If we are going to understand the Apostle Paul in full, we have to keep stripping away the layers of religious tradition and hyper intellectualism that have buried his true message. In our previous parts, we established that Paul was not a cold academic handing us a technical manual of legal loopholes. He was a living, breathing apostle demanding a transformed life.
But the errors surrounding his letters run even deeper. They have fundamentally warped how we view the rest of the human world, how we operate in our daily lives toward one another, and even how we understand life, death, and the very future of life from our perspective.
It is time to look at the massive distortions regarding the Body of Christ, the true function of Grace, the administrative timeline of the believer, and the literal cosmic government Paul was preparing us to run.
Here is the next phase of what everyone gets wrong about the Apostle Paul.
1. Believing Christianity is Outside the Body of Christ
There is a staggering arrogance in both the mainstream Christian and the hyper dispensational Concordant believer. They often look at one another as completely foreign and severed from the true Body of Christ because of their doctrinal inaccuracies, and traditions, among their ways of living. They assume that if a believer does not possess a perfect eschatological chart of the eons, a Greek interlinear, a visible tradition of practice, or a specific correct way of professing truths verbally, they are somehow operating outside of Paul’s exclusive administration.
It is as if they believe the mind of man can operate outside of God’s active administrations entirely. They act as if the human mind is superior enough to believe something that cannot be contained within God’s sovereign operation at hand: Grace.
This creates toxic, isolated echo chambers of sects and denominations that Paul instructed we must be aware of and avoid partaking in. Paul’s deep concern was exactly this type of division, warning that our gatherings were turning into a detriment rather than a blessing.
“Now, in charging you with this, I am not praising you, seeing that you are coming together, not for the better, but for the worse.” – 1 Corinthians 11:17
These niche groups look at the massive, global, messy Christian church and declare them outcasts. But Paul’s revelation of the Body of Christ is not constrained by perfect theological test scores, nor is it bound by practiced traditions.
“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
If someone is trusting in the blood of Christ and is filled with His Spirit, they are in the Body. We cannot sever limbs off the Body of Christ simply because their vocabulary is flawed, their traditions are corrupt, or they meet in a building with a steeple on a Sunday morning. All of what we call as Christianity that holds to the headship of the resurrected Christ is part of the exact same Body.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, a church plagued by profound doctrinal errors, gross sexual immorality, and chaotic gatherings. Yet, he still called them the church of God and saints. He did not ex-communicate them from the Body for getting both the behavior, or the administration instructions wrong. Neither would that be allowed of him to do.
Now, those who demand strict doctrinal perfection will inevitably try to find a loophole here. They will argue that the Corinthians merely had behavioral and fleshly problems. They will say the real test is doctrine, pointing directly at the Galatians.
The Galatians committed the ultimate dispensational sin in the eyes of the modern internet theologian. They were actively mixing Law and Grace. They were returning to circumcision, observing earthly days, months, and years, and abandoning the pure evangel of Grace that Paul handed them. If ever there was a church that the Concordant believer would immediately write off as outside the Body for failing to rightly divide the Word, it is the church of Galatia.
Did Paul declare them officially severed from the Body of Christ? Did he tell them their doctrinal failure disqualified them from the administration of Grace entirely?
No. He was absolutely furious with them. He called them bewitched and foolish. But look at how he addresses them in the very midst of his deep frustration.
“So foolish are you? Undertaking in spirit, are you now being completed in flesh?” – Galatians 3:3
“My little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” – Galatians 4:19
He repeatedly calls them brothers throughout the entire letter. He fights for them with intense passion precisely because they are family, not because they are outcasts. If doctrinal perfection regarding the strict separation of Law and Grace was the absolute boundary line for being in the Body of Christ, the Galatians would have been entirely erased from Paul’s ministry. Instead, Paul fought to correct them from the inside.
The eye cannot say to the hand that it has no need of it. When niche believers mock the broader believing church for their lack of deep secret knowledge, they are actively mocking Christ’s own hands and feet. Paul spent his life trying to unify believers under one Head. He did not write his epistles to create an elite, secret club of academics who despise the rest of the flock. He wrote to show us that the blood of Jesus is far more powerful than our flawed human theology.
