Old Testament
Job 31:13-15
13 “If I have despised the cause of my male servant or of my female servant, when they contended with me,
14 what then will I do when God rises up? When he visits, what will I answer him?
15 Didn’t he who made me in the womb make him? Didn’t one fashion us in the womb?
New Testament
1 Corinthians 10:24
24 Let no one seek his own, but each one his neighbour’s good.
Job, in the long honesty of his defence, pauses to consider how he treated those who served him. If he had denied them justice, what would he say when God rose to judge? Then comes the line that steadies the whole passage: “Did not he who made me in the womb make them?”
Lord, keep our hearts human. Give wisdom to those who design and govern powerful tools, and tenderness towards those most affected by their failures. Teach us to seek our neighbour’s good with patience, honesty, and fear of the Lord.
That is a bracing question for every age, and perhaps especially for ours, when our decisions can be multiplied by machines. Paul gives us a simple rule of love: “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of the other.” Not the most efficient good. Not the good that flatters our plans. The good of the other.
Whatever tools we build and deploy, we do so before the God who forms persons, not products. We are not free to treat people as inputs, edge-cases, or acceptable losses. Responsibility is not only about what a system can do, but what it makes easier for us to do: to overlook, to outsource conscience, to hide behind “the model” as though no one chose it.