Show Notes

Episode Summary:

In this inaugural episode of The Soma Podcast, host Adam Wolff and guests Mike Wolff and Bob Sandberg dive into the conversation behind the Substack article, “Jesus and the Woman at the Well.”

Together, they break down how modern concepts of “spiritual life” have divorced the Spirit from practical Truth, resulting in a fragmented understanding of reality. By examining the original Greek term for truth—Aletheia (the plainly seen, observable, everyday reality right in front of us)—they explore how Jesus’s encounter at Jacob’s well was not about establishing religious doctrines, but about reuniting breath and body, heaven and earth, and Spirit and Truth in the midst of everyday human existence.

Key Takeaways in This Episode

* Redefining Aletheia: Why “truth” in the New Testament isn’t abstract doctrine—it is observable, tangible daily reality.

* The Samaritan Shift: How Jesus bypassed religious debate over holy places to meet people in their everyday lives.

* The Myth of Disembodied Heaven: Why the goal of Christianity isn’t escaping the dirt, but resurrected, embodied stewardship.

* John 3:16 & Kosmos: Why God so loved the entire intricate, beautiful system—and sent Jesus to save the design, not pull us out of it.

* High-Resolution Stewardship: Why an increasingly complex, hyper-connected world requires spirit-led humanity to care for the physical world right in front of them.

Complete Episode Timestamps

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction to the Soma Podcast & Substack Companion

00:43 - Redefining “Truth” (Aletheia) vs. Sound Doctrine

02:47 - The Chasm: How We’ve Segregated Spirit and Practical Reality

04:19 - Jesus & the Samaritan Woman: Merging Abstract Spirit with Daily Life

08:07 - Rethinking John 14:6 & Applying Aletheia to Daily Experience

11:28 - The Spirit of Truth (John 16:13): Reanimating Physical Creation

17:30 - The Biblical Narrative: Resurrected Bodies vs. Disembodied Heaven

23:00 - Walking Out Spirit & Truth: Jesus at Jacob’s Well

29:18 - Samaritan History & Why Religious Leaders Missed What Samaritans Saw

36:37 - Rethinking John 3:16: God’s Love for the Entire System (Kosmos)

43:00 - Romans 8:19: Creation Eagerly Awaiting True Human Stewards

47:53 - Closing Remarks & Future Releases

Connect & Read Along:

* Read the Companion Article:

* Subscribe to the Publication:

Episode Transcript:

Adam Wolff: Hello, and welcome to the Soma podcast. This is our first episode of the podcast, and this is a companion to the articles that we release on Substack. I’m joined here today by Mike and Bob. They’re here because we want this podcast to be a deeper look into the ongoing conversation that these articles on Substack come out of. This will give you a behind-the-scenes look into the conversations that are fueling and informing these articles that we are writing and releasing. If you haven’t seen the article that we’re referring to, go check it out on our Substack. It’s called Jesus and the Woman at the Well.

I think a lot of people are going to wrestle with this idea of how we’re using “truth” here. And so I just want to take a minute to explain it in a way that hopefully makes sense to people.

Just like there are multiple concepts of love in the Greek—you have eros, phileo, or agape—you have these different versions of love that in English, we all flatten down to one word that kind of means everything and nothing. But in the Greek, you get these more robust, developed concepts of love as a commitment, love as a passionate erotic expression, or love as a brotherhood or a deep friendship. These are all very different expressions of love.

Truth is the same way. So, yes, there is something to the spirit being truth, or the logos being truth, and Jesus himself being truth. But that’s not the term Jesus or John are using in this passage. He’s using the term Aletheia. Aletheia is talked about as this common ground that all people, all humans of all time, can meet at. It is the plainly observed, objective reality right in front of you—the same one we all contend with every single day.

And so when Jesus is saying people are going to worship the Father in that kind of truth, in the way they interact with everyday common things, the world right in front of them, their families, their businesses, their relationships, all the practical stuff—they’re going to merge that being the truth with the Spirit. All of God’s creation is going to be reunited again in breath and body, in heaven and in earth, in spirit and in truth.

We’re not talking about the truth as in sound doctrine, or the truth as in the logos or the underlying code and framework of reality itself, because that’s not the word John and Jesus use here.

Mike Wolff: Something you mentioned about how we’ve separated truth and spirit... to me, it’s not only have we separated them, we’ve elevated spirit to the very heights: walk by the spirit, these spiritual people. You hear a lot about that today, but we’ve relegated truth to the depths. We’ve relegated the world to almost this concept of evil. I think the word I’d probably use instead of separated is segregated.

The thought that hit me is, how much has that held us back, and how much is it holding us back? Because if the Father is seeking those who will worship him in spirit and truth, then we have this huge chasm where we’re calling one the ultimate quest and almost linking the other to evil. How bad is that holding us up?

Bob Sandberg: I think what you just said is so key, Mike. Because if we use what I would consider my old definition of truth, it would be established laws or morals or any of those things. So this whole story is about breaking truths. Jesus going to Samaria—that’s a no-no, man. That’s going to that evil side of the Jewish population. If that’s the definition of truth, he’s already breaking truths.

