The Lutheran Hour
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"Come and See"
- Full Program MP3 Reflections
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Text: John 1:46
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This has probably happened to you. You see an image on a screen, and you think, “That’s AI. That’s not real.” Maybe you’re not even sure what, but your gut tells you it’s a fake; it’s a fabrication of artificial intelligence.
There are billions of AI-generated images floating around the internet, and millions more being made every day, getting more and more life-like. So, this problem isn’t going away any time soon. What’s real and what’s a fake?—it’s an inescapable question.
Recently, a co-worker showed me an image that we were going to be using in a project we were working on, and that was my first thought—”That’s so AI. It can’t be real. It’s too perfect.” It was a picture of a landscape—sun rays glistening over a picture-perfect snow-capped mountain in the background, and in the foreground, perfectly still, glassy, turquoise lake. It looked like a tropical lagoon cut and pasted under a ski resort, some sort of improbable Bob Ross-CGI mashup posing as a photograph: “Alps in the Bahamas with Lots of Happy Trees.” It was just the algorithm showing us what we wanted to see.
But, the image had come from someone we trusted, someone who didn’t have a track record of using fakes, so I was curious. I put a digital copy of the image through an online AI-powered AI-detection tool (sometimes you’ve got to use fire to fight fire). The first said there were no digital markings that would indicate it was made by AI. I put it into a second detection tool, and the result was the same. “We are reasonably confident that no AI was used to make this image,” the chatbot told me (It takes one to know one).
Now I was even more curious. And it was starting to open my mind to the possibility that maybe I was wrong. I found the source of the image. And there was a photographer listed. But it sounded like a fake name. Although, the photographer had a portfolio of other images, and a lot of those looked real. But still, something in me couldn’t believe what I was seeing, or wouldn’t believe it.
What pushed me over the threshold was when I happened to show the image to a friend, and she took one look at it and said, “I’ve been there.”
“What?” I said, “You mean it’s a real place?”
“Yeah,” she said, “It’s one of my favorite places.” Then she showed me pictures, her own pictures, that she had taken on her phone of that place.Turns out, it’s her favorite lake in Germany—a real, tropical-looking, glistening, turquoise lake surrounded by happy trees, nestled in the Bavarian Alps, at the foot of the Zugspitze, Deutschland’s tallest mountain. Not only had she been there, she had dipped her toes in those turquoise waters and had skied the snowy slopes behind in the background. “Oh, you should see it!” She told me. “It’s beautiful in all the seasons.” And so, she converted me. Not only do I believe it’s real. I want to go and see it.
We are surrounded by so many fakes that we become prone to doubt even what’s even real. What if someone told you that you are not alone, that you’re not here by accident, that you’re not a mistake, but that there is a God who created you, who delights in you, who knit you together in your mother’s womb and is glad that you exist, not because of what you might be able to do for Him, but because of what He wants to do for you, to share His eternal life with you—what if someone tells you that, and you hear it, but part of you says, “That can’t be real.”
What if someone told you that the darkness and emptiness and the frustration we all feel sometimes in this world and with this world, that these are not the most real things about the world; that they are the fallout, the side effect of a rebellion against the Creator, and that there are superhuman agents of spiritual darkness out there leading this rebellion, all led by an evil, superhuman adversary called the Devil who wants to trap you and me in this darkness with him forever, but also that God still loves this world and He sent His One and only Son Jesus to reclaim this world because He’s the rightful King of the world and whoever believes, whoever trusts in Him, will not be lost forever in this darkness because the darkness was not able to hold Jesus down in death, but He rose from the dead and He promises to raise you from the dead and make everything beautiful in its time—what if someone were to tell you that? Because it’s true.
And you’d like to believe it, to stake your life on it, to make it the most important, most constant, most central truth of your life, but there’s still a part of you that can’t believe it. Or won’t.
And what if they told you that Jesus knew in advance that many people wouldn’t believe and that all of us at some point would doubt Him and question whether He was too good to be true, but still, Jesus, because of His love, His beautiful love for God, His Father, and His love for people, His love for you—would you believe it?—Jesus went forward and still goes forward with His mission to save us, despite our doubts.
What would it take to convert you, or re-convert you, or me, or anyone, to bring us over the threshold from doubt to faith and wonder and desire, to dip our toes in God’s life, and jump in the waters of God and explore the mountains of God? It probably wouldn’t just be one thing, but many things, to bring us from the doorstep, over the threshold, into the household. To have a conversion takes many influences, small nudges, bits of evidence.
But in another sense, those many things are just one thing: witness. We need a witness. We need witnesses, like my friend from Germany—people who’ve been there, who’ve experienced the beauty in all the seasons, and tell us, “You’ve got to come see it!”
God, our Creator, has not left us without evidence. He has given us witnesses. He’s given us two books to read: the book of nature and the book of Scripture, the Bible. The book of nature, the natural, physical world, the universe, on its own inspires wonder and awe, even worship, whether on a grand scale, with our own Milky Way galaxy containing an estimated hundred billion stars, and the greater universe containing billions of such galaxies, with their own mind-boggling numbers of stars, or on a small scale, with the hundred million light detector cells in every human eyeball.
