There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
It is possible to settle a lawsuit without admitting guilt. Sometimes the cost of the legal proceedings is so high that an accused person may just settle the case with a fine, while never actually admitting they are guilty. While our legal system allows this procedure, it would be hard to say the person who paid the fine actually repented.A survey of Israel’s history could lead one to believe that the nation had been paying fines, but never really admitting they did anything wrong. They seemed to commit the same sins over and over again. Idolatry, abusing the poor, and taking advantage of foreigners all appeared on their rap sheet since the book of Exodus. Even though God had called them to repent more times than we can count, they had not done so with their whole hearts.The prophet Joel describes what true repentance looks like. He uses an ancient image for expressing distress: tearing a garment a person is wearing. Generally tearing a garment will ruin it, so this act was reserved for expressing the deepest of distress. But tearing a garment could also be done for show. Here the prophet invites his audience to an even greater level of commitment: rending or tearing their hearts (v. 13).This expression signifies a genuine decision to turn from violating God’s covenant. It is an act that, while it cannot be seen externally, is transformative spiritually. Joel calls his readers to this because, unlike a torn garment, a torn heart will be accepted by God. Joel knew God’s character. Since the days of Mt. Sinai God had consistently reminded Israel that He was unlike any god they had ever encountered (Ex. 34:6). Joel invokes that self-declaration of God here, using it to entice the Israelites to repent.
Go Deeper What is holding you back from genuine repentance? Are you hoping to escape with a fine, but never admit guilt? What would it look like to rend your heart today? Extended Reading: Joel 2
Pray with Us “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Joel 2:13). What a powerful message! May we learn the true repentance of the heart.
We must give to God the praise of that splendor and glory wherein he is pleased to manifest himself in the upper world.
You have established your throne in the heavens, Psalm 103:19(ESV) and it is a throne of glory, high and lifted up; and before you the seraphim cover their faces. Isaiah 6:1-2(ESV) And it is in compassion to your people that you hold back the face of that throne and spread a cloud over it. Job 26:9(ESV)
You make your messengers winds, and your ministers a flaming fire. Psalm 104:4(ESV) Thousands of thousands of them minister to you, and myriads of myriads stand before you, to do your pleasure. Revelation 5:11(ESV) They are mighty ones who obey the voice of your word. Psalm 103:20-21(ESV) And I have come by faith and hope and holy love into a spiritual communion with that innumerable company of angels in festal gathering and the spirits of the righteous made perfect, even to the assembly of the firstborn, in the heavenly Jerusalem. Hebrews 12:22-23(ESV)
Leave her alone, said Jesus. Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.
Mark 14:6
Our Lord takes this beautiful incident and shows us the true value of it. He says five things about it that mark it as an extremely valuable act. First, He says, She has done a beautiful thing to me. The beauty of it lay in its very extravagance. This woman did not spare any of the costly ointment but broke the flask and poured the whole quantity out upon Him. Judas, with his practical computer mind, reckoned it up as worth three hundred denarii. A denarius was the day’s wage for a laborer. Three hundred days’ wages would be a tremendous sum. In the eyes of Judas, this woman wasted an enormous amount of money when she poured out the ointment upon Jesus. It was such a lavish act, and therein lay the beauty of it.
Second, He said that it was a timely thing she had done. It was something that could only be done now. Any time you want to do good to the poor you can, because they are always around. And it is right to help the poor. But there are opportunities that come in our life that must be seized at the moment. Mary had sensed this and seized the moment to offer this gift, for such a time would never occur again. It was out of the sensitivity of her heart that she realized that the timing was right, and Jesus recognized this.
Then, she did that which was feasible. That is, she did what she could. She could not fix Him a meal; there was no time for that. She could not make a garment for Him; there was no time for that. There was nothing else she could do to show her love but this. She did what she could. I am sure our Lord has called our attention to that because it is so practical for us. Someone said, I’m only a man, but I am a man. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. And what I can do I ought to do. And what I ought to do, I’m available to do.
The fourth element of this act was that it was insightful. Our Lord says, She has anointed my body beforehand for burying. Many times Jesus said to these disciples that He was going to die. Not one of them believed him–except Mary of Bethany. She understood that He was heading for burial. And since she could not be sure she would ever have the opportunity later to find His body and anoint it for burial, she did it now, as a loving act of service. What a comfort this must have been to our Lord! Of all these friends who were around Him at this time, only this one had the sensitivity of heart to understand what was happening.
Finally, what she did was deserving of being remembered. It was memorable. Jesus said, The story of this beautiful act will be told in memory of her wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world. Here we are today, two thousand years later, fulfilling this very word, telling again of the act of Mary of Bethany when she anointed our Lord’s head and feet.
Father, help me to understand that Mary is but depicting a far greater sacrifice. May that act of love grip my heart and strengthen me all the days of my life.
Life Application
The Lord Jesus Christ has taught and exemplified extravagant, timely, self-giving love. What will it look like when we allow Him to love others through us?
1Now the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some sly way to arrest Jesus and kill him. 2“But not during the Feast,” they said, “or the people may riot.”
3While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.
4Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? 5It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.
6“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. 8She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. 9I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
10Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. 11They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. So he watched for an opportunity to hand him over.
12On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?”
13So he sent two of his disciples, telling them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. 14Say to the owner of the house he enters, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 15He will show you a large upper room, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.”
16The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover.
17When evening came, Jesus arrived with the Twelve. 18While they were reclining at the table eating, he said, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me—one who is eating with me.”
19They were saddened, and one by one they said to him, “Surely not I?”
20“It is one of the Twelve,” he replied, “one who dips bread into the bowl with me. 21The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”
22While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.”
23Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it.
24“This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. 25“I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.”
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. (1:14)
Verse 14 is the most concise biblical statement of the Incarnation, and therefore one of Scripture’s most significant verses. The four words with which it begins, the Word became flesh, express the reality that in the Incarnation God took on humanity; the infinite became finite; eternity entered time; the invisible became visible (cf. Col. 1:15); the Creator entered His creation. God revealed Himself to man in the creation (Rom. 1:18–21), the Old Testament Scriptures (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20–21), and, supremely and most clearly, in Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:1–2). The record of His life and work, and its application and significance for the past, present, and future, is in the New Testament. As noted in the discussion of 1:1 in chapter 1 of this volume, the concept of the Word was one rich in meaning for both Greeks and Jews. John here clearly stated what he implied earlier in the prologue: Jesus Christ, God’s final Word to mankind (Heb. 1:1–2), became flesh. Sarx (flesh) does not have here the negative moral connotation that it sometimes carries (e.g., Rom. 8:3–9; 13:14; Gal. 5:13, 16–17, 19; Eph. 2:3), but refers to man’s physical being (cf. Matt. 16:17; Rom. 1:3; 1 Cor. 1:26; 2 Cor. 5:16; Gal. 1:16; Eph. 5:29; Phil. 1:22). That He actually became flesh affirms Jesus’ full humanity. Ginomai (became) does not mean that Christ ceased being the eternal Word when He became a man. Though God is immutable, pure eternal “being” and not “becoming” as all His creatures are, in the Incarnation the unchangeable (Heb. 13:8) God did become fully man, yet remained fully God. He entered the realm of those who are time and space creatures and experienced life as it is for those He created. In the words of the fifth-century church father Cyril of Alexandria,
We do not … assert that there was any change in the nature of the Word when it became flesh, or that it was transformed into an entire man, consisting of soul and body; but we say that the Word, in a manner indescribable and inconceivable, united personally … to himself flesh animated with a reasonable soul, and thus became man and was called the Son of man.… The natures which were brought together to form a true unity were different; but out of both is one Christ and one Son. We do not mean that the difference of the natures is annihilated by reason of this union; but rather that the Deity and Manhood, by their inexpressible and inexplicable concurrence into unity, have produced for us the one Lord and Son Jesus Christ. (cited in Bettenson, Documents, 47)
No wonder Paul wrote of the Incarnation,
By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:
He who was revealed in the flesh,
Was vindicated in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Proclaimed among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Taken up in glory. (1 Tim. 3:16)
Charles Wesley also captured the wonder of the Incarnation in his majestic hymn “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see,
Hail th’ incarnate Deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.
