Communication Revolutions

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Most of these Devotions tend to be kind of little sermons. This is going to be a bit of a deviation from that. This is just something that I’ve noticed. I’m very lucky to be a communication professor at Bethany Lutheran College, and I do tend to kind of think a lot and even obsess a little bit about how Christians have employed communication through history. And it’s something that jumps out at me to look at history and see how God seems to have positioned his church right at the epicenter of every single communication revolution that has ever taken place.

Egypt is where writing really managed to explode in a huge number of institutions, became highly dependent upon writing. They expanded the system of writing using hieroglyphics and really developed it. And it just so happened at that time the children of Israel were there in slavery. The only people in Egypt who could actually learn to read and write would have been aristocracy and priests. And it just so happened that the way God chose to deliver Moses was by bringing him into a palace where he would have been one of the very small portion of the population that actually could learn how to read and write. And then God made use of that right away when he had Moses record Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

The children of Israel got to the Promised Land, and there they drove out all the peoples. But there was one group that God didn’t instruct them to remove, and that was the Phoenicians. And it just so happened that at this exact same time the Phoenicians were developing an innovation concerning writing called phonics, where all of a sudden the alphabet went from tens of thousands of characters to a much more manageable 22 for their system. The Phoenicians simplified writing and made it so that it could apply across a whole bunch of cultures. It was much easier to record information, it was much easier to get information. And Israel and Phoenicia were besties. They did everything together, shared people, shared wars. They were very good friends, and most importantly, shared language. We have the Old Testament recorded in Hebrew because of the Phoenicians and their development of phonics. And God’s church just happened to be centered right there.

When the canon of Scripture, the books that we have in the Bible, started coming together the Church was kind of headquartered in Rome at the time, and it just so happened that at the same time they were inventing the codex, they were inventing a book. So we have the Bible in the form that we’ve got it, where a whole bunch of different books have been put together into this single searchable browser able compendium because of the technological innovation that happened to take place right where the church was centered.

If you’re a Lutheran, you already know this one. The printing press was invented in Germany just in time for Martin Luther to write 95 theses and a small catechism and share it with the entire world. The gospel has been dwelling here in the United States as we developed radio and thank goodness we developed radio, my grandma came to faith listening to a radio broadcast.

God throughout history always positioned his church right at the center of every single communication revolution that ever took place. It gives us a way of thinking about the importance of the message that we share. God places a huge amount of emphasis on the need for us to spread the gospel. There is a message for every human being that you can not save yourself, that you are worthy of the punishments that you fear after death, but that God loved you so much that He sent His only begotten Son to take the punishment that you deserve to live the life that you should have, and that the end to turn all the credit for that life over to you. It’s no surprise, maybe, that we’ve been at the center of every single communication revolution since the sharing of that message is so foundational to our faith, to our hope, and to our lives.

Now, whether this moves you to faster embrace the next communication revolution, I don’t mind one way or another. But hopefully it does bring something to the forefront. Hopefully it plants right at the front of your brain the urgency, the need, and the fun that comes along with introducing someone new to Jesus.