In a culture of “technique,” as defined by French philosopher Jacques Ellul, we’re always trying to find new methods to maximize efficiency: Amazon Prime for shopping, Netflix for movies, Spotify for music, DoorDash for food, Tinder for dating, Apple Maps for travel, ChatGPT for a personal assistant, and so on. With the bare necessities (and enjoyments) of life readily available at unprecedented levels of efficiency, we assume life should be easy. But in real life, as my stepdad says, “There’s always somethin’.”
Most people feel anxious, depressed, and crippled by expectations of the ideal life. And when everything is designed to smoothen and perfect the human experience, you end up bearing the blame for life’s unending difficulties, assuming it’s on you to discover the right hack for every problem: the optimal morning routine; a new therapist; a new diet, or medication, or spouse, or church. Some of these might help. Others might make it worse. But ultimately, life just is hard.
We’re mortals. Yes, we’re made for immortality, but we aren’t there. We’re here. We’re in a temporary place with temporal goods, constantly tempted to transcend this mortal life before its time. This is the temptation of “technique”: to believe that with enough tweaking, life can be optimized to the point of perfection. One more life-size software update and you’ll be happy.
But this inevitably creates a culture of ingratitude, dooming us to discontentment in our families, jobs, hobbies, governments, and churches.
Old Gods, New Techniques
“Technique” draws on the principles of ancient paganism: sacrifice to the god of agriculture and your crops will multiply; offer to the goddess of fertility and you’ll bear children. Give. Chant. Perform. Worship. Sacrifice. Some may dismiss the parallel because ancient idolatry is “irrational” and “unscientific,” as opposed to technological advancement, which is based on scientific discovery and innovation. But the motives are the same: to maximize efficiency and expedite natural processes.
The Tower of Babel story is paradigmatic: the technological innovation of stone and mortar immediately prompted the people to “make a name” for themselves through “a city and a tower with its top in the heavens” (Gen. 11:3–5), a direct affront to God.
This city, the origin and spirit of Babylon, is thorough and sweeping in Scripture’s narrative. It’s the spirit of discontentment, the spirit of grasping, the spirit of more. It’s a rejection of the wisdom of divine providence for the promises of demons, a pattern established in the beginning: “You will be like God” (3:5).
False gods always promise a half-truth. Adam and Eve could know good and evil. The people of Babel could make a great name for themselves. You can have a more efficient life. Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and money [Aramaic, mammon],” but you can serve Mammon, and he’ll reward you for it. The “powers and principalities” are, in fact, powers and principalities. They get things done. Yet they’re opposed to the glory of God, the goodness of creation, and the flourishing of his people.
Andy Crouch has been saying this for decades: “Much of what we call idolatry in ‘primitive’ societies is simply an alternative form of technology.” In his recent book The Life We’re Looking For, he describes our desire for technological advancement as the dream of “mastery without relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance without dependence (what Jesus called Mammon).”
This desire for magic submits us into a posture of worship. Mammon promises abundance—the goods of life—without the hard stuff. It’s efficient and effective. But it’s a shallow magic, a counterfeit for the “deeper magic from before the dawn of time”: God’s law.
Discontentment Is Idolatry
The Ten Commandments are bookended by two heart-level commands, one toward God (“You shall have no other gods before me”) and the other toward neighbor (“You shall not covet”).
Mammon promises abundance—the goods of life—without the hard stuff. It’s efficient and effective. But it’s a shallow magic.
God blessed Adam and Eve, offering them every tree for food (Gen. 1:29). The blessing is even reiterated in the prohibition: “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. . .” (2:16–17). They had everything. They weren’t lacking. But this is the nature of covetousness: wanting the one thing you don’t have.
Eve desired the serpent’s offer more than God’s blessing, and covetousness is idolatry (Eph. 5:5; Col. 3:5). Although they knew God, they didn’t honor him as God or give thanks to him (Rom. 1:21). Instead, they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the image of the serpent (v. 23). They learned the hard way that “possessions” aren’t the way to human flourishing. Jesus preached a better, richer way of life: contentment.
Tear Down the High Places
“Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions,” Jesus said. Afterward, he told a parable about a rich man whose plentiful land outgrew the storehouses. The man said, “I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. . . . And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” But God responded, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:15–20).
Covetousness—being discontent with what God has given—is not only a man desiring his neighbor’s wife or house (Ex. 20:17) but a man storing up his own hard-earned grain, excited about enjoying early retirement. In 21st-century America, this would never even register as problematic. The man reaps what he sows, but God thinks he’s a fool. Why?
