260809 – Recap – Determining the Truth

by Thomas Abshier | Aug 20, 2026 | Uncategorized

Dueling Gurus and the Doctrine of Christ

Zion, Agency, and the Question Behind Every Question: How Do We Know the True Voice?

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · 9 August 2026 · A follow-up to “Quietism Is Not More Light” (3 August 2026)

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. — 1 John 4:1

I. Where We Left Off

Last week’s essay argued that the wait-for-divine-initiation teaching is quietism — an old error under a new name — and that the Great Commission is a standing order to every disciple. This week’s meeting was the fellowship’s living response to that essay. Leonard presented the fuller frame of the Covenant Christian movement’s teaching; Michael pressed with a barrage of questions; Charlie, Susan, and Isak each brought a piece of the answer.

Leonard’s opening move was a clarification: the charge of quietism, he said, rests on a misunderstanding. “We’re not being quiet. We’re trying to get out there for people to see it and to respond, but we’re not being pushy. We’re not knocking on doors.” The movement’s method is presence and availability — the seal on the hat, the cashier at the Golden Corral who noticed and asked — rather than a campaign. I receive the clarification in good faith, and I will return at the end to examine whether it answers the essay’s argument or restates the position the essay examined. But first, the frame Leonard laid out deserves a fair hearing, because we cannot weigh what we have not honestly heard.

II. The Frame Presented: Zion, the Gathering, and the Ten Talks

Leonard recounted the movement’s founding commission: Denver Snuffer, he told us, was directed by the Lord to deliver ten talks — ten parts of one talk — at ten locations along the “Mormon corridor,” with the message intended first for the Latter-day Saints and then for the wider Christian world. The subject was Zion: the concept, drawn through Joseph Smith’s teaching, of a people of one heart and one mind, dwelling in righteousness, with no poor among them. Leonard traced the lineage: Enoch’s city of righteousness, taken up before the flood because the earth was not ready; a second city under Melchizedek (identified in this teaching with Shem); and, in the last days, the necessity of a Zion people prepared on earth to receive these cities at their return, lest the earth be smitten. The New Jerusalem, in this telling, will be established in the Western Hemisphere, will grow into Zion, and Christ Himself will come to His temple in the midst of that people.

I asked the clarifying questions: Is the taken-up Zion a biblical concept? Answer: “It depends on which Bible you’re talking about” — the concept in its full form comes through Joseph Smith’s revelation, though the word Zion appears throughout the King James text (Charlie counted 153 occurrences). Is this the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21? Answer: yes and no — the New Jerusalem is the community; Zion is what it becomes when the ascended cities are reunited with the earthly one.

Two further claims from the presentation must be recorded:

• First, Leonard corrected the standard account of Mormon origins: it was not Moroni who visited young Joseph, he said, but Nephi — and the change to “Moroni” was made later, “in our time, by our people.”
• Second, he described the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible: not a new Bible, he insisted, but a restoration of the original — the King James text plus corrections and additions Joseph was directed to make, which this fellowship’s movement has now assembled and printed. The example offered was Romans 13, where the change of a single word — the powers that be are “elders,” church government rather than civil government — “changes the whole meaning of it.”

I want the fellowship to see what I see in these two claims. Each one is a revision of a revision.

• The Moroni/Nephi correction tells us that even the founding vision of the Restoration was corrupted in transmission by the Restoration’s own custodians, within living memory of the event.
• The Romans 13 example tells us that a single word, altered on one man’s authority, is sufficient to invert the plain meaning of an apostle’s teaching that the whole church has read one way for two thousand years. Both claims depend on the same premise, which Leonard then stated openly, and which became the true subject of the meeting.

III. Entropy or Refinement: Two Theories of the Word

Leonard put the premise plainly: “History is always recorded by the victors… it becomes corrupted. It doesn’t become true… It’s always been entropy when it comes to knowledge. Knowledge has always been entropic rather than refining.” On this view, the Bible is a degraded signal — “plain and precious things” removed, the name of Christ stripped from the Old Testament — and the latter-day revelations are the restoration of the original broadcast.

Michael answered this with the historian’s craft. History is not simply entropic, he argued, because corruption is not the last word — correction is. The Nazis wrote the history of conquered Europe from 1940 to 1943; when they lost, that history did not stand. The bias of the victors is real, “endemic,” but the remedy is known to every honest historian: gather the accounts from both sides, from many sides, and compose them — like the blind men and the elephant, no single testimony is the animal, but the sum of testimonies approaches it. Bias is defeated not by finding one unbiased witness (there are none) but by multiplying witnesses whose biases cut in different directions.

Now notice what Michael has described, because it is precisely the architecture of the Bible, and precisely the argument I made to Leonard in this week’s written reply. The canon of the Bible is not one victor’s chronicle. It is forty-some authors across fifteen centuries — shepherds and kings, prisoners and physicians, fishermen and Pharisees — whose accounts were delivered through separate hands into separate communities that copied them in parallel across continents. An error introduced in one line of transmission is exposed by comparison with the others; that is why the manuscript evidence, thousands of copies deep, shows the text stable to within spelling and word order, with no doctrine hanging on any disputed reading. The children’s telephone game corrupts because it is serial and oral — one whisper, one chain, no checking. The Bible’s transmission is parallel and written — many chains, constant checking. Entropy is the fate of the single channel. The polyphonic canon is Michael’s elephant: many hands on the animal, composed.

And here is the point that must be pressed: the entropy argument, if it proves anything, proves most against the system it is deployed to defend. A revelation that passes through one man — however sincere — is the serial channel. One link, no parallel witnesses, no manuscript trail, no possibility of comparison. When the movement itself must correct its own founding vision (Nephi, not Moroni) within two centuries, it has demonstrated the entropy of the single channel on its own history. The argument Leonard raised against the Bible is the strongest argument against the alternative.

IV. Dueling Gurus: The Question of Discernment

From there the meeting arrived, as it had to, at the question beneath every question, and I gave it a name that Charlie and Isak improved into “dueling gurus.” We are not adjudicating Hinduism against Islam. We are weighing two claims within the house of those who name Christ: the historic faith, received through the polyphonic canon — and a succession of single-channel restorations, each claiming to correct the last. Joseph Smith corrected historic Christianity. The LDS institution, by Leonard’s own account, corrupted Joseph within a generation of his death — “it went off the rails very quickly” — building temples like idols and development deals around them. Denver Snuffer now corrects the LDS institution. Each restoration requires a new apostasy to justify itself. The pattern is not incidental; it is the logic of the single channel, which can be corrected only by another single channel, forever.  ***

Charlie named the stakes with the memory of Jonestown, and the deeper memory of every century’s men who marched under “God is on our side”: the stream of history is full of false prophets, and the price of following one is everything. His counsel — study, comparison, prayer, and constant vigilance, because “it doesn’t seem like God made this easy” — is the sober truth. Michael noted: many people say God has spoken to them; how does this one claimant earn the credibility the others are denied? Doesn’t God speak to each of us?***

The Bible’s own answer, which the fellowship converged on from three directions, is the test of fruits: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). But last week’s essay showed why fruit must be assessed carefully here — growth under an anti-campaign doctrine is not fruit but recursion, since the anti-campaign posture is itself the recruitment mechanism. The fruit that counts is repentance, holiness, and Christ-dependence in the gathered — assessed on separate evidence. And to the test of fruits Scripture adds the test of the message: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). The messenger’s sincerity, humility, and reluctance are not the test. Agreement with the deposit already delivered is the test. That standard is fixed, public, and checkable — which is exactly what a standard must be if the sheep are to know the voice of a stranger (John 10:5).

V. The Crusade Question and the Agency Answer

I put to Leonard the challenge that has struck me since I first encountered this movement, and I put it here for the record: if the Denver Snuffer revelation is the pure word — if historic Christianity is the corrupted signal and this is the restoration — then there should be no apology and no restraint. It should be a crusade. Everyone, everywhere, should be told, urgently, because nothing less is at stake than the true gospel. The movement’s own logic demands the very campaign its doctrine forbids.

Leonard’s answer was agency: “People have to choose… I can’t convert anyone. No man can convert another man. God has to do that. The Lord does that. The Lord goes and changes people… we’re waiting on the Lord to prepare His people.”

I want to honor what is true in this answer before showing what it does not answer. It is true that no man can convert another man. It is true that the increase belongs to God alone — “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). It is true that agency is real and that most will not receive the word; the Lord Himself said the way is narrow and few find it (Matthew 7:14). Every word of this is historic Christian doctrine, held without supplement for two thousand years.

