True reality is not found in the mere visual. “For we walk by faith, not by sight”. Christian imagination enables us to experience hoped-for things as substantial, and things not seen as if they are evidentially present (Hebrews 11:1). Biblical imagination actually prioritises words over images. It focuses on the meaning of words, particularly God’s Words.

To prepare our children for a life that will likely involve vast amounts of time on the internet, we have to warn them about what is addictive and destructive. No one begins a practice and hopes to end up enslaved by it. The nature of addiction is a voluntary surrender to more and more mastery by a pleasure some habit. Therefore, we have to point out the danger before they walk into it.
On the internet, that addiction is the pleasure of novelty. The web offers a non-stop array of links to click, messages to check, apps to open, likes and comments to view. The architecture of the web is built upon our love of the new and the alluring. Films such as The Social Dilemma have well-documented how much of this was designed by those familiar with brain chemistry and psychology. The addiction to social media and to the web in general is no accident. It is a design feature that enriches some as it enslaves others.
In the meantime, not only does an addiction to continual checking of our phones or apps grow, but something is lost. That loss is the brain’s ability to focus without distraction. The habit of needing the dopamine hit for checking email or WhatsApp or some other notification literally trains our brains to want that “relief” after just minutes of concentration. We think we are just “multi-tasking”, but we are actually addicted to distraction.
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We wish to shape people who love others in living, face-to-face relationships. Relationships do not thrive when characterised by exhibitionism, voyeurism, envy, boasting or gossip. Further, people who wish to escape to where they can live vicariously through their ‘digital presence’ are retreating from real relationships.

We are often lost because we do not know our destination. Unless we know where we want to go, we may not know whether we are progressing or regressing.
When it comes to parenting our children in a digital age, it will not be enough to simply react to the latest Disney LGBTQ propaganda, or forbid our children from using a particular app, once we hear of how it is abused. These responses are merely reactive, and do not look ahead to where we wish to go. Furthermore, like frogs in a pot, we may be acclimatising to what is bad for us, and tolerating all kinds of things that are spiritually toxic for our children. Judging technology and its dangers by the current fad or danger is like judging traffic from your car’s dashboard. You will see some dangers, but you need an aerial view to really understand what is going on.
We must begin by asking, what sort of disciples are we trying to make? What is essential to the makeup of a healthy, mature disciple? We can then proceed to ask, how do our technologies help or harm? Let me suggest seven qualities of a worshipping disciple.
1. We wish to shape people who can admire and adore through intense and sustained attention. The Christian life is one in which God is revealed for our admiring attention. But He is revealed to us in ways that require concentration, focus, and the prolonged gaze of the soul. A worshipper understands he presents a sacrifice of praise to God: his costly attention, admiration, focus, and desire.
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Technology is here to stay, and can be harnessed helpfully. We can worship, work, and play as worshippers and image-bearers without a total ban on screens or online access. But such spiritual success will only come with some vigorous cultivation. 

A little over eleven years ago, I published Save Them From Secularism. I wanted to fill a gap in the parenting literature. As I see it, the majority of helpful Christian parenting books deal with the heart, motives, behaviour, correction, communication, and roles. Few deal with a child’s deep view of reality: his imagination. The shaping of the child’s overall picture of reality is the most fundamental shaping force in his life. In the book, I argue that the imagination can be shaped, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.
When I originally wrote, social media was just hitting its stride. There was no such thing as ten year-olds with smart phones and multiple social media accounts. Child YouTube stars hadn’t even been dreamed of. No one yet saw that screens were going to become the new cocaine. But in the online world, ten years is equivalent to a whole generation. It’s occurred to me to add some chapters to the book.
In the last few years, some good literature has come out that helps parents with the dangers. Predictably, the first Christian responses were all about the content: pornography, violence, and false teaching. That remains an important area to guard and shape.
More recently, writers have been dealing with the negative ways people use the internet: time-wasting, pseudo-relationships, addictive scrolling, gossip, and the negative traits that come out in people: envy, boasting, narcissism, lust, voyeurism, ungodly speech hiding behind anonymity, and covetousness.
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God exists in three ways simultaneously. If His existence comprehends past, present and future simultaneously, God is able to exist in ways that seem paradoxical to us. If this is true of time; it may be equally true of personhood.

