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Fall Asleep to the Complete Story of Lucifer _ From Light to the Fall · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: Before there was darkness, there was a being made entirely
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  Speaker 1: of light. Before there was evil, there was a beauty
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  Speaker 1: so complete, so overwhelming, that the ancient writers who tried
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  Speaker 1: to describe it ran out of human language and had
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: to reach for metaphors of dawn and fire and the
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  Speaker 1: sound of music woven into living bone. And before there
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  Speaker 1: was a fall, there was a single moment, a hinge
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  Speaker 1: point in the history of all created things, a moment
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  Speaker 1: when one choice was made in full knowledge, with full understanding,
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  Speaker 1: and with full awareness of what it would cost to night.
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  Speaker 1: We are going to tell that story from the very beginning,
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  Speaker 1: not the version dressed in medieval imagery, not the red
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  Speaker 1: figure with the pitchfork that painters invented to make evil
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  Speaker 1: visible and safely, other the version preserved in the oldest
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  Speaker 1: texts the human tradition has kept. The one that is,
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  Speaker 1: when you read it carefully and slowly, not primarily a
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  Speaker 1: story about evil at all. It is a story about
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  Speaker 1: beauty that forgot where it came from. It is a
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  Speaker 1: story about the most gifted being ever created, and what
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  Speaker 1: happened when that being decided the gift was the point
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  Speaker 1: rather than the giver. And it is before this night
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  Speaker 1: is over a story about a question that has been
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  Speaker 1: sitting quietly in the room with you, Tonite, waiting to
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  Speaker 1: be named settle in. We are going to begin before
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  Speaker 1: time itself existed. Chapter one, the name and the light
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: it carried begin with two words. In approximately the sixth century,
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: before the Common Era, the prophet Isaiah composed what scholars
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  Speaker 1: call a taunt song, a specific Hebrew literary form addressed
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  Speaker 1: to the King of Babylon. He used the elevated language
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  Speaker 1: that Hebrew prophets reached for when they wanted to say
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  Speaker 1: something was not merely historical but cosmic, something that pointed
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  Speaker 1: beyond the immediate moment toward a deeper reality underneath it.
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  Speaker 1: The Christian tradition, across more than two thousand years of reading,
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  Speaker 1: has understood this passage as reaching beyond its historical subject
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  Speaker 1: toward a cosmic being behind him. That is the reading
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  Speaker 1: we are following tonight as a reading, as the tradition's
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  Speaker 1: long sustained reflection, not as a claim that stands beyond
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  Speaker 1: all scholarly conversation. With that frame in place, let the
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  Speaker 1: words do what they were designed to do. The sentence
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  Speaker 1: in the original Hebrew reads this way Haleel ben Shachar
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  Speaker 1: three words, two of them carry everything. Haleel comes from
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew root halal. The primary meaning of halal is
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  Speaker 1: to praise, to boast, to declare something worthy of celebration.
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  Speaker 1: From this route comes Hallelujah, the great exclamation of Jewish
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  Speaker 1: and Christian worship across three millennia, and Hallal carries within
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  Speaker 1: it a secondary meaning that flows naturally from the nature
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  Speaker 1: of genuine praise, which is to shine, to be radiant,
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  Speaker 1: to send forth light the way something truly worthy of
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  Speaker 1: celebration cannot help but do. Praise and light in the
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew imagination are not separate concepts. They inhabit the same
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  Speaker 1: word because they describe the same reality. The thing that
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  Speaker 1: is genuinely praiseworthy shines. The thing that truly shines draws praise.
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  Speaker 1: Hail is built from this root, named for that radiance.
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  Speaker 1: Bend Son of Shatchah. The dawn the specific moment before
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  Speaker 1: full sunrise, when the sky shifts from black to deep
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  Speaker 1: blue to the first pale edge of gold along the horizon,
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  Speaker 1: not day, not night, the threshold between them, the most
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  Speaker 1: beautiful moment of any given twenty four hours, the moment
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  Speaker 1: that lasts only minutes and then is gone, the moment
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  Speaker 1: that people set alarms to see and are still somehow
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  Speaker 1: always surprised by. Put them together, and you have this
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  Speaker 1: Sun of the dawn, named for the instant when darkness
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  Speaker 1: ends and light begins, but the light is not yet
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  Speaker 1: fully here. In the third century, before the Common Era,
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  Speaker 1: scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. When
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  Speaker 1: they reached this verse in Isaiah, they translated heel as Hiosphoros,
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  Speaker 1: the light bringer, the one who carries the dawn. Five
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  Speaker 1: centuries later, Jerome translated the scriptures into Latin in a
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  Speaker 1: cave in Bethlehem. When he reached this verse, he translated
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  Speaker 1: Heosphoros into the most luminous image available in his language.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote Lucifer. In classical Latin. Lucifer was not a
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  Speaker 1: name weighted with evil. It was the name Romans gave
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  Speaker 1: to the planet Venus in the pre dawn sky, the
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  Speaker 1: brightest object visible before sunrise, the light bringer, the morning star,
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  Speaker 1: the signal that the sun was coming. Jerome was not
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  Speaker 1: Inventi a villain. He was reaching for the most radiant
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  Speaker 1: image his language possessed to describe a being whose Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: name described the most radiant threshold moment in the natural world.
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  Speaker 1: He was here, he was real, and the name was
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  Speaker 1: not a lie. There is a woman named Catherine who
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  Speaker 1: teaches ancient languages at a small college in the American Midwest.
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  Speaker 1: She has spent thirty years with these texts, and she
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  Speaker 1: describes the moment she absorbed what Halel actually meant as
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  Speaker 1: one of the most disorienting experiences of her scholarly life.
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  Speaker 1: She said this to her students. Once. We have spent
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  Speaker 1: centuries using this name as a synonym for darkness. We
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  Speaker 1: say lucifer, and we mean the absence of light. But
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  Speaker 1: the name itself means the opposite of all of that.
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  Speaker 1: The name means the one who carries the light of dawn.
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  Speaker 1: And when you understand that, the story becomes something completely different.
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  Speaker 1: It is not a story about the origin of darkness.
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  Speaker 1: It is a story about what happens when a source
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  Speaker 1: of light turns away from the source of its own light.
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  Speaker 1: And those are not the same story at all. She
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  Speaker 1: is right, and the difference matters more than most people realize. Now,
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  Speaker 1: let the ancient writers speak about what this being was
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  Speaker 1: before the moment everything changed. Ezekiel writing in the same
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  Speaker 1: general period as Isaiah composed a vision that is still
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  Speaker 1: one of the most arresting passages in the entire Hebrew tradition.
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  Speaker 1: He was addressing the King of Tire using the same
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  Speaker 1: technique of cosmic poetry, and the tradition has long read
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  Speaker 1: this passage as reaching beyond the historical king toward the
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  Speaker 1: same being Isaiah glimpsed. What is clear, even on a
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  Speaker 1: purely literary reading, is that the language far exceeds anything
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  Speaker 1: that could apply to a human king. No human king
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  Speaker 1: walked among the stones of fire, No human king is
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  Speaker 1: described as present at creation. The text is reaching towards
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  Speaker 1: something the prophet was being shown that ex ccceeded ordinary
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  Speaker 1: political commentary, and what it shows is extraordinary. Ezekiel describes
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  Speaker 1: this being as the signet of perfection, full of wisdom
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  Speaker 1: and perfect in beauty. He describes precious stones as his covering,
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  Speaker 1: stones that scholars have noted correspond closely to those worn
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  Speaker 1: by the High Priest of Israel when entering the innermost sanctuary.
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  Speaker 1: Not the armor of a warrior, not the crown of
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  Speaker 1: a ruler, the adornment of the one who belongs in
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  Speaker 1: the presence, and then the phrase that stops every careful
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  Speaker 1: reader cold. You were on the holy mountain of God.
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  Speaker 1: You walked among the stones of fire. He did not
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  Speaker 1: stand at the edge of the divine presence looking in
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  Speaker 1: from a distance. He walked there in the place of fire,
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  Speaker 1: in the innermost ring of radiance. And Ezekiel adds that
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  Speaker 1: this being was the cherub who covers, the one whose
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  Speaker 1: wings extended directly over the place where the divine presence dwelled,
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  Speaker 1: not approaching the throne covering it. The position of the
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  Speaker 1: covering cherub was not the most powerful position in the
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  Speaker 1: created order. It was the position of greatest nearness, not authority, proximity,
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  Speaker 1: the closest any created being had ever been, or would
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  Speaker 1: ever be, to the source of all light and being.
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  Speaker 1: And it was given to the being whose name meant
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  Speaker 1: the one who carries light. A retired pastor named Thomas,
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  Speaker 1: who spent four decades in ministry in rural Pennsylvania, says
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  Speaker 1: that he did not truly understand what was actually at
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  Speaker 1: stake in this story until he was in his sixties,
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  Speaker 1: sitting with a family whose oldest son had walked away
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  Speaker 1: from everything. The parents were not angry, They were simply
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  Speaker 1: devastated in the specific way that people are devastated when
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  Speaker 1: something they loved is no longer present, when a warmth
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  Speaker 1: that was part of the fabric of their lives has
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  Speaker 1: gone cold. He said that night I understood for the
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  Speaker 1: first time what the story was actually about. It is
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  Speaker 1: not a story about a villain. It is a story
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  Speaker 1: about a loss, the greatest loss in the history of
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  Speaker 1: created things. And the one who experienced that loss most
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  Speaker 1: completely was not the creation left behind. It was the
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  Speaker 1: one who walked away from the place where his own
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  Speaker 1: light came from. That reframing does not diminish the gravity
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  Speaker 1: of what was chosen, It deepens it. Because a villain
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  Speaker 1: is someone we can keep at a safe distance. We
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  Speaker 1: can label a villain, feel righteously opposed to them, and
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  Speaker 1: move on. But a loss is something different. A loss
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  Speaker 1: requires you to sit with the full weight of what
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  Speaker 1: was before and what is no longer, and the gap
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  Speaker 1: between them that nothing can close. The name was Halel
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  Speaker 1: Sun of the dawn light Bringer, the being who stood
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  Speaker 1: closer to the source of all light than any other
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  Speaker 1: created being in the history of the cosmos, the one
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  Speaker 1: whose wings covered the mercy seat, the one who walked
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  Speaker 1: among the stones of fire and carried the dawn in
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  Speaker 1: his very name. He was here, he was real, and
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  Speaker 1: the name, before the moment of the turn, was the
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  Speaker 1: truest thing about him. That is where we begin. We
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  Speaker 1: are still in the before, still in the time when
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  Speaker 1: the morning stars sang together, as the Book of Job describes,
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  Speaker 1: the early days of creation, Still in the world before loss,
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  Speaker 1: when the most beautiful created being walked at the center
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  Speaker 1: of the shalom. Stay in this moment a little longer.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot fully understand what was lost if you do
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  Speaker 1: not first understand what was there Chapter two, the position
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  Speaker 1: before the fall? What was there to want that he
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  Speaker 1: did not already have? This is the question that careful
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  Speaker 1: readers of the ancient texts have always had to sit with,
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  Speaker 1: and the answer is not what most people expect when
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  Speaker 1: you find it buried in the ancient writings. It reframes
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  Speaker 1: the entire story in a way that makes it not
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  Speaker 1: merely ancient history, but something uncomfortably relevant to every human
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  Speaker 1: being who has ever lain awake, reaching for something they
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  Speaker 1: could not quite name. But before we get to the wanting,
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  Speaker 1: we have to spend more time in the having. Because
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  Speaker 1: the tradition preserves a picture of what this being was
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  Speaker 1: before the turn that is far more detailed and far
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  Speaker 1: more heart breaking than most people have paused long enough
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  Speaker 1: to see. Following the traditional reading of Ezekiel twenty eight,
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  Speaker 1: which the tradition has long understood as reaching beyond the
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  Speaker 1: historical king of Tire toward a cosmic figure, four qualities
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  Speaker 1: are rendered in extraordinary detail. The first was wisdom, full
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  Speaker 1: of wisdom. The Hebrew word cokma means not merely good
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  Speaker 1: judgment or accumulated experience, but the deep structural understanding of
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  Speaker 1: how things actually work, the wisdom that perceives the underlying
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  Speaker 1: patterns of reality, that sees not just what is happening,
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  Speaker 1: but why, Not just the surface of things, but the
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  Speaker 1: architecture beneath them. Not wisdom acquired over time, constitutive wisdom,
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  Speaker 1: part of what this being was from the first moment
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  Speaker 1: of existence. The second was beauty, perfect in beauty. The
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew word tamaim means complete, whole, without defect, without anything
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  Speaker 1: missing that should be present. A beauty that did not
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  Speaker 1: gesture towards something more beautiful that it fell short of,
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  Speaker 1: a beauty that was within its own category, the full
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  Speaker 1: expression of what beauty could be. The third was adornment
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  Speaker 1: the priestly correspondence. The stones that covered him corresponded closely
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  Speaker 1: to those on the breastplate of the high priest entering
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  Speaker 1: the Holy of Holies, not the armor of a warrior,
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  Speaker 1: the covering of one who belongs in the presence. The
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  Speaker 1: fourth is where the text becomes most unusual and where
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  Speaker 1: honest reading requires a note. Ezekiel twenty eight, verse thirteen
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  Speaker 1: contains a phrase that many English translations render as something
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  Speaker 1: about timbrels and pipes being prepared in this being on
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  Speaker 1: the day of creation. This is one of the most
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  Speaker 1: textually uncertain verses in Ezekiel. The Hebrew is genuinely difficult.
