That sentence, from Christopher Ash’s recent commentary on the Psalms, captures something that too many theological systems have quietly abandoned. Not merely the dignity of humanity, and not merely the sovereignty of God, but the permanent, irreversible, bodily humanity of the one who now sits enthroned over all things. Psalm 8 is not a nostalgic poem about Eden, nor is it a vague hymn about human potential. It is a prophecy, and the New Testament tells us exactly who fulfills it: Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God, the man who was crowned with glory and honor, and who remains a man forever.

Any theological system that denies the continuing incarnation of Christ, whether hyper-preterism or any other scheme that reduces the incarnation to a temporary episode, must reckon with this psalm. Because what Psalm 8 declares, and what the apostolic commentary on it confirms, is that the visible majesty of God in all the earth depends on a man governing it. Not a spirit. Not a post-incarnate divine being who has shed his flesh. A man.

The psalm opens and closes with the same exclamation: “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps 8:1, 9). This refrain is not merely praise; it is a thesis statement. The psalm exists to answer the question: how will the covenant Lord be visibly majestic on this earth? And the answer the psalm gives is striking. It is not through raw displays of cosmic power, not through angelic armies, but through the dominion of a human being.

David looks up at the night sky, at the moon and stars, the work of God’s fingers, and the sight provokes not worship alone but astonishment at a contrast (vv. 3-4). If the heavens declare the glory of God with such effortless grandeur, then what is man? The Hebrew word used here, enosh, speaks of human beings in their frailty, their weakness, their mortality. And the parallel term, “son of man” (ben adam), means something like an earthling, a creature formed from dust.2 David does not ask this question to diminish humanity. He asks it to magnify the goodness of God, who has chosen to crown such a creature with glory and honor and to give him dominion over the works of his hands (vv. 5-6). Calvin put it sharply: “God, with very good reason, might despise them and reckon them of no account if he were to stand upon the consideration of his own greatness or dignity.”3 And yet he does not despise them. He exalts them.

The language of verses 5 through 8 is unmistakably drawn from Genesis 1:26-28. Man is made “a little lower than the heavenly beings” and given dominion: sheep and oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the heavens, fish of the sea, “whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” Nothing in all creation, save God himself, is excluded. As Ash observes, this may even include the great sea creatures, perhaps Leviathan itself, the epitome of the powers of evil. “Even this is under the authority of the man.”4

But here is the question that the psalm forces us to face: is this dominion a present reality, or is it a broken promise? We do not, at present, see humanity exercising this kind of authority. We cannot even tame our own tongues (James 3:7-8). The dominion mandate of Genesis 1 was shattered by the fall, and as Calvin wrote, “by the fall of Adam, all mankind fell from their primeval state of integrity, for by this the image of God was almost entirely effaced from us, and we were also divested of those distinguishing gifts by which we would have been, as it were, elevated to the condition of demigods.”5

So what becomes of the psalm’s claim? If it is merely a backward glance at Eden, then it is an elegy, not a hymn. If it describes only what was lost, then the refrain, “how majestic is your name in all the earth,” rings hollow. The psalm demands a fulfillment.

And this is exactly where the New Testament steps in.

The most important commentary on Psalm 8 in all of Scripture is Hebrews 2:5-9. The author of Hebrews quotes the Septuagint of Psalm 8:4-6 and then applies it directly, explicitly, and exclusively to Jesus:

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, ‘What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.’ Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (Heb 2:5-9 ESV)

Several things about this passage demand careful attention.

First, notice the scope. The “world to come” (oikoumene) has been subjected not to angels but to the “man” and “son of man” of Psalm 8. And the author identifies this man as Jesus. Not Jesus-as-he-once-was, but Jesus as he now is. The verb tenses matter. He was made lower than the angels (incarnation and death), and he is crowned with glory and honor (present exaltation). The manhood of Christ is not past tense. He did not become a man temporarily. He became a man permanently, and it is as a man that he now exercises universal dominion.

Second, notice the “not yet.” “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.” This is devastating to any system that claims all eschatological realities were fulfilled in AD 70. The author of Hebrews, writing before AD 70, does not say, “We do not yet see everything in subjection to him, but we will within a few years when Jerusalem falls.” He frames it as an ongoing eschatological reality: the dominion of Christ is real, it is inaugurated, but it is not yet consummated. There are things not yet under his feet. And the psalm’s promise, that “nothing” will be left outside his control, awaits a future and visible fulfillment. Paul confirms this when he writes that the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself (1 Cor 15:26), and that only when all things have been subjected to him will the Son himself be subjected to the Father, “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). That has not happened yet. Death is still here.

Third, notice the continuation. The passage does not stop at verse 9. Hebrews 2:10 says that God is “bringing many sons to glory” through the one who suffered. And this requires a continuing incarnation. Why? Because of what follows in verses 14 through 17:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (Heb 2:14-17 ESV)

The logic is relentless. Because the children share in flesh and blood, Christ partook of flesh and blood. He was made like his brothers “in every respect.” And this was not for the sake of a thirty-year episode that ended at the ascension. It was so that he might become, and remain, a merciful and faithful high priest. The priesthood of Christ is not a completed and discarded function. He “always lives to make intercession” for those who draw near to God through him (Heb 7:25). And he intercedes as a man. If he has ceased to be a man, then his priesthood has ceased, and we have no mediator.

This is the theological catastrophe that hyper-preterism introduces. If the incarnation was temporary, if Christ’s body “dissipated” at the ascension or at AD 70, if the hypostatic union was dissolved, then the man of Psalm 8 no longer exists. And if the man of Psalm 8 no longer exists, then no one is crowned with glory and honor. No one has all things under his feet. The psalm’s promise collapses. And the majesty of God in all the earth, which the psalm says depends on the rule of a man, has no living fulfillment.

The additional New Testament echoes only deepen the point. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:27 that God “has put all things in subjection under his feet,” directly echoing Psalm 8:6. It describes the present, ongoing dominion of the risen and ascended Christ, a dominion that will reach its consummation when death itself is abolished. Paul makes the same connection in Ephesians 1:22: God “put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church.” Again, this is a present and continuing reality, not a past event that has run its course.

Even the episode in Matthew 21 confirms the incarnational thrust of the psalm. When the children cry “Hosanna to the Son of David” in the temple, and the chief priests are indignant, Jesus responds: “Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” (Matt 21:16, quoting Ps 8:2 LXX). Jesus applies the psalm to himself, to his physical presence in the temple, to the acclamation of his messianic identity by the weakest and most unimpressive voices. The strength that God ordains from the mouths of babes is the praise of the incarnate Son. Matthew Henry observes that this is fulfilled “by the apostles, who were looked upon but as babes, unlearned and ignorant men, mean and despicable, and by the foolishness of their preaching.”6 The gospel is the weak instrument by which the strong enemy is silenced, and that gospel is the proclamation of a man, the incarnate Christ, ruling the world.

John Gill, commenting on verse 5, draws the Christological application with particular force. He writes that Christ “was made low as to nature, place, estate, reputation, and life; he who was the most high God, in the form of God, and equal to him in the divine nature, was made frail mortal flesh.” And yet this low estate was temporary in its humiliation but permanent in its assumption. Gill notes that the crowning with glory and honor refers to Christ’s exaltation: God crowned him “by raising him from the dead, and setting him at his own right hand, committing all judgment to him; and requiring all creatures, angels and men, to give worship and adoration to him.”7 The crowning did not dissolve the manhood. It glorified it. The one who sits at the right hand of God is the same one who was made lower than the angels, the same one who partook of flesh and blood, the same one who died and rose again in a body. He is still a man, and it is as a man that he reigns.

Calvin, for his part, was careful to explain the relationship between Christ and the psalm’s broader reference to humanity. He observed that what David says about mankind “belongs properly to the beginning of the creation, when man’s nature was perfect,” but that the fall ruined this dignity. And so the fulfillment passes from mankind in general to Christ in particular: “as the heavenly Father hath bestowed upon his Son an immeasurable fulness of all blessings, that all of us may draw from this fountain, it follows that whatever God bestows upon us by him belongs of right to him in the highest degree; yea, he himself is the living image of God, according to which we must be renewed.”8 The dominion of Psalm 8, lost in Adam, is restored in Christ, and it is restored precisely because Christ assumed the nature that Adam ruined. If Christ no longer possesses that nature, then the restoration has no anchor.

This is not a peripheral doctrinal point. The continuing incarnation of Christ is the hinge on which Psalm 8 turns. The psalm does not say, “How majestic is your name in all the earth, for a spirit governs it from heaven.” It says a man will rule. And the New Testament says that man is Jesus. Not Jesus as he was during his earthly ministry, but Jesus as he is now and will be forever: the glorified, incarnate, reigning Son of God and Son of Man.

