The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.

1 Corinthians 2:10b-13

Today, there is a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence and while we don’t fully understand yet, AI is definitely having an impact on our lives. How many of us use ChatGPT or Grok? Before this upgrade, many of us have a powerful tool that has been named Siri programmed into our iPhones. We can ask Siri a question and receive a response that points us to some source of knowledge – a website, a weather report or a google search. Siri may “know” what has been programmed, but SIri doesn’t know is the sense Paul describes in the verses above.

In the verses above, we learn that the Spirit

• searches even the deep things of God,
• knows the mind of God in the same way that only we know our own thoughts and
• teaches us the spiritual realities with “Spirit-taught” words.

The Holy Spirit is no Siri or Alexa or ChatGPT or Grok for that matter. The Holy Spirit is a distinct person from God the Father and the Son, “yet at the same time, the Spirit is both the interior expression of the unseen God’s personality and the visible manifestation of God’s activity in the world. The Spirit is truly God in action, yet he is neither simply an outworking of God’s personality nor all there is to say about God” (Gordon Fee: Paul, the Spirit and the People of God).

The Spirit helps us “understand what God has freely given us.” But, the person who insists on leaning on his/her own understanding will refuse to accept the mysterious teachings of God found in the Scripture inspired by the Spirit. Instead, it will be considered “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 2:14).