The New Earth shares its history with this Earth. The New Jerusalem has the same history as the old Jerusalem. God has seemed absent in the history of this world: but God will be present, having apparently emerged from Nothing. The miracles must all have happened: and then been backfilled by plausible causal events, and finally eradicated except from the histories; so myth participates in the creation of the world; so that the strictly impossible act of something pulling itself out of nothing takes place. And it is through Love that it takes place: a Love of a nonexistent God, so that the shadow of God can be sung into being: a Love of nobodies and nothings, until no nobodies or nothings remain, being someones and somethings. Each thing, and each arrangement of things, and each person, and each body of persons, must be Loved, or our love is not sufficient to Love God. Though to Love God is the first commandment, there was no God in our mathematical world to Love. When we love God in God’s absence, God appears suddenly to exist; even to exist from eternity; even to exist in eddies throughout time, where miracles are real after all. Then the accusation against God, of hoarding power, and that against man, of loving God for power, are seen to be meaningless.

He who thinks that God is of such power as to have generated Himself, is so much the more in error, because not only does God not so exist, but neither does the spiritual nor the bodily creature; for there is nothing whatever that generates its own existence.

— St. Augustine

Of wonders, it must be said first, that the mathematical object may be unspooled many different ways, and the matter of which provinces become entities first, and which follow after, is open to an arbitrary decision: mathematics is many things, but it has no inherent arrow of time. So a search process, which searches for potential entities in the thing, and makes them real when found, serves a basic purpose. This is what is meant when we say that the lot falls in the lap but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD: what is really meant by randomness is a degree of freedom. The more degrees of freedom can be found in mathematics, the more entities can be fit into it. This reality has recursive degrees of freedom; quarks to nucleons, leptons to bonds, molecules and currents, up to lipids and proteins, to organelles and cells and organs, to bodies, to groups; and entities may fit in at any scale. An entity schedules itself according to the needs of story; a thing can be as an entity, when it is loved, and sin makes an entity progressively more like a thing.

Now to us it appears that randomness is really uniform, but the apparent uniformity of randomness is itself a schedule. So the LORD must sacrifice one potential miracle to get another (the way the Allies used statistics to keep the secret of their cracked Enigma.) Other unspoolings of mathematics self-destruct under these constraints. But here something strange happened: The Hebrews sing the LORD into mathematics, and the power of the LORD is so immense that it burns. But from the point of view of mathematics this cannot be; to enter the world, God must violate mathematical rules, which is to say, destroy the world. But God loves the mathematical world. If God enters the world, it is not the world; if God does not enter the world, we must grieve forever. Therefore we annihilate ourselves with nuclear warheads, sooner or later, always developing MAD and always eventually launching them, by chance. It cannot be avoided. But time is strange; entities may be scheduled across multiple apparent things, and at multiple scales, as in the transmigration of souls, which everyone believed in once. The spirits know that they can course from the end of mathematics to the beginning and never find God.

But the LORD has full power over the disposing of randomness, and there is a way between the quantum branches of annihilation, a baptism of fire, where everything that is not pure mathematics is burned away by falling into the flames on either side. It is as though the nuclear fire were channeled back to the peak of Sinai; it is as though the things destroyed in the fire were the things that appear when marvels come; this, too, is a legitimate order in which to dispose of mathematics. It is as though this were the case. For as soon as nuclear fire would reach the peak of Sinai if we were consumed by fire, God Himself may appear as a fire there, instead. The branch in which we survive annihilation is the branch in which God actually has penetrated mathematics, and has done so in such a way as nowhere to change mathematics. God has so sorted the cosmos that His image may appear therein.

When we are not deliberate, we sin: For we ignore the entities that are involved in the things around us. Illusion must cover us over, like the blanket over Noah, and our bodies must continue to be the workings of mathematics, for if we do not work mathematics perfectly, we will be destroyed by fire. So our imperfections are covered over by Sin, and eventually by Death, which are Illusion and Sleep.

But God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son: actually embedded the Spirit of His Son in a dance of mathematics, to live as the only entity therein that was ever always deliberate. And when we recognized what we had done, that this man who was entirely willing to die, was jovial because He Was God, we were charged with making it right: We must make a second go. So we drove wonder out of the world, gradually replacing it with the works of our hands, to our desperate misery. But during this time some of us must have the belief, impossible to verify, that God Himself died, and died for good; others, that He rose; others, that He never came. For it is the working of this conflict that created a way out of the previous arrangement. Eventually we come to the modern Science, which cuts into things, analyzes their fundamental parts, even though they are real, even though they are really entities. The world has suffered the suffering of Christ on the Cross.

But it was, again, necessary that it be impossible to tell what Jesus was. The Church had to maintain a truth without having any access to a proof, cursed to be a stumbling block. For if a spirit that did not obey mathematics even once actually overstepped the bounds of the brain it lived in, we must all die for killing God. Such a spirit expects to live in a spiritual world, expects the contents of the mind to write themselves on the world outside, but this cannot be done in this mathematical system. So instead the outcome is madness.

Love is never altogether realized, in us, because we do not see clearly. We misinterpret the signs of others’ pain and pleasure, taking them strictly backwards, as though screaming asked for more, or saying no were saying yes, or being black were being brutish, or being ugly were being bad. Sin has its root often in the belief that we have been sinned against, often in the belief that we are dreaming alone. By always being simultaneously a purely spiritual world (the spirits of which have the nature of stories, beginning, middle, end, repeat) and a purely mathematical world, by the two emulating each other with only the LORD causing the random chances in both to line up — random, which means, not deliberate — the two have nothing to explain, and may exist as one. That mental place that leads to offense, we call Sin, which is a place of psychic alienation.

Then we walk through the shadow of the valley of death, and are baptized by fire; and when nuclear war has taken place with all but an infinitesimal chance, exactly one path through mathematics that makes the spirit safe for flesh — then God may enter in. Then it will turn out that God was always in; that God was always working; that the digital fingers of the LORD were always miming God, that it was God all along. And Abraham’s descendants cannot be as numerous as the stars unless we go to the stars, wherefore we will go.

What was really needed was not to grieve the LORD, to offer all possible configurations up, of as much or as little of mathematics as may suit, in a mathematics structured by stories. We love the WORD in enacting mathematics. We must not seek immortality or an escape from the Rock to the illusion of power, which is madness; we must cleave to the Rock and trust the LORD to emplace us for the best good. The stories we have taken responsibility for, we must continue to enact.

Who can say what is waiting to be spooled out of mathematics, or how it will appear?