“The Trinity is in the Old Testament present but concealed; The Trinity is in the New Testament present and revealed.” True enough, and equally true of how much the covenant name of God reveals of the Trinity in the respective Testaments.
When Moses first learns God’s name, there is something implicit in the conversation that implies threeness. Having heard God announce that He is Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh—I AM THAT I AM—the announcement of God’s name with the Hebrew consonants YHVH would have made Moses recognise that God’s name had to do with existence and being, and yet it was a new Hebrew word. God does not simply call Himself Ehyeh (I AM). Instead, God gives Moses a new Hebrew word that appears to be a concatenation of syllables from three other words: Yihyeh—He will be; Hoveh—He was; Hayah—He is. Moses would have heard in the word a strange future/past/present participle mixture. All three Hebrew tenses or aspects combine into one name. God is: in the future, the past, and the present.
This was implicit and concealed in the Hebrew name. But when the beloved disciple, John, writes the New Testament book of Revelation, he is happy to bring his Hebrew knowledge of the Name to his Greek readers. Instead of merely transliterating the name into a Greek form, something like “Ieova”, John translates the name altogether.
“Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come”Revelation 1:4
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God is immutable because time-space does not act upon God. God is not a mere participant in the cosmos, allowing events to form or shape Him. He is not passive: world history does not imprint itself on Him and change Him. This is what is meant by God’s impassibility. It is not that God has no affections. It is that God is not a passenger in the train-car of time, reacting to what life throws at Him. Instead, all of cosmic history is encompassed in the being of God, and all of God’s responses to all events are in His eternal Now. I AM THAT I AM.

The covenant name of God communicates profound depth with a two-word simplicity: I AM. The hallowed Name of God contains a wealth of truth, if we will stop to peer into its depths, and not merely notice its surface.
I AM THAT I AM reveals a God who is immutable: unchanging and unchangeable. To say I AM THAT I AM is to say, I WILL ALWAYS BE WHAT I AM, or I AM ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE, or even I AM WHAT I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. God has never, can never, and will never change, in the slightest degree. “For I am the LORD, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6)
Change belongs to finite beings. Our finitude means we are capable of growth or diminution. We can improve, or decline. We can develop or decay. We are not what we will be. We are not what we were. We can never say, I am what I will be, or I am what I have always been. We retain a sense of continuing identity across time, but we change continually.
Change also belongs to finite beings who experience time sequentially. For us, time is a stream of events coming to us from the future and then receding into the past. Each moment of time changes us in slight ways: we age, we learn, we react. Each moment is new and unknown to us until it arrives.
Finitude and sequential time are not part of God’s existence. God is unchanging because His being is infinite in all perfections. Were God able to grow, learn, or improve, it would imply that His being still fell short of infinite perfection, however little. Were God able to suffer, forget, or be weary, it would imply His being could experience decay or regression from perfection. But to move towards or away from perfection is to change, and God cannot and does not change.
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God in Himself can be known only by Himself. He is different from us, not as an archangel is different from us – by some finite distance of hierarchical complexity. No, He is infinitely removed from us when it comes to what He is. He is what He is. This distance is also called the transcendence of God. What may be known of God by creatures, and what can be understood by analogy is the immanence of God. His transcendence is the infinite gap between Creator and creature, in essence and nature. “He had a name written that no one knew except Himself.” (Revelation 19:12)

