Now onto the third and final installment of addressing the Pauline problem everyone is interpreting wrong about the Apostle. If the institutional church has fundamentally misunderstood the earthly parables of Jesus, it has almost entirely lost the celestial architecture revealed to the Apostle Paul. In the rush to either hyper-spiritualize the text or dissect it with cold academic precision, modern theology has missed the sheer scale of what God is currently doing while we are living.
We have explored the fatal flaw of possessing right division without right action, and we have collapsed the artificial wall separating the moral heartbeat of Christ’s parables from Paul’s grace. But a transformed heart must ultimately have a destination. Who are we? Why were we called out of the nations during this specific administration of grace, and where exactly are we going?
Paul was not just offering a different flavor of Peter’s gospel; he was unveiling an entirely new architectural blueprint that had been kept completely dark from the prophets of the old testament:
“…and to enlighten all as to what is the administration of the secret, which has been concealed from the eons in God, Who creates all things.” – Ephesians 3:9
When we examine Paul’s exclusive revelations regarding the Body of Christ, we uncover a cosmic identity that violently disrupts both the apocalyptic anxiety of mainstream religion and the arrogant complacency of the concordant intellectual. We are not waiting for a rescue helicopter to float on clouds, nor are we waiting to casually inherit the universe. We have been drafted into a potential position of celestial administration.
Demystifying the Principalities and the Messengers
To understand our destiny, we must first strip away the mythological veneer that has suffocated biblical cosmology. Paul reveals that the overarching purpose of the ecclesia is to broadcast the manifold wisdom of God to the
“rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” – Ephesians 3:10.
When traditional pulpits read about “principalities,” “authorities,” and “angels,” they immediately conjure images of winged men-like creatures, gargoyles, and ethereal spooks full of eyes. They mystify the text, turning Paul’s deeply administrative language into a superstitious fantasy, and they do this with the rest of the biblical canon as well. This leads to a bizarre culture of spiritual warfare where believers spend their time shouting at the air to bind invisible monsters they call demons.
The Concordant purist often makes a different error, either over-spiritualizing these entities into abstract eonian forces or ignoring them altogether because they do not fit neatly into a hyper-logical framework. In turn, they default to reading these definitions as the mythical and mystical creatures the religious have taught for centuries, never truly coming into the realization that these are pure idiomatic descriptions of mankind both in the present state, and a future heavenly state of existence.
I say this because I, too, was once caught in between both of these camps. For years, I genuinely believed that ethereal beings, eight feet or taller with perfect physical forms and strange winged anatomy, floated in the sky, or that bizarre wormholes of spiritual energy just flowed out from the throne. But ultimately, once I realized how the ancient Jewish writers communicated, taking the standard, boring, and grounded realities of human life and dressing them in a highly artistic, mystical slang, it broke open my understanding. It was like learning an entirely new language. The mythology completely shattered, and the veil dropped on what was truly being said. It was no different than Dorothy and her posse pulling back the curtain on the Wizard who controlled Oz, only to realize the truth was as boring and terrifyingly mundane as they were themselves. The matters of superstition were never what they were claimed to be. It was always just about mankind in its current state.
Before I continue, yes, I get it. I can hear you right now:
“But Matt, where are you getting any of this? Knoch and previous church writers did not teach these things! Not even our adored outspoken Bible scholar, Martin Zender, has attested to this! Why should we believe you?!”
Again, when you spend time outside of your own box and examine the world around you as though you are tasked by Christ Himself to listen and pay close attention to all things without a discriminating measure of importance, the answers will come to you, rather than you having to chase after them. Paying attention to the things you find the least amusing, edifying, or encouraging can often reveal something that has been right in front of you all along. But the world’s noise, in telling you which way to look, what to examine, and where to give your attention, has been pointing you to the exact opposite of what is really there. Fundamentally, the world is vastly more interesting in its boring state than it is in the sales pitches it pushes for you to purchase as the ideals and ideas you must accept.
Mankind loves to invent its own narratives wherever possible, especially when it comes at the expense of other people for one’s own benefit, whether for financial profiteering, power, or deception, and especially through religion, which both the earthly Jesus and the Apostle Paul strongly warned against participating in. Now, when the world proudly avows in quoting Jesus’ earthly statement in both a mythical and mystical understanding, claiming the Devil is the thief who comes
“only to steal and kill and destroy” – John 10:10
I will now ask you, who exactly is doing these very things? Are these things waiting to happen, or are they already happening, and have been happening since the fall of man? An invisible creature in the sky that bounces from place to place, person to person? No. It is you; it is me; it is every man, woman, and child fighting for their place to survive and exist to their own benefit.
Imagine hearing an Old Testament prophet declaring things that were entirely foreign to the common knowledge of their day. Yet, they were absolutely right about the premise of what they were given by God. I know this is going to be refuted by most of you. Some of you may be intrigued by what is being unveiled, while others will shun my work and believe that I am way off base. But I assure you, I am not.
This took a profound amount of wrestling to accept, just as it did to initially realize that the mainstream doctrines of eternal torment were completely mythical. The exact same is true regarding the things of the celestial, be it angels, and especially the devil and the demons. They are not what everyone thinks they are. They are everywhere, and they are you and me. Paul makes these things entirely clear if you read his letters as letters of a humbled man who is trying to reach generations of people to come into a realization of the truth.
They are what the ancient Jewish writers phrased as states of condition, position, reaction, situation, and purpose. They are not literal, anatomic entities that roam independently as we do with concrete feelings, thoughts, and aspirations. They are powerful states of circumstance that are always operating in the background of our lives, present within every person who has ever walked, and will ever walk, this earth. This even included our kinsman redeeming brotherly savior and Lord, Christ Jesus.
The root of this massive cosmological misunderstanding stems from a complete ignorance of how Jewish writers actually communicated. Paul was a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee trained under Gamaliel. The linguistic toolkit he used to write his epistles was thoroughly Jewish. The ancient Hebrew and first-century Jewish writers heavily utilized idioms, intense hyperbole, and colorful linguistic slang to describe the characteristics of personhood, systemic authority, and God’s purposes.
When a Jewish writer wanted to describe the collapse of a massive political empire, they did not use sterile, modern geopolitical terms; they used apocalyptic hyperbole. If a modern news anchor were reporting on the collapse of a superpower today, they would simply say,
“The regime has fallen, the dictator has been violently overthrown, and his top cabinet officials have been stripped of their power.”
But the ancient Jewish writer would look at that exact same earthly revolution and declare that the sun is turning to blood and the stars are falling from heaven. The sun represented the supreme authority, the king, or the overarching empire itself. For it to turn to blood meant that the era of stability was ending in violent ruin. The stars represented the princes, the governors, and the high ranking officials. For the stars to fall from heaven simply meant those leaders were being ripped from their elevated positions of power and cast down to the dirt. It was not a literal astronomical catastrophe where burning balls of gas hit the earth.
Do not confuse this with the localized, historical judgments of the Old Testament. When critics of this view point to the physical sulfur balls found in the ancient soil of Sodom and Gomorrah, they fail to realize the scriptures themselves never called those events stars falling. Genesis explicitly calls it fire and brimstone. The ancient writers knew the difference between a localized storm of burning sulfur and the massive celestial bodies in the sky. If a single literal star actually fell to the earth, it would not leave small pellets in the dirt; it would incinerate the entire earthly system. Apocalyptic literature is not a meteorological forecast. It is a profound, cosmic idiom used to describe the total collapse of earthly empires.
Likewise, when they wanted to describe a hostile, tyrannical government, they called it a beast rising from the sea. This was the cultural slang of the day, a vivid, anthropomorphic way of assigning personhood and cosmic weight to literal, earthly realities.
Mainstream Christianity reads this Jewish idiomatic language with a sterile, Western literalism, completely missing the point. They take the hyperbole and build a haunted house out of it.
When Paul writes about the
“prince of the power of the air” – Ephesians 2:2,
or the
“rulers of the darkness of this world” – Ephesians 6:12,
he is employing this exact Jewish framework. He is not drawing a picture of a literal horned monster floating in the clouds. He is describing the hostile, systemic characteristics of the current eon’s administration. The Greek word angelos simply translates to “messenger” or the Hebrew Malak for “agent”, nothing more, nothing less. It is a job title, not a species. Scripture uses the exact same word to describe the human messengers of John the Baptist
“When John’s messengers [angelos] had gone…” – Luke 7:24
and the human spies hidden by Rahab
“she received the messengers [angelos]” – James 2:25.
Likewise, Paul defines exactly what these spiritual entities are in his letter to the Colossians.
“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities…” – Colossians 1:16
Notice the vocabulary. Thrones. Dominions. Rulers. Authorities. These are not descriptions of mythical cryptids; these are literal jurisdictions and administrative ranks. Paul is establishing the architecture of cosmic government.
Consider when Jesus said:
“Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” – Luke 15:10
If we translate this through the Jewish idiomatic context for the Gentile layperson, it effectively says:
“Just so you are aware, there is joy before those persons who are believing God’s message, knowing a single person who has changed their mind about their circumstances and now trusts the good news.”
Paul is never telling us that we are at war with ghosts, nor is he implying a hostile takeover to unseat a currently dwelling civilization of other celestial species. Rather, Paul is using the local, earthly understanding of government, such as courts, rulers, and thrones, to reveal the architecture of a completely new civilization in the heavens. Try to think of this existence simply as the earthly jurisdiction we currently reside in, mirrored in an upper celestial capacity. It is a place where the life we always wished had operated here on earth will finally become a reality. It will be governed exclusively by the most loving among us, those who inwardly desire to give and serve the whole, rather than just themselves.
God has prefabricated a proxy realm, a newly constructed celestial jurisdiction, specifically designed for a New Creation where Jew and Gentile are gathered together as one Body. This realm is untouched by the corruptions of the current earthly eon. When Paul speaks of God seating us
“with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” – Ephesians 2:6,
Paul is pointing to this exact, reserved jurisdiction.
Furthermore, when Paul speaks of the “celestials” or the “heavenly places,” he is using a coded idiom for the operational state of this New Creation. It is not merely a physical zip code in the sky; it is the ultimate state of mankind’s uncorrupted governance. But how does this spiritual power operate while we are still living as mortals on this earth? It operates through God’s intervening will in the present moment. Just as God uses the “messengers” of the eons to course-correct human history, He places modern, living vessels, you and me, directly into the daily paths of others. We are positioned as earthly messengers carrying the weight of the celestials, presenting the measure of profound truth for a person’s faith to either accept or reject in real-time.
The Body of Christ is actively being trained to govern within this new realm. When the snatching away occurs, millions, perhaps billions, of graced believers will be suddenly gathered into the celestials. That massive, unprecedented civilization will not be an anarchic cloud resort where believers sit around strumming harps. It will require immense structure, administration, and governance. It will require thrones, dominions, and authorities of its own. Do not get me wrong, there will be rest in abundance and the joy of true living in the absolute sense, far beyond what we can experience here on earth. But to sustain that for all people, there must be a Body of Christ governing when Christ Himself is not directly present in the heavens, as He will be down below on the earth for 1,000 years to mediate the final matters of sin and death for all of mankind until the consummation.
This is the ultimate Prize Paul was agonizing over.
Remember that Paul, who was once named Saul of Tarsus, was a highly esteemed worker of the Law. He was regarded as one of the highest, most exemplified members in the synagogues, and for his day, he had everything a man could envy. He was already experienced in exercising himself to higher standards, making sacrifices, and pushing his mind and behavior to their absolute limits for the sake of achievement. Now, when you look at Paul, the repented and transformed complete reversal of Saul, you read the words of a man who learned to let go of the need to be important. He truly realized he had to relearn everything to achieve the things of Christ before God. He understood that mere knowledge and intellect in a clean set of robes do not supersede the love and grace of giving, and that it is humility that is ultimately rewarded at the Dais.
Those who diligently study, believe, and allow Paul’s revelations to transform their hearts in this lifetime into imitators of Christ are being prepared for the highest allotments in the next. This includes the outward appearance of one’s conduct toward others. God is currently evaluating who has the character, the endurance, and the transformed heart required to govern the vast, newly gathered civilization of the New Creation. We are not just waiting to escape the earth. We are being actively vetted to govern the heavens for a perfect life.
In simple terms, what you see happening here on earth is going to be mirrored in the heavens. Life requires movement, order, and structure. The heavens will be a human-based civilization of a “New Creation” where death, sin, decay, pain and finite limitations do not reign. But people will still have what they have here, as they will up there. “As above, so below,” as “so within, so without.”
The earthly Kingdom we all know was promised to come for Israel will be governed under the direct jurisdiction of Jesus Himself. Christ is taking the Body up to the heavens to evaluate who is qualified for the Prize to reign above. Paul made a tireless effort to clarify that some will be rewarded the greatest, some will be of benefit, and then there are those who will suffer complete loss:
“If anyone’s work which he has built on it shall remain, he will get a reward. If anyone’s work shall be burned up, he will suffer loss, yet he shall be saved, yet thus, as through fire.” – 1 Corinthians 3:14-15
An important side point to touch on from the verse Paul writes above is a key idiom that Christianity misinterprets profoundly over and over. That idiom is the word fire, which is an expression for truth delivered in love. To be saved as through fire is simply saying, as through the truth of the matter in love. Therein lies the massive issue the Concordant space carries regarding their exclusionary status of who is truly in the Body based on holding a deeper or higher meaning of the text. This verse clearly shows that a believer with corrupt doctrine can still be in the Body, provided they hold to the finished work of the cross, despite their own club held status as a member of a mainstream denomination. It is just that the person with bad doctrine survives the fire of truth with nothing extra to be gained, walking away with nothing except the truth of the matter from the loving presence of the Lord Christ Jesus and God the Father, Yahweh, the only Elohim of creation.
