Intro 2 Paul's "Christ in You" & Interior Mysticism

Christ in You: The Revolutionary Truth the Gospels Were Built to Hide

THE INTERIOR REVELATION

"The disciples came to him and said, 'Why do you speak to the people in parables?' He answered and said, 'To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.'" — Matthew 13:10-12

Christianity's survival required a transformation so profound that it rewrote the faith's form while preserving its essence. What Paul of Tarsus taught as interior divine presence—immediately accessible within human consciousness—was systematically translated into cosmic narrative, projected onto the eternal movements of the stars. This was not corruption; it was preservation through translation.

At the heart of Paul's message lies a single phrase that contains the essence of his revelation: "Christ in you." In those three words he overturned the foundations of ancient religion, declaring that divine presence was not confined to temple or priesthood but alive within human consciousness itself. This was the Gospel before the Gospels—the message that faith was not a system of belief but an awakening to what already abides within.

Such a teaching was revolutionary. It dissolved the structures upon which both Jewish law and Roman order rested. If God dwelled within every person, no institution could claim monopoly over salvation. No emperor could stand as divine intermediary. No priesthood could mediate what was already immediate.

The message he carried was too dangerous to proclaim openly, too luminous to be buried. Recognizing the hidden architecture within the Gospels allows us to trace the path backward—from the outer narrative to the illumination within that the Gospel writers risked everything to preserve.

The Mystical Thread: Paul's Teaching in the Gospel Framework

If the Gospel writers had built zodiacal architecture merely as solar symbolism, we would expect pagan mythology without interior theology. If they had written simple biography, we would expect linear narrative without cosmic structure. Instead we find something unique: Pauline mysticism embedded within astronomical design. The Gospels preserve the very teaching that could not be stated openly—the interior presence of the divine—wrapped inside a cosmic container.

Three examples make the pattern unmistakable.

Interior Presence in Community: "Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them" (Matthew 18:20). This is not Jesus promising to watch from above. It is the recognition of divine presence within gathered consciousness—the direct counterpart to Paul's "Christ in you." Matthew places this saying in the narrative segment aligned with Libra, the ancient symbol of the Scales, associated with balance, reconciliation, and right relationship. The theme and the placement mirror each other. The cosmic structure and the mystical teaching speak in one voice.

The Kingdom as Present Reality: "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). With a single sentence Jesus redirects expectation from the outer world to the inner one. The kingdom is not a descending realm but a presence already alive in awareness. This is Paul's revelation in its clearest form: the divine is not distant but interior, not mediated but immediate. Luke sets this teaching at a turning point where attention shifts from external signs to inward recognition.

Recognition, Not Appearance: On the Emmaus road, two disciples walk beside the risen Christ yet fail to recognize him until "their eyes were opened" (Luke 24:31). At that moment he vanishes—not because he leaves, but because the recognition has moved inward. They ask, "Were not our hearts burning within us?" (Luke 24:32). This is pure Pauline language: illumination in the heart, presence unveiled, not observed. Luke places this narrative at the resurrection threshold—the symbolic moment of spring's return, when light overcomes darkness.

Across these examples, a single pattern emerges. The cosmic framework provides the structure. Paul's interior mysticism provides the content. Jewish narrative provides the protective outer layer. The Gospels are not mere myth, nor mere history. They are a triple-coded text: outwardly Jewish, symbolically cosmic, inwardly mystical.

The Only Reliable Witness

Paul of Tarsus is the only New Testament letter writer whose direct experience of the resurrected Christ is historically certain. His letters—at minimum the seven universally accepted as authentic—predate the Gospels by twenty to thirty years, making him the earliest Christian author and the movement's first theological voice. Paul stands alone. His authorship is certain. His chronology is established. His claim is explicit and repeated.

In Paul's world, there was no organized religion called Christianity. The communities he wrote to belonged to a fluid, persecuted movement known simply as the Way. The term Christian would arise later, first in Antioch, and not as a badge of honor but as a taunt—a label outsiders used to mock those who followed the teachings of "the anointed one." What Paul joined was not a religion but a revelation, a transformation of consciousness that he believed had already begun within those who walked this path. It was the very path he had once tried to destroy when, according to Acts, he "went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem" (Acts 9:1-2).

