Dear Missionaryish Family,

As a former missionary in Thailand, I have stood in homes where the king’s portrait hangs on the wall by requirement, walked through temples that are not merely religious buildings but the living architecture of a covenant between a people and the powers that claim them. That experience, and a growing interest in missiological research and evangelism, has led me toward a question I am still working to understand: what is the plight of international students coming into this country to study? It is a question I am preparing to engage directly through RUF International someday. And the more I have sat with it, the more it has forced me to ask something I did not expect: what are these students actually carrying when they arrive?

Part One: The Pattern 

The students who come to study in the United States from China, from Vietnam, from the Gulf states, from countries shaped by generations of concentrated state power. They do not arrive as blank slates. They arrive formed. They come from nations with their own histories, their own cultures, and, as the scriptures make plain, their own gods. The geographic boundaries of the nations were not drawn arbitrarily. They were assigned. And the systems those nations built (political, social, institutional) carry the spiritual signature of what presided over them.

I am not interested in conspiracy theories. I am interested in spiritual dynamics. And as I began to look seriously at the power structures these students come from: the states, the institutions, the family networks that funded their education and expect a return on that investment. I kept finding the same pattern. Not similar patterns. The same one. Across continents, across centuries, across ideologies that despised each other. The same six mechanisms, assembled in the same configuration, every time.

When you trace the pattern far enough back, you find it in Bronze Age treaty tablets. When you trace it into the present, you find it in gulags and in Hollywood studios and on private islands in the Caribbean. The Jeffrey Epstein case is not an anomaly. It is the same ancient structure running in a modern address. And the students sitting across from campus ministers in RUF chapters and college fellowships across this country have been formed, in ways they may not even be aware of, by institutions that operate by the same logic.

This essay is my attempt to map that pattern, name what is behind it, and explain why the gospel, rightly understood, is not just good news in general, but the specific answer to the specific bondage these systems produce. Not to be clever. Not to win an argument. But because you cannot love someone well if you cannot see what they are carrying.

The Original Template

The Ancient Near East (ANE) gives us the clearest early picture. When powerful kingdoms made treaties with weaker ones (what scholars call suzerain-vassal treaties), they followed a recognizable form. The great king established his authority, listed what he had already done for the lesser party, then laid out the terms. Obey and you will be protected. Violate the terms and the curses in this document will fall on you. 

The curses were specific. Drought. Military defeat. Dead children. Erased lineage. And they were not just threats from the human king. They were backed by divine witnesses, the gods of both parties, named in the treaty and called to enforce it.

The binding ceremony involved a shared meal, an animal sacrifice the vassal walked through, literally enacting what would happen to them if they broke the covenant, and an exchange of vulnerabilities that locked both parties into mutual exposure. The treaty was then deposited in the temple and read aloud periodically, so the vassal people never forgot what they had agreed to and what failure would cost. 

Six things made this system work. All six show up again, in every iteration of this structure, for the next four thousand years.

The Six Mechanisms

1. You become someone new

The covenant did not just bind you. It changed what you were. Your prior identity, your family, your history, your prior loyalties, was either erased or made subordinate to the new one. This was not incidental. A person who keeps their old self keeps their old loyalties. Old loyalties are the primary threat to any system that demands total allegiance. The transformation had to come first.

2. You do something you cannot take back

The vassal was required to participate in an act that made them complicit. Walk between the severed animal halves. Sign the order. Witness the execution. Deliver someone into the network. The logic is simple: if you have done what I have done, you cannot expose me without exposing yourself. The shared act is the lock. Once it is done, defection costs you as much as it costs the suzerain.

3. The file is held

Every version of this system maintains a record. In the ancient world it was the curse tablet: the document that specified exactly what would happen to you if you stepped out of line, deposited in the temple where it could be retrieved and activated at any moment. In the modern world it is the dossier, the signed confession, the photograph, the video, the collateral surrendered at initiation. The suzerain holds it. He may never use it. He does not need to. The fact that it exists is enough.