The implications for hyper-preterism are unavoidable. If the incarnation has ended, if Christ has discarded his humanity, then the “man” of Psalm 8 is a vacated title. The dominion has no subject. The high priesthood has no mediator. The “many sons” being brought to glory have no elder brother who shares their nature. The eschatological hope of the new humanity, governing the new heavens and new earth under Christ, has no foundation. As Ash summarizes the trajectory of the psalm: “Jesus is the righteous man of Psalm 1, the world-inheriting King of Psalm 2, the King opposed in Psalms 3-7, the second Adam of Psalm 8, and he is all this so that his people will inherit the blessing and will rule the world with him.”9

A man will rule the world. Not merely as a past accomplishment in the sufferings of the cross, and not merely as a spiritual metaphor for covenantal transition. A man, the God-Man, crowned with glory and honor, reigning until every enemy is under his feet and death itself is swallowed up. That is what Psalm 8 declares. That is what Hebrews 2 confirms. And any theology that cannot confess this has departed not merely from a few proof texts, but from the living Christ himself.

I. Conclusions and the Premises They Require

Every coherent system of thought, whether in philosophy, mathematics, or theology, operates according to the same fundamental principle of deductive reasoning: conclusions are determined by premises, and any proposed conclusion reveals what premises must be in place to sustain it. This is not a stylistic preference. It is the structure of rational thought itself.

In a valid deductive argument, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. If both premises are true and the logical form is valid, the conclusion cannot be false. That is the nature of deduction. But the converse must be carefully stated. When a conclusion is altered in a way not entailed by the original premises, one of three things must be true: either the premises have been changed, the terms within them have been redefined, or the reasoning has become invalid. There is no fourth option. One cannot change the terminus of an argument while leaving its foundational propositions, their definitions, and its inferential structure untouched and still claim the same valid deduction.

This principle applies not only to isolated syllogisms but to entire theological systems. A theological system is, at bottom, a network of logically interrelated propositions. The doctrines within that system are not free-floating assertions. They function as premises and conclusions relative to one another. Modify the conclusion of the system (its ultimate end, its telos) and you necessarily modify the premises that lead to it, or redefine the terms in which they are stated. Deny a premise that earlier stages of the argument require, and the conclusion collapses. Introduce a new conclusion foreign to the original premises, and you have not “reformed” the system; you have replaced it with a different one.

This observation is not merely academic. It is, in fact, the very thing at stake in one of the most important debates within Reformed theology: the ordering of the divine decrees, commonly known as the infralapsarian and supralapsarian debate. And it is precisely this issue that hyper-preterism, whether knowingly or not, fails to engage.

II. The Lapsarian Debate: Ordering the Decrees

The Shorter Catechism, Question 8, asks, “How doth God execute His decrees?” and answers, “God executeth His decrees in the works of creation and providence.” This simple statement carries enormous weight. It tells us that creation is not a standalone event unrelated to the divine purpose but is itself the execution of God’s eternal decree. The question that naturally follows is: what is the structure of that decree, and how should its parts be ordered?

Technically, there is only one decree in the mind of God: one comprehensive, all-encompassing, eternal purpose. However, because we are finite creatures limited by time and sequence, we apprehend the one decree in its constituent parts and speak of the “decrees” (plural) of God. The debate between infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism concerns how these decrees should be logically ordered and, more fundamentally, what governing principle determines that order.

The Infralapsarian Order. Within Calvinistic theology, five decrees became the standard points of focus, and infralapsarianism ordered them as follows:

1. God decreed to create the world and all men.

2. God decreed that all men would fall into sin.

3. God decreed to elect some fallen sinners to salvation in Christ and to reprobate the rest.

4. God decreed to redeem the elect by the cross work of Christ.

5. God decreed to apply Christ’s redemptive benefits to the elect.

The label “infralapsarian” derives from the placement of the decree of election (decree 3) below, or after (infra), the decree of the fall (lapsus). The ordering reflects the historical sequence in which these events unfold in time. Creation comes first historically, so it occupies the first position. The fall follows creation, so it sits in the second. Election, atonement, and application follow in turn.

This ordering was designed to protect a crucial Calvinistic commitment: the particularism of redemption. By placing election before the decrees of atonement and application, the infralapsarian scheme demonstrates that Christ’s atoning work and the Spirit’s application are directed exclusively toward the elect, not toward all men indiscriminately. This was, and remains, a powerful rejoinder to both Arminianism and Amyraldism.

However, the infralapsarian scheme suffers from a significant explanatory weakness. As Robert Reymond observed in his Systematic Theology, the historical arrangement can show no purposive connection between the several parts of the plan. In a coherent, purposive plan, each member should presuppose the next as the necessary means to the prior purpose, so that there is purposive cohesion governing the whole. The historical ordering simply cannot demonstrate, for example, why the decree to create is logically ordered toward the decree of the fall, or why the decree of the fall is ordered toward the decree of election.1 As Berkhof put it, the infralapsarian position “does not do justice to the unity of the divine decree, but represents the different members of it too much as disconnected parts.”2

A careful infralapsarian would respond that the unity of the decree is grounded in God's single, eternal act of will rather than in any demonstrable chain of conceptual dependencies. That response has genuine force, and the critique here is not that infralapsarianism is internally incoherent. It is rather that the infralapsarian ordering possesses a relative explanatory weakness: it cannot demonstrate as clearly as the supralapsarian ordering why each part of the plan purposively coheres with every other. Berkhof himself conceded that in the infralapsarian scheme, the decree to permit the fall "seems to be a frustration of the original plan, or at least an important modification of it."3

This represents a real explanatory deficiency. If the decree to create stands at the top with no discernible logical connection to what follows, then creation appears to serve some vague, general purpose (”for His general glory as Creator”) that has no explicit relationship to the soteric center of God’s eternal plan. The result is that creation and fall appear as disconnected antecedents rather than as purposive means toward a determined end.

The Original Supralapsarian Order. To address this deficiency, supralapsarians moved the decree of election above (supra) the decree of the fall, placing it at the top of the order. The result was an ordering in which election serves as the governing principle, giving purpose to the decrees of creation, fall, atonement, and application. Creation and fall now serve the overarching purpose of bringing about the salvation of the elect.

However, the original supralapsarian view made only one adjustment: it relocated election to the first position while leaving the remaining four decrees in the same historical order. This meant that while election was now the stated governing purpose, the logical movement from one subordinate decree to the next still followed the historical sequence and still suffered from the same lack of demonstrable purposive connection between individual decrees.

The Modified Supralapsarian Order. To resolve this remaining deficiency, a modified supralapsarian view was proposed (most notably by Reymond). This view retained election at the top but inverted the remaining four decrees, producing the following order:

1. The election of some sinful men to salvation in Christ (and the reprobation of the rest).

2. The decree to apply Christ’s redemptive benefits to the elect.

3. The decree to redeem the elect by the cross work of Christ.

4. The decree that men should fall.

5. The decree to create the world and men.

The advantage of this arrangement is that it reflects the way a rational mind actually plans. Reymond illustrated this with the analogy of purchasing a car. The end goal (purchasing the car) is determined first, and the mind then works backward through the means necessary to achieve that end: arranging a loan, agreeing on a price, arriving at the dealership, leaving home, getting out of bed. Each step presupposes the step after it (viewed from the goal backward), and each step purposively answers the need of the preceding step. No step is arbitrary. No step is disconnected. There is purposive coherence governing the whole.

Applied to the divine decrees, this retrograde logical planning produces the following chain. In order to bring about the election of sinners to salvation in Christ, God must apply a redemption to them. But in order to have a redemption to apply, Christ must accomplish that redemption by His atoning work on the cross. But in order for Christ to atone for sinners, there must be sinners, which requires a fall. But in order for there to be a fall, there must be men and a world in which to fall. Hence, the decree to create the world and men. Each decree logically presupposes the next as the means by which the prior purpose is accomplished. The fifth decree (creation), which is the last in logical sequence, becomes the first to be executed in time and space. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The historical starting point of Scripture is the logical terminus of the eternal plan.

It should be noted that this retrograde model is an analogical tool for finite minds, not a description of divine cognition. God does not reason step by step. His decree is eternal, simple, and not discursive. The ordering reflects our creaturely way of apprehending the relation of end to means within the one eternal and comprehensive act of the divine will.

The question beneath the lapsarian debate is not merely how God orders His decrees but why He creates at all, and how creation relates to the redemptive end of His plan.

