In 1920, a Czechoslovakian author named Karel Capek wrote the play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. In the play, scientists created Robots to do work for humans. Eventually, the robots become so common place in this future society that they take the place of humans in nearly every occupation. But, eventually, the robots revolt. They kill all the humans. In the end, human kind is extinct, and robots figure out to reproduce and they repopulate the world.

That was the first time the word “Robots” had ever been used. It comes from the ancient Czech word “Robota” which means “slave” or “forced labor”.

Since Capek’s play, we’ve had no shortage of stories and movies about robots overtaking humans. I grew up watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, The Matrix. In all those movies, it was humans vs. robots. Dave vs. Hal, John & Sarah Connor vs The T-1000, Neo vs the Matrix. They were all cautionary tales, warning us that if we became too dependent on technology, it would turn against us.

Those seemed like visions into some distant apocalyptic future, almost laughable. But I can assure you, this is not science fiction. In fact, if you want to know who the robots truly are, all you have to do is take a look a around.

Go to the park, you know what you’ll see? I guarantee it. You’ll see parents pushing kids in swings, while they stare into their phones. You’ll see kids at the top of a slide saying, “Mommy, Daddy, watch me!” and on a bench down below you’ll hear “Just a second honey, let me just finish this text.”

Go to get your oil changed or haircut or visit the Doctor. You’ll see waiting rooms filled with people who barely acknowledge each others existence as they look down at their devices because, well what else am I supposed to do here?

Go to dinner with friends, see how long it takes for someone to mindlessly check their email. Take a look at your text conversations with people you love. Just read over a few threads. Then, ask yourself, “Do I ever have conversations like this face to face?” Look at your Facebook posts. Do you talk to people like that in real life? When is the last time you had a conversation with someone without showing them a Youtube video or telling them about a post you read about someone else’s life.

Or here’s the real test. Turn your phone off. Put it away. Then see how long it takes you to start twitching. How long before you mindlessly walk back to it and check, facebook, or instagram, or ESPN, or all three?

See, we created all this technology to serve us, to help us, to be our forced labor, our “Robota”. To help us get control of our busy lives. But the technology has only made us busier. It’s turned every moment of silence and reflection into an opportunity to return an email, or to get to the next level of a video game.

While we have more ways to connect with people, we are losing the ability to do so without the help of a machine. Humans are quickly becoming the slaves to our own creations. We are becoming the robots. As technology becomes more human, humans are becoming more like technology.

Our phones, our Facebook, our apps are telling us what to do and when to do it, and we’re simply looking back and saying “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.”

This series of messages over the next 8 weeks is not a revolt against technology. I’m not going to ask you to move into the woods and go off the grid, because I don’t think that’s the answer. I’m not even going to tell you technology is bad. What we’re going to talk about for the next 8 weeks is Robota. Slavery. The devaluing of humans as we become slaves to something we think will free us, and this isn’t a slavery that is being imposed on us against our will, it is one we are readily accepting as some brave new world.

The problem is not my iPhone.The problem is I. We. Me. Us.

We’re going to talk about the ways we are giving ourselves over to the slavery of technology in the way we think, the way we communicate, the way we date and marry and approach sex. I’m going to show you the way we are selling our kids out in our parenting, and what we’re doing to ourselves at work, at rest, and at play, and then, I’m going to show you what salvation looks like. Because as ugly as slavery is, freedom is that much sweeter. Or as the Apostle Paul put it...“Where sin increased, grace has increased all the more.”

There’s hope for us humans but before we see that hope, we need to define exactly what a human is. That’s what we’re going to do today.

And by the way, if I happen to mysteriously disappear before we meet back here next week, rest assured, the T-1000 found me and Arnold Schwarzenegger was too old to protect me.

Lets go.

Psalm 8.

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 14:1-3

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
there is none who does good.
The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand,

who seek after God.
They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good,
not even one.

These two Psalms, both written by King David, both regarded as divinely inspired Scripture both describe the nature of humanity, but have you ever heard anything so contradictory? I mean, are we the crown glory of creation, or the corrupt scum of the earth?

What does it mean to be human? In a very real sense, both of these are correct. But I want to show you today, that in our pursuit of technology, we are always ignoring one of these human realities and when we do, we lose our humanity altogether.

1) Without the image of God, we’re all just machines.

