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

260611 – CPP and Dark Matter Primer

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 12, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

What Dark Matter Actually Is

An Introduction to Conscious Point Physics

by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
6/11/2026 

Joelle, this is the conversation we had, written down so you can read it at your own pace, go back over the parts that didn’t land the first time, and have something to hand to the next person who asks. I’m going to walk you through it the same way I did on the phone — from the ground up, no physics background assumed — and this time I’ll finish the part we didn’t get to before your call came in.

By the end, you’ll understand what dark matter is. Not “what we think it might be.” What it is. And you’ll understand why that matters in life beyond physics.

Why I’m telling you this

You know my story: I came to Jesus because of the physics. The conventional intelligent design arguments — fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, the improbability of it all — those are good arguments. I respect them. But they’re conventional, and they haven’t convinced the world’s masses. They argue that there must be a Designer, but they don’t show you the Designer’s hands actually doing the work, moment by moment. It’s a good enough story for believers to strengthen their faith. And some unbelievers, Lee Strobel comes to mind, are moved by this. Often, the committed materialists, the more science-oriented skeptics, and secular atheists believe the questions of existence and evolution can be answered by evolution and relativity.

Conscious Point Physics, CPP, is a theory of physics that came to me gradually over the years since a profound March 1987 high-dose oral cannabis altered state experience. The fundamental insight from the trip was the realization that the universe was composed of points of consciousness originating in the mind of God. These Conscious Points followed the rules He declared in their relationship with each other. The particles moved a certain amount depending on the type of particle and the distance between them. From this simple insight, we derive the behaviors and phenomena that physics observes: particles, forces, and gravity, and it predicts the composition of the spherical halos surrounding galaxies that we call dark matter.

Dark matter is a perfect entry point for being convinced that the universe we perceive as physical reality is composed of Conscious Points. It will be the perfect object lesson, illustrating that matter and energy are manifestations of consciousness’s ability to see itself. It is this insight that begs the question of where the Conscious Point comes from. It comes from the mind of God looking back at itself.

The current state of science is that nobody knows what dark matter is. You’re not a physicist, and you’ve heard of it. It’s a public debate, and it’s a scientific mystery. Scientists have many different ideas about what it might be, but all of them fail. One week it is this theory, and next week it will be another. There is no candidate that meets the criterion of how Dark Matter behaves. It’s all theoretical. It is one of the great open mysteries of physics: we can see its gravitational effects everywhere — galaxies spin too fast, light bends too much, the universe is structured like a giant web — but no one has ever caught a particle of it, and no one can say what it’s made of.

CPP says exactly what it’s made of. And the answer falls out of the theory that explains what particles are, what energy is, why light is both a particle and a wave, and why particles are both waves and particles. It explains what gravity and magnetism are. It explains how particles can turn into photons, and how photons can turn into matter. I didn’t go hunting for a dark matter explanation; it just became obvious when I was writing the intelligent design essay I prepared a couple of weeks ago. CPP explains the Big Bang, the expanding universe, the first few moments of the universe, and now, apparently, Dark Matter. It’s just a natural extension of how the universe formed. looked at what I’d just written about how quark Conscious Points interacted with each other and realized: that’s dark matter. Grok had suggested this a year earlier, but I had not pursued deriving it. When I realized how quark DPs interacted, I realized this could be the missing piece in terms of bringing scientists to believe that God exists, and a scientific discovery that would also change the world.

So here we go, from the beginning.

The two kinds of things that exist

In CPP, there are two foundational kinds of Conscious Points.

First: The movable Conscious Points (CPs). These are the “stuff” of the universe — the actors, the pieces on the board. There are four types:

• a plus electron-type Conscious Point (+eCP)
• a minus electron-type Conscious Point (−eCP)
• a plus quark-type Conscious Point (+qCP)
• a minus quark-type Conscious Point (−qCP)

Every particle you’ve ever heard of — electrons, quarks, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, photons — is built out of these four types and nothing else.

Second: Grid Points (GPs). These are stationary conscious points. These are the background of space itself. This is the chessboard that the pieces move on. Here’s a simple first picture: imagine stacking dice into a big block, and marking every corner where the dice meet. Now throw away the dice and keep only the marked corners. That array of points is something like the grid that underlies space. Each of those points is a GridPoint, a GP.

But the real grid isn’t cubic like dice. The real geometry of space is built on a figure called the 600-cell — a four-dimensional hyper-icosahedron. An ordinary die (a cube) has 8 corners; an icosahedron has 12; the 600-cell has 120 vertices, and inside it you can find exactly 600 tetrahedra. The tetrahedron is a four-sided/four-cornered pyramid shape. My wife, Margo, named the book about all this Tetrahedra All the Way Down. There are 600-cells smaller than Planck’s constant (10^-35 meter) and 600-cells the size of the universe. All of them are composed of tetrahedra.

Two things about the 600-cell worth knowing even as a beginner:

1. It’s four-dimensional. Each grid point has coordinates not just in x, y, and z but also in a fourth spatial coordinate. This fourth dimension is not time — it’s a fourth direction of space. It can’t be visualized in 3D space where we live because we don’t know where to graph the fourth dimension.
2. Its proportions are governed by the golden ratio, φ (phi) ≈ 1.61803399 — the ratio you see in seashells, sunflowers, and classical architecture. The geometry of the 600-cell is filled with φ, and that single ratio, multiplied and combined in lawful ways, generates the predictable numerical relationships that show up throughout the theory’s results.

All of space is densely packed and nested with these 600-cells — small ones, larger ones, side by side and layered, from the center of the universe to its edge. And the Grid Points never move. They are the chessboard. The Conscious Points, the CPs, are the chess pieces. The board is fixed; the pieces move on it.

The rules of the game

The Conscious Points obey the rules God declared. There are nine axioms in the full theory, but for today, you need only three behaviors that are embedded within the 9 axioms.

