The word "technology" and the term "genetic engineering" do not appear in the Bible. But both phenomena are vividly described.
Let's start with the story of the Tower of Babel.
If you're like most people, you probably haven't read the story about the Tower of Babel since you were a child. It almost never gets mentioned in sermons made from the pulpit of any major Christian denomination and the Jewish Rabbis don't talk about it much either, mostly because they simply don't know what to say about it.
But I have been deeply fascinated by it ever since I was a small child and lately, I've been thinking about it a lot and I believe it has EVERYTHING to do with our modern circumstances.
But before I say more about that, go ahead and read this story for yourself.
Genesis 11:1-9
Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Now, when I first read that story as a child, something about it just didn't seem to make sense for me. I thought to myself "why would the God who created this entire physical universe be worried about a bunch of human beings making a tower out of bricks made of sand and asphalt, or even an entire city built out of such materials"?
Around that time, my mother had taken me and my sister on a trip to New York City, and I had seen the massive skyscrapers there. I found it difficult to imagine that these desert people 5,000 years ago had been able to build towers that would be even that tall out of bricks and asphalt, much less something that "reached to Heaven." Furthermore, God had allowed human beings to build the Empire State Building, so why had He been so concerned about the Tower of Babel?
It was not the only thing I was reading in my children's Bible back then that I found puzzling. The Book of Genesis has several stories that include elements that sounded very strange and illogical to me. But to be fair to my 7-year-old self, at that point in my educational journey, I had not yet learned the words "allegory" or "metaphor" and I actually had not yet even been introduced to these concepts.
Now, at THIS point in my journey, I can look back on that and what I THINK (this is informed speculation on my part so please don't burn me at the stake for this) that the "Tower of Babel" that would be the centerpiece of this city that God came down to the land of Shinar and saw people building was not a literal pile of sunbaked bricks held together by asphalt.
Now let's back up for just a moment and recall where the Book of Genesis comes from.
Moses wrote that Book after spending several days talking with God face to face up on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:20) and I think it's at least plausible to believe that when God told Moses the story about what happened at the Tower of Babel (which scholars estimate happened about 800 years previously and had probably been lost to collective memory) and also many other stories about this ancient history that happened before He called Abraham, He used allegorical/metaphorical language that Moses (and the people He was writing the Book of Genesis for) would have been able to understand.
So, with that in mind, I don't believe that the Tower of Babel and the surrounding city were simply buildings made out of sunbaked bricks held together by asphalt.
Rather, I think that these human beings were developing something that would allow them to, in modern language "play God." In other words, their "tower whose top is in heaven" is a metaphor for some technology that God saw them developing that impressed Him.
It impressed the God who had spoken the entire physical universe into existence.
It impressed Him so much that He thought he needed to do something immediately to make sure that the progress they were making towards the development of this technology would be stopped cold.
He had already sent the Flood to put a stop to the terrible wickedness that had existed in the world in "the days of Noah" but He had also promised that He wouldn't do that again. So, He had to do something different. He decided to "confuse their language" so that they wouldn't be able to communicate with each other and continue to make progress towards a goal that God had decided it wouldn't be good for them to continue pursuing.
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A modern-day Tower of Babel
In the last few years, the human race has once again started to build a tower whose top is in the heavens" and this modern-day Tower of Babel is called "artificial intelligence."
It is a project hailed by some as giving humanity the tools we need to solve every imaginable problem that we have by unlocking the secrets of the physical universe which have been eluding us for thousands of years. Indeed, AI models have already solved some mathematical equations that the most brilliant human minds had failed to solve. Problems of chemistry, physics, medicine, etc. have all been solved and the solutions to these problems are in the process of being applied to the fabrication of new medications and vaccines, machines, computers, communications networks, etc. that are likely to bring rapid and unimaginable change to every aspect of our lives, in good and bad ways.
As a journalist who covers, among other things, military affairs, I am astounded, frightened but most of all saddened at all the items coming across my desk over the last several months which are related to the application of AI to weapons development. The killer cyborgs James Cameraon showed us in the Terminator movies are not ready to take the field just yet, but machines that that will be terrifyingly effective and efficient at killing large numbers of human beings very quickly are already being built. Meanwhile, AI-enhanced targeting software to guide more old-fashioned but still very deadly weapons to their targets have already been used on the battlefields of Ukraine and also in this ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.
This is just the beginning, and the weapons that we're seeing now are the AI equivalent of a Sopwith Camel. I don't even want to imagine what the AI equivalent of an F-15 will look like and be capable of.
But once again, God might not allow things to get to that point.
There's an old saying that "history never repeats itself but sometimes it rhymes" and I am fairly certain that this current situation rhymes with the circumstances described in Genesis 11:1-9.
I believe some of these changes that AI could bring will be so monumental that they will be enough to impress even God Himself. In the case of AI-enhanced weapons, they will do more than impress Him, they will also alarm Him, for our sake, not His, just as the original Tower of Babel did. There is certainly the potential for these changes to derail the plans and purposes God has for the Human Race, and just as He sovereignly intervened in human history several times in order to prevent His plans and purposes from being derailed, I believe He will do so this time as well.
What will He do?
I doubt he'll confuse our languages like He did back then. I'm sure He won't send another worldwide flood, as He promised He wouldn't do that again.
