This poem emerged from a reflection on Franz Schubert—his ability to blend structure and lyricism, sorrow and light, all within the patient spaciousness of his music. In listening to his piano and violin sonatas, especially the A minor, I began to sense not just musical beauty but a kind of invitation: to sit in the seam between resolution and rest, between form and feeling.

Schubert, in his youth, gave voice to a musical posture that feels almost Christ-like—not overpowering, but companionate. His melodies do not force, they converse. And in that gentle blend of order and openness, he becomes a signpost to the One who truly listens while He composes: Christ, the eternal Master Blender, whose cup of grace holds every sorrow, every sweetness, and all the life of the world.

Christ Listens While He Composes

Christ listens,
while He composes
in the timeless forms of the Father.

Franz Schubert—
lyricized structure,
a light-footed hinge in history.

Eternal,
not rushing resolution.
Mark this: in urgency, we too must pause—

and sit in the seam,
in the space among notes,
and turn gently to our Lord in the light—

who meets—converses—where we are,
in form and feeling,
in sorrow and sweetness,
in minor and major,
in death—
and in the spacious bloodstream of all life.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

We live in an age of infinite playback. At any given moment, we can summon the Berlin Philharmonic, or a hundred interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth from the glass rectangle in our pocket. Miraculous—but also, perhaps, numbing. In our saturation, something essential may be slipping away: the slow and sacred process of inhabiting beauty.

When I listen to Franz Schubert, particularly his A minor Sonata for piano and violin, I don’t just hear a gifted composer—I sense a young man sitting at a piano, surrounded by hand-copied scores, listening with his fingers. His originality was not a rebellion against tradition, but a reverent dwelling within it. In that, I find an unexpected echo of Jesus Christ, who did not force revelation, but revealed Himself quietly through Scripture. Both teach us something we’ve nearly forgotten: that absence can be a form of grace—not through lack, but through the space it makes for presence.

Schubert and the Sound of Presence
Franz Schubert composed in an age of silence. Not the silence of absence, but of expectant presence—a silence that required patience, attention, and participation. To experience music, Schubert had to play it. To hear Beethoven’s work, he had to live with scores, decipher their architecture, and imagine sound into being. Music was not a stream to dip into — it was a space to inhabit. This tactile engagement shaped him. As he sat at the piano, perhaps with a page from Beethoven on the stand and another from his own draft nearby, the air was filled not with playback but with possibility. His originality emerged not from novelty but from resonance — from hearing what came before and letting it breathe through him in new ways.

In this, Schubert becomes something more than a composer; he becomes a listener-creator, a vessel of structured lyricism. His music doesn’t overpower — it invites. And this quiet generativity gives his work a spiritual quality. The lack of instant access didn’t restrict his creativity — it refined it, channeling it into music that feels both timeless and tenderly temporal.

Christ and the Silence of Revelation
This same pattern—of listening as creating, of self-limitation as generativity—is magnified in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not wield spectacle to establish His authority. He rarely shouted. He wrote no books. His signs were quiet, often cloaked in secrecy, and His miracles ended with a warning: tell no one. His mastery was not in controlling the crowd but in inhabiting the Word. Every response, every rebuke, every parable — these were not spontaneous flashes, but revelations drawn from a lifetime of dwelling in Scripture.

As explored in the video Another Messianic Secret, Christ’s public reticence was not evasive; it was purposeful. He prostrated Himself before the Father’s will, expressed through the Scriptures He had come not to abolish, but to fulfill. His originality—His utterly new teaching—came not from asserting a fresh voice over against the tradition, but by inhabiting it so deeply that it could not remain unchanged. He aligned with Scripture not merely in knowledge but in embodiment. And in doing so, He revealed the eternal.

What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Forgotten
We live surrounded by numbing abundance: recordings of every symphony, every sermon, every interpretation of Scripture are only seconds away. We do not lack content; we lack traction. And in the absence of traction, we lose formation. Art becomes background. Scripture becomes reference. The very things meant to shape us become things we scroll past.

Schubert did not compose out of boredom or distraction. He composed out of need—out of a lived musical world where to know was to touch, to read was to play, to understand was to stay. And Christ, even more profoundly, did not proclaim truth through dominance or immediacy. He lived within the limitations of a quiet life in a small town. He aligned His voice not with noise, but with Scripture—scarce, sacred, slowly memorized. And that alignment changed the world.

We do not need less access—but we do need more inhabiting. We need to dwell with music, with words, with the Word, long enough that it reshapes us. Not just to hear, but to hear again. To sit at the piano. To open the page. To let silence be the beginning of sound.

Conclusion: A Call to Inhabit
If Christ is the eternal Word, and if Schubert gave us echoes of that Word in sound, then we are invited into the same posture—not of passive listening, but of faithful inhabiting.

To live within Scripture, not just around it.
To enter music not as escape, but as encounter.
And maybe the greatest abundance still begins
in silence.

Author’s Note:
This reflection on absence, scarcity, limitation, and access is not a commentary on material systems or economic ideology. The ideas explored here are not about withholding resources or promoting austerity as an external virtue. Rather, it is a spiritual and creative posture—a voluntary quieting of noise in order to hear more clearly. It is an interior discipline, not an imposed lack. In this sense, it’s an austerity not of access, but of attention: a deliberate return to what truly forms us. Whether in music, Scripture, or the inner life of Christ, such scarcity becomes a place of resonance, alignment, and abiding presence—not a void, but a vessel.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

In Isaiah 44–45, the Lord names Cyrus the Great—king of Persia—as His chosen instrument to liberate Israel. Though a Gentile, Cyrus is called “my shepherd” and “my anointed,” not for his own sake, but to fulfill God's covenant—ultimately for the sake of all peoples and all nations. This poem reflects the paradox and power of that calling: a foreign king led by the hand of Israel’s God, unknowingly participating in divine redemption for all, pointing forward to the fullness of salvation in Christ.

Of Cyrus the Great, King of Persia

Not for price,
nor for reward,
O Lord—

I hear the remnant cry
through You.

You have grasped
my right hand.
Thus says—

And thus says:
Your right hand
is the Lord.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

Isaiah 45
There are moments in Scripture where the voice of God is thunderous—mountain-shaking, sea-splitting, world-forming. And there are moments where that same voice lowers, not into silence, but into something quieter still: a parenthesis.

In Isaiah 45, God names Cyrus—a Gentile king—as His anointed instrument. The passage is filled with declarations of power and providence: “I will go before you… I will break in pieces the doors of bronze… I call you by your name.”

But then, almost suddenly, the tone shifts. The prophet exclaims:

“Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” (Isaiah 45:15, ESV)

The God who hides himself. It is one of the most sublime declarations in all of Scripture — a cry of awe, not doubt. God is hidden not because He is absent, but because His purposes transcend the surface. His glory is veiled by mercy, His acts clothed in paradox.

And it is precisely at this moment that Isaiah begins to speak in parentheses:

“(he is God!)” (v.18)
“(he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!)”

Partitioned in parentheticals, these are not editorial clarifications or narrative asides. They are the Spirit's murmurings within the text—groanings that match our own inner stammer. They speak with the urgency and intimacy of a voice overheard—a praise breaking through thought itself.

Paul echoes this dynamic in 1 Corinthians 2:10–12, where he writes:

“These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”

And again in Romans 8:26:

“The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”

The parentheticals of Isaiah 45 are not interruptions. They are resonances—brief flashes of glory leaking out from the hidden God. They are what it sounds like when the veil lifts slightly, not fully, and the awe is too deep for declarative speech alone.

