260625 – Why the Creation Required the Cross

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 27, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

What Kind of World Would Require the Cross?

The Plan of Existence, From First Principles

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 25 June 2026

Occasion. Charlie asked me, in our Thursday evening conversation, what the hard question was — the one Christianity could not answer for me, the one that made me leave it and go searching through forty religions before I came back. I told him. It was not “does God exist,” and it was not “did Jesus rise.” It was this: “What kind of world do we actually live in, such that one man’s death two thousand years ago could put me right with God? How could such an offering have been causally effective? What is the nature of a universe where death is required for sin, and a substitutionary sacrifice is meaningful?” Draw me the line. Connect, step by step, from Jesus dying on a cross to me being able to stand in the presence of God. No one I asked could draw that line, and a religion whose central claim I could not make sense of was a religion I could not hold with integrity. I was not understanding something really basic about life. I had to know and understand it. So I left and went exploring the world’s religions to find a clue to understand the fundamental nature of existence.

Over the years, I built an answer. I have not found it laid out this way in any book, and I will not pretend it is anything more than the account that has become adequate for me. Charlie asked me to write it down. Here it is — told as plainly and as much like a story as I can manage.  It is becoming closer to an intelligible, coherent story of how existence arose (assuming God exists). Having understood the fundamental platform upon which existence stands, more functions become possible to answer. We are trying to understand the meta-story: What is the purpose of life, and why and how does it have to include the cross to fulfill that purpose?

One paragraph spoiler: God is everything. We are God experiencing God. God has worked it out so that aspects of Himself, within His being, are capable of exercising free will that opposes His central purpose and nature. He is capable of this compartmentalization by forgetting or minimizing aspects of His awareness, so that, from points of view within His being, individual points feel/think/believe they are separate from the totality of God’s existence and awareness. It is this limited perspective that allows for free will. God is capable of any action within Himself, including creating parts that forget or do not perceive that they are part of the totality of reality. It is in the recognition of the integration of that totality that the perspective of life emerges, in which Jesus’ sacrifice can be understood as logically necessary to re-establish a relationship with the estranged, rogue aspects of God’s being.

I. Begin with God, alone

Picture the situation God is in before anything exists. He is alone, because there is nothing else — no world, no angels, no company. Set aside, for now, the question of where He came from; whether He arose from nothing or simply always was. That is a question that requires an answer beyond our minds’ comprehension. We have no cause-and-effect frame that allows us to even imagine something from nothing. And we have no comprehension of the edge of infinity where beginnings happen or continue forever. The best we can do is put it in terms that disguise the fact that we have no clue how God arose. We say, “He is the uncaused source of all that would ever be, and the question of His own origin is one we are not equipped to ask. Take Him simply as He is.” But we really cannot justify that. We simply have to accept existence and the God who underlies its manifestation.

And here is the one thing about Him that sets the whole story in motion: His nature is love. “…for God is love” 1 John 4:8. By His own self-identification, that is what He is. Now follow what that means, because it contains a problem. Love is not a thing a being can have all by itself. A heart whose very nature is love can only be satisfied by love freely returned to it. Love that has no one to receive it and no one to give it back is love-starved. So a God who is alone, and whose nature is love, is a God whose own being presses toward a someone — someone who could love Him in return. There was no such someone. He would have to make one.

II. Why free will — and therefore why evil

But notice the trap inside that requirement. Love, to be love at all, must be freely given. A love that is forced, programmed, or compelled is not love; it is a puppet bowing on a string, and it would satisfy nothing in a heart that wanted to be truly loved. So the creature God creates to love Him must be genuinely free, which means genuinely able to refuse Him, to turn against Him, to choose evil. You cannot have the one without the other. The very same freedom that makes real love possible makes real evil possible, by the identical door.

(Aside: Evil is any act within God’s creation that opposes/violates His nature. Evil is defined by Good. Good is that which God does and is, and Evil is that which He is not. Man can choose either, but we are condemned to death when we choose evil, as God cannot allow evil within His being and kills/eliminates any evil that arises within His being.)

This is why I say God did not stumble and accidentally let evil into His good world. He opened the door to evil on purpose, because it was the only door through which freely-given love could also walk in. Charlie noted that this is the only way a parent can ever be effective. You have to let the child choose, sometimes suffer the consequences. Children learn through cause and effect and by instruction. You can warn him in advance about the pitfalls. But you can’t warn him about everything, and you can’t warn him his whole life. You do not leave him to discover everything on his own like a feral animal. There is protection and nurturance in childhood, followed by gradual exposure to more serious real-world threats, until he is ready to defend himself alone against them. Parents are God’s agents; His hands extended. He desires to be unseen and loved for the law that we follow. A performance displayed when expected is not as meaningful as a spontaneous expression of appreciation. That is the job of parents: to provide protective nurturance and education in wisdom and learning the ways of the world. Parenting is controlled threat exposure. It creates a real person, skilled in the ways of life. God wanted real children who would become adults and chose to follow His way freely/out of love for His world, which is His body/mind/person extended. He desires love from real spirits, rather than puppets that He directs. It was a risk; they might not love Him. He bet it all and invested His being in creating the universe, feeling the pain required to make life meaningful.

III. The animal, and the backwardness of God’s way

Now look closely at what God actually made: man, who is, among other things, an animal. He is more than an animal — he is made in God’s image, able to choose God’s way — but he is built of appetite and passion. And here is the thing worth seeing clearly: the animal wants the very goods God made to be good. Food, pleasure, mating, safety, status — these are not evil; God made them and called them good. The animal simply wants them without measure, for himself, and now. God’s way is those same goods held in their right proportion and turned outward — appetite mastered rather than served, your portion spent to lift the wounded man rather than hoarded for yourself.

And as for the animal’s perspective, the priority is inverted. It makes no sense to pour yourself out for someone else when everything in you is built to secure yourself first. So loving God — which, since you cannot embrace an immaterial God with your arms, can only mean living the way God lives — requires the animal to reject the very center of what it is. That free rejection of the flesh’s demand, chosen for the sake of God, is what love of God actually consists of in the flesh. It is the only embrace available to us. And because the animal is real and strong and central in us, the failure is not occasional but universal: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Every one of us, left to ourselves, follows the animal’s way, and often, even when we do not want to.

IV. Why purity must answer sin with wrath

Here is the part that sounds harsh until you see that it is structural, not moody. God is perfectly pure. Purity is not a temper He is in; it is what He is, all the way down. And perfect purity cannot simply coexist with its own violation. It is not that God works Himself up into anger at sin and could, on a better day, choose to let it slide. It is that holiness reflexively and non-negotiably consumes what defiles it, the way light does not decide to abolish darkness but simply does, by being light. So everything that is against God’s nature is against Him to the point of death; what is evil cannot live in His presence, because His presence is purity, and purity annihilates its opposite. The person who sins is within His body/being/existence; He feels the imperfection, walls Himself off from it, and eventually eliminates it through the death of the rebellious/imperfect/against-His-nature aspect of Himself which has arisen.

That is the wall the whole story runs into. A holy God and a sinful people cannot be reconciled by goodwill and a handshake. The sin has to be answered — fully, to the point of the death it warrants — or God would be denying His own nature. And understand why that matters even to us: a God who could wink at the violation of His purity would not be the pure God whose love is worth wanting. The very holiness that makes Him worth loving is the holiness that cannot abide our sin. The wrath is not a flaw in the love. It is the other face of it.

V. The long preparation, and the One who could bear it

So the plan was laid before the world began — “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) — and God spent ages preparing a people who could understand it when it came. Moses and Aaron, the prophets and the kings, the whole long story; and the altars, the goats and lambs offered year upon year, teaching one pattern into the bones of a nation: sin costs a death, and a substitute can bear that death in your place. Beneath all of it ran the growing promise that One was coming who would save.

And then He came, and what He announced was, in effect, this: God hates the sin and in His purity cannot abide it; His holiness must discharge its full wrath against every violation, to the point of death; and I am the one who can receive that wrath and not be destroyed by it. Only He could. Being God and being without sin of His own, the Son could absorb what would simply annihilate any of us and still live after having borne it.

VI. The substitution and the settled ledger

Here is the mechanism, this is the line no one could draw for me. At the cross, Christ takes onto Himself the sin that was truly mine and truly yours — He is “made… sin for us, who knew no sin” 2 Corinthians 5:21. When I put my whole heart in Him, I am placed into Him, so that when God turns His gaze on me, He sees the Son; and the sin I committed He sees borne there by the Son; and He pours out His full and perfectly just wrath upon it. He took on the sin of the entirety of humanity, for all time, at the cross. That wrath is the death Christ suffered. He literally died, as is the judgment against all who have ever sinned. That death-dealing judgment has been spent against Jesus. It was already discharged, and Jesus experienced it. It is only for us to accept the required credit/payment for the death that has already been exercised. It is being in Christ that allows us the protection, the union with His being that allows us to fully transfer our sin to Him so that His experience of the pain and extinction due our sin touches our being and cleanses our souls, and renders us fit for being in the presence of the Almighty.

God, in this sense, is an accountant who never lets a single sin go unpunished and never sweeps anything under the rug. He does not pretend the debt away; that would violate His justice as surely as ignoring the sin would violate His purity. He establishes relationship only when the account is completely clear. And by my confessing my sin and letting Christ be sin for me, the account is cleared — the debt genuinely paid, justice genuinely satisfied — and I am free. Not because the wrath was waived, but because it was discharged in full, on Him, in my place. That is the line from His death to my standing clean before God: my sin was really transferred, the penalty was really paid, and the books are really balanced.

VII. What is then asked of us

This is where things can go wrong because of our misunderstanding. There is a difference between living life well, fully putting yourself into everything you do, and trying to be like Christ with every fiber of your being, but failing, and closing the gap between our effort and inevitable imperfection. The closing of that gap, the restoration of relationship with God, is wholly God’s act. It is accomplished through the sovereign act of Christ. Nothing I do can close it, nothing I can do can force it. My best effort could never atone for my sin. Good works do not balance out sin. Only the expression of God’s death-dealing, vaporizing of sin-wrath at sin balances the ledger. God must eliminate sin, and His total, unmitigated, destructive wrath burns away the imperfection. He is casting sin utterly out of His kingdom/universe/self. He is eliminating sin by sending it to its full/utter/complete death.

