These are exciting times for believers in Christ who are interested in Bible prophecy. Many things that are suggested by unfulfilled, future prophecies seem to be trending.
We reserve a few minutes Sunday morning to discuss some of those things. We are careful to use recognized, reliable sources for news and information.
We’re not saying the things we report are the fulfillment of prophecy – only that they are the things you’d expect from reading the Bible literally.
In Revelation, we are told that, in the future Great Tribulation, some kind of “image” will be set-up by the false prophet who works with the antichrist. It will seemingly be sentient. We’re told that “the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed” (13:15).
We’ve suggested that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could power the Image of the Beast we see in the Revelation. That’s why I was excited to run across a transcript from a podcast featuring John Lennox. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, and pastoral advisor to Green Templeton College at Oxford.
The podcast was titled, Does Revelation Talk About Artificial Intelligence?
He will mention two things that we need defined before reading the excerpts:
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a machine capable of understanding the world as well as any human, and with the same capacity to learn how to carry out a huge range of tasks.
Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist, cosmologist, and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute.
Excerpts:
In Revelation 13 we read about an animal or a beast, and it’s clearly talking about a world authority or leader. And we read that it commands a construction of an image that is an image of another animal or human, and it gives breath to this. And the result is worldwide deception and control and all who refuse to bow down and acknowledge the authority of this beast/human, whatever it is, are killed, so that you’re dealing with this scenario for a social control that is absolute.
What is intriguing and rather chilling actually in the light of our AI developments is that freedom to buy and sell is determined by the wearing of some kind of mark… [Max] Tegmark talks about a bracelet that people may have to wear that will determine whether or not they’re regarded as socially acceptable. And we’ve already got that kind of social acceptability factor in the credit system that’s being rolled out in the Chinese population today. So it’s relatively easy to see how this kind of thing could come about.
You’ve got something that appears to give breath to another creature, to an image, actually, which is presumably a material thing. And it’s so effective that it causes the whole Earth to worship it, which is a fascinating concept.
Is it a partial realization of AGI? We just don’t know. But we do know, looking back in history, that at every stage human beings have set up images and bowed down to worship them. And what technology will produce one day is probably beyond our wildest dreams. For that reason, I want to take this scenario… seriously.https://mindmatters.ai/2020/07/do-some-passages-in-the-book-of-revelation-seem-to-talk-about-ai/
I’m not saying the image of the Beast in the Revelation will be AGI. I’m simply pointing out AGI is what you’d expect from reading the Bible.
We believe the resurrection and rapture of the church is imminent. It could happen any moment; nothing needs to happen before it. It will definitely happen before the Tribulation.
Jesus will return in the clouds. He will raise the dead in Christ. He will transform the bodies of living believers to glorified, resurrection bodies.
We will all join Him in Heaven while the earth endures one final seven-year campaign of severe evangelism.
Are you ready for the rapture? If not, Get ready; Stay ready; Keep looking up.
Ready or not, Jesus is coming!