The Veil, the Wave, and the Weight of Glory

An Inquiry into Atonement, Freedom, and the Purpose of Creation

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · July 19, 2026

I. Introduction

The fellowship’s most recent gathering began with consideration of a written essay on the atonement and moved outward from that center toward the questions the atonement necessarily raises: If the death and resurrection of Christ reconcile humanity to God, then how does that reconciliation operate, whom does it reach, and why should the created order be arranged in such a way that it was required at all? What follows is an attempt to render the substance of that discussion in continuous form. This essay is a synthesis of those topics. The answer isn’t a simple story. It is a concatenation of many forces, structures, facts about life, emotions, the origin of God, His limits and needs, man’s weakness and what he has to offer God, the purpose of life, complexity, existence, pain, polarity. The bottom line: we don’t know the details of why Jesus has to die for our sins. The best we can do is look in retrospect and try to triangulate the data of scripture and life and speculate why the atonement was necessary. But in this telling, we speculate that human freedom was a consideration, God has a need to remain hidden, randomness is important, God can see a long way in prophecy, sin separates us from God and death is its outcome, and the mystery of existence.

The fellowship is a small group, and we encourage everyone to state their view and be heard, to think outside the box of conventional Biblical interpretation, while maintaining the letter and the spirit. I feel that scripture must have a logical reason underneath its claims.

A note on epistemic register is required at the outset. The essay distinguishes throughout between what may be affirmed as bedrock — that Christ died, rose, and reconciles those who receive Him — and what is offered as speculative mechanism. The latter includes a cosmological hypothesis and a physical model of disorder drawn from the Conscious Point Physics (CPP) framework. These are presented as reasoned conjecture, and are marked as such. Today’s essay is a study in hypothetical explanation for difficult Biblical teachings. This discussion and these ideas are not revelation. Rather, it is intelligent reasoning that gives unbelievers a foothold and offers thinking people a plausible metaphor where reason can be applied to fill in the gaps.

II. The Application of the Atonement: Sufficiency and Reception

The discussion opened on a difficulty that has troubled the fellowship before, framed in this instance as a problem of proportion. If one attempts to weigh the suffering of Christ against the accumulated evil of history, the arithmetic appears not to close: how could a single death, however grievous, counterbalance so vast a quantity of wrong? The difficulty dissolves, however, once a category error is corrected. The atonement is not a quantity of merit to be measured against a quantity of guilt, as though redemption were a matter of matching sums. It is better understood as sufficient in kind rather than exhausted by degree — a remedy whose efficacy does not diminish with use and which is therefore not consumed in application.

This reframing clarified a second, sharper claim advanced in the discussion: that the atonement, while offered universally, is applied only upon reception. The distinction is between the sufficiency of the remedy and the necessity of its acceptance. On this reading, the work of Christ is adequate for all and effective for those who receive it; the remedy is inexhaustible, but its application is not automatic. The question is then how to access that application. The Bible declares that the atonement is applied to “those who believe.” This, of course, immediately raises the question of what constitutes belief.

As usual, the justice of hell for those who never encounter the name of Christ was an issue. The eternal condemnation of the unevangelized to loss through no fault of their own was rejected, with qualifications. Two considerations were offered. The first is scriptural: the light that “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9) is not confined to those who hear the explicit proclamation, and the moral law written on the heart (Romans 2:14–15) constitutes a genuine, if partial, access to the good. The second is a matter of divine character: it is held to be inconsistent with the justice and mercy of God that culpability should attach to ignorance. The conclusion drawn was not a doctrine of universal automatic salvation but a refusal to close the door that scripture leaves ajar — an insistence that whatever the mechanism of reconciliation for those outside the explicit covenant, it must cohere with a God who is both righteous and merciful. The explicit pathway of the Great Commission remains essential; its necessity for those who do hear does not settle the standing of those who do not.

