😇 Advent 4

Readings: 📜Isaiah 7:10-16; 🎶Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; ✉️Romans 1:1-7; 😇Matthew 1:18-25.

Central Thesis/Theme: A distinctive six-part Hebraic formula—"You shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name X"—appears only twice in Scripture when spoken by a divine messenger: to Hagar about Ishmael and to Mary about Jesus. This pattern reveals how Matthew and Luke connect Jesus not just to Isaiah's prophecy but to the very first child born according to God's promise.

Key Textual/Historical Insights: The formula consists of two three-part sections. Matthew explicitly cites Isaiah 7:14 and the name Immanuel ("God with us"), but doesn't mention Samson despite the pattern appearing in Judges 13. This may be Matthew's sensitivity to violent figures, even though he doesn't shy from including unsavory characters like Rahab in his genealogy. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) provides older textual witnesses than the Masoretic Hebrew text, which wasn't vowel-pointed until the ninth century.

Theological Argument: The name "Ishmael" means "God hears," directly invoking the Shema of Deuteronomy 6. Every time Jews recite the Shema, they evoke Ishmael's name. God hears when deliverance is needed—whether it's Hagar's cry, Abel's blood from the ground, or the promise of a deliverer. Jesus and Ishmael share this unique bond through the six-part formula, linking Christ back to the beginning of God's promise-keeping, before judges and kings. God's deliverance doesn't always come in the package we'd prefer—sometimes it's Samuel, sometimes it's Samson—but God sends what's needed.

Contemporary Application: Just as the Hebrew text required active engagement (reading aloud with only consonants), we're called to wrestle with God's Word rather than passively consume it. Resources like Blue Letter Bible make this accessible without paywalls or gatekeeping. The reminder that "Yahweh" isn't accurately reduced to "Father God of the sky" challenges imperial or patriarchal theology—God is Emmanuel, "with us," embodied and present rather than distant and dominating.

Questions Raised:

• Why does Matthew avoid citing Samson despite the pattern's presence in Judges?

• How does recognizing Ishmael's connection to Jesus reshape our understanding of God's promises and who receives them?

• What does it mean that the Shema evokes Ishmael every time it's spoken?

• How does this six-part formula challenge conventional messianic expectations?

Reflection

Good morning and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon.

This morning's readings come to us from Isaiah 7, Psalm 80, I think Romans 1, and Matthew 1. If you noticed a difference between my reading and any reading you might be following along with, it's because I am beginning to translate or paraphrase the Bible myself. That's why you can go to pewpewhq.com/tfw and I'll take you to The Fighting Word, which is the main page for my exegetical project, which includes this podcast and also The Fighting Word—what I call the grunt-ish version of the Bible. You can see I've already started work there, and this podcast is creating a deadline for me to translate or paraphrase some of this stuff.

For many years I've been doing the dailies—the daily lectionary—and that really got me comfortable with the Bible. I've been doing Greek and Hebrew word studies, just nouns and verbs and roots. We came up on a new year, a lectionary three-year cycle, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do the Sundays now. So that's what I'm doing, and I'm trying to do it with a little bit more effort than I did First Formation. First Formation was the dailies, and it's become Fighting Words. I'll say more about that elsewhere. You can kind of put two and two together.

But as I go through and read the lectionary the week before, I've undertaken the basic rabbinical or pharisaical work of reading the Bible every day. It has and will, I'm sure, continue to build my confidence in trusting my own experience as a veteran, as an American, as someone who's motivated by good news—even though the word "evangelical" has become entirely corrupted by the zeitgeist.

This morning's readings call out some really important parts of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, that we don't always pay attention to. And it's something I caught onto, and I just could not get it out of my brain. So the last week I've been doing a more in-depth Bible study on these six words. I'll call it a linguistic formula: "You shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name X."

This morning's readings do that for us. Matthew is using this frame. He points to Isaiah 7:14, and he quotes the Greek Hebrew Bible pretty closely. I won't get into the Greek, but if you want to read more about this specific topic, go to The Fighting Word blog, and you'll see where I'll put up an essay. If you want to get it straight to your inbox, you have to go to martinalia, which is my email newsletter at newsletter@pewpew.ghost.io. Sign up there. You can get it into your email inbox. I'm going to send it out later, as soon as I'm done with this podcast.

But this six-piece Hebraic formula—in the Greek too, I was following the Greek because we have older versions of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. We don't have Hebrew Bibles until the ninth century when they put in vowels. Before that it was really important to read the text aloud, but the text only had the consonants. So when you were young like me, your parents may have tried to hide what they were saying by spelling words, and then as you got older and you could spell, they left out the vowels. Kind of like that.

Last week I talked about how that is a feature of the Hebrew. It's not a bug. It's supposed to be like that. We're supposed to engage with the Word of God. And if we don't speak Hebrew—I don't—you can study it. It's not a private language that you have to access through paywalls. There's lots of ways you can read it. I use Blue Letter Bible.org. They do not pay me. I've just been using them for years and I'm used to it. There may be better, easier platforms I could plug, but I've been using Blue Letter Bible forever, and I love it. It works for me.

Anyway, so this six-part formula—it's actually two parts of three. "You shall conceive and bear a son," which is masculine child. And in the second three-part: "You shall call his name," whatever the name is.

In Isaiah—which we read, and from Matthew, because Matthew points to Isaiah—in the Isaiah passage it's a third person. There's a prophetic figure who... the quote comes in verse 14 and it's almost a curse because the name is supposed to remind the other person of the fear that they have of two kings. It's not a prophetic utterance directly to one of the protagonists of the Bible, the exemplars that they're trying to point you to. It's some third party figure.

But Matthew really likes "God with us," and so do I. And it's a pretty succinct way of talking about the God of the universe through whom I believe has spoken to the Jews, the Hebraic, the Israelite people. It's a metaphor that I chose a long time ago and it has never let me down.

Matthew points to Isaiah and he uses this formula, this six-part formula, and he kind of splits it up. Read more about it in the essay. But what I found as I did my Bible study last week was that this six-part formula comes out in some really interesting ways that Matthew is leaning on but doesn't cite explicitly like he does the prophet Isaiah. It's Isaiah 7:14. He doesn't say it in the text, but he wants you to know he is quoting from the prophets to show that this figure that is going to be born is a divine deliverer.

So put Isaiah 7 on the shelf for a second and Matthew 1, but not totally. Luke has a similar thing and the whole first chapter of Luke is just incredible. But in Luke we use all six parts of this formula, and it's also delivered like Isaiah from a prophetic divine messenger, but it isn't who we like.

This is the first time I found this connection—it was months, maybe years ago. And I haven't really put as much effort into organizing my thoughts until this week. But that figure that Luke is pointing to is Samson. The twelfth judge in the Old Testament. We talk about him in Judges 13 to 15.