1. Opposite charges attract, and like charges repel. A plus and a minus pull together; two pluses (or two minuses) push apart. This is the familiar electrical rule.
2. Quark-type points, qCPS, attract each other regardless of sign. A qCP and any other qCP, regardless of charge — plus-plus, plus-minus, minus-minus, doesn’t matter — always attract. This extra attraction is called the strong force in the context of the force between protons and neutrons inside the nucleus, and they call it the color force when talking about quarks attracting quarks. The color force has nothing to do with color; they just made up the name to give it a name. It’s neither; it’s just a rule that quarks move toward each other when they get the message of the qCPs near them. The strong force is the glue that holds atomic nuclei together. The color force is the glue that holds quarks together. The rules of qCP-qCP interaction reflect the underlying reality of this type of force.
3. Every Conscious Point moves by perceiving its surroundings, computing how to respond, and then displacing and moving to the next position the next Moment. This is the PCD cycle: Perceive, Compute, Displace. Every CP, every Moment, perceives the stress of the space around it, computes where the steepest gradient of stress lies (what I call the Space Stress Vector), and moves to a new GP/GridPoint in that direction. This happens about 10⁴⁴ times per second. Time itself is made of these Moments — reality is a succession of PCD cycles, like frames of a film.

Two technical terms you’ll hear me use:

• SSV — Space Stress Vector. A measure of how much “stress” (concentration of charge, energy, activity) there is at a place in space, and in what direction it changes most steeply.
• PSR — Planck Sphere Radius. How far the message from each GridPoint goes out in one Moment. Light travels at one PSR per Moment. Mass cannot go that fast; it can only go a portion of a PSR each Moment. The amount a CP moves in a Moment depends on the sum of the stress it is experiencing. Each stress comes from a different direction. If the stresses are equal from all directions, there is no movement, because the SSV_net is zero. If there is a high net stress at a GP → the CP on that GP takes long steps in the direction of that net stress.  Likewise, low stress →  movement/displacement is a small percentage of the PSR.  When there is a high SSV_absolute in a location, the PSR is smaller, which is why there is space contraction, which produces time dilation. Gravity shows up because the PSR is smaller in the direction nearer another mass.

The movement rule, in plain language: things flow in the direction of where there is the greatest gradient/difference in stress. It is somewhat like moving from a crowded area toward an empty area. That is diffusion, like a drop of ink spreading through water. This is a little different; it’s like a ball rolling off the top of a mountain. It will roll down the steepest side. Each point computes the direction of the steepest change in its current stress.

“Let there be light”

Now, creation.

In the beginning, God created all the Conscious Points that will ever exist — something on the order of 10⁹⁰ of them, an unimaginable number — sit stacked on just thirteen grid points at the center of the universe. All the CPs of the universe sit on one central point and its twelve nearest neighbors. This is one of the twelve vertices of one icosahedral cell around the center in a 600-cell. The CPs are literally superimposed, all sitting atop one another on the same GP. They are perfectly static before the creation began.

Then God said, Let there be light — and the PCD cycles began.

Each point perceived: inward, toward the center, the stress is unimaginably high — 10⁹⁰ points stacked on thirteen locations. Outward from the 12 points on the surface of the icosahedron, beyond the cluster, the stress is zero — there’s nothing out there. The outward-pointing gradient is overwhelmingly steeper than the stress moving toward the center of the icosahedron. So when God said, “let there be light,” and the CPs began to perceive the SSV, and SSV gradient on their GP, they each saw this enormous contrast in SSV coming from the direction where “everything was stacked on top of the local 12 neighbors” and “the nothing, the zero SSV coming from the volume outside the little patch” and the SSV gradient was extreme. The PSR is determined by the absolute SSV at each GP. The PSR changed each Moment, and so the speed of light was variable. The net effect is that the PSR increased exponentially during the first trillion seconds, creating what is called inflation.

This is the Big Bang. This is the period when the CPs took their first major steps after “let there be light.” It is this era that physicists call the inflation era. In CPP, it lasts roughly a trillion moments — about 10¹² PCD cycles, ending around 10⁻³² seconds after the beginning. After that, the superimposition of CPs had stopped, and the contrast relaxed enough that the points settled into ordinary motion: they kept their velocities, like shells fired from a gun, coasting outward ever after. The universe has been expanding ballistically since.

And through all of it, the grid never moved. The board stayed fixed; the pieces flew outward across it.

One more thing about the inflation era, that first trillion moments was a melee, and tiny imperfections — little unevennesses in how the points dispersed — got locked in during inflation. They were microscopic then. But every imperfection laid down in those first moments got stretched as the universe expanded, and stretched, and stretched. That is important for understanding how the universe created the filaments of galaxies and huge voids where there are no galaxies.

The universe freezes out, one bond at a time

Picture the young universe: a furiously hot swarm of plus and minus eCPs and qCPs, all attracting and repelling and colliding. CP pairs form constantly. The qCPs bond as plus and minus pairs to form quark Dipole Particles, qDPS. But the collisions are so violent in the early universe that most pair bonds get broken as fast as they form. Binding can’t stick until the universe cools below the binding energy. Each time the temperature drops past a threshold, a new kind of object “freezes out” and becomes permanent. It happens in sequence:

First freezing — the Quark Dipole (QDP). A +QCP and a −QCP bind. They’re held by both the electrical attraction (plus-minus) and the strong force (quark-quark) — double-glued. Once the universe cools below their breaking energy, QDPs are stable in low-temperature conditions. They break in colliders

Second freezing — the Electron Dipole (EDP). A +ECP and a −ECP bind. Electrical attraction only, so it’s a weaker bond and freezes out later, but once frozen, likewise stable.

Third freezing — the Hybrid Dipole (hDP). A quark-type CP and an electron-type CP bind across families: a +QCP with a −eCP (type A), or a −QCP with a +ECP (type B). Together, types A and B are the hDPs.