It’s no coincidence that I began this series on the weekend we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There would be no Civil Rights movement without Psalm 8. At the core of all of Dr. King’s actions, were his beliefs that man is the crown glory of God’s creation. That every human has inherent value based simply on the truth that God created us to look and act like him.

This is called the Image of God. In fact, anywhere in history where you find oppression, genocide, or slavery, you can also find someone denying the image of God in humans. African slaves in 18th & 19th century America were said to be 3/5 of a human. The Nazi party convinced thousands of people that Jews were not really human, therefore, it was perfectly acceptable to kill them. But we don’t get to choose who is and isn’t valuable. God does that.

Take a look at the way this Psalm flows. It starts with God, which is where our definition of humanity should always start, because the creator defines his creation. Then David writes, “When I look at everything you have created, I have such a feeling of insignificance, of smallness” Kind of like standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. He says, how can you possibly be mindful of man when we are such a tiny part of this massive creation.

But in these next verses he affirms that its actually true. That God has made humans the most valuable part of his creation. That we are crowned with glory and honor. That he has given us a job, work, See that, dominion? You know what that means? It means to rule.

In other words, humans are not created to be slaves, to be robots, but part of our glory and honor that we get from God is that we are to care for and rule over creation. We are to be creative, caring, and thoughtful about all of God’s creation. We are supposed to image God in the way he cares for us. And that’s why this Psalm ends the same way it begins. By giving glory to God.

That’s what humanity is here to do. We come from the creative glory of God and as image bearers of God, we reflect that glory back to God, like a mirror reflects the light, so that all of us, when we look at each other as image bearers, join with David in saying O LORD our Lord how majestic is your name.

Let me show you what this means for humans. It means you are significant simply because you are created in God’s image.

This weekend is the anniversary weekend of Roe vs. Wade. Now listen, wherever you fall on that issue, you cannot argue that the fundamental judgment behind making abortion legal is denying that the child inside of that womb is human. Denying that he or she is a person. An image bearer of God. When you make that judgment, you are saying that you believe being a human is based on production. Can you make a decision, a choice? Can you perform a task?

But humanity is not based on that. It’s based on a nature. An imprint given by God. The idea of defining humanity by our ability to produce, is exactly the way the Nazi’s defined humanity. Can you do something for me?

It is to look at humanity and treat them like robots. Can you do something to serve the rest of us yet? No. Then you aren’t a person.By the same token, we’d be killing anyone who we felt could no longer contribute to society or to our personal need. Mentally handicapped, elderly, by that definition of a human you cease to be a human as soon as you can’t do something. But you can’t even live that way.

Think for a minute about the alternative to defining yourself in the image of God. What if you took the secular viewpoint? What if you said, “You know, there is no god, We’re all just machines. Just brains with firing neurons. There is nothing besides us and what we see here. There is only natural. Nothing super natural.”

This means you are probably living in a massive contradiction. Let me show you. If you believe you are an accident, with no created purpose, no weight, no inherent value, no glory, hat humans are just a genetic code, a simple process of some natural selection; your thoughts aren’t really thoughts, and your feelings aren’t really feelings. They are just pulses of electricity in your brain. That means you and I don’t matter, we can’t. We’re all accidents. and there is no reason any of us should respect the other.

In fact, all of the scientists and philosophers who have gone down this road will tell you that. Listen to MIT professor Rodney Brooks in his book “Flesh & Machines” he calls humans a “big bag of skin, full of biomolecules”.- Finding Truth- Sherry Turkle pg 164

But look what Brooks says about his own children.

“When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself...see that they are machines. That is not how I treat them...I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis” - Rodney Brookes, Flesh and Machines.

That MIT professor cannot live consistently with his views. He has to live “AS IF” Psalm 8 is true. He is suppressing the truth that his heart knows. He loves his daughter because he knows the human soul longs to love, and to be loved, without condition. Without having to perform some task.

See, without Psalm 8, without the image of God, humanity loses value. We become machines. But if Psalm 8 is true, then everyone, no matter how much money they make, or what disease has ravaged their body, or what political or religious views they have, born and unborn, EVERYONE is valuable.

Humans, because we are created in the image of God are more valuable than civilizations, more valuable than art or literature, or political structures. We are more valuable than culture, more valuable than movies or games, we are more valuable than computers and phones and apps and information we are more valuable than anything we create and anything else that God created.

But once you lose the image of God, once you throw it away, you will always look for an image. You’ll have to have another way to create value for humans. Without believing you have God’s image, you’ll start looking to project your own and that’s exactly where technology is showing all of our cards.