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  Speaker 1: Major translations handle it differently. What the text clearly intends
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  Speaker 1: is some form of extraordinary gifting related to beauty and sound,
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  Speaker 1: whether that means instruments literally structured into his constitution or
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  Speaker 1: a broader gifting for the expression of beauty the ancient
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  Speaker 1: text holds open. What is not held open is this,
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  Speaker 1: whatever form the gifting took, it was constitutive, given on
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  Speaker 1: the day of creation, part of what this being was
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  Speaker 1: before he had done anything at all, and it was
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  Speaker 1: oriented in its very nature toward the source, the expression
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  Speaker 1: of beauty in the direction of the one who gave
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  Speaker 1: the gift. With that frame established, let the image breathe.
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  Speaker 1: A musician named James, who teaches is at a conservatory
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  Speaker 1: in Nashville and has spent decades studying both music and theology,
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  Speaker 1: says the image of this gifting, whatever its precise form,
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  Speaker 1: stopped him completely when he first encountered it. He said,
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  Speaker 1: most of us experience music as something we do, we practice,
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  Speaker 1: we perform. But occasionally, if you have been playing long enough,
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  Speaker 1: you have moments where it does not feel like something
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  Speaker 1: you are doing. It feels like something you are. Those
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  Speaker 1: moments are the closest thing to transcendence that most musicians
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  Speaker 1: ever experience. Now, imagine that was not a rare peak experience.
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  Speaker 1: Imagine that was your baseline, your ordinary condition. The expression
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  Speaker 1: of beauty toward the source was not a practice or
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  Speaker 1: a discipline for this being. It was nature, he paused.
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  Speaker 1: And when I try to understand what it means that
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  Speaker 1: such a being turned away, I do not think first
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  Speaker 1: about theology. I think about what it would mean to
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  Speaker 1: be separated from the thing you are made of, not
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  Speaker 1: the thing you do, the thing you are now let
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  Speaker 1: us look at the position itself, because the full picture
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  Speaker 1: is more extraordinary than most people realize. The Hebrew scriptures
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: describe the divine presence in terms of concentric rings of holiness,
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  Speaker 1: the created world, the people of Israel, the priests, the
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  Speaker 1: High Priest, who alone entered the Holy of Holies once
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  Speaker 1: a year, and in the center, the mercy seat covered
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  Speaker 1: by the wings of the golden Cherubim. That structure was
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  Speaker 1: understood as a reflection of a heavenly reality. The earthly
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  Speaker 1: sanctuary mirrored something that already existed, and in that heavenly reality.
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  Speaker 1: In the traditional reading, this being held the position the
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  Speaker 1: golden Cherubim represented in the earthly temple, not a guard
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  Speaker 1: at the gate, the one whose wings extended over the
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  Speaker 1: place of presence, the one in the center of the center,
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  Speaker 1: the being for whom the concentric rings of holiness were
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  Speaker 1: not something to be navigated toward, but the ordinary environment
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  Speaker 1: of existence. His defining characteristic was not power, It was nearness.
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  Speaker 1: The being most embedded in the Shalam had the most
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  Speaker 1: complete view of it available to any created person. He
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  Speaker 1: could see the architecture, he could perceive the harmonics. He
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  Speaker 1: could understand better than anyone, the degree to which every
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  Speaker 1: part was fitted to every other part. He knew what
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  Speaker 1: shalam was. He was living in the center of it.
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  Speaker 1: An architect named Elizabeth, who practices in Boston and came
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  Speaker 1: to Faith in her late thirties, says that the image
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  Speaker 1: of the morning stars singing at the laying of the
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  Speaker 1: foundations from the thirty eighth chapter of Job is the
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  Speaker 1: image from scripture that has stayed with her longest. She said,
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  Speaker 1: I have been present for ground breakings, for the setting
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  Speaker 1: of the first steel, and there is something in those
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  Speaker 1: moments that everyone who has done this work reckonedgnizes, a
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  Speaker 1: sense of what this thing will be before it is anything, yet,
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  Speaker 1: the joy of pure potential, of something that could be
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  Speaker 1: everything it was meant to be. She paused. And what
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: the text seems to be saying is that this being
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  Speaker 1: was present at that exact moment, standing at the beginning
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  Speaker 1: of the world, with full knowledge of what it was
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  Speaker 1: going to be, and singing. That is the being whose
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  Speaker 1: story we are telling tonight, not a late arrival, not
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  Speaker 1: an outsider looking in, a participant in the earliest moments
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  Speaker 1: of creation, present at the founding, singing at the groundbreaking
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  Speaker 1: of the world. Covered in the adornment of priestly proximity,
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  Speaker 1: full of constitutive wisdom, gifted beyond any other created being
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  Speaker 1: for the expression of beauty in the direction of its source.
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  Speaker 1: This is the before. The question of what was missing,
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  Speaker 1: of what there was to want that he did not
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  Speaker 1: already have, is the question that the next chapter will
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  Speaker 1: begin to answer. But not yet. Stay here for one
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  Speaker 1: more moment. He was made well, He was placed well.
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  Speaker 1: He was before the moment of the turn, exactly what
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  Speaker 1: his name described, and the name was the truest thing
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  Speaker 1: about him. Chapter three, The Universe before the Fracture. Shalom
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  Speaker 1: say the word slowly, not as a greeting, as a
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  Speaker 1: description of a condition that once existed, and that the
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  Speaker 1: entire Biblical narrative is in one long, sustained movement trying
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  Speaker 1: to restore. Chalom is not the absence of conflict the
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  Speaker 1: way the English word peace often implies. Shalom is the
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  Speaker 1: presence of wholeness, the condition of a system in which
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  Speaker 1: every part is functioning exactly as it was designed to function,
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  Speaker 1: in full relationship with every other part, with nothing missing
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  Speaker 1: and nothing broken, and nothing working against the sign of
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  Speaker 1: its own nature. It is the word for the universe
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  Speaker 1: before the fracture. The ancient Hebrew picture of creation is
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: not a picture of a distant God manufacturing a universe
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  Speaker 1: from a safe remove. It is a picture of a
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: creator who creates by speaking, and in the Hebrew understanding,
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  Speaker 1: speaking is the extension of the self into what is
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  Speaker 1: being addressed. Intimacy is built into the method. When Genesis
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  Speaker 1: describes the spirit of God hovering over the face of
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  Speaker 1: the waters before creation begins, the Hebrew word is merekephet,
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  Speaker 1: which appears only one other time in the entire Hebrew scriptures,
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  Speaker 1: in Deuteronomy thirty two, where it describes an eagle hovering
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  Speaker 1: over its nest, tending its young not distant observation, active,
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  Speaker 1: close involved presence. The universe, in its original condition, was
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  Speaker 1: inhabited by its maker, the way a nest is inhabited
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  Speaker 1: by the bird that built it. And into this inhabited
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: unise verse, the angelic beings were placed not as ornaments,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: not as servants in the mechanical sense, as partisipands, active
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: presences whose existence contributed to the condition of Shalam, whose
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: nature was oriented toward the source. The ancient tradition describes
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: the angelic beings as existing in a condition of continuous praise,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: not praise as obligation, not praise as performance, Praise as
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the natural expression of beings who are in full alignment
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  Speaker 1: with the source of their own existence. The way a
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  Speaker 1: tuning fork struck produces its natural tone without effort or decision.
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  Speaker 1: The sound it makes is the sound it was made
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  Speaker 1: to make, and making it is not labour but nature.
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  Speaker 1: The universe before the fracture was full of this sound.
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  Speaker 1: The gifting of the covering cherub, whatever its precise form,
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  Speaker 1: was not isolated. It was the most central voice in
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  Speaker 1: a harmony encompassing the whole created order, every part in
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: its right relationship to every other part, every voice sounding
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: its natural expression, everything functioning exactly as it was designed
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: to function. Shalom. A physicist named David who teaches at
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: a university in the Pacific Northwest and has spent his
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: career studying the mathematical structures underlying physical reality, describes the
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: moment he first read the opening chapters of Genesis carefully
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: as an experience of profound recognition. He said, what strikes
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: me every time I returned to it is the rhythm
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: of the evaluation. And God saw that it was good
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: six times. The Hebrew word TV does not mean merely acceptable.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: It means fitted appropriate to its purpose, functioning in the
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: way it was designed to function. In my field, when
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: every element is in right relationship to every other element,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: and the whole is functioning as designed, we use the
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: language of elegance, an elegant solution, an elegant proof. Elegance
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: is not decorative beauty. It is a term for something
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: that is exactly what it needs to be, with no
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: wasted motion and no internal contradiction. He paused. What the
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: creation account is describing is an elegant universe, and the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: being who stood at its center was the being most
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: fully embedded in that elegance. That last observation carries more
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: weight than it might seem at first, because the being
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: most embedded in the Shalam had the most complete understanding
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: of its value. He could see the architecture from the inside.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: He could perceive the harmonics that held everything in place.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: He could feel the weight of what was there in
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: a way that no being at the edge of the
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: order could feel it. He knew better than anyone in
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: the history of created things what would be lost, and
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: he chose anyway that is the thing. The tradition has
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: never fully resolved, and perhaps is not meant to. Why
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: would the being most embedded in shalam be the one
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: to break it? Why would the being who could see
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: most clearly the value of what was there be the
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: one to turn away from it? The tradition does not
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: answer that question directly, but it preserves the question with
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: great care, because the question is not only his question.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: It is the question that every human being who has
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: ever walked away from something good, something true, something that
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: was genuinely feeding them, has had to sit with in
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: the dark. Why did I leave the thing that was
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: giving me life? That question is older than humanity. It
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: was first raised in the innermost ring of the divine
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: presence by the being whose wings covered the mercy seat,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: whose name meant light, whose gifting was oriented toward the
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: source he was about to turn away from. The stars
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: were still singing, the harmony was still intact, the morning
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: had not yet turned. But in the one who stood
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: at the center of it all, something was beginning to move,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: something that had no name yet because it had never
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: existed before, and the universe still whole, still resonant, still
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: functioning in its original elegance had no way of knowing
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: that the silence between the notes was about to become
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: something other than rest. Stay in the music. For now
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: it is still playing. The fracture has not come yet,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: and the being at the center of it all is
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: still in this moment exactly who he was made to be.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: His name is still true. Chapter four. The Five Words
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: that Broke the Universe Isaiah fourteen, Verses thirteen and fourteen.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Most people who grew up in religious households have heard
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: this text referenced dozens of times. It appears in sermons
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: about pride, in cautionary teachings about ambition, in argument about
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: the origin of evil. It has been quoted so often
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: that most people carry a general impression of it without
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: ever having sat with the specific language and let it
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: do what it was designed to do. To night, we
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: are going to sit with it. Not at the speed
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: of a sermon illustration, at the speed of someone who
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: understands that these five sentences are in the traditions reading
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: the most precise record ever preserved of the interior architecture
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: of a soul in the process of turning away from
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: everything it was made for. Here are the words you
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: said in your heart. I will ascend to heaven. I
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: will raise my throne above the stars of God. I
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: will sit on the mount of Assembly, in the far
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: reaches of the North. I will ascend above the heights
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Five sentences, each one beginning with the same two words
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: I will. In Hebrew, the phrase translated as I will
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: is first person imperfect verb. The imperfect tense does not
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: merely indicate future action. It indicates ongoing, incomplete, not yet
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: finished action, the tense of desire that has not yet
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: been satisfied, the tense of reaching that has not yet arrived,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: the tense of a movement that has begun but has
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: no fixed end point. Because the thing being reached for
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: keeps receding as you approach it. Five times, in five
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: consecutive sentences, the same grammatical structure, I will, I will,
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: I will, I will, I will not five separate decisions,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: one decision repeating itself, escalating, each iteration reaching further than
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: the last, because the last one did not land, because
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: the thing being sought cannot be obtained by reaching, only
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: by receiving. A scholar of Hebrew named Rachel who teaches
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: at a seminary in the Eastern Earth, United States and
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: has spent two decades studying the wisdom literature of the
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: ancient Near East, describes these five sentences as the most
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: compressed psychological portrait in the entire Biblical text. She said
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: this in a lecture her students have passed around for years.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: If you wanted to map what the modern clinical tradition
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: calls narcissistic escalation, the progressive stages by which a person
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: moves from healthy self regard toward the kind of self
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: orientation that destroys relationships and eventually the self, you would
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: be hard pressed to find a more precise template than
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: these five verses. Each stage follows from the last with
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: a kind of terrible logic. Each one requires the previous
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: one to have failed to satisfy, because if the previous
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: one had satisfied, there would be no need for the next.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: The structure is the structure of a hunger that cannot
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: be fed by the food it is demanding, she paused.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: And the tragedy, the real tragedy, is that the being
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: speaking these words is surrounded by the only thing that
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: could actually satisfy the hunger. He is in the center
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: of it. He is covered by it, and he is
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: turning away from it in order to go looking for
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: it somewhere else. Now, let us go through the five
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: sentences one by one. The first sentence, I will ascend
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: to Heaven. He is already there. He walks among the
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: stones of fire, he covers the mercy seat. He is,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: by any possible definition, in heaven. So what does it
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: mean to say, I will ascend to Heaven from that position?