III. A Necessary Revision: The Covenant of Redemption as the Governing Decree

The modified supralapsarian view represents a major improvement in demonstrating logical coherence within the divine decree. However, it does not go far enough. I want to be clear that in saying this, I am not lodging a broad criticism against the theologians who developed and defended this position. The classical lapsarian debate was primarily concerned with the logical relationship between election, the fall, redemption, and application within the particularist Calvinistic framework. That was the contested question of the day, and the modified supralapsarian view answers it well. What I am doing here is not so much correcting that project as enlarging it, pressing the question further back with a specific polemical purpose in view: namely, to address and refute the minimization of creation, material existence, and the person and ongoing work of the God-Man that one finds in its most extreme and consistent form in hyper-preterism, and in more diffuse but no less dangerous forms throughout much of contemporary evangelical piety.

As the modified scheme stands, the decree of election occupies the first and governing position. This can give the impression that the election of men is the ultimate end of God’s plan, the telos toward which all other decrees are directed. But Scripture does not support that conclusion.

Election is not an end in itself. Not all men are elect, and there is a purpose even in the non-election of some. Paul makes this explicit in Romans 9:22-23: “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?” Election and reprobation alike serve a higher purpose: the display of God’s perfections, His wrath, His power, His mercy, His glory.

Furthermore, if the elect are elected “in Christ” (Ephesians 1:4), then election is not a direct, unmediated act terminating on the individual. It is an act mediated through a Person. Election, therefore, cannot be ultimate, because it is not self-referential. The elect are chosen in Christ, and that means Christ, not election, is the organizing center of the decree. And that Person, Christ, is Himself the center of God’s “eternal purpose” (Ephesians 3:11). Paul says that this eternal purpose was “realized in Christ Jesus our Lord,” and that through the church (the redeemed) “the manifold wisdom of God” is “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). Paul reinforces this in Ephesians 1:9-10, describing God’s purpose as “a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

Scripture repeatedly presents redemption as grounded in an eternal, intra-trinitarian purpose. The Son is given a people (John 6:37-39), sent to accomplish a defined work (John 17:4-6), and promised a reward upon its completion (Isaiah 53:10-12). This is not an ad hoc response to the fall but the execution of a prior design. What theology later calls the covenant of redemption is simply the systematic articulation of this biblical pattern.

This means that the modified supralapsarian scheme requires an additional decree at the top, one that accounts for why men are elected and what necessitates the “Christ” in whom they are elected. That decree is the eternal covenant of redemption (the pactum salutis) between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the triune purpose to glorify God in His holiness, power, wisdom, justice, wrath, goodness, truth, and grace through a work of salvation in which the Father elects, the Son takes on a reasonable soul and body as the incarnate God-Man to perfectly obey, suffer, die, and rise as a substitutionary atonement, and the Spirit applies the benefits of that salvation to the elect at the appointed time.

The revised order, then, looks like this:

1. The eternal covenant of redemption (pactum salutis): God’s purpose to glorify Himself in the full range of His perfections through the person and work of the incarnate Christ, the God-Man, who is given preeminence over all things.

2. The election of some sinful men to salvation in Christ (and the reprobation of the rest), as a means to the glory of God.

3. The decree to apply Christ’s redemptive benefits to the elect.

4. The decree to redeem the elect by the cross work of Christ.

5. The decree that men should fall.

6. The decree to create the world and men.

Several things should be noted. First, the governing principle is no longer the election of men but the glorification of God through the preeminence of the incarnate Son. Election is subordinated to a higher purpose and functions as one of many means by which God displays the full range of His perfections. Second, the Christ who stands at the center of the first decree is not the Son simpliciter but the incarnate Word, that is, the Son as purposing within the eternal council to take on our flesh and blood. This is critical, because it means that the material creation, the creation of bodies, of flesh, of physical existence, is not incidental to the plan but essential to it. The plan requires an incarnation, and incarnation requires a creation. Third, every subsequent decree continues to logically presuppose the next in retrograde fashion, now with even greater force, because every decree is oriented toward and finds its purpose in the covenantal glory of the incarnate Christ.

The one eternal decree, comprehended in its parts, is governed by a single telos: the glorification of God in the person and work of His incarnate Son.

IV. The Surety, the Testator, and the Permanence of the Incarnation

The pactum salutis is not an abstract, intra-trinitarian arrangement sealed away from history. It is the covenantal foundation from which the one Covenant of Grace emerges in time. And the Son’s role within that covenant was legally precise.

The author of Hebrews designates Him “the surety of a better covenant” (Hebrews 7:22), one who assumes the legal liability of another, stands as guarantor for a debt he did not personally incur, and is bound to satisfy that obligation in full. The same author also calls Him the Testator of a testament (Hebrews 9:15-17): one whose death alone puts the inheritance into force. “For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive” (Hebrews 9:17). These two legal categories together establish that the entire old covenant economy, its priesthood, its sacrifices, its typological land, was the provisional administration of a testament not yet put into force. The promises as administered in that economy were real. But they were real as anticipations of the substance, not as the substance itself.

When the Testator died, He died in a body. He rose in that body, transformed and glorified. He ascended bodily. And Hebrews describes Him as continuing in that body to exercise His mediatorial office as the great High Priest, “appearing in the presence of God on our behalf” (Hebrews 9:24) on the basis of His one complete and unrepeatable sacrifice. His mediatorial offices did not terminate at the resurrection. They continue. His intercession is an incarnate intercession. If the Son remains incarnate, then redemption cannot terminate in a disembodied state. His sitting at the right hand “until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet” (Hebrews 10:13) is an incarnate waiting that will end in an incarnate return, visible, bodily, in the same flesh He assumed in execution of the pactum salutis.

The incarnation is therefore not a temporary accommodation to sin, set aside once the legal transaction was complete. It is the permanent covenantal condition of the relationship between the triune God and His redeemed people. Colossians 1:15-20 captures this with precision:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Not that men might be preeminent. Not that election might be preeminent. That He might be preeminent.

This section of the argument must be firmly in view before the implications for creation and for hyper-preterism are drawn out, because every conclusion that follows depends on the permanence of the incarnation and the ongoing, bodily mediatorial work of the God-Man. To strip the eschaton of bodily resurrection, visible return, and the renewal of the material order is not a peripheral eschatological adjustment. It is a direct contradiction of the permanent covenantal status of the incarnation and an implicit denial of the very terms of the testament that Christ’s death put into force.

V. The Logical Necessity of Creation

With the revised framework and its covenantal foundation now in place, the implications for the doctrine of creation can be stated directly.

In this scheme, creation is the last decree in logical sequence but the first to be executed in time and space. It is the foundational means by which the entire plan of redemption is set into motion. And because each decree logically presupposes the next in the retrograde chain, creation is not arbitrary, not random, not a curious little footnote, and most certainly not the remnant of a plan that God aborted. Creation is purposive. It exists to bring about the end goal: the glorification of God in the person and work of the incarnate Christ.

Consider what this means for the specific features of creation. God created man as body and soul (Genesis 2:7). Why? Because the decree of the fall requires creatures who are body and soul. The decree of atonement requires an incarnate Redeemer who takes on our nature, body and soul. The decree of application requires that salvation be applied to whole persons, body and soul. And the governing decree of the covenant of redemption requires that the incarnate God-Man be glorified as the firstborn from the dead in a resurrected body. In short, God created bodies because every decree in the chain, from the covenant of redemption down, requires them. If the redeemed of the first decree do not end up as body-and-soul creatures in the final state, then there was no purpose in creating them as body-and-soul creatures in the first place. If God desired to glorify Himself through disembodied souls alone, He could have created disembodied souls and dispensed with bodies altogether. But that is not what Genesis records. God created man, soul and body, so that man, soul and body, would glorify Him.

Paul confirms this connection explicitly: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

The Westminster Confession 4.1 states it this way: “It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.” Notice the purpose clause: “for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness.” Creation exists to manifest divine glory. It is not juxtaposed to redemption; it is the very means by which redemption, centered in the incarnate Christ, unfolds.

Reymond states it with characteristic precision: “All supralapsarians insist that the created world must never be viewed as standing off over against God’s redemptive activity, totally divorced from the particularizing purpose of God, the ultimate concern of God’s ‘eternal purpose,’ and as fulfilling some general purpose(s) unrelated to the redemptive work of Christ. They insist so on the ground that such a representation of creation shatters the unity of the one eternal purpose of God.”4

If you remove creation from the plan, you no longer have a plan. You no longer have an incarnate Son of God. You no longer have a Gospel.

