Articles
The More Things Change...
When I first started preaching regularly in 1992, I had just bought my first computer—a desktop PC with a 386 processor, a 40 megabyte hard drive, and a whopping one megabyte of memory. (You’re laughing, aren’t you?)
Two decades later, I’m using a machine with several hundred times more capacity and who-knows-how-many-times more computing power. And that’s just my cell phone.
Funny thing about electronics—computers, smart phones, TVs, whatever. You can buy the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art, expensive gadget available, and by the time you get it home and out of the box, someone will have figured out a way to make one that’s better. Often cheaper, too.
That’s the nature of technology, always progressing. In our world, change seems to come ever faster and ever larger. Sometimes it’s just overwhelming.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote Solomon (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Technology may constantly change, but the basic needs, problems, and shortcomings of men remain constant from age to age. The old plague of sin still affects every one of us (Romans 3:23), and all our advances have not lessened its effects or made us able to save ourselves from its consequences. Men still need Jesus; that will never change. Thankfully, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). His death proved his love for all men; his resurrection proved his ability to save them from sin and death. He was, and is, and always will be, the only solution to our greatest problems.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). It’s as true for a 21st century computer engineer as for a first century tent maker. No matter how the world may change in the years to come, salvation will always be in the unchanging Christ.