4. Something bigger than both of you is watching

No human enforcement mechanism is sufficient on its own, because it can always be overpowered or outlasted. Every domination system therefore reaches for a witness whose authority nothing can override. In the ancient world it was the gods. In the twentieth century it was History, the Volk, the Revolution, the inevitable arc of justice. The names change. The function is identical. You are not just defying the king. You are defying what governs reality itself.

5. Loyalty is proved by destroying something you love

Words are cheap. Sentiment is cheap. Every domination system demands proof of loyalty that cannot be faked. The proof it reaches for, consistently, is the destruction of prior attachment. You denounce your neighbor. You report your parent. You sacrifice your friend. You deliver someone else into what you were delivered into.

Notice what is always targeted: the family. Not just the individual. The family.. The marriage. The parent-child bond. Every system in this history goes out of its way to dissolve familial loyalty. This is not random. The family is the prior covenant, husband to wife, parent to child, that competes directly with the suzerain's claim to total allegiance. It has to go. The obsession with family dissolution across every one of these systems is not a side effect. It is the point.

6. There is always an altar

Every domination system builds a place. The ANE temple housed the god's presence, archived the treaty, and served as the site where the covenant was periodically renewed, where the vassal people assembled, heard the curses recited, and reaffirmed their submission in the presence of the divine resident. The architecture enforced both the memory and the posture.

This never stopped. The Lenin Mausoleum. Tiananmen Square. The Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, where both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il lie embalmed and visitors must bow at specified angles to each body. The portraits of the king that appear in every home in Thailand, North Korea, and dozens of other countries, inspected for condition, required by law. The structure on the hill at Little St. James island. It is never enough to control people. Something in this system always reaches for the altar. 

Four Thousand Years of the Same Six Moves

What follows is not a comprehensive history. It is a recognition exercise.

In Nazi Germany: SS initiation replaced prior identity with a racial-cosmic one. Officers were required to witness or participate in executions. The shared act. The lock. The Gestapo maintained files on every senior figure. History and Providence served as the cosmic witness. The Nuremberg rallies were covenant renewal ceremonies. Hitler's final months were consumed by the paranoia this system inevitably produces in the man at the top.

In Stalin's Soviet Union: Party membership required written confessions of prior class identity that became permanent vulnerabilities. The inner circle signed execution lists: Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, all marked. The NKVD files were the heart of Soviet power. Pavlik Morozov, the child who denounced his father and was made a state martyr, was the loyalty-proof mechanism turned into official pedagogy. Stalin died possibly poisoned by people too afraid to call his doctors.

In Mao's China: Thought reform dismantled the prior self and rebuilt it from the ground up. The Cultural Revolution demanded that children denounce parents, students destroy teachers, wives denounce husbands. Dossiers followed every citizen. The Mao Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square remains a pilgrimage site with a prescribed approach.

In North Korea under Kim Jong-il: The Songbun caste system assigned hereditary identity based on loyalty history. Your standing was determined by what your family had done or failed to do across generations. The three-generations punishment imprisoned entire families for one member's transgression. The Kumsusan Palace requires the bow. The portraits require maintenance. The system is the ANE template running with almost no modification. 

In Hồ Chí Minh’s Vietnam: land reform campaigns required village cadres to personally execute landlords including neighbors and relatives. Complicity was the initiation rite. Dossiers followed every cadre; self-criticisms generated at struggle sessions became permanent records. Familial loyalty was explicitly targeted — children denounced parents, wives denounced husbands, and refusal to denounce was itself evidence of guilt. Ho’s final years saw him sidelined by Lê Duẩn and harder-line factions. His will was suppressed after his death. The founding suzerain who asked to be cremated became, in death, the covenant’s most visible altar: his embalmed body displayed in a mausoleum built against his own written wishes, before which schoolchildren make structured pilgrimages to this day.