To pray with Isaiah 45 is not just to hear what God says aloud.
It is to feel what the Spirit breathes between the lines.

God speaks thunderously.
But He also speaks in the brackets.

The Psalms
And the parentheticals in Isaiah 45 are not isolated. They belong to a larger scriptural pattern—one where God meets us not only in thunderous speech but in the pauses that follow.

In the Book of Psalms, this divine pause has a name: selah.

Repeated throughout the Psalter, selah offers no direct translation, yet its presence is unmistakable. It appears where truth requires reverence, where praise needs time to settle, where a soul must breathe. It functions like a wordless bracket—an invitation to stop, to reflect, to let meaning echo.

If Isaiah gives us divine whispers in parentheses, the Psalms give us divine breath in rest.

Both are movements of the Spirit.
Both are invitations into resonance.

To read Scripture faithfully is not only to follow the line, but to dwell in the space around it.
To listen for the voice that speaks — in thunder, in whisper, and in silence.

Selah.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

Invocation
I have learnt to love Schubert,
in shared hope,
hence Christ.

There are few pieces of music more arresting, more intimate, more tremulous with meaning than Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Written in 1824 while Schubert was gravely ill, the quartet trembles on the edge of mortality—not only his own, but all of ours. The title and thematic anchor come from a song he composed years earlier, a lied (the German word for song) in which Death gently invites a young woman to rest in his arms. The quartet’s second movement—a set of variations—is based on that haunting melody.

And yet, as much as we admire this masterpiece—and we do—it must be said: Death and the Maiden, like the culture that so often celebrates it, stands poised between truth and illusion. It gets very close to something real. But it stops short of the resurrection.

The Story Schubert Tells
In the original lied, the maiden pleads with Death to pass her by. She is young, beautiful, and afraid. But Death responds not with threat, but with gentleness. His voice is slow, calm, inevitable. And so the quartet unfolds: a fierce, stormy first movement; a slow second movement where the voice of death is varied and echoed; a restless scherzo; and a final movement that presses forward with unrelenting energy, like time itself.

There is resistance. There is mourning. There is, finally, acceptance.

This is where the cultural misreading often begins: the interpretation of death as a noble release, a shadowy friend. The aesthetic of the quartet tempts us toward a melancholic surrender, toward a Romantic stoicism—noble, tragic, beautiful.

But here’s the question: Is that the whole story?

Between Stoicism and Epicureanism
The philosophical ghosts in the room are ancient and powerful—Stoicism and Epicureanism. Most people don’t name them anymore, but they live on in cultural instinct:

• Stoicism teaches us to master our emotions, to meet death with courage and internal peace. It can sound virtuous — almost Christian. But it has no resurrection. No Christ.

• Epicureanism teaches us to detach, to enjoy life and not fear death, because death is the end of sensation. No judgment. No afterlife. No meaning beyond the moment.

In modern culture, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden often becomes a vessel for these views. We are told to accept death calmly, or to romanticize it as the final chord in nature’s symphony. We are taught to “make peace” with the end, or to dissolve beautifully into the cosmos.

But these are not Gospel truths.

They are philosophical sleights of hand—resignation dressed as peace, and annihilation disguised as transcendence.

Death in the Light of Christ
Scripture is more honest—and more hopeful.

• Death is not neutral. It is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23).

• Death is not a friend. It is the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26).

• And yet, death is not ultimate. It is a defeated foe, one whose sting has been pulled out by the crucified and risen Christ.

When Jesus stands before Lazarus’s tomb, He doesn’t merely comfort the grieving. He doesn’t quote philosophy. He doesn’t advise them to make peace with the cycle of life.

He weeps.

He is deeply moved, even angry—not at Lazarus, not at the mourners, but at death itself.

And then, He calls forth life: “Lazarus, come out.”

This is what Stoicism can never do.
This is what Epicureanism never dares to imagine.

The Christian Counterpoint
If we return to Schubert with this in mind, the quartet becomes something else.

• The maiden’s resistance becomes valid, not something to overcome, but something to redeem.

• Death’s calm voice becomes unmasked — not as tender, but as powerless, once it stands before the One who said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

• The final movement’s desperate momentum is not the sound of succumbing, but the sound of a cosmos straining toward the renewal of all things.

In that light, Schubert’s quartet doesn’t need to be rejected. It needs to be drawn through the veil—through Good Friday and into Easter Sunday.

The Gospel does not flatten the emotional depth of Schubert’s work. It transfigures it. It honors the ache, the longing, the fear—and then answers them.

With a name spoken at a tomb.
With a stone rolled away.
With the mocking cry:

“O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55 ESV)

Letting It Breathe
We let Schubert’s music breathe—not as resignation, but as pre-resurrection breath. We admire it deeply, but we do not canonize it as final truth. We let it carry us to the edge, and then we listen for a voice louder and gentler than death.

The voice of Christ.

He weeps with the maiden.
He meets her fear.
And then He takes her hand and says:

“Talitha cumi.” (Aramaic, Mark 5:41)
“Little girl, arise.”

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

There’s a kind of music that seems always on the verge of falling apart—too many ideas, too much feeling, not quite classical, not yet romantic. It stumbles forward, clutches at the hem of transcendence, and somehow—somehow—never collapses.

I heard that music recently in Schubert’s Symphony No. 2. There’s a sophisticated sloppiness to it—an almost clumsy boldness—that refuses to obey classical symmetry and yet reveals, in its very deviation, a deeper kind of grace. It’s the sound of a composer still young, still reaching, and still unwilling to tighten his soul for the sake of polish. And because of that, something remarkable happens: the symphony begins to feel… godlike. Not in the way of omnipotence or control, but in the way God seems to move through history—detouring through the margins, arriving in weakness, never missing the mark.

As I listened to Schubert’s Symphony No. 2, the story of the Gospel came to mind—not just as a theological category, but as a movement of grace: the saving story of Jesus, fulfilling the long arc of Israel’s hope. The symphony’s restless turns, its surging momentum, its refusal to stay predictable—all of it seemed to echo that singular Gospel. But then something strange happened. As I followed the flow of the music, the word Gospel in my mind quietly morphed into the word Psalms.

And that transformation felt right.

Because if the Gospel is the story that completes Israel’s longing, the Psalms are the very breath of that longing. They lurch and leap with emotion — grief, praise, trust, rage, awe—and in doing so, they teach us how to inhabit the story before we can fully understand it. They are the soundtrack of a people who walk by faith and not by sight. And in Schubert’s symphony, I heard that same spirit: bold, vulnerable, seemingly unstable, yet always held.

And perhaps that’s what this music revealed to me—something I’ve long felt but can rarely explain…

There is a clarity that comes in dreams, but which cannot be remembered upon waking. And yet, somehow, that clarity re-emerges—not through reason, but through moments of interaction. Not merely interaction with ideas, or with words on a page, but with Scripture as a generative environment—a place where God’s fire still flickers, where the Spirit still broods, where the Midrashic imagination is not a relic but a rhythm.

The Midrashic mode isn’t a genre or a doctrine. It’s more like a way of walking through Scripture—with your eyes open, your ears attuned, and your imagination baptized.

