The Creator Takes a Test Drive: On Divine Permission, the Incarnation, and the Conservation of the Soul
Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 7, 2026
Occasion. Peter, you wrote to me this Sunday morning in response to the John 5:19 essay I addressed to Leonard. You did the thing that makes the fellowship worth the labor: you took the verse and ran with it, and you came back with a letter that is itself a small theology. You did not nibble at the edges. You went straight to the hardest questions a serious believer can ask — how the power of evil relates to the sovereignty of God, what it means to say God became a man, how a God who cannot die was dead for three days, what happens to the souls that refuse him, and whether our own words carry more weight than we have been told. I want to answer you the way you wrote to me: directly, by name, and without pretending the questions are easier than they are.
I am going to do something I have not done in a fellowship essay before. I am going to print your letter in full, lightly corrected for spelling so it reads clean, and then take it up move by move. Where you have seen rightly — and you have seen rightly more often than not — I will say so plainly. Where the historic Church has drawn the line in a slightly different place than your letter draws it, I will lay both lines out, give you the reasons the fellowship holds the reading it holds, and trust you to do the discernment yourself, in your own time, the way I trusted Leonard. This is what fellowship is. We think out loud together, and we hold each other to the text.
Peter’s Letter
The following is Peter’s email of June 7, 2026, lightly corrected for spelling and punctuation. The voice and the substance are his.
Hi Thomas,
Happy Sunday!
Of course, it doesn’t seem likely that the creation could ever comprehend its Creator. Thus when Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “Don’t you know I have the power to execute you?” and Jesus answers Pilate that “unless my Father gave it to you, you would have no power,” that means even the fallen angels, Lucifer, all the satans, the Nachash in the garden, the Nephilim, and even evil people in positions of power are allowed to engage in their malfeasance only by the patience and provision of YHWH himself. In fact, at the Tower of Babel YHWH put all the nations under the power of the fallen angels they insisted on serving and worshiping. So he gave them all over to their gods. But he reserved for himself (YHWH) Abram, who became Abraham — and Abraham’s son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, who became Israel. This is where the little leaven that leavens the whole lump originates. His law is written on our hearts; he needs no nation-state. It was the “stiff necks” of the Jews who demanded kings.
But this subservience of the evil angels and people is too often overlooked. Christ even had the legion of demons beg him not to send them away, thus making it self-evident that they fully understood their complete powerlessness in the presence of Christ. Yet even the Apostles in the first-century church, who were casting out demons, healing the sick, and raising the dead, and were direct protégés of Christ, never report such groveling obsequiousness from demons. So, clearly, Christ was way above the Apostles and all the demons, and Pilate too. So why would Christ allow himself to be subjected to such incredible suffering and humiliation?
I think of it like this: If I built a sports car from scratch, I would probably want to drive it when finished. I see Jesus as YHWH, the Creator, taking a test drive in his creation. He chose undeserved suffering and death as his paramount and supreme act of solidarity with all of mankind. Nevertheless, when YHWH is in the driver’s seat of one of these mortal coils we inhabit for our trial here on earth and call a body, then we get Jesus, and that is why, if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. In other words: Jesus is what YHWH looks like in mortal/human form. It’s not that he isn’t human; it’s just that his consciousness was one with the Father’s — he was directly connected spiritually.
This is why it is so confusing for some of us (me). Jesus had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead in order to rise from the dead, which means dead for three days and three nights under Jewish law. But YHWH is spirit, which can’t be killed; yet Jesus was dead from Wednesday (Passover) at sundown until Saturday at sundown — three days and three nights. But he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say that he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction, but that is only because of our misunderstanding and fear of death, which I call our “lingering materialism.”
The resurrection of Jesus points to something much more glorious — and ominous — than merely his resurrection, which was HUGE! The glorious part is that we all get up from the dead at one time (the just and the unjust). It is a natural law of creation. That is the super cool part: we all rise from the dead. The ominous part is that YHWH doesn’t want any psychopaths in heaven. He doesn’t want spirits who have chosen evil (decadence, death, destruction, violence, theft, and the oppression of others) rather than choosing love (edification, life, creativity, compassion, generosity, and the liberation of all mankind) as part of his adopted family FOREVER. Pretty simple, really; even a kindergartner understands this. Who wants jerks in their family? But since in the material world matter-energy can neither be created nor destroyed (modern physics understands this), then…
The Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy
Because individuated consciousness, too, is part of the material creation, it also can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time. But the material universe he has created operates under laws, which we call natural law. Thus our own spiritual choices are our judgments and our punishments, and are completely self-imposed. This is because the evil spirits and souls are not destroyed. Rather, they are segregated. People who choose Jesus get to go with him. They hear his voice and follow the good shepherd.