At that time, he still went by his Hebrew name—Saul, the zealous Pharisee trained in the law—until an encounter so shattering that he abandoned not only his mission and his religion but his former identity.

The Way promoted radical equality: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). "Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all" (Colossians 3:11).

All and in all. This is omnipresence—not a distant deity observing from above, but consciousness itself recognized as the only divine reality, present equally in every human being without distinction.

What Paul is pointing to is not social unity alone but the ground of being from which unity arises. Beneath the differences of tribe, class, gender, and story lies the same field of awareness—the same luminous presence that he names as Christ. At the deepest level of existence, beneath the body and beneath the narratives we inherit about ourselves and others, there is one shared life. One consciousness. One source.

To awaken to Christ, in Paul’s vision, is to awaken to that source within yourself and to recognize it shining within every person you meet. It dissolves hierarchy at its root. It removes every boundary the ego depends on. It reveals that what separates us is illusion, and what unites us is the truth of our being

The Resurrection Paul Knew: Revelation, Not Resuscitation

What Paul describes is startling. And what he doesn't describe is equally revealing.

No empty tomb. No wounded body eating fish. No virgin birth. No walking on water or multiplying bread. Paul's letters—the earliest Christian documents we possess—contain none of the miracle narratives that would later define the faith. His silence tells us that for Paul, no narrative of miracles could compare to the living reality of Christ resurrected within him.

Throughout his letters, Paul maintains radical interior focus: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). "Do you not know that you are God's temple?" (1 Corinthians 3:16). "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).

When Paul describes his encounter, he writes that God was "pleased to reveal his Son in me" (Galatians 1:16). Not to me—"in me." The Greek word ἀποκαλύψαι (apokalypsai) means unveiling—something hidden made visible.

In 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, listing resurrection witnesses, he repeatedly employs the aorist passive ὤφθη—"he was seen by." In biblical Greek, this is often understood as a divine passive—God is the true agent of revelation. This distinction reveals how Paul understood resurrection itself: not as observation, but as unveiling. What he describes is not the sight of a risen body but the awakening of divine presence within consciousness.

Paul's vocabulary confirms this reading. He writes that God "has shone in our hearts" (2 Corinthians 4:6). He uses ἐπίγνωσις (epignōsis, "full knowledge" or "recognition") fifteen times—a term signifying direct experiential knowledge rather than intellectual assent. For Paul, the encounter with the risen Christ is an inward illumination: the unveiling of divine reality within consciousness.

The linguistic evolution is telling: Paul's generation spoke of revelation—"he was seen." The Gospel writers, decades later, transformed that passive grammar into active drama—"they saw him." The shift mirrors a theological one—from inner unveiling to outer event.

The Gospel of the Inner Kingdom

What emerged in Jesus was not a new religion but a challenge to religion itself. The quest for God in distant heavens gave way to revelation within human awareness. At its core lay revolutionary truths: that the Kingdom of God is not above but within; that the divine does not dwell apart from us but as the life within us; that God is not a distant ruler but the very essence of consciousness—of Love itself; and that the path to the Kingdom is the awakening to the Love already present within.

If this was true, direct and unmediated access to God was possible—and that meant the end of religion as the world had known it. The end of priests, temples, and sacred hierarchies. The end of intermediaries between the soul and the divine.

The word Gospel means “good news.” But over centuries the focus shifted. What had once turned the world inward—toward the Kingdom within—became overshadowed by devotion to the messenger himself. A revelation of divine life present in everyone slowly became understood as a story about a single extraordinary individual, rather than an invitation to awaken to that same life within ourselves.

Even Jesus resisted such confusion. When someone addressed him as "Good Teacher," he replied, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18). His words pointed away from himself toward the Source he revealed—the life of God present in all.

The Way Within

When Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), the Greek grammar itself supports a deeper reading. He does not say "no one comes to God unless they believe in me," but "no one comes to the Father except through me"—δι' ἐμοῦ—implying an experiential passage through the realized presence he embodies.

When paired with his later words, "I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" (John 14:20), the syntax describes not a hierarchy of intermediaries but a continuous field of indwelling awareness.

Read together, these words form a single revelation:

I am in the Father – Jesus participates in divine omnipresence. He knows that his awareness is not separate from God but subsists within divine life itself.

