Proverbs 27:20: The Eyes of Mankind

Introduction:

We are living in the information age, and the tools of the information age are primarily our computers, our tablets and our phones. But it is felt across the board that things are getting out of hand. One statistic says the people spend about 90 minutes a day on their phones, this is about 23 days a year and about 3.9 years of your life spent on your phone. One study reckons that cell phone users average touching their phones 2617 times a day, and the worst would be about 5400 times. We are becoming slaves to our devices. As a result of this growing problem companies and governments are beginning to take action. France has just enacted a nationwide ban on phone use in schools. Since cell phones are so often involved in causing car accidents, the state of Georgia in America has ruled that you may only touch your device while parked. The big tech companies are now designing system level tools that monitor and restrict screen time. This is because of the increasing complaints that people and especially the children are experiencing negative effects and are seeking solutions to this problem. As a result of this there is a growing discussion on who is to blame, is the consumer responsible, should technology like cigarettes come with warnings on it?

This however is only the tip of an iceberg that the bible has spoken about for thousands of years. Read with me Proverbs 27:20, ‘Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man.’ The world of the dead and the eyes of man are the same, there is always room for more. In all the talk of who is to blame for the excess and the destructive effects we know that the problem runs deeper and lies within us. We are broken in sin, we who have hearts that have been made to be satisfied by God alone have an endless aching hunger within us because we are alienated from God. We have experienced the effects of sin and have a sinful nature that gladly redirects our hunger for God towards all sorts of other things, and it is often through the eyes that we are enslaved and drawn away from God. So as we explore this verse together we want to consider the psychoanalysis of our hearts from a biblical perspective and how it talks about the eyes as the windows of the soul. And secondly, we want to look at gating the eyes and how as Christians we have to negotiate life with this type of weakness.

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