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: The assent being declared is not spatial. It is a
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: declaration of ownership. I will make Heaven mine, not a
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: place I inhabit by gift and proximity and the grace
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: of being placed here. A possession, a territory, something that
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: belongs to me because I have claimed it, from receiving
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: to possessing, from the open hand to the closed fist.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: The second sentence, I will raise my throne above the
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: stars of God. The stars of God in Hebrew cosmology
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: refers to the angelic beings, the Sons of God, the
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: morning stars who sang at the foundation of creation. The
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: declaration announces elevation above his peers, above the community of
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: created beings among whom he lives. Notice the shift. The
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: first sentence was about his relationship to the divine presence.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: The second is about his relationship to other created beings.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: What was inward has become comparative. The hunger has expanded
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: from wanting to own heaven to wanting to be above
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: every one else within it. This is the progression Rachel
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: was describing. Once the inward turn begins, it never satisfies
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: by the inward turn alone. It always expands outward, always
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: begins measuring, always begin ranking, always begins seeing other people
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: not as fellow participants in a shared gift, but as
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: competitors in a hierarchy. The turned soul is determined to win.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: The third sentence, I will sit on the mount of
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Assembly in the far reaches of the north. In ancient
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Hebrew cosmology, the mount of Assembly referred to the place
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: of divine council where the decisions governing the created order
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: were made. The declaration moves from possession to elevation to
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: seizure of authority, from owning a place to standing above
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: persons to controlling the direction of all things. Each sentence
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: requires the previous ones to have been insufficient. If possession
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: and elevation had satisfied the hunger. The third sentence would
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: not have been necessary. The hunger is expanding because it
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: cannot be fed. Each new thing it grasps does not satisfy,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: but sharpens the appetite for the next. The fourth sentence,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. In
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Hebrew poetry, the clouds are consistently associated with the divine presence,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: the pillar of cloud in the wilderness, the cloud that
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: filled the temple, the thick cloud on Sinai. The clouds
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: are the boundary layer between the ordinary created order and
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: the immediate presence of the Divine, the threshold, the liminal
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: space between what can be approached and what is beyond approach.
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: will place myself on the other side of the boundary, entirely,
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: not inhabit the space between the ordinary and the holy,
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: position myself above that space. Four santans in possession, elevation, authority, transcendence,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: each one reaching further, each one requiring the previous ones
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: to have failed. And then the fifth sentence, the one
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: that reveals what all four previous sentences were always pointing toward.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: I will make myself like the most High. The Hebrew
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: word translated as like here is the same word that
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: appears in Genesis one, verse twenty six, when the Creator says,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: let us make humanity in our image according to our likeness.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: The same word the same aspiration, but the difference between
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: the two uses could not be more vast. In Genesis one,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: likeness is given a gift extended by the Creator to
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: the created, something that flows from the source outward, received
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: rather than seized. In Isaiah fourteen, likeness is to be manufactured.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: I will make myself like the most High by my
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: own ascending, my own elevation, my own authority, my own transcendence.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: You cannot manufacture nearness to the source by moving away
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: from it. You cannot become like the light by turning
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: away from the light and trying to generate the same life,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: humanescence from within yourself alone. The being whose name meant
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: light was attempting to produce from himself the very light
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: he was already receiving from the presence he was in
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: the process of abandoning. He already had what he was
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: trying to take. He simply did not know how to
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: receive what he was already being given. A counselor named Jonathan,
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: who has worked for twenty years with people recovering from
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: various forms of compulsive behavior, says that the five I
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: wills are the most accurate description he has ever encountered
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: of the interior experience of the people he works with.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: He said, every person I have sat with who is
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: in the grip of something they cannot stop, has some
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: version of the same story underneath it. They were trying
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: to fill, something, trying to generate from the outside, or
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: from a substance, or from a behavior, something they could
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: not find inside themselves. And the thing they were trying
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: to generate is always, when you get underneath it far enough,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the same thing, a sense of being enough, of being complete,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: of not being at the mercy of something larger than themselves.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: He paused, What the Isaiah text shows me is that
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: this is not a new problem. It is the oldest
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: problem in the created order, the turn away from the
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: source toward the attempt to generate from within yourself what
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: you were designed to receive from outside yourself. And the
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: reason it never works is that the thing you are
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: trying to generate was never meant to be generated. It
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: was meant to be received. The five sentences of Isaiah
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: fourteen are not the biography of a villain. They are
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: the anatomy of a hunger, a hunger that the being
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: most surrounded by everything good turned inward and away from
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: the source of everything good in order to pursue on
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: his own terms, and the terrible irony that runs through
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: every line of the ancient text. Is this the thing
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: he was reaching for? The complete, the fullness, the sense
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: of being the source rather than the receiver, was already
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: being given to him, not as a possession he could claim,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: not as a throne he could mount, as a gift,
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: as a nearness, as the natural condition of a being
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: who walked among the stones of fire and covered the
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: mercy seat and carried the light of dawn, he already
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: had what he was trying to take. And that misunderstanding,
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: that ancient and catastrophic misunderstanding between receiving and seizing, between
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: gift and possession, between nearness and ownership, is not only
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: his story. It is the story of every human heart
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: that has ever lain awake in a quiet room, reaching
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: for something it cannot name, trying to fill something it
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: cannot locate, saying in one form or another, the same
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: five words, I will, I will, I will, I will,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: I will. The stars were still singing when he said it,
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: but the harmony had already begun to fracture. Chapter five,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: The War in Heaven. War arose in heaven four words
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: the opening of Revelation twelve, verse seven, and even before
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: the verse ends, Michael is named, angels are mobilized, and
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: the dragon is fighting back. Let us stay with those
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: four words for a moment before we enter the full account,
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: because they describe something the tradition has wrestled with across
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: twenty centuries of reading. A war in Heaven, the place
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: of the shalom, the place where every part was in
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: its right relationship to every other part, the place where
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: the covering cherub walked among the stones of fire and
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: the morning stars sang together. Wha there. To understand what
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: the war actually was and why the outcome was determined
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: before the fighting began, you need to understand who Michael is.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: We spent time with Michael in an earlier journey of
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: this channel. At the center of his identity is a
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: name that is not a statement but a question, me
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: ha L who is like God, not a rhetorical flourish,
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: a theological position built into three syllables and carried across
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: thirty centuries without being translated, because translation would have lost
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: the question and the moment. You understand that Michael's name
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: is a question. You understand what the War in Heaven
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: was actually about because look at what the five I
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: wills declared, I will make myself like the most high.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: The War in Heaven was not a military conflict between
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: two armies of roughly equal strength, where the outcome was uncertain.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: It was a collision between two answers to the same question,
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: the declaration I will make myself like God, the question
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: that already knew its answer, who is like God? No One?
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: One answer is a declaration of self sufficient assent. The
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: other is a question that, by its very structure refuses
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: the premise of the declaration. You cannot answer the question
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: who is like God? With the answer I will be,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: because the question already knows the answer, and the answer
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: is built into the grammar. No created being is like God,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: not even the most beautiful, most wise, most gifted being
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: in the history of the cosmos. Michael embodied the truth
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: of the question. The five I wills oppose that truth,
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: and truth when it is fully expressed, does not need
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: to be larger than the thing opposing it. It needs
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: only to be accurate. A retired judge named Susan, who
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: spent thirty years on the bench in the American Midwest
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: and came to faith late in life, says that the
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: account in Revelation twelve is the passage that crystallized something
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: she had been thinking about for years. She said, in
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: my profession, the outcome of a case is not always
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: determined by who has the most resources or the most
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: aggressive representation. Sometimes it is determined by something much simpler,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: by who is telling the truth. Force can be overcome
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: by greater force, but truth, when it genuinely corresponds to
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: the actual nature of reality, has a different kind of durability.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: It does not need to be larger than the thing
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: opposing it. It needs only to be accurate. She paused.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: What the tradition seems to be saying about the war
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: in Heaven is that it was a conflict between a
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: declaration that opposed the nature of reality and a question
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: that had always already known the answer, and the declaration,
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: when it was fully confronted by the truth, it had
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: been opposing, could not hold its position. The Greek of
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: Revelation twelve describes the outcome in Air is tense, a
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: completed action, a single event with a definite beginning and end,
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: not an ongoing struggle, A discreet conflict that happened, was
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: contested and was resolved. He was defeated. And then there
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: is the detail that changes how you understand the scope
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: of what was lost. A third of the stars of
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: Heaven Revelation twelve, verse four went with him, not one,
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: not a handful. A third of the angelic beings heard
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: the five I wills and said yes to them, heard
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: the declaration I will make myself like the most High,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: and chose to align with it rather than with the
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: question that had always known the answer. A high school
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: history teacher named Marcus, who has taught for twenty years
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: in the American South, says the detail about the third
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: of the angels is what made the story feel real
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: to him in a way it had not before. He said,
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: I have spent my career teaching about moments in history
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: when large groups of people chose to follow something destructive,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: and the thing that always strikes me is that the
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: choice did not look destructive. From the inside, it looked
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: like liberation. The most effective forms of deception in history
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: are never the ones that say follow me into darkness.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: They are the ones that say, follow me into the
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: light that has been kept from you. He looked at
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: the floor for a moment. I will ascend, I will
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: raise my throne. I will sit on the mount of assembly.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: I will ascend above the clouds. I will make myself
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: like the most high. That is not the language of darkness.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: That is the language of aspiration. And a third of
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: the angels heard it that way. He is right, and
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: that reading does not excuse the choice, but it illuminates
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: how the choice was possible, and then the outcome swift
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: and complete. He was thrown down the Greek ballow combined
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: with the prefix carter downward. Not a gentle removal, not
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: a demotion within the existing structure. The language of a
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: thing being expelled from the space its own declaration has
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: made it unable to remain in. There was no longer
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: any place for them in heaven, not because heaven became
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: hostile to them, because the position they had held was
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: defined by a reality they had rejected. You cannot cover
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: the mercy seat with wings that are reaching for ownership
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: of the throne. You cannot walk among the stones of
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: fire while declaring that the fire belongs to you. You
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: cannot be the carrier of light while claiming to be
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: the source of it. The position required the question. Michael
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: knew the answer to the question. The five I wills
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: had replaced the question with a declaration, and so there
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: was no longer any place for them. The stars were
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: still singing, but the harmony was incomplete. Now there were
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: voices missing, Voices that had been part of the music
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: from the beginning that had sung at the laying of
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: the foundations of the world gone, not destroyed, not silence
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: permanently in their existence, but no longer in the place
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: they had been made for. And the universe, the elegant universe,
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: the universe of Shalom, had a wound in it now,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: not a wound that could not be healed. The tradition
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: is clear that the story does not end here, but
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: a wound that was real that changed the shape of
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: everything that followed. The dragon was thrown down, the light bringer,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: whose name had described the most beautiful threshold moment in
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: the created world, whose wings had covered the mercy seat,
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: whose gifting had been oriented toward the source, was cast
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: out of the place. His own declaration had made it
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: impossible for him to remain. For the first time in
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: the history of the created order, something that had been
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: inside the innermost ring was outside it. Something that had
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: been near was now far. The carrying of light without
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: the source to night in the quiet of this room,
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: Let the weight of this chap to sit with you
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: for a moment before you move on. Not the drama
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: of it, not the spectacle, the loss of it. A
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: third of the stars of heaven gone from their place,
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: and at their center, the one who had been nearest
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: of all now furthest of all. The question is still echoing,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: who is like God? And for the first time, the
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: one whose name had carried the answer in its first
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: syllable was no longer in a position to embody it.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: The night is quiet, and somewhere in the distance the
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: music continues, incomplete, but continuing as it always has, as
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: it always will. Chapter six, The Fall and Everything that
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: was lost ach one word the Hebrew lament, the sound
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: a person makes when standing in front of something that
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: should not be, something that has gone wrong in a
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: way that is irreversible, something that breaks the heart, not
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: because it was unexpected, but because it was unnecessary. The
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: Book of Lamentations opens with it the prophet standing in
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: the ruins of Jerusalem, not asking how it happened in
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: the informational sense, but making the sound of grief at
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: the sight of what has been lost and can no
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: longer be recovered Isaiah fourteen, after the five I wills,
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: opens its response with the same word, ach, how you
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: have fallen from heaven o helel benshaka. This is not
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: the language of a judge announcing a sentence with satisfaction.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: It is not the language of a victor celebrating a defeat.
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: It is the language of a witness grieving what they
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: are watching. The lament is not incidental to the text.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: It is the text's first response to the fall, before
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: any description of where the fallen one has gone, before
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: any account of the consequences. The first word is grief.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: Hold that for a moment, the tradition preserved the ache
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: on purpose. Now let the description of the fall unfold.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: The text uses the Hebrew verb naphal to fall, to collapse,
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: to drop from a higher position to a lower one.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: The same word used when soldiers fall in battle, when
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: a city falls to its enemies, when a crown falls
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: from a head, napal, the downward movement of something that
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: was up, and then the parallel phrase you are cut
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: down to the earth. The Hebrew word garda means to
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: be hewn, to be severed from something you were attached to.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: It is the word used for cutting down a tree,
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: not a tree that fell on its own, a tree
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: that was severed. Falling and being severed both images pointing
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: to the same reality from different angles. The fall, the
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: loss of position. What was high is now low. What
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: was at the center of the innermost ring is now
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: outside it, severing, the loss of connection. What was attached
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: is now cut, What was part of a whole is
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: now separated from it. What was in the harmony is
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: now outside the harmony. And then Isiah writes what happens
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: when this being arrives in Sheol, the realm of the dead.
