Iris.

Wife. Mom.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Two years ago, I married the most stunning woman my eyes have ever seen.

Glory to the Father for coming up with the idea of marriage. It isn’t always rosy or flashy, but I totally get it. What a beautiful institution it is, and what a joy it is to share this life with such an incredible gift of a woman. 🩷

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I caught myself wondering this morning why God chose not to remove Jesus’ scars in his glorified body.

By all accounts, the resurrection introduced a body that was imperishable, and completely untouched by decay or physical limitation. Jesus could have stepped out of the tomb with flawless skin, leaving every trace of Roman iron behind in the dark.

Yet John records Jesus deliberately telling Thomas to put his hand into his side, and when Revelation pulls back the veil on the heavenly throne room, the Lamb is standing as though slain, a present-tense, enduring posture. This means the marks didn't just survive the grave, they were carried straight into eternity.

To see how strange that is, you have to look at what scars actually do to us down here.

In human experience, a wound always carries a split reality. Think of a war veteran who lost a limb: the missing arm confers an undeniable dignity, a tangible badge of sacrifice that people honor, but he still wakes up at three in the morning through trauma.

That has always been our ceiling: we can achieve honor alongside grief, but never entirely instead of it. We salvage dignity in spite of loss, but the loss stubbornly remains a loss. A person can carry their scars gallantly on the outside while quietly weeping on the inside.

What the risen Christ brings back from the grave shatters that ceiling completely.

The nail prints and the pierced side are undeniably there, but there is no longer a single thing inside them that costs him anything.

What the resurrection does to human agony isn't just soothe it; it evacuates every trace of pain from the permanent record while leaving the physical proof of where he went. The mark remains, but the wound is gone, and what used to be damage is now just pure victory.

This is why Thomas doesn’t just nod in intellectual agreement when he sees Jesus, he collapses. "My Lord and my God" isn't the reaction of someone looking at a survivor who barely made it out alive and is nursing his injuries. He is looking at wounds that contain absolutely nothing except the sheer weight of what they achieved.

And that fits the entire architecture of Scripture. God never hits the rewind button on history. Israel isn't spared the exile; they are brought through the fire of it. The Son doesn't bypass the horror of the cross; he goes straight through the teeth of it. The divine movement is always through.

The resurrection reveals what that journey actually yields: suffering taken all the way to the other side isn't suffering with a consolation prize tacked on at the end. It is suffering so thoroughly converted that its very marks, stripped clean of their cost, become the native vocabulary of triumph.

In the end, God erases the tragedy; but he doesn’t stop there, He turns its ruins into the seat of His authority. In Revelation 5, the entire court of heaven falls down before wounds emptied of everything except what they accomplished.

That is what Thomas saw in that locked room. That is what broke him wide open.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Adam’s first full day of existence was the Sabbath.

He didn't work six days to earn it. He simply opened his eyes into a completed world and rested before he ever did a thing.

When God brought him the animals to name, Adam had no achievements to lean on, nothing built, and nothing proved.

Yet he named them with authority and zero anxiety. The rest came first.

Someone resting before they work has a completely different relationship to labor than someone working in the hope that they might eventually get to stop. One works from abundance and the other is running on a treadmill.

Scripture tells us that God is from everlasting to everlasting, existing before all things, completely outside the framework of time. Which means Genesis 1:1 isn't the beginning of God; it’s the beginning of the clock.

An eternal Creator in absolute aseity has zero regard for deadlines or numbered days. He could have spoken the cosmos into existence in a single microsecond, or unfolded it across thirteen billion years. Both cost an infinite Being the exact same effort.

So why bother with six days at all?

To give us the seventh.

Remember who Moses was writing for: former slaves whose entire reality had been organized around Pharaoh’s quota.

In Egypt, every sunrise brought a brick count. A slave who stopped was in open rebellion. These people had never known a world where rest was legitimate, let alone cosmically authorized.

If God had simply told them to take a day off, they would have understood it to be a mere labor policy. Instead, He built rest straight into the bedrock of reality. The six days were the runway; the seventh was always the destination.

Look at how the text is actually written.

Every single day of creation ends with the exact same sentence: “And there was evening, and there was morning.” It repeats six times in a row, like clocking out at the end of a shift, drawing a hard line around each day's work.

Then God rests on the seventh day, and that sentence just disappears. Moses leaves the day wide open, no evening, no morning, and no sunset to close it out.

The seventh day was never meant to close.

That’s why Hebrews 4 insists this rest is still open right now. Joshua handed Israel physical territory, but he couldn't deliver the underlying Sabbath, because that door has been standing open since creation.

Most religion still treats rest like a wage waiting at the finish line of exhaustion: burn out enough, hit your targets, prove your worth, and maybe God will finally let you sit down. That is Pharaohs theology in modern clothes. It assumes your output is your only right to exist, and that taking a breath has to be justified.