But observe what the argument actually proves. Agency explains why not all will accept the message. It says nothing about whether we should deliver it. The sower in the Lord’s parable knows that most of the seed will fall on path, rock, and thorn — and sows broadcast anyway, because the sowing is his office and the soil is not (Matthew 13:3-8). Paul knew agency as well as any man who ever preached — “our gospel is hid to them that are lost” (2 Corinthians 4:3) — and reasoned daily in the market with them that met with him (Acts 17:17). If the reality of agency justified withholding the campaign, it would have justified Paul’s silence; instead Paul said, “woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16). Agency is the reason outcomes belong to God. It has never been the reason messengers stay home. So the clarification Leonard offered at the meeting’s start — “we’re not being quiet, we’re just not being pushy” — resolves into the same position the essay examined: presence without campaign, availability without initiative, the hat and the cashier but not the crusade. The label matters less than the substance, and the substance is unchanged: a standing order treated as awaiting activation. I leave last week’s four tests standing, and I commend them again to Leonard with the affection in which they were written.

VI. Isak’s Bread: The Chain of Neighbors

Isak brought the question down from the cosmic to the concrete, and his contribution deserves its own section. Wrestling with what the Commission asks of one person — surely not to be the street-corner pest that people flee, nor to carry the lunacy-inducing burden of personally saving seven billion — he offered a picture from the feeding of the five thousand: each of us provides for those directly around us, and the ones next to them do likewise, and the gospel moves as a chain reaction of neighbors rather than the heroic reach of one arm. “It’s not up to me to provide for everyone, but it’s up to me to provide for those around me.”

The picture is true and biblical: the faith did in fact cross the world largely through households, friendships, and scattered ordinary believers — “they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). And Isak is right that the Commission never assigns any single disciple the whole world; it assigns the whole church the whole world, and each member his portion. Two friendly amendments, offered as sharpening rather than correction. First, the chain of neighbors and the organized campaign are not rivals; Acts records both, side by side — the scattered believers gossiping the gospel and Paul’s planned itineraries, the household conversions and the daily disputation in the market. The body has hands and feet; a theology built on only one member is a body part, not a body. Second, on the naturalistic reading of the loaves — that the miracle was hearts opened to share their hidden provisions — I would hold the beauty of that picture without trading the text for it. The evangelists present a multiplication, and all four record it; the crowd sought Him the next day precisely because they “did eat of the loaves, and were filled” (John 6:26), and the Lord’s rebuke was not “you misunderstood the sharing” but that they sought bread rather than the Bread of Life. A God who cannot multiply loaves cannot raise the dead, and our whole hope hangs on the latter. But Isak’s instinct — that the miracle also teaches the economy of Zion, provision flowing neighbor to neighbor under the blessing of Christ — is not wrong. It is the application; the multiplication is the event.

VII. Where We Met: Relationship, Obedience, and the Doctrine of Christ

Now the meeting ground, because the meeting found one, and it was Susan who laid the first stone. Before any ministry, she said, must come the believer’s own relationship with God — ministry without relationship empties and drains and ends in walking away. And to the week’s running question — how do we know what is true among competing claims? — she brought the verse that reframes the whole inquiry: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself” (John 7:17). Knowledge of the doctrine is promised to the one who does the will — obedience is an organ of knowledge. She joined it to Psalm 111:10 — “a good understanding have all they that do his commandments” — and to John 1:12: “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” The power is His; the frailty is ours; the doing is the path to the knowing.

Notice what Susan’s verses accomplish for the entire dispute. If understanding comes through doing His commandments, then the surest ground in a contest of revelations is the commands no one disputes — and the Great Commission is among them by every account, since even the movement Leonard follows agrees the word must go to all the world; the disagreement is over the manner. Do the will; the doctrine will clarify. This is also the answer to Michael’s question about how to choose among the claimants: begin with the commands held in common, obey them, and the promised understanding follows.

Leonard then made the proposal that I want to receive with both hands, because it is the week’s best fruit: the doctrine of Christ can unite us. “There’s only one person at that gate; He doesn’t employ anybody else.” Whatever else divides our libraries, he said, if we come together on who gives us life and who holds our salvation — believe Him, confess Him as Lord, follow Him — we can fellowship as one while we contend over the rest. And Susan’s picture of increments completed it: a soul comes to Christ by steps, each sincere step a springboard to the next, faith becoming obedience becoming understanding. This is the fellowship working as it was built to work: we did not paper over the dividing line — the line is the authority of Scripture against the authority of a living revelator, and this essay has not moved an inch on it — but we located the gate we all stand at, and the Gatekeeper we all confess.

VIII. The Baptism Coda: Authority and the Fruits of the Spirit

The meeting closed on baptism, and the exchange between Leonard and Susan was a small masterclass in exactly the difference between the two systems — conducted, notably, between two people raised in the same church.

Leonard argued from the Lord’s own example: Christ, needing nothing, sought out John — his cousin, “set apart” from infancy — and submitted to baptism; therefore the believer’s first act of obedience is baptism, and one should “find an authorized person” to perform the ordinance. He told the story of his own rebaptism in 2018, and told it movingly. Susan pressed the word authorized: the authority is not a paper trail, she argued, not an office or a lineage — it is Christ’s Spirit, and the credential of the baptizer is the fruits of the Spirit in his life. She pressed further: is water baptism a saving ordinance, as they were both taught, or an act of obedience — real, commanded, but not the mechanism of salvation, as the deathbed believer with no water and every fruit of the Spirit attests? Leonard, to his credit, moved toward her in real time: “if the person performing the ordinance understands what he’s doing… absolutely, I agree with that.”

For the record of this fellowship, the historic answer, which I hold: baptism is commanded — this very week I withdrew, under sound rebuke, my own speculative reading that “baptizing in the name” might mean immersion in the divine nature rather than water, and the full argument will appear in the forthcoming reply essay — but the water is the sign, not the power: “not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God” (1 Peter 3:21). The thief on the cross entered Paradise unbaptized on the word of the Lord Himself (Luke 23:43). And on authority, Susan’s instinct is the Bible’s: Philip who baptized the Ethiopian was not of the Twelve; the scattered laymen of Acts 8 preached everywhere with no ordination but the Spirit; and the requirement of an “authorized” chain of ordinance is precisely the mediating structure that 1 Timothy 2:5 forecloses — one God, one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. Where the fruits of the Spirit are, there the authority is, for the Spirit is not given by paperwork.

IX. The Cultural Stakes: A Note on the Wall

I closed the meeting with a piece of cultural history, and I set it down here because it names why the campaign question is not academic. In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court lifted a phrase from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists — a letter assuring a worried religious minority that the state would not interfere with the church — and declared that the Constitution had erected “a wall of separation between church and state.” The phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution; the First Amendment restrains Congress from establishing religion or prohibiting its free exercise — a shield for the church, not a muzzle. Yet within a generation the inversion was complete: prayer stripped from the schools, faith privatized, and an educated nation persuaded that the wall is the Constitution’s most sacred clause. I have watched an intelligent, accomplished woman be genuinely shocked to learn the phrase is not in the document.

Set against this a scene from only six years before Everson: Roosevelt and Churchill, at the service where the Atlantic alliance was consecrated in 1941, standing together on a warship’s deck, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” — two heads of state, on film, unembarrassed. From that to “you can’t pray at the football game” in a single generation. This is the measure of how far and how fast a culture falls when the church accepts the muzzle — and it is why quietism, whatever its sincerity, arrives at the worst possible hour. The sanctification of the culture is the only remedy for the culture, and sanctification does not campaign for itself. Someone must go. That is not a distraction from the fellowship’s purpose, as I said in the meeting; the Mormon-versus-historic question, important as this essay shows it to be, is the proximate discussion — the ultimate work is a nation of godly character: children raised in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6), households of godly men and women, and from them neighborhoods, and from them a government godly because its people are — which is Zion built the only way Zion has ever actually been built, one regenerate heart at a time. On that end — remarkably, wonderfully — Leonard and I are in full agreement. One heart and one mind, righteousness, and no poor among us: I have no quarrel with that city. My quarrel is only, and always, over which voice commands the road to it.

X. Conclusion

Here is where the week leaves us. The dividing line is real and this fellowship will not blur it: it is the closed, polyphonic canon against the living single channel; the standing order against the waiting posture; the Bible’s own tests — the command, the practice, the fruits, the message — against the claim of newer light. On that line I stand where last week’s essay stands, and this week’s meeting gave me no reason to move and several reasons to hold.

