China says it will reverse major AI acquisition by Meta

The Hebrew of Proverbs 21:30 is absolute in its scope: there is no category of wisdom — political, military, technological — that stands in opposition to the Lord and prevails. The proverb speaks to a recurring human pattern, not a single historical event.

Applied across history, it judges every civilization that has placed ultimate confidence in its own accumulated intelligence — from Egypt's magicians to Babel's architects to Silicon Valley's engineers.

Both the American and Chinese states are treating AI as the decisive instrument of civilizational supremacy. Each is marshaling enormous intellectual and financial capital to ensure the other does not gain an edge.

Proverbs 21:30 does not tell us which nation will 'win' the AI race. It tells us that no configuration of human counsel — however sophisticated — can ultimately prevail against the purposes of the Lord.

That is a word the church must keep before a culture intoxicated by technological confidence.

In Isaiah 10, the Assyrian king boasts that by his own intelligence and strength he has absorbed the wealth, talent, and resources of the nations — erasing boundaries and gathering peoples as effortlessly as collecting eggs from an abandoned nest.

The structural parallel is precise: a dominant power, convinced of its own superior wisdom, moves aggressively to prevent strategic assets from leaving its grasp, and justifies the action by appealing to national strength and intelligence rather than any moral or covenantal principle.

China's reversal of the Meta acquisition echoes the Assyrian boast almost word for word: 'by my wisdom I have done it... I remove the boundaries of peoples and plunder their treasures.' Beijing is asserting that no foreign power may gather what China regards as its intellectual nest eggs.

Isaiah's narrative does not merely describe Assyria — it indicts the spirit of self-sufficiency that drives any great power to seize and hoard wisdom. The Lord's answer to that boast in Isaiah 10:15-19 is a measured and certain rebuke.

Nations would do well to remember who holds the axe.

Psalm 2 depicts the recurring pattern of the nations — in every era — organizing themselves in deliberate, strategic opposition, not necessarily against Israel or the Church explicitly, but in autonomous assertion of their own sovereignty over creation's resources and people.

The near horizon is the Davidic king; the far horizon, as the NT applies it in Acts 4:25-26, extends to all who set human power against divine order. The 'plotting in vain' is the key phrase: the nations' strategies are energetic, expensive, and ultimately futile.

The U.S.-China contest over AI is precisely the 'counsel together' of great powers — secretive regulatory maneuvers, acquisition battles, talent wars — all aimed at securing dominion over a technology both nations regard as civilization-altering.

The psalmist does not say the nations are idle; he says they plot *in vain*. The Christian reader is called to neither panic nor smugness, but to the sober recognition that human power consolidated outside of God's purposes carries within it the seed of its own futility.