Then the hTetra. hDPs carry an exposed quark end, and quark ends attract every other quark end via the strong force. So hDPs lock together — a type A and type B hDP will interlock and arrange themselves into a tetrahedron: the hybrid tetrahedron, or hTetra. Visualize it by forming a U with your thumb and index finger on one hand.  Do the same with the other, and interlock the U from your right and left hands. The 4 tips of your thumb and index fingers are the points of the tetrahedron.  The key fact: an hTetra is more stable than the loose HDPs that formed it, so every HDP in the universe ends up incorporated into an hTetra. There are no free-floating HDPs anywhere — they are swept up and bound as hTetras.

So when the dust settles, space everywhere is filled with three kinds of stable, neutral, bound objects:

• eDPs — electron dipoles
• qDPs — quark dipoles
• hTetras — hybrid tetrahedrons

This is the permanent furniture of space — what CPP calls the Dipole Sea, or DP Sea. It fills the universe, and it will stay this way forever.

Now we watch what happens to the qDPs and hTetras in that list. They aggregate around the imperfections formed during the Big Bang inflation era, eventually forming galactic-sized halos that attract protons and neutrons, which congeal into stars and galactic cores. You have just met dark matter.

Chains, woolly bears, and the cosmic web

Now we build a structure.

A qDP has a plus end and a minus end. So when another qDP drifts by, its minus end can latch onto the first one’s plus end. This process continues, forming a plus-minus, plus-minus, plus-minus chain. And these chains aren’t held by mere electrostatic attraction — every link is also strong-force-bonded, qCP to qCP, double-glued. QDP chains are tough.

Now the eDPs floating everywhere look at this chain and see exposed pluses and minuses all along the qDP chain. An eDP swings its minus end to weakly bind to a plus qCP on the qDP chain.  The plus end of the eDPs weakly bonds to the minus qCP. More than one eDP end can bind around the circumference of each qCP in the qDP chain.  This creates a coating around the entire qDP chain, preventing clumping and forming what is called a glueball. The chain grows a thick, fuzzy coat of EDPs, like the caterpillar we call a woolly bear. It’s also like the bar magnet bristling with iron filings. The qDP chain is a long, wiggly, fuzzy strand.

And remember those imperfections locked in during inflation? These chains are the imperfections that have grown up. As the universe expands, the strands get stretched — and more EDPs keep settling into the coat as it stretches — and stretched again, until structures that began at a subatomic scale, 10⁻²⁰ meters, have been drawn out to 10²⁰ meters: tens of thousands of light-years. They kept their shape from when they were small. The thread-like pattern laid down in the first trillion moments is now written across the sky.

Have you seen those pictures of the universe at the largest scale — galaxies arranged not randomly but along filaments, like a vast spiderweb? Astronomers call it the cosmic web, and nobody in conventional physics can tell you why the universe is webbed rather than smooth. In CPP, it’s obvious: the web is the stretched-out qDP chain network. The filaments are woolly bears writ large, with galaxies forming around those qCPs in the qDP chain that attracted other smaller qDP chains, developing what became the spherical galactic halos that attracted mass that congealed into stars and galactic cores.

The gathering: nucleation points

Here’s the next move, and it’s the heart of the dark matter story.

Not every qDP got woven into a chain. And remember, there are hTetras out there too, drifting free, probably as chains, depending on the environment’s temperature. But every one of them carries strong-force attraction points. The qCPs embedded in those chains are powerful strong-force attractors. So the free qDPs and hTetras migrate. But they don’t turn into a single round dense all-qDP mass ecause they are prevented from getting too close by the woolly-bear coat of eDPs surrounding the qDP chains. The qDPs crowd in as close as they can, up to a maximum density at the center, but fairly uniform in density across the galactic diameter. They gather around the knots/nodes form in the early universe, and form a chain network of globs of qDPs and hTetras that become the galactic halos.

Over cosmic time, this sorts the universe into two kinds of regions:

• Around the chain knots: dense gatherings of QDPs and hTetras — every quark-bearing object in the neighborhood has been drawn in. These are the nucleation points.
• Everywhere else: In the interstellar space, only eDPs exist. The empty stretches between filaments hold no quark-type matter at all — it has all migrated to where the attraction is.

What gravity is

Now it is time to talk more about what gravity is in CPP. This is important because the qDP chains and hTetra chains are drawn toward the galactic DM halos.

Remember the PSR — the distance a Conscious Point moves each moment, shorter where stress is high, longer where stress is low. Now, picture a particle sitting near a dense region. On its dense side (the side closer to a mass), space is stressed more: short steps. On its empty side, space is relaxed: CPs take long steps in their thermal random walk in the outer region. Therefore, Moment after Moment, each CP in the DP Sea (or inside the mass) takes long steps in one way and short steps the other — and the net effect is a steady drift toward the dense region.

That drift is gravity. Gravity isn’t a separate force that has to be added to the theory; it’s the automatic consequence of the PCD cycle operating in a stress gradient. Mass concentrations create stress; stress shortens steps on the near side; everything nearby drifts in.

So those nucleation-point gatherings of qDPs and hTetras that form the galactic halos are regions of high mass density and high SSV (compared to the low density of the intergalactic space). Therefore, the galactic halos of DM are gravitational wells. The massive qDP and hTetra chains are not buffeted by collisions with comparable-mass objects in the thermal soup of the DP Sea; thus, their migration toward the galactic halos is unimpaired. The eDPs cannot migrate toward the galactic halos very quickly because they are high in number, small, and are dispersed by thermal collision.

Quarks, in brief — and why it matters here

To finish the picture, I need to tell you what ordinary matter is, because ordinary matter is the stuff that falls into those wells. I’ll keep this short — it’s a whole conversation of its own. It involves mass, spin, Zitterbewegung oscillations, and the origin of neutrinos.

A quark is what you get when a free, unpaired qCP gathers a cloud around itself. Take a lone +qCP: every nearby qDP orients its minus end toward that central plus qDP. The presence of the unpaired +qCP forms a polarized cloud. In addition, a passing qDP gets captured into orbit around this central qDP and polarized cloud assembly. That captured tangential velocity qDP begins to orbit, which gives the quark its characteristic spin that all fermions have (objects with 1/2 Planck’s constant of spin). That object — central +QCP, polarized QDP cloud, orbital QDP — is an up quark. This is the simplest quark.

