Everything on this site, and in the book, rests on what Jesus Christ Himself said. What follows is held in that light, and if Scripture shows any of it to be wrong, Scripture wins.

I confess

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD

Deuteronomy 6:4

This is my confession. Israel spoke it, and Jesus Himself named it the first of all the commandments. There is one God, the Father, and I confess Him with the same words Jesus used.

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord

Mark 12:29

Three axioms

Three sentences of Christ hold everything else I believe. One is about the relationship that is eternal life. One is about how I read the Scripture that leads me there. And one is about how God makes the heavenly known: through what He made.

Knowing the Father and Christ

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

John 17:3

This is Christ’s own definition of eternal life, spoken in His prayer to the Father on the night before the cross. It is not knowing about God. It is knowing Him, the Father, and the Son He sent, the way a child knows his father. Every confession, reading and doctrine I hold derives from this one sentence. If anything I say ever conflicts with it, what I say is wrong, and the sentence stands.

Scripture cannot be broken

If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken

John 10:35

This is the rule by which I read everything, John 17:3 included. Scripture is whole and consistent. It needs no outside system to hold it together, no philosophy, no council and no creed. When a reading only works with such help, the reading is broken, never the text. The Word cannot be broken because its Author cannot be broken.

The earthly reveals the heavenly

If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you heavenly things?

John 3:12

God made the world, and even ourselves, to reflect heavenly realities. He tells us earthly things first, the things we can see, touch and live, and through them the heavenly. Without the earthly there is no knowledge of the heavenly; we need both. Whoever will not believe God about the earthly cannot receive the heavenly, as Jesus told Nicodemus. This is why He taught with seed and bread, sheep and a shepherd, a father and his son.

We do not climb up to the heavenly by our own understanding. It comes down from God, and it is received by believing (John 3:13, 27). What He shows us this way is truly known, though never fully grasped: “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20).

How God is known

“God is beyond everything we can imagine, but His Word makes Him known toward creation.”

“And it is the only interpretation that truly makes sense — since it escapes human wisdom.”

This is the posture in which I hold all of it. The first sentence refuses to shrink God: what we can imagine is never the measure of who He is. The second refuses to put Him at a distance: He has made Himself known toward creation through His Word.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

Matthew 11:25

Christ, the express image of the Father

In Christ all the Love of God is expressed — Son of God and Son of Man.

This love is meant to run through all of us like the water of life, and be expressed in Father, Mother, Child, Siblings, Neighbours.

The Tree of Life: Love gives Life.

Where Adam said: “flesh of my flesh and bones of my bones,“
in Christ we say: One in Spirit.

God is love, and Christ is the express image of the Father, so all the Love of God is expressed in Him. The current of that love is His Spirit, given to Christ, flowing through Him, poured into us, and moving through us into every human relationship.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

1 John 4:8

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus

1 Timothy 2:5

Salvation is of the LORD

Salvation is of the LORD (Jonah 2:9): received once by faith, sealed by the Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14), kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5).

What didn’t put you in cannot pull you out.

If salvation is God’s work from first to last, no human failure can undo it. The law could not save you, so the law cannot undo it. The verdict was settled at the cross, when He said “It is finished”, and not in the believer’s biography.

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

John 10:28

Where this foundation leads, in the questions that divide Christians most, is set down in What I Hold.