Expat Teacher 2.0
It was another wonderful day at the School of Theology at HTB. Our speaker today was Jeremy Begbie and he spoke about the Resurrection. It was a fabulous talk. We touched on a lot, but really focused on 1 Corinthians 15:38-58. The passage deals with the resurrection of believer's bodies. Paul contrasts the natural body (basically all that is you and connected to the sin and corruptable) with the spiritual body (all that is you that is animated by the Holy Spirit).The best news is that we will be physically resurrected with a new body that is fit for a new age, controlled by the Spirit. I hadn't really considered this. I just assumed that a "spiritual" body was sorta-airy-fairy whispy-like. Rather than being dehumanized, we are rehumanized. I wasn't looking forward to it, but this talk rearranged my thoughts on the subject completely. In fact, I thought of an analogy that makes complete sense in my computer geek mind. Let us begin...
Expat Teacher 1.0 was released on March 5, 1976. Expat Teacher was wonderfully designed and admired by all who saw him. However, early on it was clear that Expat Teacher 1.0 had some bugs. Work arounds were used to get past the bugs, but they were still there. About 14 years after the release of Expat Teacher 1.0, some more serious bugs began to show and some would say that Expat Teacher 1.0 began to crash more frequently. Certainly by the 16th year of release, Expat Teacher was all but useless to anyone but himself.
During the 17th year, the Original Programmer made himself known to Expat Teacher 1.0 and Expat Teacher 1.0 accepted the programmer's advice on how he should run. Things have been improving and many of the original bugs have been removed and work around are no longer needed. Unfortunately, Expat Teacher's operating system has become fragmented and obsolete. The more that is asked of Expat Teacher 1.0, the less he is able to add to his already full workload. Now, new bugs appear and sometimes Expat Teacher 1.0 crashes. It isn't pretty, but Expat Teacher 1.0 was looking in the manual and noticed that this wasn't as it should be.
The Original Programmer had an update scheduled. One version, Lamb 2.0, had already been released and was greatly admired. This new update would have all the original functions and functionality of Expat Teacher 1.0, but without the bugs and with additional features. Some of these new features were seen in the Lamb 2.0 like the ability to walk through walls, have wounds, but no pain, transport through both space and time. Expat Teacher 1.0 had some concerns about the new interface planned, because when Lamb 2.0 was released, some people didn't recognize it. Yet, when they did, they fell more in love with Lamb 2.0 than ever before.
Expat Teacher 1.0 was concerned that at the end of his lifecycle, he would be shut down and become just a series of numbers stored on a chip somewhere. This was ok because it appears the alternative is to just get erased completely. However, Expat Teacher 1.0 was glad to see that Lamb 2.0 was actually exactly what Expat Teacher 1.0 should have been if the bugs hadn't started causing problems. Expat Teacher 1.0 wouldn't be decommisioned, but rather recommisioned to do what he was suppose to do from the beginning. Expat Teacher 1.0 took great comfort in that. He committed himself to listening to the Original Programmer until it was time for his upgrade to 2.0 and smiled.
posted by Anonymous @ 12:24 PM