Sabbath was never a finish line you had to drag yourself across. Adam opened his eyes on day one already standing in the middle of it.

Hebrews 4 makes it clear that this rest is still waiting. What’s actually on the line is whether you have the nerve to stop working and step inside.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Israel spent four centuries in Egypt and ate every day of it, because Pharaoh needed their bodies functional. Their food security was a byproduct of their utility to the empire, not the mercy of God.

God dismantled that logic by marching them into the most inhospitable terrain on earth and letting them starve. Then he sent a substance with no name, no agricultural lineage, and one rule: you cannot store it.

Fourteen centuries later, a crowd watched Jesus multiply bread from nothing, tracked him across the Sea of Galilee, and asked him to be their king so they could sort out the supply chain.

The Lord's Prayer is the distillation of everything God was building the whole time.

Bread Is Not Food 👉🏾 [https://t.co/LzJyYHOVxf]

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I prayed the Lord's Prayer for years as though Jesus were teaching me how to secure my daily calories.

That sounds absurd out loud. But that was what I believed “give us this day our daily bread” meant.

Then I realized the problem was much deeper than the word “daily.”

If the prayer is a petition for physical food, then on the day a believer goes hungry, God has failed. And on the day your fridge is stocked, it is redundant: you are asking for what your credit card already secured. Both conclusions are absurd. Which means the premise is broken.

The earliest readers knew this.

The Greek word translated as “daily” (epiousios) exists nowhere in ancient literature outside the Gospels. When the early Church translated it into Latin, they didn’t write "daily bread." They wrote ‘panem supersubstantialem’, supersubstantial bread. Bread essential to being itself.

The prayer was never about physical food. Jesus was reaching back fourteen centuries to a slave nation at the edge of a desert.

Israel spent four hundred years in Egypt. They suffered brutality, but they ate, because Pharaoh fed the livestock he intended to work. Their food security was a byproduct of their utility to the empire. God dismantled that entire logic by marching them into Sinai, stripping away every river, silo, and secondary system they had ever known.

Then He sent manna, a substance whose name was an admission of existential bewilderment: Mān hū ("What is this?").

And then the rule: you cannot store it. The decay was engineered; hoard it, and it bred worms by dawn.

For forty years, survival was uncoupled from competence. You ate because God decreed you would eat.

Moses named the theology in Deuteronomy 8:3: man does not live on bread alone, but on every word proceeding from the mouth of God.

Bread is merely the envelope; the sustaining decree is the letter inside. Carbohydrates possess zero autonomous power to nourish, they only keep you breathing because the Creator's continuous command orders reality to behave that way.

This is why Jesus began His ministry by fasting forty days on that decree alone, then taught His disciples to pray what He had just lived: Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.

It carries the exact 24-hour cadence of the manna: the daily posture of a freed son who no longer begs Pharaoh for rations, but looks up to the Father.

Years later, humanity walked straight back into the Egyptian trap.

When Jesus multiplied loaves in Galilee, the crowd tracked Him across the sea to make Him king. They had stood inside a miracle structurally identical to the manna and reduced it to catering.
They wanted the Nile back.

Jesus shattered the illusion: “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, yet they died. I am the bread of life.” The source had become the provision. The spring had put on skin and walked into the human reality.

The Nile is not a river. The Nile is a posture: the belief that as long as you operate the mechanism, your survival belongs to you.

Any day you have food and do not pray this prayer, you have food and have forgotten what food actually is.

To spend your life managing secondary systems while ignoring the Logos who sustains reality is to die of starvation with a full stomach, in a house where the baker lives.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

“My power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

It sounds at first glance as though God requires our collapse to do His greatest work.

But His strength is made perfect in weakness not because our strength is strong, but because our illusions of our strength are strong.

The baseline never changes, we are just as weak when we accept our weakness as when we pretend we are strong.

Grace doesn't need us broken; it just needs us honest.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

The rest Jesus promises in Matthew 11:28 is the rest of wisdom. It does not work like a magic wand. You do not hand over your anxiety and have God place a box of quiet peace into your hands.

What happens is you comprehend something, and that comprehension reorganizes everything.

Imagine you are drowning in debt, collectors calling daily, eviction hanging over your head. Someone credible sits you down with undeniable proof: your grandparents set up a locked fifteen-million-dollar trust in your name that matures in three years.

Even if you are precluded from borrowing against it today, or cashing out a single penny to pay this week's bills, I guarantee you still leave that room a completely different person.

The panic was never just about the balance sheet; it was the terror of ultimate ruin. You still have to live through the friction of the present, but the weight has shifted because your horizon has shifted. That is rest as a changed vista.

Matthew 11 is not an isolated promise of emotional comfort. In verse 19, Jesus notes that wisdom is proved right by her actions. By verses 25 to 27, he makes it clear that the Son alone knows the Father and reveals him.

