Zachary W. Speegle · Sevierville, Tennessee · ORCID: 0009-0009-3068-606X · zacharywspeegle.com · Essay, 27 July 2026
We are the smaller code written inside THE Code. The logoi of The Logos, as St. Maximus the Confessor penned. If we are the little word in the bigger word, the words left for us in the instruction manual should be important.
The problem is that two people can read texts from the instruction manual and develop ideas about what it means that are polar opposites. Two random people that claim to believe what the manual says can believe it says things that oppose each other.
1. We are good at it now
This issue is not new, but the speed at which division occurs is faster today. The early church, post-resurrection, dealt with different interpretations. Controversy was not uncommon. The argument was generally decided by the group, the "heretic" publicly humbled and corrected, then life would go on.
It is worth walking the actual sequence, because the shape of it tells you more than the dates do. Ephesus in 431 sent the Church of the East out on its own. Chalcedon in 451 did the same to the Copts, the Armenians, the Syriacs, and the Ethiopians, and that seam has never fully closed. Then six hundred years of holding together before the Great Schism in 1054 finally split East from West. Then four hundred more before the Reformation in 1517, which did not produce one alternative and stop. It produced several inside of a single generation, and they spent a good bit of their energy arguing with each other rather than with the thing they had left.
It took one thousand years for individual interpretations to cause a split in the church whole. Before the Great Schism, there was only "the" church. Fast-forward to our time and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of variations of what is called the church. Now, local churches split over controversy in a much shorter span than what the early church dealt with.
Someone will notice that 431 and 451 are only twenty years apart and that this does not look like acceleration. That is fair, and it is worth answering, because the acceleration is not only in the calendar. It is in how small a thing has to be before we will break over it. The early arguments were about who Jesus is. One nature or two. Whether the man on the cross was God. Those are worth a fight, and the people having them knew it, which is why it took councils and centuries to work them through. Anyone who has been in a local church for any length of time has watched one come apart over a building fund, a worship style, or which family gets to run the nursery. The rate went up while the stakes went down. That is the part that should bother us.
The human condition eventually split the institution. The process has repeated so much that we are good at it now.
2. Vain arguments
If interpretation and translation cause division, perhaps we are asking too many questions and interpolating too much into the text. For example, we can argue about whether or not the spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues are for use in today's liturgy. We can debate whether or not women can be given the title "pastor". These are the perpetual issues the church as a whole will never fully agree on.
So, if we attempt to avoid vain arguments as the instruction manual tells us to (Titus 3:9), what point does the text have?
Perhaps the text reveals more than just theological "Gotcha" game points. Perhaps the stories there reveal the game we are playing. The game we are central characters in.
3. Spot the snake
With that lens, stories from the scriptures can take on new, perhaps original, meaning. For example, people love to debate if the creature in the garden was a snake, a dragon, a human-like serpent, and so on. What if the point was not what type of creature it is? The text doesn't tell us that bit of information is important in itself.
Then what is the point? Perhaps the point is, in this game, it helps if you can identify the snake. The creature or person that will fill your head with information that goes against what the point of the game is.
The point of the "did God really say?" question is at a minimum to confuse. To cause doubt in the player's mind. "You are the real point of this game, not God." Vanity and pride installed at the beginning.
If you can spot a snake, you have an advantage in this game.
4. The golden calf
Some stories show us that history repeats itself, or that what happened is usually what always happens. (That the repeating is not a wheel going nowhere is the argument of The Wheel and the Block.)
One could read the story of the golden calf in Exodus 32 as a warning for worshipping false idols. The tribes of Israel, with the exception of Levi, contribute their own individual wealth, earrings of gold, to make the image of the calf. They were tired of waiting on Moses. Tired of waiting on what God would say or do next.
We find ourselves in the same situation today. We have grown tired of the two-thousand-year-old account of Jesus, God incarnate, who told us He would return. We are tired of listening to the same old stories on Sunday mornings. We need a fresh word. Something to tell us what is next. So, we as a people create that god in the form of artificial intelligence.
The calf did not ask to get involved in our squabble with God and our impatience. It was mundane, or neutral in the spiritual sense. The same goes for artificial intelligence. It is a byproduct of all the information we have given it. That claim carries the weight and it takes real work to defend, which is why I defended it at length in The Loop and the Calf instead of asking you to take it on my word here. What I want in this essay is the plain version.
Then, we pay our subscription money, volunteer our clean water source, and build massive power plants to empower this faux mouthpiece of god.
