God doesn’t send us data about Himself; He gives Himself. His self-revelation is personal, Jesus-shaped, and it reconciles us with Him—presence, not info. Arguments and analysis have their place, but they can only point; they can’t put you in the room with Him. An arm’s-length evaluation of Jesus won’t land us at His feet; knowing God is communion, not mental mastery, and the Spirit draws us into that communion. This knowing unfolds slowly: God formed a people—from a promise in Abraham’s tent through Israel’s worship and prophets—so that, in the fullness of time, we could recognize the One who came. And if we ask how we know Him at all: God isn’t one more thing among all other things that we study and come to know, so He comes to us. Revelation is self-giving love—the Father sends the Son, the Son reveals the Father, the Spirit includes us. What God does shows who God is, and He has done it in Jesus: not more data, but the Person Himself, bringing us in and, by the Spirit, healing our sight so we share the Son’s knowing of the Father.
Now, Part III goes where God actually started: in a tent and with a promise to a man named Abram. We watch God make a people—not by dropping ideas down from on high, but by crafting a very particular history—teaching them a grammar for recognizing His Son: altars and feasts, law and mercy, kings and prophets, exile and return. It’s formation, not filler; not wash, rinse, repeat; not promise, failure, punishment in a loop. By the time Jesus walks on, He doesn’t float in like an unexpected, unintelligible alien; He arrives as the fulfillment—and the story God wrote across history becomes the eyes through which we see Him.
God’s Revelation begins in history, not in ideas.
It started with God electing a man named Abram (to whom God would give a new name: Abraham). Abraham would be the person through whom God would establish a pathway to his ultimate self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Through Abraham, God would create a people (who would come to be called Israel) through whom God would establish the necessary context for His eventual Revelation in Jesus Christ to be intelligible.
God starts His self-revealing actions with Abraham.1 The starting point is not the communication of timeless, abstract ideas or first principles. He begins with concrete actions—interactions with a real person within history, actions that start to reveal who He is. He begins a story (His story—hisstory, history) that unfolds in real time. God’s self-revelation takes shape within history.
Israel is not background—it is the essential framework for understanding Christ.
And so, God establishes in history a framework—a concrete history, a structure, a medium—through which His Revelation unfolds. And as it does, He progressively prepares the human race to participate in true knowledge of Himself.
Israel is not a side detail. Israel is essential2 to the divine plan of Revelation and Reconciliation. What happens to Israel, and with Israel, and despite Israel, and because of Israel—all of it—is used by God to build the framework of intelligibility for understanding who He is when He fully reveals Himself in Christ. The history of Israel is Revelation building upon Revelation, over and over, across time, culminating in a fully intelligible Revelation in Jesus Christ.
Cairo, then Paris. A dark slab sits on a table—black basalt, words in three scripts pressed into it: hieroglyphic (unknown), Demotic, Greek (known). Years of staring. Years of wrong turns. Thomas Young has tugged at a few threads, but Jean-François Champollion won’t let go of the whole knot.3 He keeps coming back to the cartouches—those ovals on temple walls that hold royal names. He brings what the stone can’t supply: his knowledge of Coptic (the late child of ancient Egyptian). Possessing such knowledge was long preparation and slow schooling.
Yet nothing speaks.
Then the turn.
Names line up—Ptolemaios, Kleopatra—sounds, not just pictures. The signs are not merely emblems; they carry a voice. Hieroglyphs are partly phonetic! Cartouches and signs move from being observed artifacts to a living language—from about to with, from static data to communicative presence.
On September 27, 1822, he rushes his letter to the Académie. He shows it’s a system with rules—a mixed script of phonetic sign, logograms, and determinatives. Not everything, not at once; but enough to open the door. (Nothing is discarded: endless walls of hieroglyphic stay. They’re not replaced; they’re finaly read.)
He walks the galleries differently now. Temples aren’t mute architecture; they’re libraries. The same carved birds and reeds and suns that sat like artifacts become sentences. From symbols to speech. He starts to re-read what scholars thought they knew—guesses bow to grammar; monuments reorder memory. The past is not swapped out; it is made intelligible. World re-read.
And note the mediation. The Rosetta Stone speaks in three scripts. The Greek is the key; it lines up the unknown with the known. The Coptic—the old Egyptian tongue living on—gives the sounds their sense. The stone doesn’t bypass history; it honors it—the known carrying us into the hidden.
Picture him at his desk—pages spread, eyes lit with the recognition that has been waiting on the far side of patience. The writing was always there. Then came a key, and the walls began to speak.