BUT those who choose evil get to go with the other spirits and souls who chose evil — but with a special treat, which is that they all get confined to a very small area, so the rest of us can enjoy the creation without their destructiveness, which will still be there, but way over there, in hell. Think of it like a prison with no innocent souls in it, only those who have chosen evil repeatedly, after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent; only those souls end up in this particular prison. Oh, and there is no warden other than Lucifer himself. Anyone who wants to live there is nuts, and that is why evildoers tend to be materialists who — whether they believe in a God, gods, or the devil — think so little of themselves that they buy the lie that this life is all there is, that this is the only shot at material wealth, fame, and luxury, and that those things are important. This is why it was such a severe curse by YHWH to shorten our lifespans. We can’t pass on our experience and knowledge to the next generation, since by the time they are even curious (age 40–60) we are already dead. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Conclusion: hell is real (if you believe in the laws of physics), and we all get to choose where we are going after this. It is totally up to us, and requires only that we set aside our egos and merely submit to a higher authority named Jesus. We don’t even have to submit to YHWH — just to Jesus. As Bob Dylan sang, we have “gotta serve somebody.” I ask, who’s it gonna be? I say, if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you. If he is, then you are my brother.
Love, Peter
* In fact, part of Christ’s message is that we have incredible power that we have been completely deprived of by our own belief in the lies of the enemy. In the beginning was the Word. YHWH spoke the creation into existence. We are to be like Christ, images of the Father in the flesh. What if every word you have ever consciously spoken has been either a blessing or a cursing on your own life? “A man does not defile himself by what goes into his mouth; rather, it is what comes out of his mouth that defiles him.” It is our enemy that tells us our words have no power. But they do — much more power than any of us can imagine. Prayer is not only important because of our supplications for our needs (YHWH knows what we need before we ask), but most especially because in spoken prayer we announce and decree the terms under which we ourselves, our households, and our realms will be governed. We choose God’s laws over man’s law, God’s providence over government allotments, God’s healing over pharmakeia, etc.
I. What you have seen rightly: all power is borrowed
Peter, the first move in your letter is the strongest and ties your letter directly back to the verse Leonard asked about. You begin with Pilate. Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above (John 19:11). You are exactly right about what that verse does. It empties the most powerful man in Judea of any independent authority in the very moment he is feeling most powerful. Pilate thinks he holds Jesus’s life in his hands. Jesus tells him he holds nothing that was not handed to him.
Now watch what that does when you set it beside John 5:19, the verse we just worked through. The Son can do nothing of himself. In the essay to Leonard, I argued that this is not a confession of weakness but a statement of the most intimate unity — the Son does nothing apart from the Father because the Son is never apart from the Father. But your letter adds the mirror image, and it is true. If even the eternal Son acts only in perfect correspondence to the Father, how much more is it the case that nothing in the entire creation can do anything of itself. Pilate cannot. The Nachash cannot. The legion cannot. The whole created order, good and evil alike, runs on borrowed power. The difference between the Son and the creature is not that the creature borrows and the Son does not — it is that the Son’s “borrowing” is the eternal communion of one divine being, while the creature’s borrowing is the radical dependence of a thing that did not have to exist at all.
This is why your reading of evil is sound, and why it matches what the fellowship has been calling “derivative negation.” Evil is not a second kingdom mounting an independent campaign against God. Evil has no power plant of its own. Every watt the enemy spends was first granted, and is still sustained, by the One he spends it against. You put this beautifully with the demons. The legion in the Gerasene country does not negotiate with Christ from strength; they beg (Mark 5:10–12). Thou art come hither to torment us before the time (Matthew 8:29). James says the demons believe in one God and tremble (James 2:19). You are right that this terror is conspicuously absent from the demoniacs the Apostles later confront — the demons resist the servants more boldly than they ever resisted the Master, because the servants carry delegated authority while the Master is the authority. That is a genuine observation, and it is worth keeping.