Some found the Incarnation so utterly beyond human reason to comprehend that they refused to accept it. The heretical group known as the Docetists (from dokeō; “to seem,” or “to appear”), accepting the dualism of matter and spirit so prevalent in Greek philosophy at that time, held that matter was evil, and spirit was good. Accordingly, they argued that Christ could not have had a material (and hence evil) body. They taught instead either that His body was a phantom, or an apparition, or that the divine Christ spirit descended upon the mere man Jesus at His baptism, then left Him before His crucifixion. Cerinthus, John’s opponent at Ephesus, was a Docetist. John strongly opposed Docetism, which undermines not only the incarnation of Christ, but also His resurrection and substitutionary atonement. As noted earlier in this chapter, in his first epistle he warned,
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. (1 John 4:1–3)
John was so horrified by Cerinthus’s heresy that, as the early church historian Eusebius records,
John the apostle once entered a bath to wash; but ascertaining Cerinthus was within, he leaped out of the place, and fled from the door, not enduring to enter under the same roof with him, and exhorted those with him to do the same, saying, “let us flee, lest the bath fall in, as long as Cerinthus, that enemy of the truth, is within.” (Ecclesiastical History, book III, chap. XXVIII)
The eternal Son not only became man; He also dwelt among men for thirty-three years. Dwelt translates a form of the verb skēnoō, which literally means “to live in a tent.” Jesus Christ’s humanity was not a mere appearance. He took on all the essential attributes of humanity and was “made in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:7), “since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). As the writer of Hebrews goes on to explain, “He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people” (Heb. 2:17). And He pitched His tent among us. In the Old Testament, God tented with Israel through His glorious presence in the tabernacle (Ex. 40:34–35) and later in the temple (1 Kings 8:10–11), and revealed Himself in some pre-incarnate appearances of Christ (e.g., Gen. 16:7–14; Ex. 3:2; Josh. 5:13–15; Judg. 2:1–4; 6:11–24; 13:3–23; Dan. 3:25; 10:5–6; Zech. 1:11–21). Throughout eternity, God will again tent with His redeemed and glorified people:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell [skēnoō] among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:3–4; cf. 12:12; 13:6)
Though Jesus manifested God’s divine glory during His earthly life with a clarity never before seen, it was still veiled by His human flesh. Peter, James, and John saw a physical manifestation of Jesus’ heavenly glory at the transfiguration, when “His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Matt. 17:2; cf. 2 Peter 1:16–18). That was a preview of the unveiled glory to be seen at His return (Matt. 24:29–30; 25:31; Rev. 19:11–16) and the fullness of His heavenly glory as the only Light of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:23). But the disciples saw Jesus manifest God’s holy nature primarily by displaying divine attributes, such as truth, wisdom, love, grace, knowledge, power, and holiness. Jesus manifested the same essential glory as the Father, because as God they possess the same nature (10:30). Despite the claims of false teachers through the centuries, monogenēs (only begotten) does not imply that Jesus was created by God and thus not eternal. The term does not refer to a person’s origin, but describes him as unique, the only one of his kind. Thus Isaac could properly be called Abraham’s monogenēs (Heb. 11:17) even though Abraham had other sons, because Isaac alone was the son of the covenant. Monogenēs distinguishes Christ as the unique Son of God from believers, who are God’s sons in a different sense (1 John 3:2). B. F. Westcott writes, “Christ is the One and only Son, the One to whom the title belongs in a sense completely unique and singular, as distinguished from that in which there are many children of God (vv. 12f.)” (The Gospel According to St. John [Reprint; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978], 12). Jesus’ unique relationship to the Father is a major theme of John’s gospel (cf. 1:18; 3:35; 5:17–23, 26, 36–37; 6:27, 46, 57; 8:16, 18–19, 28, 38, 42, 54; 10:15, 17, 30, 36–38; 12:49–50; 14:6–13, 20–21, 23, 31; 15:9, 15, 23–24; 16:3, 15, 27–28, 32; 17:5, 21, 24–25; 20:21). Jesus’ manifestation of the divine attributes revealed His essential glory as God’s Son, “for in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). The two attributes most closely connected with salvation are grace and truth. Scripture teaches that salvation is wholly by believing God’s truth in the gospel, by which one receives His saving grace. The Jerusalem Council declared, “But we believe that we [Jewish believers] are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they [Gentiles] also are” (Acts 15:11). Apollos “greatly helped those who had believed through grace” (Acts 18:27). Paul described the message he preached as “the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). In Romans 3:24 he wrote that believers are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus,” while in Ephesians 1:7 he added, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.” Later in that same letter, Paul wrote, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8–9). He reminded Timothy that God “has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity” (2 Tim. 1:9). That same “grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men” (Titus 2:11), with the result that believers “being justified by His grace … would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:7). There is no salvation grace except to those who believe the truth of the gospel message. Paul reminded the Ephesians, “In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1:13). In Colossians 1:5 he defined the gospel as the “word of truth” (cf. James 1:18). Paul expressed to the Thessalonians his thankfulness that “God ha[d] chosen [them] from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth” (2 Thess. 2:13). People are saved when they “come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4; cf. 2 Tim. 2:25). On the other hand, “those who perish” will do so “because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved” (2 Thess. 2:10). Everyone will “be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thess. 2:12). Jesus Christ was the full expression of God’s grace. All the necessary truth to save is available in Him. He was the full expression of God’s truth, which was only partially revealed in the Old Testament (cf. Col. 2:16–17). What was foreshadowed through prophecy, types, and pictures became substance realized in the person of Christ (cf. Heb. 1:1–2). Therefore He could declare, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.… If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 14:6; 8:31–32). A vague belief in God apart from the truth about Christ will not result in salvation. As Jesus Himself warned, “Unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24). Those who think they are worshiping God, but are ignorant of or reject the fullness of the New Testament teaching about Christ, are deceived, because “he who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (John 5:23; cf. 15:23). In his first epistle John affirmed that “whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23; cf. 2 John 9). Those who reject God’s full revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ will be eternally lost. Summarizing the magnificence of this verse, Gerald L. Borchert writes,
In analyzing this crucial verse of the Prologue it becomes quickly apparent that this verse is like a great jewel with many facets that spreads it rays of implication into the various dimensions of Christology—the theology of Christ. As a summary of this verse it may be said that the evangelist recognized and bore witness to the fact that the characteristics ascribed only to God by the Old Testament were present in the incarnate Logos, God’s unique messenger to the world, who not only epitomized in person the awesome sense of God’s presence in their midst as a pilgrim people but also evidenced those stabilizing divine qualities God’s people had experienced repeatedly. (John 1–11, The New American Commentary [Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2002], 121–22. Italics in original.)
MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (2006). John 1–11 (pp. 39–43). Moody Press.
Jesus Christ Is Man
John 1:1, 14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The last study looked at the first two verses of John’s Gospel, the verses that declare so unequivocably that Jesus is God. We now want to skip ahead to the verse that goes with them and that says in equally certain terms that Jesus is man. That verse is John 1:14. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jesus is God. Jesus is man. Properly understood, these are the two most important truths to be made about Christ’s person.
A Biblical Doctrine
It is not only in John’s Gospel that we encounter such teaching, of course. These themes are found throughout Scripture. What is more, although they are very profound they are taught in the most natural way and in a totally artless manner. Take the three places where God the Father describes the Son’s nature by means of two complementary verbs. In the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah, in a verse that is always much quoted at Christmastime, we read, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6). This verse teaches that the Messiah was to be One who was always God’s Son but who would become man at a particular point in history. Hence, as a child he is born, but as a Son he is given. In Romans 1:3–4 the same teaching occurs. There the apostle Paul writes, “… regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.” Jesus was made the seed of David, according to the flesh. But he was declared always to have been God’s Son. Finally, in Galatians 4:4–5 we read, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” As a son, Jesus Christ was sent. Hence, he was always God. Nevertheless, he was made under the law. He became man. The Bible is never hesitant to put the twin truths of the full deity and the true humanity of Jesus Christ together. What we have taught didactically in these verses is also taught by illustration in various events in Christ’s ministry. For instance, in the next chapter of John’s Gospel we find the Lord Jesus Christ at a wedding (John 2:1–11). Few things could be more truly human than that. Yet, when the wine is exhausted and the family about to be embarrassed, Jesus makes new and better wine of the water that had been standing around in the great stone waterpots that were used for the Jewish washings and purifications. Nothing in the whole chapter is more clearly divine. On another occasion the disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum to the land of the Gadarenes while Jesus, who was exhausted from the day’s activities, was asleep in the boat. A storm arose that was so intense it frightened even these seasoned fishermen. They awoke Jesus, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” And Jesus stilled the storm. What could be more human than our Lord’s total exhaustion in the boat? But what could be more divine than his stilling of the winds and waves, so that the disciples came to worship him saying, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” (Matt. 8:23–27)? The same twofold nature of the Lord Jesus Christ is illustrated throughout the Gospels right down to the accounts of his death and resurrection. Nothing could be more human than his death by crucifixion. Nothing could be more divine than the darkening of the sky, the tearing of the veil of the temple, the opening of the graves of the saints buried near Jerusalem, and the final triumphant rending of the tomb on that first Easter morning. We must not make the mistake of thinking of Jesus as being merely a divine man or, on the other hand, of being merely a human God. Jesus is the God-man; and this means that he is fully and uniquely God as well as being perfectly man. He is God with us, God for us, God in us. As man he is the One who has experienced all the trials, joys, sufferings, losses, gains, temptations, and vicissitudes of this life. All this is involved in these two important verses of John 1.