2. Treating Grace as a Doctrine for Correction Instead of an Operating State
The administration of Grace has been tragically misunderstood. Many internet theologians treat Grace purely as a doctrinal magnifying glass. They use it solely to correct other believers, pointing out where someone else is improperly mixing law and grace. They view the dispensation of Grace as a time of intellectual correction, a weapon used to win arguments against those who still hold to earthly ordinances of tradition, and especially, the pagan myths.
To correct this, we must understand exactly when and how Paul’s ministry took effect.
Up until the dispensation of Grace was revealed to Paul, all those who were believing the gospel of the circumcision were subjected to the earthly Kingdom. John the Baptist, Jesus in His earthly ministry, and the twelve disciples preached a gospel of repentance geared entirely toward the coming earthly reign of Israel.
For the Concordant believer, let me help you realize it like this. If one had believed in the resurrection of Jesus, forgave others, and was water baptized while the earthly administration of Israel was in effect, that believer was only ever going to be part of the 1,000-year earthly Kingdom. However, someone who believes that earthly evangel today, which includes the resurrection as its core message, can never be disqualified during the grace administration of Paul for justification.
Because Peter’s evangel was about believing the resurrection of Jesus being Lord plus a bunch of works packaged bundled together. The subtle reality is that anyone today who believes Peter’s evangel is actually duped into believing Paul’s. They are simply adding in Peter’s additional instructions by having more things to worry about, let alone, forfeit at the Dais. Not realizing they didn’t need to. God brilliantly snares as many as possible by belief in the resurrection alone.
But once Paul’s distinct ministry began, the very mechanics of the universe shifted. The secret was out. From that specific moment in history onward, anyone who believed simply in Christ’s resurrection was immediately placed into the Body of Christ.
To fully grasp the magnitude of this shift, we have to understand what the secret actually was. First century Israel had absolutely no expectation that their Messiah was going to be executed and resurrected from the dead. They were reading the ancient scrolls and anticipating a conquering political and military king who would crush the Roman occupation and immediately establish the Kingdom of God on earth.
When Jesus began talking about His impending death, it completely shattered their religious paradigm. This is exactly why Peter aggressively pulled Jesus aside to rebuke Him for even suggesting it. Even the twelve apostles, who walked with Him daily, did not truly believe He was going to resurrect until they physically saw the empty tomb.
While the prophets of old did write cryptic verses about a suffering servant, the true secret kept hidden from the eons was not just the resurrection itself. The profound mystery, exclusively revealed to the Apostle Paul, was what God was going to do with that resurrection.
God kept it an absolute secret that He was going to use the execution of Christ to temporarily pause the earthly prophetic timeline of Israel. The hidden mystery was that God would create a brand new, joint Body where Jew and Gentile are absolute equals, completely divorced from the Law, with a destiny to rule in the celestial realms rather than on the earth.
This validates Paul’s distinct ministry in a way that the modern church completely misses. Paul reveals that the cross was a divine ambush. If the Adversary and the rulers of that age had known this secret, Paul explicitly tells us they never would have pushed to crucify Jesus.
“but we are speaking God’s wisdom in a secret, the wisdom having been hidden, which God designates before the eons for our glory, which not one of the chiefs of this eon knows, for if they knew, they would not crucify the Lord of glory.” – 1 Corinthians 2:7-8
By orchestrating His death, the rulers of this age unknowingly triggered the exact event that birthed the Body of Christ and sealed their own total defeat.
It was never ever about possessing the perfect text based doctrine. It always was about the event itself and the time period in which that belief took place. The administration had already changed.
This means that if a modern believer trusts in the resurrected Christ, but they incorrectly believe they must also keep the law as part of their good works to keep their salvation, they are still in the Body of Christ! The hyper dispensationalist will point and say they do not understand, or believe in grace, or missed the administration by believing in the wrong one by the Evangel they herald. What they misunderstand completely, is that God is looking at the time of their belief in the resurrection for ‘that’ administration. Because they are trusting Christ during the administration of Grace, the event of their faith seals them. God does not demand they hold a flawless understanding of Pauline dispensationalism to be saved.