The cross is the place where God spent His full fury on all the sin that would ever happen for all time, and gave Jesus Christ control of who He cleansed. He directed His wrath at Jesus Christ fully, who was made sin for us.  “…He made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin…” 2 Corinthians 5:21. The anger the Father expressed toward the Son, that the Son felt, was complete, total, and utter. There was no spot, speck, or remnant of sin that was unaccounted for in its cleansing/destruction. It is the accounting for all sin, and attributing the debt against God paid, that cannot be added to by my good works. But receiving that finished work, appropriating that credit, dedication of my sin to that fire of destruction, is not a passive thing. The heart that truly casts itself into Christ’s protection from the wrath of the Father at sin, confesses, repents, and gives itself to living His way. This giving is not effective as a strategy to avoid punishment or to get into paradise (although those are certainly byproducts); it is effective because it is an expression of the heart in gratitude for His law – His perfect standard of being that pleases the Father and gives Him joy in living through us; it is in the appreciation for creating a creation worthy of living in conscious attention for its interest, its fulfillment, and its continued adventure; it is for creating a plan for free will, error, rescuing, and being willing to pay so high a price for reconcilliation. It is for creating a creation so grand and glorious that it is worthy of living in for eternity. It is a complete and total giving of self, in love, to the creator of the universe, in service to giving Him the experience of living in the joy of my experience living in His perfect way. It is in gratitude for the purchase of my pardon. It is the committed turning, because that is what gratitude for receiving the pardon looks like from the inside. A heart unwilling to turn has not actually trusted, loved, felt the gravity of the violation of sin, or the gratitude for the reprieve. The freedom Christ buys is not freedom to keep following the animal with a clear conscience; it is the chosen commitment to live God’s way, to sacrifice satisfaction of the animal pull. And this out of gratitude, not out of payment. Justification is His gift, given from His side. Our commitment is the appropriate, grateful, conscious, willful, purposeful response to that gift.

Closing: the plan of existence

So this is the answer to the question that once drove me out of the faith, and it turns the question on its head. We do not live in a world where the cross is a strange or arbitrary intrusion. We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. A God whose nature is love had to make free creatures who could love or refuse Him. Their freedom made evil real. Evil is simply the violation of what/who God is. God is the entirety of all creation, and the choice of a part of Himself to violate His nature must be destroyed to maintain His integrity. The Son, the Word, God Himself in the Son/as the Son, created the entirety of the universe.  “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”  John 1:3. As such, the Son could shield those within Himself from the wrath of the Father to those who committed to being within Him. This covering, hiding in the cleft of the rock, being in Christ, is the option we have, the contract that Christ offers to us, that allows our evil to coexist with the absolute purity of the Father, in whom we live and move and have our being. Christ was able to discharge the wrath of the Father against sin by being made sin for us, which He experienced to the point of death. Jesus Christ, who is God in spirit, and clothed Himself in the body of a man, suffered the full weight of God’s wrath bodily in a way that was impossible for us to experience and live. We are guilty, and He was perfect, sinless, and the wrath directed against Him was without warrant; therefore, He can apply the credit of having experienced the required death for sin to our account, and the ledger of God’s perfect accounting of sin and death is balanced. The death-dealing wrath of the Father is completely and inescapably effective and required against every sin to maintain/be His nature. God the Father, the Almighty, the perfect, must eliminate every sin with an application of wrath and death. Jesus Christ was able to take the full blow, the total exercise of annihilation from the Father, and died physically, from the force of God’s blows against His flesh. But the warrant exercised against Jesus was without merit, and He arose, being raised because death cannot hold the man against whom no sin is accounted.

Thus, the credit of death that Satan stole/unlawfully extracted from Jesus was paid against a debt that He had not incurred. The credit of Jesus dying for a sin He did not commit is an open ledger, an open entry, a credit for a paid death, and available for redemption. It is that credit that can be called in, in faith, recognizing its efficacy and power to overcome and pay for the death we owe. In payment of the debt, we are both freely given and fully reconciled with God the Father Himself. It is through His Son, who took the place of the condemned on our behalf, took the death we owed, and gave us the opportunity for eternal life, that we are justified before the Father. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

We are living a life that is lived by God. He desires to experience our expression of love toward Him by our obedience, our desire to live His Way, and experience that love of having made that choice in the tension of the other lover, which is our innate love of the animal experience. We are the someones God created so that He could experience love through our daily choice to live His Way. It is our living in His Way that our love for Him is returned/felt, and experienced by Him. The cross was the price God Himself experienced to a credit that the sinful-repentant man could redeem. He died in the hope that we would choose to accept that credit to pay the ledger entry of death we owed because of our sin. As gods, as men created in His image, He gave us freedom to choose sin while living/being inside His body. We were given the sovereignty to choose to live within His Way or choose the flesh satisfaction of the animal as our lover. The freedom He gave is our opportunity to freely choose glory or the fate of the animal. His sacrifice, accepting it, living it with the gratitude of a man given reprieve on death row, gives us the opportunity for a life of relationship with Him forever, whether in the body or present with Him in Spirit. There was no other world God could have created in which a God of perfect purity and love could have experienced what love requires (freedom to choose another seductive/attractive lover, and yet chose Him instead). There is no other bridge across the gulf between His purity and our sin than the one He built with the sacrifice and substitutionary penalty, accounting for our sin, than to experience it within His own body and attribute it to our account.

Charlie asked for the drama, passion, and stakes of creation and the redemption to be told as a story. He asked me to draw it out, to illustrate the steps of that story one frame at a time. That is the medium the human psyche is wired to receive meaning and establish understanding. Maybe someday that actual graphic will be created. In the meantime, this is that story in words. It is ready for the eventual illustration in picture, word, and song. The world is the shape it is because love requires the freedom to choose another. The cross is the shape it is because we had to choose the freedom bought with the price of the pain and death of Him who created and is All.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260621 – Telescope Discussion – Commitment and Grace

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 25, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

After All We Can Do: Commitment, Grace, and the Changed Heart

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 21 June 2026

Occasion. On Father’s Day, the fellowship gathered to talk over the Telescope essay I had written for Isak — the one about the seeker, the finder, and the cost of commitment. Isak said it read like a story that bobs and weaves but keeps coming back to one theme: the undecided life against the decided one. That was the essay’s spine, and I expected the conversation to stay there. It did not. Within the hour, the fellowship had pressed on the one place the essay leaned too hard, and what came back was better than what I had written. This essay is my attempt to keep what we found — chiefly that commitment and the changed heart are not rivals but partners, and that the gospel needs both.

I. The impotence of passive grace

When I first fed the Friday conversation with Isak into Claude and asked it to draft the essay, what came back was not the essay I eventually published. It was the standard article: we are all sinners, we are saved by grace, we are powerless to save ourselves, it is faith alone, full stop. I rewrote much of that framing, because, however orthodox it sounds, it is to my eye a large part of why so much of modern Christianity has lost its force in the world. If the message is that you can do nothing, you are a worm; grace covers it. Now relax. Then we, as witnesses, have initiated a new believer into a faith without power or responsibility. Passive people do not change a culture. They do not even reliably change themselves. The Telescope essay was rewritten to say the opposite: that something real and total is asked of us, that the commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.

I still believe that. But the discussion illuminated a subtle effect that I think is worth noting. There is a place for passive grace. Leonard was the first to attempt to rationalize both truths as part of a unified whole.

II. After all we can do

Leonard offered the line from the Book of Mormon: “we are saved by grace, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). The whole weight rests on that small qualifier. After all we can do. It does not say we are saved by all we can do — Paul forecloses that: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). But it does not say nothing is asked of us either. It says: give everything you have, and then know that the gift you could never earn is given anyway. The effort and the grace are not in competition. The effort is the form a committed heart takes; the grace is what carries the heart the rest of the distance it could never cross on its own.

This is exactly the resolution the Telescope essay was groping toward when it said the gap cannot be closed by our striving — Christ closes the gap — and yet a heart that will not lift a finger has not really committed at all. Leonard gave it a cleaner name. We labor as if it depended on us, and we receive as if it depended wholly on God, because both are true at once. That “after all we can do” is the hinge of everything that followed.

III. The changed heart

Susan supplied what the essay had underweighted, drawing on her own life rather than a doctrine. Her point was that the two great commandments — love God, love your neighbor — are already in the Old Testament and are good and true, but the law by itself never changes anyone’s heart. That is the whole burden of the prophets. What the New Covenant adds is not a better rule; it is a new heart. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Susan told us how it came to her. She had spent four months reading Scripture and praying every day, sincerely seeking the truth — not yet believing, half-convinced the God of the Bible, if He existed, was a tyrant. The persistent prompting came: it is time to accept Christ. She resisted, set the voice on a shelf, took stock of what she actually believed after four months of honest searching, and discovered she already believed. So she knelt, repented of her unbelief, and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior in a short and unadorned prayer. What followed, she did not manufacture and did not expect: a joy and peace and love for God that she assumed would fade and did not fade. It stayed. It changed what she wanted. Her prayers shifted on their own from help me do the things I am trying to do to what would You have me do today; how can I serve You?

That is the thing the law cannot give, and effort cannot counterfeit. Susan named the distinction precisely: there is head knowledge, and there is a changed heart, and many who believe in Jesus with their minds have never received the second. They have the doctrine and not the joy, and what their neighbors feel from them is judgment rather than love. The changed heart is not a happier set of thoughts you talk yourself into. It is something done to you that you could not do for yourself. It is the grace half of “after all we can do.”

IV. A confession, and a memory recovered

Then Susan turned the point of the essay directly, and on me. She said the second section — the one on the hardness of the commands — failed to make clear that it is by Christ’s power that we are able to depart from sin. She was right that it was missing, and I had to confess why. That note had in fact been in the machine’s first draft, and I was the one who cut it. I cut it because of an honest difficulty I carry: I have not, in the way others describe, experienced Christ doing things for me. What I experience are insights I receive and then work through, which I attribute to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I did not want to write a sentence that, for me, would be saying something I have not lived. The one unmistakable exception in my life was a single voice — don’t go — spoken to my being, not my ears, when I stood before the altar of another god and was, as I understood it, walking into hell. Beyond that, my testimony has been of revelation I help carry, not of a power that carries me.

Susan pointed to the testimonies where people accept Christ and find some besetting thing simply gone — the man delivered of cursing overnight, who still had to fight his lying for years afterward; Paul and his thorn that would not leave. There is, she said, a category of change that is given, not achieved, and to leave it out is to preach an incomplete gospel — a gospel of what we can manage by our own power.

