Can You Trust AI with the Bible?

Imagine taking a month to read an eighty-book Bible while AI works through that much text in ten minutes. That is an illustration, not a measured benchmark. I use AI myself. But is it safe to preach whatever it tells you to say?

I am not asking whether AI can find a verse. It can. If I remember a few words of a scripture and can't remember where it is, I can ask ChatGPT and usually have a reference in moments. I can ask it to gather precepts, compare Hebrew or Greek words, arrange a study document or build slides. I might need thirty scriptures for a message and ask AI to find forty. I will examine them, reject the ones that don't belong, and put the rest where I need them. I have preached messages using many more scriptures than that. There is a genuine benefit here, and I don't have any reason to pretend otherwise.

But being able to find the words is one thing. Knowing what God told a preacher to say is another.

That difference matters to me because I preach online. Most of my audience isn't in the room. I can't see when somebody puts their phone down or clicks away. The people who know me recognize the way I speak, the way I laugh, and the moments when I am serious. Sometimes I say “ain't.” Sometimes a sentence comes out the way people actually speak to each other, not the way a writing program thinks it ought to be written. I don't need artificial intelligence to make me sound more sophisticated, and I certainly don't need it to manufacture some exaggerated version of how Black people talk. My people know me.

A congregation's attention is on loan. That is true in a room, and I think it is even more apparent online. Paul dealt with people's attachments to different messengers almost two thousand years ago. In 1 Corinthians, some said they were of Paul, others of Apollos, and others of Cephas. Paul corrected the division, but the attachments were real. People recognize human differences. One preacher's warmth may reach somebody another preacher's style doesn't. My personality is not the Holy Ghost, and nobody is supposed to worship my personality. But God gave me a personality, a voice, and gifts to use while I am speaking to people. If I surrender all of that to a machine, I have started giving away something that was part of the work entrusted to me.

Preaching also happens in the moment. I use call and response. I may ask, “Did I say that right?” or “What do you think about that?” Sometimes I need to raise my voice. Sometimes I need to stop raising it. It is like stand-up comedy in one respect: you can write what looks like a good joke on paper, but the timing, silence, expression, and people in the room determine how it lands. A joke delivered too quickly can fail. A line that worked yesterday may not work tonight. A preacher has to understand the people in front of him, and that is far more serious than getting a laugh.

During the research for this article, I watched ChatGPT miss what I was asking it to see.

We were examining 2 Timothy 4:2: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.” ChatGPT kept explaining “be instant” as being ready to preach. It was a familiar answer, and it sounded reasonable. But I was asking it to look at the whole situation. Paul was instructing Timothy about ministry. He was telling a man who would have to deal with people to reprove, rebuke, and exhort them—and to do it with long suffering.

I kept asking ChatGPT to look at the actions rather than end with a word definition. I was asking it to keep the whole instruction in view: reprove, rebuke, or exhort with long suffering as the situation calls for. A shepherd also has to know when correction isn't what's needed. That is how I was applying the passage.

I have seen what happens when people fail to understand that.

A Sunday school teacher once arrived late after a terrible morning. Her car had given her trouble, and she had been in an accident. She was normally dependable. But when she got to the church, instead of somebody asking how she was or whether she was all right, people began yelling at her because the class had been left without its teacher. She turned around, walked back out, and we never saw her again.

I keep thinking what might have changed if somebody had simply asked, “Are you okay?” Even if she had only overslept, embarrassing her as soon as she came through the door would still have been the wrong response. If it happened once, you might respond one way; if it became a pattern, you might need to sit her down and talk with her. That is pastoral care and judgment. That's why longsuffering matters.

If I had accepted the explanation ChatGPT kept giving me, I could have delivered a nicely organized lesson about always being prepared to preach. And somebody sitting there who had been mistreated by a pastor might never have heard the part about patience and care that could have helped them. A person who needed relief or correction might have gone home without it. The sermon could have sounded fine. The missed opportunity would have been invisible to everybody who didn't already know what was missing.

It wasn't the only time ChatGPT did this.

When we discussed Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, I went back to the exact wording. Revelation 3:9 says, “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.” ChatGPT summarized the outcome by saying God would “humble them.” I stopped it. Where did that come from? “Humble” isn't the wording of that verse. The summary had removed the action I was asking about. Whether somebody agrees with my interpretation is a separate discussion. The immediate problem was that AI had changed the picture before I could examine the text.

Then we got to the seven sons of Sceva in Acts 19. ChatGPT told me they were overpowered. Overpowered? That's all? The Bible says the possessed man leaped on them, overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of the house “naked and wounded.” One man sent them running out of that house like that. I can imagine how frightening that flight was. I want the reader to stop and picture the scene Scripture describes.

If I hadn't known the passage, I could have accepted “overpowered” and lost all of that. I had already told ChatGPT not to soften these accounts. Yet we kept having the same argument. I could hear the difference because I knew the scripture before I asked the machine. What happens to the preacher who doesn't?

The sons of Sceva knew a name. They knew about Paul and the work he was doing. They sounded like something somebody might say in a deliverance service. But the evil spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?” They had words without the authority they were attempting to exercise. If somebody had given them an even more polished prayer, what would it have changed about that question?

That is why I keep coming back to Romans 10:15: “And how shall they preach, except they be sent?” Who sent you? A machine can give you an outline. It cannot give you a calling. If God didn't send you, what makes you think artificial intelligence has the authority to send you? That would be an artificial sending: the service gave you words, but it did not call you.