VI. The Catastrophic Failure of Hyper-Preterism

It is at precisely this point that hyper-preterism collapses, and it collapses not merely on exegetical grounds (though it does that as well) but on logical and systematic grounds. The entire lapsarian debate is an exercise in asking the question: Why did God create? What purpose does creation serve in the eternal plan? How does the decree of creation relate, logically and purposively, to the decree of redemption? The revised framework developed above answers these questions with a clear and unified chain of purposive coherence. Hyper-preterism never asks them. It cannot afford to, because the moment it does, its conclusion becomes indefensible.

The Hyper-Preterist Conclusion. The defining claim of hyper-preterism is that all eschatological events, the resurrection of the dead, the visible bodily return of Christ, the general judgment, and the renewal of creation, were fulfilled in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem. In their system, there is no future bodily resurrection. There is no future visible return of the incarnate Christ. There is no future renewal or restoration of the created order. Everything promised has been fulfilled. The eschaton is past.

This is a conclusion. And like all conclusions, it either follows from premises, or it does not. If it does, then we must examine those premises and ask whether they are the same premises that Christianity has always confessed. If it does not follow from Christian premises, then the hyper-preterist must either admit that his conclusion is invalid or acknowledge that he is operating from a different set of premises altogether.

Different Conclusions Require Different Premises. In orthodox Christian theology, the premises include (among many others) the following:

1. God created man as body and soul, and both are essential to human nature.

2. The incarnation of the Son of God, in which the second Person of the Trinity assumed a true human body and a reasonable soul, is essential to the work of redemption.

3. The bodily resurrection of Christ is the firstfruits of a future bodily resurrection of all the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20-23).

4. The material creation is not disposable but is destined for renewal and restoration (Romans 8:19-23).

5. Providence over the created order is directed toward the consummation of God’s redemptive purpose, including the subjection of all things under the feet of the incarnate Christ (1 Corinthians 15:25-28).

From these premises, Christianity draws its conclusion: the plan of redemption terminates in the bodily resurrection of the dead, the visible return of the incarnate Christ, the final judgment, and the renewal of all things. Creation is essential to both the beginning and the end of that plan. It is the means by which the plan begins (Genesis 1) and the substance of what the plan consummates (Revelation 21-22).

Hyper-preterism denies this conclusion. It asserts that there is no future bodily resurrection, no future bodily return, no future renewal of the material order. But if the conclusion is different, the premises must also be different. And they are. The hyper-preterist system requires, whether its adherents acknowledge it or not, a set of premises in which:

1. The body is not essential to human nature in its final, glorified state. The soul alone suffices.

2. The material creation has no necessary role in the consummation of God’s plan. It is, at best, a temporary stage that has served its purpose and can be discarded.

3. The incarnation of the Son, while historically real, does not carry its full theological weight into the eschaton. For many hyper-preterists, including Don Preston, the Incarnation does not merely diminish in eschatological significance; it does not continue at all. The risen, ascended, incarnate Christ does not return bodily because bodily return is unnecessary in a system where bodies are eschatologically irrelevant.

4. Providence over the material creation is not directed toward a future renewal of that creation. There is no eschatological horizon for the groaning of creation described in Romans 8. The creation simply continues as it is, indefinitely, with no purposive terminus.

These are not the premises of Christianity. They are the premises of a system that has far more in common with ancient Gnosticism than with anything confessed in the ecumenical creeds, the Reformed confessions, or the pages of Scripture.

The hyper-preterist will often respond that he does not deny resurrection but affirms it as a “spiritual” reality fulfilled in the first century. But this response only relocates the problem. If resurrection does not include the restoration of the body, then the body has no eschatological significance. And if the body has no eschatological significance, then its creation cannot be essential to the plan it was meant to serve.

Creation Rendered Purposeless. Now the full force of the lapsarian critique can be brought to bear. The revised modified supralapsarian framework demonstrates that the decree to create is logically presupposed by the decree to redeem, and the decree to redeem is governed by the covenant of redemption centered in the incarnate Christ. Every feature of creation, including its materiality, its body-and-soul constitution of man, and its providential ordering, is purposively connected to the eschatological consummation. But hyper-preterism has no eschatological consummation involving the material order. It has no future bodily resurrection. It has no return of the incarnate Christ in glory. It has no renewal of the heavens and the earth. And therefore, in the hyper-preterist system, the question “Why did God create?” has no satisfying answer.

Creation becomes, functionally, purposeless. It is a means to no discernible end. The body God gave to man in Genesis 2 has no final destiny. The material world God spoke into existence in Genesis 1 has no eschatological significance. And for a significant strand of hyper-preterism, the problem runs deeper still: it is not certain that Genesis 1 is speaking about the material world at all! Covenant Creationism, developed most fully by Timothy Martin and Jeffrey Vaughn in Beyond Creation Science (2007), argues that the "heavens and earth" of Genesis 1 refer not to the physical cosmos but to the covenantal world formed by God's relationship with his people. The system's internal logic drives toward this conclusion inevitably. If the "new heaven and new earth" of Revelation 21 is not a transformed physical cosmos but the old covenant order giving way to the new in AD 70, then consistency requires that the original "heavens and earth" of Genesis 1 be read the same way. Martin and Vaughn state this candidly: "Covenant Creation challenges all common creation views because they view the 'beginning' in terms of the physical world. The principles Covenant Eschatology applies to the 'end' are the same principles that Covenant Creation applies to the 'beginning.'"5 This is not a marginal distortion of hyper-preterism. It is the system pursued to its logical terminus. The material world is left with neither a theological beginning nor a theological end. It simply does not belong to the story.

Infralapsarianism merely failed to demonstrate a purposive connection. Hyper-preterism actively severs it. If bodies are not raised, why were they created? If the earth is not renewed, why was it made? If the incarnation does not culminate in a visible, bodily return, what was the full purpose of the Son taking on flesh?

The logic can be stated plainly. If creation exists for a redemptive end, and that end does not include the restoration of the body or the renewal of the world, then creation is not essential to that end. And if creation is not essential to that end, then it is not essential to the plan. But Scripture presents creation as integral, not incidental. Therefore the conclusion cannot stand.

The hyper-preterist might respond by saying that creation served a temporary, instrumental role: it was the stage on which the first-century drama of fulfillment played out, and having served that role, it has no further eschatological function. But this is precisely the point. In such a scheme, creation is not an essential, permanent, purposive component of the decree. It is disposable scaffolding. And that is a fundamentally different premise than the one confessed by the Christian church for two millennia.

Redefinition as Denial. The hyper-preterist will often object that he does not “deny” creation. He affirms that God created the world, even if Genesis 1 and 2 do not speak directly to that fact. What he denies is a future bodily resurrection and a future renewal of the material order.

But this objection misunderstands the nature of the charge. The issue is not whether hyper-preterism affirms the historical fact of creation. Of course it does. The issue is whether it affirms the theological purpose of creation as confessed by the church. When the Confession says that God created “for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness,” it is asserting that creation serves the ongoing, eschatologically directed purpose of glorifying God. When Paul says that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21), he is asserting that the material creation has a future within the plan of redemption. To deny that future is to deny the purpose for which creation was made, regardless of whether one affirms the bare fact that creation occurred.

In formal terms: if the premise “creation serves the purpose of glorifying God through the incarnate Christ and the consummation of His redemptive work, including bodily resurrection and cosmic renewal” is replaced with “creation served a temporary, instrumental role culminating in a spiritual fulfillment in AD 70,” then the conclusion about what creation is has changed. And when the conclusion about what creation is has changed, so has the premise about what God’s plan is. The entire system has shifted. The labels may remain the same, but the substance underneath them is different.

Providence Rendered Directionless. The same logic applies to the doctrine of providence. The Shorter Catechism tells us that God executes His decrees “in the works of creation and providence.” Providence is God’s ongoing governance and direction of the created order toward the fulfillment of His eternal purpose. But if there is no future consummation of the created order, if the material world has no eschatological horizon, then what is providence directing creation toward?

In orthodox theology, providence is teleological: it is aimed at an end. The creation groans, Paul says, “in eager expectation” (Romans 8:19). But expectation of what? In the hyper-preterist system, the answer is: nothing. The creation groaned, and the groaning was resolved spiritually in AD 70. There is nothing left to expect. This is not a refinement of the doctrine of providence. It is the effective evacuation of it. Providence without a telos is not providence; it is mere continuation. And mere continuation, without purposive direction toward an eschatological goal, is precisely what the revised framework was designed to avoid. The entire point of demonstrating logical coherence between the decrees was to show that no decree is arbitrary, no decree is disconnected, and every decree, including the decree to create, serves a purposive function within the unified eternal plan. Hyper-preterism breaks every link in that chain below its own conclusion and then asks us to believe that the chain is still intact.