An alternative perspective, and the insight/vision that my ministry is based upon, is that the universe is inseparable from God, and that man was created for God’s pleasure. I believe God created us to fulfill His need for love. The Bible is a revelation of His Way of being that satisfies Him. It is a narrow gate:

Not allowing souls in without passing the gate of Christ
Offering His atonement as cleansing,
Not informing people openly of His existence and giving free will so that unforced love (living Christ’s way) can be given.
Truly creating independent beings who could give love from a position of options.
Wanting people to accept Christ to develop their character and their open-eyed love of Him.
Allowing people in who have accepted His way in the call from their hearts
The deficiency is that they have not grown in character and maturity.
What God the Father really wants is mature children to be in fellowship.
Apparently, the Father wants to let as many in as possible, but he wants them to grow, mature, and love Him as a peer, rather than as a child. Both are lovely, but He asked us to cleanse, to make Jesus Lord, and to grow in Him.

Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no man comes to the Father but through Him. The Son cleans the soul before coming into the presence of the Father. The question we are really answering is, “What serves God’s ends?” God desires that none be lost,

III. Freedom and Its Shadow

Beneath the question of application of the atonement lies a prior question about the nature of the disorder that the atonement addresses. Here the discussion turned to the origin of evil, and to a distinction between two names and one refusal. The group agreed that “Lucifer” designates a particular exalted being, the light-bearer, while “Satan” functions as a title, the accuser, applicable to any who set their own will against the will of God. The scriptural warrant/validation of this title was illustrated when Peter, resisting Christ’s path to Jerusalem, is addressed as “Satan.” This usage clearly indicates that the term “Satan” is a role of opposition rather than a proper name. “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” (Matthew 16:23)

The theological weight of the distinction fell on the account of the primordial refusal. In the LDS version, the adversary proposed an alternative economy of salvation — one that would secure obedience by removing the capacity to disobey. The proposal is significant not because it was cruel but because it was, in a sense, efficient: a world in which agency is abolished is a world in which no one can fall. The fellowship’s judgment was that such a world would also be one without love, because there would be no free will. The reasoning is that the foundational structure of reality was created so that love can be freely given. Love which cannot be withheld is not love. Coerced righteousness is a counterfeit; it produces the appearance of goodness while voiding the polarity which makes it visible.

This yields a principle that governed much of the subsequent conversation: the same freedom that makes genuine love possible makes genuine refusal possible, and through the identical door. Sin, on this view, is not a created substance but a disharmony with God’s Way, a deviation from the order that constitutes God’s own being. God does not author evil; He permits the condition of freedom because no other condition allows the expression of real reciprocity of love. The adversary’s alternative, whatever its promise of safety, would have destroyed the very thing creation exists to make possible.

IV. The Wrath of God and the Nature of Hell

If sin is disordered freedom, what is the divine response to it? The Biblical language, “wrath of God,” may be reframe without diminishing it. In the common picture, wrath is imagined as active hostility — a God who strikes at the sinner in anger. The proposed alternative construes wrath instead as withdrawal: the removal of the divine presence and love from those who have set themselves against it. Because human beings are constituted for relationship with the Father, the withdrawal of that relationship is not a mild consequence but a crisis at the root of the self. Wrath, so understood, is not the opposite of love but one of its expressions — the honoring of a creature’s refusal, and the permitting of the consequences that refusal entails.

The analogy offered was parental: the parent who releases an addicted adult child to the consequences of his choices does not thereby cease to love him, but recognizes that love cannot underwrite self-destruction. The withdrawal is itself an act of love, in that it refuses to sustain the illusion that the choice is without cost. This reframing carries a pastoral benefit noted in the discussion. It replaces the picture of an angry and unappeasable deity, whom one must perpetually placate, with the picture of a God whose “wrath” is the felt absence of a love that remains, in its intention, unbroken.