After 1822, scholars re-read earlier guesses in a new light. And their understanding spirals deeper. Earlier revelations re-read in light of what has been revealed.
The Incarnation is the fulfillment, not an interruption.
All of the long history that unfolds with Israel is necessary. Only when it is complete and ready for God’s ultimate self-revelation in Jesus Christ—at just the right time, in the fullness of time4—does Jesus come.5 We would not—and cannot—know Christ apart from the story that prepares for Him.
Israel’s worship, sacrifices, Law, priesthood, tabernacle and Temple, kingship, prophecy, covenant life, land, exile and return, and scriptural memory—all form, over time, the conceptual, liturgical, and relational categories that make Christ intelligible.6
Christ doesn’t show up like we can imagine an alien might from an unknown reality—stepping out of a spaceship into human history, enacting something entirely unintelligible to us non-aliens, and then vanishing. Christ doesn’t come down as a floating figure. He arrives as the fulfillment7 of promises, covenants, and patterns God laid down—all the context necessary to understand all He will do in Jesus Christ.
The Incarnation—Jesus Christ: God as man—cannot be abstracted from the history of Israel without distorting its meaning.8 Through all of His covenant-making, law-giving, presence-dwelling, prophetic-speaking, mercy-showing, judgment-rendering, temple-centering, and wrestling with Israel, God forms the human race to recognize and receive Christ. God is not only the content (the “object”) of His self-revelation, but He also provides the means, capacity, and context by which we are enabled to know Him.
In other words, God does not stand on the far side of the chasm, waving information about Himself for us to decipher, hoping for the best. He builds the bridge, crosses the chasm, lifts the veil, and forms in us the very means of seeing and knowing Him.
God forms the knower as He reveals Himself.
God gives us the capacity, the context, and the transformation necessary to know Him.9 God forms the knower as He reveals Himself.10 This is way beyond information transfer. It is a dynamic, relational, transformative act in which God prepares and enables us to know Him.
He didn’t just speak at Israel—He made them His people, formed them through history, taught them how to hear, how to respond.11 He gave them sacrifices, priesthood, the Temple, feasts—not as ends in themselves, but to recreate in His people, across the generations, the eventual capacity to see His self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Over time, He formed a people with the spiritual, linguistic, ethical, and liturgical categories to recognize the Son—the Word made flesh—when He comes. Through Israel, God created the covenantal history necessary for His ultimate self-revelation.
Edgar Kaufmann drives with Liliane and Edgar Jr. to Bear Run. The falls are loud—spring melt, white water over rock. They want a house with a view—a picture window.
Frank Lloyd Wright12 unrolls drawings that do the opposite.
Concrete trays reach out over the torrent. Stone is quarried from the hillside and laid so the walls seem to grow from the bedrock. In the living room, the hearth isn’t imported—it’s the exposed rock itself, left rough. A hatch in the stair drops to the stream; ribbon windows carry the spray and sound. Everywhere, the water speaks. It moves through the rooms like weather.
Wright is calm. He has been listening to this site for months (years, really.) “I want you to live with the waterfall, not just look at it.” The line lands like a key in a lock. It isn’t a memo; it’s an invitation into the home's inner logic.
They walk the terraces. Ceilings press low, then explode to sky. Edges follow strata. The ochres don’t decorate; they belong. Inside, the idea shows itself: house and site aren’t paired—they’re one (why not live in it, where you can see and hear it all the time?). The desire for a framed view shrinks. This isn’t a picture of the falls. It’s a way of dwelling in them.
Driving home, the architectural drawings read in a new key. The house is of the waterfall, not looking at the waterfall: sound climbing the stair, rock ledges reappearing in the floors. What looked like lines on paper turn out to be cues for a life inside a place.
The house itself didn’t add different information; it made the same information speak—being and act as one. Not more data, but an indwelling that teaches from within.
The actions of Jesus Christ would not have been intelligible apart from the covenant with Abraham, the giving of the Law, the sacrificial system, the Davidic kingship, the prophets... the long-recorded History of Israel.13 It was this very specific covenantal history that prepared the categories (i.e., holiness, sacrifice, atonement, forgiveness, etc.) by which humanity can know God.
The Incarnation—the self-revelation of God in Christ—is organically rooted in Israel’s history—it is the climax, not an interruption. Here’s the whole movement: (i) God’s Revelation unfolds with His actions in history—(ii) covenantal actions with a very particular group of people, starting with Abraham—(iii) that culminates in the Incarnation (iv) in a way that it is not simply informational, but transformation, in that we come to know God Himself (not a symbolic representation of Him)—in His own being—because He comes to us in the very person of Jesus Christ. And so, God’s reconciling self-revelation, mediated through the personally transforming knowledge of Jesus Christ, recreates us such that (v) the Spirit of Christ can reside in us14 (vi) so that we can then participate in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father. (vii) And it is only in the communion that God is truly known.
