WE ARE AS GODS

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We are living in a world that no longer believes God exists and in fact some believe that we can become Gods. Peter Diamandis is intelligent and it is difficult for me to understand how he still believes in evolution. By most measures it is a failed theory. Sadly, it seems the following Scripture defines Peter Diamandis: “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Romans 1:28

Excerpts from: We Are As Gods – A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, By Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler

A man walks into a hospital, legally blind. Eighty minutes later, he walks out able to see faces. That’s not science fiction. That’s not a hundred years from now. That’s Monday morning in 2026.
His name doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened inside that operating room. A surgeon implanted a two-millimeter photovoltaic microchip containing 400 light-powered pixels into his retina. The chip—called PRIMA—works like a solar panel, converting infrared light into electrical signals that stimulate surviving neurons. Those neurons transmit signals along the optic nerve to the visual cortex, where the brain constructs them into images. The surgery took 80 minutes. What were the results? Biblical.

Before the procedure, this man’s vision measured 20/450: legally blind by U.S. standards. And after? 20/160. The difference between seeing darkness and seeing faces. Between isolation and connection. Between blindness and sight.The blind can now see. And if that phrase sounds familiar, it should. Because according to the New Testament, the restoration of sight to the blind is one of the defining miracles – proof in the mathematical sense, of divine power.Which raises an interesting question: If we can perform miracles of biblical proportions, what exactly does that make us?


“We Are As Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It”

In 1968, Stewart Brand wrote those words in the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was talking about technology, and it was a tall order. Consider what it would actually take to match the gods. Creation ex nihilo: the creation of something from nothing. That feat is reserved. Only supreme deities need apply. Yahweh pulled it off. So did Brahma, Atum, Pangu. The ability to drag light, land, and life out of the void. Or omniscience – the ability to know all things. Omnipresence – the ability to exist everywhere at once. “Praecognitio” – Latin for the power to foretell the future. Shape-shifting. Resurrection. The power to heal the sick, control the weather, and part seas. If you count the miracles in the Old Testament alone, you get 83 supernatural acts divided into ten categories: Creation, Provision, Nature, Healing, Resurrection, Judgment, Protection, Prophecy, Communication, and Victory in Battle. That’s a lot of miracles.
And in 1968, when Brand made his proclamation, we weren’t quite there. We were gods in training. Mainframe computers the size of oil tankers were the rule. The microchip had just been invented. Color television was a neat trick. NASA managed to orbit the moon with men in a can, but Neil Armstrong’s small step was still a year away. We were not gods. Not yet. But what nobody expected… we were very fast learners.
The Miracle Inventory
Let me show you something. If you measure modern technology against the Old Testament’s miracle categories, here’s what you might find:

CREATION MIRACLES
Synthetic biology creates new forms of life or modifies existing ones. CRISPR edits genes with precision. 3D printing brings matter into being layer by layer: literally building something from almost nothing. Generative AI creates virtual worlds populated by self-directed agents capable of forming economies, religions, and societies.
We create life. We create worlds. We create intelligence.

PROVISION MIRACLES
Vertical farming produces food with 95% less water and 99% less land than traditional agriculture. Desalination turns seawater into drinking water at scale. Lab-grown meat provides protein without slaughter. Solar-powered systems provide clean water, cooking, and sustainable protein even in deserts. Drones deliver meals and medicine where supply chains fail.
The miracle of provision—feeding multitudes, turning scarcity into Abundance—is no longer metaphor. It’s operational.

HEALING MIRACLES
Gene therapy cures disease at the genetic level. Stem cells repair what injury destroys. Telemedicine enables remote diagnosis and treatment. Advanced diagnostics detect disease before symptoms appear – often catching seven out of the top ten causes of death early enough to intervene. AI-powered drug discovery accelerates cures for cancer and rare genetic disorders.
The blind see. The paralyzed walk. The dying are healed.

RESURRECTION MIRACLES
Cryonics preserves the dead in hope of future revival. Stem cells create new organs. Organ perfusion technology keeps donated organs viable for days instead of hours. CPR and drone-delivered defibrillators revive people in cardiac arrest.
We raise the dead. Maybe not permanently. Not yet. But we’re getting there.
The list goes on. And on. And on.