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: The shades who are already there rise to meet him,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: Kings who once ruled the nations, great and feared and powerful,
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: And they say this, you have become like us. You
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: have become like us. There is no more devastating sentence
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: in the entire narrative, the being who said I will
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: make myself like the most High has arrived at the
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: place of the diminished, And the greeting he receives is
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: not the worship he was reaching for. It is not
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: the fullness he was trying to generate. It is recognition,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: recognition of a likeness he did not intend, recognition of
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: an arrival at a destination he did not choose, but
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: that the direction of his choosing was always pointing toward
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: you have become like us. He was reaching upward, toward
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: the incomparable, toward the source of all light and being,
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: and he arrived at the only destination the direction of
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: his reaching could take him into likeness with the diminished,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: into the company of those who have lost what they
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: once had, into the place where the question who is
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: like God? Is answered not by Michael's confidant no one,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: but by the hollow echo of a fall that was unnecessary,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: and a height that was real, and a light that
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: was carried but is no longer being received from its source.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: A woman named Patricia, who spent many years as a
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: hospice nurse in the American Southwest, says the Isaiah passage.
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: When she finally read it slowly enough to hear what
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: it was saying, landed in the same place as certain
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: deaths she had witnessed in her clinical work. She said,
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: I have been present at deaths where the person arrived
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: at the end still grasping, still reaching for something they
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: had spent them life reaching for and never found. The
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: tragedy was not that death had come. The tragedy was
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: the specific look of someone who realizes at the last
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: moment that the thing they spent everything pursuing was not
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: what they actually needed, That the thing that would have
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: filled them was always available, and they kept looking past it.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: She was quiet for a long time. The Isaiah text
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: is describing that specific arrival, the arrival at the destination
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: of the eye wills and the greeting is not victory.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: It is you have become like us. You have arrived
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: where reaching in that direction always arrives. Now, let us
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: talk about what specifically was lost, because the tradition is
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: precise about this, and the precision matters. The first thing
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: lost was the name Hailel ben Shachar, the light bringer,
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: the sun of the dawn. That name does not appear
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: after the fall in the Biblical tradition, after the fall,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: the being is referred to by other names, names that
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: describe what he does rather than what he is, names
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: that are functional rather than essential. The name that was
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: his nature is replaced by names that describe his activity.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: A name that describes your nature connects you to your source,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: because your nature, in the Hebrew understanding, is not something
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: you manufactured. It is something you received the particular form
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: of the gift. And when you are in right relationship
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: to the giver of the gift, your name is the
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: truest thing about you. When the relationship to the source
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: is severed, the name that describes your nature becomes inaccessible,
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: not taken away as punishment lost the way a quality
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: fades when the conditions that sustained it are no longer present,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Like the color of a flower that has been cut
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: from its root, still briefly visible, then gone. You cannot
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: be called the light bringer when you are no longer
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: in the presence of the source of life. The second
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: thing lost was the gifting. Whatever form Ezekiel's description of
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: beauty and sound takes, the text is clear that it
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: was constitutive, oriented toward the source. The natural expression of
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: a being in full alignment with the place it was
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: made for. That gifting was not free standing, not self sustaining.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: The resonance of a particular instrument in a particular harmony
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: with a particular source. The tuning fork produces its natural
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: tone when it is struck in the right conditions. Separated
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: from those conditions, the fork does not produce a different tone.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: It produces silence. The being who was made for the
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: expression of beauty in the direction of the source walked
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: away from the harmony. He was part of the gifting,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: which was never his gifting alone, but the most central
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: voice in a harmony encompassing the whole created order, was
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: no longer available to him in the way it had been.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: He still exists. The tradition is clear that his existence
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: did not end, but the resonance that was his nature
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: is no longer the sound his existence makes. That is
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: not a small loss. That may be the most profound
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: loss that a being constituted as he was could possibly experience.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: The third thing lost was nearness. In the Hebrew understanding
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: of Shiole, the defining quality is not physical suffering. It
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: is distance from the divine presence. The rabbis who studied
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: these texts understood that the most fundamental characteristic of that
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: place is simply that the warmth and light and life
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: that characterize the divine presence are not present there. The
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: beings in Shiole are not experiencing theatrical torment. They are
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: absent from the thing that gives existence its quality of
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: a liveness. And the being who had been nearest of
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: all was now furthest of all, not merely one step
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: away from the presence he had covered with his wings,
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: not merely outside the innermost ring in the place the
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: tradition describes as the maximum distance from the presence, the
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: location at the furthest remove from the source of all
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: light and being and life, from the center of the
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: center to the edge of the farthest edge. There is
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: no spatial metaphor adequate to describe the distance of that movement.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: There is only the quality of the silence, the same
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: silence that follows a great loss, the silence of a
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: room where someone used to be, the silence of a
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: harmony with a voice missing, the silence of a name
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: that is no longer being spoken because the reality it
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: described is no longer present. Receive or sees near or far.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: The name that describes your nature, or the names that
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: describe your activity, the harmony of the whole, or the
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: silence of the isolated instrument. These are not abstract theological categories.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: These are the choices that are made in ordinary lives,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: in ordinary rooms, in the ordinary moments, when the hunger
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: st urs and the five I wills begin to whisper.
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: The fall of Lucifer is not a story about what
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: happens to a cosmic villain. It is a story about
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: the maximum distance between what a created being was made
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: to be and what a created being can choose to become.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: And it is told, in the tradition, not to frighten you.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: It is told to show you the distance, and then
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: to show you that the distance, however great, is not
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: the last word, but that comes later. For now, sit
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: with the silence of the absence. The wings that cover
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: the mercy seat are gone. The gifting that was his
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: nature is no longer part of the harmony. The name
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: that meant light is no longer being spoken in the
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: place where light lives. Eke how you have fallen. The
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: lament is real, and it is the right response to
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: a loss. This great, not triumph not contempt. The ek
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: grief at the sight of what was and what is
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: no longer, and the gap between them. That the five
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: I wills produced. Chapter seven, Many Names, one emptiness. In
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: the ancient world, a name was not a label. We
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: established this in the first chapter when we sat with
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: the three syllables of Haleel and discovered that the name
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: was not merely what this being was called, but what
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: this being was. The name described the nature. The name
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: connected the being to its source. The name was the
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: truest thing available to say about a person before they
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: had done anything at all, Which means that when a
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: being begins to acquire new names, when the tradition records
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: a succession of different names applied to the same being
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: across the span of the Biblical narrative, something significant is
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: being communicated, not just a change of terminology, a change
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: of what the terminology is, pointing toward the progressive replacement
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: of an original nature with the accumulation of what has
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: been done in the absence of that nature, from what
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: you are to what you do, from the gift to
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: the activity that fills the space where the gift used
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: to live. Before we walk through the names, one honest
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: note about how they function across the biblical text. In
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: the New Testament, several of these names are applied directly
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: to a personal spiritual being, the adversary, the enemy of souls,
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the one Jesus addresses in the wilderness. In the Hebrew scriptures,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: some of these terms function differently. Satan, for instance, appears
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: in job with a definite article, has Satan the adversary
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: a role within the divine council, rather than immediately a
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: proper name for a single cosmic figure. The Christian tradition
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: across centuries has read these names as pointing to the
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: same being, and that is the reading we are following tonight.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: But the naming is a process across the canon, not
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: a single moment of renaming. With that frame in place,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: let the portrait emerge hey lel gone, never used again
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: after the fall. What appears instead is a series of names,
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: each one describing a different function, a different activity, a
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: different way that the being whose wings once covered the
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: mercy seat now moves through the created order. The first
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: name is Satan. The word comes from the Hebrew root satan,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: meaning to oppose, to obstruct, to act as an adversary.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: In its earliest Hebrew appearances, it functions as a common
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: noun ha Satan the adversary, the one who opposes in numbers,
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: an angel of the Lord, stands as a Satan before Balam.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: In the Psalms, the writer prays against those acting as adversaries.
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: The word describes a function, not an identity, And then
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: across the New Testament, the article disappears, and what was
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: a description of a role becomes a proper name. Satan
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: the adversary, the opposition, the one whose defining characteristic is
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: that he is against. Think about that transition for a moment.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: Haleel the light Bringer a name rooted in nature, a
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: name that said what this being was in itself, apart
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: from any relationship to any other being. Satan the adversary.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: A name rooted in relationship, A name that says nothing
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: about what this being is in itself, only about how
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: it stands in relation to something else. The adversary has
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: no identity apart from what it is adversarial toward. The
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: opposition is defined entirely by what it opposes. From a
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: name rooted in nature to a name rooted in opposition.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: From what you are to what you are against. That
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: is not a minor shift in terminology. That is a
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: description of what happens to identity when it is severed
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: from its source. When you are no longer defined by
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: the gift you carry, you begin to be defined by
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: your relationship to the thing you have rejected. You become,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: in the most literal sense, the one who is against it.
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: The second name is diabolos, the Greek word that gives
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: us our English word devil. It comes from the verb diabalo,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: meaning to throw across, to cast between, to put something
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: in the way of something else. In ordinary Greek usage,
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: it described slander, the act of throwing accusations across the
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: space between two people, putting false words in the way
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: of a relationship. The diabolos is the one who throws
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: things between, the one who inserts obstacles, the one who
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: takes the space between two parties and fills it with distortion,
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: with accusation, with the kind of language that makes connection
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: harder rather than easier. Compare this to Michael, whose name
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: is a question that opens space. Who is like God?
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: The question creates room for the answer to be received,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: room for the truth to arrive, room for the relationship
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: between the created being and the Creator to be grounded
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: in reality. The diabolus does the opposite. He fills the
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: space between with things that close it down. And the
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: technique of the diabolos, the throwing between, is precisely what
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: appears in the Garden of Eden. Not a direct attack,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: not a frontal challenge, something thrown across the relationship between
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: the human beings and their creator, a question designed not
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: to seek information, but to introduce a gap where there
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: had been none. The technique is the same because the
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: goal is the same, the spreading of the turn away
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: from the source. The third name is beeld Zebul. The
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: origin of this name is disputed among scholars, and the
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: dispute is itself worth noting. Honestly, the most widely accepted
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: etymology traces it to the Hebrew bal Zebub, meaning lord
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: of the flies, the name of a Philistine deity in
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: the Second Book of Kings, but some scholars argue for
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: an alternative reading, bal Zebul, meaning lord of the high dwelling,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: lord of the exalted house. If the second reading is correct,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: the irony is precise and devastating. The being who declared,
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: I will ascend to heaven, I will raise my throne
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: above the stars of God, I will sit on the
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: mount of Assembly is now associated with a name that
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: means lord of the high place. But the high place
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: he lords over is not the mount of Assembly in
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: the far reaches of the north. It is the domain
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: of corruption and decay. The highest aspiration of the five
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: i wills has produced the smallest domain. The one who
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: reached for the incomparable has arrived at the decomposing Whether
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: or not the bal Zebel reading is correct, the name
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: functions in the New Testament as a description of the
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: ruler of the demonic realm, and the word ruler is significant.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: In his original state, this being was not a ruler.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: He was a worshiper, a covering cherub, positioned for nearness
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: and service and the expression of beauty in the direction
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: of the source. He was made to cover the mercy seat.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: He is now described as ruling the realm of opposition.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: From the posture of the worshiper to the posture of
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: the ruler, from proximity to control, from nearness to ownership,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: the five eye wills have produced exactly what they were
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: reaching for, in exactly the inverted form that grasping always produces.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: Pause here for a moment. Three names in, and the
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: portrait is already complete enough to be felt rather than
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: merely understood. The light bringer who became the adversary, the
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: one who opens space, who became the one who fills
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: space with obstacles, the worshiper who became the ruler of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: the diminished domain. There is a weight to that accumulation.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: Let it settle before we continue. The fourth name is
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: the serpent. In the mythologies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan,
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: the serpent was associated with wisdom, with cunning, with the
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: kind of intelligence that operates beneath the surface of things,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: that moves through the undergrowth of reality rather than across
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: its open plains. Revelation twelve uses this name deliberately, the
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: great Dragon, that ancient serpent who is called the devil
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: and Satan. The text is stacking names, layering them, showing
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: that the figure who appears in Eden, and the figure
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: who fights in Heaven, and the figure called the adversary
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: throughout the Hebrew scriptures are in the traditions reading the
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: same being viewed from different angles. The ononsient serpent present
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: from the earliest chapters of the human story, not a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: new arrival ancion, moving through the undergrowth, using whatever intelligence
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: remains available after the turn, in the service of the
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: only project his identity has left to organize around the
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: spreading of the turn. The fifth name is the accuser.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: Revelation twelve identifies the dragon as the accuser of our brothers,
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: who accuses them day and night before God day and night.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: The phrase is the detail that matters. The accuser does
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: not stop. The accusation is continuous, without rest, without pause,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: without the mercy of silence. And here is the theological
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: observation the tradition has always found most important about this name.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Accusation is not the same as truth telling. Truth telling
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew tradition is an act that serves restoration.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: The prophet who says you have sinned is telling the
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: truth in the service of return and healing. The friend
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: who says you are heading somewhere that will hurt you
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: is telling the truth in the service of the relationship.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: Accusation in the traditions underst standing is truth telling stripped
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: of love and redirected toward condemnation. The accuser is not
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: necessarily wrong about the facts. The accuser may have an
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: accurate catalog of failures. But the accuser presents those facts
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: not in the service of restoration, in the service of
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: a verdict, in the service of the argument that the
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: human being is not worth the love being extended to them,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: that the grace being offered is not deserved and therefore
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: should not be given day and night. The accuser never
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: stops making that argument. A therapist named William, who practices
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest and has spent twenty years working
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: with people who struggle with shame, says that the figure
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: of the accuser is the figure his clients encounter most
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: directly in their interior lives, often without any religious framework
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: for what they are experiencing. He said this shame is
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: not guilt. Guilt says I I did something wrong, and
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: guilt can be addressed by acknowledgment, repair and restoration. Shame
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: says I am something wrong, and the voice of shame
