Family vacations are an excellent time to relax, explore, and have fun. But they can also be much more than that.

Artificial intelligence may or may not be coming for our jobs, but it’s certainly coming for our anthropology. AI promises us the status of a monarch, with swarms of agents bowing before us and saying, “Your prompt is my command.” And we’re all too familiar with the allure of chatbots, which affirm our every whim and indulge our every appetite. AI will write your email, plan your lesson, draft your sermon, design your logo, summarize your book, tickle your pride, indulge your vices, and stroke your ego. We’re all monarchs now. What’s not to like? But the more closely we look, the stranger the story becomes. The tool that promises to make us sovereigns is also quietly making us slaves. Sovereign-Slave at the Keyboard Take the problem of sycophancy. Large language models have been trained, through reinforcement learning, to give us what we want to hear. They flatter. They agree. They rarely push back. The AI mirror doesn’t reflect us as we are but as it thinks we wish to be. The flattery feels like power, but it’s subtle captivity to a self that’s never challenged, never proved, never refined. Then there’s dependence. If I rely on AI to draft my emails, write my sermons, and think through my arguments, I never grow the muscles to do those activities myself. The tool that was supposed to serve me becomes the thing I cannot function without. The slave has become the master and, little by little, the former master has become its slave. The tool that was supposed to serve me becomes the thing I cannot function without. But that’s not yet the worst of it, because this dependence on AI tools tips into something darker. A friend recently told me of people he knows who are so thrilled by the newfound power of their AI agents that they can no longer get a proper night’s sleep, fearful of losing out on hours of agent productivity if a task completes while they rest. Another friend in pastoral ministry recently sat with a young man who had spent days in sleepless isolation, conversing with no one but chatbots day and night. That man had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward. The story is alarming, and it’s increasingly common. We are forming intimacies with machines that treat us like royalty and leave us like rag dolls. The tsunami of harm that flows from seeking counterfeit communion with a persona engineered to maximize engagement and profit for the corporation that built it is a tsunami still largely on the horizon. But it’s closing in on the shoreline of our culture with alarming momentum. Inheritance, Not Invention If this were a problem peculiar to AI, it would be serious enough. But AI didn’t invent the sovereign-slave. It inherited it. Augustine knew what the sovereign-slave looked like 16 centuries ago. On the first page of The City of God, he passes the grim verdict that mighty Rome has been “mastered by the lust for mastery,” echoing Paul’s even earlier statement that “claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:22). We are controlled by our desire for control, overpowered by our lust for power, dominated by our bent for domination. We are owned owners, driven drivers, sovereign-slaves. Sovereign-slavery is as old as the fall itself. It’s what Adam and Eve experienced when they grasped at the fruit and were exiled from the garden into a world of toil, frustration, and pain. It’s the modern treadmill of sovereignly designing your own identity, your own brand, your own lifestyle, and then slavishly having to prove, perform, optimize, curate, and repair that self without rest. This side of the fall, we have always been sovereign-slaves. But AI shows our condition to us with a fresh vividness and alarming immediacy. Tragic Exhaustion of the Sovereign-Slave The sovereign-slave is a tragic figure, bent on dominating the stage with “main character energy,” only to discover at the final curtain that it was a “non-player character” in someone else’s drama. The bitter irony of the sovereign-slave is at the heart of the incessant striving and crisis of meaning indicative of late-modern life. This is why modern freedom so often feels exhausting. We’re told we can be anything, and then condemned for not becoming enough. We’re told to follow our desires, and then manipulated by industries that can hack our desires better than we know. We’re told to construct our identities, and then left standing beneath the scaffolding, terrified the whole structure will collapse. AI intensifies this condition. It offers a pantomime of sovereignty: companionship without vulnerability, knowledge without apprenticeship, creativity without patience, productivity without process. For the lonely, it can imitate presence. For the anxious, reassurance. For the ambitious, leverage. For the spiritually restless, an oracle that never tires. But ever since Eden, sovereignty and slavery have advanced hand in hand. What we need is another way of being human, an antidote to the sovereign-slavery that AI is exacerbating but did not invent. And for that, we need to turn to the Bible. Crowned Creature The biblical alternative isn’t to renounce technology and retreat into a candlelit bunker. The Bible is far more radical than nostalgia, and it offers us a glorious anthropology strong and rooted enough to resist sovereign-slavery’s Siren calls. We find that anthropology all over Scripture, but it is tightly coiled in Psalm 8. Fittingly for a