In 1968, when Stewart Brand made his proclamation, these capabilities were fantasy. Today, they’re infrastructure. Miracles have become utilities. We are, by any reasonable definition, gods.
Why We Don’t Feel Divine
So, if we’re literally walking the Earth in an age of miracles, why don’t we feel like gods?
The answer lies in how our brains process novelty – or more accurately, fail to process it.
In the 1980s, Northwestern University cognitive scientist Dedre Gentner ran experiments asking people questions like: “How is a solar system like an atom?”
Most people answered: “Electrons orbit the nucleus like planets orbit the sun.”
Gentner discovered something profound about how the mind works: a process she called structure-mapping. To understand the unfamiliar, humans don’t just make surface comparisons. We map deep relational similarities between domains. We use analogies as cognitive infrastructure.
The brain to a computer. The internet to a web. Genes to code. The universe to a network.
Analogy is how we compress novelty into familiarity. It’s how we make sense of the world when it starts changing faster than we can keep up.
But here’s the problem: Our comparison machinery has run out of comparisons.
Godlike powers in our pockets? What’s the analogy? Curing blindness with microchips? Resurrecting the dead with defibrillators? Creating life from stem cells?
There are no easy grounds for comparison. Without analogies, we can’t parse the world. The result is cognitive vertigo: the sense that the world is moving faster than we can make sense of it.
And when analogies fail, humans start hunting for deeper patterns—what Carl Jung called archetypes.
The Rise of Archetypal Media. Jung argued that archetypes are universal patterns embedded in humanity’s collective unconscious, primal symbols that evoke powerful reactions across cultures. The Hero. The Shadow. The Great Mother. The Wise Old Man.
In the early twenty-first century, we find ourselves awash in Jungian archetypes. And if you want to track the psychological impact of technological acceleration—the failure of analogy—just count the gods, goddesses, superheroes, and supervillains populating our screens.
Start in 1968. The next decade produced one notable cinematic release: Superman. Television gave us Wonder Woman.
The 1980s saw a step-function increase: ten superhero films and six TV shows.
The 1990s doubled: twenty major releases and nearly as many shows.
Between 2000 and 2010? The numbers tripled: sixty films and thirty television series.
Jung would argue this surge is an unconscious response to the psychic destabilization brought on by radical acceleration in human potential. With each technological leap, we need new symbols and myths to anchor our understanding of our growing power.
Archetypes provide narrative coherence and moral clarity. As Spider-Man says: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
We live in a world of abundant archetypes because we live in a world of abundant miracles.
The Information Apocalypse
There’s another reason we don’t feel divine: information overload.
In 3000 BCE, if you measured all the data in the world—papyrus scrolls, clay tablets, the works—you’d total about one gigabyte. The equivalent of 4,000 books.
In 2012, when we published Abundance, the world produced 2.8 zettabytes of data. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. That’s 4,000 trillion books.
By 2025? 181 zettabytes. We don’t have an analogy for that number. And that’s the point. Information impacts the nervous system, and we’re living through the biggest information surge in history. The result is a mismatch between the data storm outside and the prediction engine inside. Our ancient brains don’t have the bandwidth, and our imagination has been hijacked by the apocalypse.
No wonder we don’t feel divine.
The Miracles in Your Pocket. Let’s bring this home. You carry miracle technology in your jeans and handbag. You can summon a chariot of the gods disguised as an Uber with a finger tap. You can conjure a feast via Uber Eats with another.
You have answers to nearly every question in seconds—omniscience on demand.
You can see anyone, anywhere, anytime through video calls—omnipresence as a feature, not a bug.
Translation. Navigation. Simulation. Creation. Communication. It’s all at your fingertips.
The grandiosity of “omnipresence” and “omniscience” has been replaced by the prosaic “Zoom” and “Google,” but the underlying superpowers are the same.
These divine powers are everywhere and everywhen.
In 2012, we predicted a future that included autonomous cars, flying cars, delivery drones, and humanoid robots. It sounded like science fiction.
Today? Over 30 autonomous car companies are operational. Waymo operates robotaxis with zero safety drivers in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Tesla Full Self-Driving has over one million users.
Flying car companies—eVTOL vehicles—are conducting commercial test flights in Dubai, Los Angeles, and Singapore. Joby Aviation expects to launch commercial operations offering 15-minute flights from LAX to downtown LA (versus 60-90 minutes by car).
Nearly every major retailer has robots running their warehouses. Zipline makes thousands of drone deliveries every day, transporting lifesaving medicines and saving tens of thousands of lives in the process.
Humanoid robots? Google “Tesla Optimus.” You’ll find videos of robots folding clothing, serving drinks, and holding yoga poses.
We’ve gone from hard-to-believe stories to commercial operations in just over a decade.
The Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
Here’s the thing: Stewart Brand was right. We are as gods. But he left out the hard part. We have to get good at it.
Because the same exponential forces that gave us godlike powers are also overwhelming our nervous systems, hijacking our attention, and triggering bias cascades that blind us to miracles.
Our capabilities have far outstripped our wisdom.
As Ray Kurzweil writes in his endorsement of We Are as Gods:
“Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler show that while exponential technologies deliver the capability for radical abundance, the real challenge lies in upgrading our consciousness to match our accelerating power. This is more than a survival guide—it’s a manual for optimizing our destiny.”
That’s the paradox. We have the power to cure blindness, create life, and command machines with our thoughts.
But we’re still running Stone Age prediction software in our heads. Our ancient brains don’t have the bandwidth to process miracles at scale.
So we feel anxious instead of abundant. Overwhelmed instead of empowered. Burned out instead of divine.
The solution isn’t less power. It’s a consciousness upgrade.
The Abundance era has arrived. The miracles are here. The blind can see. The paralyzed can walk. We create life from stem cells and resurrect the dead with technology. But without upgrading our consciousness to match our godlike capabilities, we’ll miss it entirely. We’ll keep doom scrolling through the apocalypse, blind to the fact that we’re living through the most extraordinary transformation in human history.
The Choice
You have a choice. You can keep seeing the world through the lens of negativity bias, confirmation bias, and cognitive overload – where every headline is a disaster and every change feels like a threat. Or you can update your operating system. You can learn to see the miracles you’re living through. You can train your brain to recognize Abundance even when it’s wrapped in disruption.
You can, in Stewart Brand’s words, get good at being gods.
The tools are here. The data is clear. The miracles are multiplying. The only question is: Will you see them?
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, put it this way:
“Diamandis and Kotler’s bestseller Abundance helped shift the global conversation from fear to possibility. Now, We Are as Gods reveals that the forces they predicted—AI, clean energy, digital biology—are scaling at a pace few could imagine. This book argues persuasively that the Abundance era has arrived and challenges leaders to use these capabilities responsibly and ambitiously.”
The Abundance era has arrived. The blind can see. The paralyzed can walk. We create worlds with code and life with CRISPR.
We are as gods. The question is: Are you ready to get good at it?