Rooted in Second Temple Judaism and richly developed by rabbis in the generations surrounding Jesus, Midrash is what happens when faithful people meet sacred text not as a closed system, but as a living world. It asks not just what does this passage say, but what else is it whispering? What happens if we tilt it in the light? What stories echo behind the silence?

In Midrash, nothing is “just filler.” A missing name, a strange repetition, a surprising verb tense—all of it becomes a door. And behind that door is often a question, a reversal, a paradox, or a poetic retelling.

But it does not end there.

That same interaction—if we are willing—extends into all of creation. Into a clumsy symphony. Into a bent psalm. Into a sunrise, a stumble, a silence. And suddenly, we see it:

The Gospel has not fallen.
The Gospel cannot fall.

It moves through all things like music—not because it avoids misstep, but because it transfigures every misstep into grace.

This is what Schubert, in a way, does—and not as fully as Scripture. Schubert does not allow me to move more than an inch without being arrested by the Spirit. It is more true of the Psalms. It is even more true of Isaiah.

And someday, when all of it is peeled away, that arrest will be complete.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

“Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”
— Dr. Amelia Brand, Interstellar

In a universe defined by entropy, distance, and unknowable scale, what holds?

This is the question pulsing at the heart of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. More than a film about space travel, it is a meditation on time, trust, and the enduring power of abiding love—a power not merely emotional but relational, sacrificial, and redemptive.

And it’s here—in the longing between parent and child, in the silence between worlds, in the signal sent across black holes—that Interstellar becomes more than speculative fiction. It becomes, quietly but unmistakably, a Christocentric story. Not just a tale pointing toward Christ (Christotelic), but one that, in its very structure and heart, centers on the kind of love only found in the gospel.

And perhaps even more unexpectedly, it resonates deeply with three prophetic chapters from Isaiah—three theological bodies orbiting a center they do not name, but toward which they also unmistakably bend.

The Three Bodies: Isaiah’s Theological Orbit
In Isaiah 41, 49, and 55, we find Israel not triumphant, but exiled. Not certain, but waiting. Not solved, but sustained. These chapters speak not of human achievement, but of divine presence—of a God who does not shout over the chaos, but enters it.

Isaiah 41—God Who Enters the Orbit
“He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.” (v.3)

God does not remain distant from the chaos of history. He moves within it, treading unfamiliar paths. He calls the coastlands to silence first, not speech—a call to listen, to draw near, to stop striving after predictive control.

This is the narrative condition of Interstellar: the systems we understand no longer hold. The gravitational pull is off. The familiar paths no longer work. Yet even here, something—or Someone—still moves.

Isaiah 49—The Covenant Kept in the Silence
“Can a woman forget her nursing child? …Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” (vv.15–16)

To the exiled, it seems God has forgotten. But Isaiah offers a deeper truth: the covenant holds, even when the voice goes silent. God’s remembrance is not based on feeling, but on fidelity—on the engraved promise.

In Interstellar, the silence between Cooper and Murph becomes unbearable. It feels like abandonment. But it is precisely in that silence that love abides. Not passively—but covenantally, waiting to break through.

Isaiah 55—Love That Transcends Return
“My word… shall not return to me empty…” (v.11)

The arc of Isaiah’s prophecy resolves not in collapse, but in fruitfulness. What God sends forth—His word, His promise, His love—will return. Not void. Not lost. But fulfilled.

In the film’s final act, Cooper enters a space where communication is impossible—and yet, a word is sent. A signal. A truth. Not to the world, but to one person. And that message—like God’s Word—does not return empty. It saves.

Moments That Matter
In Interstellar, time is not linear. It folds, circles, recurs. But every moment is not the same. There are moments that matter—when the silence must be broken, when love must act, when the signal must be sent.

In Isaiah, in the gospel, and in our lives, there are moments that are weighted with divine presence. They are not random. They are covenantal. And they become inflection points in both narrative and theology.

From Christotelic to Christocentric
Much of modern biblical theology embraces a Christotelic reading: that the Hebrew Scriptures reach their fulfillment in Christ. This is faithful and true—the story of Israel does indeed find its goal in Him.

But Interstellar invites us to go further. It asks: what if Christ is not merely the telos? What if He is the center—the one already inhabiting the story, already present in the silence, already sustaining the moments that matter?

To consider Interstellar theologically is not just to see a pattern that reminds us of Christ. It is to witness, in cinematic metaphor, a world that cries out for a mediator, and for a love that acts from within.

The Mediated Center: Christ in the Tesseract
In the film, the Tesseract is not a place of power. It is a place of mediation.

Constructed by unknown beings (perhaps future humans), it exists for one reason: so that Cooper can see across time, find the moment that matters, and send the message that saves. He does not control time—he enters it, navigates it through love, and sends his word not through force, but through gravitational resonance—a message bound to the one he loves.

In the Gospel, it is in Peter that we first encounter a profound epistemic transformation. One that does not deny science or history, but—like Cooper—integrates them into a new paradigm: a new creation, where love (and faith, and hope) become not merely virtues, but ways of knowing.

Science and history, on their own, can only carry us so far—epistemologically, ontologically. But rarely in cinema has a braver traveler been portrayed. Cooper does not remain fixed within the limits of what he already knows, or how he knows it. He crosses a boundary, impassable to reason alone.

Like Peter stepping onto water, Cooper enters a new epistemology—not anti-science, but transfigured. A dialectic done rightly: not either/or, but both/and—transcending and including.

In this light, faith, hope, and above all, love become not retreats from knowledge, but its fulfillment.

“Do you love me?” This becomes the question that shifts the cosmos. Cooper succeeds not through detachment or data alone, but because agape abounds—a love so enduring, it bends gravity itself.

And through this love—through Cooper’s meticulous stewardship, his attention to detail, his faithful presence in the Tesseract—we glimpse not Christ Himself, but the kind of space Christ creates through the New Covenant:

A space where time and eternity intersect,
Where the impossible becomes communicable,
Where a message is sent not by force, but by love.

Abiding Love and the Gospel of Time
In the end, Interstellar is a film about abiding love. A love that waits, that remembers, that sacrifices, and that returns. It is a love that transcends dimensions not because it ignores reality, but because it inhabits it more fully than fear, power, or data ever could.

This is the love of the New Covenant—not a force of feeling, but a force of Christic action:

A love that descends,
A love that mediates,
A love that abides across time, not just as memory, but as Word made flesh.

The story of Interstellar, when placed in conversation with Isaiah’s prophetic imagination and the Gospel’s redemptive center, becomes more than science fiction. It becomes a parable of the Christ at the center of time.

And through Him, the orbit holds.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

“Listen to me in silence, O coastlands; let the peoples renew their strength; let them approach, then let them speak; let us together draw near for judgment.” — Isaiah 41:1

The three-body problem, in physics, is deceptively simple: place three celestial bodies in space and try to predict their motion under the pull of gravity. If you only have two, the dance is elegant and solvable— ellipses, parabolas, predictable precision. Add a third, and the dance turns wild. Unpredictable. No general equation can describe it. What begins as clarity collapses into mathematical chaos—deterministic unpredictability.

And yet, this isn't just a problem of the stars. It's also a parable of human relationship, of moral systems, of historical forces. Of brothers.

In Genesis, we meet the first three-brother system: Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain, the restless striver; Abel, the beloved and silenced; Seth, the remnant—a third orbit into which God pours a future. Their interactions destabilize more than a family. They inaugurate a pattern: that when three forces—or persons—or wills—begin to pull on each other, we can no longer predict what comes next.