And Samson is not the kind of person you want to be paying attention to. He's kind of like how I feel about the current president. It's like, I don't like you, but like, sure, you're breaking some things that need to be broken. Like, okay, fine. Samson's like that. He's a jerk. He's insecure with women. He can't keep his mouth shut. He's a braggart. He's basically like the current Secretary of Defense who wants to call it the Department of War, which isn't going to happen because it's an act of Congress anyway.

Samson's not the kind of person you want to think about too much, and I feel like Matthew knows that. He doesn't want to use the name Samson. Other parts will talk about how it also appears in Genesis 16. But anyway, Matthew seems to be aware that there's a particular name that this deliverer is given, and it's not Samson. And it's also not Samuel, because this pattern appears—not the full formula, but the pattern appears with Hannah and Samuel.

But Matthew also seems to not want to draw up too many associations with violent characters in particular. Matthew calls out Rahab the prostitute. He calls out another woman in his genealogy that slept with her own stepfather, I think. So he is not afraid of unsavory figures, but Matthew does seem to be particularly sensitive to violent unsavory figures. Not unlike a lot of theologians I know that don't even like to talk about Joshua and Judges as though there's anything good that came out of Nazareth. I mean, Joshua and Judges.

But anyway, so without further ado, the six-part formula—"shall conceive and bear a son and you shall name him X"—spoken by Gabriel, the angel Gabriel, in Luke 1. The only time that entire six-part equation appears on the lips of a divine messenger to a formerly barren woman is Ishmael.

In Genesis 16, Hagar is told after she is given to Abram because Sarah can't have kids. Hagar and Abram conceive Abraham's eldest male child, Ishmael, and she runs off—Hagar runs off into the wilderness with Ishmael—because Sarah's being a bitch. And so Hagar is going to die in the wilderness. That's what you do, and Abram's kind of absent on this, which is unfortunate. But also this divine messenger, this angel, comes and tells Hagar this exact six-sentence formula: "You shall conceive and bear a son. You shall call him Ishmael."

And Ishmael's name is a call out to Deuteronomy 6, the Shema of Israel: "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one." The Lord is God, or the Lord is his name. I can't remember. Anyway, but the Shema is where we get Ishmael. And so every time Jews would say the Shema, they are evoking Ishmael's name. And it means "God hears" because God hears Hagar's cry. God hears Abel's cry from the ground as blood. God hears when deliverance—which is a kind of birth delivery—when the people need it, God sends it. And it's not necessarily the person you want. It isn't always Samuel. Sometimes it's Samson, although it is Samuel. And Hannah also has this pattern, the six-sentence or six-word formula.

So that, and that is the only two places where that occurs. The entire two parts of three plus divine message is Ishmael and Jesus. Luke is certainly aware of this, if not the Samson piece, certainly the Ishmael piece, because he doesn't call him Samson. But Ishmael reaches all the way back to the beginning, right before Judges. And Christ is a judge, a shophet, in the Israelite tradition he is. But he's also all the way back at the very first child to be born according to the promise of God. Ishmael and Jesus have this unique bond in this six-part figure that we only get in the Annunciation.

And then Matthew, he points to Isaiah 7, which is also picking up on this same thing from Genesis. But he wants to steer us in a particular direction, to remind us—Matthew does—that God is a particular kind of God that doesn't exist all up in the sky. It isn't accurate to call Yahweh either "Father God of the sky that seeds inseminate the earth mother." It's not either/or. It's right here. That is what it means to worship a God, a Word, or a logical explanation to everything we can... to explain however you want to define or interpret. All of these just incredible mix of linguistic turns of phrases and rhyming and everything—all the stuff, all the meaning, all the need, all the yearning—we find it in the Christ whose name is Joshua, who reminds us of the military commander, but also the high priest that built the second temple that gave birth to the Jewish Renaissance that created a bunch of these texts. And if that isn't a Charlie Day board back to Joshua Christ, I don't know what is.

But that is our reading for Advent Four.

😇 Advent 3

Readings: 📜Isaiah 35 :1-10; 🎶Psalm 145 (146) 5-10; 📜James 5 :7-10; 📜Matthew 11 2-11.

Central Thesis/Theme: John the Baptist's doubt from prison reveals a fundamental debate about confronting systemic oppression. John sees Rome as the primary enemy requiring direct anti-imperial resistance, while Jesus targets something deeper—the ideology of entitlement that creates in-group/out-group categories. Jesus refuses to alienate those trapped in corrupt systems (like military families) even while condemning the systems themselves, modeling a "sharper razor" that separates the bathwater of oppression from the baby of human dignity.

Key Textual/Historical Insights: The Greek word hodos (The Way/path) connects Isaiah's prophecy to John's preparation ministry. "Born of women" is Hebrew idiom for "all humanity"—Jesus declares nobody in all human history greater than John while still moving beyond his approach. First-century Galilee had brown-skinned Herodian troops, not Roman legionnaires; the "centurion of great faith" would have been a local auxiliary soldier, not a white Roman. Luke's placement of this episode immediately after the centurion's healing highlights the tension, while Matthew's different timeline may reflect anti-military concerns. Jesus uses basileus (kingdom) language because Antipas rules Galilee as a client king, but the Greek concept of politea (republic) better captures Jesus's power-distribution model versus pyramid hierarchy.

Theological Argument: Jesus rejects hoarding divine authority at the top of a hierarchy, instead "digging down deeper" to distribute God's power among ordinary people. This isn't soft compromise—it's recognizing that the root problem isn't the emperor but entitlement itself: "the idea that we have the right thing and those on the outside have the wrong thing." Jesus warns against being "scandalized" by his healing of an imperial collaborator's child, arguing we must condemn corrupt systems without alienating vulnerable people trapped within them who need "backdoor handouts" from the charity industrial complex or military industrial complex for survival.

Contemporary Application: Modern movements for justice face the same tension: How do we resist oppression without alienating those who joined corrupt systems for survival—money, social stability, lack of options? Logan draws on his own military experience to argue Jesus models separating the bath water (illegitimate autocratic systems) from the baby (salvation for people at the dirt level). The challenge is going "even deeper" than surface anti-imperialism to address root ideologies while maintaining compassion for those the systems exploit.

Questions Raised:

• How do we differentiate legitimate resistance to oppression from alienating the very people who need liberation most?

• What does distributing divine power rather than hoarding it look like in practice?

• Can we condemn corrupt systems while extending grace to individuals surviving within them?

• What is the difference between opposing an empire and opposing the ideology of entitlement that enables all empires?

• How do we avoid recreating in-group/out-group categories even while pursuing justice?

Reflection

Good morning and welcome to. First Formation slash Fightin Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from The Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from Isaiah 35, Psalm 1 46, James five, and Matthew 11. The podcast it's in transition.

We're going from First Formation, which is what I've been doing for a couple of years, [00:05:00] and I'm keeping in the same RSS feed, but I'm changing it to Fighting Words where we go over in depth into scripture based on the Sunday lectionary every week. Um, and it's also all, uh, hyperlinked pewpewhq.com/tfw.

