Day 4085 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 2:6 NIV

What is knowledge?

Is it nothing more than the sum of what we know? Is it perhaps more the mystery of the more we don’t? Is it something passed down to us from those who found it before us? Is it something we pass in the street as it lays there still waiting for someone to care about those who come next? Is it something that knows where better is, the very hiding place of that which is best? Is it the wonder won within wonder waiting for us to wonder about it? Is it the worry felt in worry and our being usually unworried by it? Is it in a hurry to get where it knows it needs to be? Is it patient enough to take it slow so that it comes to know all it needs along the way toward wherever it goes?

Is it the learning we’ve met in the lessons we’ve learned?

Is it an opportunity to learn still more than we could ever imagine we could still?

It seems that we’ve all sort of settled upon this estimation of understanding that’s built upon the degree of knowledge already known. And indeed, to understand something you do need to know something about it. And, yes, to have come unto such a knowledge of that which becomes an understanding thereof, one must first learn about said matter in whatever measure they feel they need to know for whatever reason that’s become to them reason enough to otherwise refuse, for once, our lesser inclination to assume we already know enough about enough.

And indeed, this is something, or so it seems, that is of a growing rarity in this world as this world anymore seems to be growing in this relaxing sought in regard to the sum of what we know and the loss there of any worry as to what all we don’t. After all, we’ve got not only google now but also the intelligence which relies not on us to be ourselves intelligent but rather is more willing to outsource such a thing to literally any artificiality that may be willing to uphold what’s now seen as a common burden too boring to bear.

Can you imagine that?

That we’ve advanced and progressed and apparently then grown so much that we’re now of the ability to believe that we’re beyond knowledge? That we’ve long since surpassed the outermost limits of all we need to know, or at least know how to do? That we’ve seemingly become, and I do believe this sadly true, of this mind that even appears to enjoy this life in which we let another live for us as is done in the pursuit of knowledge gained?

That we seek less and less inside every new day to learn new things, to try new things, to believe new things, bigger things, better things?

Seriously, when I was a kid we all expected to have flying cars by now!

And yet all we got was a bunch of computer-based fakery that can make a video of a flying car that many believe is real despite the slightly strange coloring, somewhat alarming softness and simply off-putting glow.

All because we think there’s nothing now left for us to know.

Granted, it seems that for decades, centuries even we’ve been of this heart that’s aimed only at leaving whatever responsibility we might upon the table that is this life from which we’re meant to sup upon the substance of all that He is and all that He’s done for us. All because it seems that all of us love still better that idea that we’re so good, know so much, are capable of literally anything we might ever need to know or do or be, or at this point, even wanting to see that we seem to believe that we have in fact arrived at the culmination of that very first lie:

You won’t surely die but rather you shall be as God.

And indeed, these days we do live in a time in which so many are so entwined inside this ability to create something out of nothing that this excitement, this interest, this lack of resistance given unto such lies as ai has left us walking in a world in which we now don’t really know what all is fake and just how little of all that was real is left to find.

Rather many here find nothing strange about the fakeness of it all.

Because, well, we don’t yet know the harm that can be done, will be done, is literally being done as I write this very sentence.

Why?

Because we’ve never been this far before.

Society has never seen the things that we’re seeing today. We are truly, in every possible way, the most advanced and progressed and technologically savvy society in the entirety of human occupancy of this planet that is anymore treated as but a backdrop for lives lived as if staged productions meant to create perfection with the help of tools and resources that we have now at our disposal that were up until recently not even within the dreams of those who didn’t have them before.

Problem is that we think that’s a good thing.

Even though God’s Word posits that it might not be quite so good after all in that, well, we’ve a long history of doing things that were things that hadn’t entered God’s mind as things we might actually do.

Because He’s always held out more hope for us than it seems we’ve ever known how to.

For sadly there was a time in history in which the people of Israel, doing something new to them, and thus apparently exciting and hopeful enough to try, did something that did not enter God’s mind as something they might actually do, not merely try, but literally do.

What did they do, thinking they knew it the right thing to do?

“They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.”

Yep, they began offering their very own children, those little gifts of Heaven for whom those such as Abraham and Sarah had once prayed and hoped and all but begged to be a possibility for them as instead not but fuel fit for a fire that burned inside them which allowed them to create inside their minds, their hearts even, this idea of a god who would require such a thing be done. Yeah, those who descended from Abraham and Sarah determined to do with that for which they had prayed, that which God had promised, that which hadn’t even entered His mind.

They began offering up their kids as sacrifice to a god that isn’t there.

All because they thought they knew it to be the right thing to do because their grasp of knowledge had long since outgrown their interest in knowledge being a gift given from God and rather a matter measured in their desire to be God, a path proven in their delusion which made them of the ability to imagine that killing their own children might somehow help them.