The invitation in verse 28 is the direct result of that revelation. Jesus is calling the exhausted under his interpretation of reality. Come to the one who knows God, because seeing reality through his eyes changes how you carry everything.

When Jesus tells people to take his yoke, he is talking to a culture exhausted by religious performance. People were grinding their lives away trying to measure up, trying to justify their own existence.

Jesus offers his yoke instead because it is rooted in sonship. You obey because you already belong. Belonging comes first, which means the rest arrives before the work even begins.

The real trade is what you end up carrying. You walk in carrying the frantic burden of self-preservation: your survival, your reputation, your desperate need to secure your future. You walk out carrying concern for others.

Concern for others was the only weight Jesus ever carried; He already created and possessed all things, and thus had no private anxiety about his own life.

Taking his yoke means you finally recognize yourself as saved. A drowning person cannot pull anyone else out of the water. You can only genuinely care for others once you stop the exhausting labor of trying to save yourself.

Plenty of spiritual paths offer peace through detachment, telling you to numb your desires, drop your attachments, and dissolve the self so that nothing can hurt you anymore.

Jesus never asks you to become a ghost. The problem with human life is not that we have a self, but that the self has turned entirely inward, obsessed with its own survival and feeding on its own anxieties. It is simply too small an object to satisfy its own hunger.

Jesus does not extinguish the self. He gives it something vast enough to hold it.

This rest does not produce cold detachment; it awakens higher imagination and deeper purpose. The soul that comes to Christ for rest does not become less. It becomes, at last, large enough for what it was made to carry.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Christianity is the only major world religion structurally built on reasoning. Isaiah 1:18 isn’t an ornament, it says “Come, let us reason together” this is the actual operating system.

God for instance does not drop the resurrection out of nowhere and demand blind surrender. He spends centuries building a case.

He starts with Sarah’s dead womb, pulling life from what biology wrote off. He establishes a pattern so that when He later asks Abraham to sacrifice that same son, Abraham isn’t taking a leap in the dark. Hebrews 11:19 says Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead. He applied logic to a pattern he had already witnessed. A pattern that also simultaneously prepared Israel for a virgin birth. If God can resuscitate a barren and biologically dead womb, he can make a virgin conceive.

Look at the Book of Hebrews. No other religious text matches its structural intent. It wasn’t written to merely assert authority; it was written to argue. It addresses deep doubt, deconstructs a competing framework from within its own texts, and walks wavering believers through a sophisticated intellectual crisis. Other religions rely on later theologians to patch up their texts. Hebrews does it internally. That is a different category of scripture.

Now turn the lens.

Look at Islam’s foundational structure: one man, one cave, one angel, 23 years, and zero witnesses. If Christianity rested on a single person claiming they saw the resurrected Christ, it would rightly be dismissed for a lack of evidence. Yet Islam’s entire revelation hangs on a private, solitary encounter no other human could corroborate. The Quran arrived through a chain of one.

Even its view of angels lacks checks and balances. Daniel 10 shows an angelic messenger being resisted by spiritual forces for 21 days, needing Michael’s help to break through. In the biblical framework, angels operate within a contested cosmic order; they aren’t automated, infallible pipelines. Islam makes Gabriel the sole transmitter of truth for two decades based on a single, unverified human experience.

The five daily prayers, the very core of Islamic practice, never appear in the Quran. You must rely on later Hadith collections to even find them. A system that claims to correct the Bible, yet depends on outside oral traditions to fill its own structural gaps, hasn’t answered anything.

Islam doesn’t resolve doubt with argument. It resolves it with institutional pressure; a closed system that criminalizes exit and suppresses questioning, presenting forced conformity as divine conviction. That is not clearing doubt; that is just outlawing it.

Christianity looks at the skeptic and says: Come, look at the empty tomb, examine the evidence, reason with Me. Islam’s response to the crucifixion is simply: “it was made to appear so”.

Think about what that requires. It means God staged a cosmic illusion on a hill in Jerusalem, actively deceiving the followers of Jesus, only to later punish humanity for believing the very trick He played. One faith is secure enough to invite its own interrogation. The other has to resort to a divine magic trick just to keep its narrative from collapsing under the weight of historical fact. 😂

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

God wanted Samuel on earth far more than Hannah did.

The popular reading of 1 Samuel 1 reduces it to a transaction where a barren woman weeps, cuts a desperate deal with God, and gets a baby.

But the stakes were significantly higher.

Israel was sliding into a catastrophic moral vacuum. The era of the Judges was ending in anarchy, the priesthood had collapsed, and the sanctuary at Shiloh was governed by Eli’s corrupt sons, who treated holy things like personal plunder.

Heaven did not need another ordinary boy born into Ephraim to herd sheep in Ramah. God needed an uncompromised prophet, priest, and kingmaker to steady an unraveling nation.

