EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS.
Three dangers wrapped in one.
Dr. J. H. Bavinck, in his book on Revelation, the last Bible book, claims that its dominating theme is: everything becomes what it is.
I suggest: this is happening now, anno 2026.
A closer look at our lives, reveals that we have enslaved creation to serve our extravagance. If it is true that everything becomes what is, then the masquerade is over, the ugliness of our true selves is being revealed, and the laws of ecology kick in as the climate and financial bills are due.
The three dangers wrapped in one.
Yes, it is true. And the pace is picking up speed, the slow motion of change so typical until a century ago, is so yesterday. Everywhere we look, everywhere we go, everywhere we venture, in every endeavor, everything is under attack.
There now are three dangers wrapped in one: The Arms Race, AI and Climate Change, all the result of human pride (hubris).
It is true, the uniqueness of our time is that we are approaching Revelation. We are facing the true meaning of Apocalypse, which is its Greek word. Now the masks are being torn away, and the naked nature of events is being revealed.
Remember Satan?
You may remember how Satan was kicked out of heaven, landing feet first on earth.
That same Satan is now the immense moving force behind the world’s happenings. He holds humanity in the clutches of the fateful illusion that God/Creation is irrelevant, is something stale, situated in the past, a self-satisfied sugar uncle. Satan sold humanity on the notion that men and women everywhere are now fully in charge. That same Satan, that seemingly invincible enemy, the creator of the grand world illusion, this contemptible conjurer and mass murderer, has, in fact, been defeated a long time ago. He has been thrown out of heaven as one totally crushed, he is moribund flung down into defeat.
And yet he continues to sound like a victor, and continues to daily gain immense victories. He acts totally different from what he in reality is: this is a creature, exiled from heaven, the banned one, who carries his death sentence written on his forehead.
And Satan embodies 666. And 666 is the embodiment of AI.
The Book of Revelation: Revelation 13: 18 introduces that mysterious number. The verse states, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number for a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six [666]”.
Computer language is all about numbers, an endless variety of 0 and 1. The perfect number is ‘777’, evident in our 7 days week, and in 7 x 7 +1 indicating the Year of Jubilee. It is impossible for AI to attain perfection, even though it comes close, very close. 666 remains fallible for the simple reason that it is a human number. AI fails, because the Bible categorically states: Surely, I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me. Psalm 51: 5.
We see AI’s sinfulness daily.
Yet…..while all human effort fails, our good deeds – and there are good deeds – will follow us into eternity. See Revelation 14: 13.
Look around.
Under a global cloud of wars and bitter divisions, world leaders met at the United Nations this week facing new fears that runaway artificial intelligence could threaten humanity even as climate shocks and escalating prices are already making life much tougher for hundreds of millions of people.
The annual high-level gathering at the UN General Assembly will also be consumed with major wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar and a persisting question: Can the leaders do anything to end them?
And we don’t know what we don’t know. Last week, Open AI announced that it found six more “concerning” incidents. But we have no guarantee that the events we have learned about represent all or even most of the A.I. behavior we should worry about. The reason we don’t know is because we are losing control.
Is AI becoming more human? I believe the question could well be reversed: Are humans becoming more like the machine?
Neil Postman, long ago, wrote: Amusing ourselves to death.
In his book, Postman contends that print media cultivated active reading and critical thinking, while television encourages passivity and instant gratification. He invites readers to ponder how different media forms profoundly influence our perception of the world—and whether society has sacrificed depth for amusement.
Now he is vindicated: Reading has become a lost art, and with it the human advantage.
It is as if the human race, given a verdict of terminal illness, for which there is no cure, have adopted the Gladiator slogan “Ave Cesar, morituri te salutant, those about to die, greet you. That’s the time we live in.
There is that universal cognition, that general insight that Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’. It instills in humanity the subconscious notion, not expressed, not verbalized that warns them, in their bones, that the humanist dream of endless technological and economic progress turns into a nightmare, for the life of nature and the life of the human mind are not separate from each other. Just as God is alive and eternal, so too creation is alive and eternal and we too share in that collective memory.
There now are three dangers wrapped in one: The Arms Race, AI and Climate Change, all the result of human pride (hubris). Now, everything is becoming what it is.