It is not a measured, socialist sense of equality. There are jurisdictions with rank, and roles that each person will be placed in. Your age, generation, or knowledge, though different from everyone uniquely at present. Does not determine those factors. It is entirely incumbent upon your transformed heart with knowledge of God’s grace. Because the Heavens will be the supreme existence of Grace in operation. Jesus and the Twelve, with those of the promised allotment below in Israel, will reign over the earth as we will above. Because God is a respecter of jurisdictions, not of persons, He will most likely keep us quarantined in the heavens from interfering with the earth below. As these are purely jurisdiction based in placement. If God did not intervene for nearly 2,000 years with the earth during the age of Grace. Nor did He allow His son, Christ Jesus to interfere throughout this period where the administration of Grace is in effect. Then He will not allow members of the Body to intervene with Christ’s own authority over Israel and the earth below. Thank God for that.
There are no invisible, ghostly, bizarre, winged beings above in the heavens. That is completely mythical. What you see is what you get, up there. Probably more, given the abundance of God’s dwelling presence, which provides everything endlessly. But at the same time, it is there for us to be active administrators, fully engaged in the movement, work, and governance of the eons to come. It will fulfill every speck of imagination given to those who hold the faith while on this earth. The profound, uncorrupted reality we could only imagine down here will become the literal, operational state of what is to be up there.
The Idioms of the Human Condition
I want to truly help you unlock the mechanism to reread the scriptures as they were intended to be understood by the Old and first century New Testament writers. To fully drive this home, we must understand how Paul bridged the ancient writings of the Old Testament with his new revelations for the Body. The Jewish authors of the biblical canon did not write to inquire into mystical fantasies or spooky myths. They utilized their cultural idioms to describe the brutal reality of the human condition and the various states of personhood that led to our falling point.
We see this masterfully deployed when Paul explains the current state of the earth in his letter to the Romans.
“For to vanity was the creation subjected, not voluntarily, but because of Him Who subjects it, in expectation…” – Romans 8:20
Paul is not describing a magical, mythical curse cast by dark wizard like figures. To acclaim such beings exist, you might as well return to your eternal torment mythical realm where fire consumes one’s flesh endlessly. The truth is, Paul is using idiomatic Jewish phrasing to describe the devastating biological and spiritual chain reaction of Adam’s disobedience. Creation was subjected to vanity, a hollow, decaying futility, because Adam operated strictly from the mind of the flesh, as we all do today. His actions were driven by the sheer, primal survival desires of a creature prioritizing its own autonomy over dependence on the Creator’s instructions as intended. The human mind is the most subtle creature of the field. It can both shout and whisper anything into the immediate mind it is operating through. Is it a being? No. May it not be coming to that! It is our very selves containing our primitive state of necessity to obtain, abstain, and remain secure. Try going 40 days in the desert without food and see if your fleshly mind won’t scream at you with every persuasive measure to get you to eat anything just to calm the fleshly needs of survival into dormancy.
As established earlier, God is a strict respecter of jurisdictions. While Yahweh dwelled intimately with Adam and Eve in the garden, they were not under the influence of their own carnal minds; they were completely sustained and influenced by God’s dwelling presence. But when God withdrew Himself after instructing Adam about the tree, the jurisdiction of human agency was activated. Yahweh knew that the flesh, having been formed from the dust of the ground, would naturally revert to an adversarial state of mind to preserve itself if left unindwelt, just the way He expected it to be according to His counseled will of design.
Eve, lacking the direct, firsthand instruction from Yahweh, was the first to falter because she was naturally in tune with what her unindwelt mind determined as good for the flesh. This is where the ancient idiomatic language reaches its absolute peak. The serpent in the garden was not a literal talking reptile. It was a profound idiom for the mental voice of the flesh, the internal monologue calculating its best options for self preservation and autonomy. If God withdraws His presence from unindwelt flesh, that flesh will inevitably listen to its own hollow instincts.
The serpent is the mind of the flesh. It is a staggering anatomical reality that the human brain and spinal cord, when stripped from the body, perfectly resemble a snake. This was the ancient Jewish way of communicating that Adam and Eve’s internal voice reasoned with them. Their carnal nervous system examined the fruit, saw that it looked no different from the other fruit in the garden, and rationalized that it was safe, good for food, and would not actually lead to death.
When the mainstream reader hears this, their immediate defense is to point back to the earthly ministry of Jesus. They will ask,
“If these creatures do not exist, what exactly was Jesus casting out of people in the gospels? What went into the herd of pigs?”
This requires us to extend that exact same grace of understanding to the ancient medical vocabulary. In the first century, they did not possess the clinical terminology for severe neurological disorders, schizophrenia, epilepsy, or profound psychological trauma. When a human being was utterly hijacked by a violent biological malfunction of the brain, the ancient idiom to describe that terrifying reality was an unclean spirit or a demon. Jesus, in His profound earthly authority, was literally healing the biological and neurological severities of the carnal flesh. He was restoring the shattered minds of the broken.
It is incredibly telling that once we reach the epistles of Paul and the celestial administration of the Body of Christ, the practice of casting out demons completely vanishes from the text. Paul never once commands the Body to perform an exorcism, because the true remedy for the carnal mind is not a theatrical shouting match with a ghost. The remedy is the cross. The remedy is being transformed by the renewing of your mind. Institutional religion loves to keep the believer chasing invisible demons because it completely distracts them from the actual, difficult work of putting the deeds of their own biology to death.
When Paul describes the flesh, he is describing this exact state of personhood. He is diagnosing the human condition, detailing how the mind of the flesh naturally engineers its own death. Adam and Eve never understood the harsh reality of survival when Yahweh was amongst them in Eden. But when God withdraws Himself from His creation, the lesson is perfectly simple and boring in the grand scheme. Adam and Eve had no idea how vital and important God was to their own existence. To be made in His image is an idiomatic statement for the simple Genesis writing of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is the flesh’s operating system. The fruit activates this reality by flipping an on switch for Death to consume life, turning on the mental ability to see the contrast of what was once good, and what now is evil, which is a rendered conclusion in opposition to what could be examined as good.
Mainstream theology reads the Genesis account and builds a cartoonish theology of a talking snake casting magic spells of hypnotism. Concordant theology reads it and turns it into a rigged stage play. To borrow the exact framing of Martin Zender, they view the fall of Adam simply as “Act one of a masterpiece,” where God is the Grand Director who explicitly wrote the script for the entrance of sin, treating humanity like actors forced to hit their tragic marks. Both miss the profound, sorrowful reality that Paul was describing the tragic, historical severing of the human consciousness from its life source. This is exactly why Yahweh spoke through Jesus during His ministry to the Jews, declaring that with Him, they would never thirst again. The sheer mechanism of eating and drinking is the primary carnal means to our sustainment of life itself in the flesh. With God, the body no longer requires that desperate need. Rather, it can return to what was once Eden, existing purely for pleasure and enjoyment rather than mere survival.
God authored that the fall would come before it ever came into being, just as He authored everything He created, including the first man, Adam, and woman, Eve. If one believes Yahweh invisibly whispered into Eve’s mind to force her to eat the fruit, they are gravely mistaken. God endowed Adam and Eve, entirely through their anatomical structure and bodily motivations, with the full potential to do exactly what they were destined to do.
Therefore, if Paul were here today and read to us:
“Maker of good, Creator of evil; I, Yahweh, make all these things” – Isaiah 45:7
He would simply point out the mechanics of jurisdiction. God created life in such a way that when humanity entered into sin, the restraints of His direct influence were lifted. What would come to be is exactly what He expected to see humanity carry forth for itself.
It is like a mechanical toy that is wound up by Yahweh at its formation. Once it is ready and breathed into with life, He places that toy down on the board and watches it from an invisible place to see it march how it wills. If it stumbles, His respect for jurisdiction dictates that He does not actively intervene to catch it, unless the overarching Script requires a new path to be introduced. This intervention can be the insertion of His will overtaking the motivational decision and action of a person or an animal, using them to course correct the path of the many for a single moment in time. Or it can be a much more dramatic effect, like causing the earth to flood enormously to put an end to all the corruption that life is producing, simply so the script can resume its proper course. This was the Ark moment of introducing a Tartarus to life, which is, again, another idiom for quarantining or putting an end to something to prevent it from growing larger and consuming the entire trajectory like a cancer that eats itself to death without restraint.
The Courtroom of the Carnal Mind
This is exactly why we must completely reevaluate the Book of Job. When mainstream theology reads the opening chapters of Job, they picture a literal courtroom in the clouds. They imagine a cosmic casino where God and an ethereal, winged monster make wagers on a man’s life. But when you understand the idiomatic language of the ancient writers, this mythological stage play completely shatters.
The word Satan is not the proper name of a mystical beast; it simply means adversary. It is a title. And Paul’s writings completely decode what this adversary actually is. Paul reveals that the true enemy is the internal operation of the carnal mind of the flesh. In his letter to the Romans, Paul explicitly states that the mindset of the flesh is enmity against God. It is the ultimate adversary.
When the ancient narrative of Job describes the adversary approaching the throne for permission to test Job, it is a profound, poetic idiom. God is not handing a hall pass to a literal monster. He is simply removing His protective hedge and allowing the natural, adversarial entropy of the fallen world, along with the relentless friction of the carnal mind, to run its course. The entire book is a masterful, dramatic illustration of God using the adversarial nature of the flesh to ultimately break Job of his own self righteousness and bring him to the absolute end of his own human reasoning.
This idiomatic reality perfectly unlocks one of the most misunderstood commands in Paul’s epistles. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul addresses a believer living in gross sexual immorality. His instruction to the church is shocking to the modern, literalist mind:
“…deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” – 1 Corinthians 5:5
The mainstream church reads this and thinks Paul is summoning a literal demon to physically beat the man. But Paul is utilizing the exact same architectural reality we see in the Book of Job. To hand a man over to the adversary simply means to remove him from the protective, nurturing environment of the ecclesia and cast him back out into the harsh entropy of the world. It means letting the absolute destructive consequences of his own carnal mind run their natural course. The upright believers are instructed to step back and leave him alone to his fleshly-minded desires, paying no mind to the carnal path he has chosen to occupy. Why? So that he may fully reap exactly what he is sowing.
Paul knew that if the man was left to the brutal, unshielded reality of his own choices, the resulting pain and rock-bottom devastation would ideally break his pride and return his mind to the truth. But notice Paul’s ultimate comfort:
“so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”
Paul is pointing directly to the snatching away and the searing fire of the Dais. Even though the man is steeped in severe carnality, his salvation is never in jeopardy. At the snatching away, his sealed spirit is completely saved. But as he stands before the Dais, the absolute destruction of his flesh is finalized. Every one of those carnal deeds will burn to ash, costing him the Prize of administration. Satan is not a hitman Paul hired to do his dirty work; it is the natural, adversarial consequence of the flesh eating itself when God’s protective grace is temporarily withdrawn for the sake of self-discipline.
Try to understand that when Paul writes a letter, it is confined entirely to what is to happen within the Body of Christ. Nothing about Paul’s statements EVER points to a disqualification from salvation, or what is outside of it. It simply comes down to the matter of: will you win the reward, or lose the reward? Salvation is a trap God has intended to snare many into, just as effortlessly as He snared mankind into death through Adam.
The entire scope of how many are redeemed is incalculable. But know that the Gentiles, which are the many that cover the earth, are the ones being called by the majority into the Body. About 1,993 years have passed since the cross. Imagine how many people per year have heard this good news by Paul, believed that Christ rose from the dead, and held onto that? Too many to count. Just understand, even if a billion-plus are snatched up, there will be billions still in the dirt, asleep in Hades from all the eons past, just as there will be billions still left upon the earth at Christ’s return.
The Restraint of God and the Architecture of Sovereignty
This brings us to the most fiercely debated and heavily distorted concept in all of scripture: the collision of God’s sovereignty and human free will.
Now, before you try to shut me down, I ask that you read or listen to what I am going to present. I have had to think deeply about this position, one I once stood in opposition to for a time. Why? Because part of what makes studying and reconciling the truths of scripture so difficult is fellowshipping in echo chambers, where discussions are stifled by stubbornness and, worst of all, the emotionally reactive hive minds of doctrinal standards.
I have argued and wrestled a lot with common doctrine, and especially Concordant doctrine. I find that the Concordant intellectual in this situation has built a lot of exclusive views that stem directly from a hatred of the mainstream. It is a desire to be different, better, or special in their exclusivity by completely denying human free will. But the truth is, it is there. It may not be a literal biblical term, but the mechanics behind it are found throughout the scriptures, and in Paul’s epistles especially.
There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path with the Father of creation. God knows the end from the beginning, but God does not have to walk your path for you. That is where your responsibility comes into the relationship with your faith regarding what God is doing and promising to all. If Adam had no responsibility in his fall for all of mankind, then the earliest written manuscripts did the worst job possible in deflecting God’s sovereign accountability for the longest time.
