Only Enemies in Our Minds - Discovering The Gospel
Have you ever really noticed what Paul says in Colossians 1:21? He tells people who had experienced themselves as separate from God that they were “alienated and enemies in your mind.” I am sure many of us have read that passage many times, but have we ever allowed those words to carry their full weight?
For many of us, that statement may mess with our theology. It may even blow to pieces some of the doctrine we have inherited about humanity, God, separation, and what Jesus actually came to accomplish. We have often been taught that humanity became separated from God in Genesis, that this separation became the fundamental condition of humanity, and that Jesus eventually came to somehow close the distance between the two.
But what if we have misunderstood where that separation was taking place? Could it be that the separation we see beginning within the Genesis story, developing throughout Scripture, becoming embedded within religious systems, and still affecting the way many people experience God today was rooted in the human mind? Could humanity have been living within the Life of God while simultaneously believing itself to be outside of Him?
That question becomes even more important when we read the verses surrounding Paul’s statement. Just a few sentences earlier, Paul says that Christ is before all things and that “in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17). He then says that through Christ God was reconciling “all things to Himself” (Colossians 1:20), before describing people as having been alienated and enemies “in your mind” (Colossians 1:21). Paul seems to be describing people who existed within Christ while experiencing themselves as alienated from the very Life in whom they existed.
If that is what Paul is saying, then we may need to go back and look at the biblical story again. We may discover that God was never the One hiding, withdrawing, or creating distance. Humanity learned to see separation, fear it, organize life around it, and eventually build entire systems that reflected it. If that is true, Jesus did not come to persuade a distant God to return to humanity. He came revealing what humanity could no longer see.
Humanity Begins in Image, Blessing, and Presence
The biblical story does not begin with humanity as sinful, cursed, unrighteous, condemned, lacking, or separated from God. Genesis begins with God saying, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness,” and then blessed them (Genesis 1:28), and continues with entrusting humanity with governance in the earth. Before humanity accomplishes anything, obeys anything, earns anything, or proves anything, God blesses them.
That starting point matters because we have often allowed Genesis 3 to become the beginning of our theology of humanity. We begin with what has traditionally been called the fall and then allow failure, sin, and death to become the deepest statements we make about who humanity is. Scripture does not begin there. It begins with image, likeness, blessing, purpose, and humanity living within the presence of God.
Before there is a command concerning the tree, identity has already been established. Before there is failure, there is purpose, and before humanity does anything for God, God has already spoken blessing over humanity. This means humanity’s relationship with God was not established through obedience. Obedience was never the price humanity paid in order to become God’s image, receive His blessing, or participate in His Life.
That becomes important later when we begin talking about salvation, reconciliation, restoration, and awakening. If we forget humanity’s beginning, we can easily turn salvation into the creation of an identity humanity never possessed rather than an awakening to what was true before fear, shame, and separation-consciousness distorted the way humanity saw.
Genesis 2 adds something else to this picture. Genesis 2:15 says God placed the man in the garden “to tend and keep it.” The Hebrew words commonly translated “tend” and “keep” are avad and shamar, words that later appear within priestly settings involving tending to, guarding, and keeping charge of sacred space, including Numbers 3:7–8 and Numbers 18:5–7.
Genesis 1 speaks of governance concerning the earth, while Genesis 2 speaks of tending and guarding the garden. Long before Israel is called a kingdom of priests, humanity is already carrying something that resembles a king-priest calling, with governance concerning the earth and sacred responsibility concerning what has been entrusted to them.
That raises an interesting question that I do not think we should rush past: What exactly is the Garden of Eden, and how is the garden different from the earth around it? Genesis 1 speaks broadly about humanity filling the earth and exercising governance within it, yet Genesis 2 places humanity within a garden to tend and keep it. Two places with with different purposes.
I do not think we have to settle every question about Eden in order to notice that Scripture treats the garden as sacred space. When Genesis speaks about the earth, it describes it in very natural terms: animals reproducing, vegetation providing food, and the environment functioning together to create a flourishing world. Yet when the Garden of Eden comes into view, the imagery changes. The imagery of the garden is spiritual. We encounter a serpent that speaks, a tree that gives knowledge, another tree associated with Life, cherubim, a flaming sword, and a place where God walks with humanity even though God is Spirit.
