Can God Use Technology? What the Bible Says About Our Tools

Gutenberg's press was printing Bibles by the 1450s, and some people worried Scripture would land in hands that would misread it. When radio came, some preachers called it a worldly distraction and others bought airtime. Now the tool is AI, and the same two reactions are back.

The Bible says nothing about microchips, but it has plenty to say about tools and the people who pick them up.

In short

Scripture treats human skill as a gift from God, not a threat to him. He fills Bezalel with his Spirit to build the tabernacle, and the gospel itself spread by roads, letters and copied scrolls. What the Bible warns against is trust in tools, the tower at Babel built to reach heaven without God. So for any technology, AI included, the useful question is less "Is this allowed?" than "Is this helping me lean on God, or helping me avoid him?"

The first craftsman filled with the Spirit

When Exodus first says someone is filled with the Spirit of God, the person is a metalworker.

And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of craftsmanship,

— Exodus 31:3 (BSB)

His name is Bezalel, and his job is the tabernacle: carving wood, cutting stones, casting gold. God does more than put up with the skill, since the verse says he supplied it.

That ought to change how a Christian thinks about making things. Skill can be worship, and the cabinetmaker, the programmer and the woman who repairs hearing aids may all be doing work God cares about.

The tower that went wrong

Genesis 11 brings Babel. People learn to fire bricks and use tar for mortar, a real advance, and decide to build a tower with its top in the heavens so they can make a name for themselves.

Nothing in the story faults the bricks. What draws God's response is the aim, a city that makes them safe and famous without him, and he scatters them. Babel sits behind much of the Bible's wariness about technology, and that wariness is aimed at the hope we pin on an invention. A tool becomes an idol when we expect it to do what only God can do, which is save us, make us whole, and give us a name that lasts.

Letters, roads and scrolls

In the first century the gospel traveled along Roman roads laid for armies and across the Mediterranean on cargo ships. Paul wrote letters on papyrus, and churches copied them by hand and passed them on. Nobody built any of it for Christian purposes, and all of it carried the news farther than one voice could.

None of it was safe, either. Roads carried soldiers as well as missionaries, and the ships carried every kind of cargo. Paul used what was there anyway. He did not wait for a purer technology before writing his letters, and nothing suggests he thought the roads were holy.

Paul also knew where tools ran out:

How then can they call on the One in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach?

— Romans 10:14 (BSB)

A letter could travel, but somebody still had to read it aloud in a living room, and a congregation had to live it out. Tools reach farther than a person can, and they still need the person.

The printing press and the open Bible

A goldsmith in Mainz built a press with movable type, and within a few generations Bibles were being printed in the everyday languages of Europe. People who had only heard Scripture read in church could now read it in their own language, at their own tables.

It was not all gain. The same presses turned out slander, and some readers bent what they read. Still, few Christians today would un-invent the press. An open Bible in ordinary hands was worth the risk.

AI raises the same problem. A new tool can get a lot of people to Scripture, and it can also produce confident nonsense. Christians did not agree on how to answer the press. Some authorities restricted vernacular Bibles and banned books, while others pushed for Scripture in every language. Across those fights, the steady counsel was to read carefully and test what was printed against the Word.

Four questions for any tool

Whether it is a Bible app, a podcast or an AI companion, ask four things. Does it send me back to Scripture, or stand in for reading it? Does it move me toward real people who know me, or let me dodge them? Is it honest about what it is and what it does with my information? And after I use it, do I pray more or less?

The last question matters most. If a tool leaves you hungry for God less often, it is failing, however clever it is.

Where AI fits

AI is an odd tool because it talks back. That makes it feel more like a person than a concordance does, and that is exactly where Christians should be careful. It has no faith, it does not know God, and it is not filled with the Spirit the way Bezalel was. Of the two, it is closer to his chisel.

Used well, it can answer the question you were too embarrassed to raise in Bible study, find the passage you half remember, or explain what "propitiation" means at two in the morning when no pastor is awake. Used badly, it becomes another tower: a way to feel spiritually busy without ever sitting still before God, or a voice you trust over Scripture.

We have written more on this in Is it OK to use AI for Bible study and prayer?, and on why we built one anyway in Why we built Delighting.

God is not threatened by our inventions

Every tool people have made, from the plow to the satellite, came from minds God made, using materials God created. None of it has surprised him.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out.

— Proverbs 25:2 (BSB)

The verse suggests God hid things in creation for us to go looking for. Discovery and craft can honor him as long as we remember whose world it is.

Where to begin today

1. List the tools in your spiritual life: apps, podcasts, playlists, devices.
2. Put the four questions to each one, and drop any that fails the last.
3. Read Exodus 31:1-11 and Genesis 11:1-9 back to back and notice the difference. To talk it through, start a conversation, or wait for tomorrow's Daily Word.