Epilogue

That is the road, all the way to the end of it. The figure walked from the courtroom to the cross, and from the cross to the lake of fire that is still ahead of him, with the believer we have been walking with sealed and kept the whole way.

I want to be careful here. It 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.

A note on what this was. This was the bedside reading — the road walked at the pace a person can manage before sleep. It is not the spade-work. Under several of these movements 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 study, 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 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.

And one more honesty owed at this same door, because the road that dismantled the popular picture also runs past the people who taught it to you, and the last guard worth setting keeps you from running them over on the way out. The trail this book traced — Origen, Augustine, Jerome's Latin, the KJV's capital letter, Milton's verse — was not built by liars. It was built by serious people trying to do something pastoral: take the figure the New Testament actually names, fill in what the canon withholds, and give the believer a coherent picture to stand on against a real adversary. The picture got some of the details wrong. The impulse that built it was to take the figure seriously. Hold both. The correction belongs to the construction, not to the people who handed it to you. Most of the teachers who taught you wrong about Lucifer also taught you right about a great many other things, and the same body that may have read two prophets backwards is the body that handed you the gospels, the prayers, the table, and the seat at it. Correct the picture. Keep the people.

And one extra honesty owed at the end of a book like this one, which the closing movement already named but which I want to say once more in my own voice, here at the door, because the door is where it matters. Do not let the figure this book traced become the figure you now carry. This book's whole purpose was the opposite: to take the loud picture down to the size the text gives, so the believer is freer of him, not fuller of him. If at any point in this reading he has grown larger in your imagination rather than smaller, this book has failed you and you should set it down. He is on a leash. He is defeated. He is appointed for the lake of fire and is not the One who holds the keys to it. The keys are on the belt of the One on the throne. Look at Him.

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.

Keep me steadier in front of him, not fuller of him.

And now open the other Book,

and walk with me in it.