It is Babel all over again. Is it any wonder why Jesus has to return to restore righteousness. Be prepared for what is next on God’s agenda for planet earth go to http://www.millennialkingdom.net


GOD ORDAINS WHATSOEVER COMES TO PASS

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Can I suggest that before you read this post you read or re-read my post “The Key to Evangelism is God’s Power” on June 30th, 2022.

If we go into evangelism understanding that in some cases, God actually uses the proclamation of truth as a means to close one’s mind from repentance, we can guard our hearts by recognizing that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass. What that means with respect to evangelism is that sometimes, the preaching of the gospel actually serves as the means through which an individual’s heart is hardened against God. In other words, not every instance of proclaiming a message of repentance is designed by God to bring the people who hear it to repentance and faith. In fact, Scripture often demonstrates the opposite is true—that the proclamation serves to condemn the recipients rather than restore them. A great example of this is found in the commissioning of the prophet Isaiah:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” He said, “Go, and tell this people: Keep on listening, but do not perceive; keep on looking, but do not understand. Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull, and their eyes dim, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed.” Then I said, “Lord, how long?” and He answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, houses are without people and the land is utterly desolate. the Lord has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. Yet there will be a tenth portion in it, and it will again be subject to burning, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.” Isaiah 6:8-13

Many tend to focus on Isaiah’s answer to the commission, but the focus of the passages itself is on the content of the commission, which is fleshed out in verses 9-12. The Hebrew denotes the continuing nature of the commands to be given to the people in v. 9, yet also the subsequent result. The Israelites will be commanded by the prophet to continually be in a state of listening, but they will never come to understanding; they are to be continually in a state of seeking out understanding, but they will never come to an understanding. They are to constantly seek after God—yet they will not find Him. In other words, they will be given an impossible task and the preaching of the prophet himself will only solidify this reality. In v. 10 the prophet is actually commanded—the imperative form of the verbs is used here—to render their hearts insensitive (lit. fat), their ears dull (lit. heavy), and their eyes dim (lit. pasted shut). As Brevard Childs puts it, “The prophet is to be the executor of death, the guarantor of complete hardening. His very proclamation is to ensure that Israel will not turn and repent.”

