“For the word of God is living and active…” Hebrews 4:12

IS Google making me stupid? I’ve been wondering ever since the July/August issue of The Atlantic arrived in my mailbox.

The cover article, by Nicholas Carr, investigates how the internet is changing the way we read (skimming, skipping along the surface, as hyperlinks “propel” us from page to page), and how that in turn is changing the way we think. Historic developments in information technology, from the development of a written language to the printing press to the typewriter, have all caused changes not just in what we read, but how we read, how our brains interact with ideas.

Carr laments, “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy…Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Which got me thinking about how we read the Bible. (Could Google be changing the way I interact with the word of God?) We need deep reading skills if we are going to wrestle with the text and allow it to disturb us. And as I said in the Demas sermons, if we don’t let it disturb us when we’re feeling fine, how can we expect it to comfort us when we’re feeling awful? When we encounter the word as living and active, it is going to disagree with us sometimes, and speak against what our heart is saying.

One practical way we can immerse ourselves in the word of God is to memorize scripture. “I have stored up your word in my heart,” the psalmist writes, “that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). It struck me in the Atlantic article that “Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would…cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” Now I certainly don’t mean to sound alarmist about the internet—it, like written language, is obviously a wonderful advancement of knowledge. The trick, I suppose, is in maintaining the skills of previous information-eras (memorization, deep reading, text-wrestling, concentration) while we enjoy the new benefits of technology.

"‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.’
And this word is the good news that was preached to you."
1 Peter 1:24-25