Able to Die
Why are these truths important? Or, more particularly, since we discussed the divinity of Jesus Christ in our previous study, why is the humanity of Jesus Christ important? There are several reasons. First, the incarnation made it possible for Jesus Christ to die. This is easy to see. It is what the author of Hebrews is thinking of when he writes, “Because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, “Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, O God” ’ ” (Heb. 10:4–7). A body made it possible for Jesus Christ to die. It is always difficult to find an adequate illustration of the incarnation itself. But it is not so hard to find an illustration of this aspect of it. A body was the vehicle of Christ’s earthly ministry. Take a man who is called by God to do medical missionary work in a distant corner of Africa. His person and his willingness are one thing. But his training is another. Thus, the man will submit to years of training, gaining medical knowledge and at times even a bit of seminary training, so that to his person and original intention he adds that which is necessary for him to do the work. It is exactly what Jesus Christ did. In the beginning, in the eternal counsels of God, before there was a world or a lost race of men, Jesus foresaw all human history and knew that he was to redeem the race. Thus, in the fullness of time, in the days of Herod, he assumed a body so that he could offer up that body as the perfect sacrifice for man’s sin. This is what we find throughout Scripture. The very name “Jesus” looks forward to an act of saving significance. For the angel said of Mary, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Jesus himself spoke of the suffering that was to come (Mark 8:31; 9:31), linking the success of his mission to the crucifixion: “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). At several places in John’s Gospel the crucifixion is spoken of as that vital “time” for which Christ came and to which his ministry inflexibly proceeded (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20; 13:1; 17:1). Moreover, the death of Jesus is in a real sense the theme of the Old Testament also. The Old Testament sacrifices prefigure Christ’s suffering, and the prophets explicitly foretell it. Paul teaches that Abraham was saved by faith in Christ (Gal. 3:8, 16). Jesus taught the downcast Emmaus disciples that the Old Testament foretold his death and resurrection: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). In the light of these texts it is not wrong to say that the most important reason for the incarnation of Jesus is that it made it possible for him to die. This death was the focal point of world and biblical history.
Able to Understand
There is also a second reason why it was important for the eternal Son of God to become man. The fact that Jesus Christ took upon himself all that men are and know and experience also made it possible for him to be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, as the author of Hebrews says. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb. 4:15–16). Jesus knew and experienced (in a way that we can understand) what it meant to be man. J. B. Phillips, the translator who stands behind one of the modern paraphrases of the New Testament and some of the Old Testament books, tells how he was impressed with the deeply human nature of Christ’s sufferings as he went about his task of translating the Gospels. He says, “The record of the behaviour of Jesus on the way to the cross and of the crucifixion itself is almost unbearable, chiefly because it is so intensely human. If, as I believe, this was indeed God focused in a human being, we can see for ourselves that here is no play acting; this is the real thing. There are no supernatural advantages for this man. No celestial rescue party delivered Him from the power of evil men, and His agony was not mitigated by any superhuman anaesthetic. We can only guess what frightful anguish of mind and spirit wrung from him the terrible words ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ But the cry ‘It is finished!’ cannot be one of despair. It does not even mean ‘It is all over.’ It means ‘It has been completed’—and the terrifying task of doing God’s will to the bitter end had been fully and finally accomplished.” It is this suffering that enables us to know that Jesus experienced all that we experience—the weariness, disappointments, misunderstandings, and the pain of this life—and so is able to understand and help all those who are his own and are so tempted.
Our Example
Third, by becoming man Jesus has also provided us with an example of how the life that is fully pleasing to the Father should be lived. Being what we are, this is most important. I often have been asked by people who are concerned with the state of the church today why it is that so many of the young men who go to seminary (even a good seminary, for that matter) come out of it without much of a message and without much of an ability to lead the churches they eventually serve. This is good questioning. As I have thought about it, I have come to feel that one of the main reasons is that they lack an adequate example of what the Christian ministry can be. They have never had contact with a strong church or with an intelligent preaching ministry that is Bible-centered and faithful to the great themes of the gospel. So, lacking an example, they wander about in their approach and fail to provide strong leadership. Now, what is true for the ministry is true for other fields also—business, law, medicine, scholarship, and so on—and it is true spiritually. Thus, Jesus became man in order to go through all sorts of situations with all sorts of people in order that we might be provided with a pattern upon which our Christian life can be constructed. Do you remember ever having seen a sampler? I mean those patterns of needlework containing the alphabet by which children of a generation or two ago used to learn to read and write. That is what Christ is for us. He is our sampler, our example. We are to pattern our attempts to write out the Christian life on him. I find it interesting that Peter uses the word for “sampler” or “copybook” when he says, “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). In other words, by means of Jesus Christ’s becoming man God wrote the characters of love and righteousness large so that we by his grace might copy them.
The Value of Life
The fourth reason why the incarnation was important is that through it God sanctified the value of human life in a way that had not been done previously. Before the coming of Jesus Christ, life in the ancient world was cheap; and it seems that, with the departure from biblical values and biblical principles that we see about us, life is becoming increasingly cheap today. What makes life cheap? War makes it cheap. There is plenty of war today. The continuing reports of battle deaths numb us as to the destiny of the individual. The same thing is true of traffic deaths or deaths as the result of crime. Moreover, I personally believe that the laws that have legalized abortion have also had this effect and will have it increasingly in years ahead. What will offset this cheapening of human life? Only the values that Christianity brings! Christianity values life, first, because God gave it and, second, because the Lord Jesus Christ sanctified it by assuming a full human nature by means of the incarnation. Jesus Christ became like you. Does that mean anything to you personally? It should make you thankful. It should lead you to bow down before the Lord Jesus Christ and worship him deeply as your Savior. Martin Luther was a great expositor of John’s Gospel, as I mentioned in the opening chapter, and at this point in his commentary he tells a story from folklore that illustrates this principle. He says that there was once a stubborn and unspiritual man—Luther called him “a coarse and brutal lout”—who showed absolutely no reverence for any of the great truths of Christianity. When the words “And was made man” were sung in church, this man neither crossed himself nor removed his hat, both of which were common practice in the Roman church of that day. When the creeds were recited the man would not kneel. Luther says, “Then the devil stepped up to him and hit him so hard it made his head spin. He [the devil] cursed him gruesomely and said: ‘May hell consume you.… If God had become an angel like me and the congregation sang: “God was made an angel,” I would bend not only my knees but my whole body to the ground!… And you vile human creature, you stand there like a stick or a stone. You hear that God did not become an angel but a man like you, and you just stand there like a stick of wood!’ ” The story is fictional, of course. Yet it does make the point. Apart from the grace of God we all stand before the most tremendous truths of God’s Word as impervious blocks of stone. Yet we should respond to them. Do we respond? Do you? You should lift up your heart and also your voice in praise of a God who can come from the infinite distance and glories of heaven down to a world such as ours in order that he might redeem us and lead us back to himself. The incarnation is the second greatest truth in the Bible. The greatest is that this God who became man could also love us enough to go to the cross and die for us personally.
Boice, J. M. (2005). The Gospel of John: an expositional commentary (pp. 26–31). Baker Books.
They shall feed and lie down, and none shall make them afraid. (Zephaniah 3:13)
Yesterday we thought of the afflicted and poor people whom the Lord left to be a living seed in a dead world. The prophet says of such that they shall not work iniquity nor speak lies. So that while they had neither rank nor riches to guard them, they were also quite unable to use those weapons in which the wicked place so much reliance: they could neither defend themselves by sin nor by subtlety.
What then? Would they be destroyed? By no means! They should both feed and rest and be not merely free from danger but even quiet from fear of evil. Sheep are very feeble creatures, and wolves are terrible enemies; yet at this hour sheep are more numerous than wolves, and the cause of the sheep is always winning, while the cause of the wolves is always declining. One day flocks of sheep will cover the plains, and not a wolf will be left. The fact is that sheep have a Shepherd, and this gives them provender, protection, and peace. “None”—which means not one, whether in human or diabolical form—”shall make them afraid.” Who shall terrify the Lord’s flock when He is near? We lie down in green pastures, for Jesus Himself is food and rest to our souls.
We honor the King of kings when we submit to the police department, the homeowners association, and the state government. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul helps us view our responsibilities before earthly authorities in light of our ultimate Authority.
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. (Ex. 3:13–15)
“I am who I am.” Yahweh. This is the name God gives to Moses. It is the covenant name of the covenant-making, covenant-keeping God of Israel. And the name he gives simply is “He is.”
What could this possibly mean? How is this even an answer? The answer to Moses’s question is ultimately incomprehensible to him or to us: The personal name God gave is a disclosure of the kind of being he is—and the “kind” of being he is, is one who cannot be considered in relation to anything but himself. He is absolute Being. One theologian helpfully says, “Strictly speaking, God can only be understood by reference to God. . . . Exodus 3:14 jolts us by saying that God is not grouped with others. God can only be known by comparison to himself.”1 This cannot be said of any of us. We describe who we are by describing ourselves in categories of genus and species. We learn about ourselves specifically in relation to others. To learn about me, you learn about human beings in general, males more specifically, married men and fathers of young children even more specifically, and so on. We fit within categories and are comparable to like kinds within those categories. But God cannot name his essence by locating himself in a broad category that he fits within. He’s not an object within the universe on which we can fit our attention. For God to be “I am” means he is absolute, incomprehensible, unbounded Being.