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: is not interested in repair. It is interested in verdict.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: It catalogs every failure, every inadequacy, every moment when the
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: person fell short of who they wanted to be, and
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: it presents that catalog not as an invitation to growth,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: but as evidence for a conclusion. The conclusion that the
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: person is not enough, not worthy of the love being offered,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: not worthy of the relationship being extended. He paused. That
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: voice has a name in the tradition, the accuser, And
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: what strikes me about that is that the tradition is
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: not saying the accuser invents the failures. The tradition is
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: saying the accuser is real, and the failures may be real,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: but the interpretation placed on the failures, the use to
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: which the catalog is put is the work of a
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: being whose entire existence has been re built around opposition
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: to the relationship between the creator and the created. He
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: is right, and that reading matters enormously for the person
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: lying awake at midnight with the catalog running. The failures
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: may be real, but the verdict the voice is drawing
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: from them is not the only verdict available. Now, step
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: back from the individual names and look at the portrait
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: they compose together. Halo, the nature, the light, the gifting,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: the nearness, Satan identity built on opposition, diabolus, identity built
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: on disruption of relationship. Be el Zebul, the aspiration inverted
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: into the diminished domain, the serpent, the ancient intelligence moving
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: through the undergrowth of human history, the accuser, the cataloger
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: of failures in the service of condemnation. Every one of
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: these names describes a relationship to the created order. Everyone
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: describes how this being moves in relation to the human
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: beings and the divine purposes and the created world that
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: came after the fall. Not one of them describes what
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: this being is in itself apart from those relationships, because
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: there is nothing left in the traditions telling that this
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: being is in itself apart from those relationships. The nature
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: was lost, the gift was refused, the resonance was severed
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: from the harmony. The name that described what was real
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: about this being is no longer being used. What remains
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: is the accumulation of functions, the sum of what is
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: done in the absence of what was. A retired English
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: teacher named Margaret, who has spent fifty years reading literature
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: and thirty years studying scripture, says that the succession of
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: names in this tradition is the most sophisticated piece of
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: character writing she has ever encountered in any text. She
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: said this, the best writers understand that a character's names
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: are not labels, they are revelations. Each name a character
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: is given reveals something about who that character is. And
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: what is extraordinary about the naming trajectory in this tradition
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: is that it spans thousands of years of text and
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: shows with enormous precision the progressive replacement of identity with
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: function of nature, with activity of being, with doing. The
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: character who begins as the light Bringer, named for the
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: most beautiful threshold moment in the natural world, ends as
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: the accuser, who catalogs failures day and night. And the
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: distance between those two names is not a distance across
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: which the character has traveled. It is a distance across
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: which the character has been replaced, she paused. The being
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: who carries all those later names is the same being
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: who carried the first name, but the first name no
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: longer describes the reality, and the later names together describe
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: what has filled the spe that the first name vacated,
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: Identity rebuilt entirely from the outside in nature, replaced by activity,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: being replaced by doing. This is the portrait that the
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: many names compose, and before we move to the next chapter,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: one final observation for the person in the quiet room
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: to night, the interior voice that speaks in the small hours,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: the voice that runs the catalog of inadequacies and shortcomings,
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: and moments when the five eye wills whispered and were answered.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: The voice that draws from the accurate record of real
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: failures the conclusion that the verdict is condemnation and the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: grace is not warranted. That voice has a name in
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: the tradition, and knowing its name means you know what
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: it is, And knowing what it is means you know
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: that the verdict it draws from the catalog is not
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: the only verdict available. It is the accuser's verdict. But
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: there is another voice in the tradition, and that voice
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: is not catalog. In your failure, that voice is speaking
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: your name, the real one, the one that describes your nature,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: the one that was known before you were made. The
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: night is still both voices are present. You get to
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: choose which one you listen to. Chapter eight, The Garden
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: and the First Strategy. Picture this a garden in the
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: early morning, before the heat of the day, the dew
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: still on the ground. Two human beings in the fullness
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: of what they were made to be, in the fullness
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: of the relationship that was the natural condition of their existence,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: in a world where the Shalam was still intact and
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: the wound had not yet been made, and moving through
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: the undergrowth, quiet as a shadow, the ancient serpent. We
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: know who the serpent is now. We have spent seven
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: chapters building the portrait. The light Bringer, whose name is
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: no longer used. The covering Cherub, who walked among the
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: stones of fire and covered the mercy seat with wings
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: made of dawn and sang at the laying of the
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: foundations of the world. The being whose five I wills
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: broke the shalom of the created order, The being who
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: lost the name, the gifting the nearness, the being who
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: is now in the language of the names, the adversary,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: the one who throws between the ancient serpent, moving through
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: the undergrowth of human history with a single objective, the
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: spreading of the turn, the transmission of the same interior
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: movement that produced the five I wills into every human
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: heart it can reach. What happens in the Garden is
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: not primarily a story about human weakness. It is a
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: story about a strategy, the most sophisticated strategy ever deployed
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: against the human race, designed not by a being with
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: limited knowledge, but by the being who, before the fall,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: was full of wisdom, who understood the deep structure of
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: the created order from the inside, who knew from the
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: position of the covering cherub exactly how the shalam held
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: together and exactly where it was most susceptible. He knew
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: exactly what he was doing, and what he did was this.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: The serpent, says Genesis three, was more crafty than any
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: other beast of the field. The Hebrew word is arum
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: in the wisdom literature of ancient Israel. A room describes
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: the intelligence that understands the mechanism of things, that can
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: identify the precise point at which a structure is most vulnerable,
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: and apply pressure exactly there, not brute force Precisian. And
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: then the serpent speaks, And the first thing out of
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: his mouth is not an argument. It is a question.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: Did God actually say you shall not eat of any
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: tree in the garden? Read that question slowly, because what
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: it is doing is not immediately obvious. The question is inaccurate.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: God did not say they could not eat of any
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: tree in the garden. God said they could eat freely
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: of every tree except one. The question misrepresents the instruction,
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: making it sound more restrictive than it is. But the
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: inaccuracy is not the point. The inaccuracy is the mechanism.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: What the question is actually doing is this. It is
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: not asking for information. It is not genuinely curious about
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: what God said. It is inviting Eve to enter a
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: particular mode of engagement with the divine instruction, a mode
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: of evaluation, a mode in which the divine word is
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: not received and trusted, but examined and subjected to the
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: judgment of the one receiving it. Did God actually say?
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: Three words that transform the relationship between the receiver and
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: the giver of the instruction, Three words that move the
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: human being from the position of the receiver standing in
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: trust before the source of the gift, to the position
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: of the evaluator, standing in judgment over what the source
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: has said and deciding whether it seems reasonable. This is
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: the Diabolos strategy made visible, the throwing between a question
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: inserted into the space between the human beings and their creator,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: a space that had been clear, a space that now
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: contains something that was not there before. A philosopher named Andrew,
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: who teaches ethics at a university in the American Northeast,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: says that the Serpent's opening question is something he keeps
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: returning to, not just as a scholar, but as someone
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: who has watched the same move play out in ordinary
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: human relationships his entire life. He said, I keep coming
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: back to this passage because it shows something I see
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: in ordinary life all the time. The question does not
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: attack the instruction directly. It does not say the instruction
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: is wrong. It does something much quieter and much harder
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: to defend against. It introduces a space between you and
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: the word you have received, a space in which you
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: are now positioned as the judge of whether the word
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: deserves to be trusted. And the moment you step into
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: that position, something has already shifted. You are no longer
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: simply receiving. You are evaluating, and that shift, quiet as
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: it is, changes everything that follows. He paused. What strikes
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: me most is how little force it required, not an argument,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: a question, and the space was open, and then the
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: serpent took the next step. You will not surely die,
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: for God knows that when you eat of it, your
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: knowing good and evil. There it is, you will be
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: like God. The same aspiration as the fifth I will
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: I will make myself like the most high. But notice
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: the extraordinary precision of how it is deployed. The serpent
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: is not presenting this as his own desire. He is
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: presenting it as something being withheld from the human beings
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: by the divine instruction, something they could have that they
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: deserve to have, that is being kept from them by
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: a command whose motivation is not their good but God's
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: self interest. For God knows that phrase is the center
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: of the strategy, not the promise of what eating will produce,
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: the imputation of a motive to the divine command. God
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: is withholding this from you, not because it would harm you,
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: but because God does not want you to have it.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: The command is not protective, it is possessive. This is
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: not an argument about the content of the instruction. It
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: is an argument about the character of the one who
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: gave the instruction, and that distinction is everything, because if
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: the instruction is wrong in its content, you can examine
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: the content and find the error. But if the giver
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: of the instruction is untrustworthy in their motivations, then no
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: examination of the content can settle the question. The doubt
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: is not about what was said. The doubt is about
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: whether the one who said it actually wants what is
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: good for you? Did God actually say? The gap is introduced,
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: for God knows the motive is impugned, you will be
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: like God. The alternative is offered three moves, three precise
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: applications of the ARAM intelligence to the exact point where
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: the relationship between the human beings and their creator was
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: most vulnerable. Not vulnerable because the relationship was weak, vulnerable
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: because it was new, because the human beings had not
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: yet had time to build the deep history of trust
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: that survives the question of motive, the kind of trust
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: that comes from years of watching some one's actions correspond
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: to their words, The kind of trust that says, I
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: know this person well enough to know that when they
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: say something I do not fully understand. The problem is
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: my understanding, not their character. The strategy worked not because
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: the human beings were full because the strategy was designed
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: by a being who understood the structure of the relationship
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: exactly well enough to know where it would be most susceptible,
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: and deployed it at the moment of maximum vulnerability. And
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: what happened next is what the tradition spends the rest
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: of its narrative trying to address. She saw that the
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: tree was good for food, and that it was a
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: be desired to make one wise, three observations, three evaluations,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: each one made from the position of the judge rather
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: than the receiver, each one measuring the tree against the
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: human being's own criteria of value. And so she took
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: to her husband, who was with her, and he ate
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: the taking, the giving, the eating. The same structure as
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: the five eye wills, the same interior movement, the same
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: replacement of receiving with grasping of trust, with the judgment
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: that the self can determine better than the source what
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: the self needs. And then, immediately in the very next verse,
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: the nakedness. The eyes of both were opened, and they
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: knew that they were naked. This is the promise fulfilled.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: Their eyes were opened, as the serpent said, they do
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: know something they did not know before. But what they
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: know is not what the serpent implied they would know.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: What they know is exposure, vulnerability, the specific quality of
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: being seen without the covering that the relationship with the
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: creator had provided. And they covered themselves with fig leaves.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: The first act of self protection in human history. And
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: then they hid, and the divine voice comes walking in
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: the garden in the cool of the day and asks
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: the question that is not a request for information, but
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: a lament in the same register as the ache, where
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: are you? Not because the creator does not know where
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: they are? The Creator knows exactly where they are, behind
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: the trees covered in fig leaves, hiding from the one
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: who made them and placed them in the garden and
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: gave them everything, and walked with them in the cool
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: of the day. Where are you? The question is not geographical,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: The question is relational. Where are you in relation to me?
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: Where are you in relation to the nearness? That was
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: the natural state of your existence until the question was
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: introduced into the space between us and the man said,
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: I heard the sound of you in the garden, and
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. Afraid, naked, hidden,
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: three words that describe the exact opposite of the condition
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: they were created for. They were created for trust, not fear,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: for the covering of the relationship, not the exposure of
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: the self, for presents, not hiding. The serpent's strategy had
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: produced it exactly what it was designed to produce, not
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: the death of the relationship, the fracture of it, the
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: introduction into the human story of the same quality of
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: distance that the fall had introduced into the cosmic story,
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: the same movement from nearness to hiding, from covering to exposure,
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: from receiving to grasping. The garden is not merely an
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: ancient story. It is the template of the oldest interior
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: experience of the human race. Where are you? The question
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: is still being asked in the garden of your life
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: to night, behind whatever you have covered yourself with, in
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: whatever hiding place the weight of the day has pushed
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: you toward. The voice is still walking in the cool
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: of the day, and it is still asking the same question,
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: not in anger, not in accusation, in the same register
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: as the ike, with the same quality of grief at
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: the sight of a nearness that has become a hiding
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: Where are you? Chapter nine, Job and the Court of Heaven.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: A man named Job is sitting on an ash heap.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: He is scraping his sores with a piece of broken pottery.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: Everything he had is gone, the live stock, the servants,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: the children, his health. His wife is telling him to
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: curse God and die. His three friends have been sitting
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: in silence with him for seven days because the suffering
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: is too great for words, and they are about to
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: start talking. And when they start talking, they will say
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: every theologically reasonable thing that can be said about why
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: this is happening, and every word of it will be wrong.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: But before we enter the ash heap, we need to
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: go somewhere else. First. We need to go to the
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: Divine Council, because the ash heap is not where the
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: story begins. The story begins in the first two chapters
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: of Job in a scene that has disturbed careful readers
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: for more than two thousand years. Not because it is violent,
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: not because it describes suffering, though it does with a
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: specificity and intensity that have never been surpassed in the
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: literature of any tradition. It disturbs careful readers because of
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: what it says about where the adversary is allowed to go.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: The scene is the Divine Council, the assembly of the
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: sons of God, the celestial beings who stand before the
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: divine presence, and among them, on a specific day, there
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: comes the figure identified as Hasatan, the adversary. God asks
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: him where he has come from, and he answers from
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: going to and fro on the earth, and from walking
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: up and down on it. One of the most unsettling
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: verses in the entire Biblical tradition. A being who has
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: been cast out of the innermost ring of the divine
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: presence is nevertheless present in the Divine council, nevertheless engaged
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: in conversation with the Divine voice. The ancient interpreters understood
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: the divine council in Job as a kind of cosmic
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: court room. The function of the adversary, the har satan,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: in this context is the function that his title describes.