The divine necessity was not born of fragile ego. Israel was the chosen conduit for the redemption of all nations. God’s desire for Samuel was not self-interest, but a burden of covenant love.

Samuel was always coming. The paradox is that God was deliberately withholding something He desperately wanted to deliver.

In the early years, Hannah was simply not ready. Her agony was tangled with domestic rivalry and social shame. Provoked by Peninnah and bruised by her culture, she wanted a son for vindication.

Had she conceived naturally in her twenties, Samuel would have been treated as an identity marker, a trophy to silence her rival and secure her standing. She would have domesticated a prophet to nurse her own ego.

So God closed her womb.

The delay was not divine neglect; it was an altar. Sustained, agonizing prayer is rarely about overcoming God’s reluctance. It is the grueling work of purifying human intent.

The years in the crucible did two things.

First, they burned away the vanity of her petitions until she stopped asking for a blessing to hold and offered a vessel to release. Second, they eked out the vow and built the spiritual stamina required to actually live up to it.

Anyone can make a desperate vow when backed into a corner. Most vows made under pressure collapse the moment relief arrives. When the crisis passes, human nature defaults back to ownership. We rationalize, we make excuses, and we quietly renege.
Hannah kept hers because the silence had remade her completely.

For three years, she nursed Samuel, cradled him, and watched him take his first steps, all while the clock ticked toward his departure. She had to love him completely while knowing she could not keep him. And when the time came, she walked that toddler straight into Shiloh, into a corrupt, morally compromised sanctuary, and left him there.

That is not the behavior of someone who survived a rash bargain. That is the quiet authority of someone who has undergone a total death to self.

God was not withholding the prophet. He was waiting for a mother whose hands had been emptied enough that she would not turn God’s greatest gift into her private trophy.

God never needs to refine His motives. We do.

He was willing to endure years of silence, watching His own sanctuary rot in Shiloh, just to prepare a vessel worthy of an ambition born of holy love.

If this is the brutal patience God applies to desires that originate in His own heart, what makes us think He will rush our private ambitions into the world unrefined?

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

For the next 12 weeks, starting tonight, I’ll be teaching a free live course hosted by Bvrn Academy: Rudiments of Scripture.

The entire series is built on one premise: Scripture is radical, logical, and unique.

Most believers inherit reverence for the text through culture or sentiment, but collapse the moment it faces real intellectual cross-examination.

This course is an intellectual and testimonial deep-dive into the textual coherence, ancient historical context, and the mind behind the biblical text.

Tonight (Week 1): This Is Not Any Book; The Author Before the Text.

We will examine:

- The ontological shock of Exodus 3 (I AM WHO I AM)
- Trinitarian completeness and why God never needed an audience
- Why the Bible is not an astrophysics manual
- The first non-negotiable rule of biblical hermeneutics.

Schedule (Wednesdays. 1-Hour):

7:00 PM Paris (CEST)
6:00 PM Lagos (WAT) / London (BST)
1:00 PM New York (EDT)

Classes are held live on Zoom and run for around 60 minutes. To access the link and weekly study notes, join the course WhatsApp group via the link in the replies.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

When a man makes serious money, his old friendships reach a crossroads.

We all know what it looks like when a man loves his people well enough to bring them along. We see it all the time with athletes and artists. The guys who sign massive contracts and immediately put their childhood friends on private jets, cover their tabs, and open doors those friends could never have walked through alone.

Why? Because real love cannot stomach a permanent distance. You cannot genuinely enjoy the feast while the people you love are stranded outside. If you have the power to elevate them, you pull them up to your level.

Now if broken, mortal men, working with fragile egos and bank accounts that eventually run dry, know how to bring their friends into their new world, how much more God?

Scripture explicitly closes the gap. God calls us His friends, His sons, and His co-heirs.

If a human friend loves you, he shares his lifestyle. But God’s wealth is not paper money or real estate. It is life itself. Imperishability, uncreated light and boundless joy.

A wealthy friend can fly you to an exclusive resort, but he cannot give you his health. He can buy you a house, but he cannot transfer his lifespan. His generosity can only change your environment.

God changes your reality.

When He elevates us, He doesn’t just hand out tickets to visit heaven as tourists. 2 Peter says He makes us partakers of the divine nature. He takes fragile, decaying creatures and clothes them in His own immortality.

But He didn't just reach down from a distance to pull us up. He plunged straight into our poverty first, absorbing our ruin, stepping directly into the wreckage, and dragging us out by His own skin. That is what makes the rescue absolute.

If a mortal man takes joy in watching his friends step into a life they never dreamed of, how much more does an infinite Father delight in sharing His eternal life with the ones He calls His own?

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

The most striking lesson God taught me this year is that there is no theology in friendship.

Theology is crucial. It teaches precedent, guards understanding, and reveals how God has moved across history. But if you are not careful, theology becomes an intellectual shield you use to resist a living instruction from God.