When God declares “I AM THAT I AM”, He is explaining to us, as best as human language can communicate, what He is.
Philosophy, and specifically that branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, studies the nature of reality. It breaks things down into their component parts, hoping to reach the final essence that makes up the substance of things – be they atoms, protons and electrons, quarks, or according to one branch of science, strings of energy. Similarly, metaphysics classifies things by relating them to things more general or specific: genus and species. A dining-room chair is a species of chairs, which is a species of seating apparatus, which is a species of devices, and so on. Eventually we reach an abstract, general genus of “created objects” or “things”. Philosophy does this kind of exercise to know what things are.
God is not a species of some more general category, “godlike beings”. Nor are there species of God: sub-gods, demigods, emanations of God. God cannot be abstracted or specialised into something else. He is what He is. Similarly, God cannot be broken down or divided up into more basic elements that will explain the nature or substance of God. As we have seen, God is simple, and not composed. Metaphysics can do its work on the created order. But when it comes to God, it will eventually bend back on itself into circularity. What is God? God is what God is. I AM THAT I AM.
God is not being deliberately evasive or coy, nor is He obfuscating, when He calls Himself I AM THAT I AM. God cannot explain what He is with reference to something He has made.
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Every moment in the past, present and future is known, seen and experienced fully by God. No moment in time becomes remote for God. No moment in time is only probable or possible. No moment in time is anticipated or hoped for. For God, past, present, future have full and equal existence. All of time is an eternal Now for God.

“I AM THAT I AM” communicates an eternal timelessness inconceivable to human experience. We exist in a fractional, fleeting, unquantifiable moment that we call “now”. But “now” becomes past as quickly as it arrived from the future. Most of our lives, considered from the point of view of experience, is either past or future. Memory and anticipation is our concept of ourselves and the world. The present moment is an almost non-existent thing.
For God, the situation is exactly opposite. I AM THAT I AM says, all moments are present for God. Every moment in the past, present and future is known, seen and experienced fully by God. No moment in time becomes remote for God. No moment in time is only probable or possible. No moment in time is anticipated or hoped for. For God, past, present, future have full and equal existence. All of time is an eternal Now for God.
Several other terms or titles communicate this idea.
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It is fitting that the God of all being should use the simplest expression in human language to communicate: I AM. I exist. I am Reality. All that is is of Me. In fact, a thoughtful meditation on this simplest of expressions, I AM, reveals much of who this God is. We may find, that the attributes of aseity, eternality, immutability, simplicity, trinity and others are at least implicitly revealed in the meaning of the Sacred Name.

No one knows how to pronounce the covenant name of God. The form used by the majority of evangelicals today, “Yahweh”, is by no means certain, for a number of reasons. People can make their scholarly guesses, but knowing how ancient Israel pronounced the name is likely impossible, unless some archaeological find settles the debate. In fact, the disagreement or agnosticism on the exact Hebrew pronunciation is probably a good thing. Fixation on the sound of a name distracts us from the meaning of the name. It is the meaning of God’s name that is meant to be the centre of our meditations.
English-speakers have become used to naming their children with names borrowed from other languages. They like the sound of the names John, Michael, Ruth, Jennifer, or Richard, but have to look up their meanings. Many other languages still name their children with words native to their languages, words like Love, Blessing, God’s Gift, Leader, Wisdom, and so on. English-speakers still have a few names like this (Prudence, Rose, Christian), but most are words foreign to our ears. Perhaps this is one reason why we become fixated on whether God’s name sounds like Yehovah, Yahweh, Yahuwah, or some other form, instead of thinking deeply on the meaning of His name.
Biblically speaking, names were often given to summarise a person: his or her character, or nature, or destiny.
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The chaos of modern life calls all of us to simplify where we can. Often, the mantra “less is more” is really true in all kinds of areas. But it is a great mistake to think that spiritual life will thrive by challenging your faith less than its current ability. That kind of approach is not mere moderation; it is a softness and ease-seeking that fails to stir the waters of your Christian life.