More interesting still is the way Scripture later begins using garden, river, tree, fruit, and temple imagery when speaking about humanity itself. That movement deserves our attention because it suggests that what is first given as a picture of sacred space in which humanity has access to, evolves into language for the Life expressed in and through humanity.
Song of Songs 4:12–16 describes a person as “a garden within,” a spring, a fountain, and an orchard whose fragrance is released when the wind blows upon it. John 7:38 records Jesus saying, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water,” while Ezekiel 47:1–12 describes water flowing from the temple and becoming a life-giving river surrounded by trees whose fruit nourishes and whose leaves bring healing.
Then Paul says something remarkable in 1 Corinthians 3:16: “You are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” What earlier appeared as temple imagery, garden imagery, rivers, trees, and sacred space is increasingly brought into the conversation about humanity itself.
The same movement appears throughout the wisdom writings and prophets. Psalm 92:12–14 describes the righteous flourishing like trees planted in the house of the Lord, Isaiah 61:3 calls people “trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD,” and Jeremiah 17:7–8 describes a person like a tree planted by waters whose roots reach toward the river. Proverbs 11:30 even says, “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life.”
The Tree of Life begins in Genesis as something humanity encounters in Eden, but later biblical language begins applying tree-of-life imagery to wisdom, fulfilled desire, human fruit, and what comes through a person’s life. Jesus continues that imagery when He speaks of good trees producing good fruit and then immediately connects the fruit with what comes from the human heart (Luke 6:43–45). He says in John 15:5, “I am the vine, you are the branches,” and Proverbs 4:23 tells us to guard the heart because “out of it spring the issues of life.”
I believe the Garden of Eden was describing the spiritual place Adam functioned from, the inward place from which his life was expressed. It was not simply a geographical garden surrounding him; it was the sacred realm of consciousness, Life, and presence from which he engaged the earth. This is the same place humanity functions from today, which helps explain why Scripture later uses garden, river, tree, fruit, and temple imagery when speaking about what is within us.
What Adam tended in the garden affected what was expressed through his life, just as what is cultivated within us affects what flows outward through ours. This is why the change in Genesis 3 is so significant. When Adam’s perception changed, something changed within the place he was functioning from, and that inward distortion eventually became visible through fear, hiding, accusation, fractured relationships, and the world humanity began creating.
Something Changed in the Way Humanity Saw
After Adam and Eve eat from the tree, Genesis 3:7 says, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened.” Their physical eyes were already working, so something more is happening than the sudden ability to see their surroundings. Their perception has changed.
Immediately they begin seeing themselves differently. They become conscious of nakedness, cover themselves, and hide when they hear God in the garden. Adam explains the change when he says, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).
Fear has entered his experience, and that fear immediately changes the way he relates to God. Yet notice what the text does not say. It does not say God separated Himself from Adam, stopped coming into the garden, or became the One hiding from humanity. Adam hides while God continues moving toward him.
That distinction is foundational to everything I am trying to say. The relationship did not change on God’s side; what changed was humanity’s perception of that relationship. Adam became afraid of the One who was still walking toward him.
Then God asks, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). I do not think God has somehow lost Adam’s physical location. The question exposes where Adam has gone internally because his body is still standing within creation while his mind has entered an entirely different world.
Adam now sees himself as someone who needs to hide from the One whose image he carries. That is why Colossians 1:21 becomes so important later in the biblical story, because Paul eventually gives language to an alienation that had already begun showing itself in the human mind.
The warning God gave concerning the tree also deserves a careful reading. Genesis 2:16–17 says, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat,” but warns that eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will result in death. God does not say, “If you eat from this tree, I will kill you,” and He does not say, “If you disobey Me, I will become your enemy.”
God tells Adam what eating from the tree will produce. That is a very different picture from God threatening retaliation if Adam fails a test.
I think of a parent warning a child not to touch a hot stove. The warning is not given because the parent wants to create an arbitrary rule and then punish the child for breaking it. The warning comes from love because the parent knows what touching the stove will produce.
If the child ignores the warning and burns his hand, the pain is real, but the father did not burn the child. The thing the father warned about produced exactly what he said it would produce, and the father’s response toward the wounded child is not retaliation but care.
That distinction changes how I read Genesis 3. We have often heard the story as though Adam disobeyed, God became angry, and God personally responded by inflicting death, curse, suffering, and separation upon humanity. Yet the language of Genesis gives us another way to understand what is happening.