The book of nature can open your mind to the possibility that maybe God is real. The book of Scripture, though, the Bible, goes further, like a friend who’s been there. The Bible is eye-witness testimony of what the Creator has done on our little planet earth to show us who He is, to show us His heart in His Son, Jesus. Listen to how one of the great books of the Bible says it, in the opening of the Gospel according to John:
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Through Him, by Him, all things came to be. And nothing came to be without Him. What came to be in Him was life. And the life was the light of humankind. The light is shining in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome it.
There came a man sent from God, his name was John. He came as a witness to the light
so that all people would trust, would believe, through him. He himself was not the light. He only came as a witness to the light. The true Light, who gives light to all people was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him. He came to His own people, but His own people did not receive Him. But to those who did receive Him, to those who are trusting in His Name, He gave them the authority to become children of God—children born not in a natural way, not by a human decision or by a husband’s will, but children born of God. And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. And we have seen His glory—the glory of the one and only Son, sent from the Father, full of grace and truth, full of steadfast love and faithfulness. John bears witness about Him. He cries out, “The One who comes after me is greater than me because He was before me.”Later, this guy, John, he sees Jesus walking toward him. He says, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The sin of the world—what’s that? The sin, the great sin, the sin at the source of all other sins is not to believe, not to trust in Jesus, God’s Word become human. So, Jesus has come to take away this sin and thereby to take away all sins. How? By becoming the Lamb of God—like the Passover Lamb whose blood was spilled and painted on the doorframes of God’s people to set them free from slavery to the darkness, because Jesus sets people free from darkness and doubt and distrust. How? By being worthy of trust, by being the real deal, by staying true to His love, His beautiful love for God and love for people in the way He lived and spoke and served, and most of all in His self-giving, sacrificial death on the cross and His doubt-destroying resurrection from the dead. Jesus gives us faith. He takes away our sin. He takes away our unbelief because He is worthy of our trust. But, how do I that know He’s trustworthy? The Gospel of John responds with an open invitation: “Come and see.” See for yourself. Read all four Gospel biographies of Jesus in the Bible. Listen to them. Talk about them in community with others. Go and see.
It’s like my friend who had been in the picture that I thought was fake. What got me interested in this picture in the first place was that it had been selected to be the cover image of a new book I had written. If you want to stick around after the message today, I’ll tell you more about the book. But for now, I’ll tell you that because the book is about real life in community gathered around Jesus, and the goal of the book is to help people over the threshold into real community with Jesus, I really wanted the cover image to be real, and not a fake. That’s why I went looking for proof and ultimately found it in a friend who’d been there. It’s also more than that with Jesus, though, because Jesus does more than give proof. He also invites participation. Not just to go and see, but to stop for a visit, to be with Him and His people, the church, to go together, to follow Jesus for life.
As we begin a new season of The Lutheran Hour, that’s what I hope we can do for you in these broadcasts and podcasts, videos, and online courses, and booklets and books that we offer. I pray that the speakers and writers and behind-the-scenes’ workers in this ministry can be something like “a friend” for you who’s been there and has seen. Because we have seen the power of Jesus and His Word in the Bible to build a community.
I remember seeing it at the visitation, the night before Rodney’s funeral. Rodney was a member of our church and church choir. And Rodney had so many hymns that he loved—songs about Jesus that he wanted us to sing for his funeral, at his funeral, that we didn’t have time to sing them all at the funeral the next day. So, the choir director arranged a time after the visitation that night for anyone who wanted to stick around and visit and sing some of Rodney’s favorite hymns. And I remember standing there that night and seeing Rodney’s widow, Ruth, tears glistening from behind her glasses, surrounded by her church family, grieving, but happy trees, an improbable mashup of 9-year-olds and 90-year-olds at 9 p.m. on a school night, all singing together in the hope of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
And I remember thinking that I had discovered the greatest place on earth, and it almost looked too good to be true, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever witnessed.
You’ve got to come and see it!
In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Reflections for September 6, 2026
Title: Dr. Zeigler’s new bookMark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. At lutheranhour.org, you’ll find FREE online resources, our broadcast guide, archived audio, and more. That’s lutheranhour.org. Once again, here’s Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Michael Zeigler: Thanks, Mark. Today I get to visit with our friend and co-worker, Chris Macky. He serves as our content manager for US Ministries. Thanks for being here, Chris.
Chris Macky: Thanks for this message today on the basics of following Jesus. It can get really complex sometimes. People get lost in the weeds, but sometimes we just need to be reminded of the basics of the Christian faith, [that] we’re following a Person.
Michael Zeigler: I really appreciate how the Gospel of John especially emphasizes belief, in the sense of trust. It’s belief about Jesus and who He is and what He did, but primarily it’s “come and see.” See that He’s trustworthy and that you can follow Him and you can let Him take your life in His hands. That’s what it means to be a Christian.