You are in me – You participate in the same reality. The same divine life that Jesus recognized within himself is the ground of your existence as well. What he realized, you can recognize.

I am in you – This divine life is in you too. The awakened presence Jesus embodied—referred to as "The Christ"—is not his possession but the universal ground of being. He is pointing not to himself as object of worship but to the interior reality available within every person.

The way to the Father is not through inherited belief in the story of the man Jesus, but through awakening to what he awakened to—the living realization that divine presence already abides within the field of consciousness itself.

"For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters." — Romans 8:29

Jesus is the prototype of the awakened human—the "firstborn" of a family whose members share his divine lineage.

Traditional Christianity would call this heresy—Adoptionism, Gnosticism, pantheism. But consider the contradiction at the heart of orthodox teaching: Christianity proclaims an omnipresent God—"over all and through all and in all" (Ephesians 4:6), and "in whom we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).

But when anyone dares to accept what omnipresence actually means—that there is nowhere God is not, including here, now, within you—they are condemned as heretics.

They want an omnipresent God in theory but not in practice. They want God everywhere except where recognition of that fact would dissolve their authority: in the immediate awareness of every person who dares to look within. For if divine presence is discovered there, then no one is spiritually superior, no one is uniquely chosen, no one owns the sacred. The illusion of specialness evaporates. The hierarchy collapses. What remains is the simple, unsettling truth that the same presence lives in all.

And the ego resists this with all its strength. It fights to preserve its sense of separateness, its imagined importance, its need to stand above or apart. It clings to roles, titles, doctrines, and identities, because the recognition of shared divine life asks it to surrender everything it uses to define itself. The ego will defend its borders even as the truth invites it to let them fall.

Seen in this light, Jesus’ words take on a different meaning entirely. This is not Jesus saying “worship me as God,” but “recognize what I have recognized—that the divine life is in all of us.” When he washes his disciples’ feet, he is not honoring their human status. He is honoring the divine presence within them, showing by his own action that no one stands above another and that the true path to God is the recognition of the sacred in every person.

Recognition, Not Belief

When Paul writes, "Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?"(Romans 6:3), he is not describing a ritual formula spoken over a believer. If he meant "baptized in the name of Jesus," he would have used the standard New Testament phrasing—εἰς τὸ ὄνομα (eis to onoma), "into the name." He does not use it here.

Instead he chooses: εἰς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν (eis Christon Iēsoun) — into Christ Jesus.

The difference marks a shift from an external rite to an interior immersion. Paul is not speaking of water poured over the body but of a change that rises within awareness itself, and he names this in Colossians 1:26 to 27, where he calls it “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints” and “the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles,” a mystery he finally states in full: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Whatever its outer expression, its meaning for Paul is unmistakable: union with the indwelling Christ, not adhesion to an external identity. The ritual immersion in water practiced today—however meaningful as symbol—does not, by itself, grant what Jesus describes to Nicodemus: the ability to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3). Millions undergo water baptism every year, yet very few emerge with the direct recognition Paul speaks of—that "Christ lives in me" as lived reality rather than doctrine.

Belief may bring someone to the threshold. Recognition is what steps inside.

It is only in this awakening that eternal life becomes more than a promise. It becomes present reality. This is the pearl of great price—the moment when your very identity merges with the eternal presence itself. When the body fails, when the mind's activity falls silent, when memory and ego—both bound to the nervous system—release their hold, what remains is not nothingness. What remains is the same presence that has always sustained you.

Those who have associated their identity solely with the body fear its ending. Those who have recognized their life in God do not, because they have already died the death Paul describes: "I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). In this inner death the separate self falls away, and the life that endures is the life of God. This is why Paul can speak of being "raised with Christ" in the present tense (Colossians 3:1). Eternal life is not a distant reward but the awakening to the life that cannot die.

"One God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." (Ephesians 4:6)

This is not pantheism. It is the recognition that we are part of the infinite ocean we attempt to name with the three letters G-O-D—its expressions, waves, and currents. We participate in God without being the whole of God. The crucial insight is this: apart from God, we are nothing. Not nothing in the sense of worthlessness, but nothing in the sense of non-existence. Our consciousness is not independently ours. It is divine awareness knowing itself in finite form.

On this reading, the resurrection that matters is present tense, immediate, available now. No temple can contain it. No priest can mediate it. No institution can control access to it.