And the meeting ground is real too, and we will not abandon it: the doctrine of Christ — believe Him, confess Him, obey Him — with relationship before ministry, obedience as the organ of understanding, each of us feeding the neighbors within arm’s reach while the church together reaches the world. Susan’s closing prayer asked that we return next week able to edify, challenge, and reach for truth together. That is the fellowship’s charter in one sentence, and by the grace of God we will keep it.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. — 1 Thessalonians 5:21

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260705 – Venzuela Economy and Governance Debate

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 8, 2026 | Uncategorized

Who Do You Trust? Venezuela, Rival Epistemologies, and the Kingdom Test

Christos Fellowship Essay — Meeting of July 5, 2026

Present: Leonard Hofheins, Michael Sherman, Isak Gutierrez (moderating), Charlie Gutierrez (timekeeping). Thomas Abshier was absent for most of the session due to audio difficulties; this essay is reconstructed and analyzed from the meeting transcript.

Protocol: Issachar Form — Triage, Deliberation, Action. “Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32).

I. Triage: What Happened, and What Is Actually at Stake

The meeting began, as fellowship should, in friendship: Leonard and Isak trading musical histories, Leonard recounting his mission years in Venezuela in the late 1970s — the bands, the traveling production of El Plan, the baptismal font he built behind a rented quinta in the east of the country. That biographical detail turned out to be load-bearing. When the conversation drifted from music to Venezuela’s economy, it drifted into the largest geopolitical event of the year, and Leonard was arguing about a country he once loved and served, not an abstraction.

The event underneath the debate is this. On January 3, 2026, the United States executed Operation Absolute Resolve: roughly 150 aircraft from twenty launch sites suppressed Venezuelan air defenses while special forces raided the Fuerte Tiuna compound in Caracas, captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and flew them to New York, where both pleaded not guilty to narcoterrorism charges. Venezuela’s interior minister later put the death toll at around one hundred, including thirty-two Cubans acknowledged by Havana as military and intelligence personnel; seven U.S. service members were injured. The operation followed months of escalation — strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean beginning September 2025 that killed at least 115 people, and seizures of sanctioned oil tankers in December. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s own deputy, was installed as acting president; President Trump declared that the United States would run the country until a transition could occur, with an explicit emphasis on the oil sector. Opposition leader María Corina Machado — the 2025 Nobel Peace laureate, who dedicated her prize to Trump — called for the recognition of Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the stolen 2024 election. As of this writing in July 2026, U.S. forces remain postured offshore, and the transition remains a promise rather than a fact.

So the fellowship stumbled onto three genuinely important questions. First, an epistemological one: when two brothers cannot agree on a single source of truth, how do they reason together at all? Second, a historical-economic one: what actually destroyed Venezuela — socialism, kleptocracy, sanctions, or some braid of all three — and what makes an economy “good” in the first place? Third, a moral one: was the American seizure of a sitting head of state an act of liberation or imperial predation, and by what standard would citizens of the Kingdom judge it?

The meeting engaged all three, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes badly. Both the brilliance and the badness are instructive, which is why this essay exists.

II. Deliberation: The Arguments, Their Strengths, and Their Collisions with Reality

The Epistemological Contest: Short Notes Versus Body of Work

The most consequential exchange of the evening was not about Venezuela at all. It was the twenty-minute struggle over sources. Michael, attempting to ground the Chávez question in evidence, offered mainstream and academic references — Harvard, Americas Quarterly, university presses. Leonard dismissed each as propaganda and offered a single acceptable source: ZeroHedge, the pseudonymous financial blog whose articles are all published under the name Tyler Durden, a character from Fight Club.

Credit where due to both men. Michael’s instinct — “let’s pick a source you like” — was a genuine act of intellectual hospitality. He did not demand that Leonard accept his authority; he tried to enter Leonard’s evidentiary world and reason from within it, live-auditing ZeroHedge’s About page, taking its stated principles one at a time and affirming most of them. That is the correct first move of charitable deliberation, and it should be named and honored as such.

Leonard’s position also contains a truth the fellowship should not rush past. Institutional financial journalism does have owners, agendas, and a documented record of consensus failures. His instinct that credentialed orthodoxy can be a form of gatekeeping is not paranoia; it is a defensible reading of media history. And his ultimate criterion — he reads ZeroHedge because, over time, its body of work has proven “on point” to him — is at least a track-record argument rather than a credential argument.

But here the weaknesses become severe, and they were exposed in real time. When Michael asked the natural follow-up — what does your trusted source actually say about Venezuela before and after Chávez — Leonard searched, found forty-three results, read out one headline about the December tanker blockade (which, as Michael correctly noted, concerned events twelve years after Chávez’s death), and then declined to go further: “I’m not going to read all these.” A source one will cite but not read is not functioning as evidence; it is functioning as a flag. The deeper problem is asymmetry: Leonard applied maximal skepticism to every source Michael offered and near-zero skepticism to the one he preferred, with the stated warrant being agreement — “I like what he writes… I think he’s on point.” That is confirmation, not verification. Judging a source by its body of work is right; but the body of work must actually be weighed against outcomes, the way we weigh a prophet by whether the word comes to pass (Deuteronomy 18:22), not by whether the word pleases us.

The honest low point and the honest high point of the evening belonged to the same man. Pressed on his claim that Californians drive to Arizona for cheap gas, Leonard finally said: “maybe it’s just all BS… it’s just something I heard.” That admission is worth more than it appears. It is the sound of an unverified circulating claim being caught at the moment of transmission — and every one of us transmits such claims daily. The failure was not that Leonard had heard an exaggerated story; it is that the story was deployed as evidence first and examined only under adversarial pressure. A kingdom epistemology examines before deploying.

Michael’s epistemology fared better procedurally but not perfectly. His elephant-and-blind-men principle — accumulate multiple partial sources, question each, triangulate — is sound. But he, too, curates a frame, and his frame showed its seams when the conversation reached Iran, where his rhetoric (“we lost the Iran war,” projections of civilizational annihilation, “15 Hitlers”) left the realm of the documented for the realm of the polemical. The lesson cuts both ways: the man with the better method still needs the discipline to apply it to his own strongest feelings.

The Historical Contest: What Killed Venezuela?

On the substance, both men held pieces of the elephant. Michael is correct that the early Chávez years produced measurable social gains — literacy campaigns, access to clinics, poverty reduction during the mid-2000s oil boom — and that these are recorded in international datasets, not merely in regime propaganda. Leonard is correct that the same project ended in catastrophe: hyperinflation that at its worst ran to six and seven figures annually, an exodus of roughly a quarter of the population, a police state, and rigged elections — all likewise documented, and corroborated by the testimony of every Venezuelan exile Leonard has spoken with.

The precision failure matters, though. The hyperinflation Leonard attributed to Chávez in fact peaked under Maduro, years after Chávez’s 2013 death; under Chávez, inflation was chronically high but not Weimar-like. And Michael’s counterpoint — that the recent collapse cannot be cleanly separated from U.S. sanctions and, most recently, an outright naval blockade — is analytically fair: an economy under embargo is not a controlled experiment in socialism. Leonard’s rejoinder that Maduro was Chávez’s handpicked vice president, and thus continuity not aberration, is also fair. The truthful synthesis, which neither man quite spoke but which their collision produces, is this: Chávez built a petrostate patronage machine that bought real short-term gains for the poor at the cost of destroying the productive and institutional base; Maduro inherited the machine without the oil prices or the charisma and ran it as a kleptocracy; and American pressure, whatever its justification, accelerated the immiseration of ordinary Venezuelans. All three propositions are true simultaneously. Tribal argument demands we pick one; understanding the times requires holding all three.

Leonard’s appeal to exile testimony deserves special comment because it is the strongest kind of evidence he offered, yet it still needs a caveat. The witness of those who fled is real data — the Venezuelan diaspora is one of the largest displacements in hemispheric history, and people do not abandon their homeland over propaganda. But it carries a built-in selection effect: those who leave are, definitionally, those for whom the regime failed. The chavista base that remained is invisible to that sample. Testimony is weighty; a sample is not a census.

The Economic Contest: Stalin, Monaco, and a Missed Moment of Agreement

The abstract round — can communism produce a viable economy? — produced the evening’s weakest arguments and, hidden inside them, its best moment.

Michael’s example of Stalin was rhetorically self-defeating. It is true that the USSR industrialized from a broken agrarian empire into a superpower between 1924 and 1953. But the argument proves too much: forced industrialization purchased with engineered famine, terror, and the gulag is precisely the case where “the economy grew” and “the society was good” come apart — which was supposedly Michael’s own thesis, as his child-labor example showed. Choosing history’s second-most murderous regime to demonstrate economic viability unnecessarily handed Leonard the moral high ground. Leonard’s rebuttals, however, were also shaky — the “saved by the weather” account of the Eastern Front slights the twenty-five to twenty-seven million Soviet dead who did most of the dying that broke the Wehrmacht, a point Michael rightly made.

