In April, a tech company called Just Like Me launched an AI-generated avatar of Jesus that people can talk to, pray with, and seek spiritual counsel from for $1.99 per minute. The avatar was trained on the King James Bible and modeled after Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus on The Chosen. The company’s CEO told the Associated Press, “You do feel a little accountable to the AI. They’re your friend. You’ve made an attachment.”
That sense of emotional attachment isn’t an isolated curiosity.
Four in ten Gen-Z and millennial adults say spiritual advice from AI is just as trustworthy as advice from a pastor. One-third of teenagers have talked to an AI companion rather than a human being about serious, personal issues. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z would skip or delay a doctor’s visit if AI told them their symptoms were low risk, trusting an algorithm with decisions that could have life-or-death consequences. And 26 percent of Gen Z adults have engaged in some form of romantic or companion relationship with an AI chatbot.
These statistics aren’t just telling us that young people like AI. They’re telling us something far more concerning: A generation is learning to outsource decisions that require wisdom, the kind of wisdom that can only come from a relationship with God, to a machine that will never have one.
As a business professor at a Christian university, I work with students in this generation, and these numbers concern me deeply. Three thousand years ago, a king already ran this experiment and told us exactly how it ends.
Teacher’s Experiment
“I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven” (Eccl. 1:13). This verse refers to the Teacher, probably Solomon. But I know something else that does exactly this, every day, at infinite scale, without rest, without complaint, and without ever getting tired.
The Teacher had extraordinary God-given wisdom, “surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before [him]” (v. 16). He had unlimited resources. He had access to the best knowledge available in the ancient world. And he set out on what can only be described as a systematic experiment: Can wisdom, pleasure, achievement, work, or wealth, pursued with full access to every resource under the sun, produce a meaningful life?
The phrase “under the sun” appears nearly 30 times in Ecclesiastes, and it’s the key to understanding the entire book. Tim Keller, in Every Good Endeavor, understood “under the sun” to describe our view of the world when we leave God out of the picture, life evaluated within a closed system that excludes God’s eternal purposes.
Whether Solomon’s observations represent a deliberate thought experiment, a season of distance from God, or something else, the result is the same: Even extraordinary wisdom, applied within a closed system that excludes the fear of the Lord, produces nothing but vapor and grief (Ecc. 1:18).
AI operates under the same constraint. It has extraordinary analytical power but is locked into a closed, under-the-sun framework with no ability to access what’s above it. The Teacher eventually arrives at the fear of the Lord (12:13). AI never will.
Eternity in Their Hearts
Ecclesiastes doesn’t just show us the problem. It shows us something about what it means to be human. This is crucial for the AI conversation.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Every human being, Christian or not, senses there’s something more than what’s in front of him or her. There’s a longing for something beyond the under-the-sun system. This is part of what Calvin calls the sensus divinitatis, the innate sense of the divine that all humans possess.
Even extraordinary wisdom, applied within a closed system that excludes the fear of the Lord, produces nothing but vapor.
But notice the second half of the verse: We can’t satisfy the longing on our own. We need God to reveal himself to us.
This is where a person in Christ has something qualitatively different—not superior intelligence but a relational connection to God through the Holy Spirit that actively shapes how he or she processes information and make decisions. Through the gospel, believers are “being renewed in knowledge after the image of [their] creator” (Col. 3:10). That renewal is what gives the Christian access to wisdom that no amount of data processing can replicate.
Consider AI in light of this. AI has no eternity in its heart. It doesn’t even have the longing.
Posture of Wisdom
So what does it look like when a Christian processes information, from AI or anywhere else, through relationship with God?
The Teacher says,
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. (Eccl. 5:1–2)
When you come before God, you should listen. Don’t rush to speak. Don’t be hasty. The posture of wisdom is silence, receptivity, and humility. AI takes the opposite posture. AI generates endlessly. It’s never silent. It never listens. It never waits. It never says, “Let your words be few.”
When Christians approach God in prayer—quieting themselves, listening, and waiting for God to speak—their posture reminds them they aren’t the source of wisdom. God is.
Those Christians process information by asking, “Lord, show me what I’m not seeing.” They test it against Scripture: “What does God’s character tell me about what matters here?” They listen for the Holy Spirit’s conviction: “Is there something I’m rationalizing away?” They make decisions with an awareness of accountability not just to their stakeholders but to their Lord.
This is what wisdom looks like in practice. Not smarter analysis, not better information processing, but thinking in relationship with God, through Scripture, prayer, and the Spirit’s illumination.
When God’s Ways Are Higher
And then there’s this, the most important insight for the AI conversation: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8–9).
And Proverbs instructs, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Prov. 3:5–6).
Your rational analysis, unaided by God’s revealed will, might tell you one thing. God might call you to something else entirely. And that obedience, that willingness to follow God’s wisdom even when it contradicts your own logic, is the deepest form of wisdom.
AI is a hyperrational system. It processes information and optimizes for outcomes that make logical sense within its framework. But it’ll never tell you to forgive someone 77 times (Matt. 18:22). It’ll never call you to love your enemy (Matt. 5:44). It’ll never convict you that your justified anger is about to destroy something more precious than your pride. Why? Because those calls don’t make logical sense within a closed system.
They only make sense if you’re in relationship with Someone who sees beyond the system, Someone whose ways are higher than our ways and whose thoughts are higher than our thoughts.
What’s at Stake for the Next Generation
This brings me to the burden that keeps me up at night as a Christian educator.
One of my greatest concerns is that we’re about to welcome a generation of students who will never know a world without AI, and who will be subtly, quietly tempted to let AI short-circuit the very process through which God forms them into wise people.
Every time a Christian brings a decision before God in prayer, every time she listens to the Holy Spirit’s conviction, wrestles with Scripture, and chooses obedience over comfortable rationality, she’s being sanctified. She’s learning, through lived experience, that God’s wisdom works, that forgiveness produces more flourishing than judgment, that grace produces stronger bonds than accountability alone, and that the cross-shaped life, though it looks foolish to the world, is the path to genuine wisdom.
Your rational analysis, unaided by God’s revealed will, might tell you one thing. God might call you to something else entirely.
This can’t be automated. It can’t be outsourced. It can’t be replaced by a chatbot, no matter how theologically sophisticated, and no matter how much it looks like the actor from The Chosen.
If a young Christian learns to turn to AI for answers instead of turning to God, if he gets theologically correct propositions from an algorithm without ever wrestling with God in prayer, without ever experiencing the Holy Spirit’s conviction, without ever learning to obey when obedience doesn’t make sense, he’ll have information but not wisdom. He’ll have data about God but not knowledge of God. He’ll mistake the glow of a screen for the glory of God.
End of the Matter
“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccl. 12:13).
The Teacher tested every under-the-sun strategy and found them all to be vapor. The only thing that endured, the only thing that broke through the ceiling, was the fear of the Lord. That was true 3,000 years ago, and it hasn’t changed.
Young people will need to know how to use AI at a high level. But even more, they’ll need to be able to use it without being mastered by it. As Christian leaders, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring this moment. The generation sitting in our pews, at our dinner tables, and in our classrooms right now is learning to trust machines with the decisions that require the wisdom only God can give. And those of us who teach them, mentor them, and disciple them have a responsibility to show them where wisdom actually comes from.
For $1.99 a minute, you can now pray with an AI Jesus. It’ll quote Scripture. It’ll sound compassionate. It’ll remember your name. But it’ll never know you, and it’ll never be able to give you what only the real Jesus can. Because wisdom has never come from under the sun. It has always, and only, come from above it.