Thailand is the system running live, not in history. I worked inside it as a missionary. The lese-majeste law makes insulting the monarchy punishable by up to fifteen years per count, and anyone can file a complaint against anyone else — every citizen is both subject and enforcer of the covenant’s silence clause. The royal portrait in every home and business is not cultural affection. It is the divine resident distributed into every domestic space in the country. Thai national identity fuses Nation, Religion, and King into a single ontological frame: ชาติ ศาสนา พระมหากษัตริย์ (Chat, Satsana, Phra Mahakasat). To challenge authority is not just politically dangerous — the Buddhist merit framework makes it feel cosmically disordered. The current reign has removed, exiled, or prosecuted virtually everyone who had significant proximity to power. The paranoia is structural, not personal. And Thailand’s documented sex tourism and trafficking networks, operating with political and military cover, are the Epstein model built at national scale: the sin of the powerful secured by the suffering of the powerless, silence enforced by the distributed complicity of everyone up the chain. I stood in homes where the portrait watched from the wall and understood, even without this framework, that something more than political loyalty was being performed. The students who come from Thailand carry all of it. They may not be able to name it. That does not make it less present.

Jeffrey Epstein's network: the shared act sealed through the encounter itself, the alleged video archive as the held file, the victim who became the recruiter as the loyalty proof. The island with its structure on the hill. Epstein became the most dangerous node in his own network. His death served more people's interests than his survival. The kompromat holder became the kompromat.

Harvey Weinstein: the hotel room as the threshold space beyond normal social rules, the NDA as the treaty document signed after the act, assistants and executives who facilitated access proving their loyalty by enabling harm to other women. Black Cube operatives surveilling accusers. The suzerain in late-stage paranoid collapse.

NXIVM demanded collateral (photographs, confessions, material that could destroy the member) as a literal condition of entry. Keith Raniere used the word covenant. He called the relationship master and slave. Scientology's auditing sessions generate confessional records retained permanently by the organization. The confession meant to liberate becomes the leash.

Imperial Japan is the one modern system that did not bother secularizing the divine witness. The Emperor was declared a living god, direct descendant of Amaterasu. The Imperial Rescript on Education was the curse tablet read aloud in every school. Principals died in fires trying to rescue the Emperor’s portrait rather than let it burn. The kamikaze program took the loyalty-proof mechanism to its endpoint: the vassal delivered himself. Unit 731 sealed hundreds of military medical personnel into a covenant of silence through shared participation in live human experimentation on prisoners. You could not expose it without destroying yourself. When Japan surrendered, MacArthur granted immunity to Unit 731’s leadership in exchange for the research data. The kompromat held in both directions. Yasukuni Shrine stands in Tokyo today as the covenant’s active temple, every Prime Ministerial visit triggering diplomatic crises across Asia because the surrounding nations understand what it means: the covenant is being renewed before the witnesses who authorized it.

None of these people grew up together. None of them read from the same manual. A Bronze Age Hittite king and a Hollywood producer and a North Korean dynasty and a self-help cult in Albany, New York arrived at the same six mechanisms independently.

Or not independently.

The Paranoia Is Built In

Every suzerain in this history ends the same way. Alone. Surrounded by people he cannot trust, receiving worship he knows is performed, waiting for the system he built to turn on him.

This is not a personality flaw. It is structural. The man who binds people through fear knows what fear-bound loyalty actually is. He has watched people destroy their own families to prove commitment, and he understands exactly what that tells him about what they would do to him given the right circumstances. He cannot be surprised by betrayal because he understands the logic perfectly. The paranoia is the system working as designed. It just eventually reaches the man at the top.

Stalin died surrounded by people too frightened to call his doctors. Hitler trusted no general in his final months. Kim Jong-il rotated his personal staff constantly to prevent anyone from accumulating enough proximity to become dangerous. Epstein's death, whatever its cause, was overdetermined by the architecture of what he built. Raniere surrounded himself with concentric rings of followers and still could not feel safe. 

Iran provides the most recent and compressed illustration of the paranoia endpoint. Ali Khamenei spent his final months in a bunker so deep its elevator took five minutes to reach the bottom, surrounded by a rotating circle of handlers he could not fully trust, emerging so rarely that when the strike came there was almost no window to hit. He was killed on February 28, 2026. Within nine days the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps installs his son as successor, overriding the father's own stated opposition to dynastic succession. The suzerain tried to prevent this outcome. The structure he built overrode him.