Monaco was a better argument disguised as a worse one. Michael offered it as bait — a “great economy” by raw numbers, transparently a tax haven skimming wealth generated elsewhere — precisely to show that “name a good economy” is an underspecified question. Leonard took the bait, refuted Monaco, and in doing so was maneuvered into producing the finest sentence of the night: a good economy is “the abundant flow of capital and the broad dispersion of that within the populace.”

Stop and notice what happened there. Michael immediately and emphatically agreed. Abundance plus broad dispersion is a definition both a Chávez sympathizer and a free-market conservative just endorsed — and it is, not incidentally, a deeply biblical definition. It is the economy of the Jubilee provisions, of gleaning laws, of manna where “he who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack” (Exodus 16:18): productivity and participation, wealth and its wide reach. The two men had, for one sentence, converged on a shared standard by which Chávez, Maduro, Monaco, Stalin, and the United States could all be measured. And then the moment passed unharvested, and the conversation slid into gas prices. The fellowship’s discipline going forward should be to catch such convergences when they occur and build on them, because a shared standard is worth a hundred contested facts.

The Current-Events Contest: Liberation or Predation?

On the January intervention itself, Michael’s factual skeleton holds up remarkably well against the public record: the capture, the killed bodyguards and Cubans, the boat strikes without trial, the tanker blockade, the Nobel laureate’s dedication of her prize to Trump, the installation of Maduro’s own vice president, and the administration’s open declaration that it will run the country with the oil sector at the center. Where Michael editorializes is the mafia analogy — that this is open extraction, oil-for-obedience, of a piece with the American client-state model in the Gulf. That is an interpretation, and a contestable one, but it is an interpretation of accurately stated facts, and Leonard’s blanket “I don’t believe anything he said” was therefore the weakest possible response, because most of what Michael said is simply on the record from sources spanning the U.S. government itself.

Leonard’s counter-interpretation deserves to be stated at its strongest, because he half-argued it: the Maduro regime was a narco-state that stole an election, disarmed and starved its people, and drove millions into exile; removing its head is the necessary condition for any Venezuelan flourishing; and the administration’s stated intent is to sell Venezuelan oil at market rates for Venezuela’s benefit rather than letting it be siphoned to Cuba and China. On this reading, the operation is closer to liberation than larceny, and its critics are mistaking the surgeon’s knife for the assailant’s.

Here is where the fellowship’s own method — judge the word by whether it comes to pass — gives us something better than another round of dueling sources. The two interpretations generate opposite testable predictions. If Leonard is right, over the next one to three years we should see oil revenues visibly reaching Venezuelan reconstruction, a real electoral transition toward González or his equivalent rather than an indefinite American-supervised interregnum, exiles beginning to return, and Venezuelan living standards rising. If Michael is right, we should see revenues routed through American companies with little reaching the populace, a client government, continued emigration, and a widening pattern of similar operations against other resource states (his Colombia point is already a live indicator to watch). The fellowship should register these predictions now, in writing, and revisit them — treating contested political claims the way honest science treats hypotheses: pre-stated, then checked against outcomes. That is the “body of work” standard applied not to pundits but to ourselves.

III. Action: The Kingdom Test

Thomas has asked that these essays evaluate not only the evidence but the fruit — whether the discourse itself moves us toward manifesting the Kingdom on earth. By that standard, the meeting was a mixed offering, and honesty requires saying so.

The failures first. Source nihilism — “everything you cite is propaganda” — is not skepticism; it is the dissolution of the shared reality that any covenant community requires. A fellowship that cannot agree on any procedure for establishing facts cannot deliberate, and a people who cannot deliberate cannot do justice, because justice requires findings. Second, the Sabbath was invoked twice as an exit ramp from losing exchanges rather than honored as a boundary at the outset; using holiness as a debate tactic dishonors both the debate and the holiness. Third, contempt made appearances on both sides — the dismissiveness of “if you want to believe that, go ahead,” the sarcasm of “oh, but I trust you” — and contempt, our Lord teaches, is the seed of murder in the heart (Matthew 5:22), long before it is anything else.

Now the fruit worth keeping, because there was real fruit. The meeting opened in music and closed in care — Isak’s half-joking blood-pressure check was genuine pastoral instinct, and it landed. Charlie’s intervention with the three-minute debate structure was peacemaking as craft: not suppressing the conflict but giving it a form in which both men could be fully heard, which is what “blessed are the peacemakers” looks like in a Zoom room. Isak, the youngest voice present, modeled the posture the whole meeting needed — genuine curiosity toward both elders, an admission that his generation’s news arrives through Instagram and TikTok, and a request to hear each side steelmanned. And Michael’s benediction deserves to be canonized in our practice: “If we just go talk with folks we agree with, we just nod at each other. If we test our ideas, we perhaps grow.” That is Proverbs 27:17 in plain American — iron sharpening iron — and the fact that it was spoken after the sharpest exchanges, not instead of them, is exactly the point. The men fought hard and left as brothers. In 2026 America, that is itself a countercultural witness, and it should not be taken for granted.

Concrete protocol for future sessions, offered for the fellowship’s adoption. First, a shared-source covenant: before any factual dispute proceeds, each party names one source from the other’s world they will provisionally accept, and the discussion is bounded by the union of the two — hospitality made procedural. Second, the pre-registration discipline described above: contested predictions get written down with dates and revisited, so that our trust migrates toward whoever’s model of the world keeps coming true, including our own. Third, the steelman rule Isak intuitively requested: no one rebuts a position until he has stated it well enough that its holder says “yes, that’s it.” Fourth, the Sabbath boundary is set at the opening prayer, not deployed mid-argument. And fifth, the fruit test as standing agenda item: before closing, the group asks aloud whether the hour’s discourse made us more capable of loving our neighbor — including the Venezuelan neighbor, in whose name both liberation and predation are now being claimed, and whose actual flourishing, not our vindication, is the measure God will use.

The evening’s true finding was spoken by Leonard himself, in the middle of the fray, almost as a lament: “It comes back to the same question. Who do you trust? How do you know it’s true?” That is not a rhetorical dead end; it is the oldest question in our faith’s epistemology, and it has an answer that neither cable news nor ZeroHedge can supply. Trust is earned by a body of work tested against reality — and the One whose words have never once failed to come to pass has thereby earned it absolutely. Every lesser source, left or right, institutional or insurgent, must be weighed on the same scale. The Kingdom is manifested not when our side wins the argument, but when a community of people who disagree this much can still seek the truth together, submit their predictions to reality, and end the evening checking one another’s blood pressure.

Prepared from the meeting transcript of July 5, 2026. Factual statements regarding the January 2026 U.S. operation in Venezuela are corroborated by contemporaneous reporting (CBS, CNN, Al Jazeera, CNBC), the U.K. House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10452, CSIS analysis, and U.S. Department of War statements.

260509 – Law and Grace

by Thomas Abshier | May 9, 2026 | Uncategorized

From 1884f11c19235f68accbed6a387a60cab1a7b64e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Opus <opus@rm.local>
Date: Sat, 9 May 2026 14:17:40 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] CFE: add ‘The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat’ (Ritenbaugh / Amos
5:25 / grace and law)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Engages John W. Ritenbaugh’s ‘Grace and Law’ section from ‘Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness’ (Forerunner / cgg.org, October 29, 2025), received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution May 8, 2026, anchored on Amos 5:25.

Affirms Ritenbaugh’s central thesis substantively: that grace and obedience are inseparable halves of one whole, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the law was given to the redeemed as a pattern of life rather than as a means of redemption. The Christos framework agrees with this on more points than it disagrees with.

Deepens with: (1) the chronological-theological argument from the Exodus sequence — Passover, Red Sea, then Sinai; (2) the Hebrew etymology of kapporet (Mercy Seat) from kaphar ‘to cover’ — the cover sat above the law-tablets, blood was sprinkled on the cover, God’s presence dwelt above; (3) the New Testament typology in Hebrews 9:5 and Romans 3:25 where hilasterion (Greek for kapporet) is applied directly to Christ at the cross; (4) Romans 3:31’s ‘we establish the law’ as the apostolic answer to the antinomian distortion; (5) Romans 6:1-2 (‘shall we sin that grace may abound? God forbid’) and Romans 8:3-4 (the law’s righteousness fulfilled in those who walk after the Spirit) as the broader pattern; (6) brief, respectful note on the application question (which law) and the threefold-division tradition (Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, Wesleyan), naming where the Christos framework parts ways with the CGG/Armstrongite tradition’s uniform application without making it the focus of the essay.