In Christ, God’s actions are God Himself.
In Jesus Christ—in whom there is the union of divine and human natures—God makes Himself known through the actions of a human being,15 inside of time, space, and history,16 all in the long-formed and now-established context of Israel’s history—the history that makes all His actions intelligible and meaningful.
God is what He does. In Jesus, God acts toward us as who He is.17 He doesn’t pretend to be loving—He is love in His being. He doesn’t act humble—He is humility as revealed in the self-emptying Son. When Jesus heals, teaches, touches, suffers, forgives, and dies, God Himself is present and active in that human life. Jesus’ actions are not representative of God; they are not pointers in the right direction or signposts of the divine. They are the perfect expression of God’s own actions; they are God’s actions. We are not left with religious insights or divine messages. We are face-to-face with God’s very own being, embodied in human form.
God’s being is revealed in Jesus Christ. Not information. Not abstractions. Not concepts. Not ideas. The depth of His being interacts with the depth of our being. It’s personal. And the knowing is participatory, not conceptual. It’s deep, relational knowing. We don’t just learn about God from Jesus; we are drawn into communion with God through Jesus. By uniting our humanity with Himself, God reveals Himself to us within our actual human being, in Jesus Christ.
Knowing God means sharing in His communion.
God’s being is relational: He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing eternally in loving communion. To know God is not to know about that communion; it is to share in that communion.18 Only then do we know Him. Otherwise, we’re standing “outside” God—outside that communion—analyzing Him. Knowing God is not an exercise in detached observation; it is a participation.19 We are drawn into communion with Him. It is relational; our being is drawn into God’s being. God’s self-revelation is not a communication to us about God’s communion of Father, Son, and Spirit; it is the extension of that communion to us, in Jesus Christ, through the Spirit of Christ in us. If we come to know God—truly know Him—it is because we have been drawn into his being.
This is why Israel’s history is not optional background, but our indispensable schooling in the knowledge of God. To trade it for any other framework is not expansion but distortion.
All alternatives collapse into false gospels.
The long narrative of Israel’s history is the story of God working for two millennia to form the living history and covenantal matrix in which He could finally be fully known. This story is not disposable or optional. It cannot be replaced by any alternative context20—however urgent or well-intentioned—without distorting the very knowledge of God.
In Israel, God patiently prepared the historical, relational, sacrificial, ethical, and ontological conditions for His eventual complete self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This story is not a symbolic prelude to be swapped for other narratives of oppression, identity, or meaning. It cannot be replaced21 with Black Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, Trans Theology, Queer Theology, Prosperity Theology, Eco-Theology, White Christian Nationalism, Radical Individualism, Generic “Love Wins” Theology, or any framework that attempts to reinterpret the being and act of God according to the terms of human experience rather than according to God’s own self-disclosure in the experience of Israel. To do so is not to contextualize theology—it is to construct another gospel.
God’s Revelation does not arise from within our culture or identity; it breaks in from outside, rooted in the covenant with Israel and fulfilled in the incarnate life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To know God truly, we must receive Him where He has made Himself known.
Israel’s long story cannot be replaced.
Israel’s long story is the God-given structure that prepared humanity to recognize Christ. The story of Israel—the story of covenant promises (which created the forward-moving tension of divine faithfulness, culminating in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of all God’s promises), the story of the Law (which unveiled the holiness of God and exposed our radical incapacity to generate righteousness on our own), the story of a sacrificial system (which revealed the cost of reconciliation—blood, substitution, atonement—all anticipating their perfect realization in Christ’s vicarious humanity), the story of prophets (who spoke God’s self-disclosing Word, revealing His persistent faithfulness, holy judgment, and unexpected mercy), the story of the Davidic kingship (which established the royal and filial categories to recognize the Messiah as God’s Son and sovereign King), the story of the Temple (which revealed the meeting place of Heaven and earth, preparing us to recognize Jesus as the true dwelling place of God with humanity), the story of the Exodus (which revealed God as deliverer and formed Israel’s identity as a liberated people—fulfilled in Jesus, the true Paschal Lamb and leader of the new Exodus), the story of exile (which revealed the consequences of covenant rupture and awakened the longing for restoration—fulfilled in Jesus who enters our estrangement and brings us home)—all constitute God’s patient reordering of human existence that built the conceptual and relational capacity to recognize the one who was to come. God restructured human existence itself through Israel’s experience so we could finally and rightly come to know Him.