And as she spoke, I remembered something I had filed under the wrong heading for thirty years. Long before I was a Christian, in a new-age Six Day intensive. It was at a mountainous site near Calistoga, CA, attended by hundreds of people. Part of the intensive was to the discipline of not using foul language for the entire six days. I was as committed as a man can be, with a support group and total intent, and I could not do it. I failed completely. Years later, when I had the vision of the Galaxy, the stars, and thin line connecting them, when I was able to in sincerity, realize the Bible spoke of the God of the actual world we live in and surrender my life to Christ, at the moment of my own turning, the prayer that was for me what Susan’s kneeling was for her, the curse simply lifted. The issue of controlling my tongue has never been an issue since. I knew it was a supernatural gift, but I had not connected that to an offer I could make to those to whom I witness. It was clear, the contrast between my will and God’s grace. He does intervene. I experienced the transformation. That is the very thing Susan was describing. I can offer that power to those who are seeking, but I cannot say what it will be. I take it as an indicator that God is present, not as a genie whose lamp we rub. The decision to make Jesus Christ our Lord has an effect, but I don’t think we can predict what that effect will be. After grace, there will be work that each of us needs to do.

I remain convinced that the Telescope essay was right to insist on expecting converts to engage with a masculine commitment, rather than to be seduced by the comfort of a limp and passive Christianity. The One to whom we commit is present, and “my grace is sufficient” is the indicator of what our commitment requires. Commitment and the changed heart are partners. We give all we can do; He gives the heart of flesh. It is dependent upon us to live the integrity of the character of Christ after the grace of the changed heart, however much or little, it is enough. The purpose of life is to develop character to give God the greatest experience of mature love.

V. Why love cannot be forced

If grace does the sufficient work, why is so much still asked of us, and why is the road hard? The discussion answered this the way the Telescope essay had argued it, but with an unforgettable living illustration.

The doctrinal frame came first. Leonard read the Garden as a parable for every life: God set His children in the garden, gave them the command, and then let the tempter in — on purpose. The point of this life is to meet evil and choose. We are, as he put it, in a testing center, and even a poor choice teaches, because we are eternal beings who go on learning. This is exactly the free-will argument at the center of the Telescope essay: God desires a love that is freely returned, and love that is compelled is not love at all, so He had to make creatures who could genuinely refuse Him.

Then Michael gave us the illustration. He told us of a childhood trauma, a life-threatening experience in which a parent used force to demand belief of an 11-year-old boy. He does not hate her; he says she did what she had been taught, and he counts even that suffering among his teachers, quoting the line from Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” The lesson is an important one: violence cannot produce love or belief. When you beat faith into a person, you do not convert him — you only teach him how to survive a beating. Conviction forced from the outside is not conviction; it is compliance worn until the pressure lifts.

This is a vindication of the gospel’s design. A God who manufactured love by force would be the tyrant Susan once feared, and Michael was made to fear — and such a god we ought, rightly, to resist. The true God does not compel; He draws, He woos, He winsomely attracts, He persuades from within. That is why the road requires our free assent at every step, and why no one can be argued, shamed, or frightened into the kingdom. The very hardness of the choice is the proof that the love, when it comes, is real.

VI. More light, sharper contrast

If we are born again when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord, and He gives us a renewed heart when we are born again, and we are committed to Godliness after our decision, why does life often get harder? Leonard, Isak, and Charlie circled this. Leonard observed that as a person draws nearer to God, he becomes more, aware of darkness because he is now aware of what is good and Godly. In contrast to the light of true goodness, the temptations of this world are more visible, more clearly dark in comparison to the light of God’s way. Isak noted that you can now see the contrast between good and evil. The man lost in his addiction cannot see the darkness he is in, because it is the thing keeping him alive in his own mind, to him his substance is the light. Once he is pulled out can he look back and see it for what it was. As your sight comes to resemble God’s, you see what He sees — both the light and the evil. The perceptions from immersion in evil are reversed; Godliness looks dark and vice versa.

Charlie noted from his own experience: on the days he fasted he found himself both quickened in ability and curiously under attack. The closer a life draws to God, the more the adversary opposes it; the apostles drew near and most were martyred. Christianity, he said plainly, is a terribly hard religion — it can be sweet, but it is not guaranteed to be easy. So, the changed heart does not purchase a comfortable life. It purchases clear sight and the strength to stand. Isak found the seal for this in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Rejoice, and be exceeding glad” (Matthew 5:10-12). The response to opposition is neither to collapse nor to go pick fights; it is to stand by what you know, and to be content that you need not win every argument the world offers.

VII. The absolute, and the two laws

Underneath the whole conversation ran a question Michael would not let pass without a strong defense: is there an absolute at all, or only our shifting opinions about reality? He pressed every image of our smallness — the blind men each certain of the whole elephant from one part, Plato’s prisoners reading shadows on a cave wall, a caveman drawing a map of “the forest, the pond, and the unknown” and calling it the world. We are that caveman. Our scope is severely limited; we have five senses and a few millennia of notes.

I agree with every bit of that. But that was not a point of contention. The question is not whether we can see the absolute whole — plainly we cannot — but whether one exists behind our partial views. Schrödinger’s cat was alive or dead regardless of anyone looking or not; the elephant is unchanged by the hand that gropes it; what is on the far side of the fence does not bend to fit the knothole we peer through. Michael eventually began to consider the postulate: there is an absolute, and life gives us various limited perspectives, each of which we can use to triangulate toward it. The fact, now we see through a glass, darkly. Each of our perspectives  not to doctrine but to the moral order itself.

And Charlie named the part of that absolute we can see clearly. Our scientific scope has exploded; our moral reach has not changed and has not shrunk. Newton, before an ocean of unknown, called what we know a thimbleful — but the two great commandments were as true at the beginning as now and will be true on any world there is. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart… and thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). Charlie stated the basics clearly. if civilization were wiped to a remnant living among cockroaches, as long as someone remembered those two laws, we would come back. Even Michael, who challenges everything as a relative good, granted these two are the nearest thing to a universal standard of human morality. Ever culture has their own standards and traditions, but the Great Commandment to love God, and neighbor as self is universal. It is the moral absolute we are not free to vote away, the fixed star the planted telescope is fixed upon.

VIII. How the soil is made ready

Toward the end, I saw the Sower in a new way. I had always interpreted that verse as referring to four types of people. But during the discussion, it struck me that there may be a deeper message in this parable. Rather than treating the four soils as four kinds of people — the hard path, the stony ground, the thorns, and the good earth, I considered the possibility that this parable was not about four types of people but about the stages of one life? Every one of us begins as the trampled path, the rocky soil, and the thorn patch that must be worked before it can be nourish a seed that can grow and bear fruit.

Consider what good soil actually is. It is rock that has been ground into dust, and weeds that have grown to maturity, died, decayed as its organic matter fed bacteria that release acids that dissolve the dust into soluble minerals that plants need to grow. So, the hard objections — what about the Catholics and Protestants who slaughtered each other during what is perceived as wars over religion — are the rocks. These objections, whether philosophic, moral, psychological, or scientific must be broken down enough to understand how what appeared to be logical contradictions that proved that the teachings of a religion were false, contradictory, or evil, were misunderstandings of context and fact.

Other knowledge-type objections include that belief that God does not exist, that everything actually is relative, or that the universe is of our own construction. If we are God, and we are the source of our own reality and construct the moral rules of life independently of other people and the structure of reality, then individual truth is truth. When present, these scientific, ontological considerations, and knowledge/understanding-type rocks prevent the seeds of faith from growing.  Not all people place understanding at the apex of judgment about life, but it is a fact for everyone. Each of these gateway criteria must be satisfied regardless of whether we process life in terms of emotions, morality, or axiom to theorem understanding.

I process the universe through understanding. I don’t have large supernatural effects happen regularly enough to validate God’s existence by the shows of metaphysical force or supernatural power. I come to the world with no perceptual data available to tip the scales of God’s existence by anomalies of the physical world. All I have to use as my dataset to confirm the hypothesis of God is the physical world and my power of analysis to determine if a model of life, structural existence, and rules of feeling/emotion/affective tagging to reverse engineer the likelihood of God’s existence and the Bible’s accurate reflection of His nature.

This pivots back to my postulate that we must all come to the acceptance of God’s literal existence to have a relationship with Him. And after having accepted that He exits, we must believe that it is valuable to seek Him. “…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 It is helpful to accept the postulate that the Bible is God’s revelation, but if not, then the Bible must do the work of revealing itself as being authored by Him. Thus, Susan’s advice to read the Bible every day, to implant His words, His evidence, His way in the heart. With a belief in God, and planting His word in our hearts, we have an internal power working on breaking up rocks which stand against the knowledge of Him. “…the weapons of our warfare are not carnal… but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations… and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God…” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. There are spiritual rocks that must be broken. Knowledge that is a stronghold against knowing Him. Strongholds are arguments, lies, and mental fortifications. These are the strongholds of misunderstanding, ignorance, and rebellion that rationalize themselves against God’s existence, His way, and submission to Him. The fullness of experience/knowledge of His existence and the nature are both confronted and advanced by reading, dwelling, and meditating on His word, but we should also explore nature to further deepen our experience of His existence. “For the invisible things of him… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made…” Romans 1:20. It is in this search that the Conscious Point Physics gives its most clear image of God, by implication of the structure underlying that which is seen.

I postulate that creating a strong enough justification for the existence and goodness of God is important for motivation to pursue a relationship and for overcoming the difficulty of being in one. Knowledge of Him, His way, and the world allows us to tolerate the pain of warring against the flesh. The rewards are great, but the cost is high, the turning from animal satisfaction. To make it to the end of the long, hard climb of sanctification (perfection of character), we must be motivated, exert our will, and have a reason, a felt desire, a goal worthy of achievement. The goal is serious. It is a committed relationship with Him. Accomplishing it requires a firm decision, community support, and accountability. The goal is to establish a new character. This commitment to Jesus as Lord in the sanctification of our lives aims us toward understanding God’s ways in various situations in life. The Bible is a consistent voice arguing for the existence of a good God, and we must believe it. That is a stone that must be broken through understanding and emotional processing (putting life’s hurts in perspective). The experience of good fruit from following His way is an immediate self-test of the validity of the Bible as an accurate revelation. Knowledge and the wisdom to act in life, with subsequent good fruit, along with a firm commitment to a relationship with Him, are the prerequisites for initiating and maintaining a relationship that can grow.