The nature of hell was treated as continuous with this account. Three descriptions were placed side by side. The Latter-day Saint description construes hell as damnation in the etymological sense of arrest — to be “dammed” is to be stopped, halted in one’s progression toward the divine, cut off from association with God by one’s own turning away. On this view, eternal damnation need not mean unending punishment; “eternal” functions as a name of God, so that “eternal damnation” is God’s damnation, a condition from which, in the vast economy of an eternal existence, one might yet be recovered. A second participant, formed first as a Catholic and later within the Latter-day Saint tradition, described a movement away from the image of a subterranean place of fire toward the recognition that one carries heaven or hell within, wherever one is — while retaining belief in heaven as a genuine destination. A third description, offered from a Protestant standpoint, located hell in the absence of God’s love: not primarily a place but a condition, and a company — those who are together in their separation from the source of love, in a state that the observable miseries of this world only faintly anticipate.

These accounts differ, and the differences remain. What they share is more instructive than what divides them: in each, hell is understood as the natural terminus of a refusal to submit to the Lordship/Way of Christ, rather than an arbitrary sentence externally imposed. It is, in the language that recurred through the evening, self-borne — the retained condition of one who has declined the only order that sustains life and love.

V. The Veil: Why God Remains Hidden

A philosophically central thread concerns the hiddenness of God. Why, if the divine reality is as glorious as the tradition maintains, is it not simply shown? Why must faith operate across a veil of unknowing? Three answers were advanced and they prove to be aspects of one answer.

The first is that the veil is necessary for the development of faith, which is important because God desires that we have faith in Him. “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6). The question is then, why does God desire us to have faith? Why does this please Him? The answer may be that He wants us to trust His character. Trust is an aspect of love. Faith is aspirational. Faith exists only over a distance. Relationship can only occur across a separation. Faith has an element of mystery, the unknown, and desire. All of these add attraction, polarity which draws us closer. Separation is required in a universe where there is only One, and all relationship with and “other” is an illusion. Thus, while separation is an illusion, it is central to the experience of love. Faith, hope, and love are the three that are fundamental to establishing relationship.

The second answer is that the veil is the condition of freedom. Deductive proof, it was observed, would compel like gravity — and compulsion abolishes the freedom that love requires. The image offered was that of a person acting under the threat of a leveled weapon: such a person is nominally free to move, but the situation has rendered that freedom meaningless. If the perfection of God’s way and the futility of every alternative were rendered obvious beyond the possibility of doubt, there would be no genuine choice to love God, and therefore no genuine love. The opacity of the world is not a defect in its design but a feature of it: the very fact that things are not self-evidently “peachy” is what makes a free response possible; deductive proof would remove any need for faith.

The third answer is that the veil is a form of protection. If the gravest sin is the deliberate rejection of goodness in full knowledge of what one rejects — the sin that scripture names blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and declares unforgivable (Matthew 12:31) — then the veil, by withholding full knowledge, withholds also the capacity to commit that ultimate refusal. On this reading, no creature now living possesses the unveiled vision that would make such a sin possible; even the most monstrous historical actors retained some measure of the protecting ignorance. The unforgivable sin is unforgivable not because God is unwilling to forgive but because it is the rejection of goodness at its foundation, leaving no place from which repentance might begin. The veil, then, is mercy: it prevents the creature from arriving at the one condition from which there is no return.

VI. A Speculative Cosmogony of Light and Dark

The essay now enters expressly speculative territory, and the reader is asked to hold what follows as conjecture. The framework’s author is emphatic that this cosmological hypothesis is not offered as the teaching of scripture. The passage from nothing to something is indefensible. It is presented as the account that, of the available conjectures, most economically explains why creation and atonement should have the shape they do.

The hypothesis proceeds by gradations, on the conviction that reality is built “line upon line” rather than by abrupt leaps from nothing to perfection. It posits a primal, undifferentiated depth — a “gray” mixture in which light and dark, figured as awareness and inertness, wakefulness and sleep, are not yet separated. Out of this depth, the being we name God is that which is allied wholly with the light: the one that, by refusing all commerce with the dark, concentrated into pure and ordered consciousness, “in whom is no darkness at all,” in whom there is no shadow of turning. The separation of light from dark, a scriptural image, is here read as the self-organization of the divine by the total rejection of the inert.