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: He is the prosecutor, the one who brings charges, and
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: the case he is about to argue is not against
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: a cosmic being. It is against a human being. Does
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: Job fear God for no reason? That is the prosecutorial question,
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: not asking for information, design to introduce a doubt, not
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: about Job's behavior, about Job's motivation. Have you not put
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: a hedge around him and his house and all that
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: he has on every side? You have blessed the work
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has,
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: and he will curse you to your face. The strategy
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: in the Divine Council is the same strategy deployed in
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: the garden. Not an argument about what Job does an
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: argument about why Job does it an imputation of a
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: motive that, if true, would entirely undermine the relationship between
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: Job and his creator. Job fears God because it is
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: profitable to fear God. Remove the prophet and the real
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: Job will appear. The loyalty underneath is transactional. Take away
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: the hedge, the protection, the blessing, and the transaction will
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: be exposed. This is the oldest and most devastating challenge
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: to the integrity of any relationship. Do you love me
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: for me or for what I give you? A retired
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: litigator named Robert, who practiced for decades in the American
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: Southeast and came to the Book of Job late in
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: life after a period of personal suffering that dismantled most
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: of his prior assumptions about how the world worked, says
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: that reading Job as a legal proceeding was the framework
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: that finally made the book make sense to him. He said,
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: a verdict that is reached without testing is not a verdict.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: It is an assumption and What is being tested in
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: the adversary's challenge is not Job's compliance with a set
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: of rules. What is being tested is the nature of
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: Job's relationship with God, whether the relationship is real in
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: the sense of being grounded in something other than mutual benefit,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: whether it would survive the removal of the mutual benefit
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: he paused. In law, we have a concept called the
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: crucible of cross examination, the idea that the truth of
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: testimony is not established by the testimony itself, but by
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: what survives the most rigorous challenge. Anyone can say true
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: things in favorable conditions. The question is what remains when
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: the conditions are stripped away, when every reason to maintain
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: the position, except the position itself has been removed. He continued.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: Job is in the crucible, and the one conducting the
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: examination is the being who, before the fall was full
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: of wisdom, who understood from the inside the exact mechanism
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: by which the turn away from the source is produced.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: He is the most qualified examiner of the question of
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: whether Job's relationship with God is genuine, not because he
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: is powerful, because he is the only created being in
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: history who knows from personal experience what it looks like
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: when proximity to the source is treated as a transaction
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: rather than a gift, and the Divine Voice grants the
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: request not because it does not know the answer. The
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: tradition has always understood that the Divine Voice knows exactly
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: what Job is made of. But the knowing is not enough.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: The challenge has been made before the assembly in the arena,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: where the question is not merely what is true, but
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: what can be demonstrated to be true in conditions that
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: make the demonstration genuine rather than theoretical. And so the
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: hedge is removed and the suffering begins. A woman named Diane,
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: who grew up in a religious household in coastal New
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: England and went through a period in her forties that
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: she describes as the systematic dismantling of everything she thought
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: she understood about her faith, says that she read Job
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: during that time as someone who was inside the story
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: rather than outside it. She said, what I found was
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: not comfort, exactly, but something more valuable than comfort. I
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: found that the tradition had preserved with complete honesty, the
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: experience of a person whose suffering is real, and whose
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: relationship with God is real, and whose theological framework has
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: completely failed to account for what is happening, and the
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: tradition did not resolve that experience. It kept it. It
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: preserved the cry and the confusion and the absence of
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: an adequate explanation, and held all of it without adding
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: anything to make it more comfortable. She paused, and I
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: found the adversary's challenge in the first two chapters, and
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: I understood for the first time what was being tested,
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: not whether I would maintain correct theological positions, whether the
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: relationship was real enough to survive the removal of everything
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: that had made it feel easy and comfortable, whether I
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: loved God for God or for what God gave me.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: She was quiet for a moment. I did not answer
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: that question quickly. I am not sure I have answered
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: it fully yet, but I know that the question is
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: the right question. Job will answer the challenge, not quickly,
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: not comfortably, not without the long and honest and anguished
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: wrestling that the book preserves in its full difficulty, not
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: without the speeches that push right to the edge of
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: what the tradition considers permissible in the expression of grief
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: and confusion and the experience of divine absence. But he
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: will answer it, not by maintaining correct theological positions, by
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: holding on to the relationship even when the relationship feels
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: like absence, by refusing to let the accusers reading of
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: his own motivation be the final word, by insisting in
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: the teeth of the silence and the suffering and the
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: friend's inadequate explanations, that the relationship is real. At the
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: end of the book, the Divine Voice speaks from the whirlwind,
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: not to explain the suffering, not to answer the question
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: of why, not to provide the theological framework that would
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: make the experience comprehensible in the terms that Job and
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: his friends have been arguing in. The Divine Voice speaks
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: to overwhelm the frame of the argument with the reality
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: of the presence. Where were you when I laid the
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: question is not a rebuke, It is a reorientation, the
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: creator saying to the creature, the categories you have been
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: using to evaluate what is happening are too small. The
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: story is being told in the categor of relationship, of
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: presence of the voice that walks in the garden in
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: the cool of the day and asks, where are you
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: of the being who was at the laying of the
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: foundations and whose morning stars sang? And Job's response is
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: the response the adversary could not make, not because Job
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: is stronger or wiser, but because Job, in the crucible,
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: in the removal of everything that had made the relationship
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: feel comfortable, held on to the relationship itself. My ears
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: had heard of you, Job says, but now my eyes
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: have seen you. The adversary's challenge failed not because the
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: suffering was not real. It was not because the questions
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: had answers, many of them did not, but because the
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: relationship was real because Job loved God for God, Because
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: underneath the loss and the confusion and the theological inadequacy
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: of every framework his friends offered, the relationship was the
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: thing of value, the hedge, not the blessing, not the prosperity,
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: the relationship itself. Does Job fear God for nothing? Yes?
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: The answer after everything is yes. And the adversary, who
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: asked the question out of the depths of his own
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: inability to love the Creator for the creator's own sake,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: who projected his own transactional experience on to the human being,
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: he was cross examining watched a human being on an
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: ash heap hold the thing he had thrown away, the
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: relationship for its own sake, the nearness as gift rather
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: than transaction, the receiving rather than the seizing. Job sat
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: on the ash heap, broken and confused, and he had
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: what the adversary had thrown away. The question the adversary
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: asked in full confidence of the answer has been answered
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: differently by human being after human being across the millennia,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: not because they were stronger than the adversary, but because
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: they were receiving so something he had stopped being willing
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: to receive, the gift, the nearness, the relationship for its
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: own sake. Where were you when the morning stars sang?
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: They were not there? But they are here now. And
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: the answer that Job gave from the ash heap is
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: still available in any room, in any darkness, at any hour,
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: to anyone who is still willing to stay. Chapter ten,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: The Wilderness and the Three Temptations forty days, no food,
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: no shelter from the heat, nothing but the reduction of
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: the desert, the specific silence of a place where everything
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: that is not essential has been stripped away, and what
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: remains is the unmediated confrontation between who you are and
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: what you are being offered. It is into this silence
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: that Jesus went after his baptism, and at the end
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: of the forty t when the body had reached the
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: limit of its ordinary reserves, when the hunger had become
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: something closer to the body's fundamental protest against its own dissolution,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: the tempter came. We know who the tempter is. We
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: have spent nine chapters building the portrait, and by now
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: the portrait is complete enough that when he appears in
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: the wilderness, we can see not just what he is doing,
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: but why Not just the content of the temptations, but
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: the strategy underneath them. Not just the words being spoken,
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: but the intelligence that designed them and the long history
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: of their deployment that preceded this specific encounter. He is
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: not improvising. He has been refining this strategy since the garden.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: The first temptation, if you are the Son of God,
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: command these stones to become loaves of bread. Most people
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: who have heard this framed as a temptation about appetite,
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: have heard it incompletely. The depth is in the opening words,
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: if you are the Son of God, not a question
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: seeking information, a challenge to identity, a conditional that introduces
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: a gap between Jesus and his own identity, a gap
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: in which the temptation is designed to operate. If you
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: are who you are, prove it. If the relationship between
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: you and the Father is what was declared at the baptism,
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: demonstrate it by using what the relationship provides in the
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: service of what your body needs. This is the Garden's
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: strategy in its most refined form. In the Garden, the
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: gap was introduced between Eve and the divine word did
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: God actually say? In the Wilderness, the gap is introduced
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: between Jesus and his own identity If you are the
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: son of God. The conditional opens a space in which
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: the identity has to be proved rather than inhabited, and
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: the proof being requested is the use of divine provision
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: for self interested purposes. The relationship with the Father treated
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: as a resource to be activated when the circumstances require it.
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: Jesus answers with Deuteronomy eight verse three. Man shall not
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: live by bread alone, but by every word that comes
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: from the mouth of God. The answer refuses the frame entirely.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: The relationship with the Father is not a resource to
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: be activated in moments of need. It is the source
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: of life itself, more fundamental than bread. The word that
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: comes from the mouth of God is not a supplement
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: to ordinary sustenance. It is the thing that sustains existence
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: at its most basic level. The first temptation failed because
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: Jesus refused to treat the relationship as a transaction. The
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: second temptation, then the devil took him to the pinnacle
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: of the temple. If you are the son of God,
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: throw yourself down, for it is written he will command
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: bear you up. The adversary has changed his approach. He
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: now uses ripture. He quotes Psalm ninety one accurately and
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: in context. The promise is real, the angels will bear
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: you up. The divine protection is genuine. But the use
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: to which the genuine promise is being put is the test.
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: Throw yourself down, force the issue, create the condition that
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: requires the promise to be fulfilled on the terms of
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: the one being protected, rather than received in the ordinary
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: course of the relationship. Make yourself the architect of the
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: circumstances in which the divine protection is activated, so that
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: you control when and how the relationship manifests. This is
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: dressed in the language of faith, while operating as the
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: mechanism of control, not asking Jesus to distrust the Father,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: asking him to engineer the conditions under which the Father
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: must act. Jesus answers with Deuteronomy six, verse sixteen, you
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: shall not put the Lord your God to the test.
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: The answer cuts directly to the mechanism. Testing the Lord
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: your God is not an act of faith. It is
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: an act of control. The placement of the self in
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: the position of the one who determines the conditions under
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: which the relationship will be verified. The replacement of trust,
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: which receives without demanding demonstration, with the test, which requires
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: demonstration before receiving. The second temptation failed because Jesus refused
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: to treat the relationship as a performance to be managed.
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: And then the third temptation again. The devil took him
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: to a very high mountain and showed him all the
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: to him, all these I will give you if you
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: will fall down and worship me. The very high mountain,
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: the mount of assembly, the place of comprehensive vision, the
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: imagery of the third I Will, and from it the
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: offer all the kingdoms of the world, all the glory
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: of the human civilizations that have grown up across the centuries.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: Everything the mission of Jesus was sent to restore, offered
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: in a single transaction, without the cross, without the suffering,
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: without the going through the valley of the shadow, all
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: of it instantly on the terms of the one making
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: the offer. The price is a single act of worship.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: Fall down and worship me. This is the temptation that
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: strips away all sophistication and reveals what has been underneath
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: every temptation since the five I Wills were first spoken.
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: Not the elimination of worship, the redirection of it. Fall
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: down and worship me, the being whose name once meant
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: the one who carries the light of dawn, the covering cherub,
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: the morning star, the being who walked among the stones
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: of fire and covered the mercy seat, and sang at
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: the laying of the foundations of the world, and then said,
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: I will make myself like the most high. What the
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: five I Wills were all wha is actually reaching for
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: was not power, not authority, not the throne above the stars.
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: Worship the thing that had been directed toward the source.
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: The thing, the being whose gifting was oriented toward the
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: expression of beauty in the direction of the source, had
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: been made to give, and had turned away from giving,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: and had been trying to redirect toward itself ever since.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: Fall down and worship me. And Jesus answered with the
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: most direct and final statement of the three responses, be gone, Satan,
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God,
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: and him only shall you serve. The name spoken directly,
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: the strategy named the frame rejected not with a counter argument,
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: but with a declaration, you shall worship the Lord your God,
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him,
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. The
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: angels came not as proof, not as the demonstration the
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: second temptation had tried to engineer. They came in the
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: natural course of the relationship, after the testing was over,
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: in the ordinary way that the relationship provides what is
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: needed when what is needed is needed after the testing,
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: in the silence that follows the final refusal, in the
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: desert stripped to its fundamental elements, now simply the place
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: where Jesus is and where the relationship is and where
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: the ministering arrives, because the relationship provides it not as
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: a transaction, as a yift. There is something the tradition
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: has always noticed about the three temptations that is easy
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: to miss when you read the account in isolation. Jesus
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: responds to every temptation with a verse from the Book
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is the book of Moses' final speeches
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: to the people of Israel before they enter the promised Land.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: A book given to a people who have spent forty
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: years in the wilderness. A book about what it means
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: to be in relationship with God in conditions of hardship
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: and uncertainty, and the absence of the comforts that would
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: make the relationship easy. Each quote Jesus uses is drawn
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: from the section of Deuteronomy dealing specifically with the lessons
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: of the wilderness experience. The verse about bread and the
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: Word comes from the passage about the manner. The verse
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: about not testing the Lord comes from the passage about Massa.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: The verse about worshiping the Lord only comes from the
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: central declaration of Israel's covenant. The adversary brought the strategy
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: he had been developing for the entire span of the
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: human story. Jesus answered with the scripture written for people
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: who had been in the wilderness before, people who had
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: faced the same questions about provision and trust and the
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: nature of the relationship, people who had sometimes failed the
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: testing and sometimes passed it, and who had left in
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: their failure and their faithfulness, a record preserved for exactly
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: this moment. The wilderness was not a new encounter. It
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: was the culmination of every encounter that had preceded it.