When Silence Speaks

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him." (Matthew 6:5-8)

The room is not a chamber of stone but the interior sanctuary of awareness. To close the door is to withdraw attention from the noise of the world. To pray in secret is to rest in the silent presence that needs no words. The warning against babbling is plain: become quiet, let the mind fall still so the prayer can rise without speech.

When we surrender completely to the One in whom we live and move and have our being, the door of the inner room opens by itself. Silence becomes prayer. Stillness becomes knowing.

And immediately after this he gives the Lord’s Prayer beginning with the simple words “Our Father which art in heaven.” This is the form for those who are not yet ready for the stillness he has just described. First he calls the prepared soul into the inner room where the Father sees in secret. Then he gives a spoken pattern for beginners so they have something they can carry with them.

Paul names this same distinction when he says, “I fed you with milk and not with meat” because the community was not yet ready for the deeper food. It is the same pattern in Matthew. Deeper teachings for those who can receive it. A simple prayer for those who are still growing toward it.

Multiple voices within early Christianity point to this same truth. The author of First John writes: "The anointing you received from him abides in you and you do not need anyone to teach you. The anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, remain in him" (1 John 2:27). He does not say believe in him but remain in him. And where is he to remain? In Christ. And where is Christ? Within.

Paul described this same inner dying: "Our old self was crucified with him. If we died with Christ we believe we will also live with him" (Romans 6:6-8).

Jesus pointed to the same truth: "You are not to be called Rabbi for you have one teacher and you are all brothers. Neither be called instructors for you have one instructor, the Christ" (Matthew 23:8-10).

He does not claim "I am your teacher." He reveals that the Christ—the divine awareness he embodied—teaches from within every soul. All pointing toward the same interior teacher, the direct unmediated presence of God already alive within consciousness.

The Living Word

What follows will be difficult to read—but your response to it will reveal something profound about the nature of spiritual authority.

During Paul's time there was no New Testament, no Christian clergy, and no formal churches. The only sacred writings were the Hebrew Scriptures—what we now call the Old Testament—whose foundation was the Ten Commandments, revered as the very words of God. Yet Paul dared to describe even these commandments as "the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone" (2 Corinthians 3:7), contrasting the written code that kills with the Spirit within that gives life.

He went further:

"But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament,because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." — 2 Corinthians 3:14-17

Paul's claim is explosive: the very act of reading the old covenant as divine law creates the veil. The blindness does not come from misunderstanding a sacred truth—it comes from believing these texts ever spoke divine truth to begin with. The letter itself is the veil. Only when one turns inward—to what Paul calls the living Spirit within—is that veil lifted.

Let me show you what Paul means.

Consider the following passage—one among many in the Old Testament where violence is not merely recorded but commanded in the name of God.

After a military victory over the Midianites, Moses gave these instructions:

"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." (Numbers 31:17-18)

The text then tallies the spoils—675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys, and finally, as if worth less than livestock, "thirty-two thousand women who had never slept with a man" (Numbers 31:35).

This describes the annihilation of a people. Every male child slaughtered. Every woman who was not a virgin executed. Thirty-two thousand girls—who had just watched fathers, brothers, and mothers butchered before their eyes—listed in the same inventory as animals and divided among soldiers as property.

This is not metaphor. This is instruction—explicit, detailed instruction for genocide and sexual slavery, presented in Scripture as a command from Moses.

Now pause and consider the fate of those young girls.

Before any commentary softens it, before any apologetics appeal to "ancient customs"—

What do you feel?

That instantaneous recoil. The horror. The unarguable certainty that this is evil.

That was the Spirit speaking.

Clear. Immediate. Undeniable. More authoritative than the text itself.

But now—if you're like most people—something else is beginning to happen.

The rationalizations: "It was a different time." "We can't understand God's ways." "Who am I to judge?" "It's in the Bible, so there must be a reason."

Or perhaps anger—not at the passage, but at me for showing it to you.

Notice what's happening. The truth you felt at your deepest level is being warped, overridden. The mind, confronted with unbearable cognitive dissonance, will do anything to escape the tension. Rationalize the text. Attack the messenger. Anything except sit with the disturbing question: How did I come to accept a moral framework that requires me to rationalize genocide?

