Where I Landed — and Why

For eight chapters I kept my hand off the scale. I told you at the start that I had a view and that I would hold it back until the end, and I have. This chapter is different, and I want you to feel the change as you read it. The receipts are behind us now. This one is mine — where I came down, and why — and you can close the book right here with your own tally untouched and lose nothing. If you read on, read it the way you'd hear a man across a table, not the way you'd weigh a verdict. I'll tell you when I'm standing on the text and when I'm only telling you how it sits with me. Those are not the same thing, and I've spent too long learning that to blur them now.

So here's the truest thing I can say about how I got here: I went looking to prove the opposite.

I went looking to disprove it

I was raised inside it. Baptized at ten, Sunday school, the Trinity handed to me before I could spell the word. And somewhere around seventeen I asked the question every honest kid eventually asks out loud: how does that actually work? I got the diagram — three circles, all one, all separate — and then I got the sentence that has quietly ended a lot of conversations: some things we just can't know — or that's what faith is.

It never sat right. Not because I was looking for a fight — I wasn't — but because something in me could not lay its head down on "don't ask." If the most important question a person can ask about God ended in a shrug, I needed to know whether the shrug was the truth or just the place we'd all agreed to stop digging.

So at seventeen, I left. Not God — understand that part, because it matters. I never once stopped trusting God. What I walked out of was the room where the best answer was "we can't know." I lost my faith in the teachers, not the Lord. And for years I went looking everywhere a searching man looks — eastern traditions, the Mormons, the Jewish synagogue, every stone I could find — and none of them moved the thing the diagram couldn't.

What finally brought me back through a church door wasn't a settled answer. It was a wife, and kids, and the bedrock fact that I knew God was real even while I stayed undecided on all the logistics. So I came back. But the old question came back in with me, still unanswered, and it sat there quietly for years.

"Start in the Old Testament"

Then, about ten years ago — I was thirty-eight — I finally did the simplest thing I'd never thought to do: I asked God for wisdom. It had worked for Solomon. And I got back something I can only call a direction, an answer, more or less: start in the Old Testament — your answers are there. It knocked me sideways, because I'd been handed the exact opposite my whole life. The Old Testament was the old stuff, the old promise — stories and genealogies, a closed account, a covenant we'd grown out of. Read the red letters, skip the rest, and lean on Paul — he wrote most of it anyway.

That turned out to be the most expensive wrong turn anyone ever pointed me down. So I started over at the beginning, and I went slow — into the Hebrew, and further than that, down into the old shapes the letters were drawn from. And the longer I sat in it, the more the thing I'd been told was a storybook stopped looking like a storybook at all. It read like a textbook. It read like prophecy. Every account seemed to be teaching something, pointing at something, building toward something.

Which raised a question I couldn't put back down: who was it for?

For us — of course, for us. But underneath that, the floor opened: it was for Yeshua. And the moment that thought landed next to the verses that say he grew, that he learned obedience, that he came to know what he had not always known — something cracked. I sat there and asked it plainly: why would the Author of the book need to study the book? I'll be honest that this is a place where I was reasoning, not quoting — but it's the crack the whole floor gave way through.

I tried to kill it

Here's the part I'm not proud of, and won't dress up — though I wasn't doing it out of malice. I was doing it with a genuine, truth-seeking heart. With that question lit, I went straight at the thing — and I kept at it for eight years. If the Trinity was wrong, there were really only two ways to prove it: bring down the full deity of Yeshua, or bring down the personhood of the Spirit. Topple either pillar and the three-in-one cannot stand. So I set out, in dead earnest, to topple both.

I went at Yeshua first. Should I even be worshiping Him? YHWH had said it as plainly and as jealously as He ever said anything — the worship is His, and no other's. So I tried, in earnest, to prove that Yeshua is not God.

For a good while I landed near the old Arian answer, and I was comfortable there: call him the highest creature, the first and the best, the one who simply did it right and was lifted up for it. But the deeper into the Old Testament I went, the more even that came apart in my hands — and it came apart on a thought I still find almost funny in its simplicity. A true God, all-powerful and untouchable, coming down to wear flesh for thirty-three years and die — that isn't, if you're honest about it, all that impressive. He'd be playing at it. But a human — really limited, really able to fail, walking the whole road with the door home unlocked the entire time and never once reaching for the handle — that is impressive. That's a sacrifice. And once I understood what kenosis actually means — what He truly set down — the Arian floor went out from under me too.

"What is a Memra?"

Eight years into the fight, still working to take Yeshua down a notch, I stumbled onto it — about two years ago. An old rendering, online, a Jewish hand on the opening of John — and there was a word sitting in it I had never seen in my life: In the beginning was the Memra, and the Memra was with God, and the Memra was God. I remember actually saying it out loud: what is a Memra?

I've spent every day since chasing that one word down, and I'll tell you the thing I most want you to take from this whole chapter. As I dug into it, the rest of the Bible started clicking into place. Not the way you force a puzzle piece that doesn't fit — the other way, the way a piece drops in clean and you suddenly see the picture the whole table had been making. Verse after verse I'd been told to file under mystery simply opened. One God who cannot be seen and cannot be contained — and His Word, His own going-out, who is seen, who walks, who speaks, who at last steps into flesh as Yeshua. Not a second God. The same One, in a form we could finally stand in front of.