VII. Conclusion: Creation Matters Because Christ Matters

The lapsarian debate is not a speculative exercise for professional theologians. It is the question of why anything exists at all. The revised modified supralapsarian view, which places the covenant of redemption and the preeminence of the incarnate Christ at the governing position above all other decrees, demonstrates that creation is the first act in the execution of the one, eternal, comprehensive decree of God. It is the necessary means by which the incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus Christ are accomplished in time and space. Every feature of the created order, from the body-and-soul constitution of man to the material fabric of the cosmos, is oriented toward the eschatological consummation of that decree.

The covenantal history of redemption bears this out. The one Covenant of Grace, administered through successive historical forms from Abraham to the New Covenant, was never aimed at a merely earthly terminus. Its types and shadows, including the land of Canaan, the Levitical priesthood, and the temple sacrifices, were never the inheritance but the pledge of it. The Surety of that covenant bound Himself in eternity to pay what His people owed. The Testator put it into irrevocable force through His death. And He now administers its benefits as the incarnate High Priest at the right hand of the Father. The substance that all those shadows anticipated is not a first-century spiritual transaction. It is the bodily resurrection of the dead, the visible return of the God-Man in glory, the final judgment, and the renewal of the heavens and the earth.

Hyper-preterism, by positing a conclusion in which the material creation has no eschatological future, does not merely offer a different eschatology. It introduces a different set of premises, premises that sever the logical connection between creation and redemption, strip providence of its teleological direction, reduce the old covenant types to their own terminus rather than to the eternal reality they signaled, and render the permanent incarnation of the Son theologically incoherent. It mistakes the passing of the shadow for the arrival of the substance and calls it fulfillment.

Paul warned the Corinthians that the denial of bodily resurrection is not a peripheral eschatological disagreement but a rejection of the Gospel itself (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). The revised modified supralapsarian framework shows us why. If the decree to create is logically presupposed by the decree to redeem, and the decree to redeem is governed by the covenant of redemption centered in the incarnate Christ, then to deny the eschatological significance of creation is to deny the very purpose for which God decreed it. And to deny the purpose for which God decreed creation is to deny the plan. And to deny the plan is to deny the Christ who stands at its center.

Creation matters because Christ matters. The material order matters because the incarnation matters. Bodies matter because the resurrection matters. The types mattered because the substance they pointed to is real, physical, and future. And any system that concludes otherwise, no matter how piously it frames that conclusion, has departed from the faith once delivered to the saints.

On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis 2, sending four astronauts on a ten-day crewed flyby of the Moon, the first time human beings have traveled that far from Earth in over fifty years. Predictably, the mission has sent flat earth communities on YouTube into overdrive. And with that surge of activity comes the familiar recycling of old claims, chief among them the assertion that NASA's very name is a confession of guilt, a Hebrew word meaning "to deceive" hidden in plain sight. It is a claim that sounds provocative and specific, the kind of thing that feels like genuine research. It is not. Once you examine even basic Hebrew, the argument collapses under its own weight.

The argument typically begins with someone consulting Strong’s Concordance, which was designed as a reference tool for laypeople without formal training in biblical languages. Strong’s is not a primary linguistic authority, and using it to make etymological arguments about Hebrew exposes rather than conceals the user’s unfamiliarity with the language. Those who do so generally cannot read the diacritical marks that appear in the transliterations, and that inability is precisely where this particular error originates.

The argument points to the Hebrew root נָשָׁא (Strong’s H5377), which does in fact mean “to deceive, beguile, or lead astray.” This is the word used in Genesis 3:13 when Eve says the serpent 'deceived' her, and it appears elsewhere in the Old Testament primarily in the Prophets. So far, so good. The problem begins the moment someone claims this word transliterates as “NASA.”

Hebrew has a letter, ש, that carries two distinct consonantal values depending on the placement of a small diacritical dot. Standard Hebrew grammars, including Pratico and Van Pelt’s Basics of Biblical Hebrew, count Biblical Hebrew as having twenty-three consonants precisely because of this distinction. When the dot sits on the upper right (שׁ), the consonant is called shin and produces an “sh” sound. When the dot sits on the upper left (שׂ), it is called sin and produces an “s” sound. These are not interchangeable.

The word that means “to deceive” is נָשָׁא, written with a shin. In popular transliteration it is rendered nasha, with an explicit “sh” to capture the shin’s sound. In the academic SBL system it is rendered nāšāʾ, where the š (s with a háček) is the standard symbol for the shin consonant. Either way you transliterate it, the “sh” is present and unavoidable. There is no legitimate transliteration system in which this word comes out as a plain “s,” and therefore no system in which it comes out as “nasa.”

The word that actually carries the “s” sound is an entirely different root: נָשָׂא (nāśāʾ, Strong’s H5375), written with a sin, meaning “to lift, carry, or bear.” This is one of the most common verbs in the entire Hebrew Bible, appearing over 650 times. It is the word Scripture uses when God bears Israel on eagles’ wings, when the ark is carried through the wilderness, when someone lifts up their eyes, and when God forgives iniquity by lifting it away. It has nothing to do with deception. And it is not the only Hebrew root that could produce a “nasa”-like form. The root נָסַע (nāsaʿ, Strong’s H5265, nun-samech-ayin) means “to set out” or “to journey,” and its third masculine singular form likewise sounds something like “nasa.” That is the closest Biblical Hebrew ever gets to the sound in question, and it refers to breaking camp and traveling through the wilderness. Two different roots, two different sounds that approximate “nasa,” and neither one has anything to do with deception.

There is a further problem that goes beyond the shin and sin distinction. The root H5377 is not attested in the Qal in the Old Testament, but occurs in the Niphal and Hiphil stems. In the Hiphil, the causative stem, the initial נ assimilates into the following consonant. This produces a doubling, marked by a Daghesh Forte, and the vocalization shifts accordingly. The result sounds nothing like nasha, let alone “nasa.” The actual form in Genesis 3:13, where Eve says the serpent deceived her, is הִשִּׁיאַנִי (hiššîʾanî). That is the real form of this verb in the very text often cited, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to “nasa.”

This is not a minor technicality. Basics of Biblical Hebrew explicitly addresses this feature of I-Nun verbs in the Hiphil.1 They note that the difficulty lies not in identifying the stem, but in identifying the root, because in every form the first root consonant (נ) has assimilated into the second and appears as a Daghesh Forte. In plain terms, the nun disappears entirely, and its only trace is the doubling mark in the following consonant. A trained reader recognizes that doubling as the fingerprint of a missing nun and correctly identifies the root as נָשָׁא. Without that awareness, someone strips away the grammar, misses the doubling, and arrives at something that looks like “nasa.” The argument is not just incorrect. It is exactly what you would expect from ignoring how Hebrew actually works.

And then there is the simplest objection of all, the one that renders much of the above beside the point: NASA is an English acronym. It stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a name coined in 1958 by the United States Congress. It was not derived from Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, or any other ancient language. Searching for hidden meaning in an English acronym by matching its Roman letters against ancient vocabulary is the same category of error as concluding that the English word “die” must be a German article because the two happen to be spelled identically.

The claim that "NASA" means "to deceive" in Hebrew does not fail at one point. It fails at every point simultaneously. It requires confusing two distinct Hebrew consonants, collapsing unrelated lexical entries, ignoring the actual conjugated form of the verb as it appears in the biblical text, and treating a 1958 English acronym as though it were ancient Hebrew vocabulary. These are not subtle errors made by someone who almost knew what they were talking about. They are the errors of someone who has never opened a Hebrew grammar in their life, found a transliteration they could not read, and posted it on the internet anyway.

On Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026, Pope Leo XIV delivered a homily from St. Peter’s Square that presented Jesus Christ almost exclusively as a pacifist King whose God “always rejects violence,” who “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” and whose cross stands as a universal moral summons to lay down arms. The homily concluded with a prayer entrusted not to God, but to Mary.

It is a moving piece of rhetoric. It is also, at nearly every major point, a departure from the full counsel of Scripture and the theology confessed by the Reformed church.

“King of Peace” - A Selective Christology

Leo XIV builds his entire homily on the repeated refrain of Christ as “King of Peace.” He rides a donkey, not a horse. He rebukes the sword. He does not defend himself. He is silent before his accusers. All of this is true, and the texts he cites (Zechariah 9:9-10, Matthew 26:52, Isaiah 53:7) are accurately quoted.

But it is precisely what the Pope omits that reveals the theological problem.