Adam Wolff: To your point, Bob, that’s what this woman at the well is connecting with. As Jesus is speaking very abstractly, he’s playing one end of the spectrum—one complete end of the spectrum. He’s God incarnate, showing up sinless, perfect, connected to the spirit. He’s playing this one extreme of spirit.

And she’s playing this other extreme where she’s a woman in that society, so that already puts her down a notch compared to a man. Not only that, she’s one of the women who’s had multiple partners and can’t keep her relationships, so she’s not seen in a good light even in her own community. You get this massive difference between Jesus and this woman. But Jesus sits down with her and honors her, asks her for a drink, and engages in the plainly seen reality right in front of her. As she engages the plainly seen reality—which is what John, Jesus, and we are calling truth—Jesus is speaking in the abstract.

He says, “Well, if you knew who you were talking to, you would ask me for a drink.” And that’s where she replies, “Well, you don’t have anything to draw with.” He says, “Well, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m speaking purely abstractly and spiritually here. I’m saying that there is a thirst underneath all of this plainly seen reality in humanity—this thirst that’s unquenchable. It always needs more, it always has to have more, it’s never satisfied. And if you knew who you were talking to, I have the antidote for that. I have the spirit that cures that deep thirst and need that you have that’s never satisfied and fulfilled.”

So he’s speaking on a layer that she doesn’t even perceive or understand, and she just keeps going back to the practical. She’s talking about the wells, the mountains, and Jerusalem.

That’s exactly what Jesus is doing here. He’s saying that someday, true worshipers the Father seeks aren’t going to worship from this mountain—they’re not going to worship from the plainly seen realities of earth—and they’re not going to worship from the temple in Jerusalem. They’re not going to worship from spiritual abstraction, this intangible Holy Ghost thing that we can’t touch but know is so real, the breath that animates all life. Someday, the true worshipers the Father seeks are going to leave those two places and meet in a third, unified space of spirit and truth: the plainly seen reality, the body reinvigorated and reanimated by the breath and the spirit of God.

I think that’s what we mean when we say truth here. That’s just a really hard concept for people because most people think it means correct Christian doctrine, the Bible, or Jesus, and we have all these low-resolution understandings of truth. But we’re just trying to draw attention to what’s actually happening here.

This big statement that Jesus makes—that a time is coming, and has now come, where the true worshipers the Father seeks will worship him in spirit and in truth—is a big statement. This is the worshiper the Father is seeking from that moment at the well all the way until today. He is not seeking worshipers who are going to worship in this spiritual abstraction, and he’s not seeking worshipers who are just going to steward and run the earth well—the practical Aletheia truth about the world and existence. He’s looking for the breath and body, heaven and earth, spirit and truth, people that are going to go out every single day into all the practical things of human life, invigorated and animated by a covenant connection and faithfulness to the living spirit of God. But that’s just not how we’re currently thinking.

Mike Wolff: Something that showed me how little I knew about what truth was and absolutely blew my mind was the other day, Bob, when you were looking through all these passages with truth. In John 14, he says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” If that isn’t a rock-solid argument for truth being what we all thought it was before I got into this—what most Christians, I believe, think truth is, like knowledge or good theology—that truth is the Aletheia. Where Jesus is saying, “I’m the way, I’m the reality, I’m tangible, and I’m the life”—and there’s the Spirit. That one just completely blew my mind.

Bob Sandberg: I almost kind of gave up on this Christian thing because nothing in my life was changing. Nothing in my reality, nothing in my current situation was changing. So I thought, well, if it’s not affecting life right now, then it’s not real.

I think that’s where this truth that we’re talking about comes in. Jesus says, “I’m the way. I have the thing you’re looking for to make your current reality life.” If you put it into Aletheia, that’s what it’s saying: “I have this spirit you’re looking for to make your current reality come to life, to come to be the fullest that it was ever meant to be.”

It begins to change all of scripture when we look at it in the way that the Greek word was meant to be said in those scriptures. “The truth will set you free”—your current reality, ignited with the spirit, will set you free to live the life that you were meant to live. We’ve always thought this truth is for a time to come, that it’s going to affect life somewhere down the road, but it’ll be a long time. I think Jesus is just breaking that apart. He says, “No, there’s a day coming, because I’ve just released the spirit on the face of the earth, when this life, this current reality we see, should be changing for the better to ignite it into what it was originally created to be.”

Mike Wolff: Well, Bob, if you ask most Christians what they struggle with the most, it’s exactly what you were struggling with: “How do I take this spiritual thing that I hear about at church on Sunday and read about in my Bible and make it work in my life?”

Adam Wolff: Yeah, we were also talking about another verse in John—John 16:13—where Jesus is introducing the spirit that he’s sending in his place. He says earlier that it’s important that he leaves: “It’s better for you that I go, because if I do, I’m going to send another who is just like me, my very own spirit.” Then he calls him the spirit of truth, which is those Greek terms again: the pneuma of the Aletheia.

So, “I’m literally sending the breath of all existence. I’m sending the thing that animates the physical reality right in front of