a word before we begin
Before we begin, My Friend, let me tell you plainly where I stand, so that you may weigh everything that follows with your eyes wide open. I write as one who holds to a premillennial, pre-tribulational understanding of the Lord’s return; that is, I believe the Lord Jesus will come for His church, that the events laid out in the book of Revelation will unfold just as they are written, and that history will close not by the hand of man but by the hand of God.
You may not share that view, and the heart of this little booklet will still serve you well. But it is the lens through which I see the whole matter, and you ought to know it from the very first page. For it is precisely because I know how the story ends that I am not afraid of the machine, and by the time we are through, I hope you will see exactly why.
These pages are not a technical manual, and not a prophecy chart telling you this is the mark of the beast, and not a scolding aimed at anyone who has felt the fear, for that fear is understandable and a great many good people are carrying it. What I mean to do instead is set a few things back on their foundations: what this machine actually is and what it can never be, where the real danger lies, and why the believer of all people may look at the whole business with a steady eye and then put the tool to good use without a particle of dread.
chapter one
the oldest fear in new clothes
The world is frightened again. You can feel it in the air, the way you can feel a storm before it breaks. The newspapers are full of it, the talk is full of it, and not a few pulpits are full of it too. People, Christians among them, are wringing their hands and whispering that this, at last, is the thing that will undo us. The end of the world. The end of mankind. The machine that will wake up, rise up, and bring the whole human story to its close.
I want to begin by telling you something that ought to bring the temperature down in the room considerably. This fear is not new. It is not even slightly new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest and most predictable reflexes of the human heart, and we have run this very script before, many, many times, and every single time the world did not end.
Walk back through the centuries with me, and watch the pattern repeat itself like clockwork. When the printing press came in, threatening to put the Word into the hands of every plowboy and light the fires of the Reformation, the learned and the powerful greeted it with dread. It was said the common people could not be trusted to read without their betters standing over them. The very engine of the gospel’s spread was feared as the undoing of faith and order.
When the railroad came, sober physicians warned that the human body was never made to hurtle along at thirty miles an hour, that the speed would shake men’s minds loose and tear their bodies apart, and more than one preacher called the smoking, roaring thing the work of the devil himself. When the telegraph and the electric light came, there were those who feared the invisible power flying through the wires as something occult, an unnatural meddling with the God-ordained rhythm of day and night. When the telephone came, people feared the wires might carry the voices of the dead, or that this strange instrument would be the death of true human community. When the automobile came, they called it the devil wagon and swore it would shatter the family and the whole moral fabric of the nation. When radio came, and then television, the same cry went up once more; it would rot the minds of the children, hypnotize the masses, and serve as the very voice of the Antichrist deceiving the nations.1
And I must mention one more, because it strikes very close to home. A few decades ago, there arose a great wave of fear among Christians that the little striped label and the new computerized commerce were the Mark of the Beast itself, that soon no man would be able to buy or sell without it. Sermons were preached. Books were written and sold by the thousands. And here we are, still buying and selling, the barcode having turned out to be nothing more than a barcode.2
Do you see the pattern? Every single advance, the press, the rail, the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the television, the computer, the Internet, every one of them was greeted by some great mass of people crying that this was the one, this was the end, this was the rapture or the ruin of the world. And every single time, they were wrong. Most of those terrors became the ordinary furniture of daily life. And several of them, the press, the radio, the television, the Internet, became the very tools by which the gospel reached farther than it had ever reached in all of human history.
The costume is new; the trembling underneath it is ancient.
Artificial intelligence is simply the newest flavor of a very old fear. The costume is new; the trembling underneath it is ancient. And there is a great deal of ground to cover in showing not only why the Christian need not put on that costume of fear at all, but why the One who sits in the heavens does not tremble for a single moment over any of it.
dust and breath
is waiting for you
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sources & notes
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979), on the fears surrounding print; and Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (Walker, 1998), on nineteenth-century anxieties that rail travel would harm mind and body and on comparable alarms over the telegraph, telephone, automobile, radio, and television. See more broadly the historiography of “moral panics” over new media. The point drawn here is the author’s: the fear recurs with each new instrument and each time proves misplaced.
- Mary Stewart Relfe, The New Money System 666 (1982), a representative and widely circulated example of the mid-to-late twentieth-century teaching that identified the UPC barcode and computerized commerce with the “mark of the beast” of Revelation 13:16–18. Such identifications repeatedly failed, as the author notes; commerce continued unhindered.
- W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), entries “Create” and “Make, Fashion, Form,” on bara (Genesis 1:1), the verb of creation proper, which takes only God as its subject throughout the Old Testament, whereas asah (“to make, fashion”) and yatsar (“to form, shape,” as a potter with clay, Genesis 2:7; Isaiah 64:8) are used of both God and man. The theological inference, that creation from nothing belongs to God alone, rests on Hebrews 11:3.
- W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, entries “Breath” (neshamah) and “Soul” (nephesh), on Genesis 2:7, where man is formed (yatsar) of the dust, and God breathes into him the breath of life (neshamah), whereupon man becomes a living soul (nephesh chayyah). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Genesis 2, on the two elements of dust and divine breath.
- Daniel 4:17, 25, 32, on Nebuchadnezzar’s hard lesson “that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will,” with Proverbs 21:1 on God’s sway over rulers’ hearts. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Daniel 4.