For as the adage suggests, yes, knowledge is power. For, yeah, knowledge wields this ability to understand, to walk in wisdom even. Or at least to assume we are. And that seems always where nearly everything falls apart. It’s right there at that intersection between understanding and arrogance.

And it’s a narrow street to be sure.

Because, well, the fact is that what we know can, does, should help us grow into a fuller measure of the fullness of all we’re meant to be. Knowledge is this reality of the things we’ve seen, the sounds we’ve heard, the facts we’ve learned and the responsibility to henceforth use them for the best possible outcome. But you see, that’s where another adage sadly comes into play, and that’s that power corrupts.

And indeed, I think it’s pretty easy to see that the power we find and feel inside of all knowledge has in fact, and quite sadly at that, led us only to this place in which so much is so corrupt that we’re rapidly losing our ability to even know what’s real. I mean, all this ai stuff is getting pretty scary as some of it does seem so close to the real deal that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.

I deal with this on a daily basis as I find myself struggling to find photos to use for these daily posts, many of which have become fake and thus nothing I wish to allow any part or parcel within this most hopeful of process.

But still, this is world we know now. It’s one in which at least half of everything is fake, made not by people but rather by programs. Truly, I follow a Christian music site that shares news on upcoming releases and new artists and things like that and they recently posted a story talking about how of all the music that they’re sent to review/share/promote, more than 50% has been found to have been ai-generated.

Seriously, just read this little snippet from the article:

“Deezer was one of the first major digital service providers (DSPs) to respond publicly. Last year, Deezer reported that AI-generated music uploads increased from 10 percent of daily uploads in January 2025 to 28 percent by September 2025, with more than 30,000 AI-generated tracks uploaded every day. More recent reports indicate that the number has jumped to 40 percent of all submissions–roughly 60,000 tracks per day as of March 2026. That's nearly two million AI-generated tracks being uploaded every month. In 2025 alone, Deezer detected and tagged over 13.4 million AI-generated tracks.”

And this site, being one specifically geared toward Christian music, stated that they receive around 100 songs every month from artists around the world. Granted, not a lot seeing as how the quote above was talking in terms of millions. But still, I find this almost more egregious as we’re talking about Christian music.

And so now over half of even new Christian songs are being made by computer systems.

All because we, like they did back then, seem to have outgrown our interest in existing within our limits and there appreciating all the skills and abilities and struggles and curiosities that make us, well, us.

And that simply because now we know of something that can both ease the burden of even something that was once so personal and thus powerful as writing a song with lyrics and lines which poured from a heart with something to say, rather now allowing a computer with no feelings, no understandings, no possible personal connection with God to literally write our worship songs for us.

This is the world we know!

And it’s one which literally proves the writer of Ecclesiastes once again spot on in that, yeah, “for with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

That’s one that never leaves my mind as, well, inside every single day I somehow manage to find the presence of something I know that I only wish I didn’t. I learn something that I feel sad for having learned. I realize something that I’ve perceived, preferred, believed to be decent, good, useful only instead something far less than I ever hoped it would be. I open my eyes to every new day given in this place knowing that I will within it have to face the fact that even the world I grew up in is now gone.

It’s been replaced by whatever this is that feels nothing even close to all I know I knew.

And I know I knew a different world, a different life because it didn’t leave me. Rather I carry with me the memories of times in which we knew more of kindness and found it easier to care about those around us. I remember days in which we held the door for strangers and our kids didn’t have to face the dangers they do now just trying to play a game with their friends. I remember when we sought to know things in what seemed an actual interest in personal growth and the still untapped potential that we all have for it still.

Yes, I remember when we all seemed to know that there was still hope for this life, for this world, for the future and all it could be, all we could be.

News flash folks, we’re here and, well, it’s nothing of what anyone probably hoped it would be.

Because I for one never wanted to even imagine a world in which we wouldn’t know the difference between reality and artificiality. I didn’t want to know a world in which people outsourced personal responsibility to drugs and diet gurus. I didn’t hope to know a world in which all we felt was stress met every single day over bills we can’t pay and jobs that aren’t helping us quite as much as they used to.

I didn’t want a life in which love had run dry and yet every eye remained the same somehow.

How does it not break our hearts to look up and realize what we’ve become?

If not only because, of all we know, we know somehow less of God than ever before?

Because, well, how much of Him do we see inside the fruit we bear anymore? How much of His light do we each try to shine in what are lives anymore so dark that we just stay inside, hidden away under the baskets that are headsets attached to screens upon which we play games as if life’s one too? How much love do we show those around us as we shake our fists and curse their existence because it’s apparently so different from ours? How much mercy is there to know in a world that measures importance in politics and preference?

