All-knowing, All-powerful, Everywhere at Once

Sometimes I listen to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day and discover that it gives voice to my own thoughts. One such occasion was when John Bell of the Iona Community spoke a few days ago. He was talking about the way mobile phones give their users the feeling of having godlike qualities.

They give us the illusion of being all-knowing – through them we have a world of information at our fingertips.

They make us seemingly all-powerful – we can send a message to whoever we like and order a takeaway that will arrive on our doorstep as soon as we return home and are ready for a meal!

They make us think we are everywhere at once – in an instant we can be in touch with people right across the world.

You might think we should be delighted at the power the little rectangular screen puts in our hands. Yet instead many mobile phone users feel stressed and insecure if they are out of signal range for any length of time. What do people think will happen to them in that case? That they will suddenly lose all their friends because they are out of contact for a short while?

This sense of panic reminded John Bell of Adam and Eve and their temptation and fall from grace. God had commanded Adam,

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17 ESV.)

Adam and Eve succumbed to that temptation. They allowed themselves to be seduced by the serpent, Satan, into thinking that God had forbidden them to eat the fruit of that tree for fear it would make them godlike.

You can make what you will of that Genesis story, but it is echoed in the behaviour of the rest of the human race in a most uncanny way. Adam and Eve became the first examples of the common human temptation to want to be all-knowing, all-powerful and everywhere at once, which having a smartphone seems to satisfy. What human beings from the first couple onwards have failed to recognise is that they are only human and cannot mysteriously become divine!

God’s response to this sad development in the relationship between Adam and Eve and Himself is found in verse 22 of chapter 3:

“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”

John Bell concludes, 

“To live comfortably with our limitations rather than constantly frustrated by them is not a bad thing.” 

While not always agreeing with Bell’s views, I can certainly say Amen to that.