When God addresses the serpent in Genesis 3:14, He explicitly says, “You are cursed.” When He speaks to Adam in Genesis 3:17, He says, “Cursed is the ground for your sake.” What God never says to Adam or Eve is, “You are cursed.”
The humanity God created in His image and blessed in Genesis 1 is never called cursed by God. Partaking of the tree brought a consequence, but that consequence did not come from God retaliating against humanity; it came from what they had chosen to partake of. God had already warned them about what the tree would produce, which is very different from God saying He would personally produce those consequences if they disobeyed Him. Pain, struggle, toil, fear, relational domination, and death become part of the human experience, but those things do not require us to see God as the One personally inflicting the wound. They reveal what begins to happen when humanity starts functioning from a consciousness rooted in the knowledge of good and evil rather than from the Life it had always known.
This is the death Genesis warned about beginning to work itself into human experience. Death is not merely a biological event waiting at the end of life; it begins showing itself through fear, hiding, toil, fractured relationship, distorted desire, violence, and a consciousness that no longer knows how to experience Life as it was intended.
The child has touched the stove and the wound is real, but now watch what the Father does. Adam and Eve hide, yet God walks into the garden and calls, “Where are you?” They become ashamed and try to cover themselves, yet Genesis 3:21 says God clothes them.
Whatever else we believe is happening in Genesis 3, the movement of God toward wounded humanity remains one of pursuit, care, and restoration rather than abandonment. Humanity withdraws while God approaches.
Even their removal from the garden deserves another look. Genesis 3:22–24 tells us why access to the Tree of Life is prevented: humanity must not eat from it and “live forever” in the condition that has entered their experience.
That allows us to see the boundary around the Tree of Life differently. The text does not simply picture God saying, “You failed, so now I want nothing to do with you.” It gives us a reason connected with preventing humanity from becoming permanently established in a death-conscious condition.
Even there, I see a restorative movement within the story. Humanity is experiencing the consequences of a changed consciousness, but God has not changed into humanity’s enemy.
Distorted Perception Creates Accusation
The change within Adam immediately begins affecting his relationships. When God asks what happened, Adam says, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12).
Adam blames Eve, but he also manages to include God in the accusation. The emphasis is not simply “the woman gave me the fruit,” but “the woman You gave me.” Something has happened in Adam’s mind that has changed the way he sees both God and the woman standing beside him.
The same woman Adam had previously described as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23) is now being treated as part of his problem. Fear has altered the way Adam sees God, and that altered perception begins affecting the way he sees another human being.
This is what separation-consciousness does. It does not remain locked inside our theology or our private thoughts; it becomes relational and eventually social.
Genesis 4 develops the pattern further. Before Cain kills Abel, God speaks directly to what is happening within him and asks, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?” (Genesis 4:6). The murder has not happened yet, but the outward action is already forming within an inward condition of anger, distorted desire, and perception.
What begins as fear and hiding in Eden becomes accusation, relational fracture, and eventually violence. The internal world humanity carries begins shaping the external world humanity creates.
This is why saying the hostility was “in your mind” does not make the consequences imaginary. What humanity believes about God, itself, and others can shape families, cultures, governments, religions, and entire ways of living.
If I believe God is distant, angry, suspicious, or waiting for me to fail, I will approach life through fear. If I believe identity begins in deficiency, I will spend my life trying to become enough, and if I believe separation is humanity’s deepest condition, I will create systems designed to manage that separation.
That is exactly what we begin seeing as the biblical story moves forward. The separation first experienced inwardly eventually becomes organized outwardly.
“I Brought You to Myself”
When Israel comes out of Egypt, God says something in Exodus 19 that deserves far more attention than it often receives. He tells them, “I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself” (Exodus 19:4).
God tells them plainly what He is doing. He is bringing them to Himself, and then He says, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).
The language echoes what we already saw in Genesis. Humanity begins with governance and sacred responsibility, and now God speaks over an entire people as a kingdom of priests. His movement is toward participation, nearness, and relationship.
Then something happens in Exodus 20 that sounds remarkably similar to Genesis 3. The people see the thunder, lightning, smoke, and hear the trumpet, and Exodus 20:18 says they tremble and “stood afar off.”