The same Christ who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey is the Christ who made a whip of cords and drove the money-changers from the temple (John 2:15). The same Christ who told Peter to put away his sword told his disciples earlier to buy one (Luke 22:36). The same Jesus who was silent before Pilate pronounced devastating curses upon the Pharisees (Matthew 23) and declared, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34, ESV).

And the Christ of Revelation returns not on a donkey but on a white horse, with a sharp sword proceeding from his mouth, “and in righteousness he judges and makes war” (Revelation 19:11, ESV). His robe is “dipped in blood” (Revelation 19:13). He treads “the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (Revelation 19:15).

To present Christ only as the King of Peace, without the King of Wrath and Judgment, is not faithful preaching. It is selective Christology. It gives the world a Christ shaped by modern sensibilities rather than by the full testimony of Scripture.

The Westminster Confession affirms that Christ executes the office of a King by “subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies” (WLC 45). That conquest is not merely spiritual. The Confession does not reduce Christ’s kingship to meekness. It includes judgment, conquest, and the exercise of sovereign power over all enemies.

“God Always Rejects Violence” - A Claim the Bible Cannot Support

Perhaps the most striking line in the homily is this: “He revealed the gentle face of God, who always rejects violence.”

Always?

The God of Scripture commanded the destruction of the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-17). He drowned the armies of Egypt in the Red Sea and Moses sang about it (Exodus 15:1-4). He rained fire and sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24). He sent the angel of death through Egypt and killed the firstborn of every household without the blood of the lamb (Exodus 12:29). He struck Uzzah dead for touching the ark (2 Samuel 6:7). He sent bears to maul forty-two youths who mocked Elisha (2 Kings 2:23-24). He commanded Saul to destroy the Amalekites, man, woman, child, and animal, and rejected Saul as king for his failure to carry it out completely (1 Samuel 15).

And the psalmist did not reject violence when he wrote under divine inspiration: “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:9, ESV).

To say that God “always rejects violence” is not merely an overstatement. It is a direct contradiction of the biblical record. It requires the wholesale suppression of the Old Testament’s testimony about the character and actions of God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a God of mercy and a God of war (Exodus 15:3). He is gracious and terrible. He saves and He destroys.

The Westminster Confession confesses that God’s works of providence include “his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions” (WCF 5.1). That government includes judgment. That judgment includes violence. The God of the Confession is not the sanitized deity of the papal homily.

Isaiah 1:15 - A Text Ripped from Its Context

The Pope declares that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’ (Is 1:15).”

This is a serious misapplication. Isaiah 1:15 is not a blanket condemnation of all who wage war. The context of Isaiah 1 is a prophetic indictment of Israel for hypocritical worship combined with injustice. God rejects their prayers not because they are warriors, but because they are unjust oppressors who trample His courts while crushing the poor, the widow, and the fatherless (Isaiah 1:16-17, 23).

The very same God who spoke those words through Isaiah also commanded Israel to wage war, repeatedly, throughout the conquest and beyond. Joshua was commanded to take Jericho by force (Joshua 6). David was called a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22) and was simultaneously one of the greatest warriors in Israel’s history. God gave David victory in battle after battle (2 Samuel 8:6, 14). The Psalms of David are filled with thanksgiving for military victory granted by God (Psalm 18:34, 37-42; Psalm 144:1).

If Isaiah 1:15 means what the Pope says it means, that God never hears the prayers of those who wage war, then God did not hear the prayers of Joshua, David, Jehoshaphat, or Hezekiah. That is absurd on its face.

Consider Jehoshaphat. In 2 Chronicles 20, a vast coalition of Moabites, Ammonites, and Meunites marched against Judah. Jehoshaphat was afraid. He did not lay down his weapons and appeal to the brotherhood of man. He set his face to seek the LORD and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. He stood in the assembly of the people at the temple and prayed: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12, ESV). This was a king at war, praying in the context of military conflict, with armies bearing down on his nation. And God’s response? He did not rebuke Jehoshaphat for waging war. He did not refuse to hear him because his hands were stained with the business of national defense. He answered through the prophet Jahaziel: “Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed at this great horde, for the battle is not yours but God’s” (20:15). Then God Himself set ambushes against the invading armies and they destroyed one another (20:22-23). God not only heard the prayer of a king at war. He answered it by performing the violence Himself.

Or consider Hezekiah. In 2 Kings 19, Sennacherib king of Assyria invaded Judah, besieged its fortified cities, and sent the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem to demand surrender and mock the God of Israel. Hezekiah did not lay down his arms. He went up to the house of the LORD, spread Sennacherib’s threatening letter before God, and prayed: “O LORD the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth... Save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O LORD, are God alone” (2 Kings 19:15, 19, ESV). God heard that prayer. He answered through Isaiah: “I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David” (19:34). That night the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 Assyrian soldiers (19:35). God’s answer to the prayer of a king at war was not silence. It was not rebuke. It was the single deadliest act of divine military violence in the Old Testament.

If the Pope is right that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” then these texts do not exist. But they do.

The Reformed hermeneutic insists on reading texts in their canonical and covenantal context, not isolating them for rhetorical convenience. The Pope has taken a prophetic rebuke of injustice and turned it into a proof text for pacifism. The text will not bear that weight.

The Cross as Moral Example vs. Penal Substitution

Throughout the homily, Leo XIV presents Christ’s suffering primarily as a moral example. Jesus “did not arm himself, or defend himself, or fight any war.” He “allowed himself to be nailed to the cross, embracing every cross borne in every time and place throughout human history.” The implication is clear: Christ’s passion is fundamentally about modeling nonviolent love for us to imitate.

This is the moral influence theory dressed in liturgical garments. It is not the gospel.

The Reformed confessional understanding of the cross is that Christ died as a substitute under the wrath of God to satisfy divine justice. “The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience, and sacrifice of himself, which he through the eternal Spirit once offered up unto God, hath fully satisfied the justice of his Father” (WCF 8.5). “Christ, by his obedience and death, did fully discharge the debt of all those that are thus justified, and did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction to his Father’s justice in their behalf” (WCF 11.3).

Christ did not go to the cross primarily to show us how to be nonviolent. He went to the cross to bear the violent wrath of God against sin on behalf of His elect. The cross is not a model of pacifism. It is the locus of the most terrible act of divine violence in all of history: the wrath of the Father poured out on the Son (Isaiah 53:10, “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him”). If God “always rejects violence,” then the cross itself becomes incoherent, because the cross is divine violence, holy, righteous, substitutionary violence against sin.

To flatten the atonement into a moral example is to gut it of its saving power. Paul did not preach Christ crucified as a peace demonstration. He preached it as the wisdom and power of God (1 Corinthians 1:23-24).

The Civil Magistrate, Just War, and Rome’s Own Theology

The theological pacifism of the homily is not merely exegetically unsound. It is confessionally rejected by the Reformed tradition.

The Westminster Confession explicitly affirms the legitimacy of just war: “It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate, when called thereunto: in the managing whereof, as they ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth; so, for that end, they may lawfully, now under the New Testament, wage war, upon just and necessary occasions” (WCF 23.2).

This is not a grudging concession. It is a principled theological affirmation rooted in Romans 13:1-4, where the civil magistrate is described as God’s servant who “does not bear the sword in vain” and is “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (ESV). The sword of the magistrate is not a contradiction of God’s character. It is an expression of it, an expression of God’s justice executed through human government.

But here is the deeper irony: the Pope does not merely contradict the Reformed confession. He contradicts his own. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly affirms the legitimacy of just war. Paragraph 2308 states: “All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” Paragraph 2309 goes on to enumerate the traditional conditions for legitimate defense by military force, conditions rooted in Rome’s own theological tradition stretching back through Thomas Aquinas and Augustine.

When Leo XIV declares from the steps of St. Peter’s that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war” and commands the nations to “lay down your weapons,” he is not merely offering pastoral counsel toward peace. He is functionally repudiating a just war tradition that his own church developed, codified, and still officially teaches. Augustine formulated the foundational principles. Aquinas refined them in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q. 40).1 The Catechism enshrines them. And the Pope, in the name of prophetic urgency, simply sets them aside.

The Reformed position does not glorify war. It grieves over the brokenness that makes war necessary. But it refuses to deny what Scripture plainly teaches: that in a fallen world, the sword of the magistrate is ordained by God for the restraint of evil and the defense of the innocent. And it notes, with no small interest, that Rome’s own theological tradition agrees, even if this Pope does not.