2) Slavery is projecting your own image instead of God’s.

As beautiful as Psalm 8 is, Psalm 14 is just as dark. Remember, the word robot means “forced labor”. I don’t think there is a better way to describe sin than that. Forced Labor. You probably remember one of Jesus’ most quoted statements “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” But did you know that when he said that he was talking about slavery. Take a look at what he says in context in John 8:31-34.

He says “if you abide in my word, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” In other words, if you receive your meaning, your purpose, if you receive the definition of your humanity from what I say about you, you will be free. Then the Jews that were listening to him said, “What are you talking about we aren’t slaves? We do what we want to do, we’re free!”

And Jesus says, look, you might think you’re free, but if you sin. If you define yourself by anything other that what God says you are, if you project an image of yourself that is anything other than the image of God, you will become a slave to keeping up that image.

That’s what sin is. You sin not to make God the image you project, but to come up with another meaning for your life.

It's the difference in being a mirror and lightbulb. See a mirror reflects light, it doesn’t produce light. But a lightbulb is a source. When you reject God and what he says is the meaning of your life, to reflect him, you will try to create your own light, your own meaning and when you do that, you will always be a slave to that meaning.

Let’s say you decide to build your identity, your meaning, your purpose around being a good parent. This is the new image you want to project. You will become a slave to being a good parent. Being a good parent becomes the god you serve. Here’s what that slavery look like.

Your children will become the center of your universe. You’ll go to work to make sure they make the best grades, to get into the best schools. You’ll push them to be athletes, doctors, scientists, or whatever you think they should be. You’ll pour yourself out to make sure they make the choices you think they should make, and you’ll do everything you can to teach them what it means to be a good citizen. When they succeed, you might praise them, but when they fail, you’ll nail them to the wall. But you don’t really care about your kids, you are under slavery because you’ve made being a good parent the light of your life.

Here’s the crazy thing. From the outside it looks like you are doing good things! It looks like you are helping your kids. But you’re not. You are using your kids to find your purpose. And you will end up crushing them in the process.

See, if they grow up to become someone you don’t think they should be, You’ll fall into depression. You’ll even disown a relationship with them, because you feel like a failure. You’ll lose your self-worth, because your self-worth wasn’t tied up in GOD’s worth, but in your ability to perform a task, raising children.

That’s why in Psalm 14, David said, “No one does good” because even the good things we do are tainted by us trying to be god ourselves. Or maybe you decide to define who you are by how you feel about yourself. So you self-validate.

Here’s the way the slavery of self-validation works. You start out by thinking, “I don’t need God or anybody else to tell me who I am. I’m a good person because I’m me. I’m sweet, kind, thoughtful, I’m a nice guy.” So you’ll become a robot to that idea. A slave. You’ll want to prove to yourself that you are who you say you are. And as soon as someone says your not. You’ll go on the defense. And if enough people say you aren’t a good person, who is smart, or sweet or kind or thoughtful, you’ll fall into a depression. You’ll begin to fall apart.

See, technology isn’t turning us into robots, as much as it is helping us to project the image that we worship. Think about it. Never before in the history of the planet, we have technology that allows the average person to not only advertise the meaning we’ve chosen for ourselves but also to have it validated.

Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs, each of those have ways that other people can like, share, retweet, and quote us. We have so many ways to say to the world, “This is who I say I am, so what do you guys think?”

If I derive my meaning from being a good parent, I’ll use social media to show people that’s what gives me meaning, and I’ll wait on pins and needles to see if you agree that I’m a good parent.

If I derive my meaning from how I feel about myself, I’ll post something on Facebook that says “I’m awesome and I don’t care what anybody thinks!” only to wait for those notifications to show up to let me know what people think about me not caring what anybody else thinks.

See, You aren’t tethered to your phone because it's a cool toy. You are tethered to your phone, constantly checking it, because every time you get a text, or a comment, or a like, every time you hear that little ding and feel that little vibration, you know there is a chance that somebody is telling you what you want to hear. They are telling you that you are valuable for the reason you want to be valuable.

You are wanted. You are loved. Someone cares about you. That’s why keep your phone close, because your phone doesn’t just help you connect to people, it’s your connection to your god.

