sin

The AI Echo Chamber

by Ben Zornes · Jun 11, 2025

There is a great deal of excitement surrounding the technological advances of AI. As such, it’s incumbent upon Christians to not be swept off by the spirit of the age into the particular sins and follies that arise with any new technological development. Whenever a new innovation arrives, it takes five seconds before evil men use it to pursue carnal desires. New tools inevitably are put to use to kill one’s enemies, take liberties with your neighbor’s wife, pilfer the possessions of others, or blaspheme God.

AI is just the latest thing. It has great capacity for usefulness, productivity, and further innovations. But along with it comes dreadful and soul-destroying follies. AI avatars are already being put to use to function as therapists, digital harlots, and loyal companions. Embracing such digital fellowship is not harmless. It’s effectively locking yourself in an echo chamber. Everything in the servers is derived from human language and understanding. There’s no transcendence there. It isn’t a digital tower into heaven.

AI also offers a perverse illusion of easy shortcuts. It holds out a shortcut to sexual satisfaction by AI girlfriends. Or, it allures with the opportunity to skip the duty to think long and hard about a topic, offering a cheap answer spit out by the algorithm. All this appeals to our sloth and ungodly desires.

The Spirit of God which hovered over the waters, and by Whose light the first day was lightened, has been given to You. You are an image bearer of Almighty God, and this demands that You bear yourself in such a manner. You are a lord or a lady of the Kingdom of God; not a slave of 0s & 1s. Don’t be enticed into submitting to chains of subservience, when God has made you free by His Spirit.

Who are You Becoming?

by Ben Zornes · May 14, 2025

Who did you become this week? You made a multitude of choices this week. Some of those choices were certainly sinful. That tone of voice. That evasion of responsibility. That lingering covetous gaze. You never transgress God’s law through an accidental oopsie-daisy. You choose sin. And when you do so, you are consequently choosing the sort of person you will become.

Here’s one example. The choice of the fool is to say in his heart, “There’s no God.” As a result, he lives in the insanity of a world which does not and cannot exist. The fool is unstable in all his ways, and is only on his way to more and more instability. He chose to believe an impossible premise, and he’s stuck with trying to navigate this world, a world which God most certainly made, by continually redefining all the evidence which confronts him continually. He has to tell himself continual lies. Even in his twisted attempts to rationalize his insane worldview, he is using hardware manufactured by the Divine hand of God. The fool becomes continually more foolish.

Each and every choice, is like this. The choice to sin, regardless of the magnitude of the sin, is a choice to reshape the world into a senseless form. Sin is vibe-coding and the result will eventually be an fatal error message.

Nevertheless, God’s grace opens our eyes to see the impossibility of continuing to live within our twisted insanity. You can choose, even now, to repent of who you were on your way to becoming. In repentance, you refuse to become the fool, the murderer, the embittered miser. In humbling yourself through confession and repentance, you turn away from insanity, and you take a step towards becoming a real person. And what does a real person look like? Well, look at Jesus.

Carnival Mirrors & Confessing Sin

by Ben Zornes · May 6, 2025

As we ready ourselves to confess our sins, it’s easy for a self-evaluation to trick us into confessing all the wrong things. Think of those funny mirrors at the carnival that make for some good laughs. What would I look like with short stumpy legs? What if my head quadrupled in size? Those mirrors deliberately distort reality. What is small becomes big, the wide is narrowed, the short becomes tall-ified.

Self-evaluation of sin can sometimes be like that, if you look into a mirror of your own making. Really bad sins are easy to spot. We can even obsess over them. We give them very spiritual sounding names like “my besetting sin.” But this can result in minimizing sins which are actually big but which we have conveniently slimmed down through the magic of convex mirrors.