Entrusting Prayer to Mary - A Violation of the Second Commandment

The homily concludes by invoking Bishop Tonino Bello, a “Servant of God” in the Roman process of canonization, and directing a prayer to Mary: “Holy Mary, woman of the third day, grant us the certainty that, in spite of all, death will no longer hold sway over us...”

From a Reformed confessional standpoint, this is a straightforward violation of the second commandment as exposited in the Westminster Standards.

The Westminster Confession teaches that “prayer, with thanksgiving, being one special part of religious worship, is by God required of all men: and, that it may be accepted, it is to be made in the name of the Son, by the help of his Spirit, according to his will” (WCF 21.3). Prayer is to be made to God alone: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not to Mary. Not to saints. Not to any creature.

The Westminster Larger Catechism identifies among the sins forbidden by the second commandment: “all praying ... to saints, angels, or any other creatures” (WLC 105). There is no ambiguity here. To direct prayer to Mary, to ask Mary to “grant us” anything, is to give to a creature what belongs to God alone. It does not matter how beautifully the prayer is worded or how sincere the devotion behind it. The issue is not tone. The issue is address. Prayer is worship, and worship belongs to God.

Mary was blessed among women. She bore the incarnate Son of God. She is honored in Scripture. But she is not a mediator, she is not omniscient, she does not hear prayer, and she does not grant petitions. “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5, ESV).

Conclusion

Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily is, in many ways, representative of a broader tendency in Roman Catholic public theology: the reduction of the Christian faith to a message of peace, social concern, and humanitarian compassion, underwritten by selective exegesis. It is a theology that keeps what is comfortable in Scripture and quietly sets aside what is not, including, remarkably, Rome’s own doctrinal tradition on just war.

The Reformed faith cannot follow. It confesses the whole counsel of God, a God who is merciful and just, who saves and judges, who commands peace and wages war, whose Son rode a donkey and will return on a war horse. It confesses a cross that is not merely an example of love but the satisfaction of divine justice. It confesses prayer directed to the Triune God alone. And it confesses a magistrate who bears the sword not in defiance of God but in service to Him.

The gentle Jesus of papal rhetoric is half a Christ. And half a Christ saves no one.

In presuppositional apologetics, one of the most devastating moves is to show the atheist that he is living on borrowed capital. He wants logic, moral outrage, the intelligibility of science, but he denies the only worldview that can actually account for these things. He helps himself to the fruit while taking an axe to the root. As Cornelius Van Til put it, the unbeliever must sit in God’s lap in order to slap His face.1

Gary DeMar has spent decades making this very argument in the realm of culture and eschatology. Against the dispensationalists, he insisted that Christians have every reason for cultural optimism: the Kingdom is advancing, the leaven is working, the mustard seed is growing into a great tree. The pessimistic escapism of rapture theology, he argued, was not only bad exegesis but bad for civilization. And he was right. Some will point out that many dispensationalists have in fact labored for cultural change, and that is true enough. But the response from men like Gary has always been that they do so in spite of their theology, not because of it.

Here is the bitter irony: Gary now finds himself in the same borrowed-capital predicament he once diagnosed so effectively in others. He still wants the optimistic eschatology, the bright future, the leavened lump, the Kingdom that conquers. But he has systematically dismantled the confessional, orthodox doctrinal foundations that actually provide it. A future bodily return of Christ. A physical resurrection of the dead. A final judgment. A real consummation of all things. They are the engine of Christian hope. Remove them, and what remains is not optimism but sentiment, a borrowed confidence with no account to draw on.

There’s a parlor game quality to reading Gary DeMar’s works side by side. Pick up Myths, Lies & Half Truths, and you’ll meet a confident postmillennialist who affirms a future bodily return of Christ, a future consummation of the Kingdom, and the defeat of death as the “last enemy” still on the horizon. Flip open Last Days Madness, and you’ll find a polemicist who treats 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 as describing “the general resurrection of the saints,” a future event tied to the Lord’s return.2 Then crack the spine of The Hope of Israel and the Nations, his latest collaboration with Kim Burgess, and something very different emerges: a parousia that has already occurred, a Bible that “does not” say “anything literally about the end of time,”3 and a framework that explicitly distances itself from the very postmillennialism Gary spent decades championing.

So which Gary wrote these books? And can they all be right?

Contradiction #1: The Return of the King, Future or Fulfilled?

In Myths, Lies & Half Truths, Gary couldn’t be clearer. The Kingdom of God has a threefold structure: it is “definitively established in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ,” it “increases and advances progressively,” and it is “established fully at Christ’s consummating coming.”4 That last phrase is doing heavy theological lifting. It is an unambiguous affirmation of a future, bodily return.

He doubles down: “The end will come after He has destroyed all His remaining enemies. He will reign until He has brought all things under His feet.”5 And again: “Jesus will return to a world in which nearly all His enemies have been conquered. The only enemy that will remain is death, and even that will be defeated.”6

Now turn to The Hope of Israel. Here, Gary and Kim Burgess argue that “unlike the postmillennialists, one must have the King (i.e., the parousia) first to have the Kingdom. It is not that the Kingdom comes and permeates everything and then the King comes. No, in the NT, when the King comes, the King establishes His Kingdom, and then that Kingdom leaven goes to work in the world.”7

Read that again carefully. The parousia comes first, and then the Kingdom leaven works through the world. Since Gary and Kim place the establishment of the New Covenant order squarely in the “eschatological period of AD 30 to 70,” already “completely consummated,”8 the logical implication is unavoidable: the parousia has already happened. The King has already come. There is no future return to wait for.

The Gary of Myths, Lies & Half Truths would have called this a serious error. The Gary of Hope of Israel calls it biblical eschatology.

Contradiction #2: 1 Corinthians 15:24-26, Still Future or Already Past?

This is perhaps the most damning reversal. In Myths, Lies & Half Truths, Gary quotes 1 Corinthians 15:23-25 and comments: “This passage speaks about Jesus’ reign. The end will come after He has destroyed all His remaining enemies. He will reign until He has brought all things under His feet. In other words, the kingdom does not begin when Jesus returns. Jesus began reigning from the time of His resurrection. The kingdom culminates in His second coming.”9

That word “culminates” is critical. The end, the telos, of 1 Corinthians 15:24 is placed firmly in the future, tied to a still-awaited “second coming.” And by the way, the Greek term translated as “coming” in verse 23 is παρουσίᾳ (parousia).

But as Matt Doyle documented in the controversy surrounding this shift, Gary later listed 1 Corinthians 15:24 among texts where “’the end’ means nothing more than the end being described in the context, not the end of everything.”10 In other words, the “end” of 1 Corinthians 15:24 became, for the later Gary, merely the end of the old covenant age in AD 70, not the cosmic consummation he had previously taught.

You cannot have it both ways. Either “the end” in 1 Corinthians 15:24 refers to a future consummation tied to a bodily second coming (as Gary taught in Myths, Lies & Half Truths), or it refers to the events of AD 70 (as he now appears to hold). These are mutually exclusive claims.

Contradiction #3: The Consummation, New Heavens and New Earth, or “The Bible Doesn’t Say”?

In Myths, Lies & Half Truths, Gary writes about the consummation with the confidence of a man who knows what the Bible teaches: “The New Testament also teaches that we look for a future manifestation of the kingdom (1 Cor. 15:23-24; Rev. 21). In this sense, the kingdom refers to heaven and the fullness of the new heavens and new earth.”11 He continues: “We look forward to the day when all believers from all lands will gather to worship the Lamb that was slain from the beginning of the world, and when we will live in perfect peace and love, free from the last remnants of sin.”12

Beautiful. Orthodox. Hopeful.

Now consider The Hope of Israel. When Gary asks Kim about “the end point of the Adamic age,” the consummation and “final end to history as we understand it,” Kim responds: “Now if you ask me, does the Bible ever, anywhere, say anything literally about the end of time, I would have to say, no, it does not.” He adds that world history probably has “a telos somewhere, but that is not what the Bible, first and foremost, was concerned about at all.”13

Gary does not push back. He does not correct. He does not invoke Revelation 21 or 1 Corinthians 15 or any of the passages he wielded so confidently in his earlier work. He simply lets the claim stand: the Bible has nothing literal to say about the end of time.

The Gary of Myths, Lies & Half Truths pointed readers to Revelation 21 and called it “the fullness of the new heavens and new earth.” The Gary of Hope of Israel now co-authors a book whose framework renders that entire section of his earlier work incoherent.

Contradiction #4: Postmillennialism, Rebranded or Abandoned?