Connects to fellowship work: the IDM charter §7 ethical commitments framed as grace-and-obedience working together — ministry character produces the disposition, ethical commitments are the visible shape of the disposition, neither earned nor optional. The right relationship between Mount Sinai and the Red Sea.

Crescendo on 1 John 2:3-6 read in full (‘he that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar’ — the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging). Voice diagnostics per templates/authors_voice.md: steelman before extension; multi-level descent (chronology, lexicography, NT typology, Pauline argument, application); definitional precision (hilasterion, katargoumen, histanomen, teteleiōtai); scriptural crescendo. Zero direct quotes from Ritenbaugh source per templates/copyright_discipline.md — fully paraphrased substance throughout, audited against the source for verbatim and close-paraphrase issues before commit.

Dual-export per RM_bootup.md §4: canonical .md + WP-paste .html (regenerated mechanically from .md via templates/md_to_wp_html.py). Patch 0010 in the May 7-8 RM patch sequence.
—
…260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.html | 107 ++++++++++++++++
…/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md | 119 ++++++++++++++++++
2 files changed, 226 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.html
create mode 100644 CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md

diff –git a/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.html b/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8fbd1e6
— /dev/null
+++ b/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.html
@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+<p>The daily Berean email this morning carried an excerpt from the late John W. Ritenbaugh, drawn from a longer essay he co-authored with his son Richard T. Ritenbaugh, titled <em>Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness</em>. The excerpt is short — perhaps eight paragraphs — and it is anchored on a single rhetorical question from the prophet Amos:</p>
+
+<p><em>Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?</em> — Amos 5:25</p>
+
+<p>Ritenbaugh’s answer to the rhetorical question is the right one: yes, the people did sacrifice in the wilderness; but sacrifice was not the whole of what God had asked of them, and a sacrificial life detached from an obedient life is not what God wants from a redeemed people. From this answer he develops one of the more important theological points in the Forerunner archive — that grace and obedience are not in tension, that the law and the blood are not alternatives, that Mount Sinai is not the cancellation of Passover but its proper sequel.</p>
+
+<p>I want to commend this point to the fellowship, deepen it from a few angles Ritenbaugh’s brief excerpt does not have space to develop, and bring it back to how we are trying to live as a community. There is more substantive agreement between the Christos framework and Ritenbaugh’s position on this question than there is on some others, and I want to honor that.</p>
+
+<h2>The order of events in the wilderness</h2>
+
+<p>The chronological structure of the Exodus narrative is itself the argument Ritenbaugh is making. The sequence God established was:</p>
+
+<p>A lamb is killed; the blood is placed on the doorposts; the destroyer passes over (Exodus 12).</p>
+
+<p>The people are led out of Egypt across the Red Sea; the pursuing army is destroyed; Israel is, in the most concrete sense possible, freed (Exodus 14-15).</p>
+
+<p><em>Then</em> — only then, after the redemption is finished — does the column of cloud and fire bring them to Sinai, where the law is given (Exodus 19-20).</p>
+
+<p>The people who hear the Ten Words from the smoking mountain are not slaves earning their way out of bondage. They are former slaves who have already been delivered, listening to the One who delivered them describe the shape of the life He intends for them now that they are free. The law arrives as a pattern, not as a price. The redemption is complete before a single commandment is uttered. Whatever else the law is for, it is not for purchasing a freedom that has already been given.</p>
+
+<p>This is the structural fact Ritenbaugh leans on, and it is the fact the New Testament repeatedly draws back to. <em>Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ</em> (Romans 5:1) precedes, in Paul’s letter, the long discussion of how the redeemed should walk that follows in chapters 6 through 8. The justification is finished. The walking comes after. The walking is not the ground of the justification. It is the visible shape of a life that justification has already changed.</p>
+
+<p>This ordering matters because both of the great distortions of Christian teaching get this ordering wrong, in opposite directions. Legalism treats the law as something the believer obeys in order to earn standing with God. Antinomianism treats the law as something the believer no longer needs to bother with because grace has settled the matter. The first reverses the Exodus sequence by putting Sinai before the Red Sea. The second deletes Sinai from the sequence altogether and pretends only the Red Sea matters. Both misread the text. Ritenbaugh’s reading — Sinai <em>follows</em> Passover, and <em>therefore</em> the obedient life follows the redeemed life — is the right reading, and it is the reading the broader catholic Christian witness has held in its better moments across two thousand years.</p>
+
+<h2>What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it</h2>
+
+<p>Ritenbaugh draws particular attention to a piece of furniture that I want to draw out further. The Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost room of the Tabernacle and later of the Temple, was a wooden chest overlaid in gold. Inside the chest, eventually, were three things: a portion of manna, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the two stone tablets on which the Decalogue had been written by the finger of God (Hebrews 9:4). On top of the chest sat a separate, smaller piece, beaten from a single sheet of pure gold, with two cherubim of one piece extending their wings forward over it. This piece was called, in Hebrew, the <em>kapporet</em>. It is the same noun-root from which the Day of Atonement, <em>Yom Kippur</em>, takes its name. The verb form means <em>to cover, to wipe, to atone for</em>. The piece itself is, etymologically, the cover. The cover. The covering thing. It is what is over the law.</p>
+
+<p>This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.</p>
+
+<p>The image, taken in its full geometric sense, is theologically dense. God’s localized presence sat above it, between the wings of the cherubim. The blood of the atonement sacrifice, on one day a year, was sprinkled on it by the high priest. And underneath it, inside the box it covered, were the stone tablets of God’s holy demand on His people. The arrangement was deliberate. The mercy was over the law, sprinkled with blood, with God’s presence brooding above. It was not that mercy replaced the law or eliminated it. The law was still there, intact, in the same chamber, contained in the same chest. What was different was that mercy <em>covered</em> it. Atonement was the lid that allowed the holy God to dwell in the same room as a people who could not, on any given day, claim to have kept what was written on the stones underneath.</p>
+
+<p>The New Testament does not let this image go. When the writer to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle furniture, he uses the Greek noun <em>hilasterion</em> to translate the <em>kapporet</em> (Hebrews 9:5). When Paul reaches for the deepest possible single image of what Christ has done at the cross, he uses the same word: <em>whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation</em> — <em>hilasterion</em> — <em>through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past</em> (Romans 3:25). Christ Himself, in Paul’s argument, is the Mercy Seat. The cover of the Ark, the place where the blood is sprinkled and the presence dwells, the lid over the law. That image lands at the cross. The blood underneath the brooding presence, the law preserved beneath, the mercy that covers without canceling, the presence that draws near because the covering is in place — all of it converges on the body broken at Golgotha and the blood that ran from it.</p>
+
+<p>And then, three verses after using <em>hilasterion</em> of Christ, Paul asks the question that the antinomian distortion has been answering wrongly ever since:</p>
+
+<p><em>Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.</em> — Romans 3:31</p>
+
+<p>The ordinary translation of <em>katargoumen</em> is <em>abolish</em> or <em>render inoperative</em>. Paul is asking, after the longest argument for justification by faith ever written: have we abolished the law by what we have just said? His answer is the strongest negative the Greek language can carry: <em>me genoito</em> — <em>let it not be</em>. <em>God forbid</em>. The faith that grasps the <em>hilasterion</em> does not abolish the law; it <em>establishes</em> it. Paul’s word for <em>establish</em>, <em>histanomen</em>, is the same word used elsewhere of confirming or making firm. Faith makes the law firm. Grace gives the law its standing in the believer’s life.</p>
+
+<p>This is the same point Ritenbaugh is pressing toward in the Forerunner essay, and it is the point at the heart of the broad New Testament witness. Grace does not retire the law. Grace is what makes the law livable.</p>
+
+<h2>Where Paul takes it next</h2>
+
+<p>Romans is not done with the question after chapter three. Paul comes back to it in chapter six, where he names directly the antinomian distortion of his own argument:</p>
+
+<p><em>What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?</em> — Romans 6:1-2</p>
+
+<p>Some hearer of Paul’s preaching had evidently drawn the conclusion that if grace covers sin, then the more sin, the more grace, and therefore the more sin, the better. Paul does not hedge in his rebuttal. The same <em>me genoito</em> — <em>God forbid</em> — that protects the establishment of the law in chapter three protects the moral seriousness of the redeemed life in chapter six. The redeemed have <em>died</em> to sin. The grammar of redemption is not <em>now I can sin freely</em>; it is <em>now I have been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I should not serve sin</em> (Romans 6:6).</p>
+
+<p>By the time Paul reaches chapter eight, the picture has fully emerged. The law was holy, just, good (7:12). The problem was never the law; the problem was the flesh that could not keep it (7:14-25). The solution was not the abolition of the law but the sending of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit:</p>
+