God is greater than theology, greater than our systems. There are seasons where He disrupts old precedent, and seasons where He uses your obedience to create entirely new ones.

Earlier this year, God asked me to let go of something. The word came through my spiritual mentor, someone who carried authority in my life, and I had independent confirmation in my spirit that it was Him.

Still, I resisted. I fought because I searched scripture and knew, without question, that this thing was not a sin. It was lawful. Biblically permissible. It broke no commandments. So I kept asking: Why this? Where is the theological justification?

In the middle of that fight, God confronted my framework.

God walked me back through scripture and pressed the question: Where was the theological precedent for Abraham leading Isaac up Mount Moriah?

Where was the doctrine permitting Hosea to marry Gomer?

Those men didn’t receive a systematic theology. They received an intimate, specific instruction from a Person.

And because they walked with Him, they moved without demanding a legal brief.

God brought the lesson closer to home. In my marriage, there are days my wife looks at what I’m wearing and simply says, “You’re not coming out with me in that.” Half the time, I don’t even agree with her. But I don’t build a case or defend the outfit, I just go back to the closet and change. Friendship yields not because a point was proven, but because presence matters more than preference.

God is like that with those He walks with.

Even after understanding the principle, I still wrestled for days. I was shocked by how agonizing it was to release something I had convinced myself was insignificant. But the sheer violence of my resistance exposed the truth that my identity had quietly latched onto it.

Surrender is a muscle.

When I finally opened my hands, something internal broke and realigned.
The first time, God had to use someone else to speak to me because my theological guardrails were so rigid I would have never heard Him directly. But once that smaller surrender dismantled my defenses, my hearing changed.

Three weeks later, God spoke to me directly, asking me to let go of something exponentially larger, something I once thought I could never release. And this time, I let it go with total ease.
The first test was never about the object. It was God training my hands to stay open.

Theology will teach you where God has walked, but only friendship allows Him to lead you where you haven’t yet been. We often retreat into doctrinal debates because legality feels safe and gives us control. But intimacy demands vulnerability.

God isn’t looking for lawyers who can defend what they’re allowed to keep; He is looking for friends who trust Him enough to put it down.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

What Matthew 22:37 doesn’t say weighs heavier than what it does.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.”

No ancient deity asked for this. The pantheons of old wanted tribute, fear, appeasement, and blood on the altar. They asked not to be angered. But this God, YHWH, wants the heart behind the knife.

Demanding such total and robust devotion is either tyrannical madness or the foundational grammar of reality. If God were merely an emperor inside the universe, then demanding all our love would be pure theft, since every drop given upward would be stolen from the people around us.

Yet the very next line in Matthew 22:39 commands you to love your neighbor as yourself. The math only works because God isn’t another competitor fighting for space in your chest, but is the source of the heart itself.

When devotion is anchored in the source of life rather than another creature, you stop asking finite people to carry the impossible weight of playing God for you. Loving the source is what gives you the capacity to love your neighbor without needing to consume them.

Notice what the passage refuses to lead with: obey, serve, fear. Those are not erased, but they are radically subordinated. Obedience without love is legalism; service without love is exhaustion. Love is made primary because it is the only climate where duty doesn’t curdle into resentment.

And importantly, the command is only coherent and fair because it is symmetric. If God demanded total love and surrender from us while remaining detached and indifferent to us, that would be extortion and would make him unjust.

The audacity of the demand is an open confession of how God already sees us.

Scripture says the hairs on your head are numbered, that we were all wonderfully, beautifully and intentionally made. There is an infinite difference between knowing something because you catalogued it and knowing something because you cannot stop looking. God does not administrate us, He meticulously attends to us.

And his love reaches its crescendo in event. God did not issue this command from a throne. He answered it himself first, on a cross.

We are not primarily moral agents who must comply with divine law. We are invited into a fierce, mutual devotion that secures our identity where it cannot be shaken, liberates our neighbor from our appetites, and gives the architecture of existence its true weight.

The boldness of what he asks is proportional to the boldness of what he has already given. The command and the cross read each other.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Hebrews 5:9 contains one of the most arresting paradoxes in Scripture: “and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

At first glance, that almost sounds wrong. If Jesus is the eternal Son of God, how could He possibly need to be made perfect? Was something missing in Him?

The Son was fully, maximally loved and complete before the world began. All things were made for Him and through Him; in His divine essence, He lacked nothing.

But stepping into the role of High Priest for humanity was a completely different story.

You cannot represent hurting people from an ivory tower with abstract theories. Under divine parameters, the only way to qualify was through lived, human experience.

That is why verse 8 tells us that even though He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. He didn't learn how to stop disobeying; He moved from knowing what obedience looked like to feeling what it actually cost in real time.