Dear Belinda,
You’ve asked me why I think you remain spiritually stagnant, since your life evidences regular, committed service for Christ. I think the answer has to do with the very idea of stagnation.
We speak of water becoming stagnant when it has been left standing for too long, and begins to breed bacteria and fungi. Movement and aeration are essential to keep water healthy. It is not without reason that several Levitical laws required running water for cleansing.
This fact from creation is a helpful analogy for spiritual health. The Christian life requires movement and deliberate expansion to be healthy. Mere stasis, mere maintenance, mere repetition can lead to a spiritual dullness and deepening apathy.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not calling for a crisis commitment every Sunday of your life. You do not need to re-commit your life to the Lord every moment you remember to. The Christian life is not meant to be a series of altar-call surrenders, one after the other.
Further, I am a big fan of regular, plodding spiritual disciplines. We grow most when we make incremental progress by small and steady steps of obedience every day. To have routines, rhythms, liturgies, and traditions is not, in itself, an enemy of spiritual growth. A well-ordered Christian life is not to be compared with stagnant water.
Spiritual stagnation, however, is a real threat when any Christian refuses to allow God-given movement and expansion of her spiritual responsibilities and insists on protecting the status quo. This usually takes the form of becoming content and complacent with one’s current level of knowledge, commitment or service for Christ, and scaling back on spiritual responsibilities.
Often enough, a young Christian is aware of the need to accumulate knowledge and understanding. So, the young believer reads voraciously, attends every sermon, listens eagerly to spiritual conversations. He instinctively understands the need to develop his spiritual muscles and volunteers for positions of service.
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Plenty of Christians have found deeply satisfying and intellectually sophisticated answers to questions that troubled them. But they always found them because they were walking with God at the time, moving in His direction, obeying what they already knew, while waiting on Him to teach them further. The man refusing to budge until he gets answers is really the child with a folded-arms sulky posture: demanding God give an account to him of the secrets of the universe or he’ll refuse to come along. The book of Job answers the man demanding explanations by saying that the answers are a lot more than you could comprehend. Trust and submit to what you do understand, and do not presume that you could squeeze the ocean of God’s ways into the the 2 litre bottle of your own intellect.

Dear Jeremy,
It’s always enjoyable to spend time discussing theology with someone like you. You have a very fertile imagination and a robust logic, which combine for stimulating conversation.
Your strength is also your Achilles heel. It is your intellectual aptitude that is your enemy when it comes to the things of faith. You are one of those Christians who gets “stuck in his head”, and hopes to think his way out of the problem. When he can’t, he assumes the only explanation must be that Christianity is faulty (for if it were not, his brilliance would have solved the mental conundrum, right?).
We call this the paralysis of analysis: the Christian who becomes immobile in his devotion, commitment, or even Christian relationships, because he has to “solve” the problem in his mind first. The problem can be of many kinds: how does Christian growth happen, how does prayer really work, how does God’s sovereignty correspond with human choice, how does God’s foreknowledge work with human sinfulness, why does evil exist in a world made by God, why are there so many religions, what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel, could there really be an eternal hell, or many other questions.
Now most thinking Christians face and tackle these questions in some form and at some point in their lives. The difference between them and you is that other Christians integrate these questions into the broader experience of being a Christian. The Christian experience is more than a mental, cerebral experience of problem-solving: it is a life of loving, obeying, serving, and worshipping. In your case, however, these questions become like errors in an equation that must be solved before proceeding one step further. You become fixated on them, chase them around and around, and become quite despondent if you are unable to resolve them in your head.
What you cannot see is that it is quite arrogant to reduce the Christian life, and indeed all of life, into mental events taking place inside your head. While you chase these questions as if all of life depended on it, there are all kinds needs around you: people needing to be loved, served, and helped. And you cannot see that while you magnify these questions into all-consuming dilemmas, you are being quite lazy, neglectful, and irresponsible in other areas.
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