So too in The Three-Body Problem, the science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, where an alien civilization, trapped in a three-sun system, lives through endless cycles of collapse and rebirth. No stability. No predictability. Even their scientific progress is stalled by a world that won’t hold still. Human characters, too, are caught in the wake of this chaos, seeking clarity in technology, survival in control—but always missing the deeper thread.

And then we come to Isaiah 41, a transitional text so easily overlooked, but which—once listened to—holds the gravitational center of all this chaos.

The Call to Silence in a Swirling World
“Listen to me in silence, O coastlands…” — Isaiah 41:1

The coastlands—scattered peoples at the edge of the known world—are not summoned to action. Not to war. Not even to belief. First, they are called to silence. To cease their calculations. To stop trying to stabilize their own systems.

Only then: let them speak. “….let them approach, then let them speak…”

This order matters. In a world ruled by striving and noise, silence is not absence—it is space for revelation. Silence is the pause between gravitational pulls. It is what allows for a voice not our own to be heard.

God’s Motion Through Chaos
Then comes the striking image:

“He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.” (v.3)

Even God moves through unfamiliar paths. Not because He is lost, but because He chooses to enter the system. He steps into the swirling, unstable reality of human motion—and walks where no foot has walked.

This is the God of covenant: not distant, not immobile, but willing to move through the unpredictable, to enter the chaos, to inhabit the orbit.

Just as Christ would later enter time, and womb, and cross, the God of Isaiah 41 walks paths He had not yet trod—not because He had to, but because love moves.

Three Brothers, Three Bodies, No Solution?
In Genesis 4–5, the story of Cain, Abel, and Seth introduces more than family drama. It presents a moral three-body problem:

• Cain strives toward dominance,

• Abel is taken before his life fulfills,

• Seth is the unexpected continuation.

What begins as a two-body crisis (Cain and Abel) becomes something more complex—and from that complexity, God does not offer a formula, but a promise. The line of Seth is not predictable, but it is faithful. It carries the possibility of restoration, the hidden gravitational pull of covenant.

In Isaiah 41, we see echoes of this:

• The nations strive like Cain.

• Israel mourns like Abel — called a “worm,” seemingly forgotten.

• But then God says: “You are my servant… I have chosen you and not cast you off.” (v.9)

This is the Seth-moment: when in the middle of chaos, God chooses to bind Himself again to the broken orbit.

Idols Collapse, But Love Remains
The latter part of Isaiah 41 stages a courtroom drama. God calls on the idols to speak—to predict, to explain, to stabilize history.

They fail.

“Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing…” (v.24)

The three-body system of human striving—political, philosophical, technological—cannot stabilize itself. It collapses into violence, despair, betrayal.

Only one force remains: the steadfast love of the covenant God.

And this is where Isaiah 41 reveals its true brilliance: it doesn’t explain the chaos. It doesn’t fix the equations. Instead, it shows us a God who enters the orbit, and loves us within it. A God who says, “Fear not, for I am with you” (v.10), not because the orbit is now clean, but because presence is greater than prediction.

The Quiet Arrival of Love
Faith moves. Hope reaches. But love abides. It is the only force that does not decay under complexity. It is not disturbed by unpredictability, because it is volitional—not reactive.

And it is not abstract.

This abiding love takes on form—not only in Isaiah’s assurance to the exiles, but in the arrival of the Servant who will come in the very next chapter of Isaiah: the one in whom God’s soul delights, the one who will bring forth justice not by crushing, but by faithfulness. This Servant moves through history not as a distant answer but as a present embodiment.

He is the one who, in the fullness of time, steps into the orbit—not to hover above, but to be drawn into its gravity, its violence, its suffering. And yet He is not overcome. The Christ, crucified and risen, becomes the gravitational center of a new cosmos: the fulfillment, the resolution of the three-brother orbit, and the firstfruits of new creation.

Through Him, the already-chaotic world begins to shift into the already-and-not-yet of the New Kingdom—where love is not merely what remains, but what reigns.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
That which was to be demonstrated has been shown.

Not through calculation, but through covenant.
Not through prediction, but through presence.
Not through dominance, but through a crucified and risen Christ.

This is not a God who explains the equations from afar.
This is the God who enters the orbit, walks unfamiliar paths, and redeems the system from within.

This is love, and this is what remains.
Christ is risen—the orbit holds.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

A Christ-Centered Judaic Embrace

For many, the thought of embracing Christianity raises a quiet, difficult question—especially for those with Jewish ancestry. Does following Christ mean turning away from the heritage of Israel? Is Christianity a break from Judaism, or could it be its deepest fulfillment?

This tension isn’t always spoken aloud. It lingers in quiet questions, internal hesitations, or even subtle comments from others. But behind the question lies a story—a story that begins with promise, continues through exile, and finds its fulfillment in a crucified and risen Messiah.

Fulfillment, Not Rejection
Christianity is often misunderstood as a rejection of Judaism. But if one reads the Scriptures through the lens of fulfillment rather than replacement, a different picture emerges. The story that begins with Abraham—the covenant, the promises, the prophetic anticipation—is not discarded in Christ. It is fulfilled.

Jesus was not an outsider to Israel’s story. He was born into it, shaped by its Scriptures, steeped in its worship. As he said in Matthew 5:17:

“I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them.”

In him, the Law is embodied, the temple is reimagined, the covenant is kept. This is not a rupture in the narrative. It is its resolution.

A Midrashic Reading of Fulfillment
Approaching Scripture as a unified, unfolding witness to God’s self-revelation invites a posture not of severance, but of synthesis. One might call this a Midrashic imagination—not in the strict rabbinic sense, but as a reverent, reflective mode of reading. It allows the old and the new to echo across time, for symbols to stretch, for paradox to resolve in a Person.

This mode of reading, deeply rooted in both Jewish and early Christian traditions, welcomes patterns, fulfillment, and the quiet whisper of continuity. It allows the Torah, the Psalms, and the Prophets to speak forward—not just to Christ as a doctrinal endpoint, but to Christ as the living thread who runs through it all.

This way of reading also helps us understand something essential:

Jesus was not launching a new religion.

As N.T. Wright has carefully emphasized—especially in The Day the Revolution Began—Jesus was not offering a break with Israel’s story, but its long-promised renewal. His parables, in particular, reflect this. They are steeped in the oral and literary traditions of Second Temple Judaism, shaped by Aramaic idioms, folk wisdom, and storytelling forms passed across generations. His teaching does not reject the Jewish tradition—it awakens it. His voice resounds with the tone of the prophets, the rhythm of the Psalms, and the clarity of covenantal wisdom.

In Christ’s parables, we hear the natural language of a King and Messiah rooted in his people’s story, even as he draws that story to its promised fulfillment.

Theology That Holds Paradox
Many who come to Christianity from Jewish backgrounds—or even from other faith traditions—may find themselves working between tension and integration: distinguishing where necessary, but also drawing connections where faith invites synthesis. This is not a weakness of mind; it is a strength of vision.

Certain streams of Christian theology, particularly in the Lutheran tradition, model this well. The paradoxes at the heart of the faith—law and gospel, sinner and saint, already and not yet—form a theological rhythm that mirrors the scriptural one. Far from flattening the differences between Judaism and Christianity, this perspective gives space to appreciate their dynamic relationship, while recognizing Christ as the telos—the fulfillment—of the covenant.

