After one year of writing Kingdom Bitcoin, I have become less interested in predicting what Bitcoin’s price might do next and more interested in asking what money, technology, freedom, wealth, and stewardship are actually for. This six-part anniversary series looks back at the convictions that survived the writing, sharpened through Scripture, history, markets, technology, and ordinary household life. Some ideas became stronger, others became more disciplined, and a few changed entirely. What remains is a clearer hierarchy: God first, truth before narrative, stewardship before speculation, and technology beneath all of it.
Babel begins with impressive technology. Genesis 11 describes a people who learned to make bricks, organized around a massive construction project, and declared, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Their problem was not engineering. God is not threatened by tall buildings. The problem was human capability aimed toward self-exaltation, with technology becoming the instrument through which people attempted to define greatness on their own terms. Babel reminds us that greater capability does not automatically produce greater wisdom.
Then Exodus gives us Bezalel, and suddenly the Bible’s view of technology becomes much richer. God tells Moses that He has filled Bezalel “with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills” to create what the Tabernacle required. Here, craftsmanship is not rebellion. It is calling. The same human ability to design, calculate, shape materials, and create something new can serve pride at Babel or faithful purpose in the wilderness. Technology magnifies purpose; it does not supply righteous purpose.
That is where I increasingly find myself with artificial intelligence. AI can write, analyze, code, design, and increasingly complete sequences of digital work on our behalf. That will create extraordinary productivity, but it also creates a responsibility problem: when a machine can perform more of the task, what must the human being remain responsible for? AI may write the memo before you finish your coffee. It still cannot tell you whether the meeting should have existed.
Bitcoin enters this conversation from a fascinatingly different direction. AI is making generation increasingly abundant: more text, more images, more analysis, more software. Bitcoin is built around verification: Is the signature valid? Did the transaction follow the rules? Does the block satisfy proof of work? Has anyone created bitcoin the rules do not permit? As machines become better at generating, human beings will have to become much more serious about verifying.
My years at AWS taught me that innovation rarely waits for society to finish discussing its implications. The cloud changed how companies build before many leaders fully understood what “the cloud” meant, and AI is moving faster still. America has always contained this builder instinct. Benjamin Franklin was a printer, scientist, inventor, civic organizer, and public servant who repeatedly moved between ideas and practical institutions. The lesson is not “innovate at any cost.” It is that invention becomes most valuable when capability becomes useful service.
This lands at the household before it lands in Washington or Silicon Valley. What should our children know in a world where machines can produce an essay, answer a question, create software, move money, and perhaps negotiate with other machines? Teaching them only how to prompt the machine would be like teaching someone to drive without discussing where they should go. They will need discernment, character, work ethic, relationships, faith, and enough knowledge to recognize when the machine is confidently wrong. The robot can optimize the route. It cannot decide whether the destination is worthy.
Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can discern what is good and pleasing to God. Discernment may become one of the most valuable human capabilities of the next technological age. The Holy Spirit does not exist to make us more efficient. He forms us into people capable of love, truth, courage, self-control, service, and obedience to Jesus Christ. AI can imitate language about those things, but imitation is not formation.
After a year of Kingdom Bitcoin, this may be the conviction pointing most clearly toward year two. Technology will become more powerful, Bitcoin will continue developing, and AI will become more woven into money, work, markets, education, and ordinary life. The question beneath all of it is not whether machines will become capable enough; it is whether human beings will remain responsible enough. Place money beneath truth. Place technology beneath stewardship. Place the self beneath God.
A year ago, I thought I was beginning a conversation about Bitcoin. I now understand that Bitcoin was a doorway into a much older conversation about truth, freedom, responsibility, and what one generation owes the next. Bitcoin still matters enormously, but it was never the destination. God is.
Kingdom Principle 👑
Technology can increase human capability. It cannot provide human purpose.
Babel and Bezalel remind us that the great question is not whether human beings should build. We were created to cultivate, create, solve problems, and exercise stewardship. The question is what our building serves. Innovation without moral formation can magnify human creativity and human brokenness at exactly the same time.
AI may make intelligence increasingly abundant. Wisdom will remain scarce. Bitcoin may give us better tools for verification, ownership, and monetary truth, but even the best architecture cannot tell us what a human life is for. That is why the order matters: God → Truth → Stewardship → Technology.
The future belongs to Him. The stewardship belongs to us.
Prayer 🙏
Heavenly Father, thank You for creating us with minds capable of imagining, building, discovering, and solving problems. Thank You for the engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, developers, artists, and builders whose work can improve human life. Give us the humility never to confuse increasing capability with increasing wisdom, and protect us from building monuments to ourselves when You have called us to build in service of others.
Holy Spirit, renew our minds and form our character for the technological age ahead. Help us teach our children discernment, truth, responsibility, faith, courage, and the things no machine should ever replace. Keep Jesus Christ above every algorithm, protocol, market, invention, and ambition, and may everything we build ultimately serve human dignity, faithful stewardship, and Your purposes. In Jesus’ name, Amen. 🙏📖🧱🤖☁️₿🧠🏠🕊️👑