The Philistine Iron Problem: Who Gets to Use the Powerful AI?

There's a strange little passage in 1 Samuel that most sermons skip.

"Not a blacksmith could be found in the whole land of Israel, because the Philistines had said, 'Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears!' So all Israel went down to the Philistines to have their plow points, mattocks, axes and sickles sharpened." (1 Samuel 13:19-20)

Read that again slowly. The Philistines didn't just outfight Israel. They maintained a technology monopoly. No blacksmiths meant no weapons — but it also meant no agricultural tools. Israel couldn't plow a field without Philistine permission. The monopoly on iron was a monopoly on everything.

I thought about that passage in January when NVIDIA unveiled Vera Rubin.

The Hardware Race in Plain English

If you're not a tech person, here's what happened in the last 30 days: the machines that run AI got significantly more powerful, and the question of who can access that power just got more complicated.

NVIDIA, the company that makes the chips powering almost every major AI system in the world, announced its Vera Rubin platform with new H300 GPUs. These chips are specifically engineered for trillion-parameter models — AI systems so large they were theoretical two years ago. If you're running ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you're running on NVIDIA hardware. Their dominance is nearly total.

AMD countered with the Ryzen AI 400 series — laptop processors with a built-in "Neural Processing Unit" designed to run AI tasks locally, on your machine, without needing the cloud at all. IBM's 2026 trend analysis calls on-device AI one of the year's defining shifts. Real-time translation. Content generation. Image analysis. On a laptop.

Meanwhile, China's AI labs aren't waiting around. Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.5, which handles video generation and autonomous multi-step tasks. Alibaba's Qwen3-Max-Thinking outperformed leading American models on a benchmark literally called "Humanity's Last Exam." The global AI race is no longer a two-horse affair.

None of this, on its surface, seems like a church issue. Bear with me.

Who Has the Blacksmith?

Right now, the most powerful AI models run on NVIDIA hardware housed in data centers owned by a handful of companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta. To use their AI, you pay their price, accept their terms, and operate within their guardrails.

For large organizations, that's fine. They can negotiate contracts, hire AI teams, and integrate tools into their workflows. For a 150-member church in rural Kentucky with a part-time pastor and a budget that barely covers the heating bill? Not so much. For a house church in rural China that can't openly advertise its existence? For a rapidly growing Pentecostal congregation in Lagos where the pastor serves three churches across the city? The barrier isn't just cost — it's infrastructure, language, and sometimes political risk.

This is the Philistine iron problem in silicon form. When only the powerful have access to transformative technology, everyone else becomes dependent on the powerful.

But AMD's on-device AI chips tell a different story. If AI can run locally — on a pastor's laptop, without a cloud subscription, without sending your congregation's data to a corporate server — the calculus changes. A bivocational pastor in Appalachia gets the same AI-assisted sermon research as a megachurch with a tech department. Not identical capability, but meaningful capability.

That's not a minor shift. That's iron reaching the Israelites.

Bezalel Had Technical Skills Too

Christians sometimes treat technology as inherently worldly — a necessary evil at best, a spiritual hazard at worst. But Scripture has a more interesting take.

In Exodus 31, when God wants the Tabernacle built, he doesn't send angels. He fills a craftsman named Bezalel with "the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze" (Exodus 31:3-4).

Technical skill, in this passage, is a spiritual gift. God equips Bezalel with craftsmanship the way he later equips prophets with words. The medium differs; the Source is the same.

If that's true — and I think it is — then the question for the church isn't whether to engage with powerful new tools. It's whether we have people who are skilled enough to use them wisely, and whether those tools are accessible to the communities that need them most.

The Speed Problem

Here's what makes this moment genuinely urgent. MIT Technology Review characterized 2026 as the year the industry shifts "from hype to pragmatism" — from flashy demos to embedded infrastructure. The tools are moving from novelty to necessity. The organizations that figure out AI workflows now will have compounding advantages over those that wait.

Ecclesiastes 9:10 puts it more directly: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might." The Teacher isn't making a motivational poster. He's observing that opportunities have seasons. The window for learning a tool is when it's new and accessible, not after the early adopters have built moats around it.

For churches, this means the next 12-18 months matter disproportionately. Not because AI will replace pastors — it won't. But because churches that learn to use AI for administration, communication, and research now will free up dramatically more time for actual ministry. And churches that don't will increasingly struggle to keep up with the operational baseline that members — especially younger members — expect.

Three Things Small Churches Can Do This Month

This isn't a "wait for the denomination to release a position paper" situation. Here are three concrete steps:

1. Try one free tool for one task. ChatGPT's free tier, Google's Gemini, or Anthropic's Claude can all help draft a newsletter, summarize a chapter of Scripture for small group discussion, or brainstorm sermon illustrations. Pick one task. Try it. Evaluate honestly.

2. Ask who in your congregation already knows this stuff. There is almost certainly someone in your church — probably under 35, possibly under 25 — who uses AI tools daily. Buy them coffee. Ask questions. The Bezalels are already in your pews.

3. Talk about it from the pulpit. Not a whole sermon. Just an acknowledgment: "Many of you are using AI tools at work and at home. So am I. Let's think together about how to use them faithfully." That single sentence does more than a year of ignoring the topic.

Iron for Everyone

The Philistine monopoly didn't last forever. Eventually, Israel developed its own capabilities. The tools that once belonged exclusively to the powerful became available to everyone.

We're at a similar inflection point. The most powerful AI still lives in corporate data centers. But the trajectory — on-device processing, open-source models, falling costs — points toward broader access. The iron is reaching more blacksmiths.

The church's job isn't to win the AI arms race. It never was. The church's job is to ensure that when powerful tools become available, they're used for human flourishing, not just shareholder returns. That the small church in Kentucky gets access alongside the megachurch in Houston. That Bezalel's gift isn't hoarded by Pharaoh.

The machines are getting faster. The question is whether the people of God are paying attention.