Posted August 28, 2026
“This is a risk for the whole world. In a few years, we will be living in a Terminator movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.” This is how Col. Serhiy Minaiev responded to a Russian drone strike that killed three civilians in southeastern Ukraine last month.
The New York Times reports that the drone was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot. It had been programmed by human operators to fly toward a particular gas station, but when it got close, it chose its exact target, most likely propane tanks, on its own.
According to the Times, this development was long watched for in the war in Ukraine, “presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.” (For more, see Dr. Ryan Denison’s latest Focus article, “Russia launches AI-piloted drones in Ukraine. What comes next?”)
From the time the first human used the first tool to kill another human, our ethics have struggled to keep up with our technology. Today, genetic engineering can alter the DNA makeup of an organism in ways that change the species with unforeseeable consequences. Autonomous robots and weapons systems can make life-and-death decisions without human accountability. AI agents can “hallucinate,” producing errors that result in patient suicides and generating misinformation as much as 51 to 79 percent of the time.
We must therefore have an ethical compass by which to guide our technological progress. Doing what we can just because we can leads to the demise of consensual morality and governance and constitutes a path to the cultural suicide of which Abraham Lincoln warned.
In an important Dispatch article, cultural commentator Nathan Beacom notes that “vice cannot build virtue.” A Machiavellian emphasis on “realism” is ascendant today, insisting that the ends justify the means and that the personal character of our leaders is less relevant than their exercise of power to advance policies with which we agree.
By contrast, he quotes John Adams: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Beacom agrees:
One side’s lowering of moral standards lowers the bar for the other. A culture of cynicism develops in which everyone assumes that other actors are acting in bad faith and, as a result, makes excuses for their own bad faith. . . . Policy compromise is necessary. Moral compromise undermines a republic (his italics).
He adds:
We cannot expect that if in politics we are hateful, scornful, rude, dishonest, equivocating, and temporizing, we will remain kind, generous, honest, courteous, and courageous in our personal life. We cannot live long as both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Here we find another compelling reason we need a personal, daily relationship with the living Lord Jesus. It’s not just that we need him to forgive our sins and save our souls so we can escape hell and go to heaven when we die. Nor is it just that we need a moral compass in the Bible that we can study and follow as best we can.
You and I need the personal guidance of our personal Lord. Like Paul at Troas, we need Macedonian visions to direct our kingdom service. Like John on Patmos, we need continuing engagement with the risen Christ if we are to receive and share his word with the world.
But the idea that the sinless, holy Son of God would want such an intimate, continuing relationship with a sinner like me seems implausible at best. I know how often I have “sinned and fall[en] short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). I know how easy it is for me to work for my glory rather than the glory of my Lord. I know how transactional I can be with Jesus, doing what he wants so he will do what I want.
A sermon I read recently by Br. Curtis Almquist of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston was good news I needed to hear. He noted:
You learned somewhere, perhaps as a child, that to be loved you always had to get it right. Yet you are less than perfect. There may be something about you that is broken, or inadequate, or prone to failure, perhaps hypocritical or unacceptable. On a bad day, you are your own worst enemy. It may seem an impossible stretch to embrace the belief that we—that you—embody Christ, who loves you. You might even say to yourself, “If only you knew . . .” But Christ does know (his italics).
Jesus knows every failure we have committed in the past and every failure in the future we do not yet know we will commit. What’s more, because he never yielded to sin, he experienced the worst temptations any human has ever faced. Satan has not been forced to employ his full arsenal on me because the weapons he has used thus far have worked. Jesus never sinned, so he was the target of every strategy the devil could attempt.
This explains why Jesus “in every respect has been tempted as we are” (Hebrews 4:15). And why we can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (v. 16).
What’s more, because Jesus suffered a Roman scourging and died on a Roman cross, he experienced one of the most brutal and agonizing methods of execution ever devised. As the prophet foresaw, “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). There is no sin you can confess that will surprise him; no grief or pain you can suffer that he does not feel; no challenge you can face for which he does not have omniscient wisdom and omnipotent strength.
As a result, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). What the Lord said to his people of old he says to you today, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3).
Br. Almquist closed his sermon this way:
Behold what you are.
May we become what we receive.
Amen.
“Too many of us try to live so that God will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.” —Lloyd John Ogilvie
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