CRITICISM HAS OVERSHADOWED OUR SHARED PORTRAIT of the Amish for generations. The Great Commission commands us to go throughout the entire world preaching the Gospel. This, their Christian neighbor demands, the Amish have willingly failed at—as if the bulk of Christianity has made better use of the call. And yet it can be argued that the Amish didn’t forsake us. Rather, they held fast to what is true, and by their own consent, the world moved on without them. For this transgression against man’s self-declared renaissance in science, literature, and the arts they are rarely forgiven. It should be promptly noted that the Amish, originating from the Swiss Anabaptists and, being the very last vestige of the Great Reformation—in a way; historically hold to the literal promises of God’s Testimony. Ask an Amish gentleman about the shape of creation and he’ll likely tell you the Earth is flat.

It is a strange expectation that the Amish should exchange the very lifestyle which has satisfied mankind since the beginning of history for a technological imprisonment overshadowed by the beast government of John’s Revelation, thereby causing them by association to be indebted to it. And it lies. Concerning the shape of the Earth, our government lies to each and every one of us. This is no secret to the Amish. They have every reason to separate the authority of their church from the state, but none to doubt God’s Testimony, or His enduring goodness. Yet they are criticized to no end for dismissing any notion that our current technological renaissance is a “gift from God,” while their Christian accusers rarely exhibit the slightest understanding as to why they choose simplistic sovereignty over a complex spider web of technological enslavement. People everywhere have allowed the beast to convince them that unpractical scientific theory outweighs their better sensory judgement and they live on a resulting planet. The Amish know better.

Like discarded fashion, for those of us who have attempted to keep up with the trending spin of the globe, there is seemingly always a new technological era to be dressed in. The Amish decided over a century ago against electrical housewares, though now we, not quite unlike the Amish before us, find ourselves having to face another unparalleled decision in human history. Will we speak our mind and plug our brain into the machine?

If Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has it his way, we are expected to do just that. His latest start-up company, Neuralink, is centered on creating brain-computer interface and neuro lace devices that can be implanted within our skull—inserted, he says, through the jugular vein—all in an effort to merge humans with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence.

Such an endeavor is being advertised as our next stage of evolution. And if we don’t do it—if we choose not to evolve beyond the image which God has created us in, then artificial intelligence promises to sail right past us on the food chain. To this notion Musk says, “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer, a third digital layer that could work well and symbiotically with the rest of your body.”

“We are currently bandwidth limited,” he adds. “We have a digital, tertiary-self in the form of our e-mail capabilities like computers, phones, applications—we are effectively superhuman, but we are extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and the tertiary digital form of yourself.”

Another words, “If we can create a high-bandwidth neural interface with your digital self, then you’re no longer a house cat.”

The ability to hack the brain has been a subject of futurism and cyberpunk science-fiction for decades, including “Ghost in the Shell” and “The Matrix.” Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of the online payments company Braintree, which he sold to PayPal in 2013 for $800 million, invested $100 million from that sell-off into a startup company called Kernel, all in hopes of bringing film fiction to reality. With his team of committed neuroscientists and software engineers, Johnson plans to “enhance human cognition” through direct interface with computing devices by upgrading our brains. Think faster, smarter, and hardwired.

The dominoes are falling. Facebook has announced its own “brain mouse” for augmented reality. With social media, our brain will function much as our hands would when controlling cursers. Regina Gugan, head of Facebook’s Building 8 control group, said, “What if you could type directly from your brain… with the speed and flexibility of voice and the privacy of text?” In only a few short years people will be writing everything from text messages to novels by thoughts alone—and probably ordering food too. Then again, computers will soon be preforming those tasks anyways—writing bestsellers and ordering our food, that is. As of this writing, developers at Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research have already completed A.I. “chat box” robots which have reportedly conversed in human language and negotiated human trade among each other.

Even DARPA spent $60 million in 2016 developing an implantable neural interface. The project, which is part of former president Barack Obama’s “BRAIN INITIATIVE,” wants a device that can read 1 million neurons simultaneously and stimulate at least 100,000 neurons in the brain. Its implant is expected to be wireless, the size of a nickel, and ready for deployment in only a few years.

The chip is coming at us full speed. Businesses are already requiring it of their employees. It’s being implanted in the hand, just as the Apostle John said it would (Revelation 13:16). And we have very little idea how far this is going to go—how many months, years, or even decades we and our children have left, thirsting and hungering for relief against this coming trans-humanist nightmare, perhaps even succumbing to starvation in the streets, before God finally puts a stop to it. I don’t know about you, but guys like me are going the way of the caveman—and willingly, because I’m not choosing to co-evolve my inner-skull with the computer. I’ve already made that decision. Nothing of technological value is getting implanted within my flesh. Not in my head, not in my hands, not even in my rectum. It ends here.

People are going to be lining up for a brain-computer interface, smart dust, neural lace, and whatever other chip invention they’re rolling out on the belt. Masayoshi Son, the second richest man in Japan, is investing $100 billion to build a computer chip with an IQ of 10,000. Expect college degrees to be worthless currency for those of us who forsake such a god-like IQ. These neural chips are even being designed to store memories for us. This godless generation will undress their mind, exchanging the most cherished endowment of privacy for worldly comfort. Unfortunately, as these things often go, technological advancements only begin on a volunteer basis. And we Christians know where it’s ending.

The Mark of the Beast is almost upon us.

Because the Amish made their decision long ago, they have a sleek advantage over us late arrivals, for now. As a society, they are self-sufficient. We are not. They don’t need a chip implant. We do. When the cash flow stops, the only way the beast government is forcing them into submission is by bulldozing their farms down. Perhaps that will happen. In the end, once society has evolved beyond their own claim at humanity, they too will have to make a decision, if only to keep their heads from rolling. But make no mistake about it; the day of decision is coming. For me, the boundary marker is set.

Certainly, when we pronounce, “Enough is enough!” and unplug from this Matrix, our impact on society—our ability to carry out the Great Commission—will be severely handicapped, if not made completely impotent. It is why, in that day, we should remember the Amish. They have been fulfilling the Great Commission all along, if only in the best way they know how. By “keeping themselves unspotted by the world (James 1:27),” as James the brother of Yeshua requires, their testimony is made known, and their light goes out to the entire world.

Maranatha from Montreal!

Noel