They then tell Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). God had just told them, “I brought you to Myself,” yet their fear causes them to stand at a distance and ask someone else to approach God for them.
Deuteronomy 5:23–27 speaks of a similar moment. The people tell Moses to go near, hear what God says, and then return and tell them what He said.
Humanity is becoming comfortable relating to God through someone else. Fear creates distance, and distance creates mediation.
This is Genesis 3 happening collectively. In Eden, God approaches and humanity hides, while at Sinai God says He has brought Israel to Himself and the people stand far away.
The pattern continues when Israel later asks Samuel for a king “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). God tells Samuel, “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7).
God had already called them a kingdom of priests, yet they choose external representation again. Instead of living from the identity and participation God had spoken over them, they ask for a king like the surrounding nations.
This is not saying all leadership is wrong or that every mediator is evil. It is showing a repeated human instinct to place something between ourselves and the Life we have become afraid to encounter directly.
Deuteronomy 30:19 places another important statement into Israel’s story when God says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life.” The larger biblical movement continues presenting humanity with Life, while humanity repeatedly chooses structures shaped by fear, distance, and death.
When Separation Became a System
To understand the law, we have to remember what happens immediately before the covenant system develops. God does not bring Israel out of Egypt simply because He wants to give them a new collection of rules; He says He brought them to Himself and calls them a kingdom of priests.
Yet when God draws near, the people become afraid and stand far away. They ask Moses to approach for them, and that moment reveals the consciousness within which the covenant system develops.
This is why Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:19 matters so much. When he asks, “What purpose then does the law serve?” his answer begins by saying, “It was added.”
The law was added. It was not humanity’s original condition, it was not present when humanity was created in God’s image and blessed, and it was not the basis of humanity’s original relationship with God.
Something was added later into a human story already shaped by fear, alienation, transgression, and separation-consciousness. I see the law as God meeting people where they had chosen to live.
God had called them to Himself, but they were afraid. He had called them a kingdom of priests, but they asked for mediation, and later they asked for a king like the surrounding nations.
Again and again, humanity chose structures that reflected the world of separation it understood, and God met them within those choices. The law became the fullest covenantal manifestation of that separation-consciousness.
Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 3:7–9 is incredibly strong. He calls the covenant “written and engraved on stones” the “ministry of death” and the “ministry of condemnation.”
That description makes sense when we look at what the system eventually communicated. God became represented as dwelling within sacred space surrounded by boundaries, priests stood between ordinary people and the innermost place, sacrifices were repeatedly offered, sin was repeatedly remembered, veils marked a space almost no one could enter and God's presence was reduced to a box.
The entire structure gave visible form to separation. The One who had said, “I brought you to Myself,” was eventually represented within the system as dwelling behind layers of restricted access.
The separation humanity first experienced inwardly in Eden had now become visible outwardly within a covenantal structure. Fear had become distance, distance had created mediation, and mediation had eventually become a system.
Yet the system could not produce Life. Galatians 3:21 says that if a law could have been given that imparted Life, righteousness would have come through law.
Hebrews 10:4 says, “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.” Hebrews 10:5–6 then repeats the language of Psalm 40 by saying, “Sacrifice and offering God did not desire,” and that God had no pleasure in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin.
Hosea 6:6 says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” and Jesus Himself quotes those words in Matthew 9:13. These passages should at least challenge the assumption that sacrifice and continual bloodshed reveal the deepest and eternal heart of God. They absolutely did not.
God worked within the covenant, but Scripture itself tells us the covenant was not the final picture. Hebrews 10:1 calls the law “a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things.”
Paul makes the connection between law and separation even clearer in Ephesians 2:14–16. Speaking about the historical division between Jew and Gentile, he says Christ broke down “the middle wall of separation” and connects the hostility with “the law of commandments contained in ordinances.”
The law had not only shaped how people imagined their relationship with God; it created categories of inside and outside among humanity. One group possessed covenant markers that another group did not, and those distinctions became a source of hostility.
Then Jesus appears, and what had been structured around separation begins to lose its authority. The veil tears from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51), the wall dividing Jew and Gentile comes down, and the covenant Paul called the ministry of condemnation is passing away.
Separation had become a system, but separation was never the deepest truth about humanity or the heart of God toward humanity.