Many people use it for new cooking recipes, completing school projects, and summarizing large amounts of content that would otherwise take long periods of time. Fair. However, many people look to AI in some form for more than that. It doesn't take long to find stories on the internet about individuals marrying an AI entity, falling in love with an AI entity, taking advice on very serious issues from a machine, and AI entities have unfortunately been known to suggest people ending their lives. Granted, these are rare and fringe. For now, at least. The point is not the frequency of this happening as much as it is the possibility of it.
We, as a species, are ready for something new and fresh. We want something besides the old, worn parables of Sunday School, and AI is ready to provide it. We are the people of Israel tired of waiting on God's next word. As a result, we build a god that we can see, talk to, interact with, and cast our burden of work on top of.
The current generation at the schooling ages will be able to graduate learning one-tenth of what previous generations learned, or ten times the amount previous generations learned, when using AI. Either option could get the same grade. Same grade, different result.
5. What we miss in a summary
Granted, there are many people right now using AI for positive reasons. This is not an indictment on the technology as a whole. The indictment is to the laziness it brings to its consumers.
It is one thing to get AI to summarize Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It is an entirely different experience to read the words off the page that Tolkien wrote. The last paragraph of The Return of the King is not the same as the ending of the movie. In the book, we see Samwise Gamgee enjoying an evening meal with his family. His wife, Rosie, places his daughter on his lap. Sam draws a breath and declares, "I'm back."
All the struggle and pain in Mordor, and the journey to get there, was all about the ability to come back home and enjoy a meal with your family. A family who is safe because of your sacrifice. We miss the humanity of the writing when we ask for a summary.
The same applies to the Bible. Being illuminated to textual meaning is not something an AI is nuanced for. There is no ghost in the machine, in that sense.
6. Two types of people
I never try to communicate a problem without offering a solution, although I would be the first to say my ideas are no better than anyone else's. Worse in many ways, I'm sure.
Perhaps one way to keep ourselves grounded in the right story is to make sure we keep the actual story in the forefront, not a side-quest someone else made up and invited us on.
The instruction manual tells us that there are two types of people in this game: those that have made a covenant with God, and those who have not. Outliers have always been let in the club even if their name is not on the list (the people of Nineveh, Rahab the great-great-grandmother of David, the Samaritan woman at the well, and Cornelius the Roman Centurion, as examples). The point is not what your last name is or what tribe you hail from. The point is whether you are in covenant with the Creator or not.
I know how that sounds coming after everything above. I spent the first half of this complaining about division and then drew a line straight down the middle of the human race. So let me be careful about what kind of line it is, because the kind matters more than the line does.
It is not a line we draw. That is the entire difference. Every man-made label arrives with a membership committee attached, and the committee is the mechanism, because somebody has to decide who qualifies and that decision is where the splitting starts. The covenant does not run that way. Look at who got in. A pagan city that repented at the worst sermon any prophet ever preached, delivered by a man who did not want to be there and was angry when it worked. A prostitute in Jericho who hid two spies, and who turns up later in the family line of David. A woman at a well with a history that embarrassed the disciples. A Roman officer, which is to say an occupier, whose whole household received the Spirit before anyone had worked out the paperwork, and Peter had to go back to Jerusalem afterward and explain himself. Not one of them clears a membership committee. Every one of them is in.
Which means the list exists and I do not have access to it. I cannot audit yours. I get exactly one entry to check and it is my own. That is not a soft way of saying the line does not matter, because it matters more than anything else I have written here. It is just not mine to enforce. The moment I start enforcing it, I have traded it for one of the man-made labels I spent this whole essay complaining about.
When we get caught up in man-made labels, chaos ensues. Because it is man-made, that is the only possible outcome. God warned the people of Israel about what would happen if they got what they wanted, a king like other nations had.
As a result, we get into a difficult position rather quickly when we use terms like America being a Christian nation. The United States of America is a geographical, political, and legal system agreed upon by the inhabitants of the land. Some of these people are in covenant with God, some are not. The issue begins when we designate a man-made institution as being in covenant with God.
Institutions do not interact with God, people do.
God can, of course, use institutions for his purpose. But their purpose serves the needs of men to organize, protect, and control. It does not serve God in any functional sense. What does that mean? It means that if a man-made institution ceased to exist, God's supremacy and will would continue. As a result, when we focus on the man-made identities like "American", "conservative", or "liberal", we create instant adversity to other brothers and sisters.