There you'll find my entire exegetical project with the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint. The Greek, Hebrew Bible, and the Christian scriptures, as well as the liturgical Sundays throughout the next three years, or one liturgical cycle. So this morning's readings, um, Isaiah is probably used based on the text from Matthew about the blind, can see the poorer, having the good news preached to them.

The, uh, and from Isaiah verse five, the eyes of the blinds shall be open. The ears of the deaf shall hear the lamp. Uh, they shall be the, the lame shall leap as a dear. Um, and you'll notice if you're reading along that I've capitalized The [00:06:00] Way, and in Greek, in the sep two, again, the Greek, Hebrew Bible, um, it's the same word in the Greek New Testament, hodos. But hodo basically means the way, the path, the freeway, and this is the same word that John uses earlier when he says, or he quotes from the prophet saying, make straight The Path of the Lord. It's hodos. And the word there is, uh, kfar usually in Hebrew, which is where we get, uh, atonement in Yom Kippur.

And what happens on Yam Kippur, we pave the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, so the travelers are not jumped and beaten and carjacked. Um, making straight The Way of the Lord is also making clean and uncluttered and brightly lit the road to Jericho. But I really want to focus on Matthew 11 if you are a subscriber to Martinalia, my ghost newsletter.

Ghost is the brand name. Anyway, [00:07:00] um, I'm recording this a day late because I had some unanticipated distractions yesterday when I usually record, but I sent out an essay talking about Matthew 11 and Luke seven, and Matthew is a shortened version and Matthew places it a different, at a different place in the timeline.

And I'll, I'll try and stick to the Matthew version because we're in year A, which is a Matthew. Uh, lectionary cycle with the angel because that's Matthew's, uh, evangelist's symbol. But anyway, I want you to notice that John has doubts when he gets arrested and he suspects. I'm sure that he's not long for this world, but he doesn't know yet.

He sends his own followers to his. Not cousin, but he may be a cousin, but they're blood relatives. He sends his followers to his relative, Joshua, real name's Joshua. You call him Jesus as a fourth [00:08:00] century invention by Jerome. But anyway, and think about what is going on, John's like. John Ha comes to a point in which all of his prior ministry, he's come to doubt.

He baptizes Jesus in Luke three and Mark, uh, Matthew four. And you sees the dove, he hears the voice and still John is not so sure we have this doubting Thomas because one of Christ's disciples wants to put the finger in his side to be sure. But John's doubt at this moment is very. Significant. And so ge and I want to play make sure we understand Jesus.

Joshua starts by following John. John is older by nearly a year, but not quite a year. Remember, Elizabeth is pregnant first, and then Mary comes to her pregnant saying, I'm also gonna have a kid. So they're very close in age, John. It [00:09:00] goes out into the, the wilderness with camel skin, uh, camel hair and the belt.

And he eats locust and he's. Got this wild look in his eyes and he preaches a baptism of repentance. Joshua comes out and Joshua is baptized by John. That means, in other words, Joshua is becoming John's disciple. John is arrested. Joshua inherits or absorbs. John's followers, students, disciples, pupils, and so some of them.

A couple are sent by John, probably from Jerusalem, because that's where Herod is kind of based, well, he's, he has a big base in Sebass. Anyway, he sends these two people, and despite everything that John has seen, John's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. And in Luke, this the parallel here in Luke seven, it immediately follows the healing of Captain [00:10:00] Marvel, the centurion of great faith.

And now some civilian, uh, exes, uh, have suggested that Centurion, the centurion, great faith Captain Marvel, you know, he's a soldier. That's all we need to know. If you think, if you hear soldier in first century Palestine and you think white skinned with a cool little like Roman or Greek styled helmet, you've got the wrong image in your mind.

Uh, in Galilee, at least, I don't remember where this specifically occurred, but the Romans don't have Galilee. That's Antipas. And Antipas is a Roman puppet, but they give him leeway. They only have Brown skinned Herodian numerii, which are local troops, uh, that are, that are equipped and supplied by Antipas. Uh, then they have the auxiliary troops, which are [00:11:00] local recruits, brown skinned recruits, who would've reported to a (Roman) Syrian auxiliary unit.

This is in Galilee, remember? But there wouldn't have been that many because Antipas is the one who's in charge. And so the Syrian recruits, maybe they encountered them whenever they went down into the Roman province of Judea underneath Pilate's control.

Like Joshua up in Galilee, they don't see Roman soldiers. They only see hero soldiers. And down in, uh, in the province of Judea, it is under direct Roman control, under Pilate whose base is in Caesarea Maritima off on the coast where he probably maybe has a Legionnaire cohort. Um. And then in Sebaste (Samaria), there's a strong recruiting center for Syrian recruits, and then in Jerusalem there's a Jerusalem cohort of auxiliary troops.

All of those auxiliary troops would've been dark skinned, just like Jesus and [00:12:00] up in Galilee, they would've been even closer to the culture because they don't answer to Rome up in Galilee, they answer to Antipas or Antipas. Anyway. So in Luke, this happens right after a brown skinned, but Roman collaborator has a son who is healed.

And that is the moment that Luke introduces John's doubt. But in Matthew it's a different timeframe and the doubt is no less significant. And for my money, I think Matthew comes after Luke. But that's just, that's just me. 'cause we get Mark who is like, wham bam. Thank you ma'am. Short. Sweet. Impactful, right as the the war is going on that will eventually destroy the temple in 67 to 70 ad the first Jewish Roman revolt.

Um, and Mark is urgent, right? We need to figure this stuff out. Then for my money, Luke comes along, he writes Luke and Acts, which is very Gentile leaning, and then in Matthew for my [00:13:00] money. Um, we get kind of a like, well wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But he is Jewish. Let's not forget about that. And so Matthew is probably, I think, a little bit more anti-military than Luke is.

And I don't know if he just got the timeline different or is, but this community is remembering these events as no less significant, but maybe in a slightly different timeframe. And the very last thing I'll say is that look at what Joshua does. He does not take a moment to make a clean break from John and say, ah, John is wrong.

'cause John I think is much more anti-imperialist than Joshua is. Um, and I think Luke shows that, but Matthew kind of obscures it a little bit, but he doesn't want to alienate John's more ardent defenders, uh, followers who are more anti-imperialist. There are more, you know, zealous against Rome. 'cause Christ had zealot followers who [00:14:00] probably he inherited from John.

But he says, look, um, in, in Matthew, he says, there is nobody sat in the, the specific thing in Luke and Matthew, it's "nobody born of women," which is a tongue in cheek way of saying. Lotty, Dotty, everybody. There has never been in all of humanity, anybody greater than John the Baptist. And here he's basically saying like Elijah and Moses, nobody's better than him because we know Moses had a mom that Elijah had a mom, and John had a mom.