Christ Was Before the Problem
One of the assumptions we need to reconsider is the idea that Christ became God’s response to Adam. If Adam fell and God then had to invent a rescue plan, Christ becomes Plan B rather than the origin in which humanity was already held.
Colossians 1:15–17 will not allow that story to stand. Paul says Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” that all things were created in Him, through Him, and for Him, and that “He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.”
Christ precedes Adam. He precedes sin, the law, the temple, and the entire problem humanity eventually experiences.
Ephesians 1:3–4 says humanity was chosen in Him “before the foundation of the world.” Second Timothy 1:9 says grace was given to us in Christ Jesus “before time began,” and 1 Peter 1:20 says Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world.
Christ therefore cannot simply be God’s reaction to Adam’s failure. Humanity’s origin is already deeper than the fall because humanity’s origin is in Christ.
This becomes important when Paul compares Adam and Christ in Romans 5. Paul repeatedly uses the language “much more,” refusing to allow Adam and Christ to stand as equal powers competing over humanity.
Romans 5:15 says, “Much more the grace of God,” while Romans 5:17 says, “Much more those who receive abundance of grace.” Romans 5:18 places the reach of Adam’s offense and Christ’s righteous act beside one another, showing that Paul does not imagine Christ as less successful than Adam.
Adam affects the human story profoundly, but Adam does not define humanity’s final reality. Grace is not weaker than sin, and Christ does not possess less reach than Adam.
First Corinthians 15:22 says, within the immediate context of resurrection, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” We should respect the resurrection context, but the Adam-Christ contrast remains unmistakable.
Adam does not get the final word concerning humanity. Christ was before the problem, and Christ is larger than the problem.
Jesus Reveals the Father Humanity Had Misunderstood
If humanity’s alienation involved a distorted perception of God, then salvation must involve revelation. This is exactly what the New Testament says Jesus brings.
John 1:18 says, “No one has seen God at any time,” and then says the Son has declared Him or made Him known. Hebrews 1:1–3 describes Jesus as the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His person, while Colossians 1:15 calls Him “the image of the invisible God.”
Humanity had seen through fear, covenant, sacrifice, warfare, law, cultural limitation, and veiled understanding. Then Jesus appears and gives us the clearest picture of the Father.
Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father,” and Jesus answers, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:8–9). That statement changes how everything else must be interpreted.
If I want to know what the Father is like, I look at Jesus. I watch Him eat with tax collectors and people called sinners in Matthew 9:10–13, touch the leper in Mark 1:40–42, and receive and restore the woman religious people despise in Luke 7:36–50.
John 8:1–11 gives another powerful picture when religious leaders bring a woman caught in adultery to Jesus. The law provided them with a framework for condemnation, but Jesus refuses to participate in the condemnation they are demanding and sends the woman away without joining their accusation.
Luke 9:51–56 may be even more revealing. When the disciples want to imitate Elijah by calling fire down from heaven upon a Samaritan village, Jesus rebukes them.
Whatever picture of God they believed the earlier story had given them, Jesus would not allow it to override the Father standing before them in visible form. If they wanted to know what the Father was like, they had to look at Him.
Jesus continually disrupts the God humanity had imagined through fear and separation. He moves toward people religion places at a distance, and He reveals a Father who is not threatened by humanity’s weakness, uncleanness, failure, or misunderstanding.
That movement sounds remarkably similar to Eden. Humanity hides because it is afraid, while God continues moving toward humanity.
Jesus Also Reveals Humanity
Jesus does not only reveal what the Father is like. He also reveals what humanity looks like when it lives without a consciousness of separation.
John 10:30 records Jesus saying, “I and My Father are one.” In John 14:10–11, He explains His life by saying, “The Father who dwells in Me does the works.”
Jesus does not live trying to get the Father to come near. He lives from the awareness that the Father is in Him and that He is in the Father.
Then Jesus expands the conversation beyond Himself. John 14:20 says, “At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”
Jesus does not reveal union so that humanity can stand outside admiring something that belongs only to Him. He includes humanity within the reality He is revealing.
He does not simply show us what God looks like while leaving humanity on the outside looking in. Jesus reveals what humanity looks like when it no longer sees itself as something separate from the Life within it.
Once we understand that, Colossians 1:21 lands very differently.
Enemies in Your Mind
Paul begins Colossians by locating all things in Christ. He says all things were created in Him, that He is before all things, and that “in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:15–17).