A down quark is an up quark that has captured an electron. The electron’s central −eCP dives to the heart of the quark and sets up a perpetual in-and-out radial oscillation (called Zitterbewegung — “trembling motion” — ZBW for short). And the electron’s now-surplus orbital EDP spins away free: that spinning EDP is an electron neutrino, which is why neutrinos fly off whenever a proton captures an electron. The conversion of the up quark to a down quark converts the proton (Up UP Down quark) into a neutron (Down Down Up quarks). Nobody in conventional physics can tell you what a neutrino is. In CPP the electron neutrino is simply a spinning eDP.  A spinning qDP is a muon neutrino, and a spinning hTetra is a tau neutrino.

One of the principles of fermionic mass formation is that all charged fermionic masses form around free, unpaired charges. A lone plus or minus will polarize the DP sea around it. The free qCP or free eCP will polarize DP clouds around it, drawing them closer and thereby creating a condensed region of ordered eDPs and qDP chains. This condensation and ordering of the DP Sea is what energy is. That condensed order of qDPs and eDP and h Tetras compose the mass of a particle. The bound, paired-up Sea objects — eDPs, qDPs, hTetras — have no exposed/naked/unpaired CPs that will polarize and condense to form a mass. This is why the qDPs and eDPs stay in the quiet background.

Baryons: three quarks on an hTetra

Here’s the part we didn’t get to before your call arrived.

A baryon is a particle made of three quarks. The two baryons that matter are the ones you’re made of:

• a proton = two up quarks + one down quark
• a neutron = two down quarks + one up quark

And here’s how the three quarks hold together: they assemble on an hTetra. The hTetra — that little tetrahedron of interlocked hybrid DPs — serves as the structural scaffold, its two strong-force vertices and two electric-only charged vertices anchor the three quarks into a single bound particle. The quarks have an open eCP vertex. The proton is a +eCP at its open vertex, and the neutron has a -eCP at its open vertex. The hTetra and qDP chains are the background Sea of DM composing galaxies. The hTetra is also the skeleton inside every proton and neutron in your body. (Here we see another example of the  fact that the universe is composed of tetrahedra all the way down.)

Baryons form by accidental collisions between the open vertex of quarks and hTetras. As the universe cools, quarks and hTetras collide and bond when properly oriented.  If the energy of the thermal bath of the DP Sea is lower than the bonding energy of the quark-hTetra bond, then the quark-Tetra bonds remain stable. In the right orientation, a proton forms. The two up quarks and one down quark bind to the vertices of an hTetra to form a proton. Two down quarks and one up quark bind on the open vertices of the hTetra to form a neutron. This depends on the open vertex of the charged quark and its ability to bond to the charges on the vertices of the hTetras. The point of all this is to justify that protons and neutrons are massive objects – concentrations of CPs that will not be hindered in their migration by collisions toward the massive objects, such as planets, stars, galaxies, and halos of Dark Matter. The baryons (protons and neutrons) formed in the early universe and were scattered somewhat uniformly through vast expanses of space when they were formed, but the baryons were attracted to the Dark Matter halos, which accumulated sufficient baryonic mass to form stars and eventually galaxies.

The reveal

Now all the pieces are in place. We can see what Dark Matter is, how it nucleated, how it accumulated, how it attracted baryonic mass, and how it became the womb of the galaxy.

Dark matter is the aggregation of qDPs and hTetras in the region of the galactic halo.

That’s it. That’s the answer to one of the biggest open mysteries in physics. The qDPs and hTetras froze out in the early universe, formed chains, and other qDPs and hTetras, and toward these points of strong-force concentration. The chains spread, and each of the qCPs along the qDP and hTetra chains became knots of qDP and hTetra accumulation along the stretched chain network. The knots eventually became the halos of dark matter, which are the wombs of galaxies.

This checks out against the criteria that astronomers actually observe:

Why does it gravitate? Because qCPs on the chain of early forming qDP and hTetra chains are nucleation points that attract more qDP and hTetra chains from their local environment. The first chains formed during the inflationary epoch serve as nucleation points for qDPs and hTetras.  As the DM volume increases, its gravitation increases. The increase in gravitational force attracts mass more strongly, resulting in a more rapid accumulation of DM. The Dark Matter underlying galaxies is simply concentrated regions of qDP chains and hTetras. Again, the tiny regions of qDP chain asymmetry in the early universe, formed during the inflation era, attract qDP chains and hTetras from the surrounding space. The regions of high qDP concentration become regions of higher qDP concentration. Regions of high qDP concentration create SSV gradients relative to regions with lower qDP, hTetras, and eDP concentrations, resulting in a greater gravitational gradient. The qDPs and hTetras drift toward the DM concentrations faster than the eDPs due to a high thermal-collision differential. The qDPs and hTetras migrate downward; the eDPs are slowed by thermal collisions and do not migrate. This creates a region of space with a depleted population of qDPs and hTetras. This results in the two distinct regions: the intergalactic region with high eDPs, and the intragalactic/DM halo regions with high qDPs and a high Tetra chain population.

Why is DM dark? The qDPs and hTetras fill and contribute as the medium of light conduction through space. It does not interact with light because it is the light-conducting medium. It is denser than intergalactic space, being qDPs and hDPs, so it refracts light, but it does not glow, and you cannot bounce photons off of it.  A QDP or hTetra has every plus matched to a minus, every quark end locked to another quark end; there is no energetic release or absorption that makes it glow or block light. It is homogeneous, so it does not scatter. DM has no property that allows it to shine, nothing to absorb, nothing to scatter. It gravitates, and it does nothing else you could see. That’s the exact observed signature of dark matter. Conventional physics has no particle that behaves that way. The qDP and hTetra are not in the conventional physics glossary.