CS Lewis, in The Great Divorce, makes this reality plain by setting two episodes in contrast with each other: a mother who, out of so-called maternal love, demands to bring her son down from heaven and into hell with her; and a man controlled by a lizard of lust. In the end, it’s the mother’s unyielding grasp upon her presumed virtue of being a nurturing mother that proves to impede her from enjoying the delights of everlasting life, whereas the lecherous man submits to the lizard’s destruction and transformation into a stallion that whisks him deep into heaven’s mountains.

All of this to say, “Do not let your eyes deceive you.” Rather, let the clear mirror of the Word show you all your sins; even, and most especially, your most admirable sins. Your presupposed virtues must be crucified. Your best attributes must be yielded up. Your merits you pride yourself in are to be repented of. This is what it means to truly humble yourself.

Sin Scatters. Christ Gathers.

by Ben Zornes · Oct 21, 2024

Sin always brings about scattering. After the fall in Eden, we see that the family unit is fractured as Cain kills Abel; Cain’s descendants contend with Seth’s; at Babel humanist vain-glory resulted in wide-scale scattering. Due to Israel & Judah’s idolatry the Jews were exiled to Assyria and Babylon.

This, in part, is what made the covenant which God made with Abraham a true marvel of mercy. God promised Abraham a Seed, a Seed which would bring blessing to every nation. God was intent to regather mankind unto Himself. The Lord started by gathering one household. But that isn’t where He finished. From that one household a nation rose, and from that nation the Promised Christ was born. Christ is now gathering individuals, households, cities, and nations. The sign of baptism is the sign of His great gathering. To be gathered in by Christ is a summons to abide in Him by faith alone. Sin had scattered; but the grace of God in Christ is now gathering.

So welcome our brother to Jesus Christ…

Make Your Enemies Flee

by Ben Zornes · Sep 11, 2024

Introduction

It may be an uncomfortable truth, but you have enemies. Don’t pretend otherwise. You are amongst the ranks of the church militant. Congrats.

Your Enemies

Sin – Internal
World – External
Devil – Supernatural

Like Moses

During the wilderness wanderings Moses led Israel in a daily liturgy: Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And when [the ark] rested, he said, Return, O LORD, unto the many thousands of Israel (Num 10:35-36).

Your battle with sin must be met with firm faith in the covenant promises found in the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat. Does your private life reflect your public baptism? If you would leave your sin it will not be because you find it inconvenient or you get bored of it. Sin is overcome when you behold a greater glory in Christ.

You do not have a high enough view of God. Is there sin in your life that you continually struggle with? Then fix your eyes on Christ.

Like Jehoshaphat

Steadfast worship of the living God. Do you sing with all your might?

Now the enemies in the world are daunting as well. How are they scattered? Jehoshaphat gives us a wonderful example. You commit yourself to sincere worship of the living God.

Imagine the people of God gathering each Lord’s Day to worship the Lord with eagerness, to hear God’s word with zealous faith, and to confess their sins diligently. Our worship is formal, but that doesn’t mean it should be frumpy. Use your outdoor voice.

You stand, right now, before the presence of the only Living God. This God made everything visible and invisible. He wrote the code that is your DNA, and because He is the only truly original author He wrote a different code for every other creature upon earth. And you doubt that true worship of this God will have no effect?

Like Christ

The Lord scattered His enemies through humility, sacrifice, and death. If you want your enemies to flee before you, you must follow in Christ’s footsteps. You must humble yourself. You must die to your pride and prestige. You must die to your fear of man. You must die to your desire to be well-liked by everyone. You must give up all your false opinions, all your lies, all your idols. You have to die. And the only way for you to die is to die in Christ.

Those who are in Christ share in His crushing the serpent’s head. So you must place your faith, entirely, and without qualification in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

And if you do so, you will find that all your shame and guilt is driven away. Every temptation that you are confronted with must not be faced by your own power, but you will be given the power of the Spirit of Jesus to overcome your sin, and repent of your sin when you do sin.