Grace is not merely a doctrinal checkpoint. It is a state of operation triggered by an event that has already happened.
Consider how the modern internet Concordant theologian wildly misunderstands this operation by butchering Ephesians 1:11, claiming “God works all things according to the counsel of His will.” In one way, making known to us the secret can be reflected in this reality: had Christ been resurrected and never shown Himself to the disciples and Israelites, His resurrection itself would have remained a secret and a mystery to all. The tale of Jesus of Nazareth would not be that He was resurrected by God, but rather that He vanished or was an executed person whose body was never found. A true cryptic folklore of Jewish history. Think about it for a minute regarding the recorded timeline of His resurrection realistically.
Christ died, was entombed by burial, and was wrapped in fine linen with honor by those who followed Him. Three days later, He was resurrected, causing a great earthquake in Jerusalem. They showed up, and He was gone. Had He remained hidden, what would anyone truly tell? What then would anyone today have to believe upon? Would anyone know that this One was raised from amongst the dead? What would have become of the Jews in Israel not knowing He was in fact alive and well, wounds and all still present? They needed to know from Him that He truly is the Son of God, giving the Jewish disciples the sight and evidence to prove He was exactly whom He said He was to God.
Paul’s only stance in announcing what Christ had accomplished was just the event. That event is the most profound thing in human history to be relied upon in this administration. To understand that He died for our sins, or that He was unaware in death, is all secondary and truly doctrinal in the grand scope of what Paul heralded. That is all secondary explanation to understanding the why as to how Jesus was resurrected and no one else.
They read the Jewish idioms, hyperboles, parables, and so forth throughout the canon with a rigid Western literal mind and conclude that God actively wills every single tragedy, every sin, and every instance of suffering in your life. But a true idiomatic understanding reveals something much deeper.
I will state from my current understanding of the biblical writings that Paul likely intended to put together the completed Biblical Word of God for the Jewish reader, not the Gentiles. The reason is because, while he was administering to the Gentile regions through much travel, he knew the Jews would collect and protect his writings for later purposes. Especially knowing the overall scope of God’s plan, he understood that he would be able to compile all the disciples and prophets of old into one canon with his writings to reveal the entirety of God’s plan in sequence as it should be known to whoever may read all of it. When re-examining Paul’s letters, while he did write to the Gentile regions of the world directly addressing issues of how both good and bad conduct is not profitable, the linguistic style tells a deeper story.
The idiomatic and hyperbolic phrasings which are all over his letters seem as though they were intended for the Jewish mind, just as he writes, “To the Jew first, then the Greek.” Even though it can also be said that Jesus came for the Jews first, then the Gentiles, we can clearly recognize that Paul frequently mentions to the Gentiles in their regions that hearing was their primary way of believing. This makes a lot more sense as to why, through the centuries, Gentile translators often resorted more and more to a literal interpretation of the written words, rather than the true meaning behind them according to Jewish tradition, background, and thought.
The idiom is actually saying that all of life is counseled by the will of God to live and to exist. Because God is good, it is not God who wills your suffering. It is only God awaringly watching His creation operate. Only He can see into the hearts of the living. He knows exactly what may manifest, what will tempt the flesh, and what will trigger a specific response in a person He uses to complete His overarching will, according to His script. When a western mind reads Ephesians 1:9-14. It is not stating a literal “chosen beforehand” as the Calvinist/Concordant believers would acclaim. No, no. It is actually saying verse by verse for the reader…
Verses 9-14 line-by-line simplified:
- Making known to us that Christ was resurrected in order to save all mankind, which was purposed first through Jesus of Nazareth
- To have those believing from each administration, who believed in the resurrection and professed it, one for the earth, one for the heavens to reign over in glory.
- In Jesus’ death whom our death was placed into. By the plan of God before the world had begun, who is giving life to all things God created as to be intended.
- We whom having believed the resurrection alone, be the first for Gods glory, who are expected to be snatched in the Body of Christ.
- Including you, who also heard of the resurrection, and the plan, having believed it. You are permanently sealed!
- Which is bringing the happiest enjoyment of this life that we all shall not die, but live again as Christ now does. When we are delivered up to Christ in the Heavens for His accomplishment we will all glorify!
Believe me when I say I did not come into this realization overnight. This expanded truth was something that took a great deal of questioning and the re-examining of understanding I previously held to. Many hours of silence, study, questioning all things, and researching Jewish history helped the missing components finally click into place. This is where I will tell the Concordant believer that God did not simply download this knowledge into me. I diligently studied, driven by a heart that was not satisfied with the answers I had at hand. Naturally, I sought out the matter and found it.
I want the layperson who does not understand the nature of hyperbole and idioms to have a simple grasp of how to view these ancient texts. If today we see a news headline that reads, “Wall Street became a complete bloodbath,” someone one thousand years from today would read that statement and believe without any historical context that Wall Street was a literal place where people were slaughtered and blood flowed through its streets. When in actuality, it simply meant that people in the financial market lost a severe amount of money, costing jobs and creating record losses for millions of investors. It was not a place of physical death and destruction.
This exact same lens is how you should be re-examining the Jewish writers of the Bible…
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.” – Titus 2:11-12
Grace is the active operating system of the believer. It is the divine energy that trains us to live upright lives right now through live and let live approach to everyone’s unique standing. Whether in the faith or out of it entirely and in another. If your version of Grace only gives you the ability to argue about doctrine, the eons online, theology, eschatology, etc. But does not give you the power to overcome your own flesh in those moments where you and others are gathering, you are not operating in Grace. You are just operating in fleshly pride by picking sides to fight from. Do not fight at all. Be excellent to one another and have a party as you should over what’s been accomplished!
True Grace is the fuel for daily, accountable, righteous living through sincere care. Therefore, you are forfeiting your rewards for all that you do on this earth for the life you anticipate in receiving from the next one that awaits above us. Simply by slandering your brothers and sisters who were too, saved by Christ’s resurrection. If they profess that they believed Christ rose from the dead, they are in the body.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it!
3. How Doctrine Destroyed Our Imitation of Christ
“I am entreating you, then, become imitators of me.” – 1 Corinthians 4:16
“Become imitators of me, according as I also am of Christ.” – 1 Corinthians 11:1
“Become, then, imitators of God, as beloved children” – Ephesians 5:1
“Become imitators together of me, brethren, and be noting those who are walking thus, according as you have us for a model“ – Philippians 3:17
“And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in much affliction with joy of holy spirit“ – 1 Thessalonians 1:6
“For you became imitators, brethren, of the ecclesias of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you suffered the same, even you by your own fellowtribesmen, according as they also by the Jews” – 1 Thessalonians 2:14
When you reduce Paul to a purely dispensational theologian, a toxic side effect occurs. The obsessive dividing of the Word has led many to completely discard the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ found in the four Gospels.
Because Jesus was speaking to Israel under the law, hyper dispensationalists argue that His actions and His commands to love the poor, heal the sick, and care for the marginalized no longer apply to us. They quarantine the words of Jesus, locking them away in a past dispensation, and claim we only need to read Paul.
To justify ignoring the four Gospels, they constantly point to the verse where Paul says “we know Christ no longer after the flesh“. They read this with staggering literalism, assuming Paul is demanding we ignore everything Jesus did in His physical body on earth.
But this is another ancient idiom for understanding our justification. Knowing Christ no longer after the flesh simply means we no longer judge or relate to Christ, or to anyone else, based on their earthly status, strict law keeping, or biological lineage. It does not mean we throw the earthly emulation of Jesus in the trash. This rigid doctrinal obsession has destroyed our practical walk in the Spirit.
We have used dispensationalism as a sophisticated excuse to avoid emulating the good works of Jesus. But Paul completely destroys this apathy. He states that we are:
“created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them“ – Ephesians 2:10
We must ask ourselves a basic question. What does the Holy Spirit actually look like when it operates in a human being? The Spirit inside of Paul was the exact same Spirit that operated inside of Jesus. Walking in the Spirit means our lives should look remarkably like the Christ of the Gospels.
Paul never told us to stop loving, to stop feeding the poor, or to stop laying down our lives for the broken. When Paul details the fruit of the Spirit, it perfectly mirrors the Sermon on the Mount. The mechanics of our salvation and our heavenly destination are absolutely found in Paul’s epistles, but the physical output of response to that salvation should in an ideal state want to mirror the heartbeat of Jesus Christ walking the shores of Galilee, rather than remaining in or pursuing a rebellious state of mind. If your theology makes you colder and less compassionate than the Jesus of the Gospels, your theology is broken and corrupted by the Adversary, which is a Jewish idiomatic phrase for the mind of your fleshly body. Not a cryptid like creature.
If you want to see what this actually looks like in our modern era, you do not find it among the aggressive, camera facing digital influencers who profess Christ while tearing down their brothers & sisters in public. You find it in someone like Fred Rogers.
Fred Rogers was a rare, profound example of what it looks like to genuinely emulate the quiet, sacrificial love of Christ. Even I look at my own life with deep humility and a sense of holy envy, wishing my own daily walk bore that level of gentle, loving impact in hindsight. In a culture saturated with religious voices fighting for algorithmic dominance and theological superiority, almost none of the Christ professing personalities we see on screen today carry the heartbeat that Paul and Jesus instructed.
Fred Rogers had a television broadcast, so he was not completely hidden away in private silence. Yet when he was visible, the only thing to ever recall of him was his genuine humility, grace, patience, and giving nature as a loving human being. He did not use a lens to puff up his intellect, start word quarrels, or build a theological brand. He used it to look into the eyes of ordinary people and offer disarming, unconditional kindness.
The walk that Jesus took in the four Gospels was not to be overtly attention seeking either. Paul made mention that we should mind our own business and depend on nobody. Jesus Himself on earth lived for thirty years without drawing too much attention to Himself. He was quiet, worked with His hands, and formed positive relationships with others. Paul did the exact same, making tents and laboring beside others (never above them) while forming relationships of trust as an ordinary bystander who could announce what was being done in this administration for all who believed that event of Godly accomplishment: The resurrection of Jesus Christ!
Realize, if Jesus found trouble, as did Paul among others to whom they were associating with, they did not confront, argue, bash, or slander. If they did entertain the encounter or were snared into one, they did not break emotional composure to ensure they garnered an audience to humiliate those confronting them. They instead listened, questioned, and if treated in mutual respect, gave an answer. If both Jesus and Paul had to confront a matter to rebuke, it was always accompanied with an “entreat” to love and help them understand. The rebuke & refuting was always out of heartbreak for the love of whom they were confronting. Paul called the Galatians foolish, much like a modern-day person confronting a loved one would say, “What the hell are you doing!? Don’t you realize how foolish that was to do!”. It was not about putting them down, but to shock the people they cared for into a realization, or to wake them up to a truth they were not being aware of, only to be then reminded urgently.
They both always walked away in silence whenever it was possible as the go to resolution. Being right was never the objective, nor the motive. It was always about being kind to all people while unveiling the truth of God to them. Especially to those who harbor ill will towards you. Even if they curse you.
The grace you give will be remembered in the hindsight of all that was wrong on their behalf. Did Jesus have His moments with the Pharisees? Yes. Did Paul have his as well? Yes indeed. But why people believe in Jesus today and not Paul to a T is simply because it was about what Christ accomplished that we all want: Resurrection. The defeat of death. Not a reputation. Paul would tell us today that it is not about him and all that he has done. Especially when it comes to how you become “justified” according to all of your uniquely created “doctrines” of theology. It is all entirely about the resurrection of Christ.
4. Death and the Timeline
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding in all of modern theology is what actually happens when a believer dies. This confusion has bred terrifying doctrines and ridiculous cultural myths.
The religious fantasy says when believers die, they turn into invisible, floating ghosts and go sit in a waiting room in a heaven or a hell, maybe even a ‘purgatory’ of sorts. Or just outright annihilated. This Platonic idea of an immortal soul living without a body, directly contradicts Paul and all of the scriptures that address death itself.
The scriptural reality reads that Religion does not understand that time is a physical property created by God. Because God created the dimension of time, God can bend it. When a believer’s biological body dies, their personal clock stops completely. In our perspective, it would be as if God pressed the “pause” button on that person’s awareness. They are truly dead. They do not turn into floating ghosts aware of the passing centuries.
To understand how this works, imagine time as a piece of paper. If you lay the paper flat, it represents the long, objective timeline of earthly history playing out year by year, from the first century all the way to the present day and beyond.
But for the believer who dies, God folds the paper in half.
The exact millisecond their eyes close in death physically touches the exact millisecond of the Snatching Away. For someone like the Apostle Paul, who died nearly two thousand years ago, his biological and conscious clock stopped the moment he died. The very next split second of his subjective awareness is waking up with his new, immortal body in the air. Subjectively, zero time has passed for him at all.
This folded timeline reality entirely destroys one of the most profitable religious scams of the modern era: the Near-Death Experience industry (aka NDE’s).
Countless authors write books claiming they flatlined on an operating table, visited Heaven or a literal burning Hell, spoke to Jesus, and came back to tell the tale. The Concordant believer rightly points out that this industry is simply a continuation of the Serpent’s original lie in the Garden: You shall not surely die.
While this was the lie back then regarding the instruction to not eat the forbidden fruit, it would be well said according to Paul that through the twinkling of an eye when entering death today, “You shall not surely wait.” On one hand we ideally should acknowledge that death is the cessation of all life and awareness of it. On the other hand, we must remember that Jesus defeated death, and so did His Body of believers because of what Christ accomplished, for Christ alone holds the keys to death.
Every person who has ever lived and entered death, starting from Abel until today and into tomorrow, will all experience death as an instantaneous twinkle of an eye event back into life. Even though to us who are living all of their deaths were so long ago, or even with those so recent, it feels like an eternity in this flesh because of how we perceive time in these decaying bodies. Yet because of God’s mercy and Christ’s accomplishment, they do not experience that wait.
Because of Christ, every believer in life since His resurrection will now experience death like a millisecond, with each one waking up instantly to their appointed era of judgment. The Body rises first to the snatching of the bema seat, followed by those promised to the earthly Kingdom of Israel for the Sheep and the Goats, and finally those who died in unbelief to the Great White Throne through the Lake of Fire. Dare I say that they will be instantly purified in the absolute presence of God the Father through Christ Jesus who sits on the throne, who will then immediately hand over His reigning authority to the Father to be all in all of His creation. It is there that all of creation will bow in profound gratitude and give thanks for Jesus accomplishing what He did for all by His obedience to the cross, where all is finally forgiven and the next chapter of Life can begin in its new maturity.
Knowing what the eons are, only helps place perspective on things as to how God is already working. This does not mean in any capacity that I am saying somehow we must all literally die a death of the body and await our resurrection for the snatching away. Absolutely not. There will absolutely be a generation that will not experience death in the fleshly body. Is it our generation? Who knows? The only way to find out is when the nation of Israel has declared it has achieved “Peace and Security” for the snatching to be triggered.
If death is just a doorway where your soul slips out to continue living, then death is not an enemy to the unbelieving. But Paul declares that death is the last enemy to be abolished. A dead man is completely dead in a state of sleep. How can a dead person speak to the resurrected Christ who is alive? They cannot.
When a person experiences a near death state, their brain is being starved of oxygen. They are experiencing biological hypoxia, chemical dumps of DMT (dimethyltryptamine), and hallucinations synthesizing their own religious background.
Paul directly addressed these mystics in Colossians. He warned us not to let anyone arbitrate against us who is parading what he has seen.
“Let no one be arbitrating against you, who wants, in humility and the ritual of the messengers, to be parading what he has seen, rashly puffed up by his fleshly mind” – Colossians 2:18
Look at the devastating contrast. When the Apostle Paul actually was caught away to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12, he heard unutterable words which it is not permitted a man to speak. Paul was forbidden to speak of his experience. Yet today, a modern mystic flatlines, hallucinates a pagan hell, and immediately signs a million-dollar book deal to parade what he has seen on Television and YouTube. Paul calls this being rashly puffed up by a fleshly mind.
There are no ghosts. There are no conscious visits to a mythological hell, and conscious torment. There is only the absolute stillness of death, waiting for God to fold the timeline and bring the dead directly to the moment of resurrection in the blink of an eye. This is actually a lot better than being conscious and stuck in a potential nightmare. Realize that every single person who has believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ will simply experience death as a millisecond, while we the living must live out the long, drawn-out days of our flesh, awaiting to be snatched up to our Head of the Body.
If death is to come, know that it is not incorrect to say that one who has believed has died and gone to Heaven. It is actually quite accurate, but only outside our earthly perspective of time. For us who remain, it is a matter of waiting, patience, and enduring the suffering that this fleshly body brings. And that is okay! Because realizing how incredibly short your perception in death actually is, it should transform your fear into a moment of pure joy.
5. Racing for a Role in the Celestial Orchestration
Finally, we must address the ultimate goal Paul was always striving toward. Paul was constantly using athletic metaphors. He talked about running the race, fighting the good fight, and boxing so as not to beat the air.
Most Christians read this and think Paul was worried about losing his salvation. Concordant believers read this and get confused because they know salvation is absolutely secure by Grace, so they brush these verses aside as mere metaphorical encouragement.
Both are missing the magnificent reality. Paul was not racing for salvation. He was racing to expand his capacity in the coming celestial administration.
We must draw a massive distinction here between Israel and the Body of Christ. Christ is returning to be the King of Israel. A King rules over subjects, and because the earthly millennium will still contain mortal humans, sin, and death, that earthly Kingdom will require a strict, governing rod of iron.
But Christ is not the King of the Body. He is our Head.
The Body of Christ is destined for a New Creation, a perfected reality devoid of sin, death, and decay. In a flawless society, there is no need for police, courts, or punitive government. So why did Paul talk about differing rewards, and why are we racing for a prize if we are all equals in Heaven?
Because a perfected civilization still requires orchestration. God is a God of order, architecture, and infinite creativity. Think of a flawless symphony orchestra. Every single musician is equal in worth, and every player is entirely necessary to the music. But they do not all carry the same level of responsibility. The conductor and the first chair violinist hold a greater capacity to orchestrate the music than the others.
Paul taught that the Body of Christ is entirely equal in value and love, but we will not all possess the same function. Just as a physical eye has a different administrative capacity than a physical foot, our daily choices right now are determining our functional capacity in the New Creation.
When you choose to walk in the Spirit, when you endure suffering with grace, and when you quietly manage your own affairs with love, you are not earning your salvation. You are expanding your capacity to serve the Head and its members of the Body. You are determining how much of the new universe God can trust you to steward, design, and orchestrate.
We must be incredibly realistic here. We look at Paul’s shipwrecks and beatings and assume we are failing the race. But Paul gave the Thessalonians the exact blueprint for how the everyday believer runs this race.
“and that you 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, that you may be walking respectably toward those outside and you may have need of nothing.” – 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12
For the vast majority of us, the race for the celestial prize is not found on a global stage. The race is found in the quiet, unglamorous faithfulness of daily life. The believer who goes to work every day, provides for their family, refuses to get dragged into the toxic noise of the world, and walks quietly in Grace is running a spectacular race.
God looks at your faithfulness in the small, quiet things of this life to determine your massive stewardship in the next. The Apostle Paul understood that the temporary afflictions of this life were producing an eternal weight of glory. We are not just waiting around to be rescued. Through our quiet, daily love, we are actively preparing to orchestrate the Heavenly civilization of a New Creation.
6. What Actually Survives the Bema Seat
There is a final, sobering reality we must face about the Apostle Paul and his warnings. We spend an enormous amount of time arguing over doctrines that yield absolutely zero profit.
There is a massive disease infecting modern online theology that we must urgently dismantle. Many internet commentators and rigid theologians have taken the passionate, blood bought letters of Paul and turned them into a cold, literalistic computer manual.
They completely miss the rich Hebraic idioms, cultural hyperbole, and rhetorical flourishes that litter the ancient text. Paul was a first century Jewish man. He wrote with eastern, poetic intensity. When Western readers take these ancient phrases with rigid, mathematical literalism, it leads to catastrophic misunderstandings. They treat every single syllable like a legal contract, choking on technicalities while losing the entire heartbeat of the gospel.