C.S. Lewis says somewhere that to love at all is to be vulnerable, that love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. The suzerain's entire project is the elimination of that vulnerability. And in eliminating it he eliminates the only thing that could have answered the hunger that drove him to build the system in the first place.

The system that makes the suzerain untouchable makes him, in the end, unreachable. He cannot be loved, because the system eliminated the freedom that love requires. He is powerful and completely alone. There are so many dictators of the world who follow this pattern all of which we cannot cover them all in this essay, but they follow this pattern.

The Question

The same six mechanisms. Four thousand years. Every continent. Cultures with no contact with each other. Ideologies that despised each other. A Bronze Age empire and a Caribbean island and a Communist state and a Hollywood studio and a self-help organization in upstate New York.

And one more thing they all have in common: the man at the center was a nobody who became somebody. Hitler was a failed artist and a corporal. Stalin was a seminary dropout. Mao was a library assistant. Epstein was a college dropout who somehow ended up managing money for billionaires and hosting heads of state. None of them had an obvious path to what they became. None of them could have built what they built alone.

The standard explanation for the pattern is that similar pressures produce similar solutions, the same way eyes evolved independently in different species because the physics of light is universal. That explanation accounts for some of it. It does not account for all of it. The pattern is too specific, too granular, too consistent to be fully explained by independent invention.

There is an older explanation. It does not describe the system as something humans keep reinventing. It describes it as something that keeps being built by the same builder, something that has been running this play in every jurisdiction it has ever occupied, for longer than human civilization has existed. 

Part Two: What Is Actually Behind It

The Gods Were Real

The ANE did not treat the gods as symbols. They treated them as the actual third party in the covenant: the beings who witnessed the treaty, held its terms, and enforced its curses. Modern scholarship tends to read this as political theater, powerful kings using divine language to legitimize human arrangements.

The Hebrew scriptures take a different position. They do not say the gods of the nations are fictional. They say the gods are real, but they are not what they claim to be. The Hebrew term for sons of god is Elohim (אֱלֹהִים). This is often used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to divine or spiritual beings. In many passages it refers to the God of Israel, while in others it can describe members of the heavenly realm or divine council. Even conservative Reformed scholars like Mark Futato (he’s my seminary professor at RTS) engage this text without collapsing the Elohim into mere human judges. The term therefore reflects beings associated with the spiritual or divine order that, in biblical thought, ultimately governs human societies under God's authority.

Psalm 82 opens in a courtroom. God stands in the divine council (the assembly of the gods, a concept found across ANE literature) and pronounces judgment on them. The charge: they have judged unjustly, shown partiality to the wicked, failed to defend the poor and the fatherless. The sentence: you will die like men, fall like any prince. You cannot sentence a fiction. The text presupposes their reality and simultaneously strips them of the immortal authority they claimed. They are real. They are not what they say they are. And they have been running their jurisdictions corruptly.

Deuteronomy 32 provides the map. When the Most High divided the nations, it says, he fixed their borders according to the number of the sons of God. The nations were assigned to these beings as their inheritance.

Israel alone was kept as Yahweh's direct portion. The rest of the world's peoples were, in some genuine sense, parceled out to spiritual beings who then presided over their political and religious structures. We see hints of this all over oral mythological data, which is a worthy research project in the near future.

This is not mythology dressed up as theology. It is the biblical account of why the nations are not spiritually neutral. They come with histories. They come with gods: real beings, with real authority over real human structures, who have been running those structures for their own purposes. The suzerain-vassal covenant is not something human kings invented and the gods merely endorsed. It is the preferred operating method of beings who have held jurisdiction over human political life for a very long time. Beale puts it this way: 'What you revere you resemble, for your ruin or restoration.' This is crucial to understand because the nations worshiped false gods and were shaped by them. And what the Bible makes clear is that what we worship we eventually become, and it is equally clear about what stands behind those false gods.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10 that what is sacrificed to idols is sacrificed to demons. Not to nothing. To something. The tribute that flowed upward through the covenant structure, the worship, the loyalty performances, the blood offerings, was received. The human suzerain was the visible face of a spiritual patron whose claim on the vassal was the deeper claim. The franchise operator in front, the actual owner behind. 