Then in Colossians 1:19–20, Paul says it pleased the Father that all fullness dwell in Christ and that through Him God was reconciling “all things to Himself.” Immediately afterward, he speaks to people who had been “alienated and enemies in your mind” (Colossians 1:21).
Paul has already told them where everything exists. Everything consists in Christ, yet these people had experienced themselves as alienated from the very Life in whom they existed.
They existed in Christ while experiencing themselves as separated from Christ. That is the contradiction we have often overlooked.
This does not mean their alienation was imaginary or harmless. A person can live inside a reality they do not recognize, and their misunderstanding can still shape everything about how they experience life.
Ephesians 4:17–18 confirms the connection when Paul speaks about people “having their understanding darkened” and being “alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them.” Notice the words Paul uses: understanding, ignorance, and alienation.
Again, alienation is connected with consciousness. Humanity is experiencing separation through what it does not know and what it has become unable to see.
Romans 8 also connects hostility with a way of thinking. Romans 8:6–7 contrasts the mind set on the flesh with Life and peace and describes that mind as hostile toward God, while Romans 8:1 begins the chapter by announcing that there is “no condemnation” in Christ Jesus.
The New Testament repeatedly returns to the mind because transformation involves a changed way of seeing. Romans 12:2 speaks about being transformed by the renewing of the mind, Ephesians 4:23 speaks about being renewed in the spirit of the mind, and Colossians 3:10 speaks of the new humanity being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the One who created it.
Humanity does not simply need improved behavior. Humanity needs to see what fear, ignorance, accusation, and separation-consciousness have hidden.
If I believe God is distant, I will create ways to reach Him. If I believe He is angry, I will create ways to calm Him, and if I believe someone must stand between us, I will search for mediators. If I believe humanity is fundamentally unacceptable, I will build religious structures around becoming acceptable. Eventually the belief becomes a world, and we can spend generations living inside a world created by something that began in the mind.
People often become like the God they believe in. If our image of God is primarily condemning, separating, retaliating, and hostile toward humanity, we can become comfortable reproducing those same things while believing we are defending Him.
Jesus reveals something entirely different. He reveals a Father who moves toward humanity, and that revelation produces a different kind of humanity.
Living in the God They Did Not Know
Acts 17 gives us one of the clearest examples of people living inside a reality they do not understand. Paul is speaking in Athens to people surrounded by idols who do not know the Father and are worshiping what Paul calls an “UNKNOWN GOD” (Acts 17:23).
These are not people who already understand Jesus or share Paul’s theology. Yet Paul does not begin by telling them how far away from God they are.
He tells them God “is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). Then he says, “For in Him we live and move and have our being,” before adding, “For we are also His offspring” (Acts 17:28).
Paul does not tell them, “If you repent correctly, you can eventually begin living in God.” He tells them where they are already living.
Their ignorance has not changed their position, but it has changed their experience. They do not know the Father, they have built idols, and they are worshiping within a distorted understanding of God, yet Paul still tells them, “In Him we live.”
This is why repentance in Acts 17:30 becomes so meaningful. Repentance is more than sorrow or feeling terrible about wrongdoing; the language carries the idea of a changed mind, understanding, and way of seeing.
Paul is inviting them to rethink the entire reality in which they live. They believed God could be contained in temples made with hands, but Paul tells them otherwise, and they approached God as though He needed something from humanity, while Paul says God is the One who gives “life, breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25).
They thought they were reaching toward an unknown God somewhere beyond them. Paul tells them they are already living and moving in Him.
Repentance becomes awakening to reality. The mind changes concerning the God in whom humanity already exists.
Salvation Is Larger Than Escaping Punishment
If Christ is greater than Adam, salvation has to address everything that entered human experience through the Adamic condition. Romans 5 connects Adam with sin and death, Romans 8 speaks about condemnation and a hostile way of thinking, and Hebrews speaks about liberation from the fear of death.
Hebrews 2:14–15 says Jesus frees those who “through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” Salvation therefore reaches much further than the question of where someone goes after death.
It addresses fear, death, condemnation, accusation, shame, hiding, alienation, hostility, and the entire world humanity built around the belief that God was distant. It reaches the inner condition from which those things emerged and the outward systems that eventually gave them structure.