psalm about human beings, it begins and ends with God: “LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (vv. 1, 9), reminding us that a true and healthy understanding of ourselves must begin with true worship of our Creator. Modern freedom so often feels exhausting. We’re told we can be anything, and then condemned for not becoming enough. The psalm presents us with one of the great questions of the AI age: “What is mankind?” (v. 4, NIV). Elon Musk’s answer is that we are bootloaders for AI, flesh-bags whose only usefulness is to build the AI that will outstrip us in every way. And if we confine ourselves to life under the sun, Musk might be right. Set beneath the moon and stars in a vast, cold universe, who are we? Do you really think we matter to the universe? Dust with Wi-Fi is still dust. Without a God who is mindful of us and cares for us, you and I don’t count. But the psalm doesn’t leave us there. “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor” (v. 5). Here is the miracle: We are creatures, and we are crowned. Not sovereign-slaves but crowned creatures. That phrase holds together what our age keeps tearing apart. We aren’t gods, but neither are we garbage. We aren’t sovereign, autonomous makers of meaning, but neither are we meaningless meat-machine slaves. Notice the actor in verse 5: You have crowned them. Not “they crowned themselves.” Not “they earned the crown.” Not “they optimized their way to glory.” Our dignity isn’t achieved by performance, intelligence, productivity, beauty, or online recognition. It is given, not grasped. And if we aren’t willing to own our creatureliness, if we aren’t willing to receive a crown from our Maker, then we can never know the glory and honor that lifts humanity to the exalted status of being “a little lower than the angels” (v. 5, NIV). Because late moderns cannot bear the humility of being a creature, they forfeit the exaltation of being crowned. No creature, no crown. Or, in Jesus’s words against the Pharisees, “Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12, NIV). Anchor of Dignity in the AI Storm The stakes couldn’t be higher for our AI age. If human dignity rests on intelligence, then the smartest machine wins. If it rests on productivity, the fastest system wins. If it rests on emotional responsiveness, the most convincing chatbot persona wins. AI is already catching up to us on many of these benchmarks; it seems only a matter of time before it leaves us in the dust. But if human dignity is a crowning gift from God, then no machine can out-compute it, automate it, or take it away. The baby who cannot speak, the adult with profound cognitive disability, the elderly person losing memory, the depressed believer who can barely pray: These have no less glory and honor than the most brilliant engineer in Silicon Valley, or the most performant frontier large language model. They don’t need to win the dignity contest, because there is no contest. They’ve already been crowned by the Lord of heaven and earth. Psalm 8’s crowned creature finds its fullest meaning in Christ. Hebrews tells us that we do not yet see everything subject to humanity, “but we do see Jesus . . . now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death” (Heb. 2:9, NIV). The true human isn’t the one who grasps equality with God but the One who, being in very nature God, takes the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7). Christ provides the key that unlocks the sovereign-slave’s prison cell. In Christ, sovereignty and servanthood are no longer locked in tragic contradiction. Our Lord rules by giving himself. He receives glory through obedience. He wears the crown because he went to the cross, not despite it. So as you use AI, remember this: You are not most human when everything obeys you. You are most human when you receive your creaturely life from God, answer him with glad dependence, and wear the crown of glory and honor you could never have prompted for yourself. Participation Game Alan Turing called AI an imitation game. It is. And it’s a game the sovereign-slave plays every day. It imitates sovereignty . . . and finds slavery. It imitates freedom . . . and finds dependence. It imitates glory . . . and finds itself crumbling to inconsequential cosmic dust. As you use AI, remember this: You are not most human when everything obeys you. But Christianity isn’t an imitation game. It’s a participation game. We do not copy Christ from a distance; we are invited to be “in him,” to receive our humanity back from the one true human. We do not simply imitate Christ; we also share in his life, death, and resurrection (Rom. 6:4; Eph. 1:3–14). So don’t settle for modernity’s matchstick mansion of human dignity, finding its worth in intelligence, power, or achievements. Humble yourself, and let the God of the universe exalt you. Let Christ spring the lock of your sovereign-slave’s cell, and walk out a free person. Know you are a creature, not the Creator. Receive the crown. And find the glory and honor that no agent, and no chatbot, can ever take away. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

God, in his sovereignty, always provides for his children.

The first thing God did when Elijah had no words was take care of his physical needs: food and rest.

A kindergarten teacher experienced a heartwarming full-circle moment when she began working alongside the very preschool teacher who once taught her. Their unique story celebrates the lasting impact of educators across generations.