But I'm sure He will do something, and I'm also quite certain we human beings won't enjoy it. Just like the confusion of languages at the original Tower of Babel, it'll be necessary to save us from getting ourselves into a much worse situation, but it won't be much fun.
I can, for instance, easily imagine Him sending unprecedentedly powerful storms and hurricanes to physically destroy all the AI data centers. This might include massive bolts of lightning to short-circuit the electrical grid which sends these data centers the electricity they need to keep running. Of course, these storms will also destroy all the homes, businesses, airplanes, and much else that are all around the data centers and electrical power stations.
Or He might do something totally different.
The point is, the God who created this physical universe and everything in it, including you and me, is capable of manipulating the physical properties of this universe He created in ways that the human beings He created keep trying to emulate. But every time we get close to being able to actually do it, every time we try with all our might to "build a tower that reaches Heaven" He effortlessly changes something that takes away our ability to keep building the tower.
That brings me to the other modern-day Tower of Babel that has gotten far less attention than AI has gotten, and that's what's called "genetic engineering" but which I think is more correctly referred to as "genetic tinkering."
God invented Genetic Engineering
Once again, the term "genetic engineering" isn't in the Bible, but it is referred to several times.
You've probably never thought about it, but when God created the first humans, Adam and Eve, along with all the animals, birds, fish, insects, and all the plants in Genesis chapter 1, that was an exercise in genetic engineering. In fact, it was the ULTIMATE act of genetic engineering, but it wasn't the last time God conducted an exercise in genetic engineering.
The early chapters of Genesis speak of human beings routinely living for hundreds of years. One man, Methuselah, lived to be almost 1,000 years old.
But then we come to Genesis 6:3, And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.
Now I know there's some arguments about what this verse means, as some scholars believe that God was saying that God was declaring there would only be 120 more years before He sent the Flood to destroy humanity. This argument is strengthened by the fact that in later Biblical passages it speaks of people who were born after the Flood living longer than 120 years, including Abraham. But the sequence of Biblical passages is not always an indication of the chronological sequence of the historical events they describe. Certainly, by the time of Abraham's grandson, Jacob/Israel, the Bible isn't talking anymore about people living to be hundreds of years old as it does in previous chapters. For most of recorded human history, all over the world, only a handful of people live much longer than 100 years and most modern geneticists agree that the maximum age that a human being is capable of reaching is 120 years.
Now, in recent years, those same geneticists have cloned animals, given us new plants that have massively increased crop yields and are resistant to various pests that have long plagued farmers, etc.
Once again, these things are bringing tremendous benefits to the Human Race, but they are nevertheless an attempt to "build a tower which reaches heaven". Furthermore, it is also very similar to what is being described in the rest of Genesis chapter 6, with demons conducting some "genetic engineering" experiments of their own, as described in Genesis 6:4; There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
I believe this is another story which God told to Moses so he would write it in the Book of Genesis using some allegorical language that Moses and the readers of Genesis would be able to understand. I'm not sure demonic beings actually had sexual intercourse with human females and impregnated them. Later passages of Scripture which talk about angels and demons seem to be saying that these spiritual beings do not have physical bodies or gender the way human beings do, so this is not even physiologically possible.
However, I've also always wondered if this is what some of the Greek mythology is based on, as it includes several stories about "gods" having sexual intercourse with mortal human females leading to the birth of "men of renown" such as Hercules.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, or anything else in this blog, please share them in the comments section.
In any case, these experiments in "genetic engineering" that were going on "in the days of Noah" were threatening to derail the plans and purposes of God for the human race He'd created and the Earth He'd built for us to live on. It was one of the things which prompted Him to send the Flood to destroy all flesh except Noah and his family. Noah, as Genesis 6:9 tells us, was "perfect in his generations" which I believe means he was of a family lineage that did not include any of these creatures who were products of demonic genetic engineering. That's why God chose him and his family to go into the Ark so they would be preserved, along with examples of all the animals which God had created, and which were also not the result of any of these demonic experiments.
Conclusion
Brothers and sisters, please hear me.
There's a LOT going on in the world today that I believe very closely resembles the circumstances described in Biblical stories which ended with God supernaturally intervening in human history in order to prevent us from doing things which would do irreparable damage to the perfect plans and purposes He has for us.
I believe that we might be very close to something similar happening.
I more then half suspect that this "Super El Nino" that is already intensifying in the Pacific is part of the intervention that God is about to make in our world. Even if it's not, it's going to bring some very intense meteorological events to many parts of the world. In fact, it already is.
Climate scientists are saying that 2026 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded on this planet. We have already seen massively disruptive weather events and natural disasters all over the world as a result of these unusually high temperatures and the attendant droughts that have hit many regions. We are approaching the end of September and it still feels like high summer here in Jerusalem where I live. Similar conditions are persisting in many other parts of the world.
I think the high temperatures, the raging wildfires, the floods, the hurricanes, the storms and all the rest of these unusual events in the natural world are a reflection of the tremendous tensions in the spiritual world.
So, buckle up! Be in urgent prayer for your families, your governments, your congregations and your communities, and anything else God has put under your stewardship.
Also, if I'm right, and God does sovereignly interfere in history in order to put a stop to either AI, or attempts at genetic tinkering, or anything else, it's going to freak people out. So, remember 1 Peter 3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;