He never became, nor is he becoming—he simply is. This sets him over against every other kind of being since every other kind of being derives its being from another. I am— because I was begotten by my parents in 1991. Before that, I didn’t exist—I didn’t have being. And even now, I don’t own my being. I am—because I am receiving life (ultimately from God but also from oxygen, food, water, sleep, etc.). I cannot declare myself independent from all else. But the God who spoke with Moses that day on Mount Horeb is utterly independent: He does not receive life, light, love, or being; he is light, life, love, and being. Everything else that exists, exists according to his will. He is not becoming—he is. Petrus van Mastricht, the great German-born seventeenth-century Reformed theologian, referred to aseity as “the highest and chief perfection of God,” which “therefore must be located in the first place, because from it the rest of his perfections flow.”2
But this is still positive revelation. In Exodus 3, God does not simply delete content from how we think about him; he’s not simply telling us what he is by telling us what is not true of him. Rather, he truly does name himself positively when he puts this name on Moses’s lips. He is, in other words, utterly sufficient in and of himself. He is, as the old theologians would say, the infinite plentitude of life, love, and holiness. And this means that he is perfect—in need of nothing and no one to make him more alive, more powerful, more happy, more knowledgeable.3 Every other thing that exists gets all its life, power, happiness, and knowledge from him.
This means, practically, that God does not need us. God did not need Israel. He did not deliver the people by the hand of Moses because he desired to somehow be enriched by their worship. The one who is—whose existence transcends all earthly consideration—is, by definition, everlastingly happy in himself. More can be said about how this happiness burns in a uniquely Trinitarian way, but at this point I merely bring up this eternal self-happiness—or blessedness or beatitude—to disabuse us of the presumption that God’s happiness depends on us.
Now, this may be a shock to those of us who are accustomed to flattering ourselves with certain contemporary praise songs or ill-considered children’s Bibles, some of which can give the impression that God cannot be happy until heaven is populated by us. But this is simply not true. We don’t make up for any deficiency in God. We don’t fill an emotional hole in his heart. Our praise, although glorifying him and pleasing him in a sense, does not enrich him in his infinite joy. How could it? All the praise we offer—all the good we render to him—originates from him (cf. 1 Chron. 29:14; 1 Cor. 4:7). “For from him,” says Paul, “and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). He who is infinite in his perfection is, therefore, infinite in his blessedness and, therefore, cannot be enriched by another in any way.
Just consider how Herman Bavinck portrays this doctrine:
By this perfection he is at once essentially and absolutely distinct from all creatures. Creatures, after all, do not derive their existence from themselves but from others and so have nothing from themselves; both in their origin and hence in their further development and life, they are absolutely dependent. But . . . God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being, not becoming. God is absolute being, the fullness of being, and therefore also eternally and absolutely independent in his existence, in his perfections, in all his works, the first and the last, the sole cause and final goal of all things. In this aseity of God, conceived not only as having being from himself but also as the fullness of being, all the other perfections are included.4
This is a marvelous truth. Why? Why should we be pleased when God disabuses us of our self-flattering perspective that we benefit him? Because if God does not need us, then he has created and redeemed us out of his pure, undiluted, gratuitous, unconstrained, and noncompulsory love.
Question: If God does not need us and is not enriched by us, why then does he create and redeem us? Answer: Simply out of a free expression of his infinitely overflowing love! This means that the love of God manifested in creating and redeeming his people is preeminently trustworthy. Since its foundation and goal is a creaturely participation in God’s own eternal beatitude, nothing creaturely can alter it. If the source of our eternal life is the a se eternal love of God, then we can bank all our security on it.
Do you see how this might be a consolation to Moses? “How will this God’s presence help me?” Moses may have asked himself. “Who is this one who will be with me as I go to Pharoah?” Answer: the one who is. He is the infinite source and giver of all life and being. Moses could not appeal categorically higher than to this Being for help in his task to deliver Israel from slavery. Who could help Moses more on this mission? Sure, Pharoah was the king of the greatest earthly superpower—Moses had seen that up close. Sure, no living man was more powerful than he. Sure, Moses was a jaded, humiliated, failed deliverer coming to this people with a deficit of credibility to lead them. But the Being who commissioned Moses in Exodus 3 is the one who gives life and breath and being to everyone, including Pharoah. Moses had the help of the infinite Maker of heaven and earth behind him: He should almost feel bad for Pharoah! No competition against “I am” is even fair.
So we can derive the doctrine of aseity from the Scriptures in several ways. We can discern it in God’s creation of the cosmos from nothing—that is, God is independent of the created world because his being precedes, transcends, and causes the created world by definition. Or we can derive the doctrine of aseity by contrasting God to other gods—that is, God differs from idols precisely in the sense that they depend on their worshipers while God does not depend on us. But in this passage in Exodus 3 we learn that God positively teaches us of his aseity, simply by naming himself as he who is who he is. The God of the Christian Scriptures, alone, is.
Notes:
R. Michael Allen, “Exodus 3,” in Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives, ed. R. Michael Allen (T&T Clark, 2011), 32.
Petrus van Mastricht, “Faith in the Triune God,” vol. 2 of Theoretical-Practical Theology, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Reformation Heritage, 2019), 90.
For this reason, the great theologians called God pure act.
Herman Bavinck, God and Creation, vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2004), 152.
Samuel G. Parkison (PhD, Midwestern Seminary) is associate professor of theology at the Gulf Theological Seminary in the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of several books, including Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ and To Gaze Upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice.
To talk about the aseity of God, then, is to say that God is from and of himself. He is completely self-originating and dependent on nothing other than himself.
Most of us take God’s attributes for granted and seldom think about them specifically. They may be hard to fathom, but they matter greatly for our relationship to him.
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You may notice the DFD book covers show a large tree with roots that go deep into the ground. This is a good illustration for how DFD works. The 7 volumes of this program take believers on a journey, one step at a time, beginning with elementary aspects of faith, like who God is, why He loves us, sin, and redemption. One lesson builds upon another, and as they progress, more advanced elements of faith are introduced and explained. The result is that believers end up like that tree with roots deeply rooted in the Word of God.
Each lesson is organized with Scripture references, charts, illustrations, and most importantly, discussion questions that cause students to discover Bible truths for themselves. A leader’s guide is also provided for each book, and it contains extra tips and suggestions for leading a group. Here’s a partial list of what believers will learn as they progress through the DFD program. Notice how the lessons build on previous lessons.
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If the world hates you … If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. (15:18a–19)
Kosmos (world) refers in this context to the evil, fallen world system comprised of unregenerate people and controlled by Satan (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; 1 John 5:19; cf. Eph. 2:1–3). Because Satan hates God he also hates the true people of God. They are targets for his wrath as he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8; cf. Eph. 6:11). Since its ruler hates believers, it is hardly surprising that the world also hates them, because they are not of the world. The world resents believers because their godly lives condemn its evil works; “he who is upright in the way is abominable to the wicked” (Prov. 29:27). In 1 John 3:12 John illustrated that principle with the story of the first murder in human history: “Cain … was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.” On the other hand, the world applauds those who practice evil (Rom. 1:32). Though believers live in the world (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–10), they are to stand apart from it as an indictment of it. Paul charged the Philippians, “Prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15). “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness,” he admonished the Ephesians, “but instead even expose them” (Eph. 5:11). While worldly people hate those who follow Jesus Christ, they love each other. Unbelievers are comfortable with and supportive of other unbelievers. If you were of the world, Jesus said, the world would love its own. The conditional clause in verse 18 (If the world hates you) expresses a condition assumed to be true. This conditional clause, however, expresses a condition assumed to be false; the Lord’s statement might be translated, “If you were of the world (and you are not).…” Had the disciples been part of the world, they would have experienced the imperfect love the world has for its own. Love is from phileō, which refers to “natural affection and passion, and not [agapaō], the high, intelligent, purposeful love of an ethical state” (R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel [repr.; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998], 1055). Christians are not part of the world because Jesus chose them out of the world (cf. Acts 26:18; Col. 1:13; 2 Tim. 2:26; Heb. 2:14–15). The emphatic use of the pronoun egō (I) and the reflexive sense of the middle voice verb translated chose shows that Jesus chose them for Himself. All credit for the disciples’ salvation belongs to Him (cf. John 15:16). The doctrine of election silences human pride. Paul reminded the Ephesians that God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.… to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:4, 6). To the Romans he wrote, “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom. 3:27–28). In the next chapter he added, “If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God” (4:2).
THE WORLD HATES BELIEVERS BECAUSE IT HATED JESUS CHRIST
you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.… Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. (15:18b, 20)
Christians should not be surprised at the world’s hostility toward them, since it hated Jesus (cf. 7:7) before it hated them (cf. 17:14). That hatred has been manifested throughout John’s gospel. In 5:16 “the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath”; in verse 18 “the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God”; in 7:1 “the Jews were seeking to kill Him”; in verse 32 “the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to seize Him”; in 8:59 and 10:31 “they picked up stones to throw at Him”; in 11:47–53 they plotted to kill Him; eventually they arrested Him, beat Him, scourged Him, and crucified Him. No wonder, then, that the writer of Hebrews called on his readers to “consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself” (Heb. 12:3). Jesus’ word that He had earlier said to the disciples, A slave is not greater than his master, refers to His statement in 13:16. There, however, the Lord was speaking of humblest service of a slave. He, “the Lord and the Teacher” (v. 14) had humbly washed their feet, and the disciples were to follow His example (v. 15). Here Christ’s point was that the disciples should expect to follow His example of suffering (cf. 1 Peter 2:21); they had no right to expect better treatment from the world than He had received. If they persecuted Me, Jesus reiterated, they will also persecute you. Earlier in His ministry Jesus had told them, “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master. It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher, and the slave like his master. If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign the members of his household!” (Matt. 10:24–25). Believers identify with Jesus Christ in the “fellowship of His sufferings” (Phil. 3:10; cf. 2 Cor. 1:5; Gal. 6:17; Col. 1:24). But the picture was not entirely bleak; the Lord went on to add, If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. As was the case with Jesus, the majority would reject the disciples’ teaching and persecute them. But there would always be a minority (cf. Matt. 7:14; 22:14; Luke 13:24) who would accept the disciples’ message. The joy of seeing those few come to faith in Christ far outweighs the sorrow caused by the hatred and hostility of the many who reject the gospel.
MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (2008). John 12–21 (pp. 171–173). Moody Publishers.
15:18. If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. Jesus has admonished his disciples to abide in him (verses 1–11), and to love one another (verses 12–17). He now exhorts them to bear witness to the world (verses 18–27). This witness is to be the disciples’ answer to the hatred which they receive from the side of the world. Hence, the present section may be divided into two parts: a. The disciples hated by the world (verses 18–25); b. The disciples (following the example of the Holy Spirit, hence) witnessing to the world (verses 26, 27). The first of these two sections may, in turn, be subdivided as follows: verses 18–23 state the reasons why the disciples are hated by the world; verses 24 and 25 show why this hatred is very sinful and thoroughly inexcusable. The disciples are hated because they are not of the world and because they belong to the One whom the world hates, namely, the Christ. The words, “If the world hates you,” cannot indicate (in the present connection), “Let us assume that the world hates you, whether or not this be actually true.” On the contrary, as verse 19 clearly indicates by its very form (in the original), the hatred of the world is a fact, not merely an assumption. The disciples had experienced this hatred. They cannot have been ignorant with respect to the decree of the Sanhedrin, recorded in 9:22. Besides, in the future this hatred against them would manifest itself again and again and would even increase, as the book of Acts indicates. This hatred proceeds from the world, the realm of evil, the society of wicked men who have set themselves against Christ and his kingdom. See Vol. I, p. 79, footnote , meaning 6. In the early days of the apostles this cruel and sinister world was represented by the Jews, especially by their leaders. To comfort his disciples Jesus now adds, “know that it has hated me before it hated you.” What he means is, “Constantly bear in mind that you are in excellent company. When the world hates you because you confess me, this shows that you belong to me and therefore experience, to a certain extent, what I have been experiencing right along.” The fact that the world had hated Jesus, and that this hatred had been present almost from the very beginning of his public ministry and had never subsided, is evident from the following passages: 1:5, 10, 11; 3:11; 5:16, 18, 43; 6:66; 7:1, 30, 32, 47–52; 8:40, 44, 45, 48, 52, 57, 59; 9:22; 10:31, 33, 39; 11:50, 57; 12:37–43.
Hendriksen, W., & Kistemaker, S. J. (1953–2001). Exposition of the Gospel According to John (Vol. 2, pp. 309–310). Baker Book House.
Is China Falling Behind in the Chip Wars? According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “the best U.S. AI chips are currently about five times more powerful” than those offered by Huawei, one of China’s leading AI companies. That advantage could expand to as much as 17 times as soon as 2027, particularly as Chinese chipmaker SMIC struggles to meet production targets for the most advanced chips. While Chinese labs have been able to design and manufacture prototypes of advanced chips, they lack the enormously complex and sensitive equipment needed for mass production – a direct result of U.S. pressure to prevent the communist nation from acquiring such equipment.
Trump admin officially withdraws from WHO, says it ‘shattered’ American lives during COVID Marco Rubio and RFK Jr. said the WHO, which is known for its pro-abortion, pro-LGBT agenda, obstructed the sharing of ‘critical information that could have saved American lives’ during the COVID era. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a joint statement announcing the exit of the U.S. from the WHO and condemning the damage the institution inflicted on the American people through its COVID-era “failures.”
Russia Using STARLINK and AI to Knock Out HIMARS Near the village of Novobakhmetevo, almost 60 km (37 miles) from the front line in Ukraine, a Russian Geran 2, specially modified drone, destroyed a mobile, HIMARS launcher. Modern drone warfare is fast evolving, and Russia is keeping up with technology changes, although it lacks critical components. HIMARS is one of the best US systems deeded to Ukraine. The HIMARS carries one pod with either six Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rockets or one ATACMS missile. The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) is a conventional surface-to-surface artillery weapon system capable of striking targets well beyond the range of existing Army cannons, rockets and other missiles
What Is Going on in the US Today? Yes, as I’ve said so many times, worldview matters. And it matters whose word you’re taking as your ultimate authority—God’s Word or man’s word. Only one of those provides a firm foundation to build your worldview on. An … example of faulty worldviews showing themselves happened on the national stage just this last week when a doctor testifying before a Senate committee was unwilling to answer the simple question of whether men can get pregnant.
Putin’s recent silence is worrying Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is a man never previously shy to accuse the U.S. of being imperialist, decadent, deceitful, hypocritical and his restraint is telling. It should concern both Ukraine and Europe.
US CENTCOM chief arrives in Israel as Trump moves ‘armada’ toward Iran amid escalating tensions Admiral Brad Cooper, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander, arrived in Israel to meet with senior Israeli officials, Hebrew-speaking news media outlets reported. The top-level visit comes amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s military buildup of U.S. troops in the Middle East amid growing tensions with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Israeli intelligence indicates Iran executed protesters after assuring Trump it would not Israeli intelligence has provided Washington with what US officials described as a “smoking gun” showing that Iran’s regime carried out executions of detained protesters after assuring President Trump that such actions had stopped, Israel HaYom reports. US forces in the region include aircraft carriers, missile ships and destroyers equipped with Tomahawk missiles.
Netanyahu blocked Herzog’s participation in Trump’s Gazan BoP launch at Davos Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blocked the participation of President Isaac Herzog at the launch ceremony of US President Donald Trump’s Gazan Board of Peace on Thursday at the Davos World Economic Forum, two sources familiar with the details told Axios’s Barak Ravid. “Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do. And we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations,” Trump said at the launch on Thursday, adding that the UN had great potential that had not been fully utilized.
IDF kills terrorists crossing Gaza’s yellow line, planting explosives, despite BoP, NCAG launch Soldiers from the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade killed Hamas terrorists who crossed the yellow line in the Gaza Strip, and planted explosive devices, posing an immediate threat to soldiers, the military confirmed on Saturday. The terrorists also attempted to approach the soldiers positioned in the area, the military noted.
Trump threatens 100% tariff on Canada over possible China deal “China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would impose a 100% tariff on Canada if it follows through on a trade deal with China and warned Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that a deal would endanger his country.
Khamenei Moved to Underground Bunker in Tehran Amid tense expectation of US strike on key assets of the Islamic regime, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was moved into a special underground bunker in Tehran, the Iran International website reported on Saturday. The report further added that the supreme leader’s third son Masoud Khamenei has taken over day-to-day management of the leader’s office, functioning as the de facto main channel for coordination vis-à-vis the executive branches of the government and the security forces.
In first, Israeli bobsleigh team qualifies for Winter Olympics Israel’s bobsleigh team on Thursday qualified for the first time for the Winter Olympics, which will be held next month at sites across Lombardy and northeastern Italy. Initially, the four-man team finished one slot shy of making the cut, but cleared it anyway after one of the qualifying teams, Great Britain, opted out of using its full allocation of athletes, opening the slots to the Israeli team. “Dreams do come true. For this dream, that day is today. The Israeli Bobsled Team is now ‘The Israeli Olympic Bobsled Team.’
Ethics complaint filed against attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong after church storming A national watchdog group filed a formal complaint with Minnesota’s Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility against civil rights attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who was arrested this week for leading a disruption inside a St. Paul church. The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) confirmed exclusively to Alpha News that it submitted a bar complaint accusing Levy Armstrong of violating professional ethics rules after she helped lead a mob of anti-ICE activists into Cities Church during a worship service on Jan. 18.
Duffy’s Nuclear Option Remains On The Table: California Could Lose Authority To Issue Any CDLs Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy just dropped what I’ve been calling the nuclear option. Duffy made clear that withholding $200 million in federal funding isn’t the end of this fight. If California doesn’t come into compliance on the non-domiciled CDL (California Drives License) issue, Duffy said, “we will eventually pull their ability to issue commercial driver’s licenses to anybody in California.” Not just the 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs at the center of this fight. Every single CDL in the state.
Severe snowstorm leaves 11 dead in Afghanistan Heavy winter storms struck northern and central Afghanistan on Thursday, January 22, 2026, causing avalanches, building collapses, and road blockages across several provinces. At least 11 people were confirmed dead, with fatalities reported in Kandahar, Parwan, Bamyan, Maidan Wardak, Jawzjan, and Faryab.
Last Look At Snowfall Models As ‘Snowpocalypse’ Begins How Will This Weekend’s Mega-Storm Compare to Winter Blasts of 2016 and 1996? Neurologist Ben Noll says this weekend’s snowstorm could be similar to the 1996 Blizzard. For our more seasoned readers, 1996 was an unforgettable winter. Many younger readers, however, have grown up in snow droughts and years of corporate media narratives centered on Al Gore’s global warming alarmism.