From this the remainder of the hypothesis follows with comparative ease, and its explanatory payoff is what commends it. Because the divine nature is love, and love requires an other capable of free response, God wills a genuine other. But a being who is to be capable of choosing the light must also be capable of regarding the dark — and the Father, by His very constitution, cannot regard the dark or abide in the presence of one who has chosen it. The resolution proposed is that the Father brings forth a Son wholly like Himself, oriented entirely toward the light, and commissions the Son to create an order in which creatures, placed within a “fog” of forgetfulness, may look upon both light and dark and freely choose. This furnishes a reason — internal to the hypothesis — for two facts that Christian confession affirms but does not fully explain: that the Son, and not the Father, is the agent of creation, and that it is the Son who enters creation to accomplish its redemption. The Son can dwell among a creation capable of darkness, and can enter its death, precisely because the redemptive work belongs to Him who mediates between the unveiled purity of the Father and a world in which choice is real.

The possibility of freely given love and the possibility of consciously chosen evil enter the world together. The mediation of the Son is what allows a holy God to remain in relation with a world in which evil is possible.

VII. The Cancellation of Disorder: Physical and Relational Accounts

The question is then, how the atonement accomplishes what it accomplishes. Two accounts are offered. They are not rivals but descriptions of a single event at two levels: the one causal and structural, the other relational and juridical.

The first account draws on the CPP framework and is, again, speculative. It construes moral disorder as conservative in terms of acts and consequences: every act of goodness or sin imprints the substrate of reality with a disturbance that propagates outward through the substance of creation, the Dipole Sea. Given the time-bound relation between acts and effects in the physical world, the imprint of evil cannot be undone by a subsequent ripple of good deeds. The ripple of evil travels at the speed of light through the DP Sea, and a good deed done later would not erase that original etheric imprint. It may offset a human’s debt to another, but it does not affect the imprint on the creation. The wrong, once committed, has already “left the shore.” The proposed remedy that Christ offers with the atonement is not compensation but cancellation. Cancellation can be understood by analogy. Consider a wave tank with a paddle (a 2×4 floating on the water, pushed up and down) that makes long waves that travel down the tank from one end. On the other end of the tank, a similar block is driven up and down, creating waves that travel the opposite direction, driven in exact anti-phase, generating a wave that meets the first and, by superposition, returns the surface to rest. Using this concept of opposite-phase superposition, Christ in His death imprints the substrate with the full weight of death, and in His resurrection imprints it with life; and because He is master of the created order, the wave of life He has generated may be applied, upon command and request, to any disturbance of death, neutralizing it. The result is not concealment of sin but its abolition — the disorder is not hidden but gone, and the creature is thereby rendered “presentable” before the unveiled purity of God.

The alternative account reframes the atonement not as a quantitative transaction of multiplied punishments but as a drama of persons, consequences, and repair within nested realities. Sin is understood through its propagating effects: a single wrong act enters the web of personal relationships and sends ripples outward. Each person touched by it transmits the damage onward, often unconsciously, so that the full cost of even one sin is ultimately incalculable across the community of persons.

Into this wounded economy Christ enters. He does not absorb an accumulated quantity of penalties scaled to every sinner. Instead, He undergoes the punishment in kind—the complete withdrawal of the Father’s love and presence that any single soul’s sin would merit. Because He is without sin, physical death cannot retain Him. The injustice of His death therefore stands as an open credit in a conservative moral universe: an unmerited separation that must be answered by restoration or by transfer.