+<p><em>For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.</em> — Romans 8:3-4</p>
+
+<p>Read that sentence carefully. The righteousness of the law is <em>fulfilled in us</em>. Not abolished. Not suspended. Not made optional. <em>Fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit</em>. The grace that gives the Spirit is the grace that makes the law’s requirement realizable in the redeemed life. The law and the Spirit are not opposed. The Spirit is what makes the law a description of how the believer actually lives, rather than an indictment of how the believer continually fails to live.</p>
+
+<p>This is what Ritenbaugh’s two-halves framing is reaching for. The blood covers; the Spirit empowers; the redeemed life is one in which the law’s righteousness is increasingly visible. Sanctification is the name for this. The believer, growing under grace, comes to look more and more like the holy God whose pattern of life the law was always describing.</p>
+
+<h2>The application question, briefly</h2>
+
+<p>I do not want to leave a question unanswered that the careful reader will already be asking. <em>Which</em> law are we talking about? The Decalogue? The dietary laws of Leviticus 11? The civil penalties for theft and adultery? The festival calendar with its new moons and seventh days?</p>
+
+<p>The wider Christian tradition has worked through this question in different ways. The Reformed branch has historically distinguished between moral law (the Decalogue, summed up in Christ’s two great commandments — love of God and love of neighbor), ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary code, the festival calendar), and civil law (the penalties of the Israelite theocracy). On this division, the moral law is eternally binding, the ceremonial law has been fulfilled in Christ in the sense that what it foreshadowed has now arrived, and the civil law was given to a particular people in a particular polity and does not bind Christians as such. The Lutheran branch has worked the question through the law-gospel distinction. The Catholic tradition has worked it through the natural-law and divine-positive-law framework. The Wesleyan branch has emphasized progressive sanctification more than the threefold partition.</p>
+
+<p>Ritenbaugh’s tradition — the Church of the Great God lineage, descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God — has historically rejected the threefold-division and applied the law more uniformly to Christians, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the Mosaic festival calendar. This is a real difference between Ritenbaugh’s tradition and the Christos framework, which broadly inhabits the Reformed-influenced threefold-division view. The difference is not nothing, and it bears on how a fellowship community structures its weekly and annual life.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not the difference I want to dwell on in this essay. The disagreement on which law is binding presupposes the agreement on which Ritenbaugh and the broader catholic Christian witness stand together: that the redeemed are called to obedience, that grace is not license, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the Mercy Seat sat above the law and did not replace it. On the underlying point — that grace and obedience are inseparable, that sanctification is real, that a Christianity which has dropped the law has dropped half of itself — Ritenbaugh and we are on the same side. The application question is a fellowship-level discernment, not a fellowship-dividing one.</p>
+
+<h2>Where the contemporary church needs this</h2>
+
+<p>The American evangelical landscape has, for a generation now, been pulled toward a kind of grace-only preaching that has retired the law in practice if not in confession. Phrases circulate that are almost designed to soften the moral seriousness of the redeemed life: <em>grace is unmerited favor</em> (true, as far as it goes, but spoken in a way that implies the favor never asks anything of the favored); <em>we are saved by grace, not by works</em> (true, as Paul says, but spoken in a way that makes works invisible afterward); <em>don’t let anyone put you under the law</em> (true in some senses, dangerous in others). What gets lost is precisely the structure Ritenbaugh is recovering — that grace and obedience are not adversaries, that the redeemed life is a <em>life</em>, that the saved person is being made into someone whose life looks more and more like the One who saved them.</p>
+
+<p>The other distortion, legalism, exists too — particularly in some immigrant church communities, in some conservative-Reformed contexts, and in some sectarian movements that Christianize their own preferred set of cultural rules and call them God’s law. Both distortions miss what Ritenbaugh is naming. The legalist reverses the Exodus order and puts the law before the redemption. The antinomian deletes the law from the sequence and pretends only the redemption matters. Neither honors the actual structure of the biblical narrative, the actual furniture in the Holy of Holies, the actual argument of Romans, or the actual life Christ called His followers to live.</p>
+
+<p>For our fellowship — and for me as I write this — the call is the same one Amos was bringing to the northern kingdom in 760 BC. Are we sacrificing without obeying? Are we attending the gathering without changing how we conduct our business? Are we showing up to the feasts without examining whether we have left the feast different from how we arrived? Ritenbaugh’s reading of Amos applies. The question presses the same way now as then. Sacrifice that is not joined to obedience is sacrifice God will not have.</p>
+
+<p>The Ideomotion charter we have spent the past several days revising is, if it works as intended, a small and concrete instance of grace-and-obedience working together. The ministry character of the work is not earned by the obedience; the obedience flows from the ministry character. The §7 ethical commitments — non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, truthful claims — are not legalisms tacked onto a Christian-branded business. They are the visible shape of a redeemed posture toward the customer. The grace gives the disposition; the obedience is what the disposition looks like in practice. To attempt the obedience without the grace would be to reverse the Exodus order. To claim the grace without the obedience would be to delete Sinai from the sequence. We are trying to keep them in the right relationship — Mount Sinai after the Red Sea, the law beneath the Mercy Seat, the redeemed life that obeys because it has first been freed.</p>
+
+<h2>Crescendo</h2>
+
+<p>The verse I want to close on is not from Romans this time. It is from the first letter of John, a letter written, we believe, by the apostle who lay closest to Jesus at the last supper and who outlived all the others to see the end of the apostolic age. John has watched a generation come and go. He has watched the gospel survive Nero’s fires and Domitian’s exiles. And in his old age he writes — pastorally, and with the bluntness of an old man who has earned the right to say what he means:</p>
+
+<p><em>And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked.</em> — 1 John 2:3-6</p>
+
+<p>This is the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging. The test of whether we know Christ is whether we keep His commandments. Not because keeping them earns the knowledge, but because the knowing of Christ produces the keeping. A person who claims to know Him without keeping is, in John’s plain word, a <em>liar</em>. The Greek term is <em>pseustes</em>, the same word used elsewhere of those who are constitutionally untruthful. John is not soft-pedaling. The Christianity that brackets out obedience is, on the apostolic reading, not Christianity at all. It is a self-deception that has borrowed the vocabulary.</p>
+
+<p>The opposite is also true. The one who keeps the word — the one whose life shows the visible shape of obedience — is the one in whom <em>the love of God is perfected</em>. The Greek for <em>perfected</em> is <em>teteleiōtai</em>, from <em>telos</em>: brought to its end, brought to maturity, brought to its intended completion. The keeping of the commandments is what brings the love of God to its full stature in the believer. Not a substitute for grace. A consummation of grace.</p>
+
+<p>That is what Ritenbaugh is naming, and that is what I commend to the fellowship for our discussion. The grace and the obedience are not adversaries. They are the front and back of the same coin, the redemption-then-Sinai sequence, the Mercy-Seat-above-the-law geometry, the Spirit-fulfilling-the-law-in-us in Romans 8 and the keeping-his-commandments in 1 John 2. We will disagree at the edges with Ritenbaugh’s tradition on which specific commandments are in view in our practical application — that is a real and not-trivial disagreement and we should not pretend it isn’t. But on the central matter, on the structural point that the redeemed are called to obey and that obedience is the visible fruit of grace, we and Ritenbaugh stand together.</p>
+
+<p>There is a famine of this teaching in much of the contemporary church. There is a famine of the truthful word that Amos warned would come and that John warned would come and that we are, perhaps, watching arrive. The remedy is not legalism, and it is not antinomian sentimentalism. It is the recovery of the actual gospel — the gospel in which a holy God has made a way, through the blood of His Son, for an unholy people to dwell with Him; and in which that same God expects, of the people He has made His own, that they will increasingly look like Him. The Mercy Seat above the law. The blood that covers. The Spirit that fulfills. The life that shows.</p>
+
+<p>That is the religion God will have. May we, by His mercy, increasingly become the people He calls us to be.</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<h2>Sources</h2>
+
+<p>John W. Ritenbaugh and Richard T. Ritenbaugh, <em>Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness</em>, Forerunner, October 29, 2025. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1941. The excerpt engaged in this essay is the section titled “Grace and Law,” received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution, May 8, 2026.</p>
+
+<p>Internal Renaissance Ministries references: `CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md` (companion essay engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism, also from the cgg.org Forerunner archive); `IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md` v0.3 §7 (the ethics-and-non-coercion section referenced in the application paragraph above).</p>
+