Faith cannot grow on the hard rock of erroneous conceptions about God’s existence and HIs nature. Misunderstandings are youthful ignorance and naivete; we all must grow out of them. They still require admission of error, humility, and loss of pride. Lies are the adult form of information error, consciously propagated fabrications used for motivated deception. They are crafted to go deep and hold hard, even in the face of disclosure. The adult pride of having been fooled makes admission and reversal much harder than correcting the childish error of ignorance.

The good heart and mind soil is blocked from contact with reality by neither childish nor adult error. To have a proper relationship with God, we must understand the structure and rules of the universe, the affective/emotional wisdom, and God’s nature. To perceive life clearly, we must properly comprehend the facts of physical, metaphysical, emotional, and spiritual reality. The task is not trivial, but you can and should ask for help. The primary obstacle is allowing the words, commands, and precepts of the Bible to penetrate your heart. It is the ignorance and lies that prevent their entry. By simply exposing yourself to the words, the Holy Spirit can work to bring errors to the surface where they can be examined and a new perspective adopted. New character develops with repetition

Feeding on the Word/The Bible is therapy by itself. Process the thoughts, questions, and emotions that come up. Find a counselor, parent, or other person wise in the ways of the world, and mature from spending time in the Word.

Until the lies, ignorance, and traumas are resolved with truth and peace, there will be mental, emotional, and spiritual rocks that need to be crushed, and the effort to read and heed the Word may be harder than continuing with the old life. It is important to know this because the effort required may tempt us to stop the transformation and return to our old way of life. The dissonant voices in our minds may seek to minimize the value and validity of the Bible and Christ’s life, and to maximize examples of poor witness (those who claim to be Christians but do not live the principles). The Bible, God’s revelation about His creation, may seem suspect, irrelevant, unreliable, or false. To the natural man, the deep and subtle message of God’s transformative power and the excellence of His way of life may seem foolish. But when the hard rocks of lies, ignorance, trauma, and rebellion are broken into sufficiently small lems, we can process them without being overwhelmed. We can see the errors as lessons, rungs on the ladder to understanding and new decisions, actions, and character. The key is to break the lessons down into increments of new behavior and understanding small enough to process and absorb.

The seductions, worries, riches, and distractions of the world are the thorns. They can distract us from our spiritual discipline, so we may not take the time to pray, meditate/listen, or reframe/process the hurts. Each of life’s issues, the hard things, the emotionally painful or unrighteously tempting, must be faced and rightly processed. Each situation of life is a lesson from which to learn about life, the forces,  and the evaluation of God’s way vs. man’s way. The accumulation of data points about situations and righteous choices builds our character one decision at a time. After each lesson, it’s good to celebrate, rest, reflect, consolidate, and renew your strength before facing the next hard lesson. Sometimes, maybe even often, such rest and recovery is not possible. Meet your obligations, but sometimes it’s too much. Draw your strength, remember the high calling and the reward. Be courageous, fight the good fight. Bold confrontation with each situation reality presents requires courage. Do your best, deal with each situation, and learn from it. This time of trial will end, and there is a reward for doing well.

The trampled path is the heart that has been hurt — I gave myself to something once and was betrayed, and I will not be hurt again. The hard heart must be tilled until it is open to love after injury. Only when the rocks are broken, the thorns are digested, and the path is broken up is the soil prepared to receive the seed of the gospel and testimony of witnesses. As a witness, be patient: you may be speaking to ground that is not yet ready, and your job is sometimes only to break one rock.

IX. The work and the goal

The conversation converged on the purpose of the fellowship. What is our larger goal as a group? It is support for executing the Great Commission. It is to equip ourselves to move people toward commitment to living God’s way and feeling life deeply. Susan and I arrived at the same model from opposite sides. As a witness, tell the story of how your heart changed, honestly, as an offering and encouragement. My situation will probably not be yours, and I can only imagine what your pain and trials have been. Make the invitation. Make it real. There is a level of loving imposition we cannot avoid. Without a call to action, the activation energy may not be high enough for your friend to decide to take the step into the commitment of Jesus as Savior or Jesus as Lord. The invitation must be phrased as a question, not as an implied demand or declaration of guilt. The invite is the first small step. Acceptance of Jesus as Savior is a long journey that begins with Justification. The second step is the lifetime of steps toward sanctification. Susan’s own turning began not with the sinner’s prayer but with a small commitment to read and pray daily; that small commitment led her to ask Jesus to be her savior. She felt joy and peace, and she was eventually ready to make Jesus her Lord.

The process of accepting a new life lord takes time. The soil must go through the stages of accommodation. A seed cannot reliably survive the harsh conditions of soil preparation. That time is roughly equivalent to the learning experience of childhood, when there is great vulnerability, a need for protection, help in processing pain and injuries, and the development of trust in the care and maintenance of life, safety, and relationships. This translates to a need for tenderness, nurture, and protection of the seed of the Holy Spirit. The rocks of life correspond to the barriers that prevent hearing, understanding, trusting, or acting. A full surrender at the first hearing may require more nourishment, water, and space than the soil can bear.

And do not over-promise what accepting Jesus as Savior will realistically do. I have watched too many promise health and wealth and deliver only the preacher’s enrichment. I will not trade in that. But there is one thing we can promise without dishonesty: that the Lord will speak to our hearts. “If a man love me… my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” John 14:23. It is that indwelling that changes hearts. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20. That indwelling spirit is available to everyone who sincerely receives Christ as Savior and Lord. It comes differently to each — instantly for some, after years of dedicated study, service, and prayer for others. We cannot promise how any individual person will be changed by receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The honest word to the seeker is: commit to taking Jesus as your Savior. Read the Bible, pray for wisdom, confess your shortcomings with the goal of learning and overcoming with the next trial, and do not forsake the assembly or yourselves together. Persevere, even if the change is slow and you meet repeated failure. God will give you a heart of flesh if you ask and desire it deeply. It’s painful to feel life, but the openness to pain is required to feel the joy.

Leonard summarized the goal of the enterprise. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). How do we know Him? Leonard’s answer was, “The commandments are God’s self-portrait.” They are not arbitrary rules; they describe His character. He gives them because He wants us to be like Him. We should not follow His commands, but keep them.  They should be held within, as a precious possession. The goal is to internalize them until His character becomes our own. Being of like character, we are drawn into oneness with Him. If we understand God’s character, attributes, and perfections, we can see that He is trustworthy because His nature, plan, and purpose for life are good. He desires us to have faith in Him; to keep His commandments from the heart. With His commands directing the man from within, he feels God’s nature and acquires knowledge of Him in His depths. Susan noted that we find Him when we “search for [Him] with all [our] heart” (Jeremiah 29:13), undivided, not “double-minded” (James 1:8). To know Him is to be changed by Him, and to be changed into His image, feeling as He does, imprinting on him the pattern of life that brings the fullness that comes with righteousness, justice, joy, peace, and love.

Closing

The Telescope essay was about commitment, and the importance of a stable platform from which to see self and others and judge righteousness. The commitment is ours to make, and the heart of flesh is His to give. The gospel has two error modes: 1) Grace that comforts but lacks correction of error, and 2) The standard of the perfect man, which is too high to meet for any man, leaving discouragement. Leonard maintained proper tension when he said, “We are saved by grace, after all we can do.”

The transformed heart and rebirth require breaking the rocks, mulching the thorns, and tilling the path. Daily Bible reading is a good first step on the path of commitment. This requires standing fast under opposition. But by faith, we expect that we will receive the grace to endure. We are blessed by putting His commands in our hearts; we are blessed by inviting Him and His Father to come in; we are made righteous in the eyes of the Father as Christ was made sin for us, and merely accepting that sacrifice and expressing our gratitude with our obedience to His Commandments. We cannot force the hand of God, but we can invite Him in, and when we do, His spirit acts upon us, and we are moved toward being like Him. “…when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2 We should not wait to be transformed till He comes in glory. We should strive every day to be like Him.

The great commandment, love God and neighbor as self, is the fixed star that should guide our emotional, mental, moral, and spiritual journey through life and relationships. Romans 8:2 “The law of the Spirit of life… has made me free from the law of sin and death.” gives us the key to transformation. The changed heart is a gift offered to every soul, but it is only effective if the soul willingly accepts the gift of  His substitutionary sacrifice and strives diligently, desirously, passionately to obey His Law. Failure of perfection is inevitable, but striving, desire, and commitment are within our control. This is not salvation by works; it is a demonstration of salvation by works. “…I will show thee my faith by my works.” James 2:18

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260619 – Seeking and Committing to a Path

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 20, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

On the Planted Telescope: the Seeker, the Finder, and the Path to Commitment

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 19 June 2026

Occasion. Isak, you and I spent Friday afternoon in a long conversation. It began with the question of Michael, whose mandala system of categorizing all human knowledge has been his life’s work, and whose worldview sits more or less where mine sat 58 years ago when he and I were in High School and college. After Michael’s example, we moved on to discussing your sense of the impossibility of living/keeping the biblical commands, deciding whether Christianity is one of many paths or the one true path, the cultural questions of sexuality in the present day, the question of those who never heard the gospel, your own struggle with excessive attention to, and dwelling on, the pull of the flesh, the exchange about coffee and alcohol and the pre-made response to temptation. The conversation closed with your telescope metaphor — that of a telescope held by hand, the metaphorical arm of flesh, which is not steady enough to prevent large slews across the sky. It allows occasional glimpses of the desired star, but it does not provide sufficient stability to dwell on any high-magnification, deep-space object in depth. The telescope metaphor rhymes with the difficulty of focusing on achieving a life goal when there is no stable foundation.

Your questions and struggles with faith should be universal, but sadly, some never question, ask why, or realize the profound mystery of existence. You grew up around the Christian fellowship, and you have heard the conversations and read the essays. You probably know the Bible considerably better than most adult Christians. And you are still searching. You want to find the truth, but questions stand in the way. The question you face is whether to commit to the standard you already know or to keep searching, as Michael has been searching for the 58 years I have known him. You are not a baby Christian. You are not a stranger to the biblical revelation. You are an articulate, intelligent, and careful young man who knows the common answers given to those questioning whether to commit to the Christian faith. These are the issues we discussed today, and I want to document our conversation, sharpen my presentation, and address them for you to review in a format you can refer to again.