We know John's mom and we know Jesus's mom. So nobody is greater than John. But if you are scandalized by what I'm doing, and here I put the Republic because. The Greek has basileus because that is what Antipas is. Antipas has a kingdom. If this movement had arisen primarily in the land of Judah underneath Pilate, [00:15:00] the Romans had a slightly different system.

It wasn't a democracy, but it was closer to it. And in Acts 22, when the centurion, uh, Claudius Lysias says, I bought this. politea at a great price. Politea was the Greek word for what preceded the Roman Empire before the Roman imperium, which in Greek would've been autokratia, autocratic state. Um, it was a politea and some English translations translated as freedom.

Some of them say citizenship. But in the Greek mind, the original, uh, the original politea was "republic." And he doesn't say, Matthew does not say politea. That's me making a paraphrase of what's going on. Christ is not building a kingdom and putting himself on the top. He is clearly empowering a whole lot of different people to follow his example and do greater good than even he was capable of doing.[00:16:00]

It is all biblical. And so that for me, it's not a pyramid with a cool kid at the top, the cool kids at the bottom, digging down deeper into God, figuring out what's really going on. And so that's why I've put republic. But John sees the empire as the greatest problem and Christ is a little bit more nuanced.

Just, just slightly. His, his razor is just a little bit sharper and he says, don't be scandalized just because I healed an imperial collaborator's child. Uh, blessed are those, gifted are those who are not scandalized by the, the, the distribution of, of God's divine power that I'm setting up.

'cause he is not the high priest. That's caiaphas, he's corrupt appointment. But what he's doing is he's as, as Christ I'll say, like digs down deeper into. Uh, the loving God who gave us this earth that we stand on. He's in my leadership [00:17:00] model, I guess. Like there's a whole lot of shit that can roll downhill and Christ is there for it.

He's gonna take all the suffering that in that is entailed in distributing power rather than hoarding it and hoarding is wrong. And John, I think sees the emperor and Rome as hoarding power because they are. But there's people that are caught up in this system like Captain Marvel, like military families, who even, even in Galilee, they, they are being recruited for the same reasons I was recruited for money and social stability.

And Jesus is essentially saying, don't get mad at them just because you want to tear down the system, which is corrupt, which needs to be, uh, reformed. Don't get mad at them. Get mad at the system. And the system is not really the emperor, emperor or the Empire. It's Entitlement. It's the idea that we have the right [00:18:00] thing and those on the outside have the wrong thing.

Get, get rid of those categories and begin seeing the Embodiment of God, the incarnation Christ, as the distribution of God's power amongst even the lowliest of people, the people at the, at the dirt level. And then get ready to go even deeper because it's, you know, we don't want to alienate the very people that God has come to save from oppression.

The people who need the backdoor handouts, the people who need the charity industrial complex or the military industrial complex like military families. So Jesus and John, I think in Matthew and, and Luke seven. Are having this debate that we often take for granted, but we really need to look as closely as possible in times like ours to be able to differentiate the bath water from the baby, the baby of salvation, from the bath water of the systems that prop up illegitimate [00:19:00] autocrats.

😇 Advent 2

Readings: 📜Isaiah 35 :1-10; 🎶Psalm 146 (145 LXX) 5-10; 📜James 5 :7-10; 📜Matthew 11 2-11.

TRNG References:

• Armor of God

• From Anointment to Appointment

Central Thesis/Theme: The Divine Warrior motif reveals God's power as fundamentally creative rather than combative. Where Babylonian cosmology imagines creation emerging from divine conflict, the Hebrew imagination presents a God who speaks reality into existence—conquering not through violence but through divine intent and breath. This contrast between conflict-based and creativity-based cosmologies defines the difference between worldly power systems and the kingdom that emerges through ordinary humanity.

Key Textual/Historical Insights: Isaiah 11 introduces the Armor of God motif with two foundational pieces: the breastplate of righteousness (tsedek/soteria) and the helmet of salvation, which reappear throughout Scripture including Ephesians and 1 Thessalonians. The "root of Jesse" references David as youngest of eight sons, establishing Messianic expectation through the unexpected. The Sadducees (Tzadikim) claimed the name "righteous ones" to legitimate their politically-appointed authority under Herod, breaking the authentic Zadokite priestly line that ran from Solomon's temple through the Maccabees. When Jesus (Joshua ben Miriam) and Caiaphas face each other, everyone knows who was appointed versus who was anointed—both descend from Aaron, but only one represents hereditary legitimacy. John the Baptist's "brood of vipers" uses diminutive language for young snakes, which are more dangerous than mature ones because they cannot control their venom.

Theological Argument: The Hebrew God creates through logos and breath, not through cosmic battle. This represents a direct confrontation with Mesopotamian conflict theory—the assumption that we must fight for what we have because the gods fought before us. Augustine's "privation of evil" emerges from this Hebrew imagination: evil is absence, not competing power. The contrast extends to language itself: Hebrew (Ivri—"one who crosses over from afar") cultivates an imagination of God as utterly other, requiring no struggle to establish authority. When God strikes the earth "with the word of his mouth" and "the breath of his lips," we see Genesis creation language weaponized—not through violence but through the same creative power that spoke light into existence.

Contemporary Application: Political and religious power structures consistently exploit language to maintain control. The Sadducees claimed "righteousness" through naming while serving Herod's appointments. Similarly, modern institutions weaponize biblical interpretation, claiming authority through titles and positions rather than through authentic lineage or calling. The contrast between appointed and anointed authority remains urgent: Do leaders deserve our trust based on what they claim, or based on what they do? The unpredictability of "baby snakes"—those who cannot control their venom, who are caught in corrupt systems without maturity—makes them more dangerous than openly hostile opponents. Yet even within corrupt systems, individuals like Joseph of Arimathea demonstrate that what matters is action: "If you say you believe certain things, you better act like it."

Questions Raised:

• How does understanding God's creative power as spoken word rather than cosmic violence reshape our theology of judgment and salvation?

• What is the relationship between claiming righteousness (through titles, positions, institutional authority) and actually embodying it through consistent action?

• If "baby snakes" are more dangerous because they're unpredictable and can't control their venom, how do we distinguish between those caught in corrupt systems who might reform them versus those who perpetuate corruption?

• How does the Hebrew imagination's "one from afar" challenge our assumptions about divine authority emerging from familiar, institutional sources?

Reflection

All right, welcome to Advent 2 of Year A. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon.

I have not welcomed you to First Formation because I am in the process of—as I said last week—rebooting the flagship podcast for Grunt Works. First Formation was the dailies of the lectionary, the scraps that fall from the table. Now that I'm starting on the Sundays in Year A, I'm rebooting it and thinking of calling the podcast Fighting Words.

If you tuned in last week or clicked the show notes, you were probably taken to PQHQ.com/tfw, which is the holding space for everything biblical that I'm doing. TFW—The Fighting Word—is what I call my exegetical project, a paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures.