Mainstream Christianity looks at the evil in the world and panics. In an attempt to defend God’s goodness, they claim God is completely hands off, which is true in and of itself, but they portray Him in the likeness of a human being, standing in heaven, nervously wringing His hands, hoping humanity makes the right choice. This paints God as a weak, reactionary bystander rather than the sovereign overseer of all things.
The Concordant intellectual, however, swings the pendulum to a terrifying extreme on the opposite side. They embrace absolute sovereignty but distort it into hard determinism. They claim that God meticulously orchestrates every single micro action of humanity. In their minds, every lie, every murder, and every wicked atrocity was explicitly authored and puppeted by God Himself.
After speaking on a podcast a few months back with two atheists, I was pressed with a question after stating my Concordant stance to them. This interaction left me a little bit bewildered with myself, making me wonder why this question was so difficult to answer simply. Why wasn’t I able to answer them directly with the greatest of ease? Because they had former issues with the Christian religion, they pressed me with the heavy notion that God would be purely evil if He authored everything at a micro level, and I was standing by the claim that He authored that very evil to be done.
Something did not sit right. I did not insult them, nor did I run. I expressed my appreciation for their engagement and left the chat pondering my stance. Their questions were good, and they asked them out of genuine concern.
To me, engaging and listening to differing views is what helps bring the truth to light. Hanging out with the same people day in and day out is exhausting and, honestly, not edifying if they are all just parroting the same script over and over again. The only script you need is the Word of God. Nothing else. Paul would have never been able to address things from a multitude of perspectives had he only visited one Gentile region of the world while neglecting and ignoring the rest.
But this blatantly contradicts the very scriptures they claim to revere. In the Old Testament, when addressing the Israelites burning their children in the fire to Molech, God explicitly declares through the prophet Jeremiah:
“Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known; and because they have filled this place with the blood of innocents, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind.” – Jeremiah 19:4-5
If God authored every micro action, this verse is a lie. The profound truth that the Concordant camp misses is that God respects the jurisdiction of human agency. God created the property of evil; He established the capacity for it to exist so that free will could actually be free. But He does not explicitly orchestrate every single wicked act to be done in the exact way that it occurs.
God orchestrates life to function in such a way that He does not need to be actively present for every single second of it. He restrains Himself from violating the jurisdiction of the human will. Instead of micromanaging the universe like a tyrant playing with toys, God manages the cosmos through a Script.
He lays down the major timeline shifts. When humanity travels too far off course, God places a track down to detour the travel of creation to a destination He has already foreknown. To execute these major shifts without violating jurisdictions, God uses living vessels, both human and animal messengers, to carry His will and force course corrections which redirect the paths of ourselves or others. But again, He remains completely hands off in His direct approach with any subject, with the singular exception of Christ Jesus, whom He dwelled within to bring mankind into the conciliation of Adam’s consequence from the fall.
This culminated in the ultimate intervention. God created Christ as the perfect vessel, purposed for His direct dwelling presence, to completely correct the course for all mankind to return to Him.
At the consummation of the eons, when all things are finally reconciled, God will not say, “I puppeted you to do all those evil things.” Rather, He will address humanity as the sovereign Architect who takes ultimate responsibility for the board He created.
The profound realization of the eons is that God will look at a restored humanity and effectively say:
“I, Yahweh, will take responsibility for the evil that was done, because I created the framework where it was possible. But I did not ordain it to be done to you in the way that it was. You devised your own wicked ways. But I will heal you from what you did to one another, and I will show you exactly how I was working through the detours, and how I have always loved you.”
God did not directly author your trauma, but He takes sovereign responsibility to heal it, redeem it, and utilize it for a glory we cannot yet comprehend. This is the staggering, beautiful balance of free will and absolute sovereignty.
How did Paul summarize this staggering reality? He did not say God micro managed every sin, but rather that God utilized the natural rebellion of the flesh to achieve a universal rescue:
“For God locks up all together in stubbornness, that He should be merciful to all.” – Romans 11:32
Paul reveals that God’s sovereignty is not a puppet string routine; it is a grand architectural containment. God locked humanity into the stubbornness of their own unindwelt flesh, this indeed includes me, and every concordant intellectual and mainstream religious person of Christianity whom is indeed in the body of Christ now… fully respecting their jurisdiction to falter, so that when the eons reach the consummation, His mercy will crash over all of what remains. He takes responsibility for the containment so He can take the glory for the curing of it. While all give an around of an applause for His only Son, the Lord Christ Jesus for saving everyone.
If Paul were here today, I firmly believe he would explicitly address what happens when this profound teaching of absolute sovereignty and boundless grace falls into the hands of those he warned about in his second letter to Timothy: men who are lovers of self, abusive, and unappeasable. In modern clinical terms, we call them narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. We must soberly consider how a person with a severe mental deficit of empathy and complete self obsession interprets the Gospel of Grace, versus a person whose conscience is actually connected to the pain of others.
To understand how they twist the truth, you must first understand their baseline realities.
The narcissist does not care. They are fully aware of what they do and the pain they cause, but they choose themselves every single time to protect their own elevated ego. The sociopath will not care. They recognize the moral boundaries of society, but they willingly ignore them, viewing other people merely as objects to be used and discarded for their own personal benefit. The psychopath cannot care. They possess a literal biological disconnect from human empathy, allowing them to perfectly mimic love and grace to manipulate others while remaining entirely cold and hollow internally.
To the theological narcissist, the manipulative sociopath, and the completely disconnected psychopath, the Concordant doctrine of hard determinism is the ultimate playground. If God explicitly authors and puppeteers every micro action, then their cruelty, their manipulation, and their abuse are suddenly no longer their fault. They use the absolute sovereignty of God as a cosmic shield to completely absolve themselves of any personal accountability. They weaponize the teaching of universal reconciliation to demand endless tolerance from the very people they are hurting, twisting the Evangel into a license for unapologetic destruction. To them, grace is not a humbling rescue; it is simply an intellectual loophole that allows them to be a tyrant while claiming to be a saint.
This is perfectly exemplified in how Concordant teachers will routinely quote Ephesians 2:8 and Philippians 1:29 to argue that even the faith to believe does not originate from within us, claiming it is a literal, mystical gift handed to us by God. This is a narcissistic, perverted twist to the scriptural meaning that Paul wrote in. Paul never taught that faith is a magical download that overrides our cognitive jurisdiction. When Paul speaks of the gift of God, the grammar itself points to the entire profound rescue of salvation by grace as the gift, not the isolated mental mechanism of faith. Paul plainly stated elsewhere that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word, also known as the Plan. This applies even to the act of reading it, which can bring repentance to the mind of a fellow. Faith is a persuasion of the human mind when it is presented with the truth.
Think about it logically: if the Concordant intellectual claims that God must mystically approach you first to inject you with true faith, then what exactly was the point of Paul traveling the known world and enduring brutal trials just to announce what Christ had accomplished? If faith was just a deterministic download, Paul could have stayed home. But Paul never taught that Yahweh must individually approach us to force our belief. The approach has already happened! It happened when Christ was on the earth, and it was finalized by His sacrifice on the cross. His blood paid the debt for everyone. Therefore, your response to hearing that message is entirely your jurisdiction to accept or reject.
Because God is a strict respecter of jurisdictions in this age of Grace, Paul declares that faith comes by hearing, or in today’s case reading, the good news. Yes, God operates all things by His power. But Paul would boldly tell you that while the gift of salvation is freely offered to everyone, it must be understood that not everyone will accept it right now because of the varying paths they walk in their lives.
By claiming God explicitly injects belief into a select few like a scripted line of code, these individuals stroke their own egos. They paint themselves as the chosen, enlightened elite who received the magic download, completely removing any relational weight from the Gospel and turning it into just another rigged mechanic on their deterministic board. I would be alert, if you are not already, to the realization that these persons often lack the self reflection required to self-correct. They will often pat themselves on the back publicly or abstain from apologies for wrongdoings when confronted or asked for one. This does not mean they do not believe, but it points to the reality that they are not the role models Paul said we should aspire to emulate. I will not name drop who these persons are, but you will know by the Spirit the characteristics they uphold by the descriptions I have laid out for you to review. I would encourage you not to engage them or feed them with views.
I have firsthand witnessed Concordant brethren dismiss their mainstream Christian brethren when confronted on the ethics of a transformed heart that follows Christ by choosing to do good and loving things, especially in their speech toward others. The Christian was absolutely correct in addressing the Concordant individual about their gross negligence in entreating others with love, patience, and kindness. Instead, the individual who received this feedback was cold, smug, and withdrawn in posture, simply waiting for the religious brother to stop speaking. As the critique continued, the Christian became more agitated the more they addressed the Concordant believer, eventually losing their own patience and mirroring the exact same smugness as a result. This happened mostly because the Concordant believer refused to recognize the Christian’s plea for love as something Paul mandated, instead treating the entire confrontation as though it were solely an attack on their doctrine of justification that needed to be defended. This interaction perfectly exemplifies a stark reality: there are those with a heart that actually tries, and then there are those who operate like a black hole, yielding absolutely no response in return unless it comes in the form of applause or praise.
But to the believer who is not blinded by a deficit of empathy, this exact same Gospel of Grace produces the complete opposite reaction. A person with a connected heart does not look at God taking responsibility for the board and use it as an excuse to proudly sin. Instead, they are shattered by the sheer weight of God’s love, only now filled with a desire to show more love and more kindness wherever and however appropriate and possible. Not perfect, but admirable in the effort that they always try in reaching for it. They do not give up easily, or demand tolerance or give excuses for their fleshly behaviors; they actively seek to put the deeds of the flesh* to death because they genuinely care about how their actions impact the brethren around them. They operate with a newfound sense that Christ’s very eyes are watching everything they now do and speak, especially before the crowd they have gathered and attracted. Paul knew that the grace of God would always be hijacked by the lovers of self towards the last days, which is exactly why the true marker of being prepared for the celestials is never just possessing the right theology. It is possessing a heart that bleeds for others in a constant state of love and forgiveness.
The Humility of Foreknowledge
Perhaps no Pauline doctrine has been as tragically misunderstood and perverted as the concept of election through a foreknown state of the world, as Paul described in his letter to the Ephesians:
“According as He chooses us in Him before the disruption of the world, we to be holy and flawless in His sight, in love designating us beforehand for the place of a son for Him through Christ Jesus; in accord with the delight of His will… in Him in Whom our lot was cast also, being designated beforehand according to the purpose of the One Who is operating all in accord with the counsel of His will, that we should be for the laud of His glory, who are pre expectant in the Christ.” – Ephesians 1:4-5, 11-12
Mainstream literalists, heavily influenced by Calvinistic theology, frequently turn this beautiful passage into a nightmare of double predestination. They read the word “chosen” and assume it means the Creator actively engineered the vast majority of humanity for eternal conscious torment, while pulling a few random lottery tickets for salvation. This grotesque distortion turns God into a tyrant and strips the believer of any real peace, leaving them paralyzed by the dread of whether they, or their children, are truly the elect.
But when we step into the Concordant echo chamber, we must be incredibly careful not to fall into a different, more subtle mutation of this text. Concordant literalists, heavily influenced by the teachings of A.E. Knoch, rightfully realize that election is not about saving a few from hell, but about choosing a firstfruits administration. Yet, rather than this producing humility, it frequently breeds a staggering theological narcissism, which I will say did not originate from Knoch himself, but from the boomer generation of scholars today.
This is the fatal trap of the modern Concordant elite. They build a self-acclaimed royalty around their privilege. Because they have successfully decoded the Greek and shed their mainstream traditions, they view their current doctrinal accuracy as definitive proof that they were exclusively predestined above the rest of the worldly population. They strut through theological debates, bragging about a foreknown status while completely forgetting that they, too, once held bad doctrine and were entirely dependent on God’s grace to open their eyes.
In short: they believe that they themselves are as specially specific as Jesus Christ Himself in the mind of Yahweh, elevated over all of the rest of beautiful humanity that has been birthed into life’s existence.
Being foreknown should not be viewed as God pointing down through time and declaring that “Matt Fagan” is arbitrarily chosen for the Body of Christ as an absolution of exclusive favoritism. Rather, Yahweh conceived of creating Matt Fagan before the world was even set into motion on the ledger of creation. You were designed to eventually draw breath and live in this exact world, at this exact time.
This mirrors the ultimate foreknowledge: Yahweh foreknew His Son, Jesus, would be a specific human being, generated directly by His own working, purposed to be the ultimate human vessel among those begotten by Adam. In the grand architectural plan, Christ is the Last Adam. Like the first Adam, His genesis was originated by Yahweh Himself, only through the virgin Mary, purposed to redeem all mankind and reverse the course of Adam’s disobedience from the garden.
All of mankind’s creation is preceded by a father’s seed. Both Adam and Christ were created by Yahweh’s own special seed of spiritual power. They were both human, mutually equal in every biological way, and entirely susceptible to the Adversary of the flesh. Both equally endured the Father’s presence from their genesis. Yet, they were purposed for opposite trajectories: one where God withdrew His presence to allow human agency to falter by the Adversarial mind of the flesh (which we call Satan), and the other where God indwelt to protect and secure the rescue. Both could see and hear the Father from their genesis, and each was uniquely purposed to reveal exactly how God was working out His overarching plan.