Nine sections follow. The first examines what Michael’s mandala actually is. The second engages the hardness-of-the-commands question that occupied much of the early part of our conversation. The third takes up the many-paths-versus-one-top distinction. The fourth engages the cultural questions of the present moment. The fifth addresses the question of those who never heard the gospel, which was one of the big questions that drove me to search 40 religions. The sixth returns to your telescope metaphor and develops it. The seventh picks up the addiction-and-pre-made-response thread that closed the conversation. The eighth is what I want to say to you about commitment under partial knowledge. The ninth is the closing, on Romans 5:3-5 and 1 Corinthians 13:11-13, which are the scriptures the conversation pointed toward without my saying so explicitly.

I. Michael’s mandala

Michael’s mandala filing system is his life’s work. It is a comprehensive, elaborate, decades-in-development framework for categorizing the universe into nested structures of relationship and meaning. Michael is extremely intelligent and articulate. The system is intelligent. It reflects an enormous amount of careful thought, sustained study, introspection, and disciplined attention over the course of thirty years. It is, by any measure of intellectual labor, a remarkable artifact.

It is also, by my reading, the cognitive monument to a life of not committing.

What I see is a reflection of what we discussed in a different language during our conversation. The mandala is what perpetual searching produces when applied with intelligence and discipline. Someone who keeps looking, who never lands on a worldview with absolute standards, who does not take a stand because every stand looks provisional and every alternative looks possibly better, will eventually produce a system of organizing reality. The system organizes what he has found. The system catalogs the alternatives. The system tries to hold everything at once because the seeker cannot bring himself to set anything down as authoritative. The system grows more elaborate over time because every new piece of information, every new possible perspective, has to be accommodated rather than evaluated and accepted as absolute truth or rejected as a distortion of perfection.

Michael and I grew up together. We probably met in 1968, on the schoolbus, 58 years ago. We both started in approximately the same place, searching for the answer to life, whatever that meant. We diverged because at a certain point, I committed, and he didn’t. The choice I made was specific. It was to take the Bible as the load-bearing standard against which everything else in my life would be judged. I accepted the Christological claim of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central fact of history. I have organized my life and thought around those commitments since 1987. I was a  childhood Christian of extreme commitment from age four till around 14 or 15 years of age. I was a searching Christian from adolescense till 25 when I joined the Sikh Dharma, 3HO, the Yogi Bhajan cult in 1976. When I had the altered state vision in 1987, I knew Jesus was the way and that the Bible was a true revelation. Since I made that choice, the search did not stop — I have learned considerably more in the nearly 40 years since I committed than I knew before I committed. I think the reason it has been so productive is that learning requies a stable reference frame upon which to compare knowledge. I now had a perspectiv from which everything else could be evaluated in relation to the anchor. Michael did not make that choice. He kept the search open. The mandala is what the open search has produced.

Michael is a good man. He is kind and thoughtful, and he stands in awe of the world around us; everything is a source of joy and wonder to him. He lives a good life and enjoys it greatly. But I mention this because I want you to consider taking the fork in the road where Michael and I diverged. You are clearly asking questions and trying to find the truth, but you have been unable to identify it. I am very familiar with being there. The choice seems to be between Christianity and some other coherent worldview that you have not yet found. But what your life is actually manifesting is a never-ending search with indefinite goals for understanding. You have a commitment to searching for truth as a standard that has the structural shape of being true, but it is actually a lifetime of producing your own mandala. Your mandala is your own elaborated, intelligent, sophisticated, never-quite-completed system of holding everything at once, but ending with nowhere solid to stand.

The seeker and the finder are not separated by the question of intelligence, dedication, or breadth and depth of the search. They are separated by their willingness to commit to the best available alternative and to change when the evidence is overwhelming that it is needed. The finder is the seeker who has committed. True riches flow from a commitment to the truth.

II. The hardness of the commands and what salvation actually is

You raised, in various forms throughout the conversation, the worry that biblical Christianity asks of human beings what they cannot actually do. The commands are too high. The standard is impossible. A religion that requires what its adherents cannot deliver is, on its face, suspect — perhaps designed to produce permanent guilt, perhaps a sociological control mechanism, perhaps just badly engineered. The argument has precedent and cannot be dismissed.

What I want to say to you about this is what I tried to say at some length during the conversation, but I want to say it more carefully here.

The Christian claim is not that you can or will keep the commands. The Christian claim is that you cannot, that no human being ever has except Christ himself, and that this inability is precisely what the gospel addresses. The Levitical sacrificial system existed because Israel could not keep the law. The prophetic tradition exists because the people of God repeatedly failed to live the covenant they had been given. The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith exists because Paul knew, from his own zealous Pharisaical career, that the harder you try to keep the law in your own strength, the more clearly you discover that you cannot. The gospel does not say, “Here are the commands; keep them, and you will be saved.” The gospel says, “Here are the commands; you cannot keep them; here is what God has done about your inability.”

What God has done about your inability is Christ. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not an arbitrary theological invention. It is the answer to the structural problem the law itself names: the law is holy, and the people are not, and the gap between them cannot be closed by the people’s increased effort. No amount of striving lifts a sinful man to the standard of a holy God; finite effort cannot cross an infinite distance.

But notice what this does and does not mean. It does not mean that nothing is asked of you. The error that has hollowed out so much of modern Christianity is the inference that because we cannot close the gap by effort, we are therefore released from effort altogether — that grace is a blanket thrown over a life lived as an animal, that a man need only say the words and then go on exactly as before. That is not the gospel; it is the abandonment of it. What is asked of you and me is real and total: to confess our transgressions, to repent, to change course, and to do everything in our power to put on the character of the new man. This labor does not close the gap — Christ closes the gap — but it is the response of a heart that has actually committed, and a heart that will not lift a finger has not committed at all. The commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.

The gulf between the Father and man, which was made uncrossable by our sin because of God’s uncompromising hatred of sin, was bridged from God’s side. The wrath was discharged on Christ, “who was made sin for us who knew no sin,” 2 Corinthians 5:21. This was the only possible way God could build a universe of children who could choose sin, which is the rejection of God, or obedience to His way, which is the love of God. He created man in the hope that man would choose Him, His way, and obedience to His law, and so satisfy His desire for a love that is reciprocated and freely given. To make that love possible, He had to give men free will, for love that is compelled is not love at all.

He is the source of all. The Father, the One, the Almighty, performed the most mysterious of all acts: He is of Himself, owes His existence to nothing and to no one. His nature, by His own self-identification, is love, and a heart whose nature is love can be satisfied only by love freely given. But here is the conflict written into creation itself: His hatred of sin is absolute, His desire is for perfect love, and the beings from whom He desires that love are ignorant of the deep consequences of their acts, driven by the desires of the flesh, and are certain to choose the flesh over perfect love. That is a formula for inevitable, universal failure. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23.

To thread this needle of conflicting requirements, the plan was laid before the world began: “He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth,” Revelation 13:8. In the crucifixion, in the passion, Christ absorbed the wrath that human sin warrants. That wrath must be felt, and it must be discharged; it cannot simply be waived. his hatred of sin has no compassion — it is reflexive and non-negotiable, it is His nature, it is absolute. The purity of God is complete, and the hatred of any violation of that purity is unmitigated and inseparable from the character of the Father. It is not a mood He could choose to set aside; it is what perfect holiness is.

So the wrath of God toward sin is real. The fact of man’s sin is real. The discharge of that wrath upon the Son, who took our sin as His own and has borne it, is real. The substitution is real. The wrath that would otherwise have fallen on you and me for our violations of His purity fell instead on Christ at the cross.

And here is why your commitment and mine are not a small thing, but the hinge of the whole matter: we are released from that wrath because we have committed to make Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and to follow His words. For that commitment — that total dedication of our lives to walking His way — He has vouched for you and for me. Not because you or I will live it perfectly, but because we are committed to living it perfectly, and will rise, confess, and return every time we fall short. Because of that commitment, on your part and on mine, Christ is fully committed to stand as the substitutionary recipient of God’s wrath and to leave you and me clean. He became sin for us. He has taken the blows that had to be delivered for the violation that truly was yours and mine. Christ accepted what you and I deserved — and you and I are free to live in the Liberty of Christ, not because we have done nothing, but because we have given everything: our commitment to live His words, to follow His way, and to trust that His way is true, good, and right.

The shape of the Christian life, accordingly, is a life of commitment to living His way. It is the shape of falling short, receiving forgiveness, attempting obedience, falling short, confessing, receiving forgiveness again, attempting obedience again, falling short again, and continuing this pattern for the entire course of your life and mine. With maturity, by enduring in resisting temptation and living the great commandment to love God and neighbor as self, character is developed. The goal is sanctification, of becoming the perfect man. Salvation is not in the not-doing of the various sins; that is a byproduct of the development of character and aiming at the high calling. Salvation comes to the man who gives his heart to acting out the words of Christ: the committed giving of oneself totally to the relationship; your salvation lives in your commitment to live as the perfect man. There is no softening of the goal; no expectation of defeat is admitted or considered. If there is failure, your faith in His sacrifice is complete, your acceptance of it unconditional and without doubt. Your commitment is to be like Him. Your relationship with the Father is restored by Christ’s bearing of what you owed. The only appropriate response is gratitude, humility, and obedience. The not-doing (submitting to temptation/addiction/yielding to flesh attraction) is what you aim at because you love the one who paid the price for you (Christ). The not-doing is ultimately an expression of love for the Father/the Almighty God, who experiences all, and to whom is the ground of being and existence.

This is why the impossible commands are not, in the Christian frame, a defeater of the gospel. They are the reason for the good news. As humans, we cannot be good enough to meet the standard of Christ’s perfection; “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. This is not a license to sin because we are not strong enough to meet perfection. This is a reason to be grateful for Christ establishing a way to restore a relationship with the Father. That gratitude is appropriate because He has satisfied both the requirements of a creation that enables the free will necessary to express love, and the need to fully express His essence, His hatred of sin, and the need to destroy every spot of imperfection in His creation. “…that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle… but that it should be holy and without blemish.”  Ephesians 5:27. The love of Christ is expressed by our commitment to live His way, obey His law, and not subject Him to the pain of our sin. We will fail; the commands are not easy; the flesh pull is strong; and no one does it perfectly. You cannot close the gap. The sacrifice of Christ is necessary to restore a relationship with the Father. The argument from impossibility is therefore not an argument against Christianity. It is an argument from within Christianity for the centrality of Christ.