The Accuser

Within this framework, the held file, the kompromat, the curse tablet, the dossier, the collateral, is something more than a political tool. It is the primary instrument of a specific being the New Testament identifies with a legal title: the accuser. In Hebrew, the satan. Not a name. A job description. The one who stands against. The prosecutor. 

In Job, the accuser appears in the divine council as a functioning legal officer. He has been going to and fro in the earth, walking up and down in it. That is reconnaissance. He is building a case before he presents it. His approach to God in Job 1 is not impulsive. It is a prepared argument with a specific strategic objective: not just to accuse Job, but to use Job to make a larger claim about whether genuine human loyalty to God is even possible. 

Satan is a strategist. In the wilderness, each temptation aimed at Jesus is precisely calibrated: hunger after forty days, the desire to demonstrate divine identity, the real authority the accuser holds over the kingdoms of the world. The sequence matters. The framing matters. Peter is told the accuser demanded permission to sift him like wheat. That is a targeted operation planned in advance. Ephesians 6 calls his methods the wiles of the devil, μεθοδεία (methodeia) in Greek. Methodology. Systems. Structured approaches developed over a very long time.

And yet, and this is where an unlikely source turns out to be useful, the strategy is consistently undermined by something the strategist cannot fully suppress. The manga and anime series Frieren: Beyond Journey's End includes a teacher's observation about the nature of demons: demons are proud creatures. They display their power like decorations. Because of that pride, they are terrible at hiding it.

The author is not a Christian. But she identified something true. Pride cannot be satisfied in secret. Every other appetite can. But pride requires an audience. It needs to be seen, recognized, acknowledged. A pride that no one witnesses is not pride, it is just self-regard. Which means pride is always reaching outward, always leaving the signature it cannot help but leave.

This is why the domination covenant is always, at its root, a pride-delivery mechanism. The tribute flows upward. The vassal assembles before the suzerain's presence to perform recognition. The temple is built not because the god needs shelter but because the god needs to be approached. The portrait goes on every wall. The body is embalmed and put on display. The structure gets built on the hill of the island. It is never enough to hold the power privately. The power has to be seen. The system is simultaneously a control structure and a self-portrait, and a self-portrait always leads back to its subject.

This is what made Part One possible. The pattern is legible because the pride behind it cannot stay hidden. The strategist is disciplined. The pride the strategy serves overrides it. And so the same signature appears everywhere, across four thousand years, readable to anyone willing to look. 

The Counterfeit

There is a pattern within the pattern worth naming.

God consistently works through the unqualified. Moses was an eighty-year-old fugitive with a speech impediment sent to confront the most powerful ruler in the world. David was the youngest son, left in the field while the prophet looked at his brothers. Paul was a persecutor of the church who called himself the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called one at all. The pattern is deliberate. God chooses instruments whose inadequacy makes the source of the power unmistakable. The vessel is unqualified so that what flows through it cannot be credited to the vessel. 

Now look at the other list. Hitler was a failed artist and a corporal. Stalin was a seminary dropout from Georgia. Mao was a library assistant. Epstein was a college dropout who ended up managing money for some of the wealthiest people on earth. Weinstein was a music promoter from Queens. None of them had an obvious trajectory to what they became. None of them built what they built alone.

The accuser cannot create. He can only corrupt and redirect what already exists. He cannot make a man from nothing. But he can find a nobody, offer him the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and use him as the visible face of a system whose actual architect operates behind the visible layer. The human suzerain gets the apparent power. The entity behind the system gets the worship the system extracts.

It is the same offer made in the wilderness: all of this I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me. The nobody-made-somebody pattern across every domination system is the accuser's counterfeit of God's method, the same shape inverted, turned toward extraction rather than liberation.