The weight of this is devastating. Once you see it, it completely reframes your pain. When life gets brutal, our instinct is to assume God is disappointed in us or punishing us.

But look at Jesus. His suffering wasn’t an indictment of His standing before his father; it was the strict enforcement of the standard required for His calling.

When God walks you through a crushing season, it doesnt mean He has abandoned you. More often than not, He is building your portfolio, giving you the endurance, depth, and story you need to carry your assignment.

You see the weight of this in how Jesus prayed. In verse 7, He offered up prayers with loud cries and tears to the One who could save Him from death. This was visceral anguish directed with complete theological clarity. In His worst hour, He never lost grip of where power resided. His grief had an address.

And He prayed in reverent submission. He did not come to the Father assuming intimacy would do the work of submission.

He didn't bypass the weight of God's gaze; He looked to the Father as His God, the enforcer of the standards, and the One with authority over death. The love between them was infinite, but His reverence was equal to that love.

Do we pray with that same fervor? Do we bring our pain without restraint to the One with authority, and with that same submission, holding our desires inside God’s will rather than demanding an escape?

Now here is where the passage becomes unbearable: God heard Him. And He still died.

He prayed to be saved from death, and God saved Him after He died. Jesus was not praying against the cross; He was praying to be pulled up out of the belly of the grave. He didn't pray against the plan; He prayed inside it, entirely aligned with divine intent.

And God heard Him. The answer was not exemption. It was resurrection.

God loves nothing like He loves His Son. But that love did not lower the standard, it held the standard firm and carried Him through everything it required.

Verse 9 closes the loop: once perfected, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him. Fully installed and completely qualified.

I will strive to obey this man with my life. I will do so because He is worthy of obedience, having Himself obeyed to the point of blood.

He stepped into the strain of incompletion for my sake, entering the one office He started off unqualified for, and qualifying for it by enduring everything it demanded. I will strive to obey Him because through Him, imperishable life has my name on it. Amen.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I noticed something striking studying the story of Elijah this morning. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah calls down fire from heaven and it falls instantly, fiercely consuming the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the dust.

But when it came time for the rain, the pace changed completely. The same prophet who had just publicly humiliated the prophets of Baal had to adopt an entirely different posture to see the rain arrive.

The architecture of the two miracles was fundamentally different. The fire was disruptive and confrontational. It demanded nothing from the onlooker except awe, moving instantaneously to settle the argument of who was God.

The rain was different. It was covenantal, agricultural, and sustaining, and it required an entirely different posture to birth.

When it was time to pray for rain, Elijah did not stand looking boldly at the sky. He curled to the earth, pressing his head between his knees in the posture of a woman in labor. He sent his servant to scan the horizon six times, and six times the servant returned with an empty report.

On the seventh trip, the servant returned having seen only a speck of a cloud the size of a human hand. Elijah doubled down immediately, almost to the point of absurdity. He risked his entire prophetic reputation on that tiny vapor, sending word for King Ahab to hitch his chariot and run before the deluge trapped him on the mountain.

We spend so much of our lives waiting for the God of fire. We want the sudden breakthrough, the dramatic vindication, and the instant deliverance that clears the field in an afternoon.

But the enduring works of God almost always arrive like rain.

They begin as quiet, fragile shifts that look absurdly small against the scale of our drought.

Real faith does not wait for the sky to turn black before it begins to move. It recognizes the seed, treats the fist-sized sign as a guaranteed harvest, and orders reality around what has only just begun to rise.

Each miracle extracted something different from the man.

Fire demanded presence and proclamation. Elijah stood before the crowd, issued the challenge, drenched the altar, and spoke the word.

Authority from God asks for your public courage, but intimacy with God demands your private labor.

The rain required him to climb higher, collapse into the dirt, and push through six rounds of silence until life was born.

The hardest spiritual work often begins after the public victory is already won. While the crowd is still reeling and the altar is still smoking, the true work belongs to the person willing to stay facedown in the dust, laboring for the promise that only they have heard. I am still learning to be that person. That is also the main event.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Believers today do not struggle with finding the Word of God. We have an embarrassment of access: Bible apps, devotionals, and countless preachers across our feeds. We know where God’s promises are.

When trouble looms, the real crisis is much quieter and harder to admit. It is the crisis of sufficiency.

We look at what God has said and the quiet question creeps in: Is this Word actually enough?

Can a promise spoken thousands of years ago really hold the crushing weight of my current reality?

It often feels like an impossible mismatch. On one side stands a massive, terrifying storm; on the other, just a simple, quiet sentence. We expect an army, and God hands us a word.

From the start, Christianity has offended human pride because it is built entirely on trust.

Look at the thief on the cross. He had no spiritual resume, no track record of discipleship, and only a few agonizing breaths left. He did not have time to clean up his life; he just turned his head and asked to be remembered. Jesus gave him a single sentence: "Today you will be with Me in paradise."