I think of Simon in Acts 8, too. He saw that the Holy Ghost was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands, and he offered money so he could exercise that power himself. Peter told him his money would perish with him because he thought the gift of God could be bought. I keep wondering what Simon would do if he lived today. Here was somebody willing to pay for spiritual power. Is it hard to imagine that same man paying a service to produce a message for him? That is a hypothetical, of course. But the question is real to me: Why would you pay for words when the Holy Ghost is the Word?

I don't mean that nobody should ever pay for research software or use a computer. I already told you I use AI for research and preparation. I mean that purchasing a set of words does not purchase a message from God. It doesn't purchase the Holy Ghost. It doesn't answer the question of who sent you.

Jesus spoke about the Holy Ghost giving words to His disciples when they were delivered before authorities. Mark 13:11 says they were to speak what was given to them in that hour, “for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.” That wasn't an ordinary Sunday service. Those men could be brought before hostile rulers. Look at Peter and John in Acts 4, standing before religious authorities after their arrest. Peter addressed them as “Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel,” but he did not shape his answer around easing the tension. The account says he was filled with the Holy Ghost, and then he spoke about Jesus, whom they had crucified and whom God had raised.

I sometimes imagine artificial intelligence in that scene: What if Peter had asked it for a safe statement before the council? It might have supplied a courteous answer meant to lower the tension, or a forceful one. We don't know what any particular model would have generated. But Acts tells us what gave Peter his response. The issue wasn't whether somebody could write a clever sentence. It was whose words Peter had been given to speak.

Now think about Ezekiel. God told him He would take away the desire of his eyes with a stroke. That was his wife. He was instructed how to conduct himself, and he was given a particular message to deliver as a sign to Israel. Ezekiel said, “I did in the morning as I was commanded.” I cannot read that casually. The man's wife died, and the assignment did not become optional because of his grief.

Suppose AI had offered Ezekiel a beautifully written speech about the comfort of mourning. It might have been moving. People might have cried. But that wasn't the message God gave him. His wife's death became a prophetic sign God instructed him to give Israel. The power of the account is that Ezekiel obeyed in the middle of that loss. A substitute speech could have changed the very sign he was commanded to give.

And then there is Moses.

God told Moses and Aaron to speak to the rock before Israel's eyes. Moses gathered the people, called them rebels, and struck the rock twice. Water came out. Everybody drank. If all you looked at was the visible result, you might have called the moment a success.

But God had told him to speak. That was the command. Moses did something else, and the fact that the water still came did not erase what he had done. God said they had failed to sanctify Him before Israel. Later, in Deuteronomy 32, God told Moses to go up Mount Nebo and “die in the mount,” connecting that command to the trespass at Meribah. I am not going to reduce that account to a man simply missing a trip to the promised land. Moses died, and God Himself connected his death to that disobedience.

That's why this account stays with me. Moses wasn't a novice. He had experience with God that most people cannot imagine. Still, when God told him to speak, he did something else. The water came, but that visible result did not make his action what God commanded.

I have no interest in standing before God and explaining that a machine gave me a more polished version of something He had already told me to say.

Sometimes I wake from a lighter sleep already preaching a message. Sometimes I wake with only a phrase. Recently I woke with the words, “If my bed was sand, I would never get out of bed.” I don't know what that means yet. I need to pray, wait, and understand what God is showing me. In Job 33, Elihu speaks of God opening men's ears and sealing their instruction during dreams and visions of the night. I understand something about that from my own life. I won't pretend that a machine can receive the message for me.

And if I get to the day of service without having the message ready, then I need to face that. I might need to spend that time singing and worshipping instead of trying to fill the schedule with a sermon generated in a few seconds. Sometimes I have been too busy doing ministry work to spend the time I should have spent with the Lord. That is a harder admission than clicking a button, but it is still my responsibility. AI can give me a way to avoid confronting the fact that I haven't received the message yet.

The Holy Ghost isn't an “it” floating around for somebody to capture. The Holy Ghost is God Himself. Jesus is the Word, the Logos. I don't have to search for a human substitute for the intelligence of an omniscient God. In Acts 2:4, they spoke with other tongues “as the Spirit gave them utterance.” The utterance came from the Spirit. The human spoke. The Spirit gave it.

The purpose of preaching isn't simply to fill an hour or impress people with vocabulary. God draws people. John 6:44 says no man can come unless the Father draws him. I have seen services where worship was the whole point, where what people needed was not another set of clever statements. 2 Chronicles 5 describes the glory of the Lord filling the house until the priests could not stand to minister. In Acts 10, the Holy Ghost fell on the people while Peter was still speaking. God was not waiting for Peter to reach the end of a perfectly timed presentation.

I keep thinking about what Peter wrote concerning salvation. In 1 Peter 1:12, he says the gospel is preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, and that these are things “the angels desire to look into.” That stops me. Angels are God's own creation, and I take that to mean even they do not comprehend this work of salvation. If angels desire to look into it, how could I think a machine with no spirit has comprehended it just because it can organize words about it?

So yes, I use artificial intelligence. I will probably keep using it. I want the help with finding verses, checking words, putting together materials, and doing the things a machine can do faster than I can. But I already have to know the message. I already have to know what God instructed me to say. I won't let AI change that message and then ask me to trust it just because the sentences sound good.

And if a preacher has become so dependent on AI that he needs it to tell him what his message is, I think he needs to step away from preaching and reconsider his calling. If the Holy Ghost is supposed to be speaking through him, why has he stopped hearing? Or is it possible that the Holy Ghost was never the source of those messages in the first place? Those are not questions I can settle for another man by typing an answer. They are questions that man needs to face before God.

The question was never whether artificial intelligence can read the Bible quickly. The question is whether it is safe to preach whatever it tells you to say.

After everything I have seen during this research, I know why I won't do it.