jacques ellul

here's an insightful quote i found, and i believe it's worth sharing.

"Obviously when man has somewhere to turn, he does not turn to God and God does not come to him. As long as man can invent hopes and methods, he naturally suffers from the pretension that he can solve his own problems. He invents technical instruments, the state, society, money, and science. He also invents idols, magic, philosophy, spiritualism, and all these things can give him hope in himself that he can direct his own life and control his destiny. They all cause him to turn his back on God. As long as there is a glimmer of confidence in these means, man prefers to stake his life on them rather than handing it over to God. When the sailors tried to save the ship by their nautical skill, Jonah slept. All these aids had to be shattered, all solutions blocked, and man's possibilities hopelessly outclassed by the power of the challenge, to cause Jonah to return to God. Only when man has lost the vast apparatus of civilization, in personal response, does man remember God.

When man relies on these instruments, those who pay regard to vain idols, when he stakes his life on state or money, he does not know personal mercy. For these idols which help him to live are without mercy. They can indeed give a great deal to man. They can solve his problems – they can grant him happiness, power, even virtue and good. But they cannot give him the very thing he needs: mercy.

For these idols have no heart. No relation of love can be set up within them, only relations of possession. If one loves, the other possesses. The man who loves money or the state is not loved by them – he is owned. That is why so many fundamental problems of man cannot be solved by these powers, for man has a definitive need of one thing, to be loved, which also means to be pardoned and lifted above himself. None of these idols (least of all Eros love) can do this for him. But man does not know this, or hear it, until he has learned the emptiness of idols, until he has been disillusioned, until in truth he finds himself naked and without mercy, until he begs in an empty world for the mercy which cannot come to him from the world. To this stripped man God responds as he does to Jonah, and Jonah learns where mercy is to be had, and Who can give it to him, and he gets it because for once in his life he turns to the One who is, in fact, merciful."