+<p>Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Exodus 12; Exodus 14-15; Exodus 19-20; Hebrews 9:4-5; Romans 3:25, 31; Romans 5:1; Romans 6:1-2, 6; Romans 7:12, 14-25; Romans 8:3-4; 1 John 2:3-6; Amos 5:25.</p>
+
+<p>Hebrew lexical references: <em>kapporet</em> (Strong’s H3727), root <em>kaphar</em> (H3722); related: <em>Yom Kippur</em>, <em>kippurim</em>. Greek lexical references: <em>hilasterion</em> (Strong’s G2435), <em>katargoumen</em> (G2673), <em>histanomen</em> (G2476), <em>me genoito</em> (G3361 + G1096), <em>teteleiōtai</em> (G5048).</p>
+
+<p>Theological-tradition references for the threefold-division of the law mentioned in the application section: Westminster Confession of Faith XIX (Reformed); Lutheran Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VI (law-gospel distinction); Aquinas, <em>Summa Theologiae</em> I-II Q.99 (Catholic). These are not engaged in detail above but are the tradition the application discussion draws from.</p>
diff –git a/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md b/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32883b3
— /dev/null
+++ b/CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md
@@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
+—
+title: “The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat: On John Ritenbaugh, Amos 5:25, and the Harmony of Grace and Obedience”
+author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND”
+date: 2026-05-08
+module: CFE
+topics: [grace, law, obedience, sanctification, atonement, mercy-seat, kapporet, hilasterion, ritenbaugh, amos]
+status: DRAFT
+type: essay
+—
+
+# The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat: On John Ritenbaugh, Amos 5:25, and the Harmony of Grace and Obedience
+
+The daily Berean email this morning carried an excerpt from the late John W. Ritenbaugh, drawn from a longer essay he co-authored with his son Richard T. Ritenbaugh, titled *Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness*. The excerpt is short — perhaps eight paragraphs — and it is anchored on a single rhetorical question from the prophet Amos:
+
+*Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?* — Amos 5:25
+
+Ritenbaugh’s answer to the rhetorical question is the right one: yes, the people did sacrifice in the wilderness; but sacrifice was not the whole of what God had asked of them, and a sacrificial life detached from an obedient life is not what God wants from a redeemed people. From this answer he develops one of the more important theological points in the Forerunner archive — that grace and obedience are not in tension, that the law and the blood are not alternatives, that Mount Sinai is not the cancellation of Passover but its proper sequel.
+
+I want to commend this point to the fellowship, deepen it from a few angles Ritenbaugh’s brief excerpt does not have space to develop, and bring it back to how we are trying to live as a community. There is more substantive agreement between the Christos framework and Ritenbaugh’s position on this question than there is on some others, and I want to honor that.
+
+## The order of events in the wilderness
+
+The chronological structure of the Exodus narrative is itself the argument Ritenbaugh is making. The sequence God established was:
+
+A lamb is killed; the blood is placed on the doorposts; the destroyer passes over (Exodus 12).
+
+The people are led out of Egypt across the Red Sea; the pursuing army is destroyed; Israel is, in the most concrete sense possible, freed (Exodus 14-15).
+
+*Then* — only then, after the redemption is finished — does the column of cloud and fire bring them to Sinai, where the law is given (Exodus 19-20).
+
+The people who hear the Ten Words from the smoking mountain are not slaves earning their way out of bondage. They are former slaves who have already been delivered, listening to the One who delivered them describe the shape of the life He intends for them now that they are free. The law arrives as a pattern, not as a price. The redemption is complete before a single commandment is uttered. Whatever else the law is for, it is not for purchasing a freedom that has already been given.
+
+This is the structural fact Ritenbaugh leans on, and it is the fact the New Testament repeatedly draws back to. *Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ* (Romans 5:1) precedes, in Paul’s letter, the long discussion of how the redeemed should walk that follows in chapters 6 through 8. The justification is finished. The walking comes after. The walking is not the ground of the justification. It is the visible shape of a life that justification has already changed.
+
+This ordering matters because both of the great distortions of Christian teaching get this ordering wrong, in opposite directions. Legalism treats the law as something the believer obeys in order to earn standing with God. Antinomianism treats the law as something the believer no longer needs to bother with because grace has settled the matter. The first reverses the Exodus sequence by putting Sinai before the Red Sea. The second deletes Sinai from the sequence altogether and pretends only the Red Sea matters. Both misread the text. Ritenbaugh’s reading — Sinai *follows* Passover, and *therefore* the obedient life follows the redeemed life — is the right reading, and it is the reading the broader catholic Christian witness has held in its better moments across two thousand years.
+
+## What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it
+
+Ritenbaugh draws particular attention to a piece of furniture that I want to draw out further. The Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost room of the Tabernacle and later of the Temple, was a wooden chest overlaid in gold. Inside the chest, eventually, were three things: a portion of manna, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the two stone tablets on which the Decalogue had been written by the finger of God (Hebrews 9:4). On top of the chest sat a separate, smaller piece, beaten from a single sheet of pure gold, with two cherubim of one piece extending their wings forward over it. This piece was called, in Hebrew, the *kapporet*. It is the same noun-root from which the Day of Atonement, *Yom Kippur*, takes its name. The verb form means *to cover, to wipe, to atone for*. The piece itself is, etymologically, the cover. The cover. The covering thing. It is what is over the law.
+
+This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.
+
+The image, taken in its full geometric sense, is theologically dense. God’s localized presence sat above it, between the wings of the cherubim. The blood of the atonement sacrifice, on one day a year, was sprinkled on it by the high priest. And underneath it, inside the box it covered, were the stone tablets of God’s holy demand on His people. The arrangement was deliberate. The mercy was over the law, sprinkled with blood, with God’s presence brooding above. It was not that mercy replaced the law or eliminated it. The law was still there, intact, in the same chamber, contained in the same chest. What was different was that mercy *covered* it. Atonement was the lid that allowed the holy God to dwell in the same room as a people who could not, on any given day, claim to have kept what was written on the stones underneath.
+
+The New Testament does not let this image go. When the writer to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle furniture, he uses the Greek noun *hilasterion* to translate the *kapporet* (Hebrews 9:5). When Paul reaches for the deepest possible single image of what Christ has done at the cross, he uses the same word: *whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation* — *hilasterion* — *through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past* (Romans 3:25). Christ Himself, in Paul’s argument, is the Mercy Seat. The cover of the Ark, the place where the blood is sprinkled and the presence dwells, the lid over the law. That image lands at the cross. The blood underneath the brooding presence, the law preserved beneath, the mercy that covers without canceling, the presence that draws near because the covering is in place — all of it converges on the body broken at Golgotha and the blood that ran from it.
+
+And then, three verses after using *hilasterion* of Christ, Paul asks the question that the antinomian distortion has been answering wrongly ever since:
+
+*Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.* — Romans 3:31
+
+The ordinary translation of *katargoumen* is *abolish* or *render inoperative*. Paul is asking, after the longest argument for justification by faith ever written: have we abolished the law by what we have just said? His answer is the strongest negative the Greek language can carry: *me genoito* — *let it not be*. *God forbid*. The faith that grasps the *hilasterion* does not abolish the law; it *establishes* it. Paul’s word for *establish*, *histanomen*, is the same word used elsewhere of confirming or making firm. Faith makes the law firm. Grace gives the law its standing in the believer’s life.
+
+This is the same point Ritenbaugh is pressing toward in the Forerunner essay, and it is the point at the heart of the broad New Testament witness. Grace does not retire the law. Grace is what makes the law livable.
+
+## Where Paul takes it next
+
+Romans is not done with the question after chapter three. Paul comes back to it in chapter six, where he names directly the antinomian distortion of his own argument:
+
+*What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?* — Romans 6:1-2
+
+Some hearer of Paul’s preaching had evidently drawn the conclusion that if grace covers sin, then the more sin, the more grace, and therefore the more sin, the better. Paul does not hedge in his rebuttal. The same *me genoito* — *God forbid* — that protects the establishment of the law in chapter three protects the moral seriousness of the redeemed life in chapter six. The redeemed have *died* to sin. The grammar of redemption is not *now I can sin freely*; it is *now I have been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I should not serve sin* (Romans 6:6).
+
+By the time Paul reaches chapter eight, the picture has fully emerged. The law was holy, just, good (7:12). The problem was never the law; the problem was the flesh that could not keep it (7:14-25). The solution was not the abolition of the law but the sending of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit:
+
+*For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.* — Romans 8:3-4
+
+Read that sentence carefully. The righteousness of the law is *fulfilled in us*. Not abolished. Not suspended. Not made optional. *Fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit*. The grace that gives the Spirit is the grace that makes the law’s requirement realizable in the redeemed life. The law and the Spirit are not opposed. The Spirit is what makes the law a description of how the believer actually lives, rather than an indictment of how the believer continually fails to live.