That’s why David after writing about humans as the crown glory of God’s creation, comes back in Psalm 14:1 and says “The fool says in his heart there is no god.” Did you notice he doesn’t say, the fool says in his mind there is no god. He says the heart. He’s not talking about an atheist, necessarily. He’s talking about people that very well could believe God exists, but they still have a will to have someone else tell validate their godhood. And then he throws all of us in that category.

“We’re all corrupt” No one does good! Everyone sins. Everyone is rebelling against their created purpose and making up new meanings for ourselves. We are all like a piece of rusted metal, something that was once strong, now that is dis-integrating. Falling apart. And it’s all because we’ve bought the lie that we can be our own gods, defining our own meaning, instead of choosing to be the mirrors we were created to be, reflecting God’s glory, we’ve decided to create our own light.

And so we’re locked in a cycle of slavery: perform, perform, perform. Prove that you’re worth something. Project your image. Get it on video. Take a picture. Write a blog. Then ask the world to leave a comment.

You ever gotten angry because you aren’t getting enough likes on a Facebook post or Instagram picture? That means there’s a good chance you are trying to create your own meaning and that means you’re already a robot. A slave.

It seems silly to tie your worth up in a little blue thumbs up doesn’t it? But it runs deeper. It’s your longing to be valuable. To be significant. I’m telling you, God’s telling you, you already are.

Over the next several weeks we’re going to talk more deeply and specifically about how your slavery shows itself through technology but before we go today, I want to give you the way to freedom.

3) Jesus delivers robots and makes them human.

The very first denial of the image of God, came just after creation. In the garden, Adam and Ever were tempted to believe that the meaning God gave them would never satisfy them. So, they took a bite of the fruit. They bought the lie that another image would be better than God’s image, and they became slaves to death.

Once sin entered the world through humans re-defining themselves, all of creation began to fall apart. Everything began to come undone. Life turned to death. Creation was subject to decay, corruption, and man was cursed with forced labor that produced little results.

See, you were created to live forever. As a human, death is unnatural. And all of the projections of ourselves, all the images we upload to Instagram and Facebook, is our attempt to fight back death. It’s our attempt to be eternal, to leave a legacy. It's the God-given human longing you have for eternity, and you know this deep down you know, it’s not working.

But we’ve got just enough distractions in our lives to keep us from thinking about that for very long. Email, social media, movies, music, there’s always another text to read, another game to play, but you’re just avoiding death.

We all have these moments where you realize you’re falling apart. That you are more corrupt than you are crowned with glory. I call them Mirror Moments. Early morning after you did something terrible the night before. Late at night when you’re alone. You stare into your bathroom mirror and say, “What am I doing?” “Who am I”? That’s the moment you are smelling the stench of death. That’s the moment you are realizing you are made for more than being a good parent, a good student, a good employer or an athlete or whatever you’ve chosen as your image. It’s the moment you realize you can’t even live up to your own image, much less God’s, you’re just running from death.

It's the moment you realize you’re falling apart, inside and out, and no matter what angle you hold the camera for the selfie, you feel less than human. Corrupt.

In that moment, I’m asking you to put away the phone, don’t check the email, don’t turn on the television, don’t scroll through the pictures of the life you wish you had, instead, sit in that moment, because it’s God calling you to seek after him, so pick up the Word of God and read it.

In Hebrews 2, the author quotes Psalm 8. And then he says, my paraphrase, “even though you are supposed to be valuable, you feel like death. You feel worthless. You feel like Psalm 14, not like Psalm 8.” He says, the world is supposed to be under his control, but everything is falling apart.

But then he says, look at Jesus, God himself who came down, who became human, and his glory was crowned with thorns on a cross.

God himself, the majestic LORD of Psalm 8, descended into our Psalm 14 corruption, that he would taste our death, he would be subject to our falling apart. So that by dying for us, he will put us back together. By being torn apart for us, he would do away with the fear of death that forces us to work for our love.

Jesus doesn’t require you to prove yourself. There is no “forced labor” with Jesus. You are already worth something to him, not because you can produce, not because you can do something, simply because you’re human.

Stop distracting yourself from the stench of death in your life. Your soul is so thirsty for the unconditional love of God. I can prove it to you on your Facebook page. But you won’t find the validation your looking for there. You can only find it in Jesus. In Jesus you already have it. He’s taken your Psalm 14 away from you on the cross, to give you back his Psalm 8 glory. In him you are a new creation, and its not as a result of your work, but his. You are HIS WORKMANSHIP.

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, in Jesus Christ, I’m free at last.” He’s ready to make you human again. Do you trust him?