What of life can we know when all it seems we know in life is just our opinion of it?

You see, the issue is, and it’s one proven pretty much perfectly in all this artificial reality that so many are so enamored by, we’ve long been of the mind that we are in fact as gods. That we ourselves are somehow the very sources of wisdom, of knowledge, of understanding. That we’re the ones who know everything and get then never anything wrong. That we make no mistakes, and in fact are so useful and spotless in that regard, that we now seem to feel it our duty to steal away into a reality we ourselves create thanks to technology that exists that now even allows folks to, or so they think, go on a date with an ai-created love interest, one which exists only because they downloaded an app and undertook the process of creating this virtual person who is everything they wanted them to be.

Something I think we’ve all settled for because we know that people aren’t perfect.

We know that people have flaws, issues, imperfections. We know that people have their own unique preferences, opinions, plans, hopes, dreams, priorities that we probably don’t measure up to either.

Not sure how that can be seeing as how we apparently know ourselves to be so amazing that we think it best to literally settle for only virtual relationships with ideals that we ourselves create thanks to our always knowing what’s best.

But still.

My point is that we’re starting to see, and hopefully, albeit sadly, feel the reality of the power that knowledge has. Because, yes, knowledge is both the sum of all we know, but so too is it the mystery of the more we don’t. It is the facts we’ve already found, but it’s also the feelings we’ve learned not to feel. It’s the plans we’ve made and the promises we’ve made unto them being perfect, but so too is it the paths we’ve not travelled inside the lives we haven’t lived thanks to our having long been those who thought we alone knew what was best for us.

Something usually only based upon whatever felt good at the time.

Indeed, I personally know a life given unto pornography addiction. Lived it for the entirety of my adult life thus far. Was handed a little calendar in sixth grade that opened my world to things that I now wish I’d never known.

Walked in that world for 20+ years.

And it literally wasn’t until last September that I got the chance to finally remember that there was something better than the lie I’d lived believing.

And just this past weekend I had my mind blown by that very same something better that I’d finally agreed someone like me would never have the ability to experience again.

Simply because I knew I didn’t deserve to.

And that because in all the years I wasted doing what I knew to do, I was only avoiding the life that I was too afraid to know. A fact that literally broke me last night as I looked out my bedroom window and promised God that I wouldn’t quit on all the better things that He’s always known for me, wanted for me to be, has still for me. Because, well, I know now that I have.

But I will not do so again.

Because I know the sum of the things I know. I know who I’ve been, what I’ve done, all the sadness, sorrow and shame that I sowed along the way. And, yeah, I know that the harvest I’ve reaped has only caused me to lose sleep over all the things I never got the chance to experience in life.

And I know I can’t settle for that anymore.

Because I now understand what I’ve been missing all this time.

And, well, wisdom, as it turns out, isn’t about what we know but rather how well we use what we understand about what we do know, and that alongside the humility which is always there to always remind that, no, we don’t know everything.

For if we did, then we’d not need God. But friends, if we didn’t have God then, well, we’d simply not be here in what is a world in which so many know so little of Him, think so little of Him, care so little for Him that good is now put for evil whilst evil is considered good.

That’s human knowledge for you!

We can always find a way to do wrong and convince ourselves it’s right, all so that we needn’t endure the apparent suffering we always manage to assume is waiting within the humility that exists only to help us grow in knowledge, in wisdom, in understanding that our lives are not our lives and nor then are we ever to be considered anything close to those who best know how to live them.

No, take it from me my friends, we’re only those who know best how to destroy them.

And I’m simply tired of destroying myself.

Just gets old after a while, especially when you accidentally stop and allow yourself to wonder as to what you’ve never known inside that way of life you never lived thanks to your having decided to live the life you chose instead.

I don’t know that there’s a heavier burden to carry.

But I also don’t know of any reason as to why we shouldn’t welcome it.

Because I really do believe that it’s a thorn which comes from God that exists in our side, in our heart, that from there asks us every day, every moment, inside every single breath we breathe to become of the audacity to believe that while what we know may be good enough for us, good enough was never what entered His mind when He was making His plans and promises for our lives.

No, God knows only that which is good, only that which is the very best for us.

I know we can’t say the same as our every past proves an entirely different story.

I just hope that we don’t go forward allowing what we know already to be all we ever care to learn about life, about love, about hope and healing and the forgiveness that’s given us from He who is above that somehow combines all the above into what remains the greatest expression of love ever known.

Why did He do it?

I don’t know.

But I do know I won’t stop trying to learn more of Him, more from Him until I do.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold