The inner man is one. Not three. Not a spirit penthouse, a soul apartment, and a body garage with three different landlords. Andrew Wommack has helped a lot of people, and I like him on some things about faith, healing, and miracles, and “you already in God.” However, he also teaches as a core doctrine that our identity in Christ is the three-part man. Part of why that teaching works is obvious. It tells sin-conscious Christians to stop staring at their failures the way the law trained Israel to. Hebrews 10 says the old sacrifices were repeated year after year and never cleaned the worshiper. If they could have, the guilt-feelings would have vanished. They did not. Those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins. The New Contract does the opposite. God says He will never again remember their sins and lawless deeds. When sins have been forgiven, there is no more sacrifice. East from west. You cannot see them because they are gone. You already have the mind of Christ. You are already a new creation, already seated, already given every spiritual blessing, already a saint. Sin-consciousness after that is unbelief wearing a church name tag.
So yes, telling a beaten-down believer that one-third of you, the spirit part (not soul or mind), which is the real new you, is wall-to-wall Holy Ghost can yank them out of that old reminder-system. The problem is the slice. Wommack takes “spirit and soul and body” and turns completeness language into a spare-parts diagram. Spirit got saved. Soul is the mental-emotional leftover still waiting. Body is the old tent. One part of you is wall-to-wall Holy Ghost. Two-thirds still in the fryer. Andrew is correct in his reminders not to limit God. Unfortunately, this teaching is doing just that. One-third is too small for what God did.
The Bible says a man understood with his heart and felt with his mind. He considers with his heart. He reasons in his spirit. Either Scripture is contradicting itself, which it cannot do, or heart, mind, soul, and spirit name one inner man with more than one job. Jesus used the law of contradiction on the Pharisees about David’s Lord. Hebrews already told you there is not even a tiny whiff of contradiction allowed. If you treat interchangeable words as three separate inner persons, you manufacture one.
Vincent Cheung does a good analogy with the stomach. A stomach secretes acid and a stomach moves. Still one stomach. Digestion is not a second organ hiding behind the first. Love the Lord with all your heart and soul and mind and strength is completeness talk, the way you tell a child to clean the whole room. It is not an autopsy report that your soul lives in the closet and your mind lives in the attic. The Bible is not running a Kentucky Fried franchise on your inner man. It is not three extra-crispy pieces sitting in separate boxes.
First Thessalonians 5:23 is the verse they wave like a franchise license. “May your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless.” Whole. Complete. The same completeness grammar Jesus used when He said love the Lord with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Paul is not inventorying spare parts. He is praying the whole package arrives blameless, not that two rooms stay condemned while the spirit suite gets housekeeping. If that verse carves you into three landlords, Mark 12 carves you into four, and now you need a fifth apartment for the will. Scripture is not running a franchise. It is telling the whole man to show up. Hebrews 4:12 does not rescue the diagram. The Word divides soul and spirit the way a sword divides joints and marrow. Joints and marrow are not two animals. They are one body opened so nothing hides. The Word pierces. It does not install drywall and hand out three birth certificates.
The one who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Not one-third of you subletting a closet while the rest pays rent to the old man. The union is the inner man. The mind of Christ is not a guest room with a do-not-disturb sign on the soul. Peter’s incorruptible seed is the whole book rebound, not a pamphlet stapled into one chapter while two chapters sit on the counter and spoil. Romans 8:11 is the punch the diagram dodges. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, and He will give life to your mortal body. Not “give life to the spirit room and leave the body on the curb until the rapture.” The same Spirit holding the rebuilt propositions is already leaning on the tent. That is why healing is not a future coupon you redeem if the leftover two-thirds behave. The inner man is wall-to-wall, so the overflow hits the nerves.
Wommack’s diagram is a car with the engine saved and the transmission still in the flood. God did not buy a third of a vehicle and leave the tires in Adam. A partial renovation is zombie theology with better lighting. The corpse gets a room in the house and a name tag that says “soul, still processing.” God’s thoughts create. He considered the old man dead and the new man His righteousness, and that consideration is the ontology. He does not do partial ontology. The Holy Ghost does not babysit leftovers.
Start with God. He is Spirit. He is intellectual. Those are not two floors of the Godhead. God is not material. He is an invisible Spirit. This invisible Spirit is a system of propositions, not material stuff or up-and-down emotions. God does not have mutable emotions like a man with nerves and blood sugar. If He did, He would change. Emotions hitch more to the body, to the outer tent. The inner man images God as a system of propositions, spiritual and intellectual as the same reality. That is the soul. That is what the invisible inner man is. That is you.
Man sinned and the fall shredded the book. Subjects got taped to the wrong predicates. Darkness. Delusion. New birth is God putting the book back together in the knowledge of Christ, and then the Spirit shrink-wrapping it so it cannot rot again. Peter calls that the incorruptible seed. That seed is not a third of you vacuum-packed in a spirit-safe while two-thirds sit on the counter. That seed is you. Colossians says the new self is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. Ephesians says be renewed in the spirit of your minds and put on the new self created to be like God. Paul does not say a third of you was created in righteousness. He says the new man was. The Spirit did not renovate one room of a subdivided soul and leave two condemned. He recreated the whole inner man and then stood there as the power that keeps the whole system of propositions from ever being shredded again. Romans 12:2 renews the mind. The one inner man. Not a leftover soul waiting on a spirit roommate to finish the paperwork.
You can be lazy. You can let feelings run the house like a toddler with the car keys. The devil can yell at your nerves and you can stupidly listen and let it affect you. None of that un-creates the mind of Christ. The system of propositions has been rebuilt and the Holy Ghost is holding it. It is not held together by your willpower. You can leave the door open to allow Satan to harass you. But the new recreated system of propositions, which is the real you, the inner man, is protected by the Spirit and is incorruptible.
Peter says we partake of the divine nature through the knowledge of God. Your inner man was already created in that knowledge. When you refuse to think it, you are not being humble. You are sleeping on the porch of a house that already has your name on the deed. Romans 6 does not say feel dead to sin. It says reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Consider it. Intellectually agree. That is faith. The reckoning is the inner man agreeing with God’s verdict, not a spirit whispering past a stubborn soul that never got the memo. You are not schizophrenic; your inner man is one. The flesh will scream that sin is still in charge, and if you stay on this fleshly focus, you will become delusional and it might “feel” like there is a second distinct part of your inner man; that is a lie from the pits of hell, and Satan thinks you are dumb enough to fall for it. But you will not. You are strong. God has given you a sound mind and an incorruptible mind. The verse still says that Grace has dominion and control over you, not something else.
The more you renew your mind on the Word, the more the Spirit keeps saying yes inside you — yes, you are a child, yes, these promises are yours, yes, this is who you are.
The inner man is one, and that one is already new, already held, already incorruptible, already wall-to-wall Holy Ghost.
I saw a post today calling Vincent Cheung and Gordon Clark “hyper” on God’s sovereignty, as if they had cleared the Reformed fence and run off with the livestock. The picture in that post was already more honest than the accusation. A. W. Pink barely fits inside the fence. He is scraping the rail. Jonathan Edwards is halfway in and halfway out, because occasionalism will not stay seated where the confession wants it. Then Clark, and particularly Vincent, are the ones said to have jumped. Jumped what? Jumped the fence of Reformed tradition and Reformed orthodoxy. That is the whole charge. The word “hyper” is doing the dishonest work. It is not hyper relative to Scripture. It is hyper relative to a confession, a century, a mood in the study. Scripture never got the memo that there was an upper bound short of “all.”
Here is the flip they will not make. They say Vincent jumped the fence of Reformed tradition. What they have done, by denying the inference, is jump and leave the fence of Scripture. You cannot deny the inference without denying the major premise the text affirms. Tradition is the pen they are defending. Scripture is the fence they left. We do not grade doctrine by how nervous Westminster got. We grade it by what the text says, and then we let the inference land where the text already put it.
Rhetoric is an add-on. It comes after the statement is clear. Most of the time you find people holding a handful of rhetoric with no clear statement underneath it. Strip the rhetoric and you are back in grammar school. Start with the category. All, some, or none. The Bible’s category is all.
Ephesians 1:11: God works all things according to the counsel of His will. Not some things, with a polite exemption for the awkward ones. All. Isaiah 45 does not clear its throat and say, “I form the light and then carefully distance myself from the darkness by means of a secondary cause and a mystery box.” It says, “I form light and I create darkness; I make peace and I create evil; I am Yahweh; I do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). And He does not say it once, as a stray line. Isaiah 46 picks it up again: “I am God and there is none besides me, God and there is none like me, who from the beginning declares the end… My plan shall stand, and I will accomplish all my wishes,” and then He calls a bird of prey from the east and the man of His plan from a far country. “I have spoken; I will bring it to being. I have formed it; I will do it” (Isaiah 46:9–11). That is the motif. “None besides me” is not a slogan about monotheism in the abstract. In the context, it is His own definition of what it means that He is God. He created. He is now grasping and pushing the creation. He knows the future because there is no other real cause that can stop the plan. Control over humans, human choices, good, evil, and material things. To say there is no dualism in Christian ontology is only a philosophy way of saying the Scriptural line, “There is none besides me.”
It is not only the prophet and the king. Psalm 104 is not a throne-room vision. It is the night. “You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God” (Psalm 104:20–21). The lion does not forage from a system God wound up and walked away from. He seeks his food from God. That is the cleanest line in the Book for the ordinary meal. The same hand that forms light and creates darkness puts the prey in the mouth of the predator.
The same is true in the realm of knowledge. God first put knowledge in the man, and He continues to put it there. It is not observation climbing up into a blank mind. Isaiah 28 walks through the farmer. He does not plow all day. He levels the surface. He scatters dill, sows cumin, puts wheat in rows, barley in its place, and emmer as the border. “He is rightly instructed; his God teaches him… For he is rightly instructed; his God teaches him. Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge… This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom” (Isaiah 28:26–29). Practical knowledge, the kind a man uses with his hands, is God teaching him. Spiritual knowledge is the same causality with the lights turned up. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The god of this age blinds. God shines. The knowledge is put in. It is not scraped off the surface of things. And God withholds it the same way He gives it. “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly, but are they the pinions and plumage of love? … For God has made her forget wisdom and given her no share in understanding” (Job 39:13–17). The ostrich is not uninformed because she skipped class. God did not give her the share.
Whether it is invisible knowledge, or a random eagle that no man sees leaving the cliff, God says He does it. “Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars and spreads his wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high? On the rock he dwells and makes his home, on the rocky crag and stronghold. From there he spies out the prey; his eyes behold it from far away” (Job 39:26–29). Not by your understanding. At His command. The text’s other picture is the bird of prey He calls, and the man of His plan He summons (Isaiah 46:11). Even rain is not a natural leak from a cloud that God then permits. Jeremiah asks the question and answers it. “Are there any among the idols of the nations who cause rain to pour? Or can the heavens give showers? Is it not you, O Yahweh our God? Therefore we hope in you, for you do all these things” (Jeremiah 14:22). The sky, the wind, the water, and the cloud are put on the same shelf as the wooden idol. They have no inherent power to cause the shower. Yahweh does all these things. And in all these things, the lion’s meal, the farmer’s rows, the light shone in the heart, the wisdom withheld from the ostrich, the eagle leaving a cliff no man is watching, there is none besides God.
Scripture shows Him directly and absolutely controlling, creating, and causing reality at every basic level. I say basic because there are potentially infinite aspects of reality, and the Bible would be infinitely long if it had to narrate every one. In light of who God is, it only has to show Him controlling the basic aspects to conclude that He controls all. Some verses simply say the all. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “He sustains all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). That includes the inside of the thoughts, the subject and the predicate and the desire. “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). If He turns the height of man, He turns the rest. It includes the random act, the card and the dice. “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). It includes the destiny before the man is born. “Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad… not because of works but because of him who calls” (Romans 9:11). Paul took a few verses from the Old Testament in Romans 3 and said, “all have sinned.” When God, at every basic part of spiritual and material reality, says “I control this,” and then says there is none besides Him who does it, the doctrine is that He controls all things. The clay does not get a vote, and the clay does not get to call the potter hyper for using both hands. Isaiah 45 already asked the question. “Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, ‘What are you making?’ and ‘Your work has no hands’?” (Isaiah 45:9). Romans 9 starts the lump neutral, before they had done good or evil, and the Potter makes one vessel for mercy and one for destruction. Paul’s opponent understood the position perfectly: who has resisted His will? Paul does not walk it back. He tells the object to stop answering back to the One who molded it.
So the category statement is this:
All things are things directly controlled by God.
Sin is a thing. Evil is a thing. Adam’s fall is a thing that happened. David’s census is a thing that happened. The lying spirit in Ahab’s prophets is a thing that happened, and the text does not say the LORD allowed it to wander in. It says the LORD put it there. Job’s friends comforted him for all the evil the LORD had brought on him, and that line is not one of the bad counselors. It is the narrator, under inspiration, closing the book. If all things are things God controls, then these things are things God controls. The “all” already contained them.
And the inference is not a commentary on the Bible. It is what the Bible asserts. A logical deduction adds no new information. It points at what the premise already swallowed. So the Bible asserts that Oshea sinned, through the major premise that all have sinned, and that assertion is just as binding as if the text said, “Oshea has sinned.” They are equally statements given by Scripture. One is not less Scripture than the other. Oshea’s sin is not less Scripture than “all have sinned,” because Oshea is already contained in the major premise. Same grammar, same authority, on the decree. “God caused this sin” is not less Scripture than “God works all things.” Denying the particular is denying the verse. You did not protect the text. You left it.
This is where the classic move shows its hand. They want the major premise. They will print “God is sovereign over all” on the wall. Then they see where the inference goes, and they suddenly discover a zone where logic is asked to clock out and sit in the hallway. If God controls all things, then God controls sin and evil. That is the definition of metaphysical authorship. They like the poster. They hate the homework. So they affirm the universal and deny the particular, and they call the man who refused to do that the one who jumped the fence. He did not. They did. They jumped the fence of Scripture the moment the particular was exempted.
Watch the same trick somewhere they cannot hide. Paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Category form: all humans are those who have sinned. Therefore Oshea has sinned, and that “therefore” is Scripture, not an optional garnish. Now suppose I keep the major premise, because it sounds orthodox, and then I announce that John Wesley never sinned, John Calvin never sinned, Billy Graham never sinned, Andrew Wommack never sinned. I have not protected the text. I have denied it. Denying the consequent denies the antecedent. A categorical syllogism and a propositional one are the same coin. Flip one face and the other face is gone. Paul already ran this play in 1 Corinthians 15. Deny the resurrection of the dead and you have already denied that Christ was raised. You do not get a participation trophy for affirming the opening line while strangling every particular that makes the opening line true.
If the inference can be denied, then the Bible can say God is God of gods and Lord of lords, and there can still be some gods He is not God over and some lords He is not Lord over. Deuteronomy 10, Psalm 136, 1 Timothy 6, and Revelation 17 all become posters on a wall. The moment you exempt one lord, “Lord of lords” was a hymn, not a doctrine. If the inference can be denied, then Jesus is the Savior of all who believe, and John Wesley is saved, Billy Graham is saved, Andrew Wommack is saved, and Jesus is not their Savior. You kept the slogan and fired the Person. If the inference can be denied, then all the saints will be with Christ, and Wesley is a saint, and Wesley is in hell. The marriage supper still has a place card with his name on it, and the place card is a lie. If the inference can be denied, then by His stripes you were healed, the “you” of Isaiah 53 and 1 Peter 2:24, and the stripes were not for Billy Graham, and the stripes were not for Andrew Wommack, and Matthew 8:17 carried sickness for a category that somehow does not contain the people in the category. If the inference can be denied, then the Ten Commandments address all human beings, the law speaks so that every mouth is stopped, and there is a province in Asia full of human beings the commandments never reached. If the inference can be denied, then there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and Wesley is in Christ, and Wesley is condemned. If the inference can be denied, then whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, and Graham called, and Graham is not saved. On and on. There is no exit. Every universal in the Book dies the same death the moment one particular is handed a hall pass.
If inference is not always binding, then it is not always true that every human has sinned, and Wesley gets his exemption, and a village in Asia gets a vacation from the Ten Commandments, and the God of gods has a few lords He does not lord. If that is not allowed, then inference is always binding. You do not get to suspend it when the particular is sin and the universal is God’s control. The Bible uses this grammar on purpose. Jesus appeals to the law of non-contradiction. Grace is not law. Law is not grace. A thing is not its contradictory. If you say the inference does not always matter, you have already said the major premise does not always matter. You just said it with a hymnbook in your hand. If God is not the author of sin, then the laws of identity and contradiction are not always binding and so grace really is works, and works is also grace.
Some try to slip out by saying the major premise only needs a qualification. Nothing wrong with the premise, they say. It just needs clarity. An exception to the rule. Here is the problem. If you say all humans are those who have sinned, and then you say there is a group in East Africa who have never sinned, even though they are humans, you did not qualify the premise. You contradicted it. “All humans are those who have sinned” and “some humans have not sinned” cannot both be true of the same subject in the same respect. Calling the second sentence clarity, a qualification, or a nuance does not change the relation. It still denies what the first affirmed. It still violates identity and non-contradiction.
A real qualification changes the subject or the predicate before the universal is asserted. “All morally accountable humans have sinned” is a different claim from “all humans have sinned.” The class was narrowed first. By saying “All morally accountable humans have sinned,” one leaves room in the major premise for some humans who are not morally accountable, such as a particular village in Asia. With that being the case, it would not be a contradiction to say some humans are not accountable.
However, what the objector does is different. He affirms the universal, then adds a member of the same class that lacks the predicate. The same holds for sovereignty. “God is absolutely sovereign” and “all things are things controlled by God” already fix the predicate. Absolute means without remainder. All means every member of the class. To follow that with “some things are not controlled by God,” or “human choices fall outside His control,” or “evil is an exception,” is not to refine the claim. It is to assert that the same subject both has and lacks the same predicate. Partial control is a coherent idea. It is simply a different idea. It is the claim that God controls some things and not others. Anyone is free to defend that claim. What he is not free to do is defend it under the name of absolute sovereignty, as if the exception were a footnote rather than a replacement of the predicate. The word “absolute” does not survive the exception. Once the exception is admitted, the proposition on the table is no longer the one that was stated.
So here is the tell. If Reformed theology affirms that all things are things controlled by God, and then refuses the inference that sin and evil are included in the all, it never affirmed the major premise. It affirmed a slogan, and then left the fence of Scripture while accusing the consistent reader of leaving the fence of tradition. Pink is already on the rail. Edwards already has a foot out, because occasionalism is just the premise being allowed to mean what it says. Vincent did not jump Scripture. The bounds of Scripture are “all.” The man who stops the syllogism where the confession gets sweaty is the one who left.
And the panic underneath the denial is a category smash. “If God authors sin, then God is a sinner.” Sin is lawlessness, 1 John 3:4. Lawlessness is a man breaking a command addressed to man. No law was ever addressed to God. There is no authority over Him to hold Him to one. Accusing the Author of being the sinner is the same move as calling the novelist a lion because he wrote a lion, or calling God a river because He caused a river. God is not what He authors. God is not what He causes. If that sentence feels hard, it is because pantheism has been sitting in the chair where Scripture should be. How much slower is the color green than the number 7? That is the intellectual level of “God sinned by causing a man to sin.” Ex lex is already too small. The potential of a law over God does not exist. Holy, holy, holy is categorical separation, not a really impressive compliance record.
As Vincent Cheung as talk us, accountability does not rescue the denial either. Romans 9 is asked the question in plain speech. If God causes it, why does He still find fault? Paul’s answer is not freedom. The answer is the Potter. Responsibility assumes a sovereign over you, not a zone He is forbidden to touch. Pharaoh did not resist the causality. He was still judged. The elect do not resist the Spirit who sanctifies them. Same metaphysics, opposite vessel. Freedom was never the foundation. Authority was.
This is not a puzzle for the back of the book. If God causes all things, then He caused the fall, the census, the lying spirit, the hardening, the disaster, and the prosperity. If you will not say that, you do not believe Ephesians 1:11. You believe an edited version that keeps the religious reputation and hands the awkward verses to mystery. Mystery is what you say when you have already denied the premise and you need a religious word for the violation of identity and non-contradiction. You would not let a man do this to “all have sinned.” You would not let him say that “Oshea has sinned” is less Scripture than the verse that contains it. You would not let him do it to the stripes on Jesus’ back. You would not let him do it to the God of gods. Do not let him do it to the decree, or to God’s control of every aspect of reality.
Affirm the inference or stop claiming the premise. There is no third category. All, or you have already slipped into some, and some is dualism with a Reformed accent. The God of Scripture is not embarrassed by His own decrees. He forms the light and creates the darkness, and He does not ask the clay to proofread the work. Believe Him as He has spoken. Then take the pen He put in your hand, the promises already yes in Jesus, and command the mountain. The same sovereignty that authored the story is the sovereignty that backed the stripes, the resurrection, and the authority He gave you. So, open your mouth and command the mountain to get out of your way. Tell sickness to leave and be healed and happy.
I was in Luke today and I hit the woman with the flow of blood. Twelve years of that curse, no cure from the physicians, and she comes up behind Jesus in the press of the crowd and touches the fringe of His robe. The bleeding stops on contact. Jesus stops the whole parade and asks who touched Him. Peter, doing what Peter does when he is looking at what his eyes can verify, tells Him the obvious thing. Master, this whole crowd is pressed up against You. Everybody touched You. That is what a crowd is. Jesus does not take the correction. Someone deliberately touched Me, He says, because I felt power leave Me. The Greek is dunamis. The English is power. They are reporting the same event. He is not describing a word of knowledge that the Spirit slipped Him like a note under the door, although a word of knowledge was available to Him, since He was anointed by the Spirit the same way we are anointed by the Spirit after we receive what the Father promised. He said He cast out demons by the Spirit of God, and that this was the kingdom of God arriving on top of people. He operated as a man born under the law, empowered by the Spirit, standing in the same category we stand in. That is why the story is usable and not a stained-glass souvenir. The thing He bothers to say out loud is that He felt it. Power went out of Him, and He knew it by the feeling of it leaving.
Vincent Cheung calls this spiritual physics, and that is the right name. God, by His own sovereign design, created us in such a way that a Spirit-filled man can sometimes feel the power. Think of electricity. You can feel the energy. You can feel the charge. The spiritual side has that too. Both the woman and Jesus felt it on that street. She felt the surge when the curse broke off her body, like spiritual electricity finding a live wire, and He felt the spiritual power of the Spirit leave when her faith drew on what was already in Him. There is such a thing as spiritual force, and the Bible is not embarrassed to say the people involved felt it. For ministry this matters more than the faithless want it to. Feeling the power is normal. It is not proof you have slipped into emotionalism, and it is not proof you are ahead of the brother who felt nothing that morning. Jesus felt it. Luke keeps recording that Paul was filled with the Spirit in ways that were tangible, something moved and something felt, and then a judgment miracle came out of his mouth and a governor got saved. The warning, is that you do not decide whether power is with you by what you feel. Faith is the real issue, and it is only a mental assent and agreement with God. The anointing presence is a real mode of the Spirit, and we seek it on purpose, but if you only move when the goosebumps have already filed their paperwork, you have handed the devil a veto he was never issued. As odd as it sounds, if you rely on the feeling of spiritual power or God’s anointing presence to act, or to feel confident something happened or a prayer was answered, you are being unspiritual and limiting the Spirit of power. We eagerly seek it, but the foundation is faith. Think about this for two seconds. It is by faith you first received the baptism of the Spirit of power. It is by faith you are saved; it is by faith you command a mountain to move. When you use faith to receive the Spirit, you don’t wait on a feeling. If you do get a feeling of spiritual power, it is because you received the Spirit by faith first. You continue to grow in the operation of spiritual power by faith, not by something else. Faith is the foundational issue. Feelings of power are nice, and they can confirm that the circuit opened and connected for a moment. However, feeling does not authorize the mouth. The mouth was already authorized, because you are a royal priesthood in Christ. It is who you are. It is not something you merely do; this authority is you.
Last night a dream woke me. It was vivid, and it was not the kind of dream you shrug off before your eyes are open. A small bear was trying to come through the side door. In the dream I took the .22 I keep by the bed and I was shooting, trying to put it down. I thought that was the end of it. Then a giant bear came through the front door, and I was running for my mom’s bedroom, yelling for her to get the shotgun. I woke up after that. When a dream lands like that I do not pretend I have a perfect method for sorting a bad meal from a real warning. Sometimes it is something you ate. Sometimes it is more than that. I do not need a finished taxonomy before I am allowed to use the authority I already carry. Waiting until you are 100% sure is how your sword gets rusty from underuse.
On the drive home today, a good hour, I had worship on and I was praying in tongues. I was glad to be doing it. I was not running on emotion. I was tired from a long day at work. I was numb. I was not feeling the presence of God in any way I could point at and call a surge, which is the relevant part of the testimony, because of what happened the moment I decided to take authority. I decided, just in case it was more than a dream, to take authority over the thing I had seen. Isaiah 54 was already sitting there, the way it always is. If anyone attacks, it is not from Me; whoever attacks you shall fall because of you. Every weapon formed against you shall not succeed, and you shall declare guilty every tongue that rises against you for judgment. That is the inheritance. That is the legal right. Not God. You. The older rendering that has lived in my mouth says you will condemn, and the doctrine is the same either way. Jesus did not say God will speak to the mountain while you watch from the boat and call the silence humility. He said you will say to the mountain, be lifted up and thrown into the sea, and it will obey you. If you sit there waiting for God to condemn the weapon He already assigned to your mouth, and the weapon formed against you smacks you in the face, that is on you. He told you whose job it was.
So I opened my mouth. No bear. No jaws of a bear formed against me, against this house, against my mom. The moment the first words left, every hair on my body stood up. The whole car charged. I am talking about that skin-tight goosebump surge, except it was not a mood and it was not the worship track doing emotional work on a tired man. I felt power released, and I felt resistance on the other side of it, the way you feel a fence wire you did not know was hot the second your hand closes. I had been numb five seconds earlier. I kept the confession going. I condemned that situation in the name of Jesus Christ and said it will not succeed. Then I prayed in tongues some more, and I had the sense from the Spirit that what I had said was good and that I was not done. So I spoke again. Not only will the jaws not enter this house. They will not touch this house. They will not come near this house. I will see the defeat of my enemy from afar. The power came over me a second time, on me and around me, hair up again, resistance again, and I had to press through it. The .22 in the dream had been cute. The Name was the shotgun. After the second pass I felt a release, the particular kind where you know the words that needed to be said have been said, and then peace. I was still the same tired man in the same car driving home. The difference was that the weapon forming against me had been answered by a mouth that carried more power.
That is the usefulness of the feeling, once you have refused to make the feeling your priest. I was not sure the dream was spiritual. I was numb, not sensitive, not worked up, not “led” by an anointing presence of the Spirit. I only decided to act on faith, just in case, and open my mouth. Then the words left and the power reported in. Suddenly the question answered itself. There was something to it, and it was a good thing I did not wait to first see the jaws before I realized I needed to do something. Jesus felt the power leave because the woman had already touched with faith. Faith released the power. Spiritual physics does not ask your emotional permission. It waits on faith to be released. Spiritual power moved by faith, while the crowd was still arguing about who had done it.
Jesus told them to pray that their flight would not happen in winter or on a Sabbath. People hear that and turn it into a horror trailer, as if God were the weatherman of doom. He told them the hard thing so they could pray and have the hard thing altered. Information was ammunition. The same pattern sits on the spies. God named the fortified cities and the sons of Anak, and some of those names carry fear in them, and the faithless heard a scare. Joshua and Caleb heard a menu. When God warns you about something, it is not to make you afraid; it is to make the thing He warned you about afraid, as the inhabitants of Jericho were afraid of the Israelites. They are our bread. Their protection is gone. Do not fear them. God was not introducing Israel to a new species of anxiety. He was plating their food and handing them the sword. When you have no faith, a fortified city becomes a reason to die in the wilderness. When you have faith, the same report is lunch, and the spoils come home with you.
A dream like the one I had is the same kitchen. It is not there to scare you, and it is not there so you can clutch the pillow and call the clutching discernment. God is setting a plate down. Here is some food. Take the sword of the Spirit, condemn the weapon, kill the thing, and be blessed on the other side of it. You do not only divert the hidden danger. You overcome it, you watch the defeat from the porch, and you eat the spoils of the war, because a conquered enemy nourishes the man who refused to let it land. Numb is not an empty battery. Numb is a charged car sitting there with the radio on. Worship and tongues had the alternator spinning. The faith confession was the key. You do not wait to feel the engine before you turn it. The key is what makes the engine announce itself.
Open your mouth. The power is already designed to move when faith touches the promise, and sometimes, like it did for Jesus and like it did in that car, you will feel it leave and you will feel it land. Condemn the weapon. Take the bread.
Vincent Cheung said it without blushing: it is popular to teach that you must always hunt an exact verse for the exact thing you want, and then pronounce the prayer with laboratory precision, or else heaven shrugs. That is false. It contradicts both the teaching and the examples of Scripture. “It does not require a specific promise from God to receive what we ask, and there is no need to state our prayer with exact precision to receive what we desire. Prayer is not a magical incantation. God knows all things. Jesus said that God knows what you want before you pray.” (Reach for a Miracle, Vincent Cheung)
Read that again. Slowly. Then put down the wand.
Faith is not a spell. It is not an incantation you have to get syllable-perfect so the magic will fire. Faith is personal. Faith’s context does not float in a soup of unthinking laws that God set loose and then wandered off to watch. No. The context of faith is divine determinism. And for the saints, that determinism is not a cold machine. It is a direct, intimate, personal relationship with God. It is you agreeing with a living God who already knows what you meant, who already wrote you into a Contract in blood that He Himself made, and who already decided to treat you as a beloved son and not as a lab rat.
The Old Testament saints were not technicians
The heroes of faith pulled down suns, seas, bread, fire, and dead children with a shockingly small pile of paperwork. They did not have the completed canon sitting in a search bar, and they did not have AI to super-search the Bible for every footnote and loophole. They had God. They had His nature. They had the broad, blunt knowledge that He is good, that He helps, and that He is the kind of God who does wonders for people who look at Him. Cheung is right: what is always true about God cannot be contradicted by the particular situation you woke up in this morning. If God is willing to help, He is willing to help this. If God heals, He heals your sickness and pain today. You do not need a notarized footnote for every nerve ending. If God forgives, then He has forgiven your sin today.
Joshua told the sun to stand still. Elijah told fire to fall. The four lepers in 2 Kings 7 did not workshop a confession for three hours, aligning their words and actions into some liturgical NASA launch sequence. They said, “Why sit we here until we die?” and they stumbled toward the camp. God turned their footsteps into thunder. That is not a formula. That is a Person backing a person.
The Promise Is Vague On Purpose
Jesus did not tighten the screws in the New Testament. He loosened them even more. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believing, you shall receive.” “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move,’ and it will move.” “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” Those are large, general, almost scandalously vague promises given to children. They are vague because He loves us. They are vague because He wants to grant and fulfill your wants and dreams. They are vague so that your dreams fit inside them.
Think about that for a few seconds. Even as I write this I am filled with joy and physically restraining myself from detonating five more essays on this one point. What is the point of making the promise so broad and vague? So that whatever you dream up and want fits. That is the entire point. They cover the mountain, the fever, the empty jar, the demon, the paycheck, the thing you cannot even name yet without crying, and that huge dream for your life you are scared to ask because it seems too big and too wonderful. The whole design of a broad promise is to make sure all of it fits inside.
Unfortunately, when I hear most people talk about these statements, they spend their whole ministry trying to make them less broad and more specific. They shrink the application until it is so narrow it is practically unusable. They take a banquet table and turn it into a toothpick.
As Paul says, grace is grace, and works are works, and grace is not works. That is the law of identity. Categories stay categories. Same here. Broad, vague promises are not specific promises. They have different identities. To take Jesus’ broad statements and force them into a tiny, qualified box is a contradiction. Yes, it is correct that you cannot ask God to grant you sin. But that is so obvious the Bible barely bothers to mention it—and when it does, it says that asking God to sponsor your sin makes Him your enemy. You cannot in faith ask God to help you murder your neighbor. That limitation is pre-baked into the definition. You do not need to staple a ten-page disclaimer onto Jesus’ sentence.
Despite what sin promises, sin is a limitation, not an expansion. Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy. That is limits on steroids. Jesus came to give life, and life abundantly. The blessing of Abraham is so broad about every sort of blessing, increase, health, wealth joy, and victory because it was meant to be broad enough to include anything you want.
The reason “not asking for sin” is a silent presupposition, not worth plastering all over Jesus’ broad statements, is basic. The statements are designed this way so that when the Bible and when Jesus make broad promises, you are not supposed to qualify them or restrict them. It is a pure positive. When Jesus says all, and everything, it means just that. Everything.
Why would God make such broad statements and promises? He did not make them for reprobates or outsiders. He made them for His beloved children. He made them broad so that whatever you dream up, you get it. That is the point. You are the point, because He likes you. You are His point. Because you are His child, your answered dreams are His point. Yes. You heard that right. God did not make the promise so broad so that He could answer all His own dreams and will. He made it broad to make room to answer yours.
Specific is good. Superstitious is stupid.
Now, before somebody accuses me of baptizing sloppiness: there is nothing wrong with being specific. Jesus said speak to the mountain. That is a command, not a suggestion from a timid life-coach. You can look at the stinging in your arm and say, “Stinging in my arm, I command you to leave in Jesus’ name.” That is maturity. That is a mind that has learned to aim. James says the prayer of faith will save the sick. Mark 11 says believe you “have” received what you say, and you “will” have it. Romans 10 says the word of faith is in your mouth. Abraham called himself the father of many nations before the baby existed. Faith speaks, and it often speaks specifically.
As Vincent reminds us, more revelation should work for us, not against us. If you have the whole Bible and less miracle than Abraham with a tent and a promise, the problem is not insufficient verses. The problem is that you turned the Bible into a spellbook and then blamed God when the Latin was off.
But you can also say, “Arm, be healed,” and God is not sitting in heaven with a red pen circling your grammar or your vagueness. He already knows. Matthew 6:8 is not a cute devotional fridge-magnet. It is metaphysics. God is intellectual. God is personal. Divine determinism is not a fog machine, that belongs to pantheism. It means the God who decreed the prayer also knows the prayer before the sound leaves your teeth. You do not have to incant the thing until the magic works. You agree with Him. He performs what He said. It is just that simple.
The technical and psychological obsession is not holiness. It is anxiety wearing a Greek lexicon. People get locked in their own heads, measuring the sentence, measuring the feeling, measuring whether they “hit it right this time,” and they stop looking at the Father who finds no fault with them when they ask. James 1:5 is still in the Book. He gives generously. He does not scold you for asking. He rejoices and gives. The moment you treat the wording like a lock combination, you have already moved from covenant friendship to witchcraft. You have made the power sit in the syllables instead of in the God who hears His children and gives them what they ask.
Sovereignty is not pantheism in a nice shirt
This is where the wheels come off for two different crowds at once.
The doctrine the Bible teaches about God’s sovereignty is not bare sovereignty. It is not the pantheist or deist sludge where God is the water and the fever and the mountain, so when you pray you are talking to anything or nothing at the same time. It is not the fatalist shrug that says, “God controls all things, therefore sit there and call your unbelief trust.” It is divine determinism—absolute, direct, personal. God causes all things. God knows what you will pray before you pray it. This same God made a blood Contract with His only Son and said, “I will always relate to you in these good and pleasant ways. I will always relate to you as a loving Father. I will always give you a, fish for a fish; and I will always give you a, miracle for a miracle. Always.”
H2O does not “naturally” behave like water. Water behaves like water because God faithfully keeps making it behave that way. Every drop. Every moment. Occasionalism is just the grown-up way of saying there is no causality hiding behind God’s back. There is no outside machinery and no outside natural law running the shop when He is not looking. Reality is His Lego set, except He made the pieces from scratch and He is still holding every stud in place by direct and absolute control. Science can trace the regularity because God is regular. The regularity is not a rival god, a stack of natural laws, or a polite dualism. It is His faithfulness wearing physics.
Spiritual things work the same way. There are no impersonal “spiritual laws” floating out there like gravity with a pulpit. The faith-teachers get this almost right and then trip on the last stair. Yes, the spiritual realm acts with a law-like stubbornness. Healing comes to faith. Mountains move when you speak. The prayer of a righteous man has huge effects. That is not because some force independent of God got switched on at the resurrection and now runs on autopilot if you smash the buttons correctly. It is because God is so perfectly faithful to do what He said that it feels like a law. He is consistent. He is covenant-bound. He swore by Himself. He cut a Contract in blood. He always relates to His elect in the good ways He promised—forgiveness, righteousness, healing, supply, authority—without fail. The “law” is just His character refusing to become a liar.
Forget that, and prayer turns into a spell. Remember it, and prayer turns into conversation with the only real Cause in the universe, who already likes you and has made broad promises so that He can grant your dreams. And by granting your dreams, God naturally expands His glory and His kingdom.
Two levels. Stop mixing the oil and the water.
God is the only real cause. On the ultimate level, He decrees everything. The Arminians are wrong. God does directly and absolutely predestine all things.
But the Bible does not talk to you in that register most of the time. It talks to you on the relative level—the Blood Contract friendship level—the level where Jesus looks at a bent-over daughter of Abraham and says Satan bound her, not the Father. The level where He says, “Your faith has healed you.” The level where Isaiah 54:15 can say, “They will surely gather against you, but not by Me,” while God remains the only real cause in metaphysics. Mixing those categories is not deep. It is a law-of-identity violation with a choir robe on. You do not drag ultimate causality into the promise of healing in order to give unbelief a respectable accent. That is how you wreck the car. Water and motor oil. Congratulations. You are stranded, and you called it orthodoxy.
The New Contract is not vague. Jesus took the taking upon Himself in substitution. The Father took from Him so He would only give to you. That is the whole point of the substitution. By His stripes you were healed. That is already done in God’s mind. Faith is not twisting God’s arm. Faith is agreeing with what God already thinks. “God, You are correct. I agree with You.” That is the whole engine. Not a chant. An agreement.
So speak. Broad or sharp. Just believe it.
You want to get more specific as you mature? Good. Command the sting. Name the mountain. Tell the lack to get out with specifics. Do it.
But remember: with this much raw power and broad promises, you only need one word and God makes it work. “Calm.” “Be still.” Jesus did not whisper a long incantation at storms. He spoke simply and directly. He did not hold a seminar on whether the wording was sufficiently nuanced. He spoke. The centurion understood sovereignty better than most theologians: “Just say the word.” He did not offer a long-winded, overly humble slogan of, “If it be Thy sovereign will, then maybe You can have mercy on this poor sinful outsider.” Jesus marveled at his simple and broad faith. That is the model.
You want to say it broad because you are tired and the pain is loud and you cannot remember the perfect verse? Also good. “Arm, be healed.” “Father, help.” “In Jesus’ name.” God already knows. He is not a vending machine that jams if you press B7 instead of B8. He is a Father who knows what you want before you pray, and He has already bound Himself by oath to treat you according to the finished gospel.
The Faithless will tell you to be careful. They always do. Caution is their spiritual gift, granted by Satan their high priest. They will warn you that general promises are dangerous and need to be heavily qualified so they are not abused, that specificity is safer, that sovereignty means you should add a coward’s appendix to every request. Ignore them. They have confused piety with unbelief and called the result balance.
Here is a secret the faithless kept from you. Practically speaking, you cannot abuse the broad promises and statements of God. They are broad to include all things on purpose. The only abuse is when you ask too small and too little. That is the real abuse. Asking too big for yourself is not the abuse. Asking too little is.
As Vincent says, “faith is the beginning of action.” Reach. Lay the hand. Open the mouth. The four lepers did not wait for a complete systematic theology of Syrian military acoustics. They moved. God turned the move into a miracle. When you reach, God reaches. That is the relationship. That is the Contract friendship. That is why it is not a spell.
You are not trying to get the universe to behave. You are talking to the God who is the reason the universe behaves. He knows. You know He knows. Ask. Even if it is vague. He will perform what you asked. That is all you need to know.
God laid everything on the table and said it is available to you. Ask for whatever you want, as much as you want. Be specific or be vague. Just ask and reach for your miracle. God will do His part.
This is a good example to go over. It shows how the other side often does not even understand what a worldview is, let alone how to argue for one.
Oshea (replying to a video): “Christians usually respond by attacking metaphysics, which isn’t wrong. However, it is better to attack their starting point for knowledge. Attack it hard. Using sensations to prove sensation is circular nonsense. Without knowing, there is no knowledge about any aspect of their worldview.”
Johnny Billy: “How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses? Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits? Presupposing God to prove God is also circular nonsense.”
“How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses?”
No.
That sentence already assumes your starting point and then demands I live inside it. That is the very thing under dispute. If that is how debates are won, then I can just say, “Since you read the peer-reviewed article using God’s innate knowledge, I win.” I know that is what happened in the causality of the thing — knowledge comes from God — but that is not a public argument in the context of a debate. It is me describing reality on my worldview’s terms.
A blank slate cannot interpret a tree. Look at the bark all day. What leaves the eye is not “tree,” “oak,” “living,” “outside me,” or “this is not a dream.” Those are universals and judgments. Universals do not leak out of particular sensations. To understand any datum at all you already need logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. The data does not give you those. You bring them, or you do not have “data.” You have a twitch.
It is logically impossible to start with sensation in the premise and arrive at “logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, causation” without jumping categories and breaking identity. Sensation is not logic. A color-patch is not the law of contradiction. A sound is not “therefore.”
So no: I did not come to God by cataloging sensations and then inducting my way to the Trinity. The reason is simpler than a conversion story. If I start with sensation, I cannot know any term about anything in reality. Nothing. Not “God.” Not “no God.” Not “senses.” Not “Johnny.”
Vincent Cheung puts the wheel in the open in “Questions for Empiricists” (Sermonettes, Volume 1):
“What is a sensation? How did you learn the meaning of a sensation? How do you know when you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation to know that you have a sensation? If you sense a sensation, then how do you know that? Do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? Then, do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation that senses the sensation? … If information comes from sensation, then how do you know when you are having a sensation?”
That is not a cute riddle. That is the start eating itself. If knowledge comes from sensation, then knowing that you are sensing is another sensation, and knowing that is another, and you never get the first justified term. You do not even get to name the method.
“Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits?”
No. That is the whole fraud you bought.
Worldviews have different starting points. Different starting points do not have the same limits, because they are different. That is the law of identity, not a Bible tract. You assume an empiricist start, then act shocked that another start does not share your ceiling. The Christian start is God’s revelation. The causality of knowledge is defined by that same account of reality: God, not nerve endings. Very different start. Very different limits.
“Epistemic limits,”
is a polite way to say your starting point cannot justify knowledge and meaning. A start has one job: make knowledge possible. Empiricism fails that job and then calls the failure humility. What it actually yields is skepticism. Skepticism cannot even be stated without using the knowledge it denies. “I know that we cannot know” is a contradiction. So empiricism does not survive as a starting point. A start that makes knowledge impossible is not a limited start. It is a dead one.
Pretending we all begin with sensation is not humility. It is a failure to argue for a worldview. The whole point of a worldview debate is that the starts differ, and you are here to show yours can carry knowledge and the other cannot. Assuming we all begin as empiricists is like walking into a room of rival worldviews and saying, “Aliens gave us consciousness, so why do you believe the Qur’an?” That is not an argument. That is you treating your story as the weather. If aliens-gave-us-knowledge is your epistemology, it is your job to argue for it. It is not a human default.
And since Scripture contradicts empiricism, if I granted that I depend on sensation to know the Bible, I would be denying the worldview I claim to believe. I would be saying the start is sensation and the start is revelation. Those are not the same thing.
“Presupposing God to prove God is also circular.”
You are confusing empiricism with every other starting point. You are so used to empiricism’s circle that you think every axiom must be the same shape. That is sloppy on its face, because my start is not yours.
Every system has an undeduced starting point. That is what a first principle is. If you can deduce it, it is not first. Empiricism uses sensation to prove sensation. That is circular, it never terminates, and it dies as skepticism. Skepticism cannot be spoken without contradicting itself. You need knowledge to deny knowledge.
Scripture does not lean on premises outside itself. It is self-authenticating by the sufficiency of its own content — similar to the law of contradiction, rather than to a hamster wheel called empiricism. The law of contradiction is not “proved” by a second, backup law of contradiction. It is the standard: to use it, you use it; to deny it, you use it. Empiricism is not like that. To “prove” a sensation you need another sensation, and another, and another. That is infinite regress, not self-authentication. So yes: sensation, used as a start, is circular. Revelation, used as a start, is a first principle. Calling both “circular” is how you hide that only one of them can even speak.
You want to talk metaphysics? Fine. You still do not have knowledge. Using sensations to prove sensation leaves you with no start. Without a start, you have no knowledge about any aspect of your worldview — including the objection you just made. You borrowed logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. You borrowed “circular.” You borrowed “limits.” You borrowed the demand for justification. Then you pretended those tools fell out of an empiricist start you also admit is defective and limited.
Empiricism does not yield any knowledge. That is the argument.
It was never “God exists because a sunset felt warm.” It was this: your method cannot know anything, including that sentence. You cannot even know to deny my stance on God, because on your start you have no knowledge.
Vincent Cheung put some clean, heavy rounds into the target with his essay on “Theology of the Throne.” In fact, eschatology runs on one present-tense fact: Jesus is seated. Not “will be someday when everything is neat and tidy.” Not “spiritually in some vague, non-threatening sense that lets you stay sick and powerless.” Seated. Right now. At the right hand of Power.
The cross was the doorway. The empty tomb was the victory parade. The throne is the address.
And if you’re still camping at the doorway like a spiritual tourist taking selfies with a finished beam, you’ve missed the entire reason there was a cross.
Hebrews Does Not Open with a Pity Party
Vincent exposed how Hebrews does not begin with sentimental cross-gazing. It opens with the Son who, after making purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Hebrews 1:3). The writer does not warm up with “behold the wounds.” He starts with completion and authority. Then he keeps swinging the same hammer. Vincent then shows the application is about the throne.
It is true that Hebrews talks much about the Contracts and High Priest theology, but these rabbit holes that the preacher chase to help his slow-thinking audience can confuse people into thinking those are the main points. The main point of the Contract, as chapter 8 makes clear, is that only the enthroned Jesus makes it a present reality ruling reality. This is why the thesis statement of Hebrews (1:3) is not primarily about a high priest, but about an enthroned Jesus ruling in authority.
By chapter 4 we are not told to crawl back to Calvary for another guilt session so we can feel properly broken. We are commanded to come boldly to the “throne” of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16). The thesis is the enthroned high priest, not mainly about a high priest—though the high priest aspect gives us an important foundation. We are not told to go boldly to the high priest or to a cross, but to the throne of grace. Authority and power, not mere sympathy, grant your requests for help. The loving High Priest we draw near to is not hanging. He is seated.
Later the same book tells us to look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despised the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2). The author of your faith we are told to look to is specifically said to be on a throne and ruling with authority. Because Jesus is ruling, He has the power and authority to ensure your faith is grown and matured to perfection.
Hebrews is not mainly about the cross. It is a book about the throne and the authority of the enthroned King, who already made the new Contract active. We are told about the foundations that make the throne so approachable—such as a sympathetic high priest who finished our salvation once for all, with a the best of the best Contract. But the Hebrew point is about Jesus on the throne. Hebrews is pointing us to focus, not on the old tree, but on the place where the current Jesus lives. The One who perfects your faith is not the One still bleeding. He is the enthroned King who lives to intercede for you. You cannot run the race by staring at a finished beam like it’s still the main event. You run it by locking eyes with the One who already finished it and now rules from the throne of power and grace.
This is not mainly cross theology. This is throne theology. And once you see it, the applications detonate.
You Are Already Seated — Stop Acting Like You’re Not
Paul tells the Colossians they have already been raised with Christ. Therefore seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on things on the earth (Colossians 3:1-2). Why? Because that is already your location. Your identity. Your existence. You do not become seated later if you behave well enough. You are seated. So live like it. Think from the throne room, not from the dirt under your feet.
Ephesians doubles down with zero mercy for the timid. God raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6). The same power that raised Christ from the dead and seated Him far above every rule and authority and power and dominion is now at work in us who believe (Ephesians 1:19-23). Everything is under His feet—and therefore under ours—because we are His body and His body is on the throne.
It is not merely that things are under your feet while you scramble around on earth trying to “get the victory.” Things are under your feet while you sit on the throne. Think about that for two seconds. All things are under your—that’s right, your—throne of authority. Paul says, past tense, you have been seated with Jesus. To sit is a symbol of completed work and authority. Jesus finished the work, which is why not only is Jesus seated, you are also resting and sitting. You are sitting with Jesus on a throne. This is why Peter says you are a “royal priesthood.” You are royal because you are seated with Jesus, who is seated on a throne. That is why you can heal the sick, cast out demons, and tell mountains to move. The authority is not a temporary loan that expires when you feel unworthy. It is the permanent position of a royal priesthood. You do not go in and out of it depending on your quiet time. You always have it. Since Jesus is always in His position of authority on His throne, you always have it. Do you see it now? If you refuse to use it, you are not being humble. You are being negligent and stupid.
The Only Witness Available to You Right Now
I cannot be an eyewitness of the cross. I have never seen it. I do not know where the empty tomb is. I cannot stand there and point for the camera. What I can be, right now, is a witness of the enthroned Jesus Christ, because I am already seated with Him. That is the only present-tense testimony available to us.
Look at Acts. Peter’s first sermon that launched the church age was not a long, tearful meditation on the nails. It was a declaration that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ—and that this same Jesus is currently exalted to the right hand of God, has received the promised Holy Spirit, and has poured out what you now see and hear (Acts 2:32-36). Tongues. Power. Prophecy. That is the enthroned Jesus flexing. The rest of the book is the church operating from that occupied throne.
When Stephen looked up, he did not see a cross or a tomb. He saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55-56). I am a witness of Jesus on Throne, by using my Throne authority, as I am seated with Jesus. That is the power that shook the world. The apostles were never the point. Stop and think about that for a moment. It was not about apostles or men. Making men the point is man-centeredness, and it always ends in celebrity culture and powerless religion. The point is the reigning Christ. The book of Acts is the Age of the enthroned Christ. Because He is on the throne, we are seated with Him and therefore carry authority. What you bind is bound. What you loose is loosed. You have the authority to cast out demons, heal the sick, and command reality because you are already on the throne with Him.
Permanent Authority, Not Mood-Based Permission
You are a royal priesthood. That is not a future promotion. That is present reality. You always have the authority. You do not need to “work yourself up into faith” or wait for a special anointing conference. The throne is already under you. Wiggle your butt—do you feel it? That is the throne beneath you. Wiggle your toes—that is the footstool of the throne, and it is beneath you. The Name of Jesus is already engraved on your tongue. The Spirit has already been poured out from that throne for power.
If you choose not to use it, that is on you. The power that took over the Roman world was not the power of gifted apostles. It was the power of ordinary believers who knew they were seated with the King and therefore acted like it. The book of Acts is not the age of the apostles. It is the age of the occupied throne.
Conquer Now or Don’t Expect a Throne Later
Revelation seals the logic with zero sentimentality. To the one who conquers, Jesus grants the right to sit with Him on His throne, just as He conquered and sat down with His Father on His throne (Revelation 3:21). Notice the condition. Not “to the one who was forgiven.” To the one who conquers. Why?
Let’s ask another question. How do you conquer? By knowing your present position in Christ, by binding and loosing, by healing the sick, by ruling in life now. That is the proof you actually believe you are forgiven and righteous. The people who still see themselves primarily as sinners never rule. They cannot. Sin-consciousness keeps them off the throne in their own minds. They keep dry-humping the empty cross while the King is throwing a victory party two rooms over. Yes, you heard that right. I’m not mocking the cross, I’m mocking your perverted, faithless behavior on the cross. It’s gross, and we can all see you doing it.
But the one who truly believes the blood has perfected him forever (Hebrews 10:14) sits down, opens his mouth, and exercises the authority that already belongs to him. That present conquering is the evidence of real faith. And the promise stands: those who live from the throne now will sit on thrones later.
How Kings Pray from the Throne
Here is the practical payoff. The book of Hebrews, which is about the throne of grace and the authority of the seated High Priest, gives us the application in chapters 4, 10, and 12: go to the throne. Chapter 4 says go boldly to the throne of grace to ask and to receive. That is not a suggestion for the extra-spiritual. That is the normal operating system for everyone who is already seated with Christ in the heavenly places.
So when you pray, how do you see yourself?
Paul says you need to see yourself in the heavenly places, already seated with Jesus—not just standing before Him as a nervous petitioner hoping the King notices you. You are already on the throne with Him. This is why Peter in Acts 3 can look at a crippled man and say, “What I have, I give. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” Peter was not flexing apostle status. He was operating from the same position every believer already has. Because Jesus is on a throne, Peter is on a throne. Because Jesus is on a throne, you are on a throne. From that position he could say, “What I have (authority from the throne), I give.” Jesus gave him—and all of us—His name to use. Get up and walk.
This is why you can decree. This is why you can bind and loose. You are already on a throne. Not “you are going to be if you pray hard enough.” You are. Therefore when you pray, you do not beg like a peasant at the palace gate. Does a king beg? Does Jesus sit there and say, “Oh please, will someone help Me out here?” No. He is on a throne. He is a King. And here is the big idea: you are on the throne with Him.
That is why you do not beg and hedge. That is why you say, “What I have, I give. Walk. Get out of my way, mountain. Leave, Satan.” You already have the authority. That is why you can pray with such confidence. That is why the word-of-faith people are right when they pray without hedging by decreeing. Kings do not negotiate with reality. Kings decree. Kings command.
This is why you can (and should) imagine yourself visually in the throne room of heaven—on a throne or standing next to it, the way Stephen saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. From that place you open your mouth as a king and say:
“Jesus, as You are before me and the Father, I make this declaration. I am prosperous. I stand on behalf of my brother—he is healed in Jesus’ name. I decree blessing on him.”
And it will happen, because you are in authority. You can actually do that. And if you have faith for it, God will honor your words as the king that you already are.
Stop the Zombie Theology
This is why cross-centered theology is so destructive and, frankly, demonic. It is not humility. It is a sophisticated way to remain an atheist while still using Christian vocabulary. Jesus is not on the cross. You cannot have a living relationship with Someone who is not there. You can remember the cross. You should thank Him for it. The Lord’s Supper commands us to remember. But remembrance assumes you are not stuck there like a spiritual zombie still trying to get blood out of a finished sacrifice.
To camp at the foot of the cross is a dead man’s religion and a zombie theology. The King is alive. You cannot talk to a corpse. You cannot get power from a corpse. Jesus is on the throne, and the table is already spread in His presence. You do not crawl to the doorway forever while the King is calling you to sit down and reign.
The cross was finished. The tomb is empty. The throne is occupied.
And you are seated there with Him right now. Conquer now. Rule now.
That is the proof you know you are righteous. And the promise of heaven is waiting for those who live the conquering life.
Vincent Cheung’s essay “Contract” drops a few ideas that actually land with force instead of the usual theological cotton candy. One is calling the new covenant a Contract. Another is that it does not run case by case like some bureaucratic favor system. The third—and the one that keeps paying dividends—is that this Contract produces a world of its own. Not a nicer neighbourhood inside the old world. A different world. Sealed. Exclusive. Rules rewritten.
Some still try the classic humble-sounding routine: “I am the worst of sinners… and also the righteousness of God.” It plays beautifully to the gullible. It is the theological equivalent of a three-card monte where the dealer keeps both cards in play so nobody notices the game is already over. Pure unbelief in a piety costume. As a Christian I am never without God, never without ongoing fellowship, never outside the Contract, never outside my insider status, never without a re-created mind empowered by the Spirit. I am never not perfectly blameless and sinless. I am always the righteousness of God and, yes, awesome. I am never darkness. I am always the light in Christ. The dual-status routine is not humility. It is spiritual LARPing. You do not get to cosplay both beggar and king while the blood has already paid the tab and the throne is already under you.
Inside my Contract with God, He does not see or recognize any sin with me. He sees me as God’s righteousness. God is immutable; He does not do divine amnesia. Omniscience still knows the facts outside the relationship, but God and I are never outside the relationship. The blood locked the terms. 2 Corinthians 5:21 is not poetry for the sentimental. It is the Contract definition: He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Hebrews says one offering has perfected forever those who are being sanctified, and God remembers their sins no more. James says He gives without finding fault. That is not soft language. That is finished legal status. The Court has already ruled. The gavel is down. The dual identity people are still filing appeals that the Judge has already thrown out.
Because I do not go in and out of that insider-Contract status, I define myself only by the reality the Contract creates. The Contract produces a new world all its own. I never leave it. Even if God’s eternality could, in pure technical knowledge, glance at me before justification, I cannot live there. I am not timeless. I experience only linear time and present thoughts. The only way I can think of God and me together is in my present status where I have no sin. I have no ability to step outside the Contract without becoming delusional and irrational. The moment a so-called Christian says “I am a sinner,” he is already speaking as if the Contract no longer holds. That is impossible except by delusion. You can speak of past sin only in the past tense. Anything else pretends you can time-travel back into the old world or cancel the blood-bought status God Himself established. It is like showing up at the airport with two passports—one burned at the border, the other stamped with the King’s seal—and insisting the TSA agent honor both. The agent laughs. The system does not. One of those documents is already ash.
All my sins—past, present, and future—were already forgiven by Jesus. Even if I stumble today, it is already covered and God does not factor it into our present fellowship. This insider relationship is the only world I inhabit. It is the only status I know and acknowledge. It is God’s reality toward me, and it is the only reality I know or experience. The same exclusive world is the only place where Jesus ministers the healing, prosperity, and life His atonement already locked into the Contract. By His stripes I was healed. Though He was rich, yet for my sake He became poor so that by His poverty I might become rich. Inside this bubble those realities are not optional extras or spiritual upgrades you unlock after enough humility points. They are the definition of how God and I relate right now. The Contract does not create two overlapping realities. It creates one airtight world where Jesus only gives what the blood already purchased and Satan gets nothing—not a foothold, not a lease, not even a visitor’s pass.
Symptoms and shortages are trespassers with zero standing in this world. They are illegal aliens who somehow slipped through a crack of unbelief and are now waving fake documents, demanding rights they never possessed. The Contract does not negotiate with them. It does not offer temporary visas or “maybe this is God’s mysterious will” forms. It treats them as foreign invaders whose eviction notice was written in blood and already served. Command the healing. Decree the supply. Speak to the mountain the way a man speaks who already owns the land the mountain sits on and has the title deed in hand. The physics of the old world do not get a vote here. Harvest still comes in famine. Bodies still rise when the word of the Contract is spoken over them. Bank accounts still multiply when the poverty that was already carried by Jesus is treated as settled history rather than an open question. The airtight bubble does not leak.