A Covenant Completed, Not Cast Aside
In the person of Christ, the promises to Abraham are extended to the world—not by canceling the covenant, but by fulfilling its deepest intent: that through Abraham’s seed, all nations would be blessed.

The Psalms become the prayers of the Messiah.

The prophets become the foreshadowing of his mission.

The covenant becomes the vessel of God’s global embrace.

This is not a rejection of heritage. It is a homecoming.

The Invitation of Fulfillment
For anyone who has ever wondered whether following Jesus means walking away from their ancestral story, the answer may be more surprising—and more beautiful—than expected. It does not require abandonment, but recognition. Recognition that the same God who called Abraham, who spoke through Isaiah, and who sang through David has now spoken definitively in Christ.

To embrace him is not to discard the story, but to realize it. Not to leave behind one's roots, but to let them grow into what they were always meant to be: a tree grafted and flourishing, rooted in covenant, and reaching toward the renewal of all things.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

I first met Bishop Vincent Warner in late 2007, just before my wife and I were married. At our wedding reception, he offered words of blessing over our marriage. I hadn’t yet begun immersing myself in Scripture the way I do now. But even then, his presence felt like something quietly rooted. There was no sense of ceremony for its own sake—only a warmth that dignified the moment without overtaking it.

One of the next times I spent with him was in 2010. He had retired and was beginning to enjoy the rhythm of a slower season. He’d bought himself a yellow Corvette—with the convertible top, of course—and he was quietly proud of it. Not boastful, just glad. He also held onto an older car, an American model from the late '80s or early '90s, maybe a Buick. It was ruddy brown—interior and exterior matching—and full of that heavy, lived-in quality that cars sometimes carry.

That spring, my first daughter was not quite two years-old. My mother was visiting us in the Seattle-Tacoma area, and so were my wife’s parents, who had come from China to help with the baby. At one point, we joined up with Bishop Warner and his wife, a long-time friend of my wife. I ended up in the backseat of that ruddy car—just him, my mom, and me. We were converging on a Seattle beach, and I remember the ride. He met my mom with the same presence he offered to everyone: no pretense, no performance, just a warm and simple conversation and companionship that gave dignity without needing to control the tone.

That same week, he was eager to give my father-in-law a ride in the Corvette. It was a generous gesture, sincere. But my father-in-law, not used to such extravagance—or convertibles—spent the entire ride with his head turning left and right, searching for his wife in another car. The bond between them was that strong. I don’t think he enjoyed the ride much, but Bishop Warner took it all in stride. No offense taken. Just a soft chuckle and the quiet delight of a story that would age well in the retelling.

That’s the thing about him—he held his dignity lightly, and his humanity generously. Whether in a bishop’s office or behind the wheel of a yellow Corvette, he had the rare gift of making others feel seen—without making himself central.

What stayed with me most wasn’t any formal teaching or theological conversation. I wouldn’t have called him a theologian, at least not then—not in the way I now think of theology. But in hindsight, he was among those who helped shape how I receive it. I knew him not through texts or sermons, but through shared meals, quiet presence, and the kind of grounded wisdom that travels through life more than language.

We came to know each other through our wives—both women of Chinese ancestry, both from Harbin, both gracious in ways that created unexpected bonds. Our meetings over the years were few, mostly casual, and another one stands out, the last time I saw him: a simple meal in a Chinese buffet, where between the sesame chicken and the soft serve, he handed me his hat. Not a grand gesture, not ceremonial—just a quiet recognition. Our heads are about the same size, he said. I want you to have something.

I wish I still had that hat. It reminded me of something out of Indiana Jones—rugged, a bit theatrical, but full of character. I lost it during that same trip to Seattle. Carelessly, probably. A child distracted me, or I left it draped over the back of a chair in some forgettable moment. But I think of it often—not just because it was his, but because it was given. Freely. Without explanation. Like something passed on without full awareness of what it would come to mean.

At the time, I wasn’t yet into the work I now do—tracing Christ through paradox, poetry, and covenant. I wasn’t trying to find echoes of God in Schubert or draw maps from psalms to parables. But Bishop Warner didn’t treat me as if I were less for that. He met me where I was. He didn’t bring out his theology, though he had plenty. He didn’t bring up his position, though it carried weight. He just was. Present. Gentle. Still.

He was proud of a photo he took with the Dalai Lama, likely in the 1980s. It was one of the first things he showed me when I visited his home—just a picture, but clearly a moment that mattered. Not in a boastful way, but almost as if it had become a kind of icon for him: a shared smile between seekers, a glimpse of peace beyond labels, a bridge across worlds. It told me something about who he was, even if we didn’t speak of it directly.

That’s how he seemed to live—indirectly but intentionally. There was a stillness in him. A sense that the best kind of spiritual leadership doesn’t draw attention to itself, but listens. Watches. Welcomes. During that last meal we shared—just a simple Chinese buffet, surrounded by family, our wives chatting in their native tongue, our children weaving in and out of the conversation—he seemed fully present. No performance. No need to make anything of it.

And then, the hat. Our heads are about the same size, he said. I want you to have something. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I still don’t, not exactly. But now, years later, I find myself in the thick of theological writing. Wrestling with Scripture, tracing the shape of the cruciform Christ through music and myth, poetry and promise. And sometimes, when I’m lost in the work, I feel as though I’m wearing a kind of hat I didn’t know I was given.

Not the literal one—I lost that. But the gesture. The inheritance of spirit. The quiet encouragement of a man who saw something I hadn’t yet become, and gave something anyway. Without explanation. Without condition.

He loved singing karaoke. And I don’t mean occasionally—I mean he loved it. It was the only thing I ever saw him turn on the television for when I visited his home. He didn’t do it for show. He did it because it brought him joy. And when he sang, his voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Johnny Cash. That low, resonant gravity—not imitated, but natural. As if Cash had passed on not just a sound, but a spirit.

There was something holy in that, too. Because like Cash, Bishop Warner inhabited a kind of spiritual soil where tradition, Christ, justice, and brokenness all found voice. The already-and-not-yet kingdom hummed through his singing, not as a doctrine, but as a tone. Honest. Grounded. Hopeful, even when haunted.

I lost the hat. But not the memory. And not what it symbolized. Because some inheritances aren’t worn on the head—they settle into the heart. They sing in the background when you don’t realize it. They surface in your own voice, years later, when you’re trying to say something true.

Bishop Warner never tried to impress. He just offered presence. And maybe that’s the deepest kind of legacy—the quiet kind, the kind that hands you a hat without telling you why, then sings from the corner of the room while grace does its hidden work.

Postscript
The Resurrection

The resurrection
is also a present whisper—
an aged woman,
in reverence with a yellow flower,
memory both swift and motionless.

No trumpet, no stone rolled with thunder,
just the stillness of a gesture held
beneath the bloom—of something golden.

The wind of the already,
glimpsing the
not yet,
and forming.

Prelude: On Mirth, Means, and the Messiah
The following piece is offered in a spirit of lightheartedness and imaginative joy, in recognition of Jesus Christ—our Lord and Messiah, the Word made flesh, who—as Scripture attests—carried within His incarnate life not only divine wisdom, compassion, and authority, but also a holy and knowing sense of humor.

For the One who turned water into wine at a wedding, told stories of camels and needles, and paid taxes with a coin from a fish's mouth—He who healed a man’s blindness using spit and dirt—was not without laughter. Nor was He without irony, delight, or surprise.