The Ruach taught me the rest

I did not do that alone, and here is where I'll sound the least like a scholar and the most like a man simply telling you what happened to him. Somewhere in those years I took God at His word about His own Spirit:

"The anointing you received from Him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as His anointing teaches you about all things — and is true, and is no lie — remain in Him." — 1 John 2:27

I had been told my whole life that the deep things were locked, and that I needed a man with the key. That verse says something else. So I tested it. And as I read, I began to notice a kind of tingle — a quickening I can't give you a better word for — and over time I learned to stop when it came, and sit still, and listen. Because I came to know it for what it was: the Ruach, teaching. Piece after piece settled that way, not in a lecture hall but at a desk with the text open. I can't hand you the tingle. I can only tell you it was real, and that the same Helper is yours — that the verse meant what it said.

And the Spirit — the second pillar, the one I'd spent those years trying just as hard to topple — is where the whole thing finally locked. I had always been handed three beings, and I took that to the same lens I'd taken everything else, and the three-beings picture kept failing on small, quiet things. There is one throne, not two or three, and Yeshua ends up seated in it. Wisdom gets spoken of in much the same breathing, personal way the Spirit does — and nobody anywhere calls her a fourth person of God. And so much of what I'd been taught turned out to rest not on what the Bible says but on what it never says. It never says Trinity. It never says we will come and live inside you as a third someone. When I finally saw the Spirit for what the Old Testament had been calling it all along — God's own breath, His presence going out, never once a named third party — the last piece dropped. One God. His Word. His Breath. It held. That was the deciding fact for me, and it was too big to fit inside any single chapter, so I'm setting it down here, in mine.

Why it holds, in plain words

Pull all of it down to the studs, and here is the logic, as plainly as I can lay it. God said you cannot see Me; the world cannot contain Me — and He meant it. That is not poetry and it is not stage fright; it is a statement about what He is. And then He walked in the garden, and had the authority to put the man out of it. He stood in the furnace as a fourth figure in the fire. He took a body, and bled out of it on a cross. Something uncontainable kept making itself containable enough to be met.

The clearest picture I've found — and it is only a picture, so don't make it carry more than a picture can — is an author who writes himself into his own story as one of the characters. The author at his desk can't be squeezed inside the book; the character on the page can be walked with, spoken to, touched. The same person in two ways of being — the character his own creatures can meet on the page, and the author at his desk, whom they never can.

That's the whole shape of what I'm asking you to consider, and I want to be honest that the last step is mine to own: it asks you to grant a few small things. That the uncontainable God has a containable way of meeting us. That the way is His own Word, made flesh as Yeshua. Set that beside the other road — one essence, three persons, two natures, eternal relations of origin, and then, at the end, a mystery you are told you cannot follow — and judge for yourself which is the shorter list of smaller steps. The book only ever claimed this reading strains the fewest texts. I'm telling you, honestly, it's where I rest.

What it cost, and why I won't swing it like a club

I won't pretend this came cheap. It nearly cost me my mind. For about three years it lived almost entirely in my own house — my wife, my family, and a lot of careful, sideways looks across the supper table — and there were stretches in there where I honestly wondered if I was just losing it. It is a lonely thing to keep seeing something the rooms around you don't. I've made my peace with it the only way I know how: somebody saw this once. People need to see it again. And I've watched it happen — most folks who actually sit down and test it come back and say the same thing: I never saw it that way before. I think you're right.

But I will not hand it to you sharpened, and I will not aim it at anyone's church. In retrospect, this was never about tearing a thing down; it has only ever been about lifting people up — toward a Lord who is deeper and truer than the picture any of us were handed. So here is all I'm asking, and it's the same thing I asked of myself: read it, test it, live with it. If it holds, God did that work, not me. I'm a lay teacher in Iowa with a worn Bible and a stubborn streak — I do the legwork and hand the information back. When the outcome was never mine to control, I don't have to carry the weight of it. That has set me free to just show you, and let the Ruach do the part only the Ruach can do.

What it gave me

What did finding this actually give me? The honest answer is to ask it the other way: what didn't it give me. It gave me closure. It gave me peace — the kind that doesn't flinch. It showed me the real reason Yeshua walked, the real weight of what He laid down to do it, the real depth under the good news — not the shine that keeps a person comfortable in a seat, but the passion underneath, the why beneath all of it. It showed me my Lord further down than I'd ever been allowed to look. And quietly, without my noticing the day it happened, it took away a fear I didn't know I'd been carrying my whole life — that the things that matter most are sealed behind a door marked you cannot know. They are not. There are far fewer mysteries than we've been led to fear.

Where this leaves you

This is the first of these studies — the floor the rest of them stand on. Everything I've written since was built right here, on this one foundation: a study of the good news that runs from the Garden all the way to the empty tomb; one on the adversary — who he is, and the far more important matter of who he isn't; one that sits down inside Job's long silence and refuses to look away; a walk through the whole life of Yeshua, start to finish. Not one of them would read the way it does without what you've just read. Every one of them sees by this same light — the one God, His Word, and His Breath. That's why this book had to come first, and why I've told you so out loud: nothing is being done behind your back. But I am not asking you to take my landing on faith in me. I'm asking exactly what I asked of myself: go to the text, test it, and then be still and listen — because the same Ruach who taught a man who set out to disprove every word of this will teach you what you need to know. If it carries you where it carried me, the rest is waiting. And if it doesn't, you will have weighed it honestly with your own two hands — which was the whole point, from the first page.

Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. He was always one. He simply made a way for us to see Him.