The Fighting Word has every book outlined, but nothing filled in yet. As I go along the lectionary, I'll be filling in those scriptures with a public domain translation—so I'm not pissing anybody off—but I'm going to be changing some things to my liking, to my hermeneutic. This is not something I'm going to sell. I think in particular the Bible, since I'm using a public domain version, you can access it, read it, listen along. But when I read from this public domain text, I'm going to be slightly altering it for the podcast, for Fighting Words.

I might be inviting some interviews like I did with Grunt God, but I do all this because I did the dailies for however many years and I got really comfortable with the Bible. I started to see things.

One of the first things I saw that helped me begin having even more confidence in the Bible is the Armor of God. The Armor of God—the Divine Warrior motif—is a series of sayings in the Old Testament and New Testament, or the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures, that attribute to God pieces of armor. I love this because it's very modular. You can see the trajectory of it, the tradition, the motif developing in the canon, beginning with Isaiah 11.

I'll leave a link to the Training Room essay on the Armor of God. You can scroll down and see all the details. Isaiah 11—when you read about the Armor of God, say from Thomas Yoder Neufeld, who did a dissertation on it—the discussion usually starts with Paul in Ephesians: "Put on the whole armor of God," et cetera. Isaiah 11 is often left out, but the two through lines of the entire Armor of God motif are the breastplate of righteousness (tsedek in Hebrew, thorax soteria in Greek) and the helmet of salvation. Those are the two that appear throughout.

Isaiah 11 in Proto-Isaiah—the first of the three sections of Isaiah's texts—begins it. The figure is either Yahweh himself or this root of Jesse. Jesse is David's father. David was the youngest of Jesse's eight sons, so this "root" is kind of tongue-in-cheek referring to King David, describing David in Messianic terms. Isaiah comes after David, reflecting back on the Davidic dynasty, which has its own problems. But this is the earliest appearance in the canon.

Isaiah predates the other Old Testament passages like Wisdom of Solomon chapter 5, Ephesians, 1 Thessalonians. The other big one is Isaiah 59:17. Remember those two things—the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation—because it's all pieces of clothing. When Scripture describes the priestly vestments in Exodus 32, there are some interesting parallels in the Hebrew and Greek. I'll leave you to check out the Armor of God essay on the Training Room, the blog of PQHQ.

In Isaiah 11:4: "He will judge the cause of the lowly and reprove the lowly of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the word of his mouth"—the logos, the logic (because many languages have words with dual or multiple meanings)—"and with the breath of his lips he shall destroy the ungodly one."

The first thing I think of is Genesis, when God creates. The Hebrew God—the product of the Hebrew imagination—in Hebrew, Ivri means "one who crosses over from beyond," an alien or transgressor. In Greek it just transliterates as Hebraios, but Ivri means the one from afar in the Hebrew language. Think Abraham—different consonants but similar sounds: Abram and Ivri. Hebrew means someone from far away, a foreigner. They do this crossing over.

This unique imagination that the Hebrews cultivated with the Semitic language presents their God in direct contrast to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, all these other creation myths which almost always feature gods fighting and wrestling, battling to see who's going to rule humanity. Gods are the things we attribute to what we can't explain. If I can't explain why I win in victory or lose my house, if it's not my fault, it must be God's fault. In the most fundamental sense, God is a symbol for the miraculous, the things we can't describe.

But the Hebrew God? There's no battle, no ripping other gods apart. In other myths, the blood of the gods creates humans. The Hebrew God just says, "Let there be light," and there's light, and it's good. This confronts what Augustine calls the privation of evil.

The social conflict theory that fueled the Babylonian, Mesopotamian, and dominant cultural assumptions about the unknown was that we fought for what we have. The gods must have fought for us, before us. The Hebrew God doesn't have to do any of that. That's how powerful this God is—just a word uttered, a breath, conquers all these other gods, sets creation in place through mere divine intent and divine creativity.

From the very beginning, if you believe in a universe determined by conflict, that's not the Hebrew imagination. That's a worldly imagination. I say "worldly" in Hebrew because in the translations in Psalms and Isaiah, I've taken the Hebrew goy and goyim and made them slightly different.

For goy and goyim, I've said "all peoples." That's my translation, because when we say goy and goyim as "the nations" in Greek—that's ethnos—ethnos is almost like a tribe: my people. All the people are us and everybody else. "All peoples."

Then am is something collective as one. Just like when Jacob has his name changed to Israel, and Israel becomes both a singular and plural reference. Am is the whole people, the people. If the Constitution of America were written in Hebrew, it would begin with am. It's transliterated as "am" but it's a Hebrew root meaning the collected grouping of the people. You'll hear me say "the people" for am and "all peoples" for goy and goyim.

Some other things I think are important to point out, especially with John the Baptist: There are young snakes mentioned earlier in Isaiah. If you know snakes—my dad was a science teacher and kept snakes—baby snakes can't control their venom and don't know what's going on. They're more dangerous than mature snakes because mature snakes will probably run from you. Young snakes might go after you because they don't know any better, and when they bite, they can't control the venom. They might inject more, might kill you. They're unpredictable.

Here, John the Baptist says, "You brood of young snakes"—it's diminutive. Not only are the Pharisees and Sadducees less predictable, they're more dangerous than regular mature snakes.

The Sadducees—this is another reason I'm creating The Fighting Word, to hyperlink some of this language we've lost track of. Forget the word "Sadducees" in Greek. It's Tzadikim, a transliteration of Tzedek, which means "righteous." The Sadducees went out of their way to claim righteousness in a politically corrupt system. They were political appointments of Herod. They used the name Tzedek not only because it means "righteous"—they were claiming "we are the righteous ones," literally—but it also connects to the first temple of Solomon.

Zadok was the high priest who built Solomon's temple. The Zadokite dynasty goes from Zadok—at least according to the Bible and apocryphal literature—who helped build the first temple, all the way through Joshua and Jehozadak and Jeshua in the second temple, all the way to the Hasmonean Maccabees. Then it stops.

Not long before Jesus was born, the Zadokite dynasty was destroyed. There was infighting. Herod had already begun taking power, and he said, "We're not going to have any more hereditary high priests. I'm going to control who controls the temple."

So Caiaphas, a Sadducee, is not a Zadokite. Joshua son of Miriam (Mary), and Miriam and Elizabeth are daughters of Aaron—even further back than Zadokite, the Aaronic dynasty—Joshua and Caiaphas stand and face each other, and everybody knows who was appointed and who was anointed.

We lose sight of some of this. We just think, "Oh, the Sadducees were this thing." They were claiming something by that name.

The Pharisees were teachers, itinerant preachers and priests. Some were bad, some were good. You could say that Jesus—or Joshua, his Hebrew name as opposed to his Latin name—Joshua was a Pharisee. He was an itinerant preacher, just like his relative John. Not all Pharisees were good, not all Pharisees were bad.

