This is Scott Anderson, CEO for Desiring God. You and other friends of Desiring God make possible the work of this ministry, including this podcast. Thanks for your part in helping us freely share the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. This week we are joined on the Ask Pastor John podcast with Dr.

Richard Lentz, who is the vice president for academic affairs and the dean of the main campus at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, just a short drive north of Boston. And Dr. Lentz is also the author of a book that releases this winter titled "Identity and Idolatry, the Image of God and its Inversion," which is published in Don Carson's Silver Series, New Studies in Biblical Theology.

So implicitly, Dr. Lentz, where we ended yesterday is that an idol is something that is not God and something that we cannot imagine living without. Is that right? That's exactly right. And it often points at and beyond itself to deeper needs you're trying to gain, deeper significance and senses of security that are there.

And so often significance and safety are the two dilemmas we face with idols, idols in every age. How do we gain security, safety in a world which threatens us, and it threatens us in different ways, and how do we gain significance? And I think the smartphone, just to use that again as the anecdote, tells us that we are significant if we are connected to enough other people's lives, but what we find is being connected to so many different people's lives we gain actually a greater sense of insignificance, and our safety is apparently or allegedly granted here because we are connected with lots of other people.

That's our safety net, if you will. And when you pull that out, you begin to say to yourself, "How will I be granted security or safety without this?" And that's this dynamic of feeling a loss when you take the idol out. Yeah, that's a key definition. Yesterday I mentioned a study that says that the average college student uses their phone nine hours a day.

So one of these college students comes up to you and wants to know how he or she can tell if their smartphone is an idol. What are the diagnostic tests, the questions that you would put forward? Right, right. A couple of them. I mean, the immediate thing is what would you lose if you didn't have it?

Second would be what role does it play? Honestly. And third, how big of a presence is it? What's its function in your life? And so again, those are questions that are sometimes hard to answer by yourself. And so even the questions of idolatry and identity are communal questions and are best answered in a community.

And surely the fundamental community is with God. But here with the smartphone, often the dilemma is that none of those conversations appear to be very thick or rich or deep or wide. That we have condensed the conversation to a you know, a small tweet, a short text. And so we never get beyond the temporary, the superficial, the impression.

And it's an extension of the television age when we lived on the management of impressions. And so that has simply speeded up and gained momentum in our time. And so again being cautious that somehow there was a golden age back in the 1950s when we all sat around watching healthy television and had really good relationships.

I don't believe that for a second. It's in many ways an extension of that age that encourages us like a sleeping pill simply to accept the artificial and the superficial as normal. And that's the that's the key to ask the teenager or the person that lives on Facebook constantly.

What are the moments in life when you ask hard questions? When you think outside of the ordinary superficial details of life? And almost for sure not going to be because of a text message or because of a tweet. Those are good diagnostic questions for us to ask about our phones and really any potential idol in our lives.

Thank you, Dr. Lentz. And one paradox of the digital age is that we are all connected together. We're all linked via the web and yet loneliness does not go away. So how are our relationships potentially being thinned out in the digital age? This is a perplexing question for everyone and I want to ask you that tomorrow, Dr.

Lentz. Thanks for joining us on the Ask Dr. Jon podcast with guest Dr. Richard Lentz. We'll see you tomorrow.