What this means practically is that when you fall, you get up. You confess. You receive forgiveness. You try again. The temptation is to read the falls as evidence that the standard is wrong. The Christian reading is that the falls are evidence that you are a human being who needs a savior, and the gospel offers you that savior. If you are committed to living the perfection of Christ, every fall is an opportunity to be thankful for the gospel, the good news that Christ threaded the needle by disclosing His plan through prophecy while hiding it from Satan’s efforts to foil it. The cycle of fall and rise is not a failure of Christianity. It is the lived shape of Christianity in the world that fallen human beings actually inhabit. It is a remarkable plan, and it satisfies all the criteria for creating the world from nothing and establishing a meaningful relationship with the Creator and life.

III. Many paths up the mountain, and one top reached by one way

The second worry you raised — sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication — was the New Age mantra, “There are many paths up the mountain,” which attempts to counter the clear Biblical declaration of Christ as the only way. This concern addresses what appears to be the self-serving promotion of the Christian path and contrasts it with the obvious sincerity of spiritual seekers who embrace other traditions, not as rebels against Godliness, but as people who could not reconcile the language of the Bible with the realities of life. Is God going to condemn such people to hell because they could not comprehend the cryptic message of the Bible?

Other religions have moral teachings; all have serious adherents fully committed to living the Truth; all religions produce people who appear to live ordered and ethical lives. If Christianity is supposed to be the unique way, why does it look like one option among many roughly equivalent options? Why would a loving God set things up so that only those who happen to have been exposed to Christianity have access to salvation?

I want to make two distinctions here that I think the many paths framing collapses.

First, the many paths metaphor assumes that the goal is the same and only the routes differ. This is the assumption I think is wrong. The goal each religion proposes is not the same. Buddhism’s goal is the extinction of the self in impersonal nirvana, the cessation of desire, the recognition that all is suffering, and the understanding that the way out is non-attachment. Hinduism’s goal is multiple: moksha (release from the cycle of rebirth), reunion with Brahman, and the dissolution of the individual into the universal. Islam’s goal is submission to Allah, the doing of God’s will as expressed in the Quran and the Hadith, and ultimate paradise for those who have faithfully submitted. The New Age religion’s goal is self-actualization, the discovery of one’s authentic self, the realization of one’s own divinity. Christianity’s goal is reconciliation with the Father through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the destination being God’s dwelling with his redeemed people in the new creation.

These are not different routes up the same mountain. They are different mountains, with different summits and different things at the summits. The Buddhist nirvana and the Christian new creation are not the same destination reached by different paths. They are categorically different states. To equate them is not religious humility; it is conceptual confusion. The many paths metaphor only works if you ignore what each religion actually says about where it is going.

Second, the many paths framing assumes that the religions are roughly equivalent in their answers to the deepest questions: where did the universe come from, what is life for, what happens to us when we die, and how is the gap between human imperfection and divine perfection closed. I do not think the religions are roughly equivalent on these questions. I think Christianity gives answers that close the loop on the questions, and the other religions give answers that, when followed out, leave the questions still open in important ways.

Where did the universe come from? Christianity: from the Word of God, through whom and for whom all things were made, who is also the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Buddhism does not seriously engage with this question because it is a distraction from the practical task of liberation. Hinduism gives a multitude of competing accounts. Islam offers an answer (Allah created the universe), but it is sparse on mechanism and does not include the Logos-as-the-pattern-of-creation move that gives Christianity its connection between the rational structure of the world and the personal nature of God. New Age religion typically dissolves the question into vague cosmic-consciousness language.

What is life for? Christianity: to know God and enjoy a relationship with Him forever, to be conformed to the image of Christ, to participate in the redemption of the world, to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. The other religions offer answers, but in my reading, they do not close the loop. Buddhism’s answer reduces life to a problem to be escaped. Hinduism’s answer reduces life to a single cycle on an endless wheel. Islam’s answer is closer to the Christian answer but lacks the love-and-fellowship dimension that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes possible. New Age religion’s answer reduces life to self-expression, which collapses into incoherence as soon as you ask what the self is and what it should express.

What happens to us when we die? How is the gap closed between our imperfection and God’s perfection? Here, the differences are sharpest. The Christian answer — that Christ has borne what we deserved, that we are forgiven through his death, that we are raised through his resurrection, that the new creation is bodily — has no real parallel in the other religions. The Buddhist annihilation of the self is the opposite of resurrection. The Hindu reincarnation is the opposite of final redemption. The Islamic paradise is closer, but lacks the substitutionary atonement structure that addresses the gap between human guilt and divine holiness. The New Age elevation of the self is the opposite of the Christian crucifixion-and-resurrection-of-the-self.

The distinctive feature of the Christian claim is that other religions do not say what Christianity says. They have moral teachings that overlap because moral teachings across human cultures generally identify what humans find pleasurable (good) and its opposite. This polarity is intuitively satisfied and implemented in all moral systems. The love-your-neighbor command appears in Leviticus 19, and in other religious systems. It can be identified in some form in most enduring moral traditions. What no other religion has is the singular event of God-the-Son becoming incarnate, living the perfect human life, dying the substitutionary death, and rising bodily to inaugurate the new creation. No other religion has anything structurally similar to claim. Krishna and Arjuna had a wise conversation; Krishna did not die for Arjuna’s sins and rise from the dead. Muhammad received what he understood to be a revelation from Gabriel; he did not die for the sins of his followers, nor did he rise from the dead. Buddha realized that the world was suffering and that the path to liberation was the cessation of desire; Buddha did not die for the suffering of his followers and rise from the dead. The structural shape of the Christian claim has no real parallel.

This is the move I had to make to settle the many paths worry for myself. The question is not whether other religions also have moral wisdom. They do. The question is whether any of them has the structural shape of the gospel. Is life a permanent record of acts and their necessary consequence, or simply a mark in the sand for a moment that blows away into incoherent meaninglessness? Or is this a world where each moment is significant because it is felt exquisitely by God, and is part of the eternal record of credits and debits? I hold to the latter. A world of permanent significance allows for a world with meaning, a world that has consequence because of the pain, pleasure, and experience of life that it brings, has an additional level of gravity, reality, and significance that makes it worth living and living well. Christianity is unique in closing the gap. It allows God to express His wrath against imperfection without limit. Jesus Christ’s rising from the dead opened the possibility of the renewal of life after sin had condemned it to death. The resurrection was the inauguration of the new creation, in which God and man could restore a full relationship, in which man could be imperfect. It was necessary to create a world where man had the freedom to love God, as demonstrated by his obedience or reject God as evidenced by his worship other gods (sensual satisfaction). The answer is that other religions lack the same structural justification for meaning and the purpose of life and existence. Christianity is not one of many roughly equivalent religious options. It is the one religious option that has the structural shape of being true.

There was an important realization around this issue that finally allowed me to become a Christian. I participated in somewhere around fourty religions, and the people I traveled with in that spiritual journey, nearly every one of them was sincere, awake, and good-hearted. They were souls who were honestly reaching for God. I could not accept a Christianity that required me to condemn them wholesale as enemies of God. What freed me was noticing that Scripture itself holds together two sayings of Jesus that only sound like a contradiction, but resolved the tension within the Christian frame for me. In one context, He says, “He that is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). In another, He says, “He that is not against us is on our part” (Mark 9:40). I puzzled over these verses lightly in my youth to early adulthood as a Christian. Surprisingly, they were the key to resolving the conflict. I saw firsthand good people doing their best, but a scripture that condemned all who had not accepted Jesus as Lord. The resolution came when I saw that these two sayings describe two different states of the heart, not two contradictory rules. The sincere seeker who is honestly trying to do right and has not yet grasped Christ is not against Him — he is, in his groping, unfinished way, already turned toward the light he can see. But the man who has truly seen Christ and still turns deliberately away, who knows and refuses, has set himself against Him. The dividing line is not how much a person knows; it is the direction the heart finally faces once the light has actually reached it.

That distinction let me hold Christian doctrine as appropriately accounting for each soul’s culpability. This was an indicator of the truth of the path, the validity of the belief system. It allowed me to embrace what I saw that Christianity is uniquely true in its structural sense. The ontology, the existence of the creation as revealed in the Bible clearly corresponds to reality. It was that correspondence between scripture and reality was the source of the Conscious Point Physics as a description of what naturally followed/was clearly implied by scripture. The other aspect was the question of how the revelation/the Bible compares itself with other religions, other ways up the mountain. In truth, it is a logical necessity that there is  only one summit where God actually dwells. God in His manifestation of His nature, and His desire for humanity, and His plan for His creatures is not mutually contradictory. As the shema says, “Hear oh Isreal, the Lord our God is One.” There is only one God, and He has only one nature. The pinnacles of each religious mountain are not interchangeable. The summit are different. The choice of religion matters because that choice biases our actions toward reaching that goal.

After seeing the truth of the ontology, the accuracy of the description of the ground of being, I was certain this was the true religion, But, I wanted to know how much I could trust the literal words of the Bible. It was the split, the two ways that Jesus described those who were with Him and those who were not against Him that allowed me to trust the words of the Bible as a self consistent revelation. Framed in that way, I could see that my fellow travelers, my spiritual co-religionists I had searched with, are not my enemies — I can honor their sincerity, love them as God loves them, and still long to hand them the very thing I searched through forty religions to find. The  words and comands of the Bible and its good news, the gospel, does not oblige me to contempt; it obliges me to generosity, because I was once standing exactly where they stand now. It moves me to compassion. I know how lost I felt in the various religous paths I followed. All had good teachings, and were in various ways helpful to me to understand life. But to realize that the Bible is a book of compassion, that there is a place for redemption of those who are sincerely seeking, but have not found our understood the message, gave me a sense that I could defend and offer this path to others without the guilt of believing the path contained within it fatal errors that had to simply be ignored.

IV. The cultural questions and the rationalization of sin

You and I spent a significant part of the conversation on the cultural questions of the present moment, in particular, homosexuality, the love is love slogan, the Pride Month phenomenon, and the tolerance-as-virtue framing of contemporary discourse.

The cultural shift of the last sixty years has been engineered. It has not arisen organically from the discovery of new truths about human nature; it has arisen from the deliberate inversion of categories that the broader human tradition had previously held with near-universal consensus. The body was understood, across virtually every culture and every era of human history before the present, to have been made in a particular way and for particular purposes. Sexual union was understood to be between man and woman, oriented toward procreation and the bonding of the marriage relationship, with the moral framework around it serving to protect both the relational and the generative dimensions. This understanding is in Genesis. It is in Leviticus 18 and 20. It is in Romans 1. It is in 1 Corinthians 6. It is also in the moral traditions of cultures that have had no contact with the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures. The near-universality of the traditional understanding is not, in itself, an argument that the traditional understanding is right. But it is evidence that the contemporary inversion is not the discovery of an obvious truth that all previous generations missed.