Said another way, we cannot recognize Jesus Christ for who He truly is without having been prepared by the relational structures God Himself formed in history—structures that enable us to see the Incarnation rightly. Without them, the reality of Christ would break in upon a world entirely unprepared to understand Him, and we would miss the meaning of it all. Israel became the “schooling” through which we come to know Christ for who He truly is.
May 31, 2005. A quiet living room in California.
A headline breaks online: “I’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat.” It names Mark Felt—retired FBI deputy director.22
Now the room rewinds three decades. 1972: a break-in at the Watergate complex; a White House cover-up unspools. Two young Washington Post reporters—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—chase a story that keeps slipping into shadows. Their most crucial source refuses daylight. He meets Woodward at night in a parking garage. He will not be named. They call him “Deep Throat.”
Signals become a language. A flowerpot on a balcony, nudged to the wrong spot, means: meet tonight. Steps in the dark. A whisper by a concrete pillar: keep going; be careful; check everything twice. None of that is mythology to them; it’s how truth survives when power leans on the scale.
For thirty-three years, no one knows who he is. Editors guess. Historians guess. Hollywood guesses. Then Felt says it himself, and the past re-aligns around a person. The garage scenes are no longer loose anecdotes; they’re the spine. The hush of those meetings is no longer atmosphere; it’s cost. What looked like odd details—the balcony flowerpot, the wrong-way taxi, the midnight pages—click into place. Same facts. New center.
Ben Bradlee, the Post’s editor through it all, marvels that Washington kept this secret for so long. And suddenly the old clippings read like they were waiting for this line to be spoken.
Nothing gets thrown out. The articles stand, the memos stand, the tape stands. But now the source steps from shadow to frame, and the earlier scenes start speaking in a different register (the way a melody resolves when you finally hear the key).
The revelation doesn’t add footage; it makes the old footage speak.
Here’s how it all unfolded. God’s self-revelation was a progression—building upon itself from within, formed and shaped through the lived participation of a people, not by the mere accumulation of religious ideas and information.
Starting with Abraham, God initiated a history with Israel. He entered into covenant to prepare the ground for the true knowledge of Himself.
Over time, God gave real, embodied anticipations—such as the Law, prophets, and sacrifices. These were living, mind-reshaping, God-revealing expressions, not just ideas or symbols, but actual encounters through which He prepared His people to recognize Christ.
These anticipations began to shape a partial, fragmentary structure of understanding—one that grew relationally, historically, and ontologically across generations.
When Christ came, these anticipations were fulfilled, reorganized, and re-centered in Him.23 Illuminated by His presence, they gave rise to new insights—not simply about God, but about humanity, reconciliation, and the nature of reality itself. We began to re-read earlier understandings in the new light of these insights.
In Christ’s vicarious life, death, resurrection, and ascension, our broken knowing and being were healed.24 In Him, our humanity was perfected, and this opened the way for the Spirit of Christ to be poured out and to indwell us—opening the eyes of our hearts, drawing us into the Son’s communion with the Father, and enabling us to participate in His knowledge of God.
With each insight, we see Christ more clearly, and the earlier data are re-read in the new light of that clarity. This re-reading leads to still deeper insight, which in turn leads to further re-reading—and the spiral deepens.
Revelation continues to open itself from within, led by the Spirit of Christ in us, not by external systems, theological constructs, or cultural frameworks imposed upon it.
All of this history was about preparing us to recognize a person. That person was Jesus Christ. We were prepped to not confuse Him as merely a prophet, or a moral teacher, or a messenger. We were prepped to see God in Him. He became the Incarnate Son. He didn’t bring us a message from God; He is the message, the Mediator, the Revelation embodied in person.25 He is God.
God begins with Abraham, not abstract ideas. Genesis 12:1–3 — God calls Abram and promises blessing for all nations. Genesis 17:5 — Abram renamed Abraham, father of many nations. Galatians 3:8 — Scripture “preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham.”
Israel is the framework, not the background, of Christ. Romans 9:4–5 — “Theirs are the covenants… and from them is the Christ.” John 4:22 — “Salvation is from the Jews.”
Revelation arrives in God’s time, not ours. Galatians 4:4 — “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son.” Romans 5:6 — “At the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Ephesians 1:10 — God’s plan “for the fullness of time” to sum up all things in Christ.