I used to be a sinner. I am not anymore. I live exclusively inside the new world the blood created, where God looks at me and sees only His own righteousness, where power flows, where healing is normal, where mountains move when I speak. Define yourself the way the Contract defines you, or keep calling yourself a sinner and watch the power stay theoretical—like a king who insists on living in the pigsty next to the palace because it feels more “humble.” The palace is already yours. The pigsty is a self-inflicted cosplay. The choice is not complicated. Step fully into the only world that is actually yours. Stop the false humility that keeps one foot in the old world. You cannot be both the worst of sinners and the righteousness of God at the same time without tearing the Contract. The same exclusive logic that makes dual identity impossible also makes dual reality for the body and the bank account impossible. Either the blood worked or it did not. Either the world of its own is airtight or it is a leaky tent that lets the old weather in. It is airtight.
I stay inside. I define my body and my resources the same way I define my identity: exclusively by the insider status. This world of its own is the only one that is real for me. Live in it. Command from it. Receive from it. The King already wrote the terms, already paid the price, already sealed the deal, and already handed you the Staff of God. Stop crying out as if the power is still somewhere else, still waiting for a fresh download, still requiring another round of self-deprecation before it will activate. It is in your hand. Use it. The old world does not get to define you, your body, or your resources anymore. The Contract already did.
What would happen when God brings out the true you? Let me take a look; oh boy, does it look really good and awesome in here.
You ARE light.
Ephesians 5:8 does not stutter or soft-pedal the timeline. “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.” Past tense: darkness. Present tense: light. The verse is like a divine GPS that refuses to lie about your location and a permanent time-stamp upgrade that deleted the old files for good. That is why people are simply wrong—not merely off by a degree, but flat-out incorrect—when they keep confessing in the present, “I am a sinner… I am the worst of sinners.” According to the Word you are light right now. You were darkness once. The same clean break holds for sinner versus saint, darkness versus righteousness. You were once locked in the kingdom of Satan like a prisoner in a blacked-out dungeon. God has already conveyed you into the kingdom of the Son of His love, the doors behind you have slammed shut forever, and the transfer paperwork is already filed, stamped, and celebrated in heaven.
The faithless keep making this mistake because it keeps them sin-focused. Their consciousness stays glued to darkness, sin, and the enemy, no matter how many “God-centered” or “gospel-centered” banners they wave on the outside like cheap parade floats. It is like insisting on wearing the old muddy prison jumpsuit long after the King has already fitted you with royal robes and burned the jumpsuit, or playing the broken vinyl of guilt while the new album of righteousness is already streaming in high definition. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Hebrews 10 exposes the old law’s real failure: it was a constant reminder that cultivated a consciousness of sin—an endless guilt commercial that never stopped running, a dripping faucet that kept the whole house awake all night. Day and night their thoughts, even the subconscious ones, circled how sinful they were like a broken record stuck on the worst track. That is what the law produced. In Christ the whole point is the opposite. You do not carry a consciousness of sin anymore—not even in the quiet corners of your mind. That old identity is past, gone, nailed to the cross and buried under three days of empty-tomb victory.
Now you deliberately cultivate a consciousness of how righteous you are, how full of light you are, how packed with God’s goodness, power, love, and every promise you are. Think of it as rewiring the mental hard drive so the Spirit’s truth becomes the default operating system, flipping the switch from a dusty basement of guilt to a sunlit throne room of favor. When that runs through your mind—even while you sleep, when the nighttime theater used to play the old horror flick—the Holy Spirit is right there saying yes like a proud coach on the sidelines. Because those thoughts line up with the Word, He engraves them deeper, renews your mind, and transforms you. You become what you think by the power of the Spirit.
Thinking “I am a sinner, I am darkness” is not spiritual humility. It is an open invitation, a foothold handed straight to the demonic realm—like leaving the back door unlocked, putting out a welcome mat, and hanging a neon “Demons Welcome” sign. The Bible warns us not to give the devil a place, and that is precisely what a sin-consciousness does. It lets the enemy reinforce the lie until your actions start matching the confession, turning you into an unwilling actor in a script he wrote. Let’s not be faithless. Stop starring in the endless rerun of your pre-cross horror flick. The credits have rolled. The lights are on. You are the light. Walk in the light. You are righteousness. You are full of goodness, full of God’s love, full of the promises of God. Saints, you are the righteousness of God now and forever—so quit the old movie and start living the bright sequel God already filmed.
Bringing out the TRUE YOU.
That bright sequel is exactly what it means to bring out the true you. The true you is not some hidden, struggling, half-saved version still waiting for a future upgrade. The true you is the light you already are. To bring out the true you is to bring out light, righteousness, the mind of Christ, goodness, and the material blessings that flow from the finished work of Jesus. Joel Osteen once said, “God’s not trying to take something from you; He’s trying to get something to you. He wants to bring out the true you. The true you is more blessed, more fulfilled, more successful, more peaceful than you can imagine.” I do not endorse everything Osteen teaches, and the phrasing may not be the most technical or precise way to state the doctrine. Yet the statement itself is perfectly fine. There is nothing truly wrong with it. In fact, saying the doctrine this way is good precisely because it exposes the faithless. They take issue with it the same way they take issue with any clear declaration that the finished atonement delivers present blessings. It is similar to the idea of moralizing. The Bible itself moralizes for the Christian, as Vincent Cheung points out in passages like James 5 and the prophets. The more technical term might be that Scripture teaches us to apply examples to ourselves, but “moralize” works just fine. The same is true here. It is fine to say that when God brings out the true you, He brings out righteousness and blessing.
The faithless push back hard against this. One of them, let’s call him Johnny Billy for convenience, objects that God’s sovereign will ultimately determines life or death, so “giving and taking away” can still mean God removes things you consider blessings that come through Christ’s work. He points to James 4, Peter, and Job, claiming it may not always be God’s will that we live tomorrow. This is obviously stupid. The same book of James says that if a doctor tells you that you have stage-five cancer and will die within days, the prayer of faith will raise the sick. James teaches that we can know what will happen tomorrow when faith is applied to the promises and finished work of Jesus. The same is true for the wisdom James mentions. Even death can be voided by faith. Hezekiah prayed and God gave him fifteen more years. Some passed death outright and went straight to heaven. Johnny Billy insists James is telling us we are still dependent on God’s sovereign will for these things, and that He can give or take them away. No. James says our wisdom for tomorrow and healing that escapes sickness or the death sickness would cause is dependent on our faith, not on some vague, unrevealed sovereign will that contradicts the promises.
As to the give-and-take language, God already did the giving and taking away in the finished atonement of Jesus. God took away our sins, sickness, curses, poverty, and lack and gave them to Jesus, who already suffered for them. And God has already given us righteousness, the blessing of Abraham, riches, healing, the position to use Jesus’ name and get whatever we want, and all spiritual blessings. God will not take away the righteousness He already gave through Jesus. God will not take away the healing He already gave by Jesus’ stripes. God will not take away the gospel of Abraham He already gave me through Jesus becoming my curse. Not only is God truth and logic, but He did these things and through the blood and death of Jesus made it a publicly revealed contract that He will do all the good things He accomplished through His Son to us. Thus it is impossible for God to take away my health when He is in a blood contract that says He will only give me the benefits of Jesus’ atonement, which is health and healing. The Bible tells us who makes us sick, and it is Satan. Sickness is the devil’s middle finger to the atonement of Jesus, and the faithless join in with Satan by flipping off the cross (Acts 10:38).
Johnny Billy also claims that many of the blessings that come with salvation in Christ are promised in the next life, not this one. A glorified body freed from sickness and death is paid for in the atonement, he says, but we are not promised that now and cannot claim a right to it now. This is the classic already-not-yet fallacy that Vincent Cheung has exposed. The Bible’s emphasis is what we have now, not later. The faithless emphasize the opposite. Jesus healing and healing and healing is to show what we have now, not later. Matthew 8:17 tying this into the atonement makes it doubly so. Johnny makes a category error with his term “glorified body.” It is correct that a glorified body will not experience sickness, but that has no logical or categorical relevance to being healed in this life. Since a glorified body cannot be healed—it is already perfect—healing can only categorically be applied to this life. Since healing is in the atonement (Isaiah 53:4-5, Matthew 8:17) and direct promises guarantee healing on the demand of faith (James 5:15), then our unglorified bodies now are promised health and healing on faith.
Johnny Billy notes that Osteen almost certainly means material gain, emotional happiness, and physical health. This is good. Why is that a problem when the atonement not only included forgiveness but Jesus taking my poverty to give me His wealth, and taking my sickness to give me healing? Why do the faithless like Christians to suffer so much? Because they are the ones helping them to suffer. They are the ones who persecute the ones teaching the gospel and then say the gospel causes persecution.
Beyond the negative critique is the point Osteen makes that is right on the money. We are the light now, not later. We are righteous now, not later. We are the mind of Christ now, not later. We are goodness now, not later. We are lovely now, not later. We have all spiritual blessings now, not later. Our inner man was created in the knowledge of Christ when God caused us to be born from above. We have an incorruptible seed in our inner man right now. Thus, to bring out my inner self is to bring out righteousness, goodness, the mind of Christ, an incorruptible inner man already made in the knowledge of Christ. This is me right now. If this is not you right now, you are not saved and are going to burn in hell forever.
The whole point of water baptism is to demonstrate in ritual that the old man is dead and gone. The sinner Oshea is past tense. The righteous Oshea is present tense. At the end of the day the only mind that matters is God’s mind. The only reason I needed to be saved from sins is because in the mind of God He held a record of sins I committed. It does not matter if I acknowledged this record in God’s mind or not. If God thinks it is true, then it is. But the knife cuts both ways. In God’s mind right now, present tense, He only sees a record of perfection and a God-level rightness on my list. God’s thoughts about me are the only thoughts about me that matter and are true. I am righteous because God thinks I am His righteousness. Faith is agreeing with God.
“God, I agree with You. You think I am God’s righteousness, and so I am. You are correct. You think I am light, goodness, and perfect. I agree with You. You are correct. Thank You for giving me Your one and only Son to save me and make this my new reality. You are so good and so loving to me. Thank You.”
In the passage where Paul says we have the mind of Christ, it says the Spirit is in us to show us all the freely given good things God has given us. The finished atonement of Christ is a total salvation for all of life, both spiritual and material. Thus, for God to bring out the true us would mean to bring out how righteous I truly am, as much as how healthy I am, and how rich I am in Christ. I have rivers of living water in me; thus, to bring out the true me would be to bring out rivers of living water out of me. I have the Spirit; thus, to bring out the true me is to bring out the Spirit of God who anoints us to heal the sick, resurrect the dead, and preach the gospel to the poor. To bring out the true me is to bring out the Spirit who alone knows God. I have the blessing of Abraham; I have God as my exceedingly great reward, which in context is mostly about material blessings. Thus, to bring out the true me is to bring out exceedingly great material blessings.
You are the light. The true you is light. Walk in it. Let the Spirit bring out rivers. Let the finished work produce the health, the wealth, the power, the righteousness that already belongs to you. Agree with God’s mind. The old files are deleted. The new operating system is running. Live as the children of light you already are.
I’m drawing these specific presuppositional arguments from Vincent Cheung’s “Presuppositional Confrontations,” “Captive to Reason,” “Ultimate Questions,” and especially “Paul and the Philosophers.” Full credit to him—he’s the one who helped me hone these tools. The opening pages of “Paul and the Philosophers” are gold: a clear, devastating summary of how Paul did apologetics. Go read them
Acts 17 records that while Paul waited in Athens, “his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols” (v. 16). The apostle didn’t stroll through the marketplace nodding at the philosophers’ cleverness or hunting for common ground in their latest metaphysical fashion. He confronted them with the revelation of the true God who “made the world and everything in it” and who “gives to all life, breath, and all things” (vv. 24-25). In “Paul and the Philosophers”, Vincent Cheung expounds this encounter as the biblical model for apologetics: “Challenge, Confrontation, and Conquest.”
The philosophers of Athens—Epicureans and Stoics—operated from presuppositions that could not sustain the most basic conditions of thought and experience. The same pattern repeats in every age, including ours. Some things never change—except when materialists try to make them change without a Cause.