Why does every galaxy sit inside a dark matter halo? Because the order of events of its formation is as follows: dark matter gathers first, and gathers mass around the nucleation points under the influence of the strong force as the universe expands. Then the baryons formed throughout the universe as the temperature dropped, and they were attracted to the DM gravitational wells. Protons and neutrons rained into the QDP/hTetra clouds, gas pooled, stars lit, galaxies grew — each one cradled inside the dark-matter gathering. The visible galaxy is the bright sediment at the bottom of an invisible well.

Why do galaxies line up along a cosmic web? Because the nucleation points sit on the stretched QDP chain network, the inflated remnant of imperfections from the first trillion moments. The web in the sky is the fossil of the universe’s first instants.

Four mysteries are answered by the theory’s already-contained structure. Dark matter arises as simply another natural configuration of the 4 CPs that form mass, energy, gravity, photons, and quantum mechanical phenomena. Conventional cosmology has had to resort to inventing undiscovered particles to fill the gap. The qDPs and hTetras were already there, demanded by the freezing sequence. I just hadn’t thought about the fact that the qDPs and hDPs will not remain independent because of their strong charge, and had not thought about the fact that they would be covered with eDPs to prevent them from compressing into a galactic-sized glueball until I was writing the Intelligent Design paper a couple of weeks ago.  When I saw that, I immediately recognized this as the bridge between conventional physics and the metaphysics of the Conscious Points, and that the Mind of God is the origin of the Conscious Points, DM, and the rest of the visible/physical universe.

Why you can trust this — and why it matters

Lots of people have theories. Why take this one seriously?

Because CPP doesn’t ask you to take it on my say-so. The discipline of the program is zero-parameter prediction: we derive numbers from the axioms — no knobs, no fitting, no adjusting constants to match the data — and we check them against what’s measured. As of this writing, the program has made over a hundred such predictions, which are publicly registered. Every paper goes through adversarial review by a panel of independent AIs before release — ChatGPT is the toughest of them, and nothing ships until it signs off — and then gets posted to the Open Science Framework (OSF), the public registry conventional science uses, where each paper receives a DOI: a permanent, timestamped record. The line goes in the sand in public. The public-facing versions live at hyperphysics.com.

No single prediction proves a theory. But every independent, successful prediction multiplies the implausibility of the axioms being wrong. One hit could be luck. A hundred hits from nine axioms and no free parameters is not luck — it’s a fingerprint.

And whose fingerprint? That’s the real point: the fundamental entities of this physics are conscious points — perceiving, computing, obeying declared rules with perfect fidelity, 10⁴⁴ times a second, everywhere, forever. The universe runs on something that perceives and obeys. Matter is, at bottom, mind under authority. When this physics succeeds — when it explains what Dark Matter is, where the cosmic web came from, what a neutrino is, things conventional physics openly admits it cannot explain — it isn’t just winning a scientific argument. It’s evidence of the kind the modern world says it wants. The problem is that it goes in a different direction from the fundamental stance of Conventional Physics, which holds that the universe is only material. There is no pathway for adjudicating metaphysical claims. In fact, such offerings are usually ignored as being unscientific. This is different because it bridges the physical and the metaphysical and makes the plausibility of the universe being non-conscious an increasingly untenable proposition. As this theory goes mainstream, the proposition that God exists, that matter is composed of Consciousness, that the origin of consciousness is consciousness, and that there is a mind that encompasses the universe and from which it arises will become common knowledge. This will change people, society, and culture. It is the sea change that must happen before the world fractures in its ego/animal-obsessed passion to satisfy the desires of the flesh. With that new paradigm, that the God of the Bible is the origin of the consciousness that underlies the substance of the world, men will regulate themselves according to the rules of divine pleasure, and society will organize around these principles, and the earth will migrate/purify toward a society that is on earth as it is in heaven. Eventually, everyone will know that the foundation of the physical reality is the mind of God, sustaining every moment by His word.

I came to Jesus because I saw in a moment the implications of the metaphysics and the mature development of the physics that is now here, 39 years later. My prayer is that this work opens that same door for many. The work ahead of us is first to win the scientific community’s careful eyes, and then to tell the world.

We’ll keep going from here. Next conversation: spin, the ZBW dance, and the neutrino story. Call anytime.

— Thomas

Quick reference — the cast of characters:

260611 – Teshuvah – Returning Home

by Thomas Abshier | Jun 11, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Teshuvah: The Turning Toward Home

Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 11, 2026

Occasion. In the June 8 essay on why Jews do not accept Jesus as Messiah, the atonement section had to move quickly, and it named teshuvah in a single clause — one item in the list of mechanisms (prayer, study of Torah, charity, teshuvah) by which Judaism carried the weight of atonement after the Temple was destroyed in AD 70. The essay made the Christian claim that “the Hebrew Bible itself does not propose teshuvah as a complete replacement for substitutionary sacrifice” and then moved on, because a listicle of ten points does not leave room to linger on any one of them.

But that clause is not a side issue. It is the hinge of the whole atonement disagreement between Jews and Christians, and teshuvah is far too beautiful — and far too central to the interior life of Judaism — to be left in a list. So this essay stops there. I want to do three things that the earlier essay could not. I want to present teshuvah at its fullest and most beautiful, the way a faithful Jew would present it, with the strongest possible case that the turning is enough. I want to state, precisely and without caricature, where the Christian disagreement actually falls — which is not where most Christians think it falls. And I want to locate teshuvah inside the fellowship’s own ontology, where it turns out to be not a foreign doctrine at all but the native Hebrew name for the very thing we are always talking about: the return of the conscious will to the God in whom it lives and moves and has its being.

This is a doctrine we should love before we disagree with it. Most of what follows is praise. The disagreement, when it comes, is narrow, and I will try to make it exactly as narrow as it really is.

I. The word, and why “repentance” is the wrong translation

Teshuvah comes from the Hebrew root shuv (שוב), which means simply to turn, to turn back, to return. It is one of the most common verbs in the Hebrew Bible, used hundreds of times for the most ordinary kinds of returning — a traveler returning home, a borrowed object returned to its owner, water returning to its channel, the dove returning to the ark. When the prophets take this everyday word and apply it to the soul’s movement toward God, they are not reaching for a specialized religious term. They are saying the most natural thing in the world: come back.

