A friend I met in Israel, lives in the Hollywood Hills and writes books for living. (Great job if you have the talent for it and Tom Bissell has it.). Anyway, in one of his books, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, says the Vodka is not a beverage. “It is a memory-erasing headache fuel.” (p. 199 in the paperback edition). He’s probably right but I want to use his comment as picture of a very real dynamic at work in our world, but first, some biblically informing context:
There is a more insidious enemy of the human heart than the “memory-erasing headache fuel” of vodka. The beast of social media has to be conquered.
John 8:44
You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Matthew 13:37-39
37 And He said, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, 38 and the field is the world; and as for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one; 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels.
John 13:2
During supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him,
1 Peter 5:8
Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
Social Media is a Memory-erasing Drug
that The Evil One has Mastered Against You
How the evil one uses social media as an erasure of Christianity from relevance in in the modern world is everywhere self-evident in our culture. All of us are susceptible to it. Who among us hasn’t gotten lost into seemingly endless dives into sports binges, youtube, ticktok, streaming, live-streaming, binge-watching shows (old and new), instagram trends, endless (and often, pointless) researches of arcane curiosities, Facebook trolling, and Reddit dives? Very few have not succumbed to the siren call of the social media entertainment empires. We are all slaves to it in some measure.
And the evil one, the devil, satan, a liar from the beginning, is smarter than us all (after all, he is a fallen angel), and we need to wake up and “smell the coffee.” He has mastered the technologies to maximize his advantage over our souls. He uses all of it to appeal to our basest and laziest impulses. You have a tendency to procrastinate? The evil one knows it and exploits it to your disadvantage. He delights in taking our eyes off of Jesus and putting things in front of us that will mesmerize and lobotomize our brains.
Resist!
How?
Start filling your vision with Jesus. Start spending time in the gospels. Start meditating on the gospel. Immerse yourself in something other than a screen filled with pictures.
The solution is simple.
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