The universe the Son created exists inside the Father’s larger reality. Within the Son’s created order, sin is shielded during earthly life by the protective structure of embodiment and the Son’s sustaining presence. When a person dies and sheds the body, that protection ends. The sin, previously hidden, is exposed to the Father’s direct judgment. The individual stands unclean and faces the separation—the “outer darkness” and self-torment—that sin inherently produces.

As Creator of that inner universe, the Son bears a real liability for what occurs within it. From the Father’s perspective, the impurity generated inside the Son’s world is, in a derivative sense, the Son’s responsibility. At the cross this liability is actualized. The veil is torn; the Father beholds the sin the Son has taken upon Himself. The sentence of separation that rightly belongs to the sinner passes to Christ. Yet because Christ remains personally sinless, the sentence has no destructive power over Him, and He was resurrected to life by the Father because death could not hold him.

Death and separation are neutralized in His case. He survives the wrath He has shouldered. Two paths are thereby opened for the sinner. Either the Son is banished from the Father’s presence on account of the impurity He has carried (an unjust outcome, since He Himself is pure), or the Son remains in the Father’s presence and, upon the sinner’s emergence from earthly protection at death, receives the judgment in the sinner’s stead.

The second path is realized at the cross. The Son, having already undergone the required separation as a man, now stands as the gatekeeper. When a person who has trusted in Christ dies, the Son applies the credit of His own unjust death to that individual’s account. The record of sin in the DP Sea is blotted out. The person is cleansed. His noble/worthy/good character, the treasure he has laid up in Heaven, is saved, and the worthless character, the part that catered to the flesh, is erased, salted with fire and burned.

Removing the accumulated debt and the enslaving tendency to sin leaves a renewed person fit for the Father’s presence. This account yields a doctrine of repair that extends beyond the individual’s cleansing. The reconciled person does not cease to be an author of ripples. Past sins have already sent consequences into the world, and new choices continue to do so.

Reconciliation therefore carries a commission: the restored individual is yoked to Christ in the ongoing work of reversing disorder. The only instrument of repair available in the framework of the physical world is the drawing of other persons into the same reconciliation. Each soul brought to Christ becomes, in turn, an agent who can interrupt the propagation of damage and initiate healing in others. The result is a snowball dynamic. As more persons enter reconciliation, the sphere of active disorder contracts. Opportunities for new damage diminish.

In this light, the Great Commission is not primarily a program of recruitment but the practical mechanism by which a wounded world is progressively restored. One participant in the discussion extends this logic to a hope of universal reconciliation, holding that Scripture ultimately points toward the salvation of all. That conviction is offered here as a live tension with conventional interpretation of Scripture, but sufficient references to the salvation of all are present in Scripture that it must be included as one of the poles of a paradox that begs for a larger explanation.

The convergence of the two accounts is the essay’s central claim. The physical model describes the cleansing required to stand in the presence of a wholly pure God; the relational model describes the restoration of the world of persons and consequences. They are the same reconciliation told from different frames, and each is impoverished without the other. Neither, it should be added, could be accomplished by a God who did not become incarnate: only a real death, unjustly borne in a genuine body, could generate the wave of life that overcomes it, and only an embodied life could furnish the authority by which that life is dispensed.

VIII. The Question of Purpose and the Posture of the Child

Having gotten some insights into how the process of atonement may have been implemented, the next question to address is the purpose of creation, which corresponds to many of the “Why” questions: Why death and resurrection? Why the obligation to obey? Why this life? Why the labor of teaching others. And why the suffering of the innocent?

The issue of the suffering of the innocents gives the why questions teeth. We see the injustice of suffering, that lack of conservative cause-and-effect in the cycle/orbit/domain of any individual person’s life. For many, there is an obvious injustice in the lack of causal connection between a life profoundly and undeservedly afflicted. We heard this vividly illustrated by the story of the sudden health loss for a young woman with a great capacity for joy. A second story of a young survivor of grievous childhood abuse who transformed her suffering into a vocation of care for others.

