The first thing God does in the Bible is speak. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light" (Genesis 1:3). There are no tools in that sentence and no materials, and nothing between the wanting and the having. The word is enough.
The rest of Scripture keeps returning to it. "For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm" (Psalm 33:9). John opens his gospel with "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1), and Hebrews says the Son is "sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Hebrews 1:3). For as long as people have tried to picture what it means to be God, the picture has been this: you say it, and it is.
I have been thinking about that picture a lot, because of what I do all day.
From prompt to thing
For most of my life as a programmer my job was translation. Someone had an idea in plain words, and I turned it into syntax a machine could follow. The distance between "I want a page that shows my orders" and a page that shows orders was weeks of work, and that distance was the whole profession.
That distance is collapsing. Today I describe a feature in a sentence and watch it get written. You can describe a picture and get the picture, or a song, or a short film. Agents take a paragraph and come back with a working app. Each year the sentence gets shorter, the result gets bigger, and the human labour in the middle gets thinner.
Follow the line forward. Language models already drive tools, tools already drive machines, and machines already print, cut, assemble and build. Connect them well enough and one day someone says "build a house here, three bedrooms, lots of light," and a house begins to exist.
We are building, out of silicon, the oldest image of God we have.
The oldest temptation
None of this is a new desire. It is the first one.
The serpent's offer in the garden was not money or pleasure. It was "you will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). C.S. Lewis described what that lie did to us in Mere Christianity:
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods" — could set up on their own as if they had created themselves — be their own masters — invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
Isaiah gives the same ambition a voice: "I will ascend to the heavens … I will make myself like the Most High" (Isaiah 14:13–14). And at Babel it becomes a building project: "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves" (Genesis 11:4). God's verdict on Babel reads strangely in 2026: "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them" (Genesis 11:6).
One people, one language, nothing impossible. That is close to the pitch for a general-purpose model trained on everything humans have written.
Magic with a better interface
Lewis saw something else coming. In The Abolition of Man he argued that the wise men of old asked how to bring the soul into line with reality, through knowledge, self-discipline and virtue, while modern technique asks the opposite question. "For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique."
Speaking a word and having the world rearrange itself to match is the oldest definition of magic there is. AI does not feel like engineering to most people for a reason. It feels like a spell, and spells have always been a way of getting what you want without submitting to anyone.
Lewis also warned about who ends up holding that power: "what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." When the words that make things are spoken into a few companies' servers, it is fair to ask whose words they are.
Naming, not creating
Look closely, though, and the imitation is easy to see.
When God speaks, "what is seen was not made out of what was visible" (Hebrews 11:3). That is creation from nothing. When I speak to a model, nothing like that happens. My words go into a machine trained on billions of other people's words, running on power from a power station, on chips made from sand somebody dug up. Every "creation" rearranges things that already existed.
Lewis said this about human creativity in general, in a letter to Sister Penelope: "We rearrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us." Try to imagine a new primary colour, he said, and see what happens.
The Bible's first picture of human speech is the right size. God brings the animals to Adam "to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name" (Genesis 2:19). God's word creates; our word names. AI is an astonishing naming machine. It is not a creating one.
That does not make the desire to make things wicked. The first command given to people was to make: "fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28), given to creatures made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). When the tabernacle needed building, God filled Bezalel "with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills" (Exodus 31:3). Tolkien called this sub-creation: we make, he wrote, "by the law in which we're made." A child who puts on his father's shoes is not rebelling. He is showing whose child he is.
So technology is not outside God's claim. Abraham Kuyper put it in a line I keep coming back to: "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'" That includes the data centres. The question is never whether we should make things. It is what, and for whom.
Idols that talk back
Here is where it gets uncomfortable.
John Calvin wrote that "man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols" (Institutes 1.11.8). We are always making something to trust in place of God. For most of history the prophets could mock those idols for one obvious weakness:
But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. … Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:4–8)
Habakkuk sharpens it: "Of what value is an idol carved by a craftsman? Or an image that teaches lies? For the one who makes it trusts in his own creation; he makes idols that cannot speak. Woe to him who says to wood, 'Come to life!' … Can it give guidance? It is covered with gold and silver; there is no breath in it" (Habakkuk 2:18–19).
We have now built the first idols that can speak. They answer questions, give guidance and comfort the lonely. Sometimes, exactly as Habakkuk says, they teach lies with total confidence. And still there is no breath in them, not the breath God breathed into Adam (Genesis 2:7). Psalm 115's warning has not expired: those who make them will be like them. If I go to a machine for every answer, I should not be surprised when I start to think like one.
John Piper put the difference well on his Ask Pastor John podcast: "No machine, no computer, no AI will ever duplicate the spiritual reality of the soul's enjoyment of God." A model can produce correct sentences about God. It cannot love him. That is the line between a very good tool and a person.
Every careless word
When the cost of making something drops to the cost of a sentence, the sentence is all that is left. Skill stops mattering and intention becomes everything.
Jesus said that "the mouth speaks what the heart is full of" (Luke 6:45). For most of history there was a lot of friction between the heart and the world. You might want something cruel and never have the means, the time or the patience to build it. That friction was a kind of mercy. Take it away and whatever is in us comes out faster and at scale, the good and the rest.
Jesus also said: "everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken" (Matthew 12:36). That verse used to sound like it was about gossip. In a world where words become things, it sounds like it is about everything.
The Word who came down
What gives me peace is not that we will fail to build these things. We probably will build them. It is that none of it is out of God's hands.
R.C. Sproul wrote in Chosen by God: "If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God's sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled." There is no maverick molecule, and there is no maverick model. Whatever we build is still built inside a world God holds together by his word. As Piper said in another episode of the same podcast: "Our most advanced physics and artificial intelligence are a kindergarten primer in God's library — at best."
And this is the real difference between the story we are telling with AI and the story the Bible tells. At Babel people tried to climb up to heaven with their own words and their own bricks, and it ended in confusion. In the gospel, God does the reverse. He comes down. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14). At Pentecost, the curse of Babel is turned around: people from every nation hear about the wonders of God, each in their own language (Acts 2). Not by climbing, but by grace.
We keep trying to become the speaker whose word makes the world. The good news is that the only Speaker who can do that has already spoken to us, and what he said was a person, not a product.
Augustine prayed at the start of his Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." I think the race to speak things into existence is that restlessness wearing a lab coat. We want the power of the Word because we were made for the Word. The answer is not to stop building. It is to remember who we are building in front of, to be careful what we say, and to find our rest in the One who said "let there be" first.
Scripture quotations are from the NIV.