Why He Has to Do It Legally

The accuser does not fabricate charges. He does not need to. The shared-act mechanism ensures that everyone inside the covenant has genuinely done what the file says. The vassal who signed the order did sign it. The recruit whose collateral was surrendered did surrender it. The file is real. The claim is legitimate. 

Paul describes this experience in Romans 7 with an honesty that is almost uncomfortable to read. “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He is not describing a bad habit or a character flaw. He is describing legal captivity. Something has standing over him that his own intentions cannot override. The law shows him the debt but cannot pay it. Willpower makes him aware of the problem and helpless before it. He ends the passage not with a resolution but a cry: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” That is not a man who needs better discipline. That is a man who knows he is held.

The descent of Saul shows how the file gets built, one entry at a time. He does not fall suddenly. He walks down the stairs. He partially obeys when total obedience was required. He preserves what he should have destroyed. He fears the people’s opinion more than God’s command. He loses the Spirit. Each compromise establishes new legal ground. Each step makes the next one more available. By the time we find him hiding in disguise outside a medium’s house at Endor, the king of Israel who once drove out the mediums himself now sneaking to one in the dark, the accumulation of the record has brought him to exactly the place the record leads. He is asking the dead for what God will no longer give him. The file was not imposed on him from outside. He built it himself, one compromise at a time, and the weight of it carried him to Endor and then to the hill at Gilboa where he fell on his own sword.

Judas is the sharpest illustration of all, because the detail the text preserves is so specific: thirty pieces of silver. Not a large sum. Not a grand ambition. A transaction. The text says Satan entered him, not as a metaphor for bad intentions, but as a legal occupation made possible by a deliberate act of betrayal for personal gain. The covenant with the chief priests was real. The money changed hands. The act was done. And when Judas tries to undo it, when he brings the money back, throws it into the temple, confesses that he has betrayed innocent blood, the response from the chief priests is almost cold in its precision: “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” He had established the legal grounds. Returning the payment did not cancel the claim. The file does not un-file itself because the person who created it has regrets. Judas went and hanged himself. Not because the guilt was too heavy to bear emotionally, though it was, but because he had looked clearly at what he held and understood that he had no way to answer it. 

This is the pastoral weight of the analysis, and it needs to be said plainly. The person who feels they cannot be free because of what they have done is not just experiencing shame. They are experiencing the accurate perception of a real legal situation. Something holds a legitimate claim. That claim is what makes the bondage so difficult to break by ordinary means. Willpower does not cancel a legal claim. Therapy does not satisfy a debt. Moral improvement does not empty the file. The accuser is not impressed by any of it, because none of it addresses what he actually holds.

He also cannot simply seize what he wants. Jurisdiction requires grounds. The covenant structure, the shared act, the signed document, the surrendered collateral, is the process by which legal standing is established. The domination covenant is, at its foundation, a legal filing system. And the beings behind it operate within that legal framework, because they have to. They cannot simply occupy a life or a nation. They need the entry point that legitimate grievance provides. Every single patriarch failed because they gave Satan an in legally. Adam brought the fall because he legally forfeited his rights by eating from the tree of good and evil.

The One Move It Had No Answer For

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not just a religion. It is a legal intervention. A rescue for humanity’s invisible bondage.

Here is the system's genuine strength: the accuser holds a legitimate file. The debt is real. The curse has standing because what the vassal did, they actually did. The bondage is grounded in legal reality, not arbitrary force. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to undo.

And it is precisely the point at which the system is most vulnerable.

The one move the system cannot survive is the appearance of someone the accuser has nothing on. No entry in the file. Did not participate in the blood seal. Did not surrender collateral. Did not sign the order. Did not deliver anyone. Against a person with no legitimate liability, the accuser has no case.

Now suppose that person voluntarily steps into the jurisdiction of the curse, not because they owe it, but because someone has to pay it, and they are the only one who can. It is the perfect Adam. The ultimate archetype.

Paul says in Colossians 2 that the written record of debt, the certificate of charges that stood against us, was taken away and nailed to the cross. Not metaphorically forgiven. Legally satisfied. The debt was real. The claim was legitimate. And it was paid in full by the one person against whom the accuser had no counter-claim. Christ himself.

