It's not been a good week for Facebook – but then it's
not been a good week for any of us, unless coming to
understand the enormous scale of its influence is a
good thing. It turns out that Facebook has been collecting
extraordinary amounts of data about us and this data
has been used to influence everything from what we
buy to how we vote. Facebook – like other mega-
tech companies – has become a law to itself,
permeating every layer of our lives, knowing more about us than we know about ourselves. And that
knowledge is being used to shape our behaviour by
companies like Cambridge Analytica, now in the full
glare of media and government scrutiny after it was
found to be harvesting and selling data without
consent. Reuters Facebook is said to know more about us than we
know about ourselves. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, after some days
of paralysed silence, has said he's sorry and that
what's happened is 'clearly a mistake'. But for many
observers it just shows how powerful Facebook,
Google and their ilk actually are. The BBC quotes advertising boss David Kershaw, who describes them
as an 'oligopoly' – not quite a monopoly, but a state in
which a very few companies hold enormous power. And it's power that prompts the headline. The book of
Revelation is not really about future events. It's a
critique of the present and insofar as it is concerned
with the future, it is a warning: this is what life under
an all-powerful Roman state is like for Christians now,
in the 1<sup>st century, and this is what it's going to be like for you, the readers of 2,000 years later, as
well. The power of the state in Revelation is
characterised as a dragon, a beast; it is Babylon. You
cannot trust it. It will seek to gather everyone into its
grip, marking them with its sign on the forehead or
the hand. If you don't resist it and refuse it, you'll be judged along with all the other apostates who put the
world before Christ. At this point, someone's saying: Facebook, though,
really? Cat videos? But that's the point: we now know
that there's a dark side to it. It feeds us what it thinks
we want to see. It reinforces our prejudices, and
implants a few more. It subtly, cleverly makes us
think in different ways. Donald Trump becomes president of the United States. Britain votes to leave
the EU. Putin is re-elected yet again. Those cat videos are the sweet and furry face of
power. That's why #deletefacebook is trending on Twitter –
ironically, another giant data harvester. And that irony indicates just how complicated this
whole thing is. It's all very well thinking we can
unplug ourselves from the world – and yes, we can
delete Facebook if we want and try to reduce our
online presence as far as we can. But aside from the
practical difficulties of this – the online world is increasingly the real world in which we have to live –
it doesn't really solve the problem, because we can
only distance ourselves so far. Saying it's nothing to
do with us because we aren't on Facebook becomes
a form of virtue signalling, like refusing to eat
avocados or peanut butter: it doesn't actually make any difference. And that's the problem with these huge anti-Christ
powers in general – like the state, whichever state it
is, or an unaccountable company or institution, or any
of the principalities and powers that exercise such
control over us while we hardly realise it. It is
desperately hard to be different, to stand up and say, 'I do not accept this.' We have to live in the world, but
we struggle not to be of the world. Resistance, though, begins when we recognise our
enemy. The state, whether it's the British state with
established religion embedded deep in its structure
or the American state with 'In God We Trust' on its
banknotes, is not the Kingdom of God. It's Babylon. Those Facebook cats? They are dragons. Resisting Babylon involves keeping ourselves, as far
as possible, unstained by the world (James 1:27). This
requires constant vigilance, a monitoring of what we
see and what we're told, a refusal to take anything
for granted, a watchful testing of culture and beliefs
against the standard of the gospel. It's hard. Or, as we might say: 'This calls for
endurance on the part of God's people, those who
obey God's commandments and are faithful to
Jesus' (Revelation 14:1