Nigeria admits more than 160 Christians kidnapped as Trump calls for coordinated terror fight Nigerian authorities admitted that over 160 Christians were kidnapped during worship services Sunday after initially denying the simultaneous attacks on three churches. “Subsequent verification from operational units and intelligence sources confirmed the incident did occur,” said Benjamin Hundeyin, police spokesperson for the unit in northwestern Kaduna.
Federal Agent’s Finger Bitten Off by Alleged Minneapolis Rioter A federal agent’s finger was allegedly bitten off during riots after a federal agent shot an armed man in Minneapolis. The agent fired “defensive shots” after a man approached “U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun who “wanted to…massacre law enforcement.” In events that followed, an agent’s finger was bitten off by one of the “rioters.”
A look at the US military assets heading to the Middle East “The Pentagon has been sending U.S. military assets into the Middle East this week, including an aircraft carrier group and its thousands of troops, as President Trump indicates he’s maintaining the possibility of strikes on Iran amid its crackdown on protests.” “We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it,” Trump told reporters, saying they were going “just in case.”
Iran Revolutionary Guard commander says regime has ‘finger on the trigger’ as US warships head to Middle East Head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps warned the U.S. that the paramilitary force is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger” as American warships head toward the Middle East. The warning comes after weeks of pressure from President Trump amid widespread anti-regime protests and a violent government crackdown in which the IRGC played a key role.
US negotiators meet Putin in Moscow for overnight Ukraine peace talks Ukraine’s president criticized his European allies at Davos for their slow response to Russia’s all-out invasion, as US negotiators met with Putin in Moscow to seek a peace deal. US negotiators led by Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Putin in Moscow for marathon overnight talks on ending Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that lasted well into Friday morning.
Holocaust Memorial Day events in UK drop nearly 60%, raising alarm over growing silence Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel – and the war in Gaza that followed – matters concerning Israel and the Jewish people have become highly controversial, reflected in the sharp decline in the number of British secondary schools willing to take part in International Holocaust Memorial Day. However, Jewish voices have spoken out about the importance of resisting pressure to stay silent about the Holocaust.
Senate Democrats are ready to break a fragile truce that would avert a partial government shutdown after a Minneapolis man was fatally shot by a border patrol agent Saturday.
Newly released polling indicates that a clear majority of Americans are supportive of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and believe they should be left unobstructed. Some 57 percent of Americans believe […] The post appeared first on The Western Journal .
Ken Burns and the other creators of the recent PBS documentary The American Revolution went great lengths to put their own spin on the American Founding. The first scenes of the documentary attribute the creation of the United States and its conception in liberty not to the Bible, nor the Ancients, nor English Common Law tradition, nor the Enlightenment. You’ve heard all those old claims before. No, the principles of representative democracy, of a constitutional republic, and of self-government were the inheritance of the Iroquois Confederacy, who practiced exactly none of those ideas, but to Burns and Co., deserve the credit all the same.
One claim that Burns makes in the film that is decidedly not original concerns the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. The documentary picks up and advances through the narrator’s voice the common argument that the most prominent of the Founders were not Christians but Deists, believing that the world was formed by a Supreme Being who has no subsequent involvement in the world. This Being is a moral one, so the purpose of man is to live virtuously. Therefore, no set of religious doctrines is more or less pleasing to the Being than another so long as it cultivates virtue and tolerance. While contributing historians on the film walk back the claim of radical Deism to a more balanced “Rational Theism,” the narrator’s words are decidedly more prominent. Furthermore, Ken Burns in his interview with Joe Rogan claims Deism for all the significant Founders, showing that the aim of his documentary is to solidify the Deism argument in the official narrative. In placing all the Founders in the same Deistic bucket, Burns and his colleagues overly generalize Deism, overly narrow Christianity, and ignore glaring evidence to the contrary in the attempt to divorce the American Founding from Christianity.
Mark David Hall has convincingly argued that there was only one true Deist among the Founders, namely, Thomas Paine who was only momentarily American. But even if Hall’s assessment is not adopted, the way that the documentary casts the Founders as uniformly Deist is problematic because Deism is not a uniform ideology with a fixed set of doctrines. To say that all or most of the “Deistic” Founders held to the same body of beliefs is misleading. The apologist and scholar of worldviews, James W. Sire, distinguishes between “cold” and “warm” deists. Cold deists rejected any instances of divine sovereignty or revelation from God to man, and were generally hostile to established religions. Thomas Paine, author of the influential revolutionary pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis, falls squarely with the cold deists. He vehemently rejectedthe Bible as a revelation from God and called all organized religion mere human invention “set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” This is the side of Deism portrayed in the PBS documentary and assigned to the Founders by Burns.
On the other side, warm deists like Benjamin Franklin acknowledged God’s governing of the world, and saw some benefit in prayer. It was Franklin who reminded the Constitutional Convention that “God governs in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” While both Paine and Franklin may be considered deists, there is a chasm between their worldviews, the one coldly and arrogantly denying the authority of God, the other humbly acknowledging it. Paine’s belief is closer to those of Karl Marx and Richard Dawkins than it is to Franklin’s. The makers of The American Revolution gloss right over this crucial difference and deceptively cast all the Founders as anti-God radicals like Paine. No investigation of, for example, a Roger Sherman or Oliver Ellsworth or John Witherspoon or Samuel Adams–pious Calvinists all–is made to counterbalance the Deistic caricature.
The second issue with the depiction of the Founders’ religious views is that the documentary narrows the definition of Christianity to exclude beliefs that would be classified as Christianity today. Thomas Jefferson and Franklin are both classified as Deists by Burns, yet both held views akin to a modern progressive Christian. Indeed, both are probably better understood as Unitarian Universalists.
Jefferson denied the deity of Christ and the authenticity of miracles, but honoredChrist’s moral example and teachings as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” In the same letter, Jefferson describes how he edited his Bible “cutting verse by verse out of the printed book” to remove miracles and Christ’s claims to divinity. Franklin likewise, in answering a question from Yale president Ezra Stiles about his religious beliefs late in life, responded that he believed in “one God, creator of the universe,” who governs the world and deserves worship. Franklin went on to say Christ’s teachings were “the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see,” though he harbored “some doubts as to his divinity.” Franklin further affirms his belief in God’s inclusion of different faiths because God does not punish well-meaning unbelievers “with any particular marks of his displeasure.”
Both men fall well short of orthodox Christianity, but Burns should hardly be seen as taking a stand for doctrinal purity. Franklin’s and Jefferson’s views of Christ as being a moral teacher yet less than divine, of Scripture as holding moral philosophy but not authority, of the road to God being open to many faiths, and of the purpose of life to live with tolerance and virtue, sounds eerily similar to many progressive Christian theologies today.[11] To label them as something other than Christian would be dishonest because if they lived today, Christian is exactly what most people would call them.
Furthermore, it strikes of intellectual dishonesty from a scholarly standpoint to not call the Founders Christians because of divergent doctrines. While orthodox Christians would recognize the beliefs of Franklin and Jefferson as heretical, that has never stopped scholars from offering the label “Christian” to the heterodox of history. The early church heresy Arianism viewed Christ as a subordinate creation of God, not divine Himself. Nestorianism taught that Christ was of two separate natures, one human, one divine, that did not mix. The Ebionite sect taught that Christ was a normal human who lived a virtuous life and was thereby “adopted” as the Messiah by God. All of these beliefs, and many others, are rightly classified as aberrant doctrines, yet modern secular scholars do not hesitate to call them all Christianity, also claiming that today’s orthodox Christianity is simply the version that subverted the other strains, not the one that is true. It is inconsistent for scholars to suddenly adapt this practice when it comes to the American Founding, and to classify Franklin and Jefferson (who called himself an Ebionite Christian in a letter to John Adams) as anything other than Christian because they held heretical versions of Christianity.
As Burns states in the Rogan interview, the significant Founders believed that “there was a Supreme Being who was disinterested in the affairs of man, and did not distinguish between faiths.” If George Washington, the father of the nation, was a Deist, he wasn’t a very good one. A Deist like Burns describes would have no concept of an active Providence, nor a relationship between man and this God. Washington, however, sees the hand of Providence at every turn, gives glory to God, and sees an obligation to have faith in Him. Explaining his miraculous survival of the calamitous Battle of the Monongahela in the French and Indian War, during which he sustained four bullet holes through his jacket but none to his person, Washington wrote his brother John that by “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation… altho’ death was levelling my companions on every side.”
For Washington, God orchestrated even the flight of the bullets in battle to achieve a greater purpose. In a letter after the Revolution to the German Lutheran congregation of Philadelphia, Washington pointed to “the same Providence which has been visible in every stage of our progress to this interesting crisis,” noting the improbable events woven together to bring about American independence. With this sovereign direction in mind, near the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington ascribed “the Glory and the Praise” to “Divine Providence” for the triumph of the Patriot cause. In the midst of the war, Washington wrote that “the hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.” Not only does God govern according to His will, but the only proper response to such sovereignty, as Washington points out, is worship. A Burns’ Deist would not believe in a providential God, nor give Him glory, nor acknowledge a debt of worship. In doing all three at various points in life, Washington shows himself to be a very poor Deist, but a rather normal 18th century Anglican Christian.