This is why Jesus did not come to save humanity from God. He came revealing the Father humanity had misunderstood and freeing humanity from everything that distorted understanding had produced.
The good news is not that Jesus finally convinced an angry Father to tolerate humanity. Jesus reveals that the Father humanity had been afraid of was never the enemy humanity imagined.
Reconciliation Comes Before Our Awareness of It
Second Corinthians 5 gives us some of the clearest language concerning reconciliation. Paul says in verse 14, “One died for all, then all died,” and then in verse 19 says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them.”
Notice who acts first. God is the One reconciling, the world is the object of that reconciliation, and God is specifically described as not counting their trespasses against them.
Then Paul says, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). That can sound confusing if reconciliation only means something God has not yet accomplished.
But the tension begins to disappear when we understand the difference between reality and conscious participation. Something can be true before I recognize it, and I can live inside something without understanding what I am living inside.
The Athenians were already living in God while worshiping an unknown God. The Colossians existed in the One in whom all things consist while experiencing themselves as alienated and hostile in their minds.
In the same way, God was in Christ reconciling the world, yet humanity still needed to awaken to reconciliation. “Be reconciled” becomes an invitation to stop living from an imagined hostility and begin participating in what God has already revealed.
This completely changes the ministry of reconciliation. We are not convincing God to receive people, persuading Him to forgive them, or trying to move humanity across a distance God created.
We are awakening people to what God has already accomplished in Christ, to who the Father truly is, and to who humanity truly is. We are helping people recognize that in Him they already live, move, and have their being.
Paul’s language in 1 Timothy 4:10 fits naturally here. He calls God “the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe.”
We should allow the statement to say what it says. Paul does not call God a potential Savior of all or merely someone available to save all; he calls Him “the Savior of all” and then adds, “especially of those who believe.”
That distinction makes sense when we understand the difference between reality and conscious participation. Belief does not create what Christ accomplished; belief awakens us to it.
Faith does not move God closer. Faith recognizes the One in whom we already live and begins engaging the reality that ignorance prevented us from seeing.
Rediscovering The Gospel
When we step back and look across the story, a pattern of the gospel begins to emerge. Genesis shows humanity becoming afraid and hiding while God continues walking toward humanity, and Sinai shows Israel standing far away even after God says, “I brought you to Myself.”
Humanity repeatedly asks for intermediaries and external forms of governance. Fear creates distance, distance creates mediation, and eventually the law gives visible structure to a consciousness of condemnation and separation while remaining unable to produce Life.
Then Jesus appears and reveals both the Father and humanity. He shows us a Father who was never the enemy humanity imagined and reveals what humanity looks like when it lives from union rather than separation.
Paul eventually gives us language for the entire story when he describes people as “alienated and enemies in your mind” (Colossians 1:21). He says this after already telling us that “in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).
Acts 17:28 says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” John 14:20 says, “You in Me, and I in you,” while 2 Corinthians 5:19 says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”
Those are not unrelated religious statements. Together they describe humanity awakening to the Life in which it has always existed.
This does not mean the consequences of separation-consciousness were unreal. Fear was real, shame was real, death was real, violence was real, condemnation was real, and the systems humanity built around those things became very real.
But the hostility was never located in the heart of the Father. Humanity learned to imagine itself opposite God, and then we lived from that imagination until distance felt more believable than union.
That is why awakening matters. Repentance matters, the renewing of the mind matters, and the ministry of reconciliation matters because a humanity that knows where it lives will not build the same world as a humanity convinced that God has abandoned it.
The message of reconciliation is not, “Here is how you can finally get to God.” It is, “Wake up to the God in whom you already live.”
That changes the entire announcement of the good news. We were never on the other side of God trying to find our way back to the Life from which we came; we learned to see ourselves there.
Jesus reveals the Father, reveals humanity, and exposes the consciousness that told us we were separated from the Life in whom we had always lived. Perhaps the distance we have spent generations trying to overcome was never located where we thought it was, because the Father was never our enemy and humanity was never outside the Life that holds all things together.
We were only ever enemies in our minds.
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Serge is an author, minister, podcast host, and the founder of Urban Eden Community. his passion is helping people see God more clearly, awaken to who they are, and engage life more fully. Through essays, conversations, books, and community, his hope is to create spaces where people can ask honest questions and discover the life that's already present within them.
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