Therefore, being chosen before the disruption of the world is not a VIP badge designed to inflate our egos. God does not elect the few to mock the many. In actuality, He extends His grace through Christ’s sacrifice to the many, thereby revealing the few (at the Dais of Christ) who were willing to race for the Prize by sacrificing themselves for His greater purposes.
Make no mistake: this Prize is something to be earned, not simply given. Your salvation into justification through vivification is the absolute free gift. But the Prize reserved for the few is a heavy, sobering draft into a life of sacrificial service for the sake of blessing the many. As Paul would likely tell us, God gave mankind the free gift of Christ Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. It is incumbent upon us to accept that gift, especially when presenting it to the world at large through the gratuity of the love that Christ has revealed the Father has for it all.
It is painfully obvious that some prematurely assume they have already won this Prize. They stream themselves on cameras daily before an audience, boasting in the ignorance of their own fleshly pride. According to Paul, when carefully examined, these are the very ones who will not be rewarded. They pull many down with them, luring followers with unkind hearts that bear absolutely no fruit beyond a self masturbatory applause in everything they do before the few. I do not choose to do this, because it is very easy to speak without thinking, and before you know it, you may have a library of arrogance to be reflected upon at the Dais. Instead, I choose to teach about overlooked things and consolidate them into simplified messages for the layperson.
A careful reading between the lines of all the defensive verses in Paul’s letters reveals that he wrote about far more than just the justification for the gift of salvation. His mandate was always about humility, love, and imitating Christ in ways that directly war against the fleshly desires of a dying biology, a biology that wants nothing more than to defend its pride, its survival, and its peace from a threatening world. Paul realized you must be willing to let all of that go in order to be part of a reigning administration, a government elect in the celestial kingdom, rather than just an everyday citizen of the heavens. Though being a citizen of the heavens is far better than anything the earthly kingdom can provide, the calling of the Prize demands more. We must be humble in our walk, our speech, and our thoughts, prospering the differences each person brings rather than demanding compliance and conformity to our fleshly comforts. Anything that merely suits the flesh is entirely temporary and involves The Adversary that exists in each one of us.
If our grasp of ultimate reconciliation produces arrogance rather than a bleeding, desperate love for those still trapped in blindness, our election has produced absolutely no functional fruit. In all honesty, if we hold a theology of grace but operate with a heart of contempt, the searing fire of the Dais will likely reveal that we have forfeited the very Prize we expected to win. Instead of a crown, we may be shown the ugly mirror of how we spent our time on earth humiliating and bruising the weaker members of the Body. It is a sobering echo of the Master’s warning: a lord delayed his return, only to arrive unannounced and find the servants he entrusted with deep responsibility using their authority to beat their fellow servants. If you slander anyone, then you are beating them with a fruitless heart. If you dismiss anyone without reasonable cause, then you are functionally disowning them, bringing upon yourself Paul’s severe warning:
“Now if anyone is not providing for his own, and especially his family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” – 1 Timothy 5:8
“if we are enduring, we shall be reigning together also; if we are disowning, He also will be disowning us“ – 2 Timothy 2:12
True foreknowledge should never make us arrogant. It should drive us to our knees in gratitude, compelling us to serve the very people who do not yet see what we have been so graciously allowed in our walk to understand. It is understandable that it becomes immensely frustrating when you speak of the profound truth that salvation is being brought to all of mankind, and not just the religious. It is baffling that such a beautiful claim is immediately shunned without question, and not given even a few moments of pondering, by the very ones who devote their lives every Sunday to give praise to a loving God they claim loves the world through John 3:16. Yet they operate under a sheer stubbornness that plants and sows seeds of corruption among the many, blinding them from the Prize and from recognizing the true character of Christ and the Father.
I fully understand that reading Ephesians 1 can give a strong impression of supremacy. It is incredibly easy to assume that if you have been given a realization of the absolute truth of God’s love, this must automatically place you in the Body, when, in reality, you already are in the Body. The distinction lies in realizing what you know. However, truly knowing and realizing that truth alone does not make you a winner of the Prize. It simply means your race for that Prize has now begun. But if you truly start listening to those you berate and those you applaud, you will realize that both sides are deeply prideful in completely opposite ways. This shows the stark reality that neither one is truly racing for the Prize. Instead, both are flaunting their supremacy, boasting about how much more justified they are than the other. The truth is, they are equally justified, just ignorant to the fact that they will obtain absolutely no extra rewards at the Dais for their intellectual stance on justification.
Therefore, this foreknowing of predestination cannot be about arrogant exclusivity. It is about a zoomed-out scope of mankind and an underlying mystery that the adversarial mind of the flesh simply cannot comprehend when it is still in the driver seat behind the steering wheel. What does this mean practically? It means that even while you have believed the Evangel, the Adversary (the mind of the flesh) still operates within your biology. If you harbor pride, you are still giving that carnal mind the ability to steer your heart exactly where it should not go.
The staggering reality is that God already chose every single person who ever came into existence before the world began, only in the strictest sense to be created. The plan God made before the disruption of the world was about foreknowing every human being in His love, imagining them existing. It was not exclusively about arbitrarily locking in who would be elected to the Body while discarding the rest. What must be realized is that God gave all of us the opportunity in our earthly path to accept the announcement in our hearts. If someone has not accepted this truth yet, it does not mean they were not predestined to be foreknown in the grand plan of God. In fact, if they were not predestined to be foreknown, then who created these persons of mankind? Are we to acclaim there is more than one God? May it not be coming to that!
Who actually becomes a member of the Body is entirely dependent on each person’s agency and their disposition in the world as they encounter the truth. That includes our own accountability regarding how we share that truth with them. Paul explicitly confirms this agency when he asks:
“How, then, should they be calling on Him in Whom they do not believe? Yet how shall they be believing in Him of Whom they do not hear? Yet how shall they be hearing apart from one heralding?“ – Romans 10:14
God has a specific number that He wishes to fulfill to complete the complement of the Christ. Yahweh is operating according to the grand Script of the eons, and He will trigger the change of administrations exactly when that quota is met. Which is when, according to Paul? It is exactly when they are announcing that peace and security have been achieved by their own making:
“Now whenever they may be saying, Peace and security, then unforeseen extermination is standing by them…” – 1 Thessalonians 5:3
For example, the man of lawlessness is foreknown and will inevitably step into the role he is destined to play before the world. But when Paul writes in his letters that this message is worthy of full acceptance, that acceptance is not deterministically forced upon a person. It is purely the agency of the individual who lives, hears the message, and decides in their heart that it is a truth worth accepting.
Understand that people come to accept the truth in vastly different ways. Some are willed by God to be entirely silent about their acceptance. Others are loud, obnoxious, and boastful. Some are more moderate and modest when speaking. But a verbal confession, even a simple, whispered yes internally at its minimum, is entirely enough to be placed into the Body. God made entry into the Body incredibly simple because a loving God does not want a restricted few; a loving God wants as many as possible. A mathematical theological exam is not a divine requirement. It is merely an artificial barrier to entry constructed by the cold and the proud of those who desire to lead the many into their own fleshly desires, giving exactly what is sought to those who desire to heap up teachers in accord with their ears being tickled by what already operates within them.
Therefore, free will is indeed a biological reality of the world we live in. The difference I am declaring before you is that God gave you a free will to make decisions that involve real consequences, allowing you to learn profound lessons and discover your path in this life. But what God did not do is give you a free will to determine the final outcome of your own destiny. You do not have the jurisdiction to decide whether you are savable or not. In the end, you will be saved, and that is the unwavering will of the Father. God simply allows your agency to determine whether you want to experience that salvation now, or later at the consummation of the eons.
Now tell me, how good is God?
When you allow that staggering realization to finally settle into your heart, how does it compare to a robotic, predetermined God of absolutely no free will that is boasted by the Concordant intellectual? It is a yoke much lighter than a feather of thought. It certainly allows me, as I know it will for you, to see that life’s destiny is always in the hands of the Father. Especially if we are in a sandbox of our own devising.
Realize all is being done by God, the Father. Christ alone accomplished that, whom we accept and in return, give thanks for everything. But in the end, it is always God who is operating all things in accord to His will. If the plan provided a path, a speech, a deed, or a revealing, it was always done first and last by God the Father. God right now only asks that you accept His Son for having accomplished the major change for all, a change that the all could never do. He is our brother, our Lord, and our Savior. He is the Plan.
The Bride vs. The Biological Organism
This calling demands a radical shift in how we view our relationship with one another. The prophetic scriptures concerning Israel frequently utilize the metaphor of a wedding. Israel is the Bride, waiting for the return of the Bridegroom to restore the earthly kingdom.
Institutional religion has committed identity theft, hijacking this imagery and applying it to the modern church. This produces a highly romanticized, deeply emotional, and often effeminate worship culture where Jesus is treated as a cosmic boyfriend. It focuses entirely on intimacy and feeling while completely abandoning the actual structural reality Paul revealed.
Paul never calls us the Bride. He introduces a completely new, biological reality: we are the Body of Christ. A New Creation.
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” – 1 Corinthians 12:12
A bride is a separate entity joined to a husband by a covenant. A body is an integrated organism joined to a Head by a central nervous system.
While the mainstream pew sings romantic songs to the Bridegroom, the lexicon purist makes an equally devastating error. The armchair theologian fiercely defends the doctrine of the Body on paper, yet functions like a severed limb in reality. They hyper fixate on the Head, meaning the intellect and doctrine of Christ, but they refuse to cooperate, bleed, or function alongside the other messy members of the organism. You cannot claim to honor the Head while actively despising and amputating the hands and feet.
Remember how Paul addresses the measure of faith for each person? Well, in the very case of how people realize the truth, each person is equal in the eyes of the Lord when it comes to being a member of the body. Each person will be given a rank, a role, and responsibilities to serve each and every person in the body. Why? Because we are united as one in Christ.
The Crucible of Suffering
Because we are a biological organism being prepared to govern the celestials, our earthly training ground is intense. Paul’s theology of suffering shatters the illusions of modern religion.
“Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” – 2 Corinthians 12:8-9
Mainstream prosperity pulpits and charismatic circles treat suffering, sickness, and poverty as a demonic breach of contract or a lack of faith. They believe God’s primary goal is their immediate earthly comfort, constantly “rebuking” the very trials God sovereignly ordained to mature them.
But the right-divider falls into a trap of theological stoicism. Because they possess a flawless mathematical understanding of the eons and understand that God is operating all things according to the counsel of His will, they often become emotionally flatlined. They view human tragedy, grief, and suffering as mere cosmic algorithms. They forget that while Paul possessed the greatest revelations of sovereignty ever given to man, he still wept, he still ached for his brethren, and he still deeply felt the sting of his thorn. Sovereignty is not an excuse for a lack of empathy; it is the anchor that allows us to endure suffering without losing our humanity.
The purpose of empowering our humanity while racing in the faith is to appropriately tender each and every heart on the earth that has and will come into the faith, whether they attain the reward or not. We are striving to be entrusted with the Prize, to reign with Christ over those who did not inherit the Prize, having been disqualified from reigning.
Bearing with the reproach of others while maintaining love for them, as Christ does for us, is the pinnacle achievement of having truly realized the truth of Paul’s mystery.
The Anatomy of the Flesh: Religion and Rebellion
To understand how Paul defines sin within the Body of Christ, we must completely deconstruct how both mainstream and hyper-grace spaces define “the flesh”, in the Greek: (sarx). Because they both operate in extremes, they both fail to grasp the nuanced, dual nature of Pauline carnality.
For Mainstream Christianity, sin is simply a behavioral scorecard. They view “the flesh” exclusively as a list of dirty deeds, drinking, swearing, sexual immorality, or failing to attend church. They treat sin as a looming threat that constantly jeopardizes a believer’s eternal security, leading to a culture of sin-management rather than true spiritual execution.
The Concordant right-divider sees this legalism and violently overcorrects. Because they study the lexicons, they know that the Greek word for sin (hamartia) literally means “to miss the mark.” Furthermore, they correctly identify that Paul frequently used “the flesh” as a theological metaphor for the Jews keeping the Law of Moses. Paul constantly warned the Gentiles not to be fooled into Judaizing, explicitly stating that attempting to be perfected by physical rituals like circumcision was to end up
“in the flesh” – Galatians 3:3.
But this is where the Concordant intellectual springs a fatal trap. They take this specific, metaphorical application of “the flesh” and make it absolute. They begin to redefine carnality purely as religious legalism. In their digital locker rooms, the only way you can be “carnal” or “sinning” is if you have bad dispensational theology, believe in eternal torment, free-will, an after-life, the trinity, or practice water baptism. Because they have “the right doctrine,” they convince themselves they are walking in the Spirit, completely blind to the fact that they are drowning in the other half of Paul’s definition of the flesh.
Paul did not just define the flesh as self-justifying religion. He explicitly defined it as self-gratifying rebellion.
“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” – Galatians 5:19-21
The flesh is not just a metaphor for the Mosaic Law. It is the literal, rotting gravity of the old humanity. It is a hostile, anti-Spirit virus that manifests in a multitude of expressions. When the Concordant believer sits at their computer, arrogantly mocking a weaker understanding believer, sowing discord, and reveling in theological rivalries, they are manifesting the exact “dissensions and divisions” Paul explicitly labeled as the works of the flesh. They have simply traded the carnal religion of the mainstream church for the carnal arrogance of the intellectual.