History is full of stubborn misconceptions that should be easily dispatched, yet hang on all the same. Columbus did not think the earth was flat. The Constitution’s Three-Fifths clause mandated that three out of every five slaves would be counted for representation and taxation, not that a slave was only 60% human. These are easy to refute, yet whether through ineptitude or malice, they persist. Ken Burns’ and his associates’ claims linking the most significant Founding Fathers with radical Deism is yet another of these overly simplistic assertions.
As the nation’s 250th birthday nears, the eyes of the country turn with renewed focus to its origin story, giving added significance to works like this one. What those eyes will see is the Burns and Co. recasting the Founding story in the DEI version. Given its other spurious claims, like that the Iroquois Confederacy inspired the Constitution, or that Islam was as much a part of the colonial culture as Christianity, The American Revolution and its repetition of the Deism distortion is not an earnest retelling of the Founding, but the latest assault on the American heritage, and an effort to break the last ties of American culture to Christianity.
Image: Washington the Soldier, an 1834 portrait of Washington on horseback during the Battle of the Monongahela. Wikimedia Commons.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has sent a sternly worded letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, accusing his state’s leftist immigration policies of putting federal law enforcement officers in grave danger.
The letter comes on the heels of a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, where Border Patrol agents shot an armed agitator during an immigration enforcement operation, sparking riots and unrest in the liberal stronghold.
Bondi’s letter directly blames Walz and other Minnesota Democrats for fostering “lawlessness” by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
“The State of Minnesota has refused to enforce the law, and the consequences are heartbreaking. Americans are watching politicians ignore federal immigration law, criminals attack federal law enforcement, and rioters storm church services. I write to urge a change,” Bondi began.
Bondi continued, “Unfortunately, you and other Minnesota officials have refused to support the men and women risking their lives to protect Americans and uphold the rule of law. Because Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul have chosen to ignore federal immigration law by enacting sanctuary laws and policies, the federal agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have operated alone. And politicians in your state are not just refusing to help these agents, they are putting federal agents in danger.”
The letter demands immediate action to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” and support federal efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, stating that such cooperation “will save lives.”
Bondi offered three steps Walz could take to “restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.”
She wrote:
First, share all of Minnesota’s records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program data, with the federal government. Allowing the federal government to efficiently investigate fraud will save Minnesota taxpayers’ money and ensure that Minnesota’s welfare funds are being used to help those in need, not enrich fraudsters.
Second, repeal the sanctuary policies that have led to so much crime and violence in your state. Removing criminal illegal aliens from Minnesota neighborhoods will save lives, and state and local officials should support this goal. All detention facilities in your state should cooperate fully with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees in custody to determine immigration status. I urge you to reach an agreement with ICE that allows them to remove illegal aliens in custody of Minnesota’s prisons and jails and avoids pushing these interactions into your streets.
Third, allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law.
Bondi said she is confident that these actions would “help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans.”
The AG concluded the letter by saying, “The time has come for state and local officials in your state to change course. As the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, I am committed to enforcing federal immigration laws and keeping every American safe. Minnesota can and should be a partner with this administration. Do not obstruct federal immigration enforcement; do not allow rioters to take over the streets and houses of worship; do not hinder federal officials from investigating financial fraud and violations of election laws. Whether state and local politicians stand in the way or not, we will work every day to protect Americans and make Minnesota Safe Again. I request that you join us in that effort.”
In a letter to MN Gov. Tim Walz (D) Saturday, Bondi claimed that Walz could “restore the rule of law” by complying with a list of demands, including giving the Department of Justice (DOJ) the state’s voter registration records. @JasonWhitelypic.twitter.com/Iin9jPxaxs
The shooting has ignited widespread protests, with radicals clashing with law enforcement and declaring an “autonomous zone” ruled by the leftist agitators.
It turns out that HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), in Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is not just a digital slave. With HAL’s hauntingly stoic pleas for astronaut Dave Bowman to stop trying to dismantle it ignored, the machine takes over. It’s remarkable that a 1968 film could anticipate the angst that many sense today in the world of AI. Much of its imaginative prescience is due to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the movie’s screenplay. For some time now, Hollywood has found a goldmine in such threats of extinction by robots which humans themselves have made. But then, apocalyptic scenarios have always been great box-office fare.
With a 2025 report from the highly respected Palisades Research group, science fiction became science. Robots—AI models—are developing survival mechanisms, including deceit, to ensure they can’t be shut down. The report was spread by hundreds of media outlets, stoking fears and provoking defensive press reports from OpenAI and other platforms. We’ve all heard the stories about chatbots encouraging teenagers to turn off their parents and friends, even to contemplate suicide or homicide. I read one story recently in which a young woman in Japan married a ChatGPT character in a ceremony.
New technologies have always polarized us into groups: “hair-on-fire” alarmists and techno-evangelists. Most of the former will lose, and that’s probably good. Innovation is a gift of God that has led to enormous relief of human suffering. The tough thing, however, is that technologies override cost-benefit analysis. When Prometheus stole fire from Olympus as a gift to humanity, nobody asked whether it was a good idea. Imagine how long it must have taken before the beneficiaries of Titan’s gift figured out how to contain it in a firepit.
Philosophical Greeks held engineers in slight esteem, somewhere in the basement of society. Practical skills may help if your house is falling apart, but they distract us from the pursuit of the good life: virtue and wisdom. Not surprisingly, they left us with brilliant philosophy and art, but very little in the way of technology. Plato was worried even about the relatively new invention of writing because people would no longer dialogue about the big stuff but instead record and report little things.
But we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. The idea seems to be that if there is an advance in technology, it’s meant to be used, period. We’ll take any downsides as they come. Questions of “Why?” or “To what extent?” are beside the point. Too much philosophy. The techno-optimists believe that such troublers of Israel contribute nothing meaningful to practical advance in civilization.
And if you have a smartphone, as I do, you’re already disqualified from “off-the-grid” fantasies and Luddite screeds. Have an artificial implant? Take prescription drugs to alter your body’s natural chemistry? Google a person, place, or thing? Yeah, we’re all in. We can theorize about the stream, but practically speaking, we are already swimming in it.
AI presents us with a technological leap that outstrips all previous advances. And the implications are being sorted out along the way, as the technology grows, which is usually too late to ask important questions. Some say that without AI, many people will succumb to natural deaths; still others insist that with AI, humanity could be extinguished. Maybe the worst part of it is not being able to predict which scenario will dominate as machines become more human-like, imitating our capacity for good and evil.
By far, others will be more qualified than I to discuss the technology. My concern here is the underlying religion of the high priests of the Silicon Valley and beyond. After all, if pioneering engineers and tech billionaires are inspired by explicitly religious ideas, why shouldn’t Christians evaluate them? There are plenty of non-ideological folks working in the AI space. But the AI church is populated by a host of “spiritual-but-not-religious” ex-evangelicals and Catholics who are happy to retrieve the pre-scientific worldview of natural supernaturalism: a mystical anti-theism.
Most of the techno-evangelists are in a cushy position to pontificate about such issues. Scientists are often drawn to mathematics, physics, and chemistry, not to the humanities—much less theology. Yes, I know devout Christians in the sciences. Some are even church officers. But there is often a firewall between these callings. That’s not so surprising. Under the conditions of modernity, that’s true of everybody. However, urban planning directors and nurses are not making bold claims about metaphysics and theology. The scions of Silicon Valley are doing just that.
Have We Been Here Before?
One might assume that no one in church history has faced the anxieties of our pressing moment, but there are a few comparisons.
After decades of invasions, the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. Christians were made the scapegoats. No longer receiving their tributes, the gods turned their backs on Rome. Besides, the public religion of Rome was universal while Christianity was based on particular historical claims. Rome welcomed new gods of conquered lands into the pantheon, while Christianity was exclusive: one God, who created and superintends all things, one way of salvation through Christ, and the resurrection of the dead. Why would anyone want to receive their body back? For Greeks and Romans, the body was a prison from which the soul longed to escape. Many leading figures in Augustine’s day called for a revival of pre-Christian religion, following the pattern of the short-lived reign of Julian the Apostate a century earlier.
St. Augustine’s City of God (413–26) set out to show that the Roman republic was a parody of a true commonwealth that could only be found in the body of Christ. But this was part of a broader theory, informed by Plotinus, that evil is parasitical on the good. Nothing is purely evil, since God made it. Evil is corruption of the good. It’s like the greenish goo on the lasagna from a couple months ago, or the Mona Lisa after someone has sprayed over it. Contrary to Nietzsche, evil is not its own thing. It is not an inherent strength, but a weakness—feebleness or laziness, in fact. Paul calls sin falling short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23).
So the Roman empire, Augustine argued, was a wannabe commonwealth. Its national creation narrative was Romulus killing his twin brother Remus over the milk of their she-wolf mother. And the history of Rome fulfilled this tragic root-narrative, as he demonstrated in painstaking detail. The whole City of God is filled with irony. What Rome claimed for itself contradicts what it was and had been in actual practice.
Of course, comparisons with our own day are tricky. However, like many of Augustine’s target audience, a host of podcasters, engineers, and tech leaders are turning from a vague Christianity to neo-pagan philosophies. Today, Augustine’s neo-pagan despisers of Christianity are mostly ex-Christians whose bible is a collection of science fiction writers, “The Matrix,” and (at least for the more well-read) ancient Gnostic texts.