You’ll also find that your life becomes the sort of life which causes unbelievers to ask about the hope you have, and cling to you asking you to show them the way to God. And you must be certain that although there will be profoundly wicked tyrants who will not swerve from their designs against the saints, the Lord has promised that the worst they can do is kill you. And if you have rested in Christ, you too will cry out with the martyred saints before the throne of God, “How long oh Lord?” Jesus the Savior will one day return as the Judge and will make all things right.

That same Jesus, who died and rose again, summons you to rest in Him. And then you can face all foes with that wonderful confidence described in the 57th Psalm.

Blindspots

by Ben Zornes · Aug 26, 2024

A common tendency is to minimize our sin by coming up with alternate names for our sin. One such phrase is “blindspots.” Now, this phrase can be used in a useful way. None of us are all-knowing, so there will be things we’re unaware of.

But if you zero in on its meaning as a way to put daylight between you and your sin then you’ll see the folly of slapping that phrase over your sin. Sin is never a matter of lack of education or awareness. This would be to adopt a view of evil that is foreign to the Bible. The lusts of our hearts lead us into our various sins. More info doesn’t suddenly strip temptation of its magnetic draw.

Describing your sin as a blindspot makes it sound like if you had only known such-and-such was evil you never would have done it. But if we take a hard look at our motives we know that we always sin because that’s what we actually wanted.

Resisting sin, then, isn’t found in degrees or courses. Don’t pretend that if only you knew more that you’d sin less. This means that resisting sin is found elsewhere. And indeed it’s found in the light of Christ. Paul says, “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light. (Eph 5:8).” Elsewhere he makes a similar exhortation “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light (Rom. 13:12).”

Walking in Christ is walking in the daylight. The glory of walking with Christ is that you can now see clearly how horrific and foolish sin is, and–by the Spirit–resist temptation’s allure.

Trauma-Mongers

by Ben Zornes · Jul 15, 2024

The therapeutic worldview which prevails in our society views trauma as the operating system. Your every action is caused by underlying trauma. But the demand for trauma outstrips the supply. So, the priests of this new religion contrive new sorts of trauma. Everything becomes a tangled web of traumas inflicted upon you, and trauma for trauma you’ve inflicted on others due to your privileges.

It’s hard to keep up with such a system, because, at its core, it’s an incoherent system. It’s a system which wants any evil in you to be pinned on someone else.

But evil doesn’t come from outside you. Each of us are quite capable of innovating some of the worst scum known to mankind. Have others wronged you? Most certainly. But in your response to that wrong have you always and in every way responded with innocent motives. Have you never harbored bitterness, wishing for evil to befall those who wronged you, lusting for revenge?

God’s Word gives us an entirely different route for dealing with evil. Ironically, God calls you to pin all your evil on Someone Else. You must put all your sin on the only One who never sinned, but first you must also confess that all your sin is, in fact, yours. You can’t blame shift. You can’t pin it on your parents, your culture, your skin color, your socio-economic class, or anything other than you. Your sins, every last one, is yours, and God welcomes you to put it all on Jesus. He who knew no sin became sin, that we might be made righteous. Confession of sin, then, is taking responsibility for all the vile things you’ve done as well as all the vile things you’ve desired to do. And then Christ gladly takes it upon Himself, and pins it to His cross, that it all might die there.

Prayer of Confession

Father God,
You have given unto us a great salvation. Our modern remedies for evil have left us worse off. We’ve blamed our sin on others, and not confessed with David that our every sin is ultimately a sin against You. Where we have evaded responsibility for our sin, forgive us. If we have embraced the notion that this, that, or the other trauma is the cause of the evil in us, grant us strength to put that godless notion to death. Purge us of evil, by giving us enough faith to place all our sins upon Christ, the only true and willing scapegoat.
In Jesus Name,
Amen

Assurance

Trauma-mongers want to dwell on the trauma and make it their whole personality. But, trauma is a poor substitute for faith. Faith looks at all the evil and then looks at the cross, where evil was dealt with. If you’ve looked to Christ, and looked to His cross, confessing your sins with true faith then your sins are forgiven through Christ.