There is a subtle, but growing unease in our midst, brought into the open by artificial intelligence. Some recent fuel came from an AI-generated song that quickly rose to the top of the charts. The reaction was immediate. People were fascinated. But also unsettled. Not because we’re suddenly becoming experts in copyright law, but because it feels like something much deeper is at stake.
The questions are straightforward, beginning with “Who wrote this? Whose voice is this?” Many of us are asking whether this song is really art or an imitation of someone else’s art?” If imitation, how is this different than an artist doing a “cover” of another artist’s song? Still others say, “If it moves us, does it matter how it was made?”
These are not technical questions. They are human ones.
They belong to a much larger conversation that has been unfolding for years, long before AI entered the picture. Famous artists have become wealthy through the legal ownership of their work. Others have found themselves entangled in costly legal battles over melodies, rhythms, and influences that feel impossibly difficult to separate. Courts are asked to draw sharp boundaries around something that was never meant to be airtight.
This isn’t about blaming artists or dismissing the value of creative labor. Artists deserve to live from their work. Creation has worth. But the intensity of these conflicts reveals something more profound than ownership. It reveals a fear that if what sustains us can be taken away, we will lose not just income but also identity.
I feel that tension personally. I’ve written for decades, long before AI tools became a part of my process. Like most writers, I’ve relied on help. Over the years, I’ve used spell-checkers, editors, grammar tools, and the like. But I also use voices that have shaped my own. So now the question feels sharper. Not just how we write, but who gets to claim what is written.
If I didn’t create this entirely on my own, is it still mine? If I can’t keep it, does it still matter?
Further underneath the debates about technology, ownership, and influence is a more profound anxiety. An anxiety that reaches far beyond artists alone, known as the fear of scarcity. The fear that there isn’t enough to go around. The fear that if we don’t hold tightly, someone else will end up with what we need to survive.
And that fear has consequences. We see wealth and influence concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. We see systems built to protect value slowly suffocating the life they were meant to preserve. We see people fighting over what once flowed freely among us.
A more common word for scarcity keeps surfacing in our public conversation right now: affordability. It shows up in headlines, campaigns, and kitchen-table conversations alike. And regardless of who we listen to or trust, many of us feel the same pressure—the sense that ordinary life is becoming harder to sustain.
Scarcity, when shaped by fear, is not a natural condition but a human creation. It emerges when greed concentrates more and more into fewer and fewer hands, leaving the rest grasping for what remains. That is why an affordability crisis born of greed cannot be healed by solutions that rely on more greed—more control, more hoarding, more competition for air.
Scarcity teaches us to hold our breath. But Scripture insists that life is not restored by clenching harder; it is renewed when we learn, again, how to receive and how to share.
Which is why this conversation ultimately isn’t about AI at all. It’s about breath. We’re really talking about breath, because breath is the one thing we cannot live without—and the one thing we were never meant to own.
There are two processes involved in breathing. When we inhale, we receive what we did not create.
And when we exhale, we release what we cannot keep.
Life depends on both. And scripture speaks about life in the language of breath, rather than ownership.
In Genesis, humanity does not begin with invention or achievement. The human is formed from dust, which most of us see as lifeless matter. That is, until God breathes into it. God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the first human became a living being.
Breath is life. Life is not seized. It is received. And it must be received again and again.
We find this idea again in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. These bones belong to a people with history, memory, and identity. They can be assembled. They can be organized. But they cannot make themselves live.
God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” And the answer comes not through better systems or stronger claims, but through breath. Breath restores life without reassigning ownership. The bones do not own the breath. Instead, they are animated by it.
And after the resurrection, when the disciples are hiding behind locked doors—afraid of loss, afraid of the future—Jesus does something unmistakably familiar. He breathes on them. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” He says.
Not new rules. Not control. Not protection of assets. Breath.
Scripture is remarkably consistent here: life is sustained by gift, not possession. Meaning flows from relationship, not accumulation. And whenever God’s people forget this—whenever fear leads to hoarding, domination, or exclusion—life begins to dry up.
Laws can define rights, but laws cannot heal fear. Laws can assign ownership, but they cannot teach us how to trust. Laws can protect boundaries, but they cannot breathe life.
Which is why the struggles we’re witnessing now—over art, technology, wealth, and influence—feel so costly. We are trying to own what was never meant to be possessed. We are holding our breath, afraid there won’t be enough air for everyone.
Scripture names this not as innovation, but as a familiar human problem. But then scripture offers a different way.
Can these bones come back to life?
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Ezekiel’s vision does not end with animated bones standing alone in the valley. When God breathes, life comes, and the bones rise together, because renewal in scripture is never a private matter.
Life can never be hoarded. Life is never for the few at the expense of the many.
The breath of God creates a people, and this is where the gospel speaks directly to our moment.
In a world shaped by scarcity—where fewer have more and more, and many are left grasping for what remains—the gospel announces abundance. Not abundance as accumulation, but abundance as shared life.
Jesus does not gather breath and store it. He gives it away. Jesus feeds crowds instead of protecting the supply. He releases forgiveness instead of guarding power. Jesus pours out his life rather than securing it.
And after the resurrection, the first gift he offers is not ownership, but the Spirit.
“Receive,” He says. That word alone challenges everything fear has taught us.
Renewal begins when we stop trying to own what was never ours to begin with—our breath, our creativity, our lives—and begin to receive them again as gifts meant to be shared.
This idea does not erase responsibility. It does not deny labor. And it certainly does not dismiss justice. But it does confront the lie that life is preserved by holding tighter.
The Spirit renews us by teaching us how to breathe again—together. To trust that God’s life is not diminished when it is shared. To believe that meaning is not lost when it flows beyond our control.
In a world tempted to escape our humanity, Scripture calls us back to it. In a culture obsessed with possession, the gospel offers participation. In a valley full of dry bones, God still breathes life.
And where the breath of God moves, renewal is not only possible—it is already beginning.
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Pastor Tommy
Dr. Mark Coeckelbergh, AI Ethics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020. (ISBN 9780262538190).