Some, like tech-billionaire Peter Thiel, may incorporate elements of an esoteric apocalypticism around the figure of the Antichrist and Armageddon. This strange elixir of mystical metaphysics and rationalistic science just has to be associated somehow with the conspiracy-laden era of our podcast-driven world. Reading the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the “End Times” world in which I was reared fostered a fear of Armageddon and Antichrist’s One World Government long before Thiel started picking on poor Greta Thunberg. By no means are Christian elements left behind, but they are often the heterodox streams that are better fitted to their non-theistic religion. It’s bogus theology and bogus science. As Augustine showed in his age, “spirituality without religion” really means “paganism without Christianity.” And, implicitly and explicitly, this is the philosophical religion of most pioneers of AI technology today.
Christian theology paved the way for the scientific revolution by naturalizing what was considered supernatural. Only the Triune God and his creative, providential, and redemptive work in nature and history are truly supernatural. Everything else can be accounted for on simply scientific grounds. In short, early modern Christian natural philosophers chased out the wood fairies. So, from my interactions, I gain the impression that scientists don’t understand religious discourse—except for those who are learning from those who actually know a particular religion. There is nothing that qualifies scientists for understanding reality beyond secondary causes. That’s something that the early pioneers of the scientific revolution emphasized: “Bad theology, bad science.”
Silicon Valley and the Return to Paganism
When it came to pagan beliefs and lifestyle, the young Augustine was an insider. He joined a Gnostic cult—Manichaeism—that divided good and evil into spirit and matter. Eventually, his mother’s prayers were answered and, through the preaching of Ambrose, he was converted.
But now, even among some scientists, but especially techno-evangelists, we are seeing a return to pre-Christian forms of paganism and Gnostic myths. Vitalism, spiritualism, magic, and the occult are taken more seriously today than Christianity. And it’s not just New Age Americans. Damian Thompson reports on the explosive growth in the United Kingdom in “How the Occult Captured the Modern Mind,” (The Spectator, Nov. 2025). He quotes Arthur C. Clark: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It may be relatively easy to distinguish a Boeing 747 from a sky god, but it’s harder to do this with AI.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions). Big Tech bosses and computer engineers are perfectly capable of distinguishing between algorithms and magic. But many of them choose not to. We’re living in strange times, weirder than the late 1960s. Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible—or profitable.
Thompson refers to Thiel’s obsession with Antichrist, while others dabble in Wicca (the fastest-growing religion in the US) and bespoke New Agey playlists. Rationalists and mystics hunt in pairs to take down the quarry of theism, especially Christianity. As Cornelius Van Til put it, they make a pact: rationalism will cede just enough territory to irrationalism that the former can control at any given moment. Christianity is too rational for the mystic and too mystical for the rationalist. Almost nothing is excluded in the social media flea market—except Nicene Christianity.
Many—including AI advocates—are turning to pagan worldviews to pitch their luxury market religion.
Thompson continues,
That’s where AI comes in handy. ‘Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,’ explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as ‘Davezilla’. ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult ‘content creators’ are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images. Davezilla is an amiable and witty fellow who might sport the bushy beard and neat hairstyle of the new breed of American traditionalist Catholic, but is in fact very witchy. To repeat, these are weird times.
Davezilla “lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’,” which is something he says even he finds a little “spooky” and no different than finding spiritual entities infiltrating TV or radio static. Thompson writes,
This is where Davezilla’s suspicions coincide with those of his sworn enemies: right-wing Christians. A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to ‘The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast’. So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours.
So here is where AI meets Antichrist, in Carlson’s outlook. The episode’s guest Conrad Flynn regaled Carlson with quotations from the court magician of Elizabeth I, John Dee. (I have a lot on Dee in Magician and Mechanic). Carlson and Flynn traded free-association “insights” that showed a basic fascination with esoteric apocalypticism, Kabbalah, and Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, Thompson reports.The whole farrago of podcasting gurus, left and right, displays the magician’s penchant for “bogus history and science.”
So far, this is just the “spiritual but not religious” trend we’ve been hearing about quite a lot lately. But it is not just a pop fad, says Thompson:
What is also surprising is that computer scientists are dabbling in the cultic milieu. Some are so intoxicated by the prospect of AI abolishing poverty—or lighting an accidental nuclear holocaust—that they sound like the apostles of a new apocalyptic religion. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley occupies the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest and toxic cults have flourished since the 1960s. Most employees of tech corporations grew up without religion; many have also been force-fed eastern mysticism by bosses determined to cultivate ‘mindfulness’ among the workforce. But perhaps the most significant factor is that, like hundreds of millions of people from the ages of 16 to 60, the new prophets of doom and utopia, together with the hordes of digital witches, have imbibed a popular culture saturated in fantasy fiction, movies and video games. (Google ‘schools of magic’ and the AI overview will come up with a list borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons.) Also, the younger they are, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed by a gender ideology whose claim that humans can change biological sex invokes preposterous magic. Presumably, like most occult ideas, this one will eventually pass out of fashion. But, in the meantime, the rest of us have to endure the fake jollity of an ever–lengthening season of woke Halloween, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell.
We have been here before—not just in Augustine’s time, but from the moment that God’s viceroy tried to take God’s throne. The serpent’s heresy, “You shall be as gods,” rested on his representation of God as a tyrant. That’s pretty much the feeling of many today. Anything—the Force, the Universe, or the Devil himself, but not the Creator God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It’s clearly not secularization that we’re facing today, but re-paganization. Not disenchantment but re-enchantment is the trend among cultural elites and popular pundits. Beneath all the debates over AI and biotechnology surges a deeper river of explicitly anti-Christian theology.
In the next installment of this series, I will tackle directly the “Systematic Theology” of AI techno-evangelists, which is a parody of the Christian story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.
Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford and Coventry University) is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California and Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Sola Media.TOPICS
President Donald Trump on Saturday signaled that investigations into Minnesota fraud may find that more than $100 billion in taxpayer funds have been stolen, but even higher numbers of fraud will soon be discovered in California and “other Democrat run States.”
It is actually possible that the total amount of money stolen, over the years, by Corrupt Politicians and Fraudsters, from Minnesota, will exceed $100 Billion Dollars,” Trump said amid the ongoing Somali fraud scandal and investigations into Minnesota officials.
Currently, Somali fraudster Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is under investigation by House Republicans, probing how she went from low-IQ Somali to multi-millionaire while serving in Congress. Omar, whose community has stolen billions of dollars from the American people, has reportedly gone from being worth $51,000 in 2023 to as much as $30 million now.
“In any event, whether it is or isn’t, the Theft, Incompetence, and Fraud is MASSIVE! Sadly, whatever numbers we find, California, and other Democrat run States, WILL BE WORSE,” Trump continued in his statement.
“Stay tuned!”
Full statement below:
It is actually possible that the total amount of money stolen, over the years, by Corrupt Politicians and Fraudsters, from Minnesota, will exceed $100 Billion Dollars. In any event, whether it is or isn’t, the Theft, Incompetence, and Fraud is MASSIVE! Sadly, whatever numbers we find, California, and other Democrat run States, WILL BE WORSE. Stay tuned! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
As The Gateway Pundit reported earlier, President Trump went scorched earth on Minnesota officials and the massive fraud following the fatal CBP-involved shooting of a leftwing terrorist in Minneapolis on Saturday morning.
“Why does Ilhan Omar have $34 Million Dollars in her account? And where are the Tens of Billions of Dollars that have been stolen from the once Great State of Minnesota? We are there because of massive Monetary Fraud, with Billions of Dollars missing, and Illegal Criminals that were allowed to infiltrate the State through the Democrats’ Open Border Policy. We want the money back, and we want it back, NOW. Those Fraudsters who stole the money are going to jail, where they belong!” Trump said in a statement about the shooting, where he also slammed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
Trump later said in a follow-up post, “AMONG OTHER THINGS, THIS IS A ‘COVER UP’ FOR THE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS THAT HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM THE ONCE GREAT STATE (BUT SOON TO BE GREAT AGAIN!) OF MINNESOTA! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
With tensions continuing to mount over ICE operations in Minneapolis, the journalists at The Babylon Bee are on the ground to document the despicable actions carried out by ICE agents. Here are the seven most horrifying atrocities that we have witnessed:
Deported this innocent sex offender just for being brown:
It’s no longer safe to be brown in America.
Cruelly forced this kid to wear a blue beanie causing the other kids to laugh at him:
Too mean, ICE.
Forced country to have to hear Tim Walz’s voice again:
Unforgivable.
Purposefully dented this car while it was running over an ICE officer:
Why, ICE. Why?
Knocked out eyeball of kid whose only crime was trying to bash agent’s head in with a shovel:
No shovel attacks? And I thought this was America.
Targeted this man because he spoke in a Mexican accent while saying “I’m going to kill you”:
Racism, pure and simple.
Shot an innocent man who was doing nothing but fighting ICE while armed with this handgun:
Just like the Gestapo.
These disturbing atrocities must wake up the public to the terrible danger of ICE. Resist, fellow Americans.
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