This hyper literalism births endless, destructive semantic wars. Believers will spend years divided over micro arguments, tearing each other apart over phrases like the faith, of Christ versus having faith, in Christ. They will parse out microscopic technical definitions of what constitutes a true believer of the faith versus a believer who is merely performing works. Why? Just so they can crown themselves the ultimate intellectual gatekeepers of God. They weaponize grammar to stroke their own egos, completely forgetting that salvation is a gift to be received, not a vocabulary test to be passed.
We must apply Colossians 2:18 to this exact behavior. We already saw how this verse dismantles the mystic parading his visions of hell. But it equally dismantles the intellectual parading his lexical discoveries. When an internet theologian uses his deep vocabulary to arbitrate against you, declare you foolish, and parade what he has seen in the Greek, Paul says he is acting in false humility, rashly puffed up by his fleshly mind. The ego of the mystic and the ego of the intellectual are fueled by the exact same flesh.
We have to realize something profoundly liberating. God does not care about our flawless categorization of these technical debates. These doctrines do not benefit the Body of Christ. They only serve to divide it while on the earth. God is looking at the allotment of our faith and the reality of our love, not our ability to pass a Greek vocabulary test.
The exact same intellectual disease drives people to swallow heavy, pagan, religious inventions that mainstream and niche traditions alike have dragged into the church. Doctrines like eternal conscious torment, a literal mythological hell, annihilation, the rigid philosophical abstractions of the trinity, and mandatory monetary tithing are not just inaccurate. They are entirely unprofitable. They terrify the believer, distort the true character of God, and place heavy religious yokes on the necks of what are to be a “free people”.
Paul explicitly warned us about this trap before the Bema Seat. He told us that every single believer will face an evaluation of what they built their lives upon.
“Now if anyone is building on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, grass, straw, each one’s work will become evident, for the day will declare it, for it is being revealed by fire, and the fire will be testing each one’s work, of what kind it is. If anyone’s work will be remaining which he builds on it, he will get wages. If anyone’s work shall be burned up, he will forfeit it, yet he shall be saved, yet thus, as through fire.” – 1 Corinthians 3:12-15
When we stand before Christ, He is not going to hand us a Greek grammar exam to see if we successfully won an online debate over the faith of Christ. He is going to test the materials of our life with fire.
It is here that God will brilliantly unpack His ultimate idiom: using the foolish to shame the wise. A Concordant believer may pridefully think they were foolish once for falling for hell as a doctrine, but now having turned to Universal Reconciliation, they believe they have become the absolute wise ones. There is no wise person who understands this truth purely by their own massive intellect.
At the Bema Seat, that very same hyper intellectual debater will be shamed and exampled as foolish for thinking they were wise. God will reveal that the truly wise among the many was the quiet studier, the non-debater, the self-directed person who asked questions with a childlike heart and mind. The very people whom the gathered majority of believers deemed to be foolish or heretical, that is who will be declared before all as the wise among the many.
If you spent your life building with gold, silver, and precious stones by loving your neighbor, looking past idioms to see the heart of love, quietly working with your hands, and showing grace to those who misunderstand you, your work will survive. You will receive a reward in the celestial orchestration.
But if you spent your life building with wood, grass, and straw by picking fights over semantic phrasing, parroting pagan myths of eternal torment, demanding financial yokes, or tearing down your brothers & sisters to prove your intellectual superiority online, all of it will burn. It is entirely unprofitable. You will still be saved, but you will have forfeited your administrative reward because you wasted your time on earth fighting the wrong battles.
Paul’s ultimate message is clear. Drop the rigid literalism. Stop choking on idioms and weaponizing vocabulary. Let go of the unprofitable myths. Cling to the resurrection of Christ, walk quietly in grace, and build a life of love that will actually survive the fire.
For all you mainstream Christians and Concordant believers, you can chill out and rest in this realization. You all actually believe in the exact same thing for justification! You are all brothers and sisters! You are all members of the exact same Body! Rejoice, for we shall see many all together at the snatching! Do not spend your days mocking and belittling others over the text, or over what you think you know. No one can boast in the resurrection, because none of us were qualified by God for it to have happened. Only our big brother, Lord, and Savior, Christ Jesus!