In the latest Indiana Jones movie, eighty-one-year-old Harrison Ford was de-aged forty years by artificial intelligence (AI). Accordingly, Sean Connery fans might hope they’ll see a young version of the first James Bond in the next Bond film. Alas, producer Barbara Broccoli has announced that, while the next 007’s identity is currently unknown, James Bond will not be an AI-rendered actor from the past.

Fans of the Swedish rock band ABBA are suffering no such disappointment. The group is currently making $2 million a week performing as avatars (lifelike digital images projected onto a screen). The band KISS now plans to do the same. “We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamed of before,” KISS bassist Gene Simmons said.

Is this a good thing? Or is it just a less ominous example of a crisis that threatens us all?

“They’re some new kind of human”

Teenage girls in New Jersey were recently victimized by such technology when it was used to generate nude images of them that were then circulated at their high school. The Department of Homeland Security is warning that “deepfake” technology is being employed to generate hundreds of thousands of pornographic images, including those of children.

Fake audio is being used to steal passwords and breach financial accounts. Deepfake videos are being used to manipulate political opinion and voters. Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley is warning that “robust space and cyber capabilities [now] allow adversaries to target critical national infrastructure” vital to our military defenses. (For more, see my website paper, “ChatGPT and artificial intelligence: What you need to know.”)

But there’s an even deeper element to this rising threat.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes:

What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life.

Finding “Bethlehem” today

This is the Advent week of “hope.” I would define hope as confidence in the future that brings benefits in the present. Soldiers hope their Boot Camp training is preparing them to serve their country more effectively, and this belief sustains them in their present challenges. Students hope their years of education will lead to careers that repay their investment, and this belief enables them to stay the course.

However, the validity of our hope depends on its basis. If you have cancer but place your hope in aspirin rather than oncology, your hope is not only misplaced but dangerous.

Similarly, if we hope that humans can solve humanity’s greatest problems, our hope deters us from trusting the One whose omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence we need so desperately. As creatures of such a Creator, our most empowering hope lies in submission to his gracious sovereignty.

Like the Christmas shepherds, we need to experience personally “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). But we no longer must “go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened” (v. 15) because it is happening in us. Oswald Chambers noted:

Every man is meant to be the “Bethlehem” of the Son of God by the regenerative power of redemption. Just as the historic Son of God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary . . . so the Son of God is formed in the life of the individual saint by the supernatural grace of God.

“With him everything else thrown in”

Paul assured us that “Christ in you” is “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27, my emphasis). How could it be otherwise?

“In [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (v. 19). As Richard Melick notes, “Everything that God is, Jesus is.” Thus, “through him” God could “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (v. 20). Because God died for us, God has the moral authority to forgive us for the sins that caused his death. He can thus make peace (the Greek word means to “make all things right”) in us, with us, and for us.

This is why the ultimate solution to every problem we face is found in daily submission to our Savior. When he is our Lord, his Spirit will guide us infallibly with regard to AI and every other challenge we face. We will love our neighbor as ourselves, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, Chinese or American, Democrat or Republican. And our differences will lead not to cultural division and destructive animosity but to kaleidoscopic celebration.

C. S. Lewis advised us, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

For whom will you “look” today?

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As the whole world knows, Taylor Swift is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. She has attended four of his games this year, each of which the Chiefs won. All of Green Bay was hoping she would come to last night’s contest against the Packers; the Green Bay Press Gazette reports that “small businesses, community organizations, restaurateurs, nightlife spots, and local Swifties” across the area sought to welcome her.

She did attend the game, but Kelce’s team lost.

This might serve as consolation: the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan recently wrote that Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year. According to Noonan, Swift is “the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023,” with a concert tour that broke attendance and income records across the country and transformed the economy of every city she visited.

From pop culture to historical precedence: Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, died Friday at the age of ninety-three. The New York Times noted that “during a crucial period in American law . . . she was the most powerful woman in the country.” The Times added that she “inspired a generation of women” with her rise to such significance.

Former President Barack Obama wrote after justice O’Connor’s passing, “When a young Sandra Day graduated from Stanford Law School near the top of her class—in two years instead of the usual three—she was offered just one job in the private sector. Her prospective employer asked her how well she typed and told her there might be work for her as a legal secretary.

“Fortunately for us, she set her sights a little higher.”

“The only nation in the world based on an idea”

According to a recent study, nearly 2.4 billion women around the world do not have the same economic rights as men. In 178 countries, legal barriers prevent their full economic participation; globally, they have only three-quarters of the legal rights afforded to men. In addition, the United Nations reports that nearly one in three women worldwide has been a victim of violence.

Contrast the gender discrimination that persists in our fallen world with the example set by our Lord.

Jesus regularly engaged women in his ministry (cf. Luke 8:1–3), reaching out to women marginalized by their culture (cf. John 4), and including them in his most personal relationships (cf. Luke 10:38–41). The risen Christ could have appeared first to anyone, from his lead apostle Peter to his best friend John to his other apostles or brothers. Instead, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene and commissioned her as the first evangelist of Easter (John 20:11–18). Women were among the most significant leaders in apostolic Christianity (for more, see my website paper and podcast on this subject).

Paul sounded the death knell to gender discrimination when he announced, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). America’s founders built our nation on this biblical commitment to the sanctity and equality of all life (Genesis 1:27). As President Biden noted on Women’s Equality Day this year, “America is the only nation in the world based on an idea—the idea that all people are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout their lives.”

If they were invited, you are invited

But there’s even more to the story: our lives are sacred not just because we are each equally created by God but because we are each created for intimate, personal relationship with our Creator.

Jesus was the only baby to choose his attendants, and he chose field hands who could not keep the laws of Jewish society and thus were considered ritually unclean. Shepherds could not sacrifice at the temple or attend services at the synagogue, but they could worship the Christ of Christmas (Luke 2:8–16).

If they were invited, we are all invited.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent, celebrated by churches across the Christian world as they lit the candle of hope. We’ll discover ways this week to light that “candle” in our souls by embracing the truth that “Christ in you” is our “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Let’s begin today by deciding that we want to know Christ more intimately than we do now. The more fully we experience the risen Lord Jesus, the more fully we experience his transforming hope for today and for eternity.

We know someone best, not by reading books or listening to lectures about them, but by spending time with them. So it is with our Lord, which is why Jesus commended Mary when she “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching” (Luke 10:39).

When last did you follow her example?

“To God I would commit my cause”

Job testified: “As for me, I would seek God, and to God would I commit my cause, who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number” (Job 5:8–9). When we do the same, we will say with the psalmist, “I love the Lᴏʀᴅ, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live” (Psalm 116:1–2).

If you truly “love the Lᴏʀᴅ,” you will “call on him” all through this day and across this Advent season. He promises that “you will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

Will you “find” your Lord today?

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