I will add one note to your Babel passage, because it is better grounded than even you let on. The reading you are reaching for — that at Babel the nations were apportioned to lesser spiritual powers while YHWH kept Israel as his own portion — is not a fringe idea. It is written into the text. In Deuteronomy 32:8–9, the older manuscript tradition preserved in the Septuagint has God dividing the nations according to the number of the sons of God and then taking Jacob as the LORD’s portion. Psalm 82 shows God standing in the divine council, judging the gods (the elohim) to whom the nations were given because they judged unjustly. The Deuteronomy 32 picture is exactly your picture: the nations handed over to the powers they preferred, Israel reserved as the seedbed of the leaven that would eventually leaven the whole lump. You have your hand on real Scripture here, not a private theory.
So the foundation of your letter is solid. Hold onto it. Everything else you wrote is built on the recognition that nothing — not Pilate, not the principalities, not death itself — stands outside the sustaining patience of God. Keep that, because in Section IV, it is going to do some heavy lifting for you, where I am going to ask you to be a little more careful than in your letter.
II. The test drive — and who is in the driver’s seat
Here is the image everyone will remember from your letter, and it is a good one: God built the sports car, and God wanted to drive it. The Incarnation is the Creator’s test drive in his own creation, with undeserved suffering chosen as the supreme act of solidarity with the creatures who have to drive these mortal coils through the trial of a lifetime. There is something deeply right in that, and I do not want my careful qualifications to bury the rightness of it. The eternal God did not stay outside what he made. He came in. He took the worst of it — the betrayal, the scourge, the nails, the godforsaken cry — not because he had to, but as solidarity. We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15). When you say “if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father,” you are quoting the Lord himself: he that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9). That is not your invention. That is the heart of the thing.
So I am with you on the destination. Let me just adjust the steering, because the test-drive image, taken too literally, can slide into two old ditches the Church marked off centuries ago, and I would rather you drive between them than into either one.
The first ditch: who is driving? Your letter says, “when YHWH is in the driver’s seat… then we get Jesus,” and “his consciousness was one with the Father’s.” I know what you mean, and what you mean is true. But the precise way the essay on John 5:19 framed it matters here. It is not the Father who climbed into the car. It is the Son. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not three masks the one God wears in turn — that is the ancient error called modalism, and the Church rejected it because it makes the cross incoherent (to whom is Jesus praying in Gethsemane, if the Father just is Jesus under another name?). The Son is the one who is eternally from the Father, eternally distinct in person while identical in being. When you say Jesus’s consciousness was one with the Father’s, the orthodox way to put it is the one I gave Leonard: perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the persons. The Son’s life is the Father’s life lived from the Son’s side. So — yes, perfect unity of will and consciousness. But it is the unity of two who are genuinely distinct, not the collapse of the two into one driver wearing a human suit. Keep the persons distinct and the test drive holds. Collapse them, and you lose the Gospel of John, where the Son speaks to the Father, is sent by the Father, and returns to the Father.
The second ditch: what is being driven. A test driver is not the car. He sits in it, works the controls, and gets out at the end. If we press the image, Jesus’s humanity becomes a vehicle the divine consciousness operates from the outside — a costume, an avatar, a remote-controlled body with no human mind of its own. The Church rejected that, too. It has a name — Apollinarianism — and the answer the fathers gave is the one that protects everything you care about. The Son did not drive a human body. He became a complete human being: body, soul, mind, and will. The Word was made flesh (John 1:14) — made it, not merely wore it. This is the hypostatic union defined at Chalcedon in 451, the doctrine I leaned on for Leonard: one person, two natures, neither confused nor separated. It is why Gethsemane is real. Not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42) is a true human will, genuinely afraid, genuinely surrendering — not the Father talking to himself through a puppet. If Jesus only looked human, then his solidarity with us, the very thing your letter rightly exalts, evaporates. He can only stand with us all the way down if he came all the way down — into a real human nature, not into a driver’s seat he could step out of.