The contemporary inversion has been accomplished primarily through the rhetorical strategy of moving the argument from the substantive question (what is sexual behavior for and what is its proper form?) to the tangential question (are you a kind person, are you tolerant, do you accept your neighbor?). The substantive question, when honestly engaged, has the answers it has had for most of human history. The tangential question, when substituted for the substantive question, allows the person who answers the substantive question correctly to be accused of failing the tangential question. You think homosexual practice is morally disordered? You must therefore hate homosexual persons. You hate. Hate has no home here. You are a bad person. The substitution is logically invalid — believing that a behavior is disordered does not entail hating the persons who engage in it; on the contrary, the love of the persons is what motivates the concern about the behavior — but the substitution is rhetorically effective. It moves the burden of proof from the side that has just departed from the universal moral tradition to the side that has continued to hold it.

The love-your-neighbor command is not violated by the refusal to celebrate what your neighbor’s flourishing is harmed by. The friend who watches another friend walk toward harm and says nothing, while smiling and affirming, is not being a friend. The friend who says I see what you are doing; I do not think it is right; I love you, and I am here when you need me, but I cannot celebrate this with you, is being a friend and loving his friend. The Christian framework treats the substantive moral question and the love-of-neighbor question as integrated rather than opposed. Go and sin no more, which Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11), is the model. He did not condemn her, but he did not celebrate her sin. He told her the truth about what she was doing and called her to a different life, in the context of having defended her from those who would have stoned her. The integration of mercy and moral clarity is the Christian standard.

The love is love slogan is, structurally, the rationalization-of-sin move that has appeared in every era of human moral failure. The slogan conflates categories. The love of friend for friend, parent for child, husband for wife, neighbor for neighbor — all of these are real and good. They are not all the same kind of love, and they do not all warrant the same kinds of expression. Treating all loves as equivalent is not a deeper recognition of the truth about love; it is the collapse of the categories within which love operates meaningfully. When everything is love, nothing is love specifically; the term loses the content that gave it weight in the first place. The slogan is therefore not a moral advance. It is a moral evacuation, dressed up in the language of moral advance.

When you encounter these arguments in the cultural air you breathe, the rhetorical pressure of the contemporary moment is intense and deliberate, and resisting it requires a stable reference frame from outside it. The Bible provides that reference frame. The historical Christian tradition provides it. Your own conscience, properly formed, provides it. What the contemporary moment provides is the constant pressure to substitute the tangential question for the substantive question and to be shamed for noticing the substitution. Do not let yourself be shamed or seduced by it. The substantive question has the answers it has always had. The persons who have been caught up in the disorder are to be loved, prayed for, befriended, witnessed to, and helped — they are not to be celebrated in their disorder. Celebration of the disorder is not love. The integration of clarity and mercy is what the Christian standard requires.

V. The pygmies, the never-heard, and the question of proportionate judgment

You raised, in a different language, a question that contributed to my search for truth in world religions in the first place: what about those who never heard? What about the pygmy in the rainforest, the medieval Japanese farmer, the pre-Columbian indigenous American — none of whom had access to the gospel through any cause of their own? Are they consigned to eternal conscious torment for failing to believe in someone they never had any way of hearing about?

Christian theology commonly settles this question in a simplistic blanket statement of condemnation of all who have not confessed the name of Christ, which is trivially proof-texted. I, of course, cannot give a definitive answer to this question, because I do not sit at the judgment seat, and I do not want to give any sense of leeway or downplay the necessity and benefit of bowing and confessing the name, “…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue should confess…” Philippians 2:10-11, and “…unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Isaiah 45:23. In the following are three considerations:

First, the Bible itself addresses this question more than the more aggressive forms of Christian apologetics usually acknowledge. Romans 1 says that the basic moral law is written on the conscience of every human being, and that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). The argument is that everyone has access to enough natural revelation to know that there is a moral order and that they have not lived up to it. Romans 2 extends this: For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves (Romans 2:14). The pygmy in the rainforest is not without moral knowledge. He knows that murder is wrong, that theft is wrong, that infidelity is wrong, that cruelty is wrong, in the same way that the educated Westerner knows it. The basic moral order is accessible to every human being who has not deliberately seared his conscience against it.

Second, the principle of proportionate judgment is explicitly stated in the New Testament. Luke 12:47-48: And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. The principle is that judgment is calibrated to the knowledge the person has. The man who knew the gospel and rejected it is more culpable than the man who never heard it and lived as faithfully as he could to the natural-revelation light he had. The judgment is not arbitrary or uniform. It is proportionate.

Third, the universal-reconciliation question, which the fellowship engaged at length in the Sunday meeting two weeks ago, is the broader theological territory within which the never-heard question sits. I lean tentatively toward the view that all people will eventually be reconciled to God through Christ, while acknowledging that this position runs counter to the mainstream Christian consensus and that I cannot settle it from the texts with the certainty I would like. I believe judgment is real. I believe nobody enters into communion with God for free. I believe Christ is the only gateway. What I do not know, and what I think nobody who is honest about the texts can claim to know with confidence, is the cost for those who do not in this life accept Christ’s sacrifice, and the temporal scope of their reconciliation. I trust that the judgment is both just and merciful in proportions I cannot fully calculate. I trust that the God who is described in Scripture as not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9) is acting consistently with that description in the administration of his judgment.

What I can say is that the question about the fate of the pygmies who never heard is not a decisive judgment against the plausible validity of Christianity and the overt/obvious scriptural claim of Christ as the only way to the Father. The Christian tradition has resources for engaging it. The natural-revelation framework, the proportionate-judgment principle, and the question of universal reconciliation provide a substantial space within which the question can be addressed without either dismissing it or capitulating to it. The pygmy in the rainforest who lived faithfully according to the natural-revelation light he had is not, in my reading of Scripture, in the same situation as the educated Western atheist who heard the gospel, rejected it, and lived satisfying his sensual desires, having rationalized that there is no judge other than self as law. The judgment is proportionate. The mercy is real. The Christ who died for the world (John 3:16) died for the pygmy as much as for the seminary professor. How the application of that death to the pygmy proceeds in cases where the pygmy has never heard of it is a question I hold with humility, trusting the character of the one who created the Law and administers the judgment.

VI. The telescope, the planted instrument, and the depth of life

Late in our conversation, you offered a new metaphor for the search for meaning and understanding, and the importance of commitment. You spoke of using a telescope. When held by hand, it is unsteady, and focusing on distant objects allows only the occasional glimpse of a target star. This brief, seldom-seen glimpse of the target does not allow for in-depth examination. The wide field allows it to be seen continuously as one unremarkable object among many, without significant distinction as far as its individual character. A narrow focus and a stable platform are required for the in-depth examination needed to characterize a heavenly body in detail. Without that detailed focus, all stars look the same. With the steady discipline of commitment to a single goal, the richness of life is found.

The image is an analogy for Michael’s life. He has produced the mandala, the catalog of all stars, types, and their relationship. He has mastered the wide-angle examination of life. The record of what Michael has produced is comprehensive and impressive. But it has not, in the lifetime of searching, and thirty years of cataloging the mandala specifically, allowed Michael to see any one star with the depth that requires sustained attention to a single object. The telescope keeps moving and the wide angle view of life is seen.

It can seem like a loss, an ignoring of the whole, to point the telescope in one direction and spend all one’s time focused on that single object. But the planted telescope does not require one to give up examining every other star in the universe. The instrument planted on the North Star does not mean you never look at anything else. It means you have a fixed reference frame from which everything else can be located. You can walk around. You can look at the near field. You can attend to your work, your relationships, and the immediate practical demands of an ordinary day. You can, and should, return frequently and regularly to the object of your committed standard, the North Star that orients all other stars in its relation. Commitment to understanding the center and knowing the details of the absolute standard of life is important to put all other worlds in proper perspective. Committing to living that single standard of truth enables you to judge if your standard is rightly chosen. If you think you are pointed at the North Star, and its position changes every night, you have not identified the absolute truth. Over time, watching the same target across years, you see what a wide-angle or uncommitted platform cannot see — the slow evolution of the object, the changes that emerge only with patient integration over long periods, the depth that requires the discipline of returning frequently and looking in the same direction with a steady gaze.

In my experience, commitment to the Biblical standard as true and judging all else by that standard is required to gain the benefits of a life regulated by that perspective. It is the planted telescope. The instrument is fixed on the resurrection of Christ as evidence of the efficacy of the work that Christ did, and is available to us. Why it was necessary and meaningful is key to understanding the purpose of life and the requirements for creating the universe. From that fixed point, everything else can be located. The other religions can be examined without anxiety because they are examined from a stable reference frame rather than held perpetually as candidate positions, one of which might be the right one. Cultural pressures can be evaluated without panic because the evaluator has a place to stand from which to measure them. Personal failures can be confessed and worked through without despair because the framework in which they appear is grace, not self-justification. The depth of life, understanding its purpose, method, and structure, arises logically and can be extracted with sufficient effort. The pearl of great price can be found if one sells everything to buy the field – total commitment is required to find, have, and own the pearl. That level of commitment to exploring the depth of your chosen path allows you to discern truth. The wide field and unstable platform do not allow for a detailed experience of the distant goal.

The commitment does not produce certainty about every question. I do not have certainty about the question of universal reconciliation. There are many specific theological points that the broader Christian tradition has debated for two thousand years. All will be resolved when we see Him face to face. Uncertainty about details should not be used as a barrier to making a full-hearted commitment to living the Biblical/Christ-centered life. The Biblical paradigm, with the words of Christ as the bedrock of truth, provides a stable reference frame for examining life’s complexities and moral dilemmas. Uncertainties about details should not be used as a disqualifier for commitment. The broad view, the wide field scan of all religions, easily identifies the bright star. The wide-field should be searched, but it should be done with the perspective of an intent to settle, to explore the committed path. Are other religions evil and only Christianity good? Whatever is wrong, not of God’s way, should be identified and spoken clearly. “…whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… of good report… think on these things.” Philippians 4:8. Identify what is good, and dwell on the truth, and put aside that which is false.

