at this point. It’s just part of the way many (though not all) of us live in the always-wired, always-connected Internet age.
Here is my point: Keeping God’s Word always before me as Deuteronomy 6 instructs might seem excessive, burdensome and unrealistic. And yet I do it easily, effortlessly and unconsciously with my smartphone. It’s not a burden at all. In fact, on those rare days I accidentally leave my precious little black device at home, a moment of panic sets in (another anxiety that scientists are increasingly chronicling as we grow ever more cybernetically attached).
As I sat and reflected on my little revelation in church, it prompted a moment of honest confession, as such devotion to a device borders on idolatry (if not being a full-on case of it). And it prompted me to pray that I might intentionally devote even a fraction of my energy to keeping God’s Word in mind compared to the energy I devote to making sure my Motorola is always charged and within an arm’s reach.
In the last few weeks, I’ve begun to make some small changes to my habits that helps me to focus more on what God has to say and less on the blinking reminder light on my phone alerting me to new texts, Facebook messages, email and voice mail. At lunch each day, I’m trying to leave my phone in my pocket (or, better yet, in my cubicle) while I get my Bible (a printed copy!) out and just read and reflect on it while I eat.
Mind you, this is hardly rocket science. Many, many, many voices before me have counseled taking deliberate, daily time to meet with our Heavenly Father and to meditate on what He has to say to us in His Word. Still, in our info-saturated, tech-tethered world, even a little step like that has felt freeing and significant as I’ve sought to take back a bit of the ground I’ve subconsciously surrendered since I got my first smartphone two years ago.
I’m also hardly the first Christian to write about this conflictual relationship with technology. And I’d like to leave you today with a bit more to ponder on this subject. I recently came across Tony Reinke’s article at desiringgod.org titled “Six Ways Your Phone Is Changing You.” It’s an excellent read, as Reinke offers his own thoughts as well as those from theologians David Wells and Douglas Groothuis. In fact, I’m going to the (almost) last word on this subject today to Groothuis, professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary:
“We need to have integrity when we are online. We should do it prayerfully. We need to resist impulses. And I don’t always successfully do this. I have deleted not a few Facebook posts. But remember that we are doing this before the face of God and we are interacting with eternal beings. We are having an effect on people’s destinies, even through a Twitter message.”
So here’s to modest movements toward being people of integrity in the way we use technology, one stop light, one lunch, one changed habit at a time.
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