Consider the video “Origin of the Genetic Code: What We Do and Do Not Know,” produced by the “Stated Casually” channel with Stephen Woodford. The presenters note that the genetic code functions as a genuine symbolic system (we’ll grant they are codes and a symbolic system for the sake of argument. This means we’re pretending here, because that’s what “for the sake of argument” means). That is, a language with codons as symbols, amino acids as referents, syntax, redundancy, and error-correcting mechanisms. They invoke signaling theory, co-evolution, RNA-world hypotheses, and probabilistic arguments to claim this code arose through mindless natural processes. They admit “vast unknowns” yet insist evolution suffices. But this is skepticism—and skepticism denies the law of contradiction. We’ll move on anyway.
In doing so they stand exactly where the Athenian philosophers stood: using the language of intelligibility while denying the only foundation that makes such language possible. One almost admires the gall—until one realizes they’re trying to get blood from a philosophical stone… or rather, intelligible code from a universe that’s philosophically non-intelligible code. LOL. Such a position is to be mocked and dismissed.
Non-Christian presuppositions are in rebellion against God and therefore distort and suppress the truth (Romans 1:18-20). The video’s materialist narrative cannot account for the preconditions of intelligibility it constantly employs. Materialism and empiricism are inherently circular: they use every point of intelligibility to construct their arguments, then attempt to “prove” those same points from within a system that cannot justify them. That’s wall-punching hilarious. Their premises always smuggle extra unproven information into the conclusion to make the intelligibility conditions appear to emerge from matter alone. They have no justification for using them. Let us press the matter point by point—because nothing says “I love philosophy” like watching someone saw off the branch they’re sitting on while claiming the branch grew itself.
When intelligibility is defined by materialism, atheism, observation, or empiricism alone, the result is not neutral inquiry but a closed loop that devours its own justification. The secular thinker must presuppose the very rational order, categories, the 3 laws of logic, and knowledge he denies in order to deny it. This is not a minor flaw—it is epistemic suicide. It’s like trying to debug the C++ while denying the laws of C++. Bold move.
Cause. Every effect requires a sufficient cause. If the genetic code is an ordered, functional system of information, then it is an effect. The video traces its “origin” through gene duplication, peptide-RNA interactions, and selection pressures, yet this merely pushes the problem backward. What is the real cause? As Vincent Cheung points out in Paul and the Philosophers, the Epicureans appealed to chance collisions of atoms; the Stoics appealed to an impersonal logos. Neither could explain why causation exists or why causes are orderly rather than chaotic. Only the biblical worldview answers: the self-existent Creator who upholds all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3).
The materialist uses cause at every step of his evolutionary narrative, then tries to prove that cause itself arises from blind matter. This is circular. He must already assume causal regularity (the very thing in question) to interpret his observations, then adds unproven information—that matter alone can produce ordered causation—into his conclusion. He has no justification on materialist premises for doing so. It’s like trying to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, except the bootstraps are made of unproven assumptions, the boots are on fire, and the fire was started by a random chemical reaction that somehow “knew” it needed to be dramatic.
Identity. Since the law of Identity relates to categories, we’re dealing with categories. A thing must be itself and not something else. The genetic code must maintain stable identities: adenine pairs with thymine, specific codons specify specific amino acids, the standard code persists across vast domains of life. The video discusses minor variations yet treats the code as a stable identity that “evolved once.” On materialist premises, why should any pattern remain identical across replications or generations? Without justification for Identity, the materialist cannot intelligently say that identity “x” stayed identity “x” while identity “y” became identity “q.” Why shouldn’t flux and contradiction reign in a world where chaos is the foundation? Only the immutable God—“I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6)—grounds identity. The Bible teaches that grace is grace and works are works, and grace is not works and works is not grace.
The materialist uses identity throughout his account, then attempts to prove that stable identities emerge from matter in motion. This is circular. He presupposes the very stability he claims to explain, smuggling extra information into his conclusion that matter can sustain sameness over time. He has no justification for this move within his own system.
“Some may argue that categories are learned from repetition. They think that a person hears the word ‘cause’ whenever one event follows another, so eventually the mind learns the concept of cause from repeated patterns. This fails. To recognize a pattern already requires categories like identity through time and rules for connecting one case with another. Without those categories, the person would have nothing to tell him that the same kind of event has happened again, rather than just a meaningless string of flashes. Even the claim that a concept is ‘learned’ from many examples uses the very concept during the learning process.
This means that meaning itself requires fixed rational structure that is prior to and independent of any particular observation. Prior does not mean earlier in time… It means logically prior. If reason is to be reason, it must stand on something that does not depend on shifting feelings or human customs. This foundation must be universal… necessary… and rational in itself… If such a foundation exists, then human thought has an anchor… Without it, thought reduces to meaningless sounds with no right to claim belief.”
— Vincent Cheung, Paul and the Philosophers, p. 4
Probability and the numerator-denominator problem. The presenters repeatedly appeal to probability: the “likelihood” of functional proteins, the “probability” of certain codon assignments, the unlikelihood of design. Yet as Vincent Cheung reminds us, probability consists of a numerator (specific observations) and a denominator (the complete set of all relevant possibilities—the universal framework). Empiricism and induction can never know the denominator unless they are all-knowing. But if you’re all-knowing, you don’t need science or experiments—you already have knowledge. The act of science or experimentation is an admission you don’t have knowledge. Science is not knowledge. Science, by its own materialist, empiricist, observational method, makes knowledge impossible. It lies beyond any finite set of observations.
To claim the genetic code’s origin is “probable” under naturalism, one must already possess knowledge of the total range of possibilities—an omniscience the materialist does not have. The appeal to probability is therefore circular: the unbeliever uses the numerator while smuggling in an unjustified denominator. He adds extra unproven information into his conclusion—that a stable universal order exists from which probabilities can be calculated—while denying the only source of that order. He has no justification for the denominator on empiricist terms.
“Before you have knowledge, you cannot possibly know the denominator, the complete set of relevant possibilities. But without the denominator, you cannot calculate a probability at all. To establish the denominator, you would need knowledge larger than the present context, in fact, knowledge of the entire range of possible outcomes. At that point you would already have the very knowledge probability is supposed to deliver, and you would have no need for the experiment or the appeal to probability in the first place.
In practice, when people appeal to probability in this way, they are never doing real probability. What they describe is a sense of confidence, an intuition shaped by repetition or prejudice, or a pattern their minds have supposedly recognized. Then they dress this feeling in the language of numbers. But a feeling of confidence is not knowledge, and pattern recognition is not proof, especially when the pattern was derived from a defective framework. Probability without a true denominator is psychology disguised as epistemology.
Probability cannot serve as a path to truth. If you lack knowledge, you cannot establish the denominator, so probability cannot be applied. If you somehow knew the denominator, you would already possess knowledge far greater than the experiment offers, which makes the experiment irrelevant. In either case, probability does not solve the problem of knowledge. It assumes what it must prove.” — Vincent Cheung, Paul and the Philosophers, p. 6
Difference and distinction. Intelligible thought requires real distinctions. Codons must differ from one another; start codons must differ from stop codons; the genetic code must differ from other biological signaling systems, or there is no intelligibility. Without grounded distinctions, language itself becomes impossible. The Athenian philosophers could not consistently maintain distinctions because their ultimate principles blurred all categories into flux or unity. The biblical doctrine of creation establishes real differences: God made the beasts “according to their kinds” (Genesis 1:25).
The materialist uses distinctions at every turn in his analysis, then tries to prove that real differences arise from undifferentiated matter. And yet again, this is circular. He presupposes the distinctions he claims to explain, adding unproven information into his conclusion that matter can generate and maintain genuine difference. He has no justification within materialism for doing so. Matter apparently has a very strong opinion about what counts as “different”—until it doesn’t. (LOL.)
Time and history. The video narrates a story of the code “emerging” over deep time through gradual processes. But time itself requires grounding. Why does time flow in one direction? Why is there a past, present, and future rather than eternal stasis or chaos? The philosophers of Athens offered cyclical or eternal views of time that could never ground genuine history. Scripture reveals time as the created arena where God consistently makes reality act in regular ways for His purpose.
The materialist uses time and temporal sequence throughout his narrative, then attempts to prove that time and history themselves emerge from matter. This is circular. He presupposes the temporal order he claims to explain, smuggling extra information into his conclusion that matter can produce directed, meaningful history. He has no justification on his own premises.
Motion—the ball in flight. Even the simplest act of perception exposes the problem.
“When the mind looks at a scene, it does more than take a mental picture. It interprets the scene using concepts such as identity, difference, number, relation, time, and cause. These concepts are not pulled from the scene itself. When a child looks at two apples, he uses the concept of number to know that they are two. When he follows a ball flying through the air, he uses time and continuity to track its motion. When he says that the ball broke the window, he uses the concept of cause. If he had to first create number, time, or cause from raw sensory data before using them, he could never begin to use them at all. Any attempt to ‘get’ them from experience would already need them to be in use. Interpretation comes with built-in categories that experience does not provide. This concerns the necessity of innate structure. Certain categories must exist for observation to have any meaning at all.”
— Vincent Cheung, *Paul and the Philosophers*
As Cheung shows, this simple act presupposes the intelligibility conditions that empiricism claims to derive from sensation. The materialist uses motion and continuity at every step of his evolutionary story, then tries to prove that ordered motion arises from matter alone. This is circular. He presupposes the very motion and regularity he claims to explain, adding unproven information into his conclusion that blind matter can sustain directed, continuous change. He has no justification within his system for this assumption.
Language and meaning. The video correctly identifies the genetic code as language. But language presupposes a mind—a speaker who intends meaning. Without an intelligent source, symbols collapse into mere physical motion of particles. Non-Christian worldviews cannot account for meaning. The materialist uses meaningful language and symbolic analysis throughout his presentation, then attempts to prove that meaningful language and symbols arise from matter without mind. This is circular. He presupposes the meaning and intentionality he claims to explain, smuggling extra unproven information into his conclusion that chemistry alone can produce genuine communication. He has no justification on materialist terms for treating meaningless matter as meaningful.
Science isn’t knowledge, because it’s anti-logic with a PhD. Science is without logic, and so it is just expensive storytelling in a lab coat.
These are not peripheral issues. They are the fatal flaws that render the entire video incoherent on its own terms. The presenters employ cause, identity, probability, difference, time, motion, language, and meaning at every turn; precisely the preconditions of intelligibility that only Christian revelation can justify. They use these tools to “prove” a naturalistic origin for the genetic code, yet they have no justification for the tools themselves. Their method is circular by necessity, because their first principle—random matter in motion without God—cannot produce or sustain rationality, intelligibility, order, or information. They borrow the Christian doctrines of providence, uniformity, and meaning while denying the Provider, always adding extra unproven information into their conclusions to make the intelligibility conditions appear to emerge from matter alone.
If the genetic code is indeed code, then it testifies against them. The video’s story is a modern retelling of the Athenian idols: sophisticated in appearance, but built on sand. Paul did not flatter the philosophers or accommodate their categories. He declared the Creator, exposed their ignorance of the “unknown god,” and called them to repent because God “has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained” (Acts 17:31).
To the makers of the video and all who share their presuppositions: your system cannot account for the intelligibility you employ in every sentence. You speak of cause, identity, probability, difference, time, motion, language, and meaning while standing on foundations your worldview has sawed off. You use these points to construct your argument, then circularly attempt to prove them from within materialism and empiricism—always smuggling extra unproven information into your conclusions—yet you have no justification for doing so. Repent. The same revelation that explains the intelligibility for all codes explains your need for a Savior.
Chance denies order yet relies on order to articulate the theory. Necessity cancels rational judgment yet uses rational judgment to defend it. Both erase the preconditions of meaningful time, logic, categories, intelligibility, morals, and knowledge.
God is the only response that does justice to the supposed genetic code and all other codes. All other explanations are variations on the idols of Athens—old and new. The truth remains: the God who made the genetic code has spoken, and His Word is the precondition of every word we speak, every code we decode, and every argument we advance. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.