Paul’s understanding of sin within the Body is vastly deeper than just “missing the theological mark.” Sin is any action, attitude, or religious system that relies on the self rather than the Head. To Paul, walking in the flesh is realized as both the arrogant Pharisee demanding a ritual and the arrogant Gentile excusing their apathy.
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” – Galatians 5:13
The true grace of Paul does not redefine sin to make the believer comfortable. It exposes the flesh in all of its forms, both religious and rebellious, and demands that it be put to death.
The Measure of Faith vs. The Measure of Doctrine
Both the institutional church and the Concordant movement have completely inverted the relationship between faith and doctrine. They assume that a perfect intellectual realization of the truth is the qualifying marker of a person’s faith. If a mainstream believer does not understand the absolute sovereignty of God or universal reconciliation, the Concordant purist often assumes their faith is invalid or that they are not truly in the Body.
Paul never operated this way. He was not preoccupied with anxiously measuring who was “in” or “out” of the Body based on their systematic theology. To Paul, faith precedes the doctrines of corruption, and it precedes the realization of deep mysteries. The spark of faith, simply trusting in the crucified and resurrected Christ, is the sole entry point. The deeper realizations of the truth, such as the salvation of all mankind or the architecture of the eons, are not the prerequisites for faith; they are the measures of gratuity given to a maturing faith.
Did Paul ever define the absolute markers of a disqualified, or “feigned,” faith? Yes, but it had nothing to do with failing a theology exam.
“The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere [unfeigned] faith.” – 1 Timothy 1:5
A feigned faith is not an ignorant one; it is a loveless one. It is a faith that learns the facts of the scriptures but refuses to serve the brethren. Paul knew that the latter days would be filled with unprofitable doctrines and corrupted truths, but he never commanded us to play the gatekeeper of another man’s foundational trust in Christ. Paul did not rejoice in the absolute doctrinal perfection of his students; he rejoiced wherever the Evangel was trusted and wherever genuine faith produced an active, self-sacrificing love. The moment you make “realizing the truth” the absolute barrier to entry for salvation, you have replaced the grace of Christ with the merit of the intellect.
Paul commands Timothy to operate out of unfeigned faith. The word feigned literally comes from the ancient Greek theater, referring to a hypocrite playing a part and wearing a mask. Paul’s true meaning of believing feignedly is to put on a religious or intellectual act. Mainstream religion forces you to wear the mask of moral perfection to avoid judgment. Concordant intellectualism forces you to wear the mask of the enlightened debater to prove you are smarter than the mainstream. Paul is calling for the exact opposite. Unfeigned faith is dropping the mask entirely. It is the raw, honest exhaustion of a vessel that has stopped trying to impress God or men, and is simply resting nakedly in the finished work of the cross. The most misunderstood verse on this topic is where Paul says:
“by which also you are saved… unless you believed in vain.” – 1 Corinthians 15:2
Religion uses this to say you can lose your salvation, and the Concordant community often dismisses it as just a hypothetical logic puzzle. Paul is making a strict architectural argument about the object of your faith, not the intensity of it.
In Corinth, some claimed there was no literal resurrection of the dead. Paul says if there is no resurrection, then Christ is still dead. If you place your trust in a dead man, your faith is vain. It is an empty mechanism pointing at a void. Because Christ did rise, the mechanism works flawlessly, and their salvation is secure. Paul uses this exact same logic again in his letter to the Galatians:
“If righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.” – Galatians 2:21
If you can save yourself through your own religious works or superior theological intellect, then God slaughtered His Son for absolutely no reason.
Believing feignedly is the human ego putting on a mask. That mask can be either religious morality or cold intellectual superiority. Believing in vain is the logical result of trusting in anything other than the resurrected Christ. Paul’s unmixed Evangel completely shatters both sides of the coin, inviting the believer to drop the act, stop trusting in their own flesh, and rest entirely in the unearned Grace of God.
The Two-Prong Mandate and the True Measure of Approval for “The Prize”
If there is one final, devastating reality to grasp about the Apostle Paul, it is this: he never esteemed it worthwhile to measure a believer’s faith by their ability to merely recite the facts of scripture.
In his second letter to Timothy, Paul laid down a vital instruction that has been severely perverted by both the mainstream Christian and the Concordant studier:
“Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” – 2 Timothy 2:15
Both extremes in each of these camps have weaponized this single verse. The mainstream church uses it to build academic hierarchies, where “approval” is measured by seminary degrees, factual memorization, and adherence to traditional creeds. The Concordant camp uses it to build an intellectual colosseum, turning “right division” into a competitive measure of superiority. They use their lexicons like a badge of elite faith, showing off their approval strictly through the capacity of their brains while their hearts remain stone.
But Paul never intended the cutting of the word to be a weapon of supremacy. It was a mandate of service.
The true purpose of study was to forge a workman capable of esteeming others, putting bruised and fearful believers at ease, and serving the Body. Paul knew that those who revel in realizing the truth by their hearts, rather than just their brains, bring a profound benefit of power. This heart-level realization is what actually helps others repent and change their minds. Just as in the earthly Kingdom promised to Israel, where those who truly grasp the heart of the law will be capable of teaching as a literal extension of Christ’s voice, the celestial administration requires administrators whose knowledge is entirely governed by empathy.
To attain the ultimate Prize of reigning in the celestials, Paul laid out a two-prong mandate: you must rightly divide the word of truth, and you must love all as Christ loves you.
This mandate is a double-edged sword, carrying both immense reward and severe consequence.
If you take the first prong, right division, and use it to mock, alienate, or intellectually destroy those who are trapped in ignorance, that edge swings back in consequence. It will disqualify you from the Prize, resulting in a profound loss at the searing fire of the Dais. But if you take the sharp edge of truth and balance it with the second prong, a bleeding, fierce, and active love for all men, that double edge cuts away the flesh and prepares you for the ultimate reward.
The cosmos is not looking for human encyclopedias. The heavens do not need more Pharisees of the Greek text. God is actively vetting a government in exile, searching for those who have taken the profound, staggering realities of grace and allowed them to completely break, rebuild, and tenderize their hearts.
The Sober Transition of Power: The Snatching Away
The culmination of this training is the sudden, violent transition of power known as the snatching away, or the Harpazo.
“For, if we are believing that Jesus died and rose, thus also, those who are put to repose, will God, through Jesus, lead forth together with Him...Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air…” – 1 Thessalonians 4:14 & 17
The mainstream church conflates this event with Israel’s Second Coming, creating an industry of apocalyptic terror. They scour the news for the antichrist, stockpile supplies, and live in a state of perpetual fear, utterly violating Paul’s command to comfort one another with the promise of our departure.
Yet, the hyper dispensationalist treats the Harpazo with casual chronological arrogance. They have the timelines charted perfectly. They know they are exempt from the indignation. But they use the promise of perfect theology to claim that the rest of Christianity is excluded from the Body and will not be snatched away, even while knowing there is a vast populace of believers who trust that the work was finished on the cross and that Christ rose from the dead. In addition, they see a pre wrath rescue as a safety net to remain completely spiritually asleep. They treat the snatching away as a free elevator ride to an entitled glory that “comes packaged with” a crown and a seat to reign with Christ automatically, completely ignoring what truly is about to happen the moment Christ shouts to call us up to Himself.
The snatching away is not the end of the story; it is the immediate precursor to the searing fire (aka the Truth) of the Dais. It is the moment the government in exile is finally called up to give an account of their stewardship from the earth they lived on in Sin and Death below.
“For we must all be manifested before the dais of Christ, that each one may be getting back the things done through the body…” – 2 Corinthians 5:10
And as Paul sternly warned,
“…for whatsoever a man may be sowing, this shall he be reaping also.” – Galatians 6:7
God has cracked open the blueprints of the cosmos. It was only through the Apostle Paul, not John Nelson Darby or other mainstream leaders, that He handed us the architecture of the heavens to come. He invited us to step out of the synagogues and temples of worship, to step onto the dirt, and race to pursue our seats in the administration of the eons. We may have the right doctrine. We might even hold the right text. But the cosmos is not waiting for men with perfect vocabularies or behavioral obedience to traditions. It is waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, those who have taken the profound revelations of grace and allowed them to forge a heavy, humble, and fiercely active love.
As I have touched base with you about in prior articles and videos, Paul did not retain a high opinion of himself when viewing others after his encounter with the ascended Christ in Damascus. Saul of Tarsus had been shown something so far beyond his own comprehension that Christ’s truth completely surrendered his reality. He became the beloved Paul we all now know, walking in humility, truth, and perseverance for the goodness of others, with the sole aim to be worthy of the Prize at the Dais.
I can only imagine what such a human being went through to have it all and then lose it in pursuit of sharing the truth of what is actually Good News. He preached in an era where everyone in the Gentile region was a self made, confident philosopher of internal realities. They were men who believed Elohim Yahweh did not dwell among them and had not intervened for generations. It was a world so cynical that philosophers like Diogenes would live as barren as a dog, free to insult anyone with authority, doubting that anything beyond himself was worthy of love and care. Diogenes was so fiercely independent that when Alexander the Great stood over him, the philosopher was utterly unintimidated by the tyrant’s power, simply critiquing the emperor for standing in his sunlight.
If Paul had lived in that exact timeframe, he would not have dealt with Diogenes directly with hostility. Both would likely hold a mutual respect for one another’s differences, honoring a friendship of live and let live while Paul continued slaving for the Evangel. Paul had to endure such intimidating, deeply philosophical circumstances. But today, we the Body are living in a modern shopping mall of excess and abundant choice. We are so deeply fatigued by it that we actually dare to dream of having no free will at all.
This perfectly explains the Concordant intellectual’s stance on salvation. In our modern idiomatic terms, the price of the cross is viewed as entirely unaffordable. In the Concordant circle, they declare that a person simply cannot afford to choose their faith through free will. In their eyes, humanity is so spiritually bankrupt and destitute in its own circumstances that accepting such a high priced offer through personal agency is impossible. Because they are exhausted by the responsibility of choice, they invent a theology where choice is eradicated. They claim God simply overrides the transaction entirely, forcing the purchase upon them by His choosing through foreknowledge. But salvation is not a forced transaction to bypass our fatigue; it is a free gift meant to be willingly and lovingly received by everyone, with the profound exception of those who are loved and united to us through marriage and our household, like our children, who are entirely set apart from the world by our faith alone, whether they know it or not.
Your faith, as Paul explained, is able to be a life raft for those you love the deepest. If you have raced to keep the faith with love exercised in the sacrifice of your own enjoyment for the betterment of others, then your unbelieving spouse and children will witness Christ honor you with the Prize, and you will be able to glorify them in honor before all.
To the Concordant spaces and brethren: the goodness, love, and power of God far exceed your own realities of understanding. While you all may have turned to the faith many years in understanding before me, I have been given a realization that exceeds the limits of what you all have professed. I do not dislike you for that, nor do I care any less for you. I only wish to entreat you to see what amazing love is waiting for all to come. I ask you to change your mind to what I am saying by accrediting God the Father beyond the measures we have all been acclaiming. Because if it is too good to be true, and it comes from God? Then it must be true. Because God is Good!
If there is one thing I know this world has taught me, it is that it can be both scary and incredibly easy to deny ourselves the permission to feel what is good, loving, and expected. We do this because of how much we have all endured from decades or years of hardship. We have faced hardships where love should have been possible, and ideally would have happened, if only it had been allowed. We even withhold this grace from ourselves in what we see, do, think, feel, or imagine for our own potential. But it only takes the loving, transformed heart of one person to pursue the question of its possibility and to see if it even exists in the scriptures. Questions are marvelous, and they open doors. Doctrinal echo chambers stifle realization and build fences and constraints on ways to be thinking, learning, and loving everyone and everything.
What Paul NEVER Said
If we are going to rightfully claim Paul as the exclusive pattern for the Body of Christ, we must be ruthlessly honest about what he actually wrote. Just as important as what Paul declared is what he absolutely never said. Both the mainstream pulpits and the Concordant forums have added massive volumes of fine print to the Evangel, creating artificial prerequisites that Paul never once authorized.
These prerequisites are perfect indicators of a person’s flesh operating in real-time, marking those who will likely be disqualified from reigning as administrators for the eons. God did not separate people for the sole purpose of being “exclusive.” The spark of faith that comes to a person is a faith that no one else can measure, see, or hear. It exists entirely within the heart by the measure authorized on the Father’s behalf. It is not our jurisdiction to omit or confirm; that is Christ Jesus’s to determine at the snatching. He knows who His are, and we are not capable of knowing this. This is why the only faithful position is to rest on the sovereignty of the Father’s will to counsel a person’s heart. A verbal confession can say many things, but what a person cannot fake is what is truly in their heart.
When Paul says to judge nothing before the time, he literally means it. If one truly believes and rests in God’s sovereignty over all things and acclaims Ephesians 1:11 is true and not a half truth that must be finished on their behalf, then no one should be avowing to outright determine if another person is a true believer. This is especially true if that person has been wrongly misled and fed lies and myths of doctrine that tickle their hearing. It is entirely upon them to stand or fall before the Lord Christ at the Dais, who is their master to say whether they were true or not. Is this judgment for their justification? No. It is for the Prize, to earn a place in administrating those who were brought into the heavens.
As we examine what is written below, I hope you have come to grasp the understanding of idioms and hyperboles a bit better so you can leverage the information contained within the verses to follow. This will massively help when you now read the scriptures to easily understand the picture of life in front of you. If you do not have it perfectly figured out yet, that is okay! It takes practice, patience, and a thorough examination of what is truly in front of your eyes on the text and in the life that operates around you. It is that simple. But this will be much harder if you are always pressed to be impressed by what others have to say, or if you resort to their opinions, giving them greater influence than you give yourself credit for. Do not become codependent on whoever you claim to be an expert. I am not an expert. I am just another believer with an earnest need to question everything, to study, and to listen to the things most people would rather ignore.
The Mainstream Additions: The institutional mainstream church has weaponized the silence of Paul to build behavioral and doctrinal tollbooths.
- Paul never said the entire Bible is written directly to you. The mainstream church (not all but most) treats the Bible as a flat, universal manual, haphazardly applying promises and warnings meant for national Israel directly to the modern Gentile believer. But Paul explicitly taught the concept of rightly dividing the word, recognizing that different administrations have entirely different operating rules. If you do not distinguish between God’s earthly program for the circumcision and His celestial program for the uncircumcision, you will live in perpetual theological confusion, trying to obey laws you were never given. “Endeavor to present yourself to God qualified, an unashamed worker, correctly cutting the word of truth.” – 2 Timothy 2:15.
- Paul never said you must say a Sinner’s Prayer. Mainstream religion relies on a transactional, scripted prayer at an altar, an emotional ritual found absolutely nowhere in the epistles. Salvation is not a magic spell or a formulaic chant you repeat after a pastor while music plays softly in the background. It is the internal belief of the heart. “That if you should be avowing with your mouth the declaration that Jesus is Lord, and believing in your heart that God raises Him from among the dead, you shall be saved.” – Romans 10:9.
- Paul never said your behavior maintains your justification. The traditional church preaches grace for salvation but quietly demands works for maintenance, terrifying believers that a severe moral failure will somehow unseal them from the Spirit. Paul taught that you are permanently sealed by God Himself, not by your own moral performance. Your behavior affects your Prize at the Dais, but it can never undo the free gift of your salvation. “In Whom you also, hearing the word of truth, the evangel of your salvation, in Whom believing also, you are sealed with the holy spirit of promise.” – Ephesians 1:13.
- Paul never made the Trinity or Eternal Torment a prerequisite for grace. Mainstream gatekeepers demand perfect adherence to fourth century creeds and pagan concepts of hell. If you do not hold their specific mainstream theology, they declare your faith invalid, completely ignoring that Paul’s gospel requires only belief in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. “For I pass on to you first of all, that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, and that He was entombed, and that He has been roused the third day, according to the scriptures.” – 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.
- Paul never commanded a ten percent tithe. Mainstream Christianity frequently weaponizes the Old Testament prophets, specifically Malachi, to guilt believers into funding their institutional budgets. They threaten the pew with financial curses if they do not pay their dues. Paul completely obliterated this Mosaic tax for the Body of Christ, instituting a system of voluntary, cheerful giving based purely on what a believer has resolved in their own heart, entirely free from compulsion or mathematical percentages. “Each one, according as he has purposed in his heart, not sorrowfully, nor of compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” – 2 Corinthians 9:7.
- Paul never established a passive, spectator church model. The traditional church has built a strict, unbiblical hierarchy separating the clergy on the stage from the laity in the seats. They treat the gathering as a performance where one CEO pastor speaks and everyone else watches. Paul taught that the Body is a living organism where every single member has a function, a voice, and a responsibility to edify the others. He never designed the ecclesia to be a spectator sport. “Whenever you may be coming together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a language, has a translation. Let all occur for edification.” – 1 Corinthians 14:26.
- Paul never localized God to a Sunday building. Mainstream religion constantly refers to physical brick and mortar structures as The House of God and makes Sunday attendance the ultimate metric of a person’s spiritual health. Paul completely destroyed the concept of sacred earthly geography, revealing that the believers themselves are the temple. He never commanded the Gentiles to construct religious monuments or attach their spirituality to a zip code. “Are you not aware that you are a temple of God, and the spirit of God is making its home in you?” – 1 Corinthians 3:16.
- Paul never told the Body to seize political dominion over the earth. Institutional Christianity frequently conflates the Evangel with political power. They attempt to legislate morality, take back the nation for God, and build the kingdom on earth through the voting booth. Paul never once commanded the ecclesia to reform the Roman Empire. He explicitly stated that our citizenship exists in the heavens, and we are currently operating as ambassadors in foreign, hostile territory. “For our realm is inherent in the heavens, out of which we are expecting a Savior also, the Lord, Jesus Christ.” – Philippians 3:20.
- Paul never mentioned The Mark or The Beast. The mainstream church has built a massive industry around apocalyptic panic. Pastors constantly scour the news for microchips, barcodes, vaccines, and political figures, terrified of accidentally taking the Mark of the Beast. But Paul never once used this terminology. The imagery of the Beast, the Antichrist, and the Mark belongs exclusively to the prophetic writings of John, an apocalyptic text concerning the earthly kingdom of Israel and the future indignation. Paul’s epistles to the Body of Christ contain absolutely zero warnings about avoiding a literal mark on your right hand or forehead. While Paul did warn of a man of lawlessness, the modern church aggressively conflates Israel’s prophetic timeline with the secret administration of the Body. By doing so, they rob the believer of the peace that surpasses understanding, replacing the glorious celestial calling with a superstitious, fear driven anxiety that Paul never authorized. “For God did not appoint us to indignation, but to the procuring of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:9.
- Paul never told you to shout at the devil. Charismatic mainstream circles have invented a loud, theatrical mythology of spiritual warfare. They spend their gatherings shouting at the air, attempting to bind invisible demons or loose financial blessings. Paul’s actual instruction for spiritual warfare was profoundly sober: put on the armor of God, stand fast in the truth, and pray. He never authorized the believer to perform arrogant, performative exorcisms against the principalities. “Stand, then, girded about your loins with truth, and putting on the cuirass of righteousness… with all prayer and petition praying on every occasion in spirit.” – Ephesians 6:14 & 18.
The Concordant Additions: While the mainstream adds behavioral fine print, the hyper-grace and Concordant camps add intellectual fine print. They boast in being freed from orthodox legalism, only to construct a far more insidious legalism of the mind.
- Paul never said your realization of the cross is the prerequisite for belief. The Concordant camp has effectively added a mandatory postscript to the gospel. They act as if a person is not truly a believer until they have mentally grasped the deep, technical mechanics of what happened on the cross, specifically, that Christ’s death was a universal reconciliation. They turn the simple, childlike reception of the good news into a sophisticated intellectual realization that must be unlocked. But Paul never demanded a doctorate in eonian reconciliation to count someone as saved. He established a singular, uncompromising standard: “that if you should be avowing with your mouth the declaration that Jesus is Lord, and believing in your heart that God raises Him from among the dead, you shall be saved.” – Romans 10:9. Some will argue that Paul’s words in Romans 10 are addressed to national Israel, attempting to isolate the verse into a different dispensation. But this is a category error. Paul is not laying out a dispensational membership form; he is describing the universal anatomy of belief. He is detailing how a human heart responds to the truth, regardless of the administration. If the mechanism of faith, believing in the heart and confessing with the mouth, were different for the Body of Christ, Paul would have provided a different anatomy. He did not, because faith is the heartbeat of a person, not a ritual of a dispensation. Paul did not command us to avow a specific dispensational realization; he commanded us to believe a specific event. When a person hears the claim of the death, burial, and resurrection and their heart loves believing that claim, they have believed. Period. Everything else is the growth that follows faith, not the price of admission.
- Paul never said that “choosing” to believe is a human “work.” The Concordant intellectual loves to accuse mainstream believers of hypocrisy, claiming that if you use your personal agency to accept the gospel, you are somehow adding your own fleshly works to the finished work of the cross. They argue that because salvation was finished two thousand years ago, human faith cannot possibly be a choice, otherwise man gets to share the glory. Let us completely out fence this weasel argument right now. They will claim that if you have to actively reach out and accept a gift, then you are paying for the gift with your action, making it no longer a gift of grace. This is a spectacular distortion of reality. If a father purchases a priceless inheritance for his son, and the son simply opens his hands to receive it, the son did not work for the inheritance. He merely yielded to the father’s generosity. Paul explicitly and violently separated faith from works: “Now to the worker, the wage is not reckoned as a favor, but as a debt. Yet to him who is not working, yet is believing on Him Who is justifying the irreverent, his faith is reckoned for righteousness.” – Romans 4:4-5. Believing is the exact opposite of working! Faith is not a human contribution, a currency, or a labor of the flesh. Faith is the natural, restful persuasion of the human mind when it finally hears and accepts the truth. Paul masterfully dismantles the Concordant trap by placing the power entirely in the message being heralded, not in the deterministic forcing of the hearer: “Consequently, faith is out of tidings, yet the tidings through the declaration of Christ.” – Romans 10:17. The declaration does the heavy lifting! The truth presents itself, and the human mind, within its own jurisdiction, either yields to that persuasion or stubbornly resists it. Yielding to a truth is not a labor, it is a surrender! Yes, Christ paid the debt universally two thousand years ago. But Paul tells the Body that we must actively take hold of this. “For if, by the offense of the one, death reigns through the one, much rather, those receiving the abundance of grace and the gratuity of righteousness shall be reigning in life through the One, Jesus Christ.” – Romans 5:17. Notice the word receiving. It is an active posture of the human heart, not a passive, deterministic download forced upon a biological robot. Let us be brutally honest about where this theology actually originates. This is the concoction of a narcissist who wants to hoard the glory entirely for themselves. It is a perspective engineered not by a graceful, loving person with a bleeding heart for the world, but by someone desperate to build an exclusive club. By falsely categorizing free will as a “work,” the Concordant intellectual completely redefines Paul’s vocabulary to protect their own deterministic echo chamber so they can remain “special,” robbing the believer of the profound, relational joy of actively choosing to trust their Father.
- Paul never said you must perfectly understand the state of the dead. While the scriptural reality of mortalism, the cessation of consciousness at death, is a profound truth, the Concordant elite frequently weaponize it. If a grieving believer finds comfort in thinking their deceased loved one is looking down on them, the Concordant purist will often bypass compassion entirely to deliver a cold, clinical lecture on the state of the dead. They act as if failing to perfectly articulate the anatomy of the soul and spirit prevents a person from holding true faith, turning a secondary doctrine into a brutal prerequisite. Paul told us to comfort one another regarding those who are reposing, not to pass a theology exam over their graves.
- Paul never demanded a flawless vocabulary. Concordant purists claim that believers must use a highly specific, hyper literal phrasing to prove they have the correct faith. They police terminology with ruthless arrogance, assuming that if someone uses a traditional word like hell or eternity, their salvation is highly suspect and they must be immediately corrected. Paul cared about the posture of the heart, not the precision of the lexicon. In fact, he explicitly condemned this exact behavior, warning against anyone who “is puffed up, comprehending nothing, but is morbidly out of his mind over questionings and logomachies [battles of words], out of which is coming envy, strife, calumnies, wicked surmisings…” – 1 Timothy 6:4.
- Paul never said bad doctrine disqualifies you from the Body. The Concordant camp often treats traditional Christians as though their ignorance completely locks them out of the faith. They write them off as entirely carnal. But Paul explicitly wrote that within the great house there are vessels of wood and clay alongside the gold and silver: “Now in a great house there are not only gold and silver utensils, but wooden and earthen also, and some for honor, yet some for dishonor.” – 2 Timothy 2:20. Bad doctrine will absolutely burn as wood, hay, and stubble at the Dais, but the fire evaluates the work, it does not sever a believing vessel from the Head.
- Paul never said faith is an exclusive, intellectual country club. The hyper grace camp frequently parades their faith as proof of their elite, predestined superiority, claiming it is an exclusive position only a few smart enough to decode the text can receive. They confuse their intense study habits with divine favoritism. Paul obliterates this arrogance, warning us that intellectual accumulation without empathy is a destructive force: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” – 1 Corinthians 8:1.
- Paul never said we are better than the ignorant. The exact moment you look at a mainstream believer who is trapped in traditional dogma and feel a sense of elite superiority, you have completely violated the foundational premise of grace. You did not figure it out because you were smarter; your eyes were opened because God willed it. Paul crushes this pride directly: “For who is making you to differ? Now what have you which you did not receive? Now if you received it also, why are you boasting as though not receiving?” – 1 Corinthians 4:7.
- Paul never said God’s absolute sovereignty eradicates your personal accountability. The Concordant camp loves to dismantle the philosophical concept of free will, correctly recognizing that God operates all things according to the counsel of His will. However, they dogmatize this into a toxic fatalism. They use God’s sovereignty as a cosmic scapegoat, secretly reasoning that since God operates their sin, they are not responsible for their carnal behavior. Paul obliterates this. He taught profound divine sovereignty, but he seamlessly paired it with strict human accountability, commanding the believer to actively execute the deeds of the spirit, flee immorality, and run the race. Paul never allowed determinism to be used as an excuse for apathy, explicitly warning: “God is not to be sneered at, for whatsoever a man may be sowing, this shall he be reaping also.” – Galatians 6:7.
