Foreshadowing.

There is a quiet eschatology running underneath every piece of technology you use. The thing you reach for at the end of a hard day is not just a tool; it is an answer — your body's answer — to a longing for the world set right. The Foreshadowing pillar is the downstream-artifact question. After all the others, this one asks what the use is pointing toward — and whether the direction is the new creation or its counterfeit.

Both options matter. A use can genuinely point ahead — a video call that ends in a longer ache to see the person, a piece of digitally rendered beauty that pulls your eyes upward, a sermon podcast that bends your week toward Sunday. A use can also substitute — feeding the longing for presence with a parasocial bond, feeding the longing for rest with infinite scroll, feeding the longing for new creation with a synthetic version that demands no waiting. Both are doing eschatology. Only one is true.

The Bible never lets the present be only the present. Even Paul's plainest pastoral advice carries an eschatological undertow:

Therefore — because the resurrection is real, because the future has broken into the present — your present work is not in vain. The grammar of foretaste is exactly this. The work you do now participates in the world being made. The community you keep now is a small picture of the gathered city. The Lord's Supper you take this Sunday is a small portion of the wedding banquet. The Bible everywhere assumes that present goods can be foretastes — real participations in a future that is already arriving in pieces.

Revelation puts the picture most strikingly. The new Jerusalem is not a replacement for our world but its glorification. The kings of the earth bring their glory into it. The nations walk by its light.

Notice what does not get left outside: human glory — culture, craft, the made things of nations — comes in. The new creation is not the abolition of human making but its purification. Which means every tool you use now has an eschatological future. It can be made for the city, or it can be a small substitute that keeps you from longing for it.

And the heart of the picture is presence — the gap that opened in the garden, closed at last:

The dwelling place of God is with man. Every foretaste in the present is a foretaste of that. Every counterfeit is a small denial of it.

Christ is the firstfruits (1 Cor 15:23). The pattern of foretaste runs through him. He is the first to have raised, the first to have crossed from the old age into the new. The Holy Spirit poured out on the church is, in Paul's word, an arrabōn — a deposit, a down-payment, a real portion of the inheritance given now to guarantee the rest. Every right use of a tool in this age operates inside that grammar: a small, real, down-payment on the world to come.

Counterfeits run the opposite grammar. They offer the look of the future without its substance — limitlessness as possession rather than as God's character, presence without bodies, gathering without flesh, beauty without source. They are not failures of the future but forgeries of it.

The sharpest tool the church has for sorting foretaste from counterfeit is what we call the appetite test: did this use increase or decrease your hunger for the real thing?

Paul's letters are the historical model. He sends them not to satisfy the churches but to make them long for him to come. They are appetite-increasing. They acknowledge their own inferiority — "I had much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face" (3 Jn 13–14). The mediation works precisely because it points beyond itself.

Apply this to your particular use. After a video call with a far-away friend, do you ache for the next visit or feel relieved you do not have to make one? After a long beautiful scroll through someone's curated life, are you grateful or restless? After a sermon podcast at 2x speed on the commute, are you readier for Sunday or vaguely justified in skipping it? The test is not whether the use felt good. The test is what it did to your appetite for the real.

A use that increases the hunger is a foretaste, even when it is humble. A use that dulls the hunger is a counterfeit, even when it feels satisfying.