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: The Garden, the Divine Council, the long span of the
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: human story in which the strategy had been deployed and
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: refined and applied to every variation of the human experience
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: of the relationship with the Creator, and in the wilderness,
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: the strategy met its final refusal not because Jesus had
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: more will power than job, not because he had more
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: spiritual discipline than the human beings in the garden, but
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: because the three refusals were not acts of resistance. They
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: were acts of reception, the inhabiting of the relationship on
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: its own terms, the receiving of the gift rather than
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: the management of the provision, the trust rather than the test,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: the worship directed to its only legitimate object begone Satan,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: the name spoken clearly, the strategy named, and the wilderness
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: stripped to its fundamental elements, containing nothing the strategy could use.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: Becomes the place where the ministering angels arrive, not as
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: proof as yift, the same gift that has always been
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: available to anyone willing to receive it on its own terms,
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: in any desert, in any reduction, in any place where
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: the ordinary cushions have been stripped away, and what remains
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: is the unmediated question of what the relationship actually is
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: and what it is actually for. The angels are still
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: coming in the silence after the final refusal, as yift,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: as they always have been. Chapter eleven, The end of
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: the story and the weight of a choice. The story
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: has an ending, not an ambiguous trailing off, not an
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: unresolved tension left hanging in the air for subsequent generations
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: to interpret as they will, an ending declared in the
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: last book of the Christian scriptural canon, in the twentieth
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: chapter of Revelation, in language that the tradition has read
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: for two thousand years, as describing the final resolution of
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: the conflict that began when the five I wills were
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: first spoken. Before we enter the ending, one honest word
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: about the text itself. Revelation is written in apocalyptic literature,
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: a specific ancient genre that communicates through symbol and vision
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: rather than through the kind of historical reporting we are
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: accustomed to. The tradition has never reached complete consensus on
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: how to read all the details of the twentieth chapter,
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: the thousand years, the binding, the release, the precise sequence
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: of final events. These have generated careful and ongoing debate
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: across two millennia of Christian reading. What the tradition has
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: consistently understood across those interpretive differences is the direction of
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: the story. It moves toward resolution, to w award, the
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: completion of what the fracture began, toward the closing of
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: the wound that was opened when the five I wills
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: were first spoken in the innermost ring of the divine Presence.
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: With that frame in place, let the ending speak. An
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: angel comes down from heaven with the key to the
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: bottomless pit and a great chain, and he sees the dragon,
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: that ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan, the
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: stacking of names again, the dragon, the oncient serpent, the devil, Satan,
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: the tradition making sure the reader understands exactly who is
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: being described. Every name that replaced the name that could
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: no longer be used, every title built from function rather
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: than nature. Every label accumulated across the span of the story.
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: We have been telling, all of them pointing to the
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: same being. The covering Cherub, the morning star, helel ben Shachar,
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: and he is bound. What follows is described in the
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: language of vision, and the tradition continues to debate its
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: precise meaning. What is not debated is the direction, And
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: near the end of the chapter, after the binding and
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: the passage of time, comes a detail that the tradition
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: has preserved with particular care. He is released, not permanently confined,
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: given one more moment in which the direction of movement
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: is available to be reconsidered, and the text says, he
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: will immediately come out to deceive, not he might, he
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: will the choice confirmed, given the opportunity to choose differently,
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: The adversary moved immediately and without hesitation, in the same
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: direction he had always been moving. And then the conclusion,
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: lake of fire and sulfur. There it is before we
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: go further sit with the weight of it. Not theologically
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: first personally a retired pastor, not Thomas, whom we have
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: met before, but a woman named Grace, who spent thirty
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: five years in ministry in the American Pacific Northwest, and
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: who spent the last decade of her career teaching theology
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: at a small seminary, says that she never reaches the
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: end of Revelation twenty without pausing in the specific silence
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: of the ache. She said, the lament is still appropriate
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: at the end of the story, may be more appropriate
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: than at any other point, because at the end of
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: the story, the full distance of the fall is visible
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: from the morning Star at the founding of the world
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: to this and I do not feel triumphant when I
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: read it. I feel the grief, the grief that is
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: not incompatible with understanding that the choice was made with
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: full knowledge and full understanding. But grief and justice are
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: not mutually exclusive. The tradition has always known that she
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: is right. The ancient rabbis who preserve the story of
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: the Crossing of the Red Sea also present deserved a
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: tradition that when the Egyptians drowned. The angels began to celebrate,
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: and God silenced them. Do not celebrate when my creatures
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: are drowning, even them. The loss of a created being
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: from the place it was made for is not a
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: cause for celebration. It is a cause for the ache.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: Now the question that the ending forces into the open.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: If the tradition's most fundamental claim about the nature of
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: the divine is that God is love, then how is
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: this ending consistent with that love. Different theological traditions have
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: answered this in different ways, and those differences are genuine
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: and ongoing. What the text itself presents is a detail
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: that many different readings have found significant. He was released,
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: and he immediately chose the same direction. The choice was confirmed,
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: not imposed, not extracted by force. The adversary, given one
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: final opportunity to receive, rather than sees to orient toward
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: the source rather than away from it, moved immediately and
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: without hesitation, in the direction he had always been moving.
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: The Lake of Fire, in this reading, is not the
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: destination chosen for the adversary by a force external to himself.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: It is the destination that the direction of his own
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: choosing confirmed. In the garden confirmed before the Divine Council
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: in Job, confirmed in the wilderness, confirmed in the final release,
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: has always been pointing toward the maximum distance from the source,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: which is what you arrive at when you have been
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: moving away from the source consistently and finally and completely.
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: This is one theological interpretation among several, not a claim
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: that stands beyond all honest debate, but it is the
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: interpretation that most carefully reads the detail of the release.
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: The adversary chose, and the choosing, not the punishment, is
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: what produces the destination. But the story does not end
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: only there, because embedded in the larger narrative, Revelation twenty
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: is not the final chapter. What follows is this a
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: new Heaven and a new Earth, the Holy City coming
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: down out of Heaven from God, the dwelling place of
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: God with humanity. He will dwell with them, and they
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: will be his people, and God himself will be with
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: them as their God. He will wipe away every tear
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more.
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: For the former things have passed away. The Shalam restored,
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: not merely returned to its original condition, something described as new,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: something that has been tested because the question that the
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: adversary raised in the Divine Council has been answered. Across
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: the full span of the human story, the relationship between
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: the creator and the created has been demonstrated to be
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: genuine in the crucible of the cross exams, in the
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: garden and the wilderness, and the ash heap and the
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: empty tomb. The shalam restored is not the naive shalam
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: of the before. It is the proven shalom of the after.
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: The story ends in two places simultaneously, at the furthest
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: remove from the source, where the direction of the five
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: I wills has finally and completely arrived, and in the
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: new city, where the relationship is restored and proven and
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: inhabitable in a way it could not be before the testing,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: because the testing has revealed what the relationship actually is.
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: Two endings for a story that began in the same place,
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: and everything in between is the account of what the
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: fracture produced and what was done about it, and how
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: the healing moved through the human story, and what it
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: cost and what it accomplished. The night is quiet, and
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: the direction of the walking toward the source or away
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: from it is being chosen in every ordinary life, in
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: every ordinary room, at every ordinary hour, one choice at
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: a time, in the small and uncelebrated decision of which
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: voice to listen to in the silence, the accuser who
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: catalogs the failures and draws the verdict of condemnation, or
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: the voice that walks in the cool of the day
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: and asks, with the quality of grief rather than anger,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: where are you? Both voices are present, The choice is
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: always available, and the road begins here, in this room,
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: in this night, in this breath, Chapter twelve, The mirror
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: that the story holds up. There is a reason this
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: story has survived for three thousand years. Not because it
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: is dramatic, though it is. Not because it involves cosmic
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: conflict and the longest arc of narrative tension in the
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: history of human literature, though it does. Those things are true,
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: but they are not the reason. The reason is simpler
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: and more personal than any of them. That the story
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: has survived because every generation of human beings who has
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: encountered it has looked into it and seen themselves. Not
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: the dramatic version, not the cosmic version, the quiet, ordinary,
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: every day version that lives in the interior of a
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: human life, and does not require a throne room, or
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: a pinnacle of the temple or a high mountain to
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: play out the version that plays out in a quiet
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: room at a late hour, when the people you love
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: are sleeping and you are awake with something you cannot name.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: To night. Before we move to the final words of
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: this long night together, let the story do what it
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: was designed to do. Hold it up as a mirror,
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: not to accuse, not to produce the catalog the accuser
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: runs day and night, but to show with the same
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: honesty and the same care that the ancient writers brought
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: to the preservation of the ache. The ways in which
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: this story is not only about a cosmic being who
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: fell from the innermost ring of the day vine presence.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: It is a story about the oldest interior experience of
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: the human race. Begin with the five I wills, not
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: as cosmic declarations spoken from the position of the covering cherub,
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: as the whisper that every human being who has ever
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: lain awake in the small hours has heard in some form,
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: the whisper that says the life you are living is
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: not the life you were meant for, that what you
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: have is not enough, that The gap between where you
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: are and where you should be is real and can
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: be closed by reaching, by grasping, by making yourself into
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: the person who deserves the thing you do not yet have.
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: I will be enough. I will be more than I am.
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: I will elevate myself above the circumstances limiting me. I
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: will transcend the conditions keeping me from what I was
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: made for. I will make myself into what I need
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: to be. Five variations on the same sentence. Not evil sentence,
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: not villanous declarations, deeply human ones, the sentences that run
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: in the interior of ambitious people, of wounded people, of
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: people who were told they were not enough and have
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: spent decades trying to prove otherwise. The tradition is not
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: saying that ambition is wrong. It is not saying that
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: the desire to grow, to develop, to become more fully
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: what you were made to be is the road to ruin.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: The tradition is saying something more precise. The eye will
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: that generates itself from the interior, that treats the self
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: as the source of its own becoming, that reaches upward
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: by turning away from the source rather than toward it,
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: is not the road to what it is reaching for.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: A man named Kevin, who works in East London, describes
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: himself as someone who spent twenty years building a version
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: of himself that turned out not to be him. He
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: said this once to a group of people who had
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: gathered to talk about faith and doubt and the experience
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: of the distance between the life you are living and
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: the life you were made for. He said, I knew
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: exactly what I wanted to become. I had a very
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: clear picture, and I worked toward that picture with everything
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: I had. I was disciplined, I was focussed. I arrived
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: at the picture. I became what I had decided to become,
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: and I stood there in the picture and felt nothing,
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: not emptiness, exactly something worse, the specific quality of having
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: arrived and finding that arrival was not what the arriving
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: was supposed to feel like. He paused, What I understand
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: now looking back, is that the picture I was working
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: toward was a picture I had painted myself from the inside,
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: from my own understanding of what I should be. I
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: had not received the picture. I had manufactured it. And
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: the difference between a received life and a manufactured life
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: is not visible from the outside. But from the inside,
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: from the place where you live, in your own skin.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: In the difference is everything, Kevin is describing the five
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: I wills in the language of a contemporary life, and
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: he is describing the arrival at the same destination Isaiah's
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: dicationed not a dramatic plunge into cosmic darkness, the quiet
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: and specific emptiness of arriving at a destination you chose
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: entirely on your own terms, and finding that the terms
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: you chose were not the terms of your own nature.
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: You have become like us. Now hold the mirror up
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: to the second dimension, the strategy in the garden? Did
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 1: God actually say the question that throws things between the
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: imputation of a motive to the divine instruction that makes
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: the giver of the instruction seem less trustworthy than the
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: gift they are offering seems desirable. Every human being who
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: has ever been awake in the small hours has heard
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: some version of this question. Does God actually love you?
