Before Anything Existed

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Understand this and the whole battle this site describes comes into focus, because the conflict was never mainly between religions or cultures. It is between truth and deception, between the kingdom of God and a kingdom of darkness that is organized rather than chaotic. Paul describes principalities, powers, and rulers of this present darkness, an ordered opposition arrayed against the purposes of God, and calls the enemy the god of this age because he blinds the minds of those who do not believe, the prince of the power of the air because he exercises real influence over this present fallen world. None of this is meant to make you obsess over darkness. It is meant to make you stop underestimating what you are up against, and to drive you to the only One strong enough to stand against it. What settles my heart every time I come back to this is that the three Persons of the one God have never worked against each other or apart from each other for a single moment. The Father plans redemption. The Son accomplishes redemption. The Holy Spirit applies redemption to the human heart. Their works are distinct and never divided, because God is perfectly one, and the same God who has loved in perfect fellowship since before time is the God who reached the whole length of Himself to bring you in. From Genesis to Revelation, the thread has always been leading somewhere. Every shadow exposed in the chapters before this one exists because the light was there first, and every substitute pointed, in its broken way, toward the real thing.

There is a moment in Genesis I walked past for most of my life without understanding what I was looking at, and when it finally opened up to me I had to stop and sit in it, because it is the whole gospel hidden in plain sight thousands of years before the cross. To feel the weight of Genesis 15 you have to understand what a covenant actually was in the ancient world. The Hebrew word is berit, and it carries the idea of cutting, because that is what they did. When two parties entered a covenant, they took animals, cut them in half, and laid the pieces in two rows with a path down the middle, and both parties would walk together through that aisle of blood, saying something terrifying and binding. If either one of them broke their end of the agreement, let what happened to these animals happen to me. Watch what God does with Abraham here, because it is not what anyone in that culture would have expected. His name is still Abram at this point in the story, two chapters before God renames him, but he is the same man you already know. God tells him to cut the animals in two and arrange the pieces, and Abraham does it, and then he waits for the part where he walks through with God to seal the deal. That moment never comes. Instead, Genesis 15:12 tells us that as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham, the same kind of supernatural sleep God placed on Adam when He formed Eve, and while he lay there unconscious, a smoking firepot and a blazing torch, the visible manifestations of God's own presence, passed between the pieces alone.

If I fail, I pay.

If you fail, I still pay.

Let that settle into your spirit. God did not make a mutual agreement with Abraham. He made a one-sided promise, and by walking through the blood by Himself while the other party slept, He was declaring something no human covenant had ever said. If I fail, I pay. If you fail, I still pay. Hebrews 6:13 tells us that because God could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself. The entire promise rested not on Abraham's faithfulness but on God's unchanging nature, and that sleeping man and that lonely walk through the pieces is the shadow of the cross falling backward across history. Thousands of years later, when humanity had failed every standard of holiness God ever set, the Word made flesh stepped into His own creation and took the cutting upon Himself. Jesus absorbed in His own body the death the broken covenant demanded, so that we could be counted righteous through faith exactly the way Abraham was counted righteous while he slept. This is the meaning behind it is finished. The promise was never hanging on your performance. It was resting the whole time on the character of the One who walked through the blood while we were still asleep in our sin. Then came Sinai, and here is where so many of us misread the Bible. We were handed the Law and told it was God's way of telling us to clean ourselves up and earn our place. That was never its purpose. The Law was given to show us what holiness actually looks like and to prove, beyond any argument we could make in our own defense, that we could never produce it on our own. Every lamb slain on every altar was a finger pointing forward to the Lamb who was coming, and Sinai was never meant to save anyone. It was meant to drive us to the end of ourselves so we would finally stop trying to walk through the pieces on our own strength and let the One who already walked through them carry us home.

Every system here has a Jesus problem. They either reduce Him, replace Him, reinterpret Him, or remove Him entirely, and each of those reductions requires you to look away from what Scripture actually says about Him, leaving you with a Jesus who cannot actually save you. The Jesus of Scripture is the eternal second Person of the triune Godhead, the Word who was with God and was God before the first syllable of creation was spoken. He is the one through whom and for whom all things were made, the image of the invisible God, the exact representation of His being, the I AM of Exodus 3:14, the one before Abraham was, the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. He did not come as a great teacher or a moral example or an enlightened guide. He came as the only solution to the only problem that has ever actually mattered. The problem is sin. The consequence is death and eternal separation from God. The solution required someone fully human, able to die in our place, and fully divine, able to bear an infinite weight of judgment on behalf of every human being who would ever live. No angel could do it, no prophet could do it, and no organization, no system, no tradition, no amount of human religious effort could do it either. Only the God-man could do it. Only Jesus. His resurrection is not a metaphor for spiritual renewal. It is a historical event, witnessed by more than five hundred people, documented by multiple independent sources, and never credibly refuted by opponents who had every political and religious motivation to produce a body and end the movement. The tomb was empty, and He appeared, ate, was touched, and spoke before He ascended, and in that day His feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, the very mountain He ascended from, and He shall return the same way He left.

One of the things that settled my fear about everything happening in the world was realizing God has never once lost control of history. He has not been reacting to it. He has been writing it, and the clearest proof is the way He used the great pagan empires, the most powerful and godless kingdoms the ancient world ever produced, as instruments in His own hand to set the exact stage for Jesus. He used Egypt, oppressive and idolatrous and violent, to grow a family into a nation, the Passover that delivered them becoming a perfect foreshadowing of the Lamb who was coming. He used Babylon to discipline that nation and purify its faith, forcing Israel in exile to confront its idolatry while Daniel was given visions there that mapped out the rise and fall of world powers before those empires had even appeared. He used Persia to rebuild what had been torn down. Isaiah had named a king called Cyrus roughly a hundred and fifty years before that king was ever born, foretelling that he would release Israel from exile and see the temple rebuilt, a precision no other ancient prophecy naming a future ruler comes close to matching. When Persia conquered Babylon, Cyrus did exactly that, funding the reconstruction of a temple his own empire had no reason to care about, because God will use whoever He chooses to keep His promise to His people. He used Greece to unite the world under one language, so that when the time came, the entire New Testament could be written in a single tongue the whole region could understand. He used Rome, brutal and pagan and controlling, to spread the gospel like wildfire, its roads and its law and its infrastructure becoming the very veins the message traveled through, even the crucifixion itself a Roman method prophesied centuries before Rome existed.

Then comes the line that ties all of it together. Galatians 4:4 says that when the set time had fully come, God sent His Son. Egypt formed a nation, Babylon purified it, Persia restored it, Greece unified the language, and Rome built the roads and the law. Every one of those empires thought it was building something for its own glory, and God was quietly using every one of them to prepare the moment His Son would step into history. If God could take the most arrogant, godless powers the world had ever seen and bend every one of them toward the coming of Jesus, then nothing happening in your life or in your generation is outside His reach either, nothing is random, and nothing is out of His hands.