And so, what follows rolls forth in His wake.

The Forgiveness Bike Shop
And it came to pass that a man, bearded with years and bearing the quiet confidence of someone who once owned BMX pegs, entered a bike shop filled with anodized potential.

He walked between the displays of oversized 29ers and featherlight race frames…
and spoke to the staff, saying:

“Your sins are forgiven.”

The staff froze. The assistant manager looked up from adjusting a derailleur. A young mechanic with grease on his nose dropped a torque wrench in disbelief.

“Who is this man who speaks such things?” they muttered among themselves.

“Who does he think he is—to forgive sins in a retail environment?”

But the man, perceiving their thoughts—perhaps by intuition, or perhaps from having worked in customer service himself—said to them:

“Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier—to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to place an order for a Haro Master 24 with full chromoly frame, front and rear U-brakes, gyro detangler, and tires treaded with grace?”

And he stepped forward to the register, laid a hand upon it as one might an altar, and said:

“But so that you may know about the Son of Man, who has His Father’s authority to forgive so that we may ride…”

He gestured toward the backroom and declared:

“Bring forth the Haro.”

And lo! The shop bell chimed, and a courier entered with a box glowing faintly. The staff looked on, astonished.

“We have never seen anything like this,” one whispered, “not since the freestyle prophets of the ‘80s walked the earth.”

And the man opened the box, cradled the frame like a long-lost relic, and smiled.

“Rise,” he said to the bike. “And roll.”

And it did.

Postlude: Grace Through Chrome, Mercy Through Means
This story, though spoken in mirth, follows the deeper pattern of Scripture:that our God delights to work through means—through water and word, through bread and wine, through spit and dirt, through fish and coins, and yes, even through chrome and childhood dreams remembered.

Jesus does not need tools. But He uses them anyway.

Not for efficiency, but for intimacy.

Not for spectacle, but to remind us that grace often comes wrapped in the ordinary—a coin, a touch, a muddy eye, a bicycle.

That, through the means of our vocations, we can channel the image of God, in and through Christ, in service of one another.

And in that, we are healed.

And in that, we ride.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

At a recent high school track meet concession stand, I paid $5 for what I believed might be a hipster-style street food experience—a “walking taco,” no less. Sounds inviting. At $5, it already sounds hip! I like things that move—I’m at a track meet after all, where hopes, and a casting about of faith, abound. My imagination—under the cooling sky and within my springtime, pollen-fogged brain—began, itself, to walk!

What I received was a fun-sized taco travesty with a forked tombstone—a vague, multi-textured gruel in a chip bag with a plastic utensil already standing vigil.

This is not a food review. It is a monologue of disillusionment. A cautionary tale about misplaced trust, and the subtle ways even our smallest cultural rituals can carry the scent of something much larger—and much hollower. Inspired by nothing more than Dorito dust and the slow death of optimism, I offer this as a dramatic reckoning with the taco that walked straight into my lungs.

In a world shaped by flash and filler, sometimes you only need two bites to taste Babylon.

Two Bites from Babylon: A Dramatic Monologue
[Spotlight fades in on a lone folding chair beside a trash can. Enter

TEACHER, clutching a chip bag, fork protruding like a weary mast. The aroma of ground beef lingers with menacing resolve.]

TEACHER (gazing outward, solemnly):
I came in peace.
Five dollars folded tenderly in my palm—
not for sustenance,
but for a glimmer of something artisanal,
a whisper of cumin-scented grace.

They called it the “Walking Taco.”
And I, foolish in my faith,
thought perhaps it would walk—
hand-in-hand
with dignity.

[He pauses. Looks at the bag.]

Instead—
Taco barf.
Soggy despair ladled
into the cadaver of a Doritos bag,
its foil skin crinkled like the hopes I once held.
A 14-year-old stood nearby,
silent, solemn,
holding a plastic fork upright
like a tombstone.

I did not yet know
that fork was for me.

[He sits slowly.]

First bite:
confusion.
Second bite:
rebuke.
A wayward puff of Dorito dust
slipped into my bronchioles,
a subatomic orange shard of shame
detonating
deep in the cathedral of my chest.

And so I stopped.

Not at five bites,
not at four—
but at two.
Because when the taco fights back,
you don’t press on.
You repent.

[He gently places the chip bag in the trash. The fork remains upright.]

They say
faith is the evidence of things not seen.
But this I have seen.
And I believe no more.

[Blackout.]

"The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again." — Revelation 18:14

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

In the unfolding drama of divine revelation, the question of who belongs—and how the story continues—has often turned on a single tension: supersession. It is a term burdened with pain, rooted in the idea that one people, or one revelation, replaces another. For centuries, this has complicated the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. And more recently, it has become a contested lens through which broader interfaith engagement must be navigated.

Yet perhaps the better question is not whether one tradition replaces another, but whether fulfillment must always mean erasure.

The Gospel of Christ does not cancel the story of Israel—it completes it. The crucified and risen Jesus does not sidestep the covenant, but embodies it. In Him, the promises made to Abraham, the law given through Moses, and the prophetic cries of justice and mercy find their long-awaited resonance. This is not a narrative of replacement, but of transfiguration. Christ does not uproot the tree of Israel; He is its firstfruits.

Still, it must be acknowledged that even within Christianity, the temptation toward a hard-edged supersessionism has existed—one that forgets Paul’s stern warning in Romans 11: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches.” This arrogance often results not only in theological pride, but in cultural and historical harm. Judaism, the root and trunk of our shared covenantal story, has been subjected to both neglect and caricature. Yet Scripture insists: “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

Today, that distortion takes on new forms. Some modern ideologies, even those wrapped in the language of reverence or tradition, frame earlier revelations as fundamentally corrupted or invalid. They position themselves not as the next verse in the melody, but as a new score entirely. Whether explicit or implicit, these perspectives deepen the displacement of Judaism and obscure the covenantal arc that runs from creation through Israel to Christ and, ultimately, to the renewal of all things.

In light of this, the Christian calling must be reframed not as conquest or correction, but as vocation and reflection.

We are invited to reflect God’s wisdom into the world and return the world’s praise to God—just as ancient Israel was called to be a light to the nations. The resurrection of Christ is not the end of that light, but its radiant center. Through Him, the covenant expands, not collapses.

This is why defending the dignity and ongoing vocation of ancient Israel and Judah is not merely an ethical task—it is a theological necessity. It is also a form of doxology. In honoring the covenantal history through which God has chosen to act, we offer praise to the faithfulness of God. And in bearing witness to Christ as its fulfillment, not its negation, we allow the whole story to sing.

To move beyond supersessionism, then, is not to water down the claims of Christ. It is to deepen them. It is to proclaim that in Him, the story of Israel does not end—it flowers. And in that flowering, we are called—not to dominate or displace—but to serve, to reflect, and to praise.

There is, perhaps, something worth pondering in the structural fact that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam form a triad—three faiths bound by a common claim to Abraham, a shared reverence for divine revelation, and a profound entanglement in one another’s histories. Like the threefold cords spoken of in Ecclesiastes, this triadic structure suggests not only tension but potential strength. Each tradition, in its own way, reaches back to a singular root and stretches forward with distinct vision.

That shared root does not imply identical fruit. Nor does it collapse difference into bland unity. Rather, it invites the deeper work of interfaith reflection—not as competition for theological ground, but as cultivation of soil already sown with covenantal intent.