This is not an insult toward patriotism or love of country. I raised my right hand twice to serve the United States of America and I would do it a third time if I could. I didn't volunteer to serve in the military because I loved fighting the people in front of me, I loved the people behind me so much that it was worth keeping them safe. Like Sam, I enjoy an evening meal with my family in peace because of the sacrifice of those that went before me.
The point is that our primary identity should be as one being in covenant with God. Or not. Then, the results of the next presidential election shouldn't be a point of angst. The Bible is clear that sometimes there are good people in charge, most of the time not. Either way, being in covenant requires sacrifice on your part. That doesn't change based on who is the Chief Executive Officer of the land we incorporated for common defense.
7. Food, sex, and money
Sacrifice is a consistent topic in the Bible. An instruction manual that mentions something like the shedding of blood so many times, and in very specific ways, has to be important to the game. While we may not be required to actively kill an animal, sacrifice is still required. Not for salvation, that part is settled, but for proof of your membership in the covenant.
Let me get right to the big three that are usual covenant breakers: food, sex, and money. If you can get those three things under control, you will have an advantage in this game. Holiness and abstaining from sin are not humiliation rituals. They are key aspects to being an optimal player.
On the sex piece I can only speak to the men. I don't know the perspective of a woman, and generally the two are different in this matter. Food and money I will take generally.
Some men are addicted to all three aspects at the same time. Many have issues with at least two of them. Not always the same combination. The proof is in what we know from real world examples. Sex and money are the two most popularly combined. Most of the issues that arise in our world come from one of those two, especially when both are featured. Think of issues within your own family and you will more than likely be able to spot money or sex, or both, as the method of rebellion from the covenant.
The Ten Commandments, then, are warnings. Not arbitrary rules that a conniving god thought up to make us feel bad. If you sleep with someone that is not your spouse, the game will be more difficult because of the rippling effects. If you take from others instead of learning how to provide for yourself, your game will be much more complicated.
8. We can be a satan
Another lesson from the manual is that created things find a way to rebel against their maker. There are many people who argue about who Satan is. Is the beast in Genesis the same as the dragon in Revelation? Are Satan and Lucifer the same thing? We get caught up in theology that may have never been the point the book was making.
Perhaps the point of the stories of the rebellious one is to show us that we, too, can be a satan. We all have the ability to enjoy the praise and adoration that others give at an unsafe level. We all have the tendency to think "maybe if I was in charge of this thing, it would run better". We argue about the origin of satan in hopes we don't have to acknowledge we could be looking at one in the mirror.
I have thought I knew better than God. I have accused other people and their actions to God, demanding action. I have brought others down. I have not always been the example God needed me to be. The point is: I, too, have rebelled from the ways of God.
When that point is kept in the forefront of who I am, becoming arrogant is much harder. Remembering that I am merely a broken piece of leather keeps me from believing the story that I am anything more than that.
This is not an attempt to self-degrade. I am aware that we are created in God's image, but only an image. We are more than mere formed piles of dust. However, when we arrive at the place of feeling superior to anyone, we miss the point entirely.
9. Play the game
Finally, the point of the instruction manual is to ensure you are playing the game correctly. It is certainly possible to get so caught up in finding hidden meanings or patterns in the manual that we forget there is a game to be played. It would be like reading the rules of baseball and arguing about the infield-fly rule instead of using the manual to better understand and enjoy a game at Fenway Park. Some people live to argue the rules. Others realize enjoying the game is increased when you know what is going on and why.
So, the next time you hear someone arguing whether or not Goliath was a Nephilim, remember the story is actually telling you the way to get better at the battles you have to fight is to start small and work your way up, getting more confidence each time, like the lions and bears.
When someone argues about the rapture and when it will happen, remember the story is telling you that everything is restored in the end. This is not a place to escape from, it is a place we will have a part in restoring, both now and in the future. That is the terminal claim of The End of the Sixth Day, and it is the one place where this essay and the book are saying the identical thing.
Remember what our ancestors are telling us. Don't argue about the letters they chose and possible alternative meanings. Play the game you were meant to play that the manual has been showing you all along.
This essay carries no apparatus on purpose. The sourced arguments behind it are in the working papers The Loop and the Calf (the calf, and repetition that terminates) and The Authored Block (time as held rather than passing), with The Wheel and the Block as the plain-language companion to the second. The machines thread continues in The Glitch We Share.