So I would put your image this way, with the steering corrected: the Son — eternally distinct from the Father, eternally one with him in being — did not test-drive a body. He took the whole car into himself and became a driver who is also, fully and forever, the car. That is a stranger and more wonderful thing than a test drive. It is the Maker becoming the made, without ceasing to be the Maker. And it is the only version of the story in which “he chose undeserved suffering as solidarity with all mankind” is actually true, because only a real man can really suffer.
III. How a God who cannot die was dead
This is the knot you named most honestly: he had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead… but he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction. Peter, you are feeling the exact pressure the Church felt for four centuries, and your instinct about the resolution is half-right. Let me give you the other half.
Your half: the contradiction is partly an artifact of “lingering materialism” — the assumption that death is annihilation, the snuffing-out of a being into nothing. On that assumption, “God died” would indeed mean “God stopped existing,” which is impossible. You are right to reject that. Death in the biblical frame is not annihilation; it is separation — the soul from the body, and in the worst case, the person from God. So the resurrection is not God re-creating a Jesus who had blinked out of existence. The person never went out of existence at all.
But here is the half your letter does not yet have, and it is the half that dissolves the contradiction cleanly. The resolution is the two natures of Section II. The one person of Christ has two natures, divine and human. Death belongs to him according to his human nature — a real human body really stopped, a real human soul really departed it. The divine nature did not and cannot die; God remains impassible and immortal in his deity. But — and this is the move the fathers made, called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties — because the two natures belong to one and the same person, what is true of either nature can be said truly of the person. So we are permitted to say, and Scripture does say, that God purchased the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). Not because the divine nature has blood or veins, but because the person who bled is God. The subject who died on that cross is divine. The dying happened in his humanity. Both halves are true at once, and they do not collide, because they are predicated of one person through two natures.
So you can keep “God incarnate was dead for three days” without contradiction. The person who was dead is God. What died in him was his humanity. What could not die — his deity — is precisely what guaranteed that death could not hold him. It was not possible that he should be holden of it (Acts 2:24).
On the calendar — Wednesday-at-sundown to Saturday-at-sundown, to fit a literal three days and three nights against Matthew 12:40 — I will only say this: it is a real position, held by careful people, and I am not going to relitigate the chronology here, because the theological core stands on either the Wednesday reckoning or the traditional Friday one. Whether the tomb held him seventy-two hours or something less, the thing that matters is the thing you already have: he was truly dead, and he truly rose. The fellowship does not need to settle the calendar to confess the Creed.
IV. The conservation of the soul — and the one place I would have you be careful
Now, your “Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy,” which is the most original thing in your letter and the place where you and I, as a physicist-physician and a lawyer arguing theology, get to enjoy ourselves. Your intuition: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed; individuated consciousness is part of the creation; therefore, consciousness too is conserved — souls are not annihilated, only sorted. I think the intuition is largely right, and for a reason that ties straight into the verse Leonard asked about. But it needs one anchor bolted down, and to your great credit, you bolted it down yourself, in a single sentence most people would have skipped.
The anchor is this. The conservation of the soul is not a brute metaphysical fact that stands over God. It is God’s ongoing act. The reason a created person cannot fall out of existence is that the same God who spoke him into being holds him in being, moment by moment. This is the precise teaching of John 5:26, the verse at the center of the discourse we walked: as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. Only God has life in himself — that is the divine attribute the tradition calls aseity, self-existence, life that depends on nothing. The Son has it by eternal gift from the Father. And the creature? The creature never has life in itself. The creature has life on loan, sustained from outside, every instant. So consciousness is conserved — but it is conserved the way a note is conserved as long as the singer keeps singing it, not the way a rock sits in a field. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), which I keep returning to because it keeps being the answer.
And here is why I say you bolted the anchor down yourself: in the middle of your conservation law, you wrote, “Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time.” That one clause is the whole orthodox correction, and you supplied it. It means you are not claiming the soul is a little uncreated, self-existent god that God is powerless to unmake. You are claiming the soul persists because God has ordained that it persist — that the conservation is a law of the creation, which means it is a standing decision of the Lawgiver, not a chain on his wrists. That is exactly right, and it is exactly the CPP picture. The Conscious Points are not eternal sovereigns. They persist because the divine consciousness sustains them, Moment by Moment, in their Perceive-Compute-Displace cycle. Conservation, in physics and in the soul alike, is God’s faithfulness expressed as regularity. Take away the sustaining, and there is no law left to conserve anything.