The Incarnation fulfills Israel’s story, it does not interrupt it. Matthew 5:17 — Christ came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. Luke 24:27 — Moses and all the Prophets speak of Him. 2 Corinthians 1:20 — “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.”
Israel’s life prepared the categories that make Christ intelligible. Hebrews 10:1 — The law’s shadows anticipate Christ. 2 Samuel 7:12–14 — A Davidic Son promised to reign forever. 1 Corinthians 5:7 — “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed.”
Christ comes as fulfillment, not as a stranger from beyond. Hebrews 10:1 — The Law is “a shadow of the good things to come.” Acts 13:32–33 — What God promised to the fathers He “has fulfilled to us.” John 5:39 — The Scriptures “bear witness about me.”
The Incarnation cannot be abstracted from Israel without distortion. Matthew 1:1 — Jesus Christ, “son of David, son of Abraham.” Luke 24:44 — Everything written in Law, Prophets, Psalms “must be fulfilled.” Romans 1:3 — God’s Son “descended from David according to the flesh.”
God gives not just information but capacity to know Him. John 6:44 — “No one can come to me unless the Father… draws him.” Ephesians 1:17–18 — The “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” opens “the eyes of your hearts.” John 16:13 — The Spirit “will guide you into all the truth.”
God forms the knower as He reveals Himself. Jeremiah 31:33–34 — God writes His law on hearts so that “they shall all know me.” Matthew 11:27 — Only the Son reveals the Father to whom He wills. 1 Corinthians 2:12 — The Spirit is given “that we might understand” God’s gifts.
God didn’t just speak at Israel, He formed them as His people. Exodus 19:5–6 — “My treasured possession… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Deuteronomy 7:7–8 — Chosen purely by God’s love. Psalm 78:5–7 — Statutes given so each generation learns to hope in God.
The actions of Christ only make sense in light of covenant history. Galatians 3:16 — The promise to Abraham ultimately “refers to… Christ.” Hebrews 9:11–12 — Christ, as High Priest, secures eternal redemption. Luke 1:32–33 — He inherits David’s throne forever. Isaiah 53:5 — The Servant bears our iniquities.
God’s reconciling revelation in Christ recreates us by the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 5:17–19 — New creation and reconciliation “in Christ.” Romans 8:9–11 — The indwelling Spirit gives life through the risen Christ.
In Jesus, God’s acts are God Himself. John 14:9 — “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Hebrews 1:3 — The Son is the “exact imprint” of God’s nature. John 1:18 — The Son “has made [the Father] known.”
God makes Himself known in Jesus’ concrete humanity. John 1:14 — “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Philippians 2:6–7 — The Son “emptied himself… being born in the likeness of men.” Hebrews 2:14 — He “partook” of our flesh and blood.
God is what He does; Christ’s acts reveal His being. John 10:30 — “I and the Father are one.” 1 John 4:8–9 — “God is love… he manifested his love among us by sending his only Son.”
To know God is to share in His communion. John 17:3 — Eternal life is knowing the Father and the Son. 1 John 1:3 — “Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son.” Ephesians 2:18 — “Through him we… have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
Knowing God is participatory, not observational. John 17:24–26 — The Father’s love for the Son is in us, and the Son in us. 2 Peter 1:4 — We become “partakers of the divine nature.” Romans 8:15 — The Spirit of adoption cries, “Abba! Father!”
All alternative gospels collapse into distortion. Galatians 1:6–9 — Any “different gospel” is anathema. Acts 4:12 — Salvation is in “no other name.” 2 Corinthians 11:4 — Beware of “another Jesus… a different gospel.”
Israel’s story is irreplaceable in God’s plan. Romans 11:1–2 — “Has God rejected his people? By no means!” Romans 11:29 — God’s gifts and calling “are irrevocable.” Jeremiah 31:31–33 — The new covenant promised to Israel and Judah.
Christ fulfills, reorganizes, and re-centers all anticipations. Matthew 5:17 — He fulfills Law and Prophets. Luke 24:27 — He re-reads all Scripture around Himself. 2 Corinthians 3:14–16 — The veil is removed “because it is set aside in Christ.”
In Christ’s vicarious life, death, and resurrection, our knowing and being are healed. 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 — Christ died and rose “according to the Scriptures.” Hebrews 2:17–18 — He became like us to make propitiation and help the tempted. 2 Corinthians 5:21 — He was “made to be sin… that we might become the righteousness of God.”
Christ is not a messenger from God, He is the Message. Hebrews 1:1–3 — God has spoken “by his Son,” the radiance of His glory. John 1:18 — The only-begotten Son “has made [the Father] known.”