This is the veil Paul described.

Not a failure to understand Scripture, but the very act of treating it as divine authority—even when it commands atrocity. You just witnessed both in real time: the Spirit testifying against the letter, and then the letter attempting to override the Spirit.

What Love Knows Without Being Taught

The skeptic objects: Your horror at this passage is just modern sensibility. In ancient contexts this was normal.

But this misses the point entirely. If morality is nothing more than cultural habit, if there is no deeper reality that speaks across time, then Christianity has no ground to stand on. Its entire claim rests on the idea that something in the human spirit can recognize truth beyond the customs of any age.

History itself confirms this. The same interior witness that awakens moral clarity in you now is what allowed abolitionists to oppose slavery when their societies accepted it without question. Abolitionists didn't cite new scripture—they followed interior witness against culture, speaking from a place more authoritative than custom or text. It is what allowed prophets to confront kings and call injustice by its name. It is what made ordinary people begin to understand that apartheid was wrong even when the law, the culture and the church defended it.

If morality were only conditioning, none of this would be possible. There would be no reform, no courage, no prophets, no progress. There would only be the unbroken continuation of whatever a culture happened to approve.

This leads to a choice that cannot be avoided. Either God changes over time, moving from a figure who demanded regular animal sacrifice and commanded atrocities to one who is love, or our understanding of God changes. You cannot claim that God is unchanging and at the same time insist that every ancient claim about God in the Bible carries equal authority. If God is constant, then the shift must be in us, in our willingness to release the older images and hear the truth that was present from the beginning.

You just felt that truth. The recoil at Numbers 31 was immediate. It did not wait for analysis or doctrine. It rose from a place more authoritative than any text.

That was the Spirit Paul described. The interior teacher. The presence that does not ask permission to speak.

The Criterion That Tests Itself

A common objection arises immediately: If everyone has an inner moral voice, why do people disagree so often? Why do cultures come to such different conclusions? How can the heart be trusted when human conscience varies so widely?

The answer begins with a simple observation: not every impulse that arises within us is the voice of Love. Fear speaks within us. Pride speaks. Desire, tribal loyalty, conditioning, and ego all speak. This is why the early teachers gave a specific, practical way to discern the difference—one simple test that exposes illusion every time.

Jesus taught it plainly: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31)

Paul revealed the deeper truth that makes this possible: “Christ is all, and is in all.” (Colossians 3:11)

Put these together and you get a criterion that is neither subjective nor culturally conditioned. It works because it requires two acts of recognition:

1. Step into the place of the other.

   
   

2. Recognize that the same divine life moves in both of you.

When these two recognitions happen together, moral clarity becomes immediate.

Consider slavery. Would you want to be enslaved? No. Is the enslaved person inhabited by the same divine presence as you? Yes. The conclusion is not a cultural preference. It is the only response Love can recognize.

This is why the interior teacher is trustworthy. Not because every inner impulse is sacred, but because Love reveals itself by what it asks of you when you truly see the other as yourself. The ego cannot sustain that vision. Fear cannot sustain it. Only Love can.

This is not relativism. This is not sentimentality. This is the recognition of what divine presence actually is in human consciousness.

Yet for centuries Christians were taught to distrust that first, immediate knowing. They silenced the inner witness by elevating the letter instead. They blessed conquest and called it conversion. They baptized empire and named it providence. They justified crusades, inquisitions, slavery, segregation, and the subjugation of women as divine order. The command to love became a weapon.

But the voice of Love never changed. It was ignored, not absent.

At every turn, the pattern repeated: the letter exalted, the Spirit silenced.

And yet, across centuries marked by blood and smoke, the first voice never disappeared. It kept speaking through poets and prophets, mystics and heretics, rebels and saints. It kept reminding humanity of what it had always known but so often feared to trust: that Love does not harm, that God is no tyrant, and that the true temple has never been made of stone. It lives within.

The Shadow in Scripture

Before we turn to this material, I need to speak plainly. What follows is not written with pleasure. Nor is it an attack on God. It is the opposite: an attempt to defend the character of God from the actions ancient writers attributed to God.

While a book like Numbers is already unsettling to modern sensibilities—devoted as it is to ritual laws and sacrificial procedures, page after page describing how to kill, cut, burn, and offer animals on the altar—far darker truths lie beneath the surface of the Old Testament.