Sadducees, however, held political power and were exploiting language and culture to hold onto power. But even that didn't completely undermine them, because Joseph of Arimathea—who buries Joshua after the Passion—he's a Sadducee.

You can't just dismiss the people in power, whether that's a Sadducee or an emperor or a general like Naaman the Syrian. You can't do it. You have to look not at the outer appearance. You have to look at them themselves. What have they done? Do they deserve our respect and trust and attention?

I think earlier in this reading we talked about how God does not judge by appearance. God judges by what comes out of the heart. What do you do?

Sadducees' hearts were mostly corrupted. They wanted power. They wanted to hold onto power. Not all of them. Some were caught up in the system and were open to seeing how the system needed to be reformed, like Joseph of Arimathea. Or even if Joseph were a total douchebag, he did what he needed to do. He followed the law. If you die before sundown, you have to be buried.

So even if Joseph were the worst of the worst, what the text—not here but elsewhere—points out is: What matters is what you do. What matters is whether, if you say you believe certain things, you better act like it. If you believe in righteousness, if you believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, you better live consistently with it.

If you don't, that's what makes you unpredictable and dangerous and a baby snake.

😇 Advent 1

Readings: 📜Isaiah 2:1-5; 🎶Psalm 122 (121 LXX); 📜Romans 13:11-14; 😇Matthew 24:36-44.

Central Thesis/Theme: The Advent season inaugurates a new way of seeing humanity itself—the "son of man" as both ordinary human and harbinger of radical transformation. This first Sunday reintroduces the lectionary cycle not as institutional prescription but as framework for discovering what Scripture says when freed from calcified interpretation and enforcement of meaning.

Key Textual/Historical Insights: The Septuagint provides our earliest textual witness, predating the Masoretic text by centuries and representing what Jesus and the earliest Christian community likely read. Isaiah's "word of Yahweh" emanating from Jerusalem connects to John's Logos—divine communication that judges (convicts, brings to trial) rather than simply condemns. The Psalm's Hebrew root for "throne" (kisê/kasa) carries connotations of concealment, not Solomon's ostentatious throne room. Romans 13's "rulers" (al) signifies those who set standards and examples, distinct from those who lord over (radha). The "son of man" in Matthew echoes ben adam—child of earth, ordinary human—language Jesus employs to simultaneously claim and democratize messianic expectation.

Theological Argument: Advent announces something emerging from below, not imposed from above. Like the judges of Israel who arose charismatically in response to oppression, transformation comes through ordinary humanity when systems calcify. The Hebrew prophetic imagination offers "logic incarnate"—of course charlatans on thrones will be challenged, of course new language will route around enforced meanings, of course salvation comes through the unexpected.

Contemporary Application: Language belongs to the people, not to those who sell dictionaries and enforce definitions. When institutional interpretation becomes weaponized control, faith must be "federated"—distributed, accessible, belonging to the many rather than monopolized by the few. The Marshall hermeneutic reads Scripture as everyman/everywoman, privileging the grunt's perspective over the officer class, the scraps over the cool kids' table.

Questions Raised:

• How does beginning with the Septuagint rather than Masoretic text reshape our reading?

• What does it mean that Jesus identifies with "son of man"—ordinary humanity—rather than royal messianism?

• How do we distinguish between confidence and arrogance when claiming interpretive authority outside institutional ordination?

Reflection

Hello and welcome to Advent 1 of Year A, Matthew's year. This is Brother Logan Isaac, and you're listening to First Formation.

Before I launch into this morning's reflections and why the reading was different than you might have in your own Bible, I wanted to welcome you to what I'm calling the reboot of First Formation. I've been doing First Formation and reading the lectionary for seven or eight years. I started not too long after our oldest was born, reading the dailies—the Monday through Saturday daily lectionary readings of the Revised Common Lectionary. Thank you, Vanderbilt Library, for making them accessible.

I did that for three full years, an entire liturgical cycle. That really got me comfortable with the Bible and made me more curious about getting into what's behind the Bible—the stuff I don't always see myself but see through layers of interpretation.

I speak American English as my native tongue, and that distinction matters. But I knew from a very young spiritual age that this was written in Greek and Hebrew, languages I don't speak natively. One of my first Bibles was a keyword study Bible with the Greek and Hebrew Strong's numbers. If you've read God is a Grunt—which I'm running out of hardcover copies of, though I'll be re-releasing it as a softcover—that was the first place where I really got into the Greek and Hebrew. I gave people resources to get into it themselves through BluLetterBible.org, which is what I use.

I have this big Strong's Concordance with all the Greek and Hebrew roots, verbs, nouns, compound words. The more I dug into these foreign languages, the closer I got to God. By that I mean the more my curiosity was satisfied.

When I got that keyword Bible at an evangelical mom-and-pop Bible store in Mililani on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, I prayed a prayer without really knowing it. The cashier—probably the owner, some older woman—said, "What do you want to engrave on your new Bible?" I didn't know. She said most people get their names.

Something struck me: that's not important to me. If I lose this Bible, it would be great if someone else had it and used it and enjoyed it. I didn't want to put something personalized on it that would name it as mine.

So I told her, "Let me think about it," and wandered around the store. Something came into my brain—and I say I prayed a prayer because my conception of God is such that I think God hears everything, is capable of hearing everything, even the unspoken prayers that go on in our hearts.

I wasn't talking out loud—that's weird, people think you're crazy when you talk to yourself. But I was talking to myself, and in those quiet places, I know God heard me because I got this flash, this one sentence that I think irrevocably shaped the rest of my life to this point and therefore beyond.

What I put on that Bible in gold leaf lettering was: "Lord, give me wonder, may wisdom follow."

I asked God for curiosity and I got it. That's both a blessing and a curse—a curse because you can never satisfy curiosity. If you believe that curiosity killed the cat, you've been misled. A feeling is not going to kill you, much less curiosity of all feelings.

No matter where my life has been, I've always been fascinated by the Bible. When I started doing First Formation, it gave me an outlet for that curiosity, and I got closer to this literature.

After my first master's degree—an MTS from Duke—I got a job teaching the Bible to undergrads who probably didn't really want to be instructed on the Bible. They were going to a formerly Christian college where it was a requirement, and none of the tenured faculty wanted to deal with it. So I taught five semesters of Bible at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I walked my students every semester through the Jewish holidays and where they come from, Torah and the prophets, the gospels.

I didn't really choose that—it just got put in my lap. I've never taken Greek or Hebrew.

When I got ready to take my second master's degree at St. Andrews in Scotland, including some courses with Tom Wright, I was given the option of doing Bible and Scripture and Theology or Systematic and Historical Theology. The systematic stuff bored me to no end. But I figured the one class I'd have to take for the Bible track would be kind of boring because I'd already been teaching it, probably took it at Duke.