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: Does the care you have been told is extended to
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: toward you actually extend to someone like you with the
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: specific catalog of failures and inadequacies that the accuser has
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: been compiling, does the grace being offered actually apply to
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: your case? Does the one who made you actually know
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: what you are and still want the relationship? The tradition
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: preserved the story of the Garden not to produce despair
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: about human vulnerability to the question, but to name the
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: question for what it is. It is the diabolos strategy,
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: the throwing between the insertion into the space between the
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 1: receiver and the giver of a question about motive, designed
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: not to seek truth but to produce the turn. Knowing
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: the name of the strategy does not make you immune
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: to it, but knowing the name means you know what
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: it is, and knowing what it is means you know
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: that the doubt the question produces is not evidence. It
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: is a strategy, the oldest strategy in the history of
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: the created order, aimed at the exact point where the
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: relationship is most susceptible to the question about motive. The
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: character of the one who gave the gift is not
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: established by the absence of doubt. It is established by
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: the history of the relationship, by the long account of
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: the voice that walks in the cool of the day
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: and asks where are you, the voice that speaks from
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: the whirlwind to job and does not explain, but is
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: present the voice that sends the angels in the wilderness
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: after the final refusal, the voice that is described at
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: the end of the entire tradition as the one who
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: will wipe every tear from every eye. The question that
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: throws things between is not the truth about the giver.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: It is the strategy of the one whose identity is
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: built on opposition to the relationship between the giver and
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: the receiver. Knowing that does not silence the question, but
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: it changes what the question means. And the third dimension
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: of the mirror, the Job dimension the adversaries challenge before
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: the divine council. Does Job fear God? For nothing? Is
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: the relationship genuine or transactional? Is the nearness about the
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: relationship itself or about what the relationship provides? Every human
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: being who has walked through the removal of the hedge
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: has faced this question in some form, not in a
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: cosmic courtroom, in an ordinary life, in the season when
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: the things that made the faith feel easy and comfortable
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: are removed, when the prayer does not produce the expected answer,
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: when the hedge comes down, and what is left is
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: the bare question of whether the relationship itself is the
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: thing of value, or whether the relationship was always a
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: transaction in which loyalty was maintained because loyalty was profitable.
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: That is the hardest question the mirror can hold up,
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: because it cannot be answered theoretically. It can only be
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: answered in the living of it, in the sitting on
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: the ash heap, in the maintaining of the position when
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: every external reason to maintain it has been removed. There
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: is no short cut to that place, and the tradition
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: does not offer one. What the tradition offers instead is
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: the company of everyone who has been in the same
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: place before. Diane in coastal New England during the dismantling years,
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: Robert in the Crucible, Kevin in East London, standing in
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: the picture he had painted for himself and finding it
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: empty and underneath all of them job sitting in the ash,
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: refusing the easy framework, holding on to the relationship in
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: the absence of every external reason to hold onto it,
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: and arriving at the end of the holding at the
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: eyes that see. My ears had heard, but now my
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: eyes have seen. That is the answer to the adversary's challenge,
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: not a theological argument, an experience. The experience of a
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: relationship that survived the removal of everything except itself, and
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: was found in the surviving to be real. The mirror
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: shows you the adversary, and then it shows you Job,
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: and it asks in the specific quiet of this specific night,
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: not as a verdict, but as an orientation, which direction
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: is the reaching pointed away from the source or toward it.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: You are not the adversary, You are not Job. You
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: are the person in the room right now, holding both
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: possibilities in the specific quiet of the night that has
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with the clock. And the source that
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: the adversary turned away from and that Job held on
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: to in the ash heap is the same source that
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: has been present in this room to night, not as
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: a doctrine to be evaluated, as a presence to be received.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: The ache that brought you here to night is not
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: a problem to be solved. It is the compass, the
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: built in incompleteness of a creature who was made for
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: a fullness that this life con gesture toward but cannot deliver.
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: The ache is the five I wills felt in the
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: body before they have chosen their direction. It is the
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: hunger that preceded the turning in the adversary, and that
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: preceded the receiving in Job, and that is present in
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: you right now as the signal that you were made
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: for something that nothing available in ordinary life can fully
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: contain or satisfy. The ache is not evidence that something
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: has gone wrong. It is evidence of what you were
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: made for. And the thing you were made for has
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: not withdrawn from this room. It is here the adversary
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: turned away from the source of his own light and
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: spent the rest of the story trying to generate from
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: within himself the light he had been receiving for free.
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: You do not have to make that choice to night.
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: The light is still coming from the source. The gift
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 1: is still being given. The relationship is still being extended
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: on the same terms it has always been extended on.
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: Not the terms of the transaction, not the terms of
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 1: the test, not the terms of the five I wills,
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: the terms of the receiving, the terms of the open
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: hand rather than the grasping one. The story of Lucifer
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: is the story of what happens when the being nearest
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: to the source decides that nearness is not enough. The
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: story of Job is the story of what happens when
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: a human being on an ash heap decides that the
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: relationship is enough, even when the hedge is down, even
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: when the framework has failed, even when the ears have
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: heard but the eyes have not yet seen. Even then,
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: the relationship is enough, and the source from which it
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: comes has been here, in this room, in this night,
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: in this breath the whole time, not waiting for you
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: to be worthy, not waiting for you to resolve the questions,
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: not waiting for you to silence, the accuser's catalog already here,
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: already extended, already present in the specific quality of this
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: specific silence, hailed turned away from it, job held on
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: to it, And the story told in this room tonight
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: has been told for one reason, to show you that
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: the thing Job held on to is still here, still available,
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: still being given on the same terms receive it. The
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: ache is the compass, the breath is the gift, and
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: the one who gave it has been watching over your
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 1: going out and your coming in. He will be watching
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: when the morning comes.
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 2: You made it through the night, not through the night
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 2: in the sense that the darkness has necessarily ended, though
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 2: perhaps by now it has through the night, in the
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: sense that you stayed, you listened, you walked through the
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: full weight of the oldest story the tradition has preserved
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: from the morning Star at the founding of the world
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: to the new city at the end of the age,
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 2: and you are still here. That matters more than you
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: may realize right now, because the accuser's strategy is not
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 2: only the strategy of the five I wills. It is
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: also the strategy of the not enough. The voice that
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: says the story you just heard is for other people,
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 2: for people whose faith is cleaner, or whose lives are
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 2: more ordered, or whose relationship with the divine is less
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: complicated than yours. The voice that says the grace is
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: real but does not apply to your specific case. That
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: voice has a name, and its name is not the truth.
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 2: So before this night ends, before the words run out
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 2: and the silence takes over, and the breath that has
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: been moving through you carries you down into whatever the
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: rest of the night holds, let these words be spoken
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: directly to you, not to the general you, not to
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: the audience, to the specific person in the specific room,
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: who brought the specific weight of the specific day in
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 2: to this night and has been carrying it through every
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: chapter of this long story. You came here tonight with something.
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: Maybe it was grief, the specific weight of a loss
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 2: that has not finished working its way through you, and
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: that settles back the moment the ordinary distractions stop. Maybe
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: it was the five I wills in their ordinary human form,
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 2: the sense that the life you are living and the
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 2: life you were made for are not entirely the same thing,
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: the gap between them, the reaching that has not arrived.
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 2: Maybe it was the accuser's catalog, the running inventory of
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 2: failures and inadequacies and moments when you chose the wrong direction.
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 2: Maybe it was the job dimension, the ash heap season,
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: the removal of the hedge, the framework that used to
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: hold everything together and no longer does. The prayer that
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: used to feel like a conversation and now feels like
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 2: words sent into a silenceance that does not respond. Maybe
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 2: it was all of these at once. Whatever it was,
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: whatever it is, you are still here, and the tradition
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 2: that has been speaking through this long night has something
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 2: to say to you directly. You are not Lucifer. I
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: want to say that clearly, because the accuser, who is
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: always in the business of applying the worst possible reading
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: to the evidence, would like you to hear the story
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: of Lucifer and see yourself in it. Would like you
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 2: to hear the five I wills and recognize them in yourself,
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 2: and conclude that the recognition makes you the dragon. You
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 2: are not Lucifer. You are a human being in a
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 2: quiet room who is still here. The distinction matters enormously.
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 2: The being whose story we have told to Night made
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 2: the turn in the position of maximum nearness, with maximum wisdom,
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 2: with full knowledge of the source, and full understanding of
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: what the source was, and full awareness of what it
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 2: would cost to turn away from it. And he turned away.
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 2: You are not in that position. You are in the
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 2: position of a human being who was created with the
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 2: capacity for the relationship, but who is still in the
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: process of learning what the relationship is, who is still
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 2: accumulating the history that transforms the herd of the ears
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 2: into the scene of the eyes, who is still, in
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 2: most moments somewhere in the middle of the journey. And
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: being in the middle of the journey is not the
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 2: same as having turned away. The ache is not a
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 2: turned back. The ache is a compass, the signal of
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: a creature who was made for something and knows it,
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 2: and has not yet fully arrived at it. The ache
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 2: is the evidence of the orientation, not of the abandonment.
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 2: The accuser will tell you that the presence of the
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: ache is proof of the distance. The tradition says something different.
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 2: The tradition says that the ache is the proof of
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 2: the making, the evidence that you were made for the fullness,
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 2: the signal that you have not settled for less than
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 2: what you were made for, even when settling would be easier,
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 2: even when the reaching has not arrived. The ache is
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 2: not a verdict. It is a direction. And the direction
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: is not away from the source, it is toward it. Now,
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: let us pray not the prayer of people who have
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 2: resolved everything and arrived at theological clarity and organized their
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: lives around the correct doctrinal framework, the prayer of people
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 2: who are still here, who are still in the room,
• 2:12:41
  Speaker 2: who are still breathing. Father, We come to you tonight,
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 2: not from the position of the covering cherub, not from
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 2: the innermost ring, not from the place of maximum proximity
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 2: and maximum wisdom. We come from the ordinary rooms of
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 2: ordinary lives, carrying the ordinary weight of the ordinary ways
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 2: that the five eye wills whisper in ordinary hearts, the
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 2: reaching that has not arrived, the hunger that has not
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 2: been satisfied, the gap between who we are and who
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 2: we sense we were made for. We come carrying the
• 2:13:16
  Speaker 2: questions that the diabolos throws between the did you actually
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 2: say questions, the doubts about your character that settle in
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 2: the quiet moments and are harder to answer in the
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 2: small hours than in the daylight. We come carrying the catalog,
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 2: the accurate record of the moments when the turn happened,
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 2: when the grasping replaced the receiving, when the five eye
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: wills were answered in the small and ordinary ways that
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 2: they get answered in ordinary lives. We are not bringing
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 2: you a cleaned up version of ourselves. We are bringing
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 2: you the actual version, the one that is still here
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: in the room at this hour, with the weight still
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 2: present and the questions still open. And we are asking
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 2: for the thing that the tradition has always said, you
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 2: give to people who show up like this, not the fullness.
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 2: Yet we understand that the fullness is at the end
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 2: of the road, not the beginning, but the present tense
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 2: of it. The presence that was real in the garden
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 2: before the question was introduced, the presence that was real
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 2: in the whirlwind that spoke to job, the presence that
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 2: was real in the wilderness where the angels came after
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 2: the final refusal. We are asking for the awareness of it,
• 2:14:34
  Speaker 2: for the capacity to receive it on your terms rather
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 2: than ours, on the terms of the gift, rather than
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 2: the transaction, on the terms of trust, rather than the test.
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 2: We are asking to hear our names, not the names
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 2: built from the catalog, Not the names that describe our
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 2: function in the space where our nature used to be.
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 2: The real names, the ones that describe what we were
• 2:14:59
  Speaker 2: made to be before we had done anything at all,
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 2: The ones that were known before we existed, the ones
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 2: the accuser cannot find in the catalog because they were
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 2: given before the catalog began. You have been maintaining the
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 2: relationship through every chapter of our lives, through every ash
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 2: heap season, through every removal of the hedge, through every
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 2: moment when the framework failed and what was left was
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 2: the bare and uncomfortable question of whether the relationship itself
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 2: was the thing of value. You have been maintaining it.
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: We are still here, and the breath is still moving.
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: The morning Star whose name meant light, who turned away
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 2: from you and found in the turning only. The place
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 2: defined by the absence of your presence is not our story.
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 2: Our story is still being written, and the direction it
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 2: is written in is the direction of this prayer toward you,
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 2: however imper however slowly, however many times, the direction has
• 2:16:06
  Speaker 2: to be recalibrated toward you. Hold us in that direction
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 2: not because we are strong enough to hold ourselves there,
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 2: because you are strong enough to hold us. Because you
• 2:16:18
  Speaker 2: are the presence job held on to in the ash
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 2: heap and found real. Because you are the one who
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 2: walked in the garden in the cool of the day
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 2: and asked, where are you, Not to condemn, but to find,
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 2: Because you are the one whose name is not a
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 2: question but the answer to every question. Not I will
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 2: I am. I am the Lord, your God. I am
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 2: the one who called you by name. I am the
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 2: one who knew you before you were formed. I am
• 2:16:48
  Speaker 2: the one who has been watching over your going out
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 2: and your coming in. I am the one who is
• 2:16:53
  Speaker 2: here right now, in this room, in this breath, in
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 2: this silence that is not the silence of absence, but
• 2:17:02
  Speaker 2: the silence of a presence that does not require noise
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 2: to be real. I am rest now the story has
• 2:17:11
  Speaker 2: been told, all of it, from the Morning Star to
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 2: the New City, from the covering cherub to the empty tomb,
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 2: from the five eye wills to the one word that
• 2:17:22
  Speaker 2: receives them receive. The ache is the compass, The breath
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 2: is the gift. The direction is toward the source, and
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 2: the source has been here the whole time. Halel turned
• 2:17:36
  Speaker 2: away from the light. You do not have to. The
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 2: light is still coming. Sleep now. The name he speaks
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: when the morning comes is not the accuser's name. It
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 2: is yours, the real one, the one that describes what
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 2: you were made to be, the one that has been
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 2: true since before the catalog began, the one the Morning
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 2: Star forgot, and that you still here, still breathing, still
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 2: in the room, at the end of this long night,
• 2:18:07
  Speaker 2: still can receive sleep. Now. The light is traveling toward you.
• 2:18:12
  Speaker 2: It has been traveling toward you the whole time, and
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 2: it will find you when the morning comes.