Consider human sacrifice.

Most people know only the story of the binding of Isaac, where Abraham hears the command to sacrifice his son but is stopped by an angel. Many take this as proof that God rejects such acts. Yet when you examine the broader biblical record, a far more troubling pattern appears.

The law itself treats the firstborn in sacrificial terms: "You shall give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep" (Exodus 22:29-30). Leviticus adds: "No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; they are to be put to death" (Leviticus 27:28-29).

Several narratives deepen this picture.

Jephthah vowed that if he won the battle, he would offer whatever came out of the door of his house to greet him as a burnt offering (Judges 11:30–31). In an ancient Israelite household, this was not a vague or innocent promise. Houses were not filled with wandering livestock. The only beings who walked through the doorway to greet a returning warrior were people—family members or household servants. Jephthah knew this from the start. He was not shocked that a human appeared. He was devastated because it was his daughter.

When she runs out to greet him with timbrels and dancing, he cries, not because the vow unexpectedly demands a human sacrifice, but because it demands her:

“Alas, my daughter… I have made a vow to the Lord, and I cannot take it back” (Judges 11:35).

And the text ends with stark finality: “He did with her according to his vow” (Judges 11:39).

No angel intervenes.

No voice forbids it.

No ram appears in the thicket.

The story simply allows the sacrifice to stand—unquestioned, uncorrected, uncondemned.

This is the part of the tradition people were never taught to see. The Old Testament does not hide what ancient Israel believed about sacrifice. It records it openly

Kings of Judah follow the same pattern:

“He sacrificed his son in the fire” (2 Kings 16:3). And again: “They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire” (2 Kings 17:17). The Torah itself contains one of the starkest commands in all of scripture:

“The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.

You shall do the same with your oxen and your sheep.”

Exodus 22:29 to 30

No qualification. No redemption ritual. Human firstborns and animal firstborns are treated in the same breath as offerings to the deity.

Ezekiel then gives the most startling confession in the biblical tradition:

“I gave them statutes that were not good…

and I defiled them through their gifts,

the sacrifice of every firstborn,

so that they might be horrified.”

Ezekiel 20:25 to 26

Here the prophet claims that Yahweh gave laws that led directly to the offering of firstborn children.

Scholars across the theological spectrum agree that Ezekiel is referring to real practices inside Yahwistic religion, not foreign rites.

Jeremiah looks back with anguish:

“They built the high places of Topheth to burn their sons and daughters in the fire,

something I did not command.”

Jeremiah 7:31

Ezekiel goes further. Jeremiah says Yahweh did not command it. Ezekiel says Yahweh did.

Together they reveal something deeper. The biblical writers themselves were struggling to understand their own past.

The consensus of mainstream historians and biblical scholars is clear:

child sacrifice did occur in ancient Israel, and the Bible preserves evidence of it.*

Early laws reflect an older worldview where offering the firstborn was the costliest gift to the divine. The prophets condemn it because it was happening in their time. The story of the binding of Isaac is remembered precisely because it interrupts that pattern.

This does not mean God desired such acts. It means the people mistakenly believed God did. Scripture itself records the evolution of that belief.

And this tension does not end in the Old Testament. Christianity itself, as it is commonly understood, places a human sacrifice at the very center of its story. The traditional interpretation teaches that Yahweh required the death of his own son so that he could finally forgive humanity for the sin of Adam and Eve. The structure remains the same. A divine being requires death before reconciliation can take place. The only difference is the scale of the victim.

The darkest passages of scripture do not reveal a God whose character changes. They reveal a people whose understanding of the divine changes over centuries. They show the slow emergence of a new vision of God, one in which mercy replaces sacrifice and the sacred is no longer imagined as a being who requires the death of children, whether human or divine.

Two Versions of God, One Choice

Vision 1: One god says you were born broken, carrying the weight of an ancient curse for something you never did.

Vision 2: The other says Christ is inside you, present from the beginning, the light that has never left you for a single breath.

The Veil and the God of This Age

Some readers may think these ideas sound like Marcionism, as if I were proposing two different gods. I am not. I am proposing something that some might find far more unsettling: that much of what the Old Testament attributes to God was never divine revelation at all, but human projection. Ancient people—like all people—imagined God in their own image, then mistook the projection for the divine voice.