Now, the one place I will ask you to slow down. In describing the sorting of souls, you wrote that the lost end up where they are “after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent.” Peter, I want to name this the way I named the Mormon reading for Leonard — laying the two lines side by side, giving you the fellowship’s reasons, and leaving the discernment to you. The historic, Nicene-orthodox tradition the fellowship works within has read Hebrews 9:27 as the boundary on this question: it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. One mortal life, then judgment — not a series of return trips through the body to keep trying. The reincarnation strand has had its Christian sympathizers here and there across the centuries, but the mainstream of the tradition — the same tradition that gave us the two-natures answer in Section III and the perichoresis answer in Section II — set it aside, and for what I take to be a sound reason: the whole weight of the New Testament’s urgency depends on this life being the arena of decision. Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). If there were always another lap, the cross would not be the hinge of history; it would be one more option on an endless menu. I am not going to argue it past that. I am only telling you where the fellowship stands and why, and trusting you, as I trusted Leonard, to weigh it on your own.
Everything else in your conservation law, I am glad to keep. The dead rise — all of them, just and unjust — and that is not your speculation either. It is the climax of the very discourse Leonard’s verse opened. All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation (John 5:28–29). You arrived, by your own road, at the exact verses I walked for Leonard. The just and the unjust both rise. The sorting is real. The conservation holds. You have the structure right.
V. Hell as the prison with the doors locked on the inside
Your picture of hell — segregation rather than active torture, a confinement of those who chose evil so the rest of creation can be enjoyed without their destructiveness, “no warden other than Lucifer himself,” the judgment self-imposed — is more defensible within orthodoxy than you may realize. It is close to the reading C. S. Lewis gave when he said the doors of hell are locked on the inside, that hell is God in the end, honoring a creature’s settled refusal of him, giving the soul forever what it insisted on having: itself, without God, in the company of others who chose the same. Thy will be done, said two ways — by the saints to God, and by the damned to themselves. On that reading, the misery of hell is not a torturer’s invention; it is what the absence of God is, experienced by a being made for him. Your “self-imposed judgment” is in the neighborhood of a serious and humane strand of the tradition.
I would only round it out, so you are holding the whole counsel of Scripture and not just the part that is most congenial. The Bible also uses the harder, more active imagery — fire, the worm that dieth not, weeping and gnashing of teeth, the wrath to come. The mature tradition has generally held that the gentle picture (self-exclusion, the absence of God, the prison locked from within) and the severe picture (judgment, fire, wrath) are the same reality described from two sides — what the lost experience as the natural consequence of their own choice is, at the same time and not by contradiction, the just judgment of a holy God. Hold both. The self-exclusion reading keeps you from making God a sadist; the judgment reading keeps you from making sin trivial. Your letter has the first and could use a little of the second.
And let me affirm the pastoral spine of this section, because it is the right spine: nobody is dragged to that prison who did not, repeatedly and finally, choose the road to it. Who wants jerks in their family? is a kindergarten way of saying something the prophets and the apostles say in their own register — that love cannot be coerced, that a heaven full of the unwilling would be no heaven, and that the God who is love will not violate the freedom that makes love possible. That is sound.
VI. The power of the word — and a caution against making the tongue a magic wand
Your footnote is, to me, the most interesting part of the whole letter, and it deserves more than a footnote. In the beginning was the Word. God spoke, and it was. We are made in his image, and you are asking whether the image carries the power — whether our words are blessings and cursings on our own lives, whether prayer is not only petition but decree. The biblical witness behind you here is strong, and you should not let anyone talk you out of it. Death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21). James spends a whole chapter on the tongue as a fire, a rudder, a thing that no man can fully tame (James 3). And you have the Lord’s own word exactly right: not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man (Matthew 15:11). Words are not weightless. The God who is Word made word-bearers, and what we say does work in the world and in us.
