The eighth session of Doyt’s 12-part Bible study on AI and human identity continued exploring sin with a radical implication: mercy, not judgment, is God’s nature—and pursuing mercy, not justice, creates just societies. This challenged comfortable assumptions about divine justice and what it means to live the “cycle” of sin and repentance. Three crucial insights emerged.
God’s Bound Nature: Mercy Without Conditions
The session opened with a challenge: count how many times “mercy” appears in Sunday worship. It’s everywhere—confession, great thanksgiving, prayers. Why? Because mercy is God’s nature, and God cannot be anything other than merciful.
This flows from God’s fundamental character: “If God is love, God must be merciful.” This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: God is not primarily a “just God” in the sense of a judging, retributive God. Justice emerges from mercy lived through the sin-repentance cycle, not as God’s primary attribute.
Jesus’s parables hammer this point:
The Prodigal Son: The father shows mercy to both sons—the wayward one through welcome, the angry elder through patient love. Both receive mercy because that’s who the father is.
The Good Samaritan: While religious professionals pass by, the Samaritan embodies mercy, revealing God’s character.
The Pharisee and Tax Collector: The self-righteous versus the despised. Who goes home justified? The one seeking mercy.
We resist this. “Because some people deserve…” we start. We want God smiting our enemies. But “the evidence seems to indicate it is a merciful God” because terrible things continue happening and God continues offering mercy.
Clyde asked: “Where there is no repentance, there is no mercy?” Doyt’s response: “There always is mercy 100 percent of the time without question irrespective of whether or not somebody repents.”
God’s mercy isn’t conditional on repentance. Repentance allows us to receive mercy that’s already present. Barbara’s submarine analogy: we’re swimming in water (God’s love), but we can choose submarines. The water doesn’t disappear—we isolate ourselves. Open the hatch, and there’s the water, unchanged.
People can live unrepentant. The elder brother “lives pissed, lives the unrepentant life.” The father allows it while saying “I am here, I am merciful.” The consequence isn’t God withholding mercy but our own misery—”a pretty crappy life.”
The Sin-Repentance Cycle: Formation Through Freedom
We don’t move from sin to final redemption in one conversion. We live a cycle: sin, repentance, mercy, repeated continuously, formatively.
Why? Sin is the shadow side of freedom, and freedom is necessary for love. God “continues to let humanity sin” while providing repentance-mercy. This isn’t negligence—it’s love’s structure.
The serpent didn’t introduce evil but distrust and competitive pride—the idea that God is “insecure, thin-skinned, needy” and holding things back. Did God want this? “If he gives you freedom, he knows that’s gonna happen because sin’s the shadow side of freedom. But what’s more important? Love.”
God takes responsibility for creating conditions where sin emerges. God made beings with freedom, knowing freedom produces sin, because love requires freedom.
The cycle: We sin (loving something more than God). We recognize misalignment. We have faith God will be merciful. We repent (reorient toward God). We experience mercy. We move closer to God. We sin again. Repeat.
Each cycle reveals the imago dei—making us like God, making us merciful. When we become merciful, what does justice look like? “It looks like mercy.” If the world fills with merciful people, justice naturally emerges as restoration rather than retribution.
This is “how we get to justice”—not through punishment but through practicing mercy over time. “If the whole world is full of people who are merciful, what does justice look like? It looks like the Good Samaritan, the father of the prodigal son.”
The alternative—”punishment, justice, retribution”—seems easier. “We’re good at it because we’re mighty.” But that’s not the Gospel. “We don’t see [Jesus] ever do that.”
Staying in the Cycle: Community and Practice
How do we maintain the cycle? Christian community practicing spiritual disciplines together.
“Stay in community”—specifically Christian community. Why? “Because they get the same story.” Shared narrative enables mutual support through the cycle.
We practice: prayer (reorientation), worship (collective acknowledgment), tithing (proper ordering), pilgrimage (physical journey), confession (naming misalignments). “We do the things together. This is what we’ve been taught to get us back into the pattern.”
Reality check: “That spiral isn’t always going up.” We don’t have guaranteed progress. The prodigal might leave again. We cycle through the same sins. But practices keep us engaged with mercy rather than abandoned.
Even others’ sins become instructive. “One of the gifts of everybody else’s sin is it is instructive.” Watching someone struggle teaches us. Prayer for those “out of relationship with God” helps them potentially but also forms us.
The Old Testament often presents sin as boundary-violation with angry God outside. But Jesus reveals the truth: God comes out of Eden with humanity. Even when we sin, God doesn’t abandon us but remains present, providing better clothes than fig leaves.
“Even through the Old Testament we have had a God of presence, a God who is merciful. God does not go away.” Mercy isn’t New Testament innovation—it’s God’s eternal nature.
Why This Matters for AI and Human Society
AI cannot participate in the sin-repentance-mercy cycle. It cannot sin (no freedom, no love to misorder), cannot repent (no will to reorient), cannot receive or extend mercy (no relationship with God). Therefore AI cannot develop moral character through this formative process.
Human judicial systems reflect human power, not divine mercy. “Who makes the rules? People in power.” These can be noble or self-serving, but they’re human constructs. Confusing human justice (punishment) with divine justice (mercy-produced restoration) misleads us about what God wants.
The woman at the well (John 4) exemplifies Jesus’s merciful approach. He violates social boundaries, doesn’t judge her five husbands. His mercy creates transformation through acceptance. “That mercy, she can’t even believe it.” She becomes an evangelist because mercy freed her.
“Jesus is God 100 percent of the time. Why? Because Jesus is merciful 100 percent of the time.” Not because he walks on water but because he embodies mercy consistently. “Our capacity to be like Jesus is directly proportional to our capacity to be merciful.”
Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission exemplified this. Built on mercy rather than retribution, it created space for confession and healing. Not everyone achieved reconciliation, “but he did exemplify mercy.” Its existence proclaimed mercy as foundational.
Understanding that justice emerges from mercy, that God’s nature is unchangingly merciful, and that Christian life consists of cycling through sin-repentance-mercy together clarifies what it means to be human. We’re not beings who achieve perfection but beings who grow toward merciful love through repeated practice—acknowledging failure, reorienting toward God, experiencing mercy, extending mercy to others.
This is “old school, simple Christian stuff,” the foundation of church teaching and Scripture. And it’s entirely unavailable to artificial intelligences that cannot love, sin, repent, or participate in the transformative cycle creating truly just, merciful communities.