This matters because the standard English translation — repentance — carries freight that teshuvah does not. “Repentance” comes through Latin paenitentia, and behind it stands a whole apparatus of penance, satisfaction, contrition as a kind of self-punishment, the doing of acts to work off a debt of guilt. Some of that apparatus is defensible, and some is not, but none of it is in the Hebrew word. Teshuvah is not primarily about feeling bad, nor is it about performing acts to discharge a penalty. It is about direction. The sinner is a person who has turned his back on God and is walking away from God. Teshuvah is the moment he stops, turns around, and starts walking home. It is, at bottom, a doctrine about geometry — the geometry of a will that has pointed itself in the wrong direction and is now pointed back toward its source.

Keep that geometry in mind. It will matter at the end, when we ask what the fellowship’s own framework says about the structure of reality. The Jewish doctrine of teshuvah and the fellowship’s account of sin and return are, at the level of geometry, the same picture.

II. Teshuvah in the Hebrew Bible

The doctrine is not a rabbinic invention layered onto the text after the fact. It is the great refrain of the prophets, who say one thing to Israel above all others: return.

Hosea ends his book with it: O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words, and turn to the LORD (Hosea 14:1-2). Joel makes it the center of the call to repentance: Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments (Joel 2:12-13). Jeremiah hears the LORD pleading with a wandering nation as a husband pleads with a wife: Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the LORD (Jeremiah 3:12). Malachi puts the reciprocity of it in a single line: Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the LORD of hosts (Malachi 3:7); Zechariah says it almost identically (Zechariah 1:3). Lamentations, out of the rubble of the first Temple, turns the whole posture into a prayer: Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD (Lamentations 3:40).

Two passages deserve to be drawn out, because they carry the doctrine’s deepest theology.

The first is Ezekiel, who gives teshuvah its most radical and most personal statement. Against any notion that guilt is sealed and fate is fixed, Ezekiel insists that the door is always open, in the present tense, to anyone: But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die (Ezekiel 18:21). And he grounds this not in a divine concession but in the very heart of God: Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? (Ezekiel 18:23). He says it again, even more starkly, in chapter 33: As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:11). This is the engine of the whole doctrine. God does not stand at a distance hoping the sinner stays away. God wants the return. The whole posture of heaven, in Ezekiel, is the posture of a father scanning the road.

The second is Deuteronomy 30, which contains a detail the casual reader misses. Moses tells Israel that after the curse and the scattering, thou shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice (Deuteronomy 30:2) — and then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity (30:3). The same verb, shuv, is used for both movements. Israel turns to God; God turns to Israel. There is a double turning built into the text, and the order is suggestive: the human turning and the divine turning are bound together, two halves of one reconciliation.

And then there is the line that, more than any other in the Hebrew Bible, opens the door to the deepest question this essay will raise. It is in Lamentations, and it is recited in the synagogue to this day when the Torah scroll is returned to the ark: Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old (Lamentations 5:21). Read it slowly. Turn thou us — the turning is asked of God. And we shall be turned — only then does the human turning follow. Even teshuvah, on this verse, is something God must first work in us before we can do it. The return is asked of the One we are returning to. Hold that verse. It is the seed, planted in the Hebrew Bible itself, of everything the gospel will later say about grace going before the will.

III. Teshuvah in Rabbinic Judaism

What the prophets sang, the rabbis built into a complete doctrine of the spiritual life, and it is one of the genuine glories of the Jewish tradition. No honest Christian engagement can proceed without first admiring it.

The rabbis taught that teshuvah was among the things prepared before the creation of the world (Nedarim 39b) — that is, repentance is not an emergency repair God improvised after humanity fell, but a possibility woven into the structure of reality from the beginning. Before there was a sinner, there was a way home. “Great is teshuvah,” the Talmud says, “for it reaches the very Throne of Glory” (Yoma 86a). And in one of the most startling claims in all of rabbinic literature, the sages held that in the place where the penitent stands, even the wholly righteous cannot stand (Berakhot 34b) — the one who has fallen and returned occupies higher ground than the one who never fell. The fall, redeemed, becomes an ascent.

Maimonides codified the anatomy of teshuvah in his Hilchot Teshuvah, the Laws of Repentance, and his account is demanding and precise. True teshuvah has parts: the abandonment of the sin, genuine regret for having committed it, verbal confession before God (vidui — and note, confession in Judaism is made directly to God, not mediated through any priest), and a settled resolve never to return to it. For sins against another person, none of this avails until one has gone to the wronged party, made restitution, and sought their pardon — Yom Kippur itself, the Day of Atonement, does not cover sins between a person and his neighbor until the neighbor has been appeased (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). And Maimonides defines complete teshuvah with a stringency that ought to humble every Christian who imagines Jewish repentance is a formality: complete teshuvah is when a person finds himself in exactly the same circumstance in which he once sinned, with the same opportunity and the same desire, and refrains — not from fear and not from weakness, but because he has truly returned.

This doctrine has a season. The Days of Awe — the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur — are the appointed time of return, when the liturgy turns the whole community toward self-examination and the work of turning. At the height of that liturgy stands the prayer Unetaneh Tokef, with its famous declaration that teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah — repentance, prayer, and charitable righteousness — avert the severity of the decree. There is the triad of the June 8 essay named: this is where it lives, and it is not a cold mechanism but the beating heart of the most solemn worship in the Jewish year.

And there is one rabbinic moment that matters more than any other for our subject, because it is the exact hinge on which post-Temple Judaism turned. The Temple lies in ruins. Rabbi Yehoshua looks at the wreckage and cries out that the place of Israel’s atonement is destroyed. And Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai answers him (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 4): Do not grieve, my son. We have another atonement as effective as this — deeds of loving-kindness, as it is said, “I desired mercy, and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6). That sentence is the founding charter of rabbinic Judaism’s theology of atonement without a Temple. When the altar fell, the rabbis did not despair; they located the essence of atonement in the turning of the heart, which they argued God had always desired more than the blood of bulls — and they had a verse from the prophet himself to prove it.