The question is not whether God changed. The question is whether those texts ever represented God accurately. If you listened earlier to the interior recoil you felt at the violent passages, you already know the answer.

Paul understood this problem. He did not claim the Old Testament revealed a different deity. He said the written law was "the ministry of death" and that a veil lies over the reading of Moses. He contrasted the letter that kills with the Spirit that gives life. He diagnosed the real issue: the presence of a veil.

And what is a veil? It distorts what is seen—and hides who is doing the seeing.

This is the blindness that occurs when belief becomes projection. The human mind shapes an image of God out of fear, tribal loyalty, or cultural norms, then forgets it was the author. The violence is ancient, the stories are old, the language is sacred—so the projection becomes invisible. The veil is no longer recognized as a veil.

Paul had a name for this illusion. He called it "the god of this age."

Not satanas—the New Testament's word for "the accuser," the adversarial impulse Jesus names when he rebukes Peter, saying, "Get behind me, Satan" (Mark 8:33). When Paul means satanas, he uses the term directly in several letters. But in 2 Corinthians 4:4 he pointedly chooses a completely different phrase: ho theos tou aiōnos toutou — the god of this age. That is not a devil's name. That is the language of a deity—the false divine image a culture enthrones without realizing it.

Violent cultures imagine violent gods. Fearful cultures imagine punitive gods. Storm-fearing cultures imagine gods who thunder. Empires imagine gods who bless empire. Every age creates its own god. Then worships what it has imagined. Then calls the result "revelation."

That is the god of this age. That is the veil.

And when the veil hardens, cruelty becomes "justice," fear becomes "obedience," tribal violence becomes "holiness." The projection is enthroned, and people no longer see God—nor do they see that they are not seeing God.

Consider the biblical progression:

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

"I the Lord your God am a jealous God."

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”

Then, centuries later:

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

"Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."

"Perfect love casts out fear." "Love never fails."

Two visions stand before us, just as they stood before Paul's world.

One speaks through an ancient book, demanding belief before presence. The other speaks unbidden from within—the voice written on no scroll, answering silently through conscience rather than command, breathing through every act of compassion and every stirring of love.

One is the god of this age. The other is the God Jesus revealed. And the veil is what keeps us from knowing the difference.

These two visions collided at the Cross.

On one side stood the Jealous god of blood—the deity who demanded sacrifice, who required appeasement, who could only be satisfied through violence.

On the other stood the God who is Love—offering himself freely, surrendering without condition, revealing in that final breath what had always been true: there was never wrath to appease. There was only Love, waiting to be recognized.

The Cross was not transaction. It was unveiling.

The Authority of Love

If you dare to believe that Love is more authoritative than scripture—that what speaks in your deepest knowing carries greater truth than what is written in any book—you have already stepped beyond religion into revelation.

In that moment, you have touched what the earliest followers called the Christ within—the stirring of divine presence that no text can contain and no institution can mediate.

That knowing is what Paul meant when he wrote: "Test all things; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

The interior teacher doesn't need textual permission to recognize truth. It doesn't need institutional approval to reject what contradicts Love. It doesn't need a degree in theology to know that the slaughter of children is evil—even when presented as the command of God.

Paul describes this interior knowing as Love itself:

"Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments... are summed up in this word, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."— Romans 13:8-10

God is Love. Christ is in you. And the Love that stirs within you is the voice of God—speaking not from the heavens above, but from the depths of your own being.

The Criterion

When the veil drops, the entire debate about "authentic sayings" collapses. Literal history loosens its grip, and what remains is the only authority Paul ever recognized: the interior Christ.

If the Gospels were constructed with zodiacal architecture, how can we trust any particular saying as authentically from Jesus?

To answer that, we need to see what Paul meant by authority. When he wrote his letters, he never claimed to transmit Jesus' exact phrasing. He had never walked with Jesus in the flesh. Yet he wrote with extraordinary confidence—not because he possessed verbatim memory, but because he spoke from the authority of the Presence alive within him.

The same principle applies to the Gospels. Whether a particular line came directly from Jesus' mouth or from the early communities who encountered the same Presence within themselves matters less than whether that line speaks from that Presence—the same interior divine reality Paul described.