The consequence was immediate and structural. having disarmed the rulers and authorities, God made a public spectacle of them. The powers were not defeated by superior force. They were stripped of their instrument. When the legal grounds are gone, the accuser cannot prosecute. The curse cannot be invoked where the record has been annulled. The file has been answered. The docket is empty.

Isaiah 53 names the sacrificial logic underneath it. The servant bears the iniquities of the many. Not their emotional pain. Their legal liability. He makes himself an asham, a guilt offering, the specific sacrifice for legal debt before God. The one who had done no violence and in whom was no deceit steps forward and pays what is owed. The proceeding is not dismissed. It is completed. 

Romans 8:1 delivers the verdict simply: there is therefore now no condemnation. Not as a feeling. As a ruling. The case has been fully adjudicated. The prosecution has nothing left.

And consider what it cost. Every domination system in this essay demanded that vassals sacrifice what they loved most to prove their loyalty: their children denounced, their families destroyed, their most precious attachments surrendered as the price of belonging. In some sense, the regular christian is subjected to this temptation everyday. Parents giving up their children for career progress. People sacrificing close relationships to pursue the dream they always wanted.

Christ the Loved Suzerain

The descent is not the end of the story. It is the hinge. 

Philippians 2 does not end at the cross. The one who emptied himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient to death. Therefore God has highly exalted him. The therefore matters. The exaltation is the Father's response to the act of Christ’s self emptying. The glory is given, not taken. That is a completely different economy of honor than anything in the domination systems, where glory is always extracted upward through fear and tribute.

The suzerain always demanded the offering from someone else. God made the offering himself. Romans 8:32 puts it plainly: he who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. The word spare echoes the moment in Genesis when Abraham is stopped from the knife: do not lay your hand on the boy, for now I know you did not withhold your son. God stopped Abraham. He did not stop himself. The voice at the baptism and on the mountain had called him beloved. This is my Son, whom I love. And that is exactly who was given. Not a vassal’s child. Not someone else’s offering. The one he loved most. The six moves of the domination covenant are inverted one by one. So what does it mean for those who repent and turn to Christ?

1. You become someone new The covenant erases your prior identity and replaces it with one that serves the suzerain. The gospel's inversion is adoption. You are not conscripted into the suzerain's labor pool. You are brought into his family. The transformation runs the opposite direction: not from person to vassal, but from orphan to son.

2. You do something you cannot take back The covenant seals the vassal through an act of complicity. The gospel's inversion is that the suzerain does something he cannot take back on behalf of the vassal. The incarnation, the cross, the absorption of the curse: irreversible acts by the one with no prior liability. The lock runs the other direction. He sealed himself to you by what he did, not by what you did.

3. The file is held The covenant's power is the held record. The gospel's inversion is Colossians 2:14: the record of debt is not held, not sealed, not kept in reserve. It is nailed to the cross and publicly canceled. You cannot threaten to activate something that no longer exists.

4. Something bigger than both of you is watching The covenant invokes a transcendent witness to enforce the curse. The gospel's inversion is that the witness steps into the proceeding as the defendant's advocate. The Father who could enforce the curse provides the sacrifice that satisfies it. Romans 8 puts it plainly: who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. The witness has spoken. The prosecution has no standing.

5. Loyalty is proved by destroying something you love The covenant demands the vassal prove loyalty by destroying their most precious attachment. The gospel's inversion is that the suzerain proves his love by giving what he valued most on behalf of the one who was his enemy. God did not spare his own Son. The offering was not demanded from the vassal. It was given by the suzerain. And the loyalty the gospel produces is not a proof performed under threat. It is a response to a gift already given.

6. There is always an altar The covenant builds a place where the vassal presents themselves before the suzerain's presence, hears the curses recited, and renews their submission. The gospel's inversion is that the suzerain comes to where the vassal is. The Word becomes flesh and pitches his tent among them. And the new covenant's renewal ceremony is not the recitation of curses. It is the breaking of bread in memory of what was absorbed so the curses could be canceled. The posture is not submission under threat. It is the table of those who have been welcomed as guests. This friends is what communion is all about.