We must take that move seriously, because it is serious. It is the strongest form of the Jewish case, and I will state it now in its full strength.

IV. The strongest Jewish case: that the turning is enough

A faithful Jew, hearing the Christian claim that teshuvah cannot replace blood atonement, would answer something like this — and the answer has real force.

You Christians, he might say, have misread your own Bible. You read the sacrificial system as a transaction — a debt of guilt that must be paid, a divine justice that must be satisfied by the destruction of a victim, so that without the payment, no forgiveness is possible. But that is not what the sacrifices were. They were never a payment that bought off an angry creditor. They were the divinely appointed expression of teshuvah — the concrete, embodied enactment of a heart already turning home. The sacrifice was the outward form; the turning was always the substance. And the Hebrew Bible says so, again and again, in its own voice.

I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings (Hosea 6:6). Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams (1 Samuel 15:22). For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51:16-17). Wherewith shall I come before the LORD? . . . will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams? . . . He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:6-8). Isaiah opens his whole book with God recoiling from sacrifices offered by unturned hearts: To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? . . . Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings (Isaiah 1:11, 16).

The witness is overwhelming, the Jewish argument runs. The Hebrew Bible’s own prophets place the turning of the heart above sacrifice and treat sacrifice as worthless without it. God is not a creditor who must be paid before he can forgive. God is a Father who forgives freely the moment the child turns home — exactly as Ezekiel says, exactly as the father in your own gospel does. When the Temple fell, nothing essential was lost, because the essence was never the blood; the essence was the return, and the return survives the altar. If anything, the loss of the altar purified Israel’s worship from the literalism the prophets had been warning against for a thousand years.

That is the strongest Jewish case, and the fellowship should feel its force fully before answering it. It is not a weak argument made by people who have not read carefully. It is a powerful argument, grounded in the prophets, made by people who have read more carefully than most Christians ever will.

V. The two problems of sin, and what the turning cannot do

Now the Christian disagreement — and here is where it actually falls, which is not where most Christians put it.

The Christian disagreement is not that repentance does not matter. It is not that teshuvah is a Jewish error to be replaced by Christian grace. Any Christian who says “the Jews have works, we have faith” has misunderstood his own faith catastrophically, because the gospel begins with the very same word. Nor is the disagreement that God is an angry creditor who must be paid before he can love — the cruder versions of Christian atonement theory deserve the Jewish critique, and the fellowship does not hold them.

The disagreement is narrow and precise, and it concerns a distinction between two different problems that sin creates.

The first problem is subjective. My will is turned away from God. My heart is set on lesser things. My relationship with the One in whom I live is broken from my side. This problem is healed by turning — by teshuvah. When I turn back, the subjective breach is closed. On this, Jew and Christian agree completely, and teshuvah is exactly the right and sufficient remedy.

The second problem is objective, and it is the one teshuvah cannot reach. Real guilt has been incurred. The moral order — which is not an arbitrary rule but the very nature of God, the structure of reality itself — has been violated, and the violation is a fact about the past. The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:4). The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Here is the difficulty, stated as plainly as I can: my turning today reorients my will, but it does not reach backward and undo what was done. A debtor who reforms his spending habits has done something genuinely good and genuinely necessary — but his future thrift does not pay yesterday’s debt. Future obedience cannot retroactively cancel past guilt because the two operate in opposite directions in time. Teshuvah turns the will toward home. It does not, by itself, settle the account that was opened when the will was turned away.

And this is precisely why the Hebrew Bible holds both things at once — why the prophets who exalt the broken heart never abolish the altar. The same Torah that records God’s delight in mercy over sacrifice also says, with no qualification: For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul (Leviticus 17:11). The honest reading is not that one of these cancels the other. The honest reading is that they are ordered. The sacrifice without the turning is an abomination — Isaiah 1 is right, the prophets are right, a blood offering from an unturned heart is worthless. But the turning was never meant to bypass the altar; it was meant to arrive at it. Teshuvah is the heart’s movement toward the place of atonement; the atonement is what happens when it gets there. Mercy over sacrifice means the heart must be in it — not that the heart replaces it.

So the Christian says: teshuvah is necessary, beautiful, demanded of every soul, and exactly as central as the rabbis say. But it is the human half of a two-sided reality. The other half — the actual covering of guilt, what the Hebrew Bible calls kapparah, atonement — is something God provides, not something the returning sinner generates from within himself. In the Torah, God provided it through the altar. The Christian claim is that the altar was never the final thing; it was a sign pointing forward to a single, sufficient atonement that God himself would provide.

And note what this does to the Jewish objection that God need not be “paid.” The fellowship agrees: God is not paid. The cross is not God being bought off. It is God paying — God himself, in the person of the Son, providing the atonement at his own cost. It is not divine justice overriding divine mercy; it is the place where, as the Psalmist longed, mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other (Psalm 85:10). The whole point is that the One offended is the One who provides the covering. That is not the logic of a creditor. It is the logic of a Father who will not pretend the wound is nothing, and will not make the child pay for it either, and so pays for it himself.

VI. The gospel keeps teshuvah and completes it

When the gospel arrives, it does not abolish teshuvah. It opens with it. The first recorded word of John the Baptist’s preaching, of Jesus’s preaching, and of the apostolic preaching at Pentecost is the Greek word metanoeite — repent, turn, change your mind and your direction. Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17). Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out (Acts 3:19). Metanoia is teshuvah in Greek dress. The New Testament does not move past the turning; it stands the whole gospel on it.