- Paul never said the absence of physical rituals gives you the right to destroy a weaker brother. It is true that Paul’s revelation for the Body of Christ transitions away from the physical shadows of water baptism and the dietary strictures of the earthly kingdom. But the Concordant intellectual turns this anti ritual stance into a rigid, hostile ritual of its own. If a traditional believer finds comfort in partaking in communion or a water baptism, the Concordant purist will ruthlessly mock and attack them for being carnal. They completely ignore Paul’s strict mandate regarding liberties and weaker consciences: “For if, because of food, your brother is sorrowing, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not, by your food, destroy that one for whose sake Christ died.” – Romans 14:15.
- Paul never said the ultimate reconciliation of all things justifies antinomianism (lawlessness). Because the Concordant believer knows that the grace of Christ will ultimately secure every human being, they often develop a reckless attitude toward present sin. They assume that because the final destination is guaranteed, the journey does not matter. Paul anticipated this exact fleshly distortion of his grace, asking: “What, then, shall we declare? That we may be persisting in sin that grace should be increasing?” His answer was not a casual nod to the eons, but a violent rejection: “May it not be coming to that!” – Romans 6:1-2. Paul never taught that a future universal salvation grants a license for present carnal living.
- Paul never demanded a flawless mechanical understanding of Christ’s existence. While the mainstream church weaponizes the Trinity, the Concordant camp weaponizes their anti Trinitarianism. They obsess over the exact ontological nature of Christ’s genesis of origin before the eons, turning debates about His preexistence into a brutal theological litmus test. Which ultimately begins the cannibalizing of brethren into divisions of us vs. them approach to fellowship. If a believer does not perfectly articulate the celestial genealogy of the Son, the Concordant intellectual often mocks them as a tare. Paul wrote profoundly about Christ as the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of creation from among the dead, but he never made mapping out the exact mechanics of Christ’s preincarnate origin a prerequisite for entering the Body. He required faith in the crucified and resurrected Lord, not a flawless mathematical formula of celestial biology. Rather, what Paul did say about Christ and mankind is that all of humanity begins from the soil, made into a living soul through the first Adam. But now, because of Christ, all who are born of the soil will eventually be made into a life giving spirit clothed in celestial glory. “The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam a life giving spirit… The first man was out of the earth, made of soil; the second man is the Lord out of heaven… And according as we bear the image of the one made of soil, we shall bear the image also of the Celestial.” – 1 Corinthians 15:45, 47, & 49
The Mutual Illusions (Where Both Camps Fail) While the mainstream and hyper-grace camps love to wage war against one another, they are entirely united in several massive assumptions that Paul never actually taught.
- Paul never said the ultimate glory stops with Christ. Both the mainstream church and the Concordant camp make a bizarre error regarding who actually gets the credit for the eons. The mainstream conflates the Father and the Son into a Trinity, treating them as interchangeable. The Concordant camp, while rejecting the Trinity, often hyper-fixates on the finished work of Christ to the point that they treat Jesus as the ultimate ceiling of the Evangel, effectively leaving God the Father in the background. But Paul was architecturally precise about the flow of glory. He taught that God the Father is the Source, and Christ is the Channel. “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, out of Whom all is, and we for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom all is, and we through Him.” – 1 Corinthians 8:6. Let us connect this directly to their obsessive fear of free will. The Concordant intellectual hates the idea of personal agency because they are terrified that a man might share in the glory of salvation. Yet they completely miss the staggering irony of their own theology: the very Savior who accomplished the finished work on the cross was, in fact, a man! Yes, Christ was uniquely created by Yahweh without an earthly father’s seed, but He was a human being nonetheless. It was Yahweh who originated this perfect human vessel. It was Yahweh who paved every single step for Christ to walk, orchestrating exactly what He must accomplish to reconcile all of creation back to Himself. Christ did not act independently to save the universe. He was the obedient, faithful man through whom God chose to do the work. Paul explicitly wrote that every knee will bow to Christ, but notice where that praise ultimately lands: “and every tongue should be acclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord, for the glory of God, the Father.” – Philippians 2:11. Christ’s entire purpose is to rescue the universe and then hand it right back to the One who authored it. Paul declares that at the consummation, “the Son Himself also shall be subjected to Him Who subjects all to Him, that God may be All in all.” – 1 Corinthians 15:28. When we obsess over Christ’s mechanics but fail to stand in awe of the Father’s overarching mind, we have completely missed the very destination Christ died to bring us to. God is the One who made this all happen, and He will continue making all that is to come happen. Do not forget about Him.
- Paul never permitted us to profit off the Evangel. The modern theological landscape is filled with teachers building private empires, selling their exclusive truths, and profiting from their platforms. The mainstream church institutionalizes this through compulsory tithing, building massive corporate campuses, and demanding a cut of the believer’s paycheck under the fabricated threat of being cursed. On the other side, modern intellectuals monetize their hidden truths through book sales, exclusive memberships, and monetized video platforms. Both treat the Evangel as a commodity. Paul fiercely rejected this. He worked with his own hands building tents so that he would not be a financial burden, ensuring he offered the gospel completely free of charge. He explicitly warned against corrupt teachers who assume that godliness is a means of financial gain. “For you remember, brethren, our labor and toil: working night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, we preached to you the gospel of God.” – 1 Thessalonians 2:9. He also sternly warned against those who possess a depraved mind and suppose that “godliness is a means of gain.” – 1 Timothy 6:5.
- Paul never said an unbelieving spouse or child is excluded from the celestial rescue. Both extreme camps completely misunderstand the spiritual weight of the family unit. The mainstream church terrifies parents and spouses, convincing them that if their partner or child does not recite a specific prayer, they will be left behind to suffer a tribulation or burn in eternal torment. They sever the sanctity of the family unit with a rigid rod of individual confession. The Concordant intellectual makes a similar error in the opposite direction, claiming that because the spouse or child lacks the advanced theological realization of the Evangel, they cannot possibly be part of the Body of Christ and must wait for the final consummation of the eons. But Paul explicitly taught that the marital one flesh union and the biological family hold profound cosmic weight. God does not measure a child’s faith or an unbelieving spouse’s intellect with a yardstick to determine their worthiness for the snatching away. The unbelieving spouse and the children are sanctified, meaning set apart and made holy, simply through their union with the believing vessel. This is exactly why Paul and Jesus so fiercely defended the sanctity of marriage and warned against sexual immorality; the physical union itself provides a protective, spiritual covering for the family. “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother. Consequently, your children are unclean, yet now they are holy.” – 1 Corinthians 7:14. Being holy simply means to be set apart, which is exactly what we want for our loved ones, not just for ourselves. Those who do not want this covering for their unbelieving family members are likely at odds with them because they have steeped their relationships in extreme demands rather than in grace. They sever the relationship, falsely believing it is for the betterment of their own faith, only to face profound embarrassment at the Dais when they realize how wrong they were for abandoning the very family God promised to set apart through them.
- Paul never said a cosmic demon literally shape shifts to trick you. Both camps completely misunderstand Paul’s dire warning that “Satan disguises himself as a messenger of light.” – 2 Corinthians 11:14. The mainstream pulpit reads this with Western superstition, teaching believers to fear a supernatural devil who glows in the dark to deceive them. The Concordant intellectual often falls into the same mythological trap, or they weaponize the verse to label anyone with traditional theology as a literal agent of a cosmic spook. But in Gentile simplicity, the Hebrew word Satan simply means Adversary. Paul was using a grounded, highly practical idiom. If you read the surrounding verses, Paul is explicitly talking about human beings: “false apostles, deceitful workmen.” – 2 Corinthians 11:13. The messenger of light is not a winged creature; it is a human preacher. It is the charismatic pastor in a suit at a Sunday service, or the articulate intellectual in a livestream who preaches a distorted gospel that sounds brilliant, holy, and enlightening, but actually binds the believer in legalism, fear, or the arrogance of boasting. Paul is warning us about the religious flesh masquerading as divine revelation. At the same time, he is cautioning against the reality of those who outright deny Christ, Paul, the Evangel, and the efficacy of the finished work of the cross, claiming instead that their own works will earn their justification rather than qualifying them for the Prize.
- Paul never taught a schizophrenic two nature spiritual identity. Both extreme camps claim that believers possess two warring spiritual identities locked in a perpetual cage match: the Old Man and the New Man. The mainstream church preaches the two dogs analogy to explain why Christians still sin, claiming whichever nature you feed is the one that wins. The Concordant camp frequently uses this dual nature myth to excuse carnal behavior, casually blaming their Old Humanity for their arrogant actions as if it is a separate entity they cannot control. But Paul explicitly obliterated this idea. He declared, “knowing this, that our old humanity was crucified with Him.” – Romans 6:6. Paul taught that the old spiritual identity is entirely dead. The believer is a single, unified New Creation who is temporarily housed in unredeemed, decaying biology (the flesh). You do not have an evil spirit living inside of you fighting a good spirit; you have a perfected, sealed spirit operating a carnal, survival driven machine. This is why Paul explicitly stated that what we are groaning for is the deliverance of our biology, not an evil spirit: “we ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the spirit, we ourselves also are groaning in ourselves, eagerly awaiting the sonship, the deliverance of our body.” – Romans 8:23. This biological machine is what we can idiomatically refer to as the Adversary. In contrast, our sealed spirit operates by the Advocate, a divine influence that, at this current time, is not actively operating in all people. Hence why we are trained now to walk in love for all, as Christ did, and why Paul asks us to follow his lifestyle as the pattern, because his life points straight to the Head: “Become imitators of me, according as I also am of Christ.” – 1 Corinthians 11:1.
- Paul never commanded a compulsory, hustling evangelism. Both extreme camps view the spreading of their message as a forced compulsion or a mandatory metric of a person’s spiritual transformation. The mainstream church weaponizes guilt, pushing believers into door-to-door salesmanship, sidewalk bullhorns, and mandatory witnessing quotas to fill their pews. The Concordant camp simply trades the sidewalk for the digital platform, vigorously hustling their writings, books, and forum debates as the ultimate proof of their awakened superiority. But Paul never commanded the Body to act like spiritual salesmen or theological content hustlers. The heralding of the good news is a gentle entreatment to further understand and realize the truth; it is not a pressurized sales pitch or a platform building exercise. Paul actively despised the idea of treating the Evangel like a product, declaring: “For we are not as the majority, who are peddling the word of God.” – 2 Corinthians 2:17. When you turn the gospel into a compulsory hustle, whether for financial gain, church attendance, or intellectual platforming, you have stripped it of its celestial dignity. You have turned it into a self-appointed boasting of superiority by simply chaining its good message to what everyone else is doing wrong. Constantly pointing out the wrongs of others in this manner truly ruins the hearers, driving them into a defensive wall of opposition.
- Paul never said to slander or humiliate others for holding incorrect doctrine. Both extreme camps treat theological disagreement as a blood sport. The mainstream church frequently uses the pulpit and apologetic platforms to publicly slander and character assassinate anyone who strays from mainstream creeds, quickly branding them as heretics to be shunned and destroyed. The Concordant camp commits the exact same sin in their digital forums, using their advanced knowledge of the Greek to arrogantly mock, belittle, and humiliate traditional believers for their ignorance. Both sides justify their cruelty under the guise of defending the truth. But Paul explicitly forbade using the truth as a weapon of public humiliation. He commanded the exact opposite posture for anyone claiming to represent the Lord: “Now a slave of the Lord must not be fighting, but be gentle toward all, apt to teach, bearing with evil, in meekness disciplining those who are antagonizing.” – 2 Timothy 2:24-25. Paul did not tolerate bad doctrine, but his method of correction was always rooted in patience and meekness, never in arrogant destruction. The truth does not need a bully to defend it. If you are using your realization of right division to slander, mock, or humiliate a weaker brother, you are not walking in the spirit of the Evangel; you are simply operating the flesh with a better vocabulary. Based on what Paul wrote, he would advocate walking away, just as Christ did, in situations where loving dialogue would not prosper with those who challenged them. There is a time and place for everything in life. Rebuking and refuting without entreating is something Paul never advocated for, especially if it lacked the heart of Christ to patiently endure the stubbornness of others. “A sectarian man, after a first and second entreaty, be refusing, aware that such a one has been perverted…” – Titus 3:10-11.
What Paul DID Say
When you strip away the behavioral tollbooths of the mainstream church and the intellectual colosseums of the Concordant movement, what remains is the actual, unburdened Evangel. Paul’s true instructions were never designed to build corporate empires or elite theological clubs. They were designed to build a humble, functioning Body.
What Paul DID Say to the Mainstream:
- Paul DID say salvation is a simple conviction of the heart. You do not need a scripted altar call. “For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” – Romans 10:10.
- Paul DID say you are entirely sealed by the Spirit upon belief. Your behavior does not maintain your justification; God’s down-payment does. “In whom also, believing, you are sealed with the holy spirit of promise.” – Ephesians 1:13.
- Paul DID say giving is entirely voluntary. There is no mathematical tithe or financial curse for the Body of Christ. “Each one according as he has purposed in his heart, not sorrowfully, nor under compulsion, for God is loving a cheerful giver.” – 2 Corinthians 9:7.
- Paul DID say the believers themselves are the temple. God does not live in a brick-and-mortar building on Sunday mornings. “Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and the spirit of God is dwelling in you?” – 1 Corinthians 3:16.