This is the inversion that breaks the whole logic at its root. Ever wondered why we have the sacraments? This is why. and it is is mind blowing indeed.

Revelation 5 shows the throne room of the actual suzerain: the great king, the council of elders, the whole apparatus of ANE royal protocol. The one found worthy to open the scroll, the title deed to all things, is a lamb bearing the marks of slaughter. And the response of the whole assembly is not a performed loyalty ritual. It is recognition. Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. Every creature in heaven and earth and under the earth joins in. 

Jesus, the ultimate suzerain is beloved. Not feared into submission. Genuinely loved, by people who are free to withhold it and choose not to. The domination systems produce a man who is powerful and alone. The gospel produces a Lamb who is powerful and beloved. Those are not the same thing. They are not even close to the same thing. 

A Closing Word

The goal of this analysis is not to be right. It is not to sound smart. It is to understand the vulnerabilities of humanity clearly enough to speak truth in love, and to do that without being cruel to people who have been shaped by extremely cruel systems.

Because here is what is easy to miss when we look at the Hitlers and the Epsteins and the Kims: they are not a different species. The capacity for this evil is not theirs alone. It is ours. Every family, every city, every nation is susceptible to this evil. Every mechanism in this system exploits something real in human nature: the need for belonging, for identity, for transcendent meaning, for a witness who sees and affirms. When we choose to live as if there is no God and no transcendent moral law, we do not become free. We become empty. And empty vessels do not stay empty. Something fills them. The prince of this world is not short of material. He does not need to create the desire for power and recognition. He just needs a person who has decided to meet that desire on his terms rather than God’s.

This is not an abstract warning. We should not be surprised when society produces these leaders. We should not be surprised when the patterns keep reappearing. We should not be surprised when the invisible things behind them keep operating. The surprise would be if they stopped, and they will not stop on their own, because the system has been running longer than any of us and it does not tire. 

The nations are not spiritually neutral. They never were. A student who arrives from China, from Vietnam, from North Korea’s diaspora, from the Gulf states, from any country shaped by the covenant structures of domination. They do not arrive as a blank slate. They arrive formed. Their family sent them to study, to develop, to return and serve the institution or the state or the dynasty that funded them. No one goes abroad to stay the same. They go to become more useful to the power that sent them.

Understanding this changes the nature of the encounter. To love them well requires seeing what they are actually carrying, not to condemn them for it, not to be naive about it, but to understand it clearly enough to offer them something the system they came from cannot offer: a suzerain who descended instead of extracted, who paid their debt instead of adding to it, who proves his power through dying for his enemies rather than holding their file.

The oldest operating system has been running for four thousand years. It found new addresses every time an old one was vacated. It has inhabited empires and studios and islands and cults and households. It is still running. And it will keep running until the people inside it encounter something it has no answer for. 

What would happen if the people who understand this, who have seen the pattern, traced it to its source, and received the news that the file has been paid, and brought that understanding into genuine contact with people formed by the system? Not to win an argument. Not to dismantle a culture. But simply to love someone who has only ever been in a world where power means domination, and show them a power that came to serve and to die.

It would change everything.

Let’s go love our neighbors.

Much Love in Christ,

David and Reagan

Quick Ministry Update

I am happy to announce that I have officially passed both of my courses. And I have started classes again on Mar 11th.

With that, I have now completed all of my New Testament classes. At this point, I have six more classes until graduation, plus one additional class to complete my Hebrew language requirement for ordination.

This is really exciting.

We would appreciate your continued prayers for diligence, wisdom, energy, and humility as I balance family, work, and school. This past quarter went much better than the last, and my prayer is simply to continue abiding in Jesus through it all. That has been the biggest thing.

Thank you again for supporting our work, praying for us, and helping make this journey possible. We are truly grateful as we continue to walk in the path God has set before us.

If you’re still prayerfully considering partnering with us as we move into 2026, we’d be honored to have you join us.

All gifts are tax-deductible through Missionaryish Inc.’s 501(c)(3) status.