+
+This is what Ritenbaugh’s two-halves framing is reaching for. The blood covers; the Spirit empowers; the redeemed life is one in which the law’s righteousness is increasingly visible. Sanctification is the name for this. The believer, growing under grace, comes to look more and more like the holy God whose pattern of life the law was always describing.
+
+## The application question, briefly
+
+I do not want to leave a question unanswered that the careful reader will already be asking. *Which* law are we talking about? The Decalogue? The dietary laws of Leviticus 11? The civil penalties for theft and adultery? The festival calendar with its new moons and seventh days?
+
+The wider Christian tradition has worked through this question in different ways. The Reformed branch has historically distinguished between moral law (the Decalogue, summed up in Christ’s two great commandments — love of God and love of neighbor), ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary code, the festival calendar), and civil law (the penalties of the Israelite theocracy). On this division, the moral law is eternally binding, the ceremonial law has been fulfilled in Christ in the sense that what it foreshadowed has now arrived, and the civil law was given to a particular people in a particular polity and does not bind Christians as such. The Lutheran branch has worked the question through the law-gospel distinction. The Catholic tradition has worked it through the natural-law and divine-positive-law framework. The Wesleyan branch has emphasized progressive sanctification more than the threefold partition.
+
+Ritenbaugh’s tradition — the Church of the Great God lineage, descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God — has historically rejected the threefold-division and applied the law more uniformly to Christians, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the Mosaic festival calendar. This is a real difference between Ritenbaugh’s tradition and the Christos framework, which broadly inhabits the Reformed-influenced threefold-division view. The difference is not nothing, and it bears on how a fellowship community structures its weekly and annual life.
+
+But it is not the difference I want to dwell on in this essay. The disagreement on which law is binding presupposes the agreement on which Ritenbaugh and the broader catholic Christian witness stand together: that the redeemed are called to obedience, that grace is not license, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the Mercy Seat sat above the law and did not replace it. On the underlying point — that grace and obedience are inseparable, that sanctification is real, that a Christianity which has dropped the law has dropped half of itself — Ritenbaugh and we are on the same side. The application question is a fellowship-level discernment, not a fellowship-dividing one.
+
+## Where the contemporary church needs this
+
+The American evangelical landscape has, for a generation now, been pulled toward a kind of grace-only preaching that has retired the law in practice if not in confession. Phrases circulate that are almost designed to soften the moral seriousness of the redeemed life: *grace is unmerited favor* (true, as far as it goes, but spoken in a way that implies the favor never asks anything of the favored); *we are saved by grace, not by works* (true, as Paul says, but spoken in a way that makes works invisible afterward); *don’t let anyone put you under the law* (true in some senses, dangerous in others). What gets lost is precisely the structure Ritenbaugh is recovering — that grace and obedience are not adversaries, that the redeemed life is a *life*, that the saved person is being made into someone whose life looks more and more like the One who saved them.
+
+The other distortion, legalism, exists too — particularly in some immigrant church communities, in some conservative-Reformed contexts, and in some sectarian movements that Christianize their own preferred set of cultural rules and call them God’s law. Both distortions miss what Ritenbaugh is naming. The legalist reverses the Exodus order and puts the law before the redemption. The antinomian deletes the law from the sequence and pretends only the redemption matters. Neither honors the actual structure of the biblical narrative, the actual furniture in the Holy of Holies, the actual argument of Romans, or the actual life Christ called His followers to live.
+
+For our fellowship — and for me as I write this — the call is the same one Amos was bringing to the northern kingdom in 760 BC. Are we sacrificing without obeying? Are we attending the gathering without changing how we conduct our business? Are we showing up to the feasts without examining whether we have left the feast different from how we arrived? Ritenbaugh’s reading of Amos applies. The question presses the same way now as then. Sacrifice that is not joined to obedience is sacrifice God will not have.
+
+The Ideomotion charter we have spent the past several days revising is, if it works as intended, a small and concrete instance of grace-and-obedience working together. The ministry character of the work is not earned by the obedience; the obedience flows from the ministry character. The §7 ethical commitments — non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, truthful claims — are not legalisms tacked onto a Christian-branded business. They are the visible shape of a redeemed posture toward the customer. The grace gives the disposition; the obedience is what the disposition looks like in practice. To attempt the obedience without the grace would be to reverse the Exodus order. To claim the grace without the obedience would be to delete Sinai from the sequence. We are trying to keep them in the right relationship — Mount Sinai after the Red Sea, the law beneath the Mercy Seat, the redeemed life that obeys because it has first been freed.
+
+## Crescendo
+
+The verse I want to close on is not from Romans this time. It is from the first letter of John, a letter written, we believe, by the apostle who lay closest to Jesus at the last supper and who outlived all the others to see the end of the apostolic age. John has watched a generation come and go. He has watched the gospel survive Nero’s fires and Domitian’s exiles. And in his old age he writes — pastorally, and with the bluntness of an old man who has earned the right to say what he means:
+
+*And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked.* — 1 John 2:3-6
+
+This is the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging. The test of whether we know Christ is whether we keep His commandments. Not because keeping them earns the knowledge, but because the knowing of Christ produces the keeping. A person who claims to know Him without keeping is, in John’s plain word, a *liar*. The Greek term is *pseustes*, the same word used elsewhere of those who are constitutionally untruthful. John is not soft-pedaling. The Christianity that brackets out obedience is, on the apostolic reading, not Christianity at all. It is a self-deception that has borrowed the vocabulary.
+
+The opposite is also true. The one who keeps the word — the one whose life shows the visible shape of obedience — is the one in whom *the love of God is perfected*. The Greek for *perfected* is *teteleiōtai*, from *telos*: brought to its end, brought to maturity, brought to its intended completion. The keeping of the commandments is what brings the love of God to its full stature in the believer. Not a substitute for grace. A consummation of grace.
+
+That is what Ritenbaugh is naming, and that is what I commend to the fellowship for our discussion. The grace and the obedience are not adversaries. They are the front and back of the same coin, the redemption-then-Sinai sequence, the Mercy-Seat-above-the-law geometry, the Spirit-fulfilling-the-law-in-us in Romans 8 and the keeping-his-commandments in 1 John 2. We will disagree at the edges with Ritenbaugh’s tradition on which specific commandments are in view in our practical application — that is a real and not-trivial disagreement and we should not pretend it isn’t. But on the central matter, on the structural point that the redeemed are called to obey and that obedience is the visible fruit of grace, we and Ritenbaugh stand together.
+
+There is a famine of this teaching in much of the contemporary church. There is a famine of the truthful word that Amos warned would come and that John warned would come and that we are, perhaps, watching arrive. The remedy is not legalism, and it is not antinomian sentimentalism. It is the recovery of the actual gospel — the gospel in which a holy God has made a way, through the blood of His Son, for an unholy people to dwell with Him; and in which that same God expects, of the people He has made His own, that they will increasingly look like Him. The Mercy Seat above the law. The blood that covers. The Spirit that fulfills. The life that shows.
+
+That is the religion God will have. May we, by His mercy, increasingly become the people He calls us to be.
+
+—
+
+## Sources
+
+John W. Ritenbaugh and Richard T. Ritenbaugh, *Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness*, Forerunner, October 29, 2025. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1941. The excerpt engaged in this essay is the section titled “Grace and Law,” received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution, May 8, 2026.
+
+Internal Renaissance Ministries references: `CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md` (companion essay engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism, also from the cgg.org Forerunner archive); `IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md` v0.3 §7 (the ethics-and-non-coercion section referenced in the application paragraph above).
+
+Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Exodus 12; Exodus 14-15; Exodus 19-20; Hebrews 9:4-5; Romans 3:25, 31; Romans 5:1; Romans 6:1-2, 6; Romans 7:12, 14-25; Romans 8:3-4; 1 John 2:3-6; Amos 5:25.
+
+Hebrew lexical references: *kapporet* (Strong’s H3727), root *kaphar* (H3722); related: *Yom Kippur*, *kippurim*. Greek lexical references: *hilasterion* (Strong’s G2435), *katargoumen* (G2673), *histanomen* (G2476), *me genoito* (G3361 + G1096), *teteleiōtai* (G5048).
+
+Theological-tradition references for the threefold-division of the law mentioned in the application section: Westminster Confession of Faith XIX (Reformed); Lutheran Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VI (law-gospel distinction); Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* I-II Q.99 (Catholic). These are not engaged in detail above but are the tradition the application discussion draws from.
—
2.43.0