Notice the prophet doesn’t ask any questions concerning the fairness of God’s edict in v. 11, but rather the duration for which he is to heed this commission. The answer, of course, is devastating. The prophet’s work of preaching a message that will only harden the hearts of his people will not be completed until the Lord has rendered the capital cities desolate and carried the Israelites away to captivity.

The passage plainly suggests the purpose and result of the prophet’s commission is to be an agent God uses to harden the hearts of those who hear him. In other words, his message, though one riddled with calls to repentance and faith in Yahweh and a future restoration of the nation, will never be heeded by the people because it only serves to intensify their immediate judgment. The promise of v. 13 still carries with it the tones of judgment simply because like their fathers before them who died off in the desert, they will die off in captivity. Thus, even this promise serves as a means of hardening their hearts against the Lord.

This theme comes up time and again not only throughout the book of Isaiah, but the other prophets as well, and likewise, in the New Testament.

“The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor,
eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day.” And David says, “Let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution for them; let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and bend their backs forever.” Romans 11:7-10

The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah are called to a similar path as Isaiah, where they will preach a message of judgment and salvation, yet they will not be heeded (Ez. 2:7; Jer. 7:27). Christ Himself taught in parables for the express purpose of concealing the truth of the Kingdom of God, lest those whom it was not granted to would hear and repent (Matt. 13:10-16; Mk. 4:10-12; Lk. 8:9-10). The apostle Paul even picks this idea up when he speaks of God giving mankind up to the lusts of their hearts, dishonorable passions, and a debased mind (Rom. 1:18-32). When you look through the entirety of the Old and New Testaments, what is plainly seen is that God is at work to harden the hearts of whom He desires, which is most clearly expressed in Rom. 9:6-29. In every instance where the edict is rendered a “lost-cause” against the recipients of the message, the truth of God has been made self-evident so that man is without excuse.

None of this is a matter of controversy in Scripture. Instead, election and reprobation are simply part of the cosmic reality of judgment and salvation unfolding before us as the plan of God is revealed. In the midst of this, Scripture unabashedly upholds the tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility without much qualification. The important thing to note in all of this is that it is not as if those under this severe indictment from the Lord are under it without cause. In every instance, the people have either forsaken the covenant or rejected their Creator willingly. The commission of Isaiah serves to show us this reality quite clearly, in that chapters 2-5 give clear evidence that the people plainly rejected the terms of their covenant with God, and as a result, He would send the prophet to seal their fate.

To put it in as blunt of terms as I can: there was no hope for their escape from judgment, as God made it an impossibility for them to hear the words of His prophet and repent. The fullness of the consequences had come upon that generation, showing the patience of the Lord had long been extinguished. The only thing one is left to conclude then from the call given to Isaiah is that his words would not serve to be a message of hope; his words tell them, “I have been given a command by Yahweh to preach in such a manner that your hearts become hardened, your ears become blocked, and your eyes become darkened.”

What all of this means for the church then is that we are simply to be found faithful to the task of heralding God’s message. We are to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth, which for most people, means you are to bring the gospel into your workplaces, friendships, families, and so forth. All that is required of you is to look to where God has placed you currently and simply be found faithful to the task of proclaiming the good news to those who are dead in their sins. It requires that we not be ashamed of the good news of the gospel, which includes not being ashamed of the bad news of God’s judgment against sin. Whatever the result of that proclamation of the gospel may be, whether a hardening or a softening of the heart, God effectually uses this message for His purposes. We may not necessarily like the implications of God using our proclamation of judgment and salvation to effectively harden an individual’s heart. We may not believe the implications of this are even fair—but we ought to remember in the midst of everything that we don’t want fair because our idea of what’s fair doesn’t square with God’s.

The gospel is a scandal to the world because it sees the murderer, rapist, racist, and the like, on equal footing with the sweet old lady who doesn’t confess Christ—and offers them all the same grace of God in Christ. What that very simply means is that the gospel is not barred from anyone on the basis of their own doing or choosing, but rather, on the sovereign choice of God Himself. If those who struggle with evangelizing were to focus on the sovereignty of God in evangelism, it would free many a burdened soul up to take joy in the work that God has given them, realizing that whether the person they share the gospel with rejects or receives it, God is glorified in accomplishing His work through the preached word.

Adapted from an article by Grayson Gilbert “God ordaims whatsoever comes to pass: including your suffering” http://www.patheos.com