So I took the course that led me to historical and systematics. In that class with Mark Elliott—a patristics scholar—and Tom Wright, we explored origins of Christian theology. We think of patristics, the fathers, as second and third century, when theology was hitting its stride. Tom's point to Mark and to us graduate students was: no, theology's happening right there in Paul before we even have the gospels. That's what theology looks like—Paul writing to communities. Later, those communities began to narrate the things they remember about Christ's life.

That stuck with me.

I came back, got in a lot of trouble with the wrong people—or the right people—and had a lot of time because I wasn't going to be an academic. I was a stay-at-home dad for eight years, and that's when I was doing First Formation. I was reading my Bible and Blue Letter Bible because I had the time. You've got to read something while you're trying to put the kids to sleep or waiting for them to go to sleep in their crib so you can low-crawl out or they'll wake up and start screaming.

That began in 2018, seven years ago. I've done all of the dailies, all three years, the entire three-year cycle. I've been practicing getting up to the Sundays, because the Sundays are the cool kids' show. That's where all the best readings go. Me being a grunt, I'm happy with the scraps that fall off the table. So I did the dailies—the parts of the Bible, or at least in the lectionary, that nobody wants. Just like my Bible as Literature class—nobody wanted to teach the Bible as Literature to a bunch of reluctant undergrads. So I did it.

That's the grunt in me. I'll take the work nobody else wants. You don't want to clean the bathroom at the chapter house? I'll do it.

I'd never done the Sundays before. Yet I believe in myself and I believe in how I've been trained. I didn't take languages, but I took theology and ethics and interpretation, hermeneutics. Reading the Bible and giving however many seasons of First Formation made me comfortable in taking on the cool kids' Sunday readings.

Year A is the beginning of a new three-year liturgical cycle. Year A is Matthew. I would really prefer to go Mark, Luke, Matthew, John, but that's not the way the calendar fell. I like piggybacking off of what an institution has already created. I'm not going to reinvent the lectionary. But it does provide me something outside myself to extrapolate and to apply my Marshall hermeneutic.

If there's one thing PQ HQ dot com and Grunt Works is about, it's about applying a Marshall hermeneutic to our faith, to our current culture, our current politics. By Marshall hermeneutic, I mean interpreting it as an everyman or an everywoman. That's why "grunt" is really important to me.

Grunt is a protected word in the infantry. I was not a grunt because I was artillery. Only 11 Bravos are grunts, and maybe 11 Charlies. The irony is that I stood in formation in Iraq when my infantry platoon got their combat infantrymen badges. Me and the medic were standing next to each other—we were being polite, but it was kind of funny. We didn't laugh out loud, but like, give me a break. We carry more stuff, are responsible for all of you, and we don't get the same credit.

That was fine. The medics and I—that's our lot. We don't need the accolades. Call us the original or the last quiet professionals. I don't need it. I got a CAB, Combat Action Badge, like they told us when we got home, because my artillery unit put us in for one.

I'm not here for the laurels, I'm not here for the accolades. Whenever I go skating and land something I'm proud of, I know people are tapping their skateboard for me. I'll exchange glances or whatever, but I've deliberately put that out of my mind because I'm worried about becoming arrogant.

If you've interacted with me, a lot of people would say I'm arrogant. I think there's a very thin line between arrogance and confidence. Being worried about being arrogant can keep you from being confident.

I've been putting off doing the Sundays for a long time because I'm not ordained. I never felt a call to ordination. I don't have languages. But I do think the Bible is saying something different than what I've heard other people tell me it says. It isn't necessarily the language that is at the heart of it. I think it's the culture. I think the people who have been telling me what the Bible says have something to lose if they find that it says something slightly different.

There are a lot of anti-imperialists I've been in contact with who have formed my own interpretation of scripture, but that's not me. Not only was Cyrus, the emperor of Persia, called a Christ in the Old Testament in Isaiah—John and the Christ Joshua didn't see the same way. John was very anti-imperial. He sends his disciples from jail to ask his relative, "Are you really the Messiah?" Like, I just went to jail for you, and here you are healing a military family member's son. I thought we didn't do that. I thought we didn't associate with those people.

The hermeneutic I've developed in my brain isn't exactly progressive and certainly not conservative. I got pushed out of the military because I refused to carry a weapon. I was artillery, but I was willing to deploy. I made it very clear, and they would not allow me to deploy without a weapon. They kicked me out with an honorable discharge.

I am a person of many paradoxes.

To get into today's readings and why I read what I did: I've taken the public domain translations for the Septuagint, which should be the starting point. It's the oldest text we have. The Hebrew text didn't come until the 900s.

Part of the problem we don't always see as Christians is that the Masoretic text we base all of our English Bibles on—they were correcting. They came after the Septuagint. Before the Masoretes, the Hebrew Bible didn't contain any vowels, just consonants. You can imagine that in English—if there's a sentence or a paragraph or an entire book without vowels, you could probably read it, but there would be some flexibility.

One of the trade-offs with the Masoretes is they took all these different Hebrew variations and said, "Okay, let's decide what vowels belong where and what these things are saying." The Greek Septuagint doesn't have that same issue.

What I have done with my exegetical hermeneutic: when I look at the Hebrew Bible, I start with the Septuagint, because the Dead Sea Scrolls and almost everything points to the fact that the Greek text is what Jesus and the earliest Christian community had. I want to know what they were reading, and it was not the Masoretic text.

Christ maybe, probably spoke Hebrew. He does preach at his own synagogue in Nazareth and reads. He would have been reading Hebrew probably. But if he's up in the north, it could have been Aramaic, could have been Greek. We don't really know for sure. But I want to be as close to Jesus as possible, as close to this individual whose Anglicized American name would be Joshua.

I start with the Greek, and sometimes when I'm not clear, I'll reference the Hebrew, the JPS Hebrew Tanakh. But I start with the Greek.

When I go through and read Isaiah, the word of Yahweh is what John later calls Jesus the Christ. The word coming out of Jerusalem is like a gentile like me saying, "Salvation comes from the Jews." It's inescapable. The Semitic roots that make up the Hebrew Bible are what give us the prophecies, the texts that make people anticipate a coming savior.

That savior is not a king. I'll get into that another time. That's why I did not do a podcast episode for Christ the King Sunday last week. He's not a king. But he is a savior, and he is more closely associated with the judges of Israel than the kings.

That's why it says, when the word of Yahweh comes out of Jerusalem, this word, Christ, will judge all people and shall convict people. In the Greek it's krinō, I think, which is to convict, to put someone on trial and to find them guilty or to be found guilty. The Christian language around "the spirit convicts"—you are guilty of something. You've made mistakes. When you realize you've made mistakes, you'll want to change your ways. You might stop using violence as much because that's a mistake. Coercive violence, because it's a mistake. It's hamartia, a sin—with scare quotes. It's a mistake.

If you want to correct your mistakes, a rational person will correct their mistakes. They will metanoia, they will turn from their old ways. They will repent, which means acting in a way that doesn't look like the old way.