This one is particularly striking because it touches Gary’s theological identity. For decades, Gary DeMar was among the most visible advocates of postmillennialism in American evangelicalism. In Myths, Lies & Half Truths, the postmillennial framework is presented without apology: the Kingdom was established at Christ’s first advent, it grows progressively through history like leaven in a lump, and it will be consummated at Christ’s second coming. Jesus returns after the Kingdom has substantially conquered.

But in Hope of Israel, Gary and Kim explicitly distinguish themselves from postmillennialism: “One ends up here where the postmillennialists end up. But, unlike the postmillennialists, one must have the King (i.e., the parousia) first to have the Kingdom.”14

This is not a minor refinement. It is a structural inversion of postmillennial eschatology. Classic postmillennialism says: the Kingdom grows, then Christ returns. Gary now says: Christ “returns” (in AD 70), then the Kingdom grows. The order has been flipped. The second coming has been relocated from the future to the past. And the label “postmillennial” no longer means what it used to mean in Gary’s hands.

As P. Andrew Sandlin noted, Gary himself once claimed he hadn’t changed his views in 25 years. The texts tell a very different story.

Contradiction #5: The “Already/Not Yet,” Collapsed or Preserved?

In Myths, Lies & Half Truths, Gary deploys the classic Reformed “already/not yet” framework with precision: “Since the coming of Jesus, therefore, we can say that the kingdom is both already present but not yet fully consummated.”15 The “not yet” is doing real work here. It points to a genuine future event, a real bodily return, a final transformation.

In Hope of Israel, the “not yet” has been hollowed out. The New Covenant order has been “completely consummated.”16 What remains is the working out of the Adamic age, but the Bible, we’re told, doesn’t really address that. The “not yet” has been reduced to a vague, non-biblical residue rather than a robust eschatological hope grounded in specific New Testament promises.

Contradiction #6: 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, Future Resurrection or...?

In Last Days Madness, Gary argues against the dispensational pretribulational rapture by affirming the orthodox alternative: “Most postmillennialists and amillennialists see 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 as relating to the general resurrection of the saints.”17 He approvingly quotes Anthony Hoekema: “What this passage clearly teaches is that at the time of the Lord’s return all the believing dead (the ‘dead in Christ’) will be raised, and all believers who are still alive will be transformed and glorified.”18 This is plainly future. The Lord returns. The dead are raised. These are events Gary treats as still ahead of us.

But Gary doesn’t stop at exegesis. He brings the full weight of church history down on the dispensationalist’s head: “Not only is the Bible on the side of those who view the rapture as the general resurrection, so are eighteen hundred years of church history.”19 He then quotes a dispensationalist who candidly admits that the pretribulational rapture “is scarcely to be found in a single book or sermon through the period of 1600 years!” Gary’s verdict is merciless: “He’s too generous. There is no evidence.”20

He presses the point further. Citing Thomas Ice, Gary notes that the pretribulational rapture is “the product of a deduction from one’s overall system of theology” because “neither pre nor posttribs have a proof text for the time of the Rapture.” Gary calls this out with obvious relish: “What an admission! A pillar doctrine of dispensationalism does not have a single text to prove it.” He then lays out the dispensationalist method: “First, create the system; second, create the doctrines to make the system work; third, claim to have restored ‘the Biblical doctrine of the pretrib Rapture,’ which is based on a ‘deduction from one’s overall system of theology’ because there are no verses that teach it; fourth, imply that the early church, the ‘apostles of the apostles,’ knew nothing of this foundational doctrine.”21

The rhetorical force of this is devastating, and Gary clearly knows it. A system with no exegetical proof text and no historical precedent for 1,800 years is, in his words, “a theological house of cards.”22

But here is where the borrowed capital problem becomes almost unbearable. If 1,800 years of silence condemns dispensationalism, what does 2,000 years of explicit creedal affirmation do to full preterism? The church has not merely been silent about a future bodily return, a physical resurrection, and a final judgment. She has confessed them, repeatedly, in every major creed and confession from Nicea to Westminster. Gary wielded church history like a sledgehammer against the dispensationalists. That same sledgehammer now swings back at him with considerably more force. The dispensationalist innovated a doctrine the church never taught. Gary, it appears, has denied doctrines the church has always taught.

If the parousia has already occurred, as Hope of Israel implies, what do we do with this passage? If the King has already come, has the general resurrection already happened too? Gary’s earlier work treated 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 as a bulwark against dispensational novelty. His later framework makes that very passage a problem for his own position, and his own church-historical argument the most damning witness against him.

So Which Gary Is It?

The contradictions are not subtle, and they are not peripheral. They touch the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the consummation of all things, and the very meaning of the Kingdom. These are not matters of emphasis or nuance. They are matters of substance.

Gary was asked three straightforward questions by a group of his own friends: Do you believe in a future bodily return of Christ? A future physical resurrection? A final judgment? He declined to give straightforward answers.

The books, however, answer for him, and they answer in two very different voices. The Gary of Myths, Lies & Half Truths and the earlier editions of Last Days Madness was a man who stood within the broad stream of historic, orthodox, postmillennial Christianity. The Gary of The Hope of Israel and the Nations has stepped outside that stream into waters that the church has consistently identified as heterodox.

And this brings us back to where we started. The presuppositionalist exposes the atheist for borrowing Christian capital, enjoying the fruits of a worldview he refuses to confess. But what do we call it when a man wants the Kingdom optimism, the leaven working, the mustard seed growing, the nations discipled, while denying the bodily return, the physical resurrection, and the final judgment that Scripture everywhere grounds that optimism in? The Nicene Creed does not say, “We look for a metaphorical coming and a spiritualized resurrection.” It says, “He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end” and “we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”23

That is the worldview that underwrites the bright future. That is the engine of genuine Christian hope. Without it, the optimism is just atmosphere, borrowed confidence from a confession you no longer hold. The atheist borrows from God to argue against Him. And Gary DeMar, it appears, now borrows the hope of Christianity while quietly dismantling the Christianity that funds it.

But I got curious. If I’m the one who supposedly can’t function without Gary DeMar as a topic of conversation, what does Gary’s own track record look like? So I ran the numbers. I ran a script to crawl both my site and americanvision.org to count how many pages mention specific individuals by name.

Here’s what I found.

My Blog

On reformation.blog, the name “DeMar” appears on 65 pages. That’s it. Sixty-five. Out of the entirety of my blog’s content. And the reason it appears at all is because DeMar is one of the most visible proponents of a theological position that is deeply heretical and demonstrably dishonest, and because he runs within our circles while pretending to still be Reformed.

Gary’s Blog

Now let's look at americanvision.org. I searched for just four names. Four dispensationalist theologians that Gary has spent years critiquing and responding to:

Read that again. Five hundred and eighty-eight pages mentioning just four people. And these are only four names. I didn't search for John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, Jack Van Impe, Dave Hunt, Mark Hitchcock, or the dozens of other dispensationalists Gary has written about over the years. The real total is almost certainly north of a thousand pages dedicated to naming and critiquing specific individuals.

So Who Doesn’t Have a Life?

My 65 pages about DeMar are apparently evidence that I’m obsessed. But Gary’s 202 pages about Hal Lindsey? That’s just “ministry.” His 162 pages on Tim LaHaye? “Faithful theological work.” His 143 pages on Thomas Ice? “Important kingdom labor.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Gary DeMar built his entire career at American Vision on one thing: naming, critiquing, and responding to dispensationalist theologians. That is what the site exists to do. And he makes money doing it. Page after page after page of “Here’s why Thomas Ice is wrong,” “Here’s why Hal Lindsey failed,” “Here’s why Tim LaHaye doesn’t understand eschatology.” That is the bread and butter. That is the brand.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. If you believe someone is teaching theological error, you should say so publicly and make your case. That’s how theology works. Iron sharpens iron. But you don’t get to spend decades doing exactly that and then turn around and tell someone else they “wouldn’t have a life” for doing the same thing back to you. You don’t get to write two hundred pages about Hal Lindsey and then act like sixty-five pages about you is some kind of pathology.

The truth is, Gary doesn’t object to people building a body of work around critiquing a specific theologian. He objects to being on the receiving end of it. When he does it, it’s “contending for the faith.” When it’s done to him, the critic needs to “get a life.”

It's a silencing tactic. It's what false teachers do when they can't answer the critique, so they attack the critic instead. They want you to feel embarrassed for holding them accountable, to make you think something is wrong with you for paying attention to what they're teaching.

Don't let false teachers bully you into silence, especially you pastors out there who have had these troublemakers show up at your church, cause division in your flock, and then try to portray you as unloving when you confront them. You're not unloving. You're doing your job. You're shepherding. The moment a pastor is made to feel guilty for protecting his congregation from false teaching is the moment the wolves have already gotten inside the gate.