Epilogue

That is the road, all the way to the end of it.

I want to be careful here. The road already ended where it had to end, and I am not going to walk back onto it and end it again in a smaller voice.

What you have just read was one set of hands tracing one road out of the text. It was never the authority, and if it has done its work you no longer need it — the way you stop needing trail markers once you can see the trail. I went a little way up the path ahead of you and called back what I saw. That is all this was. I am stepping off it now, so that what stands in front of you is not me, but the text, and the Spirit who was given to read it with you.

One honest thing first: this was the bedside reading — the road walked at the pace a person can manage before sleep. It is not the digging. Under several of these chapters there is far more: the Hebrew and Greek laid all the way out, the hard passages argued where they can be fought with, the places I only pointed to opened the whole way up. That work lives in the companion studies, for whoever wants to go down rather than along. The road was kept walkable on purpose; the spade-work is real, it is there, and it is meant to be checked harder than this was.

And one more, the same thing I said at the door, said once more now that it costs something, because you have seen where it leads. Do not keep what failed the text as you walked it. If any of this did not hold, the failure is mine; the text still stands; it always stands; that was the entire point. My hope was never that you would agree with me — only that you would stop taking anyone's word for it, mine most of all, and go back to the source, which has been waiting the whole time, is better than this book, and is still open.

Go read it for yourself.

A PRAYER

Father,

the book is closed now. That is how it should be.

Keep me from loving the map more than the road,

or any voice more than Yours.

Make me slow to swallow and quick to check,

unwilling to take even this on anyone's word but Yours.

Now open the other Book, and walk with me in it.