The theological register of these accounts is the pattern of John 9, in which the man born blind is neither his own fault nor his parents’ but an occasion for the works of God to be displayed. This falls under the aphorism that one’s joy is one’s sorrow unmasked, and that the depth carved into a person by suffering becomes the measure of what that person can afterward contain and give. The essay records these instances with sobriety and without resolution, as the discussion did, refusing the false comfort of an explanation that would make the suffering acceptable in advance.

To the question of ultimate purpose, no single answer was imposed. What emerged instead was a proposal about the posture proper to creatures who do not possess the answer. Perhaps, in the face of such suffering, we must become as a little child to enter the kingdom. The child does not stand outside each moment appraising it, comparing its yield of satisfaction against alternatives not chosen, anxiously projecting how long it will last. That recursive self-regard — the endless calculation about experience rather than the having of it is itself a species of hell. The child simply receives what is given. Perhaps this receptivity is a foretaste of what heaven is: not a reward earned and then evaluated, but presence fully occupied by what is present. We note that the Latin pax is the derivation for both peace and a pact. The peace is the result of the settled accord. Heaven, on this reading, is the condition of those who have entered into accord with God and now simply dwell within His order, as within a world that is good.

This posture does not dissolve the “why,” and it was not offered as a substitute for the inquiry the question demands. It offers, rather, the disposition in which the inquiry can be borne without despair — the recognition that finite creatures, working at an immense subject with partial knowledge, may proceed in trust rather than in the paralysis of demanded certainty. The parallel to the essay’s account of the veil is exact: as faith is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of God, so childlike presence is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of purpose.

On Why:

Having noted that we do not know why, we nevertheless long to know, and we speculate.

Why the death and resurrection of Christ?
- His death and resurrection were simply methods of creating a doorway through which we can escape from the physical world and be in relationship with a perfect God. Without the womb of the physical universe shielding our sin from His perfection, we would not have been able to grow to be mature, develop our own character, and be individuals with free will.
Why the obligation to obey?
- Obedience is a requirement to live in God’s universe. If we are not perfect, we cannot survive in God’s body-mind.
Why this life?
- Life was created to satisfy God’s desire for companionship in the fullest way possible. To satisfy God’s heart, life must be real. Life truly is as unknown inside His perspective as it seems to be from ours. Our perspective truly is His perspective from our viewpoint. He desires to fully experience relationship, and it is as hard for Him to be satisfied by it as it is for us.
Why the labor of teaching others.
- This is the process of teaching others to enjoy living inside of life, and doing it from God’s perspective. It is the lighting a candle from another candle, and lighting another; the light spreads. This is all for expanding His joy. If we do not have joy, neither does He. We are teaching faith, hope, and love in the midst of the confusion.
Why the suffering of the innocent?
- If there were no possible consequence of disorder, then there would be no joy in the order. The sorrow of the innocent victim is incomprehensible in the frame of the individual. It is sorrow/pain/loss… in the heart of God. God desires to maximize His joy/love/peace, and if everyone takes their lot in the best way possible, we have served God by appreciating the experience of being in this world. Pushing against difficulty and doing it well is of more benefit than living a life of ease and simply enjoying the goodness of life. There is a reward in following His way, developing character, and trials provide more opportunity to develop character.

IX. Conclusion

The discussion this week was in the form of a single argument. Its claim is that the atonement is the act that allows the reuniting of man with God the Father in relationship. Without the atonement, man is held in the cocoon of the physical universe, sustained by Christ, insulating sinful man from the perfection of the Father. In this state, it is impossible to leave that protective environment to be in direct fellowship with the Father. But because of the atonement, man has the possibility of escaping the confines of the physical universe and being in that open, unveiled relationship with Him.

God is love according to scripture, and from common sense we derive that He is inherently alone if he is the source of all. Love by its nature requires the experience of an other. He created creatures capable of free will, which means beings capable of refusing to love Him and choosing to follow the way of the flesh over the Way of Christ.