Chris Macky: You often have a guest talking about a book or a Bible commentary that they’ve written. You’ve interviewed people after messages, but you mentioned that you have this new book coming out. Was it something you’ve been working on for a while?
Michael Zeigler: The book comes out of sermons, broadcasts that have happened on this program over the course of several years, reaching back to 2019, 2020, some from 2024. Listeners remember that sometimes we go through series of several messages on a book of the Bible, and we went through most of the book of Genesis over the course of about three years. So I took all those sermons and organized them into chapters, revised them, reworked them a little bit, added some discussion questions so that it could be a group study and made it into a book with 25 chapters, and each chapter is centered on an excerpt from the book of Genesis.
Chris Macky: What is your interest in the book of Genesis?
Michael Zeigler: I think I didn’t really like it at first. I like Genesis 1-3. That’s the one we all know. And I hadn’t spent a lot of time, especially not time preaching through Genesis. It just kind of seemed like old archaic stories. And I remember there was a teacher at my son’s school who taught a whole year on Genesis for junior high students at a Christian school. And I thought, wow, I should do that. I’m a pastor. I should take that time going through Genesis. And so going through it and learning the stories and trying to bring them to life for people and imagine them made me love Genesis. It’s like the whole Bible encapsulated into one really powerful, long-wandering narrative about this man, Abraham, and his family, and all the things they get into and the way God is faithful to them.
Chris Macky: The whole story of the Bible in a book.
Michael Zeigler: It’s all there. You got the promise of Jesus right there at the beginning. You’ve got faithful humans and unfaithful humans, and often they’re the same person combined into one and the God who leads them through and starts again. And that’s the title of the book, as I mentioned, Begin Again. I think that’s a good way to capture what Genesis is showing us: that God is the God who makes all things new and He will begin again and again and again, as many times as it takes.
Chris Macky: And so that theme, begin again, encapsulates the Gospel story that we see over and over again in the Bible.
Michael Zeigler: God loves to create. He’s always doing something new and He loves to involve us in His creation. And we see this right at the beginning with Adam and Eve, that they are not just sitting there idle and inert in the garden, but they’re called to work it and to keep it. So He loves to create and He loves to have us involved in His work. And even when we like little children mess things up and gum things up and get things all tied up in knots, He finds a way to involve us, even use the worst things that we offer to bring them around. Like Joseph says at the very end of the book of Genesis to his brothers, what you intended, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. And so that’s just the way God is. He loves to make new things and good things even out of bad things.
Chris Macky: You mentioned also that He’s a playwright.
Michael Zeigler: Yes.
Chris Macky: Tell us what that encapsulates for you. What does that image give to you to give to us?
Michael Zeigler: That comes from the second chapter in the book, and it’s one of many metaphors that I want the readers to think through with me. And each chapter focuses on a different metaphor or a different way to understand our relationship with God. So the playwright is another way to get at this, God wanting to work alongside us, to be co-workers. So a playwright will set the script, but then the players have to enact the stage directions to speak the lines. And in many ways, that’s what the Scriptures are. It is God’s script that we have. And in some sense, it’s an unfinished script that He’s writing through us, through His Holy Spirit. And so it brings together God’s authorship, God’s responsibility, God’s creativity, and His desire for us to be involved and to participate.
Chris Macky: Jesus, of course, is the center of the story. And your heart is for people to come and see the greatness and the goodness and the mercy and the grace of Jesus. How do you hope this book will help people see Jesus more clearly?
Michael Zeigler: I hope that this book is a way for people to gather in community around Jesus. That the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, is so much more than just He saves us from hell and He saves us from the consequences of our sin. That is true, but He saves us for community. He saves us to experience life in Him and to experience it together. And that’s part of the whole playwright and the co-worker image and the participation is that He wants us to participate together. It’s not good for man to be alone. And so I hope that this book can be a tool for gathering in community around Jesus, for building community around Jesus. Each of the chapters ends with discussion questions that are open ended and encourage storytelling. So I’m offering some stories in a chapter and I hope that they become a catalyst, a launching point, for other people to share their stories because by sharing stories together, we’re helping each other write the script that is our lives in Christ.
And these stories also have the effect of bringing us together so that we understand each other. Where have you come from and where have I come from? And who’s this person I don’t really know? And I get to hear some of their background. And then it helps open up new opportunities or new ways of seeing the world around us. So that’s what I hope is that this would be a tool for building community around Jesus.
Chris Macky: So tell us, where can people go to get a copy of this book, Michael?
Michael Zeigler: Shoplhm.org. Lutheran Hour Ministries has several resources that we put out. You’re a part of producing these resources, booklets, Bible studies, pamphlets, lots of things. And we have this online store, shoplhm.org. And if you search that, you can find it and just look for the picture that looks too good to be true of the landscape that I talked about, with the mountains and the beautiful turquoise lake. Look for that picture and Begin Again. [It’s] just shoplhm.org.
Chris Macky: Thanks for sharing with us, Michael. This was a pleasure.
Michael Zeigler: Thanks for coming and letting me talk about it.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“God’s Word Is Our Great Heritage” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“My Soul, Now Praise Your Maker” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.