The criterion is not historical verification. The criterion is spiritual discernment.

Paul gave the measure: Love.

When Jesus says, "The kingdom of God is within you," does this resonate with Love? Yes—because it dissolves every barrier between the soul and the divine.

When he teaches, "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Luke 6:31), does this spring from Love? Yes—because it recognizes that there is no real separation between self and other, that the same life moves through both.

When Scripture commands genocide—does this align with Love?

You already know the answer.

You knew it instantly. Before any priest could explain it away, before any theologian could excuse it, before any institution could authorize your knowing.

That knowing is the Christ within—the anointing that teaches all things, the Spirit that needs no letter, the Love that casts out fear. That is the only authority Paul ever trusted.

Test all things and let Love be the measure.

And consider this: the defenders of the written law—those who insisted the letter must be obeyed without question—were the same religious authorities who crucified Jesus for challenging it.

Why It Was Dangerous

If the kingdom is within, if the Spirit teaches directly—then what becomes of structures claiming to mediate God?

This was not merely theological speculation. It was structural destabilization.

For Roman Authority: Rome controlled through hierarchy—citizen above slave, man above woman, conqueror above conquered, Caesar above all. Paul's insistence that "there is neither slave nor free" and that Christ—not Caesar—was Lord directly challenged this. But more subtly, his emphasis on interior divine presence meant you didn't need Jerusalem's Temple, or Rome's temples, or the priests and gods who sustained both systems.

For Jewish Authority: The Temple was the central mediating institution. Priests controlled access to God through sacrifice and ritual. Paul's claim that believers themselves were God's temple, that the Spirit dwelt directly within, structurally replaced what the Temple provided. Add his declaration that the written law was "the ministry of death" superseded by the Spirit, and you have a recipe for conflict with any religious establishment.

The threat wasn't theological—many competing theologies existed. It was structural.

What Required Protection

The message Paul proclaimed—that divine presence dwells within human consciousness, that Love is the interior teacher requiring no external mediator—was so threatening to both religious and political hierarchies that those who taught it openly faced systematic opposition.

Various movements within early Christianity continued to preach resonant mystical teachings. Communities openly proclaimed that the divine dwells within, that direct knowledge surpasses faith in external authority, that awakened consciousness is accessible to all.

And they faced suppression—first from emerging church hierarchies seeking doctrinal control, and later from the Roman state once Christianity became an imperial institution.

By the second and third centuries, as the church consolidated power and formalized doctrine, these mystical communities were branded heretical. Their texts were burned, their teachers expelled or executed, their memory rewritten as deviation from "orthodoxy"—when they may have preserved the most direct continuation of Paul's revolutionary teaching.

The reason "orthodox" Christianity prevailed was not superior truth but superior organizational capacity. Mystical immediacy—the claim that divine presence is directly accessible within consciousness, requiring no mediating institution—is spiritually powerful but institutionally fragile.

Institutional Christianity succeeded because it could organize, expand, and endure through external structures: bishops, creeds, sacraments, priests who controlled access to the sacred. But success in building institutions does not prove theological correctness. What became "orthodox" was what could be institutionalized. What became "heresy" was often what couldn't.

This historical reality reveals exactly why zodiacal encoding was necessary. Those who taught Paul's mysticism too openly faced opposition and suppression. The teaching could not survive through open proclamation alone. It required protection, concealment, a form that could pass through hostile institutions while preserving the truth intact.

Those who taught it openly were silenced. Those wise enough to hide it in cosmic symbolism preserved it in plain sight.

"Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?" (2 Corinthians 13:5)

Having established the mystical teaching that required protection, we turn now to the historical crisis that made such protection necessary—and to the brilliant literary strategy that allowed this dangerous truth to survive.

*These scholars openly acknowledge child sacrifice in ancient Canaanite and early Israelite religion, based on archaeological, textual, and comparative evidence:

• Mark S. Smith – The Early History of God (Yale, 2002)• John Day – Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge, 1989)• Susan Ackerman – Under Every Green Tree (Brill, 1992)• Karel van der Toorn – Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (1996)• William G. Dever – Did God Have a Wife? (2005)• T. M. Lemos – Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Cambridge, 2017)

These are not fringe voices. These are the top names in ancient Near Eastern archaeology and early Israelite religion.