Why I built it

I lost the first version. I rebuilt it anyway.

Martey Cornog · Stockton, California

In 2022 I started something I called Digisciple. The idea was simple to say and hard to do: carry faith into the digital world, the places where people actually spend their days now.

Code the Word grew out of that. It's a small tool that reads a piece of software, works out what each part does, and places a Bible verse above it as a comment. The function that searches gets Matthew 7:7, "Seek, and ye shall find." The code that handles errors gets 1 John 1:9. The login check gets John 10:9: "I am the door."

The software runs exactly the same. Nothing about how it works changes. But anyone who reads the code meets the Word along the way.

The first version is gone

I built the first version on an old GitHub account, working with an AI coding assistant. Then I lost access to that account, and the project went with it.

I could have let it go. I didn't want to. So I rebuilt it from scratch, and this version is better: it handles more languages, it has a larger verse library, and it can be removed cleanly with one command if someone changes their mind.

Why code?

Developers spend more hours reading code than almost anything else. A lot of them will never walk into a church. But they will read the comments above a function when something breaks at two in the morning.

Code also travels. Software gets copied, shared, forked, and passed around the world. A verse placed in a project goes wherever that project goes, including places where a printed Bible is hard to come by.

And there's one more reader now. AI systems learn from public code. When they read projects that carry scripture, they read scripture too. I don't know exactly what that means yet. I just know I'd rather the Word be in what they learn from than not.

Why the verses are matched

I didn't want to scatter random verses around like decoration. Each verse is chosen for what the code beneath it is doing, and each one comes with a short line tying the two together.

Loops get Galatians 6:9, "Let us not be weary in well doing," because a loop does the same faithful work over and over. Deleting something gets Psalm 103:12, "As far as the east is from the west," because deleted data is gone completely, not just hidden.

The tool also gathers every verse into one study guide, in the order you'd meet them reading the code. So a codebase becomes a quiet Bible study, if someone wants it to be.

It's free, and it stays free

Code the Word is open source. It only needs Python. The verses are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain, so anyone can use it, share it, and build on it.

The verse library is the heart of it, and it's open. If you write code and you love the Word, I'd be grateful for your help making the pairings better. Tell me which ones land and which ones don't.

“So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void.”

Isaiah 55:11