- Paul DID say our citizenship is in the heavens. We are not called to seize political control of the earth or legislate morality for the nations; we are ambassadors in foreign territory. “For our realm is inherent in the heavens, out of which we are awaiting a Savior also, the Lord, Jesus Christ.” – Philippians 3:20.
- Paul DID say to simply put on the armor and stand. He never told us to perform theatrical exorcisms or shout at the devil. We are told to quietly and firmly hold our ground in the truth. “Therefore take up the panoply of God, that you may be able to withstand in the wicked day, and having effected all, to stand.” – Ephesians 6:13.
What Paul DID Say to the Concordant:
- Paul DID say knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Having a flawless lexicon is worthless if it makes you arrogant. “Knowledge is puffing up, yet love is building up. If anyone is presuming to know anything, he knew it not yet as he must know it.” – 1 Corinthians 8:1-2.
- Paul DID say the strong must bear with the weak. Advanced theological understanding is a mandate to serve, not a license to mock. “Now we, the able, ought to be bearing the infirmities of the impotent, and not to be pleasing ourselves.” – Romans 15:1.
- Paul DID say bad doctrine will burn, but the believer will be saved. An ignorant brother is still a brother. Their bad theology will be destroyed at the Dais, but they will not be severed from the Body. “If anyone’s work shall be burned up, he will forfeit it, yet he shall be saved, yet thus, as through fire.” – 1 Corinthians 3:15.
- Paul DID say God chose the foolish to shame the wise. The Evangel is not an exclusive intellectual country club for those smart enough to decode the Greek. “But the foolish things of the world God chooses, that He may be disgracing the wise.” – 1 Corinthians 1:27. Even as you watch the mainstream boast in their own wisdom, you are claiming that exact same position the moment you view yourself as the wise intellectual among ignorant sinners. The sheer act of claiming to be greater is the very marker Paul indicated will lead to your own disgrace. Remember, humility is the only key that unlocks a heart that truly loves.
- Paul DID say to actively put the deeds of the flesh to death. God’s absolute sovereignty is not an excuse for carnal apathy. You are commanded to act. “For if you are living according to flesh, you are about to die, yet if, in spirit, you are putting the practices of the body to death, you will be living.” – Romans 8:13.
What Paul DID Say to Both:
- Paul DID say to lead a quiet life and mind your own business. This is the ultimate antidote to the compulsory hustle, the digital platforming, and the religious grandstanding of both camps. “And to be ambitious to be quiet, and to be engaged in your own affairs, and to be working with your hands, according as we charge you.” – 1 Thessalonians 4:11.
- Paul DID say our battle is against systemic powers, not each other. Stop slandering and destroying the brethren; the true Adversary is the system of the flesh and the present darkness. “For it is not ours to wrestle with blood and flesh, but with the sovereignties, with the authorities, with the world-mights of this darkness…” – Ephesians 6:12. This is a plain indicator from Paul that while we live in this flesh for now, we are actively wrestling with the corrupt powers of government and the authorities of this earth. Therefore, be at peace with anyone who is acclaiming that Jesus is the Lord, even if they possess poor doctrinal understanding and stubbornness. The government systems of this earth and those who run them are the true systemic enemies, and they will crush us all if we do not stand in unity and love for one another. We endure this because we know we will eventually have our own government and authority in the heavens, exactly as Christ promised, which I am sharing with you today.
- Paul DID say the ultimate goal of all instruction is love. The true measure of any believer, regardless of their camp, is not their Sunday attendance or their doctrinal perfection. It is a transformed heart. “Now the end of the charge is love out of a clean heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith.” – 1 Timothy 1:5. Therefore, exercise your heart to be the biggest muscle you flex for all peoples of this earth, so that Christ may reward you later at the Dais for what you have sowed while in the Body.
Conclusion: Waking the Government in Exile
The blueprint of the heavens has been completely exposed. The Apostle Paul did not endure stonings, shipwrecks, and the executioner’s block just to hand us a textbook of cold vocabulary so that we could boast in pride. Nor did he write the epistles to build a spectator religion grounded in emotional mythology. He was tasked with delivering the architecture of the cosmos.
Right now, the believer is caught in a tragic crossfire between a mainstream church that fears everything and a hyper dispensational movement that feels nothing. If we are to truly grasp our cosmic destiny, we must ruthlessly abandon both the haunted house of mainstream superstition and the sterile, arrogant laboratory of the Concordant elite. We must stop mythologizing the idioms of the scriptures, and we must stop using the absolute sovereignty of God as a shield for our own carnal apathy from walking as both Paul and Christ Himself walked before us.
The heavens are not a retirement resort in the clouds, and they are not waiting for sectarian pastors. The celestials are not looking for believers who hide behind lexicons and commentaries to justify their lack of empathy, nor are they looking for religious performers who measure their salvation by their Sunday attendance and obedience to traditions.
God is actively vetting a government in exile to be announced before the Body of believers in the heavens.
We are not just waiting to be rescued from the dirt; we are being rigorously tested for the heavens. The Prize, the highest allotment of celestial governance in the New Creation, will not be handed to those who merely successfully decoded the Greek text. It will be awarded at the searing fire of the Dais to those who took the staggering reality of grace and allowed it to completely break and rebuild hearts that have been shaped by the harshest realities of this earthly existence.
The ones who will be trusted to govern the millions in the proxy realm above are the exact same ones who learned how to bear with the reproach, the ignorance, and the frailty of the brethren below. Those rewarded the highest can be anyone. They could have suffered immensely on the earth in agonizing physical pain. They could have endured severe mental anguish. Or they could have experienced very little suffering at all, yet were brought down a path that profoundly showed them the greatness of loving others. Each of these individuals has lived according to their own circumstances, and neither path is inherently greater or lesser than the other. The carnal, fleshly mind may immediately protest, crying out, “That is not fair!” But Christ will peer into them, revealing that the Prize was never about cosmic fairness or a scorecard of physical effort. It was always about a profound change of heart toward others, and how they actively exercised that love with the knowledge of truth they held. They are the ones who recognize that God respects the jurisdiction of human agency, and so they step into the mess of humanity as active administrators of love, rather than passive critics sitting in the bleachers of determinism.
To rightly divide the word of truth is only half the mandate. The other half is to bleed for the Body. To bleed is not to literally injure oneself, but to provide the goodness of showing love to all others. It is having the capacity to serve and be of service without a self aggrandized level of self importance or personal opinion. Flaunting your sufferings before an audience in lieu of the actual work of sharing the good news is not bleeding for anyone. It is boasting in the flesh of your adversarial mind:
“Look at me! Am I not important?! Does my ministry not matter?! Can you not see that God is bringing me ordained sufferings so great that I am fully justified in hating this world? Watch me spit on it! Watch me trash it and declare what a garbage heap it all is! And while I do it, watch me loudly profess my elite love for a God who is so good to puppet me through this exact misery, strictly by the counsel of His own will!”
I am sorry to be the bearer of absolutes, but you are where you are due to the consequences of the personal choices you have been making for some time now. It will be quite difficult to reign over anything if your only propensity is to trash the world you have been instructed to love with all your heart. Heaven will be an Earth 2.0 in all likelihood, and God’s clever trick is to pluck you from the earth you grew in hatred of, only to place you in a perfected version where you finally see what could have been yours to administrate. God truly shows you everything where you are now, vetting you for what is coming ahead.
It would be truly strange to live in an existence where things are one way in familiarity, only to have to radically transform to complete unfamiliarity when being prepared to inherit. The architecture above mirrors the architecture below. As the scriptures state, we are living under a massive body of water on this earth, just as there is water on the earth itself. God divided the realms with a physical barrier:
“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” – Genesis 1:7
Just as these physical realms reflect one another, the way we live down here prepares us for up there. God provides everyone a unique path, each with its own circumstances. We are all accountable to these choices, though some carry greater weight than others. The measure of love in each of those paths is how they refine and shape us to care for not just ourselves, but one another. If you have a greater abundance of wealth and opportunity, you can use that lived experience to help guide and assist others who do not know how to reach it, or you can actually be the reason they get there. If you are suffering, in pain, or in dire straits, you can serve as an advocate, showing those with abundance how to avoid ever reaching such a place through the wisdom of your experiences.
You are all here with the ability to be signposts, helping to show which way to go when the path meets a fork in the road. When Paul had it all, he knew how to take from all. When he gave it up, he saw how to point others to love. Can you imagine what kind of an Apostle Paul would be had he remained cynical, stubborn, and high minded while serving as a slave of Christ for the evangel to the nations? Forget the Roman Empire. Paul would have easily been in brawls, threatening others with the Evangel, or even still murdering those who threatened his path to getting the message out there. He could have easily written the doctrines of eternal torment himself, avowing that one MUST be a scholar of the scriptures to be saved.
But no, he did not. He outwardly professed a complete change of heart and a deep love for the world he once deemed himself greater than. He realized, after his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, that the path he walked as a Pharisee was a path to death itself. It offered him no benefit, in spite of the privileges it once served his fleshly mind. It simply is not worth it.
The time for theological tribalism, personality cults, and intellectual superiority is over. The transition of power is imminent. We have the right doctrine. We hold the right text. Now, we must actually walk worthy of the calling to which we have been called.
A series of questions you can even ask yourself are these:
“Am I being a taker, or a giver?“
“Am I trying to be right, or to be kind?”
“Am I being heavy, or being light?”
“Am I thinking impossible or possible?”
“Am I believing in fear or love?”
Simple questions in everyday moments, paired with a self reflective evaluation of your own heart, can reveal quite quickly what you are truly resting on in your faith. Begin with the Dais now from within. Do this so you can stand firm in accountability for the things you will see about yourself at the Dais and not be ashamed. It allows you to acknowledge with honesty that the value of all things you have built, exactly as Christ evaluates them, can be accepted and admitted as truth, rather than experienced in shock and shame.
Paul summarized this entire cosmic pursuit with a singular, agonizing focus that should shake both the mainstream pew and the Concordant forum to their core:
“I am pressing on toward the goal, for the prize of the calling above of God in Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 3:14
Pressing toward that goal is often a deeply lonesome path, much as it was for Paul in his final reflections. I, too, am losing support as I push these truths to the surface. With every new article and video I publish, I watch my subscriber count drop. The comments grow sparser, and a silent viewership remains without utterance. But I do not view this as a defeat. I trust that this silence is the heavy weight of deep reflection, an awakening for those who are willing to accept a foreign perspective that sits directly in the crossfire of two comfortable extremes.
If these truths are bringing a profound peace to your own walk, I simply invite you to pass them along. Not out of a religious obligation, and certainly not to help build a platform, but as a quiet act of love for someone else who might be suffocating under the weight of tradition or arrogance. The reach of this message is entirely in the hands of the Father, but if it has freed you, let it be a gift you freely give to others.
While the many around this earth, from over 55 countries that regularly visit this site (reconciliatedtruths.com), have read the various topics I have addressed, I am hopeful that it is bringing peace of mind to them in their own local communities. If nothing else, I hope it breeds the thinking needed to reconsider everything ever known into a perspective that finally clicks with a profound rest, and a recharge of love for all things.
It is a labor of toil, but it is one that I cherish. I do this not in vain, but as a messenger (angelos) of the Evangel. I am not striving to please men for applause, though it is welcomed when never at the expense of ostracizing others. I labor my fingers in reproach of those who are adversarial, with the hope that these foundational truths might eventually reconcile something within themselves.
Because of this transition, I am committing to this series being my final long video content. To those who have wondered why I utilize AI narrators for these messages rather than my natural voice and face, I want to openly clarify: faith comes by hearing the good news, and if not by hearing, then by reading, which is why my website will remain the herald of this work. If you require my real face and my natural voice to validate this message, you are conforming to the idolizing habits of modern platforming, tradition, and fear. A face and a voice are the absolute least important credentials of truth. Assuming you are a good Berean, you should be studying the scriptures to see if these perspectives align with the Pauline stance revealed in his thirteen epistles, entirely independent of the physical messenger delivering them. Just as Paul commanded:
“Try yourselves, if you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or are you not recognizing yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you, if it be not that you are disqualified?” – 2 Corinthians 13:5
And if you are not in a season of diligent study, then my prayer is that simply reading and hearing what has been said will provide you with profound hope and the realization that the goodness you seek is actually profiting you and those you love.
The ultimate matter of all this deep study is simple: to pursue, with an earnest and loving heart, the sight to see how much more loving God truly is. It is to recognize His grace without denying His sovereign power over all the life He has passionately and patiently created in His mind long ago. How can we not give praise and thanks when realizing the staggering truth of what He has accomplished, especially when staring into the faces of those who have snared themselves in the entrapment of conceit and a cauterized conscience?
The heavens are waiting. The proxy realm is built. It is time to run the race.
May the Lord and the Father give you what you need in this time of repentance and a heart that blossoms for all brethren amongst yourselves. Especially to those who sit outside amongst the world out of the faith. May the love you now realize you have in power be given with the patience and sincerity of absolute rest for those who are yet to receive it. May your impact greatly draw those who are yet to be the finishing fullness of the Body. I look forward to meeting you all in the air when the time arrives. May the glorious appearing of our Lord, Savior, and big brother, Christ Jesus, be coming soon for us to hear Him calling us up to Himself.
Love, Grace and Peace to each and every one of you with many blessings from our Father above, and the Lord Christ Jesus.
Matthew – “a gift from God”.