This structural triad offers a symbolic frame for mutual engagement: not to relativize Christ, nor to deny difference, but to acknowledge a shared framework through which theological, historical, and moral resonance can be explored. It is within this resonance—not erasure—that a meaningful witness to truth can emerge.

Of course, significant theological divergences remain. One such divergence is eschatological: while Judaism and Christianity share a vision of embodied resurrection and the renewal of creation, other traditions envision a more sharply divided cosmology—heaven, earth, and judgment held at greater remove. These differences matter. But they need not prevent us from recognizing a shared impulse toward justice, reverence, and covenantal response.

Indeed, this triadic structure may offer not only a metaphor for mutual recognition, but a form of resilience—resilience against the great unravelings of the human condition: evil, injustice, violence, and sin. Though each tradition names and addresses these realities differently, they all seek to bear witness against them.

And in a cultural moment where consequences for wrongdoing are increasingly downplayed or unevenly applied, this shared moral witness becomes vital—not only as theological conviction, but as civic necessity. A society that grows lax toward crime and disorder does not become freer; it becomes more vulnerable to the rise of harsher, ideologically rigid alternatives.

For Christians, Christ’s atoning work does not remove the call to righteousness; it deepens it. Grace is not an exemption from the covenantal life, but the ground on which it is now walked—toward the restoration of all things.

Such a reflection does not preclude dialogue with other traditions, religious or otherwise. The world is vast, and the Spirit moves where it will…

But for those drawn into the long story of Abraham and its branches, the triadic structure can serve not only as a map of past divergences, but as a kind of architectural metaphor: a structure that, at its best, holds tension, reveals strength, and invites habitation.

Postscript

This essay offers no resolution—nor should it. The questions it raises are not problems to be solved but tensions to be inhabited, with reverence, humility, and hope. What it does offer is a path: one shaped by covenantal memory, Christic fulfillment, and the vocational call to reflect God's wisdom into the world.

Yet even that path can be distorted when we forget who we are and who we are not.

Across centuries, the temptation to claim divine authority has recurred—sometimes in the form of supersessionist pride, sometimes in the rigidity of ideology, and sometimes in the quiet erosion of moral clarity under the guise of neutrality. Whether theological or political, religious or secular, the impulse is the same: to stand in the place of God rather than before Him.

But we—all of us—are not the Author. We are image-bearers, not originators. The story of covenant, fulfillment, and justice is not ours to redefine but to receive—and in receiving it, to be shaped.

Christ fulfills the story not by replacing what came before, but by transfiguring it. In Him, the glory of God does not bypass creation; it passes through it. The call is not to possess that glory, but to reflect it.

And in that reflection, we find not resolution—but the beginning of wisdom.

Post-Postscript

If this essay resists resolution, it also resists naivety. The call to covenantal clarity and interfaith witness must include vigilance—not only against theological pride, but against the cultural conditions in which justice is softened into irrelevance, and power becomes the only remaining truth.

When societies lose the will—or the coherence—to apply consequence, they do not remain empty. Into that vacuum, ideologies rush. And not all ideologies are content with conversation.

Some, in their most extreme forms, bring with them codes of law that are likewise extreme—claiming divine mandate while silencing dissent by fear. While such expressions often emerge from within specific theological frameworks, the broader danger transcends any single tradition. These are not anomalies. In some systems of belief, they are the execution of a script—one written with absolute certainty and enforced without mercy.

This is not a call to paranoia. It is a call to discernment: to uphold moral order not as an imposition of power, but as a safeguard of peace. Lawlessness—whether in the name of tolerance or revolution—does not birth freedom. It births chaos. And chaos, unresisted, invites domination.

In this light, it is worth acknowledging a quiet yet important counterbalance in the religious landscape: traditions whose internal metaphysics resist theological absolutism. Among these, Hinduism stands out—not as an alternative theology, but as a civilizational current that tends to absorb rather than conquer, to reflect rather than enforce. Its tolerance for paradox, its regional elasticity, and its spiritual plurality create a kind of ballast against the rise of ideological extremism—religious or secular.

Justice, rightly applied, is not cruelty. It is covenantal stewardship. It is part of what it means to bear God’s image in the ordering of creation. And if we do not bear it well, others will bear it for us—in ways we did not choose.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

The world, we are told—rightly—is round. And for centuries now, we have taught this truth as a triumph of scientific knowledge over myth and superstition. The idea of a flat earth has become a shorthand for error, backwardness, and ignorance. It is mocked with a kind of reflexive superiority, the symbol of a mind unwilling to accept progress.

And yet, what if the old belief—wrong though it may be in physical terms—carried within it a symbolic longing we have too quickly dismissed? What if it gestured, in its limited understanding, toward something Christic, something fulfilled rather than corrected?

The flat earth of the ancients was not simply a misunderstanding of physical shape. It was a worldview—a sense of horizon, of place, of direction, of coherence. People stood within a world that felt spread before them: where North, South, East, and West extended like the corners of a great tent, a covenantal expanse. In that worldview, one could imagine walking from one end to the other—not escaping the world, but inhabiting it fully.

Perhaps that was never meant to be replaced, only transfigured.

The Geometry of Fulfillment
Christ does not discard the old; He fulfills it. The Law is not abolished, but transfigured. The Temple is not preserved, but replaced with something better—not by erasure, but by elevation. Likewise, the geometry of the cosmos may itself be caught up in this process of transfiguration.

In the vision of New Creation, Isaiah tells us:

“Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” (Isaiah 40:4)

This is not a flattening in the pejorative sense. It is a leveling for glory—the kind of “flatness” that makes way for doxology. The topography of strife and separation is made smooth for the coming of the Lord. In this sense, the idea of a “flat earth” becomes a symbol—not of ignorance, but of hope.

What if, in New Creation, geography itself is made permeable to praise? What if the four cardinal directions no longer pull us outward into isolation, but draw us inward into universal communion? A redeemed horizon where the edges do not divide but echo the voice of God?

Resonance in the Physics of Strings
This redemptive geometry does not oppose science—it opens space for it. In fact, within string theory—the leading theoretical framework in modern physics—there is profound harmony with this vision.

String theory imagines that the most fundamental units of reality are not particles, but vibrating strings. These strings trace out two-dimensional surfaces—called worldsheets—as they move through spacetime. And these worldsheets, often modeled as flat surfaces, hold within them the mathematics of resonance, tension, and song.

Many string theory models begin in flat ten-dimensional space. These "flat" spacetimes are not simplistic—they are elegant. They form a canvas for deeper laws to unfold. Vibrational patterns, encoded in the hidden dimensions of creation, become the building blocks of reality. In that sense, the universe is not only built but played—sung into being.

So while the Earth is physically round, the fundamental reality, as modern physics describes it, is one of woven, vibrating unity—a cosmic music stretched across flat dimensional frameworks. Not unlike the flat expanse of covenantal prophecy, preparing the way of the Lord.

This doesn’t resolve cosmology into eschatology, but it does reveal how science, when properly framed, can echo doxology. For the God who incarnates in Christ is not threatened by knowledge; He is the Logos in whom all knowledge coheres. The elegant mathematics of strings, the leveling poetry of Isaiah, and the square-shaped city of Revelation all whisper the same promise: a cosmos brought into resonance.