Here is the caution: it is the same as Section I, but with a new key. The power of our word is derivative, exactly the way Pilate’s authority and the demons’ strength and the soul’s persistence are derivative. Our words have power when they are spoken in agreement with God’s word — when our “let there be” is an amen to his “let there be.” There is a counterfeit of this teaching loose in the church, the name-it-and-claim-it strand that treats the tongue as a wand and faith as a force that bends reality to the speaker’s will. That version makes me the little creator and reduces God to the power supply I draw on by speaking the right formula. That is the Pilate error turned inward: forgetting that the power was given from above. The true version — the one your footnote is actually reaching for — is covenantal, not magical. When you say prayer is the place where we announce and decree the terms under which our households and realms will be governed, the deep truth in that is the declaration of allegiance: in spoken prayer, I confess whose I am, under whose law I live, by whose providence I am fed, by whose hand I am healed. The decree has power because it aligns me with the Word who already spoke, not because my larynx is a lever on the universe. Keep the power; locate the source outside yourself; and you are on solid ground.
One small flag on “pharmakeia,” since you reached for the Greek. The word does carry the sense of sorcery and idolatrous drug-craft in places like Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23, and there is a real prophetic warning in it about a culture that medicates its way around God. But the etymology should be held lightly. Luke, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was a physician. The Samaritan poured oil and wine into the wounds. Medicine as such is a mercy, a part of the dominion God gave us over the creation; the sin pharmakeia names is the idolatry — trusting the remedy in the place of God, or using the craft to manipulate and deceive, not the aspirin. Choose God’s healing first and always; receive his providence through whatever means he provides, the physician’s hands included. I say that as the physician in the fellowship, with no contradiction at all to choosing the Great Physician first.
VII. The CPP intersection
A brief closing meditation, the way I closed for Leonard, and held just as lightly. The thread running through your whole letter — through the borrowed power of Section I, the Son’s perfect responsiveness in his human nature in Section II, the soul conserved by God’s sustaining in Section IV — is the same thread that runs through the substrate. In CPP, every Conscious Point, on every Moment, perceives its environment, computes its response, and displaces accordingly. Perceive, compute, displace. It does nothing of itself; it acts only in response to what is given, and it persists only because it is sustained. That is the John 5:19 pattern, read all the way down to the floor of physics, and it is the pattern your letter keeps rediscovering at every level it touches. Pilate, the demons, the soul in the resurrection, the word on our lips — none of them generates its own power; each is a node in a creation that runs entirely on what God gives, and God upholds. The Son’s perfect perceive-compute-displace in the divine life is the source; everything below it is a fainter and more dependent echo of the same shape.
I am not claiming this proves anything theological, any more than I claimed it for Leonard. It is a resonance, not a demonstration. But it is the thing CPP keeps handing me: a picture of a universe in which to live the way you are describing — borrowing all power gratefully from God, speaking in agreement with his Word, refusing the lie that the soul is its own little god — is to live with the grain of how reality is actually built, from the smallest Conscious Point up to the eternal Son. In him we live, and move, and have our being. You have been writing about the grain this whole letter without naming it.
VIII. Closing
Peter, you ended your letter with Dylan’s question — we have got to serve somebody, so who is it going to be? — and with a line I want to give back to you, because it is the truest thing in the whole email: if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you; if he is, then you are my brother.
You are my brother. We do not agree on every clause — I have asked you to keep the persons of the Trinity distinct where your test drive blurred them, to let the two natures carry the weight of “God died” where your “lingering materialism” carried half of it, to bolt the soul’s conservation to God’s sustaining hand where your law could float free, to leave the lap of “multiple lifetimes” off the track where Hebrews draws the finish line, and to locate the power of your own words outside yourself where the counterfeit teaching would lodge it within. But look at what we agree on. That no power in heaven, earth, or hell is anything but borrowed from God. That the Maker came in and took the worst of it as solidarity with us. That he truly died and truly rose. That the dead all rise, the just and the unjust, and that the sorting is real and the stakes are forever. That a man defiles or blesses himself by what comes out of his mouth. And that the only thing the whole creation is finally asked for is to set the ego down and serve the King.
That is a great deal of agreement for one Sunday morning. The rest is what fellowship is for. We will keep thinking out loud together and holding each other to the text.
And one of the scribes… asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. — Mark 12:28–30
Serve somebody. We have. His name is enough.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – i Chronicles 12:38