When you stop to think about it, it is almost absurd. In that dying man's shoes, the immediate human reaction would be: Really? That is it? Just a word?

I once heard a preacher playfully imagine the scene at heaven's gates when that man arrived. In this humorous picture, the man shows up with zero theological credentials, no baptism, and no good works to present. When the angels ask him what right he has to enter, his entire defense is simple: "The Man on the middle cross said I could come." That is the raw scandal of faith. We are asked to stake our entire existence on a spoken decree.

Why can we trust that decree? What makes it so utterly reliable?

The Word of God is unique because it was forged outside of time.

Before the universe had a clock, God existed in unhurried, perfect communion within Himself. There was no panic, no deadline, and no rush.

C.S. Lewis once noted that a human author has unlimited time to sit with a character's arc before the chapter opens.

But God was not writing fiction. In that boundless eternity, He looked at your life, saw the exact texture of your deepest heartbreak, and calibrated the exact measure of grace required to carry you through. It arrived in your hands having already passed through the reality of your worst day.

If that Word is not enough for your situation, it would mean God miscalculated. It would mean the Almighty suffered a manufacturing failure.

Think about how absurd that is when you look at the intentionality inside your own body.

Your DNA carries three billion base pairs of encoded information, a language science can read but could never author.
Your retina processes millions of calculations every second.

Did God really show obsessive precision with your biology, weaving microscopic brilliance into every cell, only to become careless with His grace? Did He master the vessel only to neglect the rescue?

Scripture says the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. The remedy was settled in eternity long before the wound ever occurred in time. This means the promise you are leaning on is not an emergency patch; it is an eternal verdict.

You already carry the evidence of His meticulous nature in your own chest. A God that precise with the vessel will not fail the rescue.

His Word might feel simple. It might look completely disproportionate to the weight of your battle. But it was designed to carry you, and it is enough.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Eventually, every serious believer collides with the silence of God. You pray, and nothing shifts. Heaven stays completely still while problems mount in real time.

In that gap, a fear takes shape that few believers will say out loud.

Scripture tells you God possesses an unbroken, eternal joy. That He cannot suffer loss. That death is powerless before Him. That He already knows how the story ends.

And when you are bleeding, that certainty starts to look like detachment.

You begin to suspect you are the prank. That somewhere behind the veil, the one who holds all outcomes is watching your panic the way someone watches a joke they wrote long before you arrived.

Christianity has an answer to that suspicion. Stranger than noise. More demanding than a sign. It tells you what God is doing in the silence, where He reveals four distinct faces.

First is the attentive face of the craftsman.

Malachi 3:3 says “He sits as a refiner of silver”. In the ancient workshop, sitting was not passivity; it was the posture of supreme proximity. A silversmith does not shout over the flames or pace the room. He pulls his chair to the lip of the fire because the work demands unblinking focus.

God does not manage our suffering from a safe distance. He leans over the crucible, watching the flame and guarding the parameters of our pain so the heat purifies without destroying the vessel. His stillness is the proof of His closeness.

Second is the archival face of the judge.

When injustice runs unchecked and the innocent are exploited, silence is not consent. It is the terrifying patience of an open ledger.

Human anger is loud and erratic because we fear losing control, but divine justice operates with immaculate, unhurried precision.

Nothing is lost on God. The most calculated injustice, the quietest tear, and the subtlest abuse of power are cataloged with absolute exactness. An empire that fell two thousand years ago stands before His judgment seat with the exact same freshness as an injustice committed this morning.

Third is the priestly face of the intercessor.

This is the scandal of the Christian faith. God did not supervise human sorrow from the safety of eternity; He entered the fire Himself.

In Christ, we have a high priest who stepped into our vulnerability and took the silence of heaven into His own flesh. At Golgotha, the Word through whom all things were made took on our dereliction beneath a blackened sky. God did not just administer the silence. He endured it.

When we sit in the quiet, we are not trapped in a place God has never been.

Fourth is the sovereign face of divine intention.

When Joseph told his brothers that what they meant for evil God meant for good, he was not pretending the pit and prison never happened. God does not merely erase the historical reality of loss. He overrules its meaning and trajectory. He absorbs the malice of betrayal and weaves it into an indestructible architecture of deliverance.

That is the bedrock of Romans 8:28. God commandeers every deficit, deceit, and displacement, forcing the weapon designed to break us to serve our ultimate good.

To stand in the silence of God is never to stand in an empty room. Silence is terrifying only when you do not know who is in the dark with you. When you know His character, the quiet stops being a void. It becomes the purposeful stillness of a God who is watching the fire, keeping the ledger, bearing the grief, and finishing a redemption that no human malice can destroy.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

If you feel led to stand with our family through this transition, you can support us directly here:

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We are deeply grateful for the messages, counsel, and generosity shown to us since I shared this post. Thank you for being in our corner. 🫶🏾

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I returned home from a meeting yesterday afternoon to find my wife on the phone in tears.