When we get into the psalm, I changed things up. If you read this online at PQ HQ dot com slash—I have to decide on that—there are thrones for judgment. The Hebrew root is kise or kasa, and it means to conceal. So these thrones, which we think of as Solomon's big throne room, are actually—the Hebrew root is to conceal, like you're in a bathroom, that kind of throne.

When we play with the language, when we remember that we get to play with the language, that language belongs to us—you can't enforce language or it's going to find another way around it. That's what pidgin, Hawaiian pidgin, different pidgins around the world like Creole—that is when a dominating system tries to tell a human community, "You don't get to talk that way. We own the language. We sell you dictionaries. You buy them, and by God, that's how you define your very existence, very perception of the world."

And the word, the Christ, comes and says, "Oops, new meaning."

When we get into Romans 13: "Be subject to the rulers above you." What do you mean by ruler? When you look into what the Hebrew polity once was, there's a difference between radah, which is to rule over, to lord over, to put people below you, and al, which is also a ruler, like you'd get in a schoolyard.

What it means to be a ruler is to set the precedent, to be a standard, an example for all other humans to be able to follow. If you want people to follow you, you better be a decent human being. If you're not, you will not last long on that throne—which, by the way, are not passed down hereditarily, because with the judges it was not a child, there's not a genealogical system. That's what Gideon and Abimelech and Jotham tell us in Judges 9 and the bramble king, the first parable of the Old Testament.

Finally, Matthew 24. We get to Advent. Advent is this coming. Advent is the beginning. The dark season for the Northern Hemisphere is the beginning of the liturgical year. There's more landmass in the north, so I take some solace in the fact that most humans reside in the Northern Hemisphere. This does get complicated if you live in Australia, South America, Southern Africa, India perhaps.

Advent—the word in the Greek, the coming of the son of man. The son of man was a term that meant any old person, a child of humanity, ben adam. Adam means the earth. An earthling, a descendant of earthlings, just a regular person. But it gets inflated with all this meaning.

Jesus, if he's fully human, if Joshua is fully human, he's walking around the northern tribal area of Israel saying, "I know what you mean when you say son of man. You might think it means me because I'm healing people. I'm doing miraculous things. I have a guru in my relative John, a prophet just like Elijah, who eats locusts like Elijah, who wears a belt and camel skin like Elijah. He has inaugurated me. He has begun my ministry by anointing me, by blessing me, by dipping me in the river—the same river where Naaman the Syrian is the first to be baptized, baptismos, in 2 Kings 5."

This thing is coming. A new way to see the son of man, to see a child of humanity. A new way of humanity, a new humanity, a new age is upon us—whether that's because of AI or the printing press or fill in the blank.

Something new is happening and all these crazy dumpster fire things are going on. That's just kind of how humanity works.

In Judges, the people suffer under oppression. They are oppressed by the Philistines, fill in the blank, whatever you want. Some outside force is oppressing them. The saviors—yoshia—the first one is Othniel, then Shamgar, then Deborah. They just kind of emerge at the right time, and they do something charismatic and dangerous and sometimes violent, but not necessarily coercive violence. Not the top-down violence, but the bottom-up violence. I wouldn't call it class warfare unless, when you say warfare, you mean spiritual warfare, character battle.

Something's coming through the Jews, through the Hebrew Bible, through the Hebraic imagination. The Semitic root is logic incarnate. Of course this is what happens. Of course, when we have charlatans on the throne, someone is going to find their way around the same old red tape and scare the powerful dipshits at the top who just want to hold onto power. Of course. Because that's how humanity works.

If you take a moment and look at the Bible as a whole—which I've had the privilege of doing as a literate, privileged, hetero male evangelical—you begin to see things a little differently. You want to use new language than the language you've inherited, because the language you've inherited has become calcified and enforceable.

First Formation is about a new thing happening, especially this next three years that I'm going to be doing First Formation. You'll see there's new logo art. If you've been listening for a while, there's a slight difference—mostly the same, little different. I'm going to be putting this right there on PQ HQ dot com slash first-formation. I might shorten that later. It might just be "formation."

You'll find it on PQ HQ dot com. You'll see where you can follow the video podcast, the audio podcast. You'll get to read the same things that I just read, which may get updated. If you want to see the most up-to-date exegesis I'm doing, go to PQ HQ dot com slash TFW for The Fighting Word, because that's what I call my exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint and the Christian scriptures.

Something is happening. I've been through a lot and yet I'm still ticking. I'm a child of humanity and I have a lot of privilege. What I want to do with that privilege is help other people find the satisfaction, the contentedness that I've been able to find, despite all the slings and arrows of all the entitled enemies I've encountered in the last 15 years, 25 years.

First Formation is going to be my backbone, where everything else flows out of. I've been thinking about doing this anew for a long time, and I'm just going to do it. It's not going to be perfect, but I think it will be good—just like me. I'm made good. I'm imperfect, but I've been thinking about this a long time, and I am just dumbfounded at the beauty I'm still able to see.

A lot of veterans, a lot of military families, a lot of just other Americans have been asking me for a long time how and why and what. I've tried to organize my thoughts and share them: God is a Grunt, Reborn on the 4th of July, Forgotten Country, in that order. I'm going to keep writing, I'm going to keep creating, I'm going to keep doing the thing I've always been doing.

The only thing that's different is that I've definitely begun to see something that is breathtaking. It's also breathtaking to think I might have something of value that other people who are hurting in the kind of way I'm hurting or have been hurting—that I might have something to offer them. That I might be worthy. That I might be capable of inviting you to follow me.

I learned from a friend, a companion on the way, how ironic it was that I was ready to give my life for freedom and democracy, but what scares me more than anything else is asking people to follow me, inviting people to follow me. The arrogance of thinking that I have something good and satisfying to share with the world.

It might be confidence. Maybe I'm right. That's the only difference, after all, between confidence and arrogance: time. False confidence becomes arrogance. But if what I'm saying is true and good, then I'm just confident, and I need to trust that.

This is First Formation, the first season of fullness. I don't know how many years I've been doing it, but this is going to be Season 1, Episode 1 of the real First Formation, because that's how I feel. I feel more capable than I've ever felt, and I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. I'm 100% disabled through the VA, so I have a lot of flexibility, a lot of privilege. What I want to do with that is share it with other people as much as possible.

Listen to First Formation. Go to PQ HQ dot com. Come to the Chapter House. Buy one of my books. Join the conversation.

Thank you for trusting me. Pray for me that I remain worthy and trustworthy. Pray for me that I remain trustworthy, because that's what I want. I want to remain as good a person as I can be, and I don't want to hide whatever gifts I have or value I have under a bushel.

We live in an attention economy and a lot of people will think I'm just doing this for attention. But if I wanted attention, I could have had it a long time ago. I just had to get in bed with assholes, and I didn't want to.

This is me doing the thing I think I've been called to do from the start. The only regret I have is waiting this long to do it.

Thank you for following me.