Against the Mockery of Small Knowledge
To be quite clear: the earth is not flat. Yet the mockery against so-called “flat-earthers” grates—not because the science is in doubt, but because the dismissal itself is shallow. It reveals a kind of reductionist thinking that not only misunderstands others, but also flattens the complexity of human belief, with a reflexive disdain that resists deeper reflection. Mockery always reveals a kind of smallness—the inability to see symbolic meaning in imperfect understanding. The early flat earth models were wrong in shape, but maybe they were right in intuition—right in their hunger for a world that made sense, where space stretched meaningfully from one covenantal end to the other.

In our modern “spherical” knowledge, we’ve gained precision, but perhaps lost a kind of sacred shape. We see curvature, but miss coherence. The round earth orbits through space, yet we drift through meaning.

But the Gospel is not curved. It is radiant and radiant outward. Christ is not a globe, but a cornerstone.

And the City of God, in Revelation, is not a sphere. It is foursquare—length and width and height in harmony (Revelation 21:16). Not a planet, but a temple. Not a globe, but a mosaic.

The Shape of Hope
We will never go back to believing the earth is flat. Nor should we. But perhaps we can go forward into seeing that the old longing—flattened landscapes, reachable ends, unified space—was not simply wrong, but incomplete. Like the Law before Christ, it awaited its fulfillment in glory.

The flat earth, in all its supposed foolishness, now becomes a symbol of that final geography—a redeemed, radiant cosmos where every place is connected, where distance no longer divides, and where the horizon is not a boundary, but a song.

And in that New Creation, we will not fall off the edge.

We will walk—together—across the flat and shining expanse of God’s everlasting praise.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

Karl Marx famously called religion the opiate of the people, a phrase that has echoed through generations as a rallying cry against what he saw as the narcotic effects of spiritual belief. But what Marx critiqued was not Christianity as it truly is—it was a shadow of it, a distortion. What he condemned was not the Gospel proclaimed by Christ, but a Platonized or Gnostic caricature: a belief system that sees the world as disposable, the body as irrelevant, and salvation as escape into a disembodied beyond.

That is not the Christian faith.

The Gospel, as preached by Christ Himself—fully divine, fully human, and rooted in the story of ancient Israel and Judah—is not a doctrine of retreat, but of covenantal fulfillment. It is the culminating moment in the long covenantal narrative of God's people, a story transfigured rather than discarded. In Christ, the promises made to Abraham, the cries of the prophets, and the longings of exile converge and take on flesh. Christianity, in this light, is not a brand-new religion but the revelation of what the story of Israel always pointed toward: the resurrection of the dead, the renewal of creation, and the reign of God on earth as in heaven.

This eschatology—the Christian hope—is not about drifting off into the clouds. As Paul proclaims in Romans, especially in chapters 5 through 8, the resurrection is bodily, the future is embodied, and the Spirit is at work even now renewing creation from within. N.T. Wright refers to this as a collaborative eschatology: God’s ultimate victory has been secured in Christ, but we are drawn into the story, empowered by the Spirit to anticipate that final renewal in our lives and vocations. This is not works-righteousness, as is sometimes mistakenly alleged. Rather, it is the gift of freedom: to serve, to create, to heal, to build—in short, to love with purpose.

Scot McKnight has similarly emphasized that the Gospel is not a mere transaction but a story: the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s hope and the Lord of the world. And this Lord does not call us to passivity. He calls us to live into our vocations—not to earn salvation, but to participate in the work of God, to reflect His image, and to bear witness to a coming kingdom that has already broken in.

And here lies a modern irony: many who today espouse a quasi- or fully Marxist worldview—often quite openly—end up reinforcing the very caricature Marx himself perpetuated. Whether knowingly or unconsciously, they describe Christianity not as it actually is, but through the distorted lens of Marxist critique. In doing so, they construct a convenient straw-man: a Christianity of passive piety, private comfort, and escapist fantasy.

But this straw-man is not drawn from Scripture. It is a reflection of Marxism’s own project—one that must distort in order to replace. It critiques a Christianity of its own making and declares victory over a phantom.

Yet Christians themselves have not been immune to promoting this distortion. The widespread belief in a rapture—a sudden evacuation of the faithful from the earth—represents a theological error both in metaphor and in literal reading. Though rooted in isolated interpretations of 1 Thessalonians, the concept collapses when viewed in light of the full scriptural witness. Through intertextual reading—from the Hebrew prophets to the Gospels, from Paul’s letters to the apocalyptic vision of Revelation—the picture is not of escape from the world, but of God’s faithful return to it.

The Christian hope is resurrection, not removal. Restoration, not rapture.

Marx, though intelligent and historically aware, misunderstood not only Christianity but arguably his own religious inheritance. Raised within a Jewish cultural framework, he nonetheless missed the central drama of that story: that the arc of Israel’s history finds its meaning not in negation or revolution, but in Christ. This is not a sweeping claim about Judaism or those who faithfully live within its tradition—entirely to the contrary. It is a specific critique of Marx himself, whose reductive analysis—so common to postmodernist thinking—flattened religion into mere sociopolitical utility. In doing so, he overlooked the richness of his own heritage and failed to see how the Gospel fulfills, rather than erases, the story of ancient Israel and Judah. The Gospel is not an opiate; it is an awakening—not to fantasy, but to the world as it truly is and will be. As C.S. Lewis rightly asserted: the lion will not be tamed.

But ask most people today—even many Christians—what happens when they die, and the answer often drifts into vague spirituality. However, the earliest Christian confession is far more tangible: He is risen—and so too shall we be. In that light, we do not wait passively.

We rise each day to participate—vocationally, communally, and doxologically—in the renewal God has begun.

In an age crowded with distortions—some ancient, some modern, some disguised as intelligence or activism—the Gospel calls us to remain rooted, not in abstraction or escapism, but in the living, resurrected Christ. He is not merely a symbol or an idea, nor a projection of our needs, nor a myth to be deconstructed. He is the fullness of God dwelling bodily, and the fulfillment of the story. To lose sight of that is to lose the thread—not just of theology, but of truth itself.

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." — Colossians 2:8–9, ESV

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

Schubert’s Eighth threads even among the blood that pulses through one’s ear.

There are few works in Western music that inhabit the listener so gently, yet so irrevocably, as Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It begins not with assertion, but with a murmur—a tremble in the low strings that feels less like the start of a performance and more like the surfacing of something long hidden, already alive inside you. It’s not a piece that asks to be heard, but one that reveals itself as having always been there, softly echoing in the chambers of the soul.

This is not the music of arrival, or conquest, or triumph. It is the music of presence. Of ache. Of grace so delicate it must be received rather than seized.

And there is something like this of the indwelling of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, as described in Scripture, rarely announces itself with fanfare. It moves like breath, like whisper, like thread. It abides within, often unnoticed—until one day you are still enough to hear it, and you realize it had been accompanying you all along. This is the kind of presence that Schubert somehow intuits and transmits—not through doctrine, but through tone; not through proclamation, but through patience.

When Schubert writes, he does not impose. He abides. His melodies do not carry you forward so much as sit beside you. They do not orchestrate your catharsis but offer a space where sorrow and wonder can be companions. Like the Spirit, his music weaves into your being, from without, but also from within.

To say that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony threads among the blood is not metaphor alone—it is a kind of confession. A recognition that what we often call “art” can also engage in revelation. And that what we often hear as music is sometimes a whisper from the Spirit, softly reminding us: I am with you, even here.

© 2025 Matthew Rubinstein, PsaltPress™.
All rights reserved.

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