As Jesus says a few sentences later, “Life is more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Luke 12:23). All the nations of the world—citizens of Babylon—seek after earthly goods, and God knows we need them. But we—citizens of the new Jerusalem—are to seek first the heavenly goods (vv. 30–31). The rich fool stored up treasures for himself, but he wasn’t rich in relation to God (v. 21). That’s true poverty.
When the Israelites worshiped idols, they built “high places” for the pagan gods. In times of renewal—for example, under the kings Josiah and Hezekiah—these high places were all torn down. Likewise, this parabolic man was an idolater; his “larger barns” were higher places.
If we’re to learn contentment, we must tear down Mammon’s barns and throw away the blueprints.
‘You Mustn’t Wish for Another Life’
Americans adore an underdog who scales the social hierarchy through grit and perseverance. Never satisfied. Always striving for excellence. Proverbial wisdom bears witness to the same truth: You reap what you sow. But sometimes you work harder than everyone else, you get cancer or die in battle, and somebody else gets all your stuff. You reap and another sows.
Suffering is unavoidable. At best, life is optimal for a short period. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can live well with the time you have.
Thanksgiving begins with a recognition that the basic, fundamental realities of human existence aren’t things we earn or choose: birth, familial relations, geographical location, death. You don’t choose these things. God does. They’re givens to be received, not problems to be relieved.
Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter is instructive here (see Jake Meador’s article):
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
You must not wish for another family, or another body, or another life. You must receive life as a gift before you can cultivate it as a garden.
You must receive life as a gift before you can cultivate it as a garden.
In his book about living with mental illness, On Getting Out of Bed, Alan Noble quips, “You either choose to receive the beauty and wonder of this life in the midst of chaos and distress, or you never will.” The most important choice we’ll make today is whether we’ll receive the goodness God grants to us or waste our few remaining years searching for a better offer.
There’s no better offer. Don’t exchange actual goods for imagined ones. Don’t ignore the tangible blessings right in front of you while you’re clicking around in the playground of virtual possibilities. Don’t forsake time with your friends and family to build an internet empire of fame and “influence.” You already have an empire. It’s your household, and you’ve been given the responsibility to steward it with wisdom and justice.
Worship God at Thanksgiving Dinner
Every year, people talk about the difficulty of spending time with family during the holidays: overbearing parents, critical in-laws, the weird uncle, children running around everywhere. It may be hard—some have much worse situations than that—but they’re the family God has given you. You don’t choose them. God does. What you can do is choose to love them and be thankful for them. I’ve come to recognize that life’s chief pleasures are almost all annoying inefficiencies that defy the logic of “technique”: children, friendship, learning, and so forth.
The ancient allure of “technique” is as strong as ever. Modern life has become an algorithm: optimizable, customizable, subject to improvement. The digital age conditions us to avoid discomforts and inconveniences as easily as we delete spam emails, photoshop pictures, or unfollow irritating people on social media. But the greatest earthly goods are stubbornly resistant to that sort of controllability and optimization. They’re gifts that should prompt thankfulness, not technique; contentment, not control.
This Thanksgiving, you can honor God and give thanks to him, stewarding the temporal goods he’s given you and refusing to wish for another life. Heed Basil of Caesarea’s piercing exhortation: “Destroy the granaries from which no one has ever gone away satisfied. Demolish every storehouse of greed, pull down the roofs, tear away the walls, expose the moldering grain to the sunlight, lead forth from prison the fettered wealth, vanquish the gloomy vaults of Mammon.”
The battle isn’t against flesh and blood; it’s against the powers and principalities. They want your heart. Don’t give it to them.
Involved in Women’s Ministry? Add This to Your Discipleship Toolkit
We need one another. Yet we don’t always know how to develop deep relationships to help us grow in the Christian life. Younger believers benefit from the guidance and wisdom of more mature saints as their faith deepens. But too often, potential mentors lack clarity and training on how to engage in discipling those they can influence.
Whether you’re longing to find a spiritual mentor or hoping to serve as a guide for someone else, we have a FREE resource to encourage and equip you. In Growing Together: Taking Mentoring Beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests, Melissa Kruger, TGC’s vice president of discipleship programming, offers encouraging lessons to guide conversations that promote spiritual growth in both the mentee and mentor.