Ah, John Piper. The man who’s made a career out of turning theological somersaults to explain why God might hand you a lemon and call it lemonade. He says, “God does not give bad. And I mean, ultimately hurtful. This tests our faith to the limit, doesn’t it?… I asked for healing. I asked for a job…. This isn’t what I wanted. And my theology from every part of the bible. I know God only gives what is good for his children. Painful as it has been. This brings us stability in our lives. I am thankful for you having embraced that sovereign goodness and grace of God.”
This isn’t just nitpicking; it’s about the heart of the gospel. Piper’s teaching trains believers to settle for Satan’s leftovers and call them God’s feast. Imagine praying for healing, getting more pain, and then thanking God for “stability” in suffering. That’s not faith; that’s resignation dressed up as piety
He’s essentially patting folks on the back for accepting pain as a divine gift wrap. This isn’t biblical theology; it’s a clever dodge that hybridizes good and evil until they’re indistinguishable, like mixing chocolate milk with motor oil and calling it a smoothie. The Bible doesn’t play that game. God’s goodness isn’t some cosmic bait-and-switch where sickness or hardship gets relabeled as “ultimately good.” No, Scripture draws a sharp line: good is good now, just as it’ll be in heaven, and bad things like pain and disease? Those have the devil’s fingerprints all over them, not God’s.
In Acts 10:38, Peter delivers the first apostolic sermon to the Gentiles, painting a childlike yet profound picture of the gospel: “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him” (NIV). Here, goodness is tied directly to healing, while sickness is oppression from the devil. It’s not ambiguous—Jesus’ ministry was a relentless campaign against disease, not a distribution of it. If Piper’s view holds, we’d have to imagine Jesus handing out tumors as tokens of grace, but the text says the opposite: sickness victimizes people under Satan’s thumb, and Jesus smashes it as an act of divine goodness. This isn’t just narrative flair; it’s a partitioning line in theology, as fundamental as affirming that all things exist for God’s glory. To mix them up is to confuse the kingdom’s advance with the enemy’s attack. It is to look at a police lineup, when asked who hurt you, and you point to Jesus rather than Satan. This isn’t a minor theological mistake; it is seeing reality upside down. It is a worldview issue. It is a different view of reality than the Christian one.
Consider Isaiah 54:15, where God speaks to His covenant people: “If anyone does attack you, it will not be my doing; whoever attacks you will surrender to you” (NIV). God assumes His ultimate sovereignty quietly in the background, as He often does, but on the human level—where He commands, relates, and expects us to live—He declares plainly that attacks aren’t from Him. This echoes through the New Testament. In Luke 13:16, Jesus heals a woman bent over for eighteen years, declaring, “Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (NIV). Notice the emphasis: she’s an insider under Abraham’s covenant, which promises blessing and health, not curse and pain. Satan bound her, not God, and Jesus frames her healing as a necessity—a “must”—because God’s covenants don’t break. If sickness were God’s “painful but good” gift, Jesus would be contradicting His Father’s mission, but instead, He treats it as an affront to the Father’s promises, demolishing it wherever faith allows.
God is in a Contract with us, and therefore, relative to our interactions with God, and God’s interaction with us, He does not send sin to us—otherwise, Jesus would be a minister of sin. Jesus does not send poverty to us—otherwise, Jesus would be High Priest of poverty. Jesus does not minister sickness to us—otherwise, His ministry would be a ministry of sickness, pain, and death. There is a being who does minister such things, and that is Satan. He has a ministry of death, sickness, poverty, and pain. He comes to steal, kill, and destroy. But Jesus comes to give life and even abundant life.
The argument God gives in Isaiah 54 is simple. On the relative level, God did not send the trouble; therefore, when trouble comes to you, command it to leave. Jesus gives us a clear picture of this in His faith doctrine. What does it mean to refute every tongue that accuses you? Jesus commands us to “speak” to our mountains and tell them to get out of our way. Jesus also says that we can use His Name to ask for whatever we want and get it to increase our joy and give the Father glory. Peter therefore said, “What I have, I give, In Jesus Name, Walk.” Thus, because the trouble did not come from Jesus, when troubles—or that is, when mountains—come, condemn it, refute it, and tell it to cast itself in the sea.
This brings us to the heart of the issue: Piper’s hybridization of good and bad under the banner of sovereignty. On the ultimate metaphysical level, yes, God controls all things directly, as Vincent Cheung aptly notes in his work on divine sovereignty: “God is the metaphysical author of evil,” meaning nothing escapes His decree (vincentcheung.com). All things are things God directly and absolute controls, including all human thoughts, actions and evil. When you say God absolutely and directly controls all things as category truth claim, you can only say it as an “all, some, or none.” The bible says it is all, regarding the ultimate or only real cause level. However, the Bible speaks mostly on the relational, human level, where God relates to us through Contracts sealed in blood and promise of good. In the New Contract, God promises to deal with us always in goodness—like a father giving a fish for a fish, not a stone (Matthew 7:9-11). Jesus, as our eternal High Priest, ministers healing, not torment; if He sent sickness, His priesthood would include pain and suffering as promised ministry, which it doesn’t. The curses of the law, including sickness and poverty, are bad—plain and simple—as Deuteronomy 28 outlines, while Abraham’s blessings, which Galatians 3:14 applies to us, are good: health, prosperity, victory. Jesus bore those curses in our place (Galatians 3:13; Isaiah 53:4-5), so attributing ongoing sickness to God’s goodness is like saying the atonement half-worked. It’s not faith-testing; it’s faith-denying.
Think about it this way: when Joseph told his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20, NIV), he didn’t say God intended harm and then God flipped the harm into good. The evil came from human (and likely demonic) intent, while God orchestrated the outcome for blessing. Piper’s approach risks congratulating believers for accepting Satan’s “bi@#h slap and graffiti” as God’s artistry, but as I argue in my Systematic Theology (2025), sickness is Satan’s glory, not God’s. It sidelines Christians, stalls the kingdom, and turns soldiers into casualties that drag others down—like wartime tactics where injuring is more disruptive than killing. If we label that “good,” we’re cheering for the wrong side in this cosmic showdown. Jesus saw sickness as a direct insult to His atonement, where He took 39 stripes for our healing (Isaiah 53:5; Matthew 8:17), bearing our diseases as the scapegoat did sins (Leviticus 16). To say God continues it for our benefit dishonors that finished work, making the cross a partial payment rather than a finished work.
Piper’s words aim for stability, and there’s a kernel of truth in trusting God’s sovereignty amid trials. The problem is conflating the trial’s source with its resolver. The Bible never frames sickness as paternal discipline for believers; it’s the devil’s opportunism under the curse, which Jesus came to destroy (1 John 3:8). James 5:15 promises healing and forgiveness together: “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven” (NIV). God wants prosperity, not pain—His goodness is consistent from Eden to eternity, where no sickness exists (Revelation 21:4).
Faith isn’t passive acceptance; it’s active resistance against bad, sickness, pain, evil and lack. Jesus commanded us to heal the sick (Matthew 10:8), not endure them as lessons. If you’re facing illness or lack, don’t redefine it as God’s “painful good”—confess the promises, and command the mountain to move (Mark 11:23), and watch reality bow to the King’s decree. Piper’s theology, encourages believers to give glory to Satan, letting the devil conqueror them in pain and suffering. However the scripture tells a different story. We are called co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17), seated above every power (Ephesians 2:6), with all things possible (Mark 9:23).
In wrapping up, Piper admits the pain is real and unwanted—something you’d never pray for if you thought it was better—but then insists it’s still God’s good gift. This is a category error of epic proportions, folks. The Bible defines goodness consistently from Genesis to Revelation. In the Garden, goodness meant abundance, health, and harmony without a hint of pain or curse. Abraham’s blessing, which Galatians 3:14 says is ours through Christ, included prosperity and healing as unequivocal goods. Deuteronomy 28 spells it out: blessings are health, wealth, and victory; curses are sickness, poverty, and defeat. Jesus didn’t come to hybridize them; He came to redeem us from the curse entirely (Galatians 3:13). When Piper says “painful as it has been” and calls it God’s goodness, he’s essentially saying God gives curses wrapped in blessing paper. But Isaiah 54:15 shoots that down: “If anyone does attack you, it will not be my doing; whoever attacks you will surrender to you” (NIV). God explicitly disowns the attackers—be they relational strife, financial woes, or cancerous tumors. If pain, loss or sickness is knocking on your door, it’s not a delivery from heaven; it’s fiery arrows from the enemy, and Piper’s theology is handing Satan the quiver while crediting God for the attacks.
Piper’s congratulating his audience for embracing this is like high-fiving someone for eating spoiled food and calling it gourmet. It gives Satan glory by attributing his works to God. But the Bible’s worldview is clear: Jesus heals because it’s good; the devil afflicts because it’s bad. No hybridization. In my “Systematic Theology,” I build this out: epistemology from revelation, metaphysics of sovereignty without compromise, logic deductive, ethics obedient faith. The thesis? All things possible to believers. Piper’s view limits God by redefining His gifts by the devils works.
As Vincent Cheung says so well, “Don’t waste your Redemption,” in response to Piper’s book, Don’t Waste Your Cancer. The benefits of the atonement are already purchased by Jesus and freely given to you. I have sympathy with hurting Christians, but sickness and lack does not negate the commands of God. The command is to pray and make the sickness, purchased by the strips of Jesus, to go away and be healed. My sympathy and God’s compassion, does not give an excuse for disobedience. You fully obey God when you are healed. The same is for conversion. It is a command to be forgiven of your sins. A hard life, depression and peer pressures might draw sympathy, but it is not an excuse to not repent of your sins and receive salvation. Until you are fully healed, you are wasting the gospel, or that part of the gospel, in your life. The call to maturity, is to correct this and get better. God wants this more than you and will help you improve.
So, what’s the takeaway? Ditch the muddled mess. Embrace God’s unmixed goodness. If pain shows up, declare, “Not from my Father!” Pray in faith, resist the devil, and watch him flee (James 4:7). Stability comes not from enduring bad but from receiving good. Let me say that again, Stability comes not from enduring bad but from receiving good. Don’t let theologians turn your theology into therapy for defeat—let Scripture turn it into triumph. God’s not sending the pain; He’s sending the power to overcome it. Believe that, and you’ll see mountains move, not just molehills managed.
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Vincent Cheung has some fantastic passages about John Piper’s, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer,” and I will post here them.
“Don’t waste your cancer? Are you kidding me? Don’t waste your redemption! Don’t waste the blood of Christ! Jesus took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses (Matthew 8:16-17). Every point in this small book is either misleading or the opposite of what the Bible teaches. If you do not want to “waste” your sickness, then get healed from it and testify about the miracle. Don’t crucify Christ afresh so you can make yourself look like a religious hero. Don’t urinate on the face of Christ just so you can make yourself feel better in your unbelief and defeat. Don’t waste your life romanticizing unnecessary suffering. Don’t waste the sacrifice of Christ with your stupid fake piety.” (Backstage, 2016, pg 7).
“One Christian author wrote, “Don’t waste your cancer.” What a demonic message. This is counter-gospel. This is fake religion. The Bible never calls sickness a gift from God, but it says that sickness is satanic bondage and oppression. Sickness is a demonic attack, not a divine gift. Jesus devoted an inordinate amount of effort to obliterate it everywhere he went. Would that author accuse Jesus of wasting everyone’s sickness? Behold the demeaning effect of unbelief. This fake teacher calls upon thousands of people to waste the blood of Christ, who took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses to obtain healing for us. Unless you “waste” your sickness, you waste your redemption. Behold the perverse theology of tradition. This fake teacher romanticizes sickness and suffering, and urges thousands of God’s people to embrace bondage and oppression, surrendering to Satan to do all his will. Because he weakens people’s faith and urgency in receiving healing from God, the author has become directly responsible for their suffering and even deaths. He is a sadist and a murderer. But spiritual poison like this is usually presented as profound piety and scholarship.
Jesus never said, “Don’t waste your sickness,” but he said, “Do you want to be healed?” And then he said to the invalid, “Pick up your mat and walk.” He never said, “Let the will of God be done,” but he said, “What do you want me to do for you?” And then he said to the blind man, “Your faith has healed you.” (Platitudes as Orthodoxy, web 2018).