Since April, five full months now, every single rent payment we made was being intercepted by scammers.

The scheme was pretty coordinated. The scammers reached out to the landlord’s agency using a fraudulent email address while posing as my wife. The agency accepted the unverified address without question and corresponded exclusively through it, while the scammers fabricated personal hardship and pleaded for extensions.

On our end, the scammers played the role of the agency to perfection, they issued monthly payment confirmations, sent out standard administrative paperwork, and even spoke with us over multiple phone calls.

About three months ago, we randomly received correspondence from the landlord’s lawyers stating that we owed back rent.

Because our records were clean, we reached out immediately to what we thought was the agency to ask for an explanation. The scammers intercepted our inquiry, dismissed the lawyers' letter as an internal misunderstanding, and assured us everything was in order.

It was only after that exchange that a formal notice arrived stating the landlord had decided to sell the apartment and we needed to vacate by October 2.

We now understand what was happening behind the scenes. The owner had received nothing for months. The real agency, flooded with endless pleading emails from fraudsters pretending to be my wife, concluded we simply lacked the capacity to pay and likely advised the landlord to sell the apartment as his cleanest exit.

Because the fraudsters actively managed both sides, the agency never called our actual numbers or sent physical warnings to our door. The entire illusion only collapsed yesterday when an employee returned from a long leave of absence, noticed the mounting balance, and decided that despite the emails, he should place a direct phone call to my wife.

We are now facing thousands in back rent, an impending October eviction deadline, and the friction of finding a new home in the Paris rental market, all while navigating life as new parents.

In hindsight, we should have been far more alert when an updated IBAN was introduced for payments. But because we had experienced routine banking updates in the past, we treated it as standard administrative procedure instead of a red flag.

I was scammed once when I was twenty-two, chasing an investment return I had not properly vetted. That was easier to carry because the failure belonged entirely to my own lack of diligence.

This one carries a very different weight. We acted in good faith, honored our obligations every single month, and did everything right. Defrauding us out of money is painful enough, but losing our home in the process is devastating.

I believe Scripture when it says all things work together for good for those who love God. I am genuinely waiting to see the good God has in store, but right now, this hurts. And it hurts deeply.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Most atheists would probably prefer a God who explained quantum mechanics to them over a God who told them to love their enemies.

If Jesus had arrived explaining astrophysics instead of commanding repentance, forgiveness, and holiness, the modern world would have found Him far more compelling.

We do not seem to want a God who is holier than us. We want a God who is just smarter than us.

A God who is merely smarter is safe. He stays in the comfortable category of an intellectual superior. We could admire His mind, take His laboratory notes, and use His data to master the universe on our own terms.

A God of pure information gives us power without ever touching our pride.

The absence of a scientific manual in Scripture is not an oversight. It is an act of design.

In Genesis, God does not hand Adam a completed catalogue of creation. He brings the animals to him and lets him name them. God builds an intelligible world, gives humanity minds capable of interrogating it, and then leaves room for discovery.

The skeptic looks at that silence and calls it a deficiency. He demands that God should have handed us the finished physics.

But if God owes us the completed mechanics of the universe, why stop at science?

Why didn’t the Mona Lisa descend from heaven fully painted? Why didn’t Beethoven’s Ninth arrive fully scored? Why did God not pre-design the airplane, pre-discover penicillin, pre-build civilization and hand it to us at Eden?

He could have. The demand has no principled stopping point.

What you are actually asking for, worked out to its conclusion, is a world where humanity arrived to find everything already done. No discovery to make. No art to create. No problem left to solve. God would have been comprehensively generous. Humans would have been comprehensively useless.

The blank canvas is not God withholding. It is God protecting the only conditions under which making something actually means anything.

So why is Scripture so much more explicit about how we should live than about how God built the universe?

Look at the asymmetry of consequence.

Ignorance of astrophysics and the exact mechanics of creation is remarkably survivable. A civilization can flourish for centuries without knowing how the cosmos was physically assembled.

Moral disorder is different.

An abusive father does not need a better cosmology before his family suffers. A corrupt ruler does not need to understand thermodynamics before he destroys a nation. Societies can survive enormous intellectual ignorance. They cannot indefinitely survive the corruption of trust, justice, love, and leadership.

We treat technical mastery as if it were the summit of human purpose.

But knowledge is merely instrumental. It decorates our world, extends our reach and amplifies our power, yet it leaves the human soul entirely untouched.

We split the atom and did not become more virtuous. We simply acquired the capacity to industrialize our vices.
Science can tell us what we can do. It cannot tell us what we ought to do.
God never came primarily as our lab instructor.

He came as a Father to heal a terminal heart.

He gave us the cosmos to discover, our neighbour to love, and Himself to know.