There must be a separation between God and man in a meaningful way for God and man to have a relationship. And while we probably don’t understand and have not described/concepturalized exactly how He produced a split from One into many, the illusion of separation is significant enough that a statement of “I am me, and God is someone else,” seems absurdly obvious.

If God’s nature is pure harmonic order as a synonym or metaphor for His state of love, light, truth, beauty, justice, life… and there is no shadow of their counterpart in His world, then He cannot allow sinful humanity to enter that space. So the ability to generate genuine love is dependent upon the creation of separation that allows us to exist in the space of His existence.

Creating a world of order and goodness is the creation that a perfectly good God can create. A holy God cannot allow the disorder in His presence that man, with true free will, generates. The Son, creating a creation that man could live in and be free, allows God to be separated from the sin that man must use as his other lover against which God competes for man’s affection. In ordinary life, it is our way of being, the holiness and goodness of one’s life that brings honor and commendation to the Father and Son as the pattern of the life of God.

The atonement is purely a reparative strategy to allow man to emerge from the womb of the physical universe, within the shield of the Son’s purity before the Father, and to exist. The death of Christ was necessary as a fulfillment of prophecy, and prophecy was necessary as a symbolic pointer giving plausible proof of revelation to those with eyes to see.

The atonement was the death of the physical death of the incarnation of the creator of our universe. If death unveils the soul to judgment, and there is impurity/sin/unGodliness associated with that soul, then the Father will cast Him out. He did not. He raised the Son/Jesus Christ to life. The death that the Son experienced in His incarnation was unjust, and as such, in God’s environment of perfect justice, is a credit looking for a debit. As such, Christ can supply that debit to the account of anyone who enters the plane of the Kingdom of God.

Thus there may be multiple layers upon which the atonement is acting. Ultimately, we live in a command-based universe. The Conscious Points operate, perceive, compute, and move according to rules. The ultimate cost and consequence of enforcing all of the rules (in this paradigm) is the postulate of a God who is committed to focusing on light/life/awakeness, and allowing any darkness into His consideration/dwelling/meditation would be contrary to His being; in fact, He would not be who He is if He allowed darkness in His being. His very being is at stake. He is focused/aware/alive because He is committed to those. He is who He is because He has rejected all other aspects of Himself/the primal grey/mixture of light and dark, and embraced only light. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)***

Perhaps the As purely the disorder must not be overlooked but canceled; and because the cancellation must be accomplished within the created order by one who is both innocent and master of that order, it is accomplished by the incarnate Son, whose death and resurrection generate the remedy that reconciliation applies. The wrath that this order requires is best understood as the honoring of refusal by withdrawal, and the hell that terminates unremedied refusal as a self-borne condition rather than an imposed sentence. The veil across which all of this is transacted is at once the condition of faith, the guarantor of freedom, and a protection against the one refusal from which there is no recovery.

The framework’s speculative elements — the cosmogony of light and dark, the wave model of moral disorder — are offered as reasoned conjecture. We do not know the mechanism by which God maintains the universe or why He could not have created the universe directly, and not through the Son. We do not know the actual mechanism by which Christ pays the debt, or what rule required Him to die to pay for our sins and restore our relationship to Him.

The only thing we know is that the Bible says we are reconciled with God by the blood of Christ and by making Him Lord of our lives. If the model of creation proposed here is helpful in rationalizing why Jesus’ sacrifice is effective and reasonable, then use it; otherwise, just remember, belive, and act on the Biblical promises:

Romans 5:10 (KJV)
“For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”
Colossians 1:20–22 (KJV)
“And, having made peace through the blood of his cross…
you… hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death…”
Romans 10:9 (KJV)
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
Luke 6:46 (KJV)
“And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”
Colossians 2:6 (KJV)
“As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him.”
Ephesians 1:7 (KJV)
“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins…”
Philippians 2:11 (KJV)
“…that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

260719 – Recap – God, the Beginning, and the Atonement