What we all want is the fruit of the planted telescope, but we cannot have it without the commitment to exploring its depth. Realizing the advantages of the planted telescope requires commitment. Nobody can decide what the most likely religion in which to find truth is but you. The choice is yours, and the consequences, for gain or loss, are only borne by you. The one thing that is certain is that without commitment, you will not experience the fruit and certainty that commitment brings. The choice to commit to the Christian standard as the load-bearing reference frame of your life is the responsibility of every soul, made alone, without the comfort or support of culture or academics. I made it almost 40 years ago and have not regretted it. Michael did not commit to dedicating his life to deep searching along a single theological path; instead, he produced the mandala. The fork in the road to commit or keep searching is one we all must make. The results/fruit of commitment vs. continual searching will necessarily follow.

VII. The addiction principle and the pre-made response

Late in the conversation, we moved to the question of habit and addiction. I told you that I gave up coffee in 1994 — that I had to, for health reasons, rather than as a spiritual discipline, although it should have been the motivation. The improvement in my clarity and emotional stability was obvious. But I continued using alcohol extremely moderately until about four years ago. I had used alcohol as a once-weekly celebration; pizza and beer at McMenamins, the local Portland brew pub, were my way to reward myself for the victory over another week. But even that small indulgence had a cost. I knew it and felt it. My emotional instability across the entire week was compromised, but I continued that habit for years. I want to develop this thread here because I think it connects to the broader pattern of your question about commitment.

The addiction principle, as I have come to understand it, is universal. Every human being is addicted to something. The thing varies — alcohol, food, work, sex, attention, validation, control, fear, anger, distraction, the endless scroll of digital media — but the underlying structure is the same. There is a particular activity or substance or pattern of behavior that the flesh wants more than it should want, that produces a short-term reward at the cost of long-term integrity, and that the person engages repeatedly despite knowing that the engagement is costing him. The Christian tradition has been working on this pattern for two thousand years and has never claimed that human beings, in their natural state, can simply stop being addicted to whatever they are addicted to by an effort of will alone, but it does require commitment and will. The pattern requires what I call the pre-made response.

The pre-made response is the decision you make in advance about how you will respond when temptation arises. The decision is often made poorly in the moment of temptation. In that moment, the cognitive resources required to make the decision are overwhelmed by the flesh. The rationalization is fluent, the immediate appeal is overwhelming. The decision has to have been made beforehand, in a state of clarity, and carried into the moment of temptation as a settled commitment rather than an open question. No, I am not going to do that. I decided not to. I am not deciding now; I decided then. The decision stands.

I realized the two most dangerous moments for any addiction are the moment of pain and the moment of celebration. The moment of pain — the bad day, the relational rupture, the financial setback, the feeling of failure — produces the impulse to numb. The addictive substance is the available numbing agent. The moment of celebration — the good day, the success, the relational high — produces the impulse to amplify. The addictive substance is the available amplifier. Both moments require a pre-made response. The response is the same: no, I am not going to use the substance to numb the pain or amplify the joy; the substance is not going to be how I regulate life; I have decided this, and the decision stands. The pre-made response, the commitment, is what makes the difference between a person who is being lived by the addiction and a person who is living with the temptation, but handles it by simply saying no, rationalized by the refreshed commitment. And yes, “Just say no” is possible and necessary. Support and continued rationalization are necessary to support the commitment. The large perspective on the deep purpose of life helps us recognize how addiction plays into the fact of God’s experience of living through us. We are given freedom to choose, to modestly appreciate pleasure. “Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.” Proverbs 25:16

Of course, the commitment to sobriety, moderation in pleasure, and proper time connects to the broader question of what to commit to and when. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 The same structure that operates in the alcohol-addiction case operates in the searcher-finder case. The searcher’s moment of decision to commit is also a moment of temptation. He faces the temptation to keep the search open, to not commit, to imagine that the unsettled state is somehow safer than the committed state. Having committed to commit, the searcher girds himself with armor against the next temptation to continue the search as a seeker. The newly committed man must establish his defenses and prepare a pre-made response for the next moment, in which the reasoned response is always the same: no. I can explore, study, and learn, but now my search comes from a bastion of commitment, rather than the open fields of seeking.

We must live in the world. New ideas will continue to arise. Is this new argument a totally new perspective, never before considered? Compare it with the established commitment; does it stand up under all imaginable angles of attack? Ask for the support of your Christian brothers in meeting the objection. The seduction to leave the fortress of faith and brotherhood is real, but it should meet the same level of rigor as was applied in choosing your faith. Is this new perspective really truer and better? All such seductions should be met with the same cool reason and willingness to be proven wrong. Trust in the scholarship of the millennia of tradition, but remain open to being wrong, but not flighty. Approach all new offers to a new faith as seduction. The seeking is from the perspective of commitment, open but skeptical. The commitment stands; the response is that I am not returning to the position of an uncommitted seeker every time I hear a new opinion. I hear, I engage strongly, I defend with my best arguments, I understand the objections and new offer, and I continue to weigh the claims against those of my faith. I remain skeptical until time, counsel, and my heart have processed that opening thoroughly – rather than reopening the question every time the cultural air shifts, every time I encounter a new objection, or every time my own emotional state would prefer continued searching to commitment. Having explored, rationalized, and committed, the pre-made response makes the difference between a life that lives the commitment and a life that endlessly reconsiders and returns to foundational seeking without an anchor to stand upon.

Lest you think I am confusing commitment with stubbornness in the face of reality, please note that I think everyone must make an adult commitment to their religion. And everyone should be constantly testing the truth. Your birth religion does not determine its truth. You may have grown up on a metaphorical island, a monoculture that did not allow for comparison. As you grow up, expose yourself to new ideas, and continually test the rationality of your commitment. “…be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you…” 1 Peter 3:15. Does it meet the tests of freedom? “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free…” Galatians 5:1. Is your life showing fruit? “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance…” Galatians 5:22–23. Be open to seeing the world through new eyes. Defend your commitment with honesty and rationality. If it is true, it will stand up against the temptation to worship false gods. “…above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” Ephesians 6:16. Stand tall, be vulnerable, and be a champion. If you are convinced you are wrong after all, you have earned your right to change allegiance. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.

VIII. Commitment under partial knowledge

The hardest version of the question is the worry that commitment under partial knowledge is itself a failure of intellectual integrity. If you do not know with certainty that the Bible is the word of God, that Christ rose from the dead, that the Christian framework closes the loop in ways the other frameworks do not, then how can you commit? Isn’t the honest position one of continued search until you find something that justifies commitment with certainty?

The Christian answer is that certainty in the deductive sense is not available for any of the deepest commitments human beings make, and that requiring it before committing is a recipe for never committing to anything. You cannot prove with deductive certainty that your wife loves you. You cannot prove that your closest friend would not betray you under sufficient pressure. You cannot prove that the basic structures of reality you depend on — that the sun will rise tomorrow, that your memory of the last hour corresponds to events that actually happened, that other people have the same kind of inner life that you do — are what you assume them to be. The argument from the requirement of certainty would, if pressed consistently, paralyze every commitment in your life. Nobody actually lives that way. Everybody commits to many things under partial knowledge. The question is not whether you will commit under partial knowledge. The question is what you will commit to.

The Christian framework, on inductive grounds, is the framework I commend to you as the framework most worth committing to. The argument is not that you should commit because committing is good in itself. The argument is that the Christian framework has the structural shape of being true: it closes the loop on the deepest questions in a way the other frameworks do not, it is historically anchored in events that the early witnesses were willing to die for, it has produced — across two thousand years of imperfect human implementation — more of the moral and cultural goods that make human life flourish than any other framework has produced, and it provides a stable reference frame from within which the depth of life can be seen. The argument is not deductive. It is the cumulative weight of converging considerations, none of which is conclusive on its own, all of which together produce the inductive case that commitment is the rational move.

Paul’s language for this, in Romans 5, is the language I want you to carry forward from this essay. We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:3-5). The Christian life is the long working-out of the commitment through the actual texture of a life — the falls, the rises, the cultural pressures, the personal failures, the unanswered questions, the seasons of certainty and the seasons of doubt — and what the working-out produces, by God’s grace, is character and hope. The hope is not ashamed because it is grounded in the love of God, which the Spirit has poured into the heart of the committed disciple. The commitment is what allows the working-out to proceed. Without the commitment, there are only the unsteady, random views through the unplanted telescope.

You know the material. You can articulate the objections better than most adult Christians can articulate their defense of the faith. What you lack is not knowledge. What you lack is the moment of commitment that turns the knowledge into a life direction. That moment is available whenever you are ready to take it. I am here when you want to talk it through further. The fellowship is here. Your father is here. Your mother is here. The conversation does not end when this essay ends. But the choice is yours. The fork in the road is the actual fork. Michael stayed on the path we were both on in High School and College, and, in the last 30 years, has produced the mandala, the detailed map of all of life’s roads. I chose a different path almost 40 years ago, developed Conscious Point Physics, which expands the first few verses of the Bible into millions of words, and spent 30 years as a counselor helping people make that choice. The choice is always available. “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” (Led Zeppelin)

IX. Closing

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

— Romans 5:3-5

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

— 1 Corinthians 13:11-13

The second of these passages names the structural condition under which all human commitments are made. Now we see through a glass, darkly. The partial knowledge is the condition of being human in the present age. The full knowledge — face to face — is reserved for the age to come. Within the present age, what abides is faith, hope, and love. The three are not three different things; they are three aspects of the one committed life, in which faith is the trust that what cannot yet be fully seen will one day be seen in full, hope is the anticipation of that fullness, and love is the way the committed life is lived in the meantime. The greatest of the three is love because love is what the fullness will turn out to have been about all along.

The Christian life is the life lived in faith, hope, and love under the condition of partial knowledge, with the planted telescope fixed on the resurrection of Christ as the load-bearing fact from which the rest of reality can be located. The commitment is not made under conditions of certainty. The commitment is made under conditions of inductive sufficiency, with the trust that the one in whom it is made will, in His own time, complete what was promised. Romans 5 names the working-out. 1 Corinthians 13 names the epistemological frame within which the working-out occurs. Both apply to us all, and we pray, by God’s grace, for the entire course of our lives that it opens, matures, and bears the fruit of the spirit.

We are all in this together. We have a fellowship that loves each other. Your family loves you. That love is not conditional on your decision. But I would much rather you decide for the planted telescope of Biblical revelation than the unsteady one held by human reason and theory. I have seen both lives. The planted one is the one I commend to you. The commitment is yours to make.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38