The clearest proof that the gospel honors teshuvah is that the most beloved parable of return in all of Scripture was told by a Jew, to Jews, in a form they would have recognized instantly: the prodigal son (Luke 15). A son turns his back, walks into the far country, wastes everything, and comes to himself in the pig-yard. And then he turns. I will arise and go to my father — that is teshuvah, in narrative form, complete with the resolve and the confession he rehearses on the road. The parable could be lifted whole into a treatise of Maimonides. But notice the detail Jesus adds, the detail that is the whole gospel: when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20). The son’s turning is real and necessary — there is no embrace if he does not arise and go. But the son’s turning is not what produces the robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf. The Father provides the feast. The Father runs. The return is the son’s; the restoration is the Father’s gift. That is the exact shape of the whole disagreement, told as a story, with the Jewish doctrine of return fully honored and the Christian conviction about who pays for the feast fully present.

And here, finally, is where Lamentations 5:21 comes home. Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned. The deepest Christian claim is that teshuvah and atonement are not two separate transactions that the sinner must somehow coordinate, but two things that meet in one Person. In Christ, the perfect teshuvah — a complete human life turned wholly and without remainder toward the Father — and the perfect atonement — the offering that covers — are united in a single man, who is also the God being returned to. He is both the One who turns perfectly toward the Father on our behalf and the offering that makes the turning land. And the grace that the synagogue prays for every time it returns the scroll to the ark — turn thou us, and we shall be turned — is, in the gospel, answered: God turns us, by his Spirit, so that we can turn; he goes before the will so that the will can come home. The turning is still ours. It was always also his gift.

VII. The geometry of return: teshuvah in the fellowship’s own frame

I said at the start to hold the geometry in mind, and now I can say why.

The fellowship’s foundational conviction is that God is everything — that nothing that exists that is not of God, from God, in God, sustained by God. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not poetry but ontology. And our account of evil follows from it: evil has no independent existence of its own; it is the rejection of God’s nature by a free creature — a turning of the conscious will away from the Real toward a nothing it mistakes for something. Sin, in our framework, is self-exile — the will pointing itself away from the Ground of its own being, attempting to stand on its own where there is no ground but God.

Look at that picture and then look at teshuvah, and you will see they are the same picture. Sin is the will turned away from God. Teshuvah is the will turned back. The Hebrew word means exactly the movement our ontology describes: shuv, the return of the conscious agent to alignment with the One in whom it has its being. Teshuvah is, for the fellowship, simply the native Hebrew name for what we mean by returning to alignment with the Absolute Standard — the reorientation of a will that had pointed itself into self-chosen exile back toward the only direction in which life exists.

This is why the seven perspectives map onto it so cleanly. Perspective three holds that evil is the rejection of God’s nature; perspective five holds that to love God is to live as God, embodying his nature. Teshuvah is the entire arc between them — the turning that carries a soul from the first back toward the second. And perspective four, present-tense living, is Ezekiel’s exact insistence: turn ye, turn ye . . . for why will ye die? The door is open now, the kingdom is at hand now, the return is available in the present tense to anyone who will arise and go.

So the fellowship does not engage teshuvah as a foreign doctrine to be corrected. We recognize it as our own subject, spoken in the mother tongue of the faith from which our own Lord came. We disagree with our Jewish friends about one thing only: not whether the will must turn — it must — but whether the turning, by itself, settles the account that the turning-away opened, or whether God must provide the covering that the soul cannot provide for itself. On that one question, we hold the second answer. On everything else about teshuvah, we are students of a tradition that has thought about the return of the soul to God long and deeply.

VIII. The fellowship’s posture

How, then, does the fellowship hold this?

First, with admiration before disagreement. Teshuvah is one of the most beautiful doctrines in any religion, and the rabbinic tradition has developed it with a seriousness and a tenderness that should put casual Christian repentance to shame. The Christian who learns that the penitent stands higher than the never-fallen, who learns Maimonides’ standard of complete return, who learns that God prepared the way home before he made the world — that Christian has been given a gift by the Jewish tradition, and should say so.

Second, with precision about the disagreement. The disagreement is not “works versus grace,” and any Christian who frames it that way has slandered both his neighbor and his own faith — for the gospel begins with the command to turn, and Judaism has always known that God turns the heart before the heart can turn. The disagreement is the narrow and real question of whether the subjective turning reaches the objective guilt, or whether God must provide a covering the sinner cannot generate. State the disagreement that narrowly, and it stays honest.

Third, with the recognition that this is, in the end, the same disagreement that the June 8 essay located at the foundation. Whether teshuvah suffices and whether Jesus is the Messiah are not two questions but one, asked from two directions. If God has provided the final atonement in Christ, then teshuvah is the turning that brings the soul to that provision and is completed there. If he has not, then teshuvah carries the whole weight alone, and the rabbis after the Temple were right to rest the whole house on it. The fellowship believes the first, on the same grounds the earlier essay laid out, and holds the belief with respect for those who hold the second.

Fourth, with patience and with Paul. The Jewish people remain, in Paul’s words, beloved for the fathers’ sakes (Romans 11:28), and the God who taught Israel to pray turn thou us, and we shall be turned is faithful to finish what he began. Our task is not to win an argument about teshuvah. Our task is to live the return — to be people visibly turning home, daily, in the present tense, so that the doctrine is not merely defended but seen. The most persuasive thing the fellowship can say about teshuvah is not a sentence. It is a life that keeps turning back toward the light, and a Father who keeps running down the road.

IX. Closing

Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. — Lamentations 5:21

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. — Luke 15:20

Teshuvah is the turning toward home. The fellowship holds it as a glory of the tradition out of which our own faith was born, and holds with our Jewish friends that the will must turn, that God desires the return, that the door is open in the present tense to anyone who will arise and go. We differ on one thing: whether the turning, alone, settles what the turning-away broke, or whether the Father provides the feast that the returning son could never have bought. We believe the Father provides it — that he ran down the road in the person of his Son, and that the same God who commands the turning is the One who, going before us, first turns us so that we can be turned.

On that conviction we rest. We hold it with respect for those who do not share it, with gratitude to the tradition that taught the world to call repentance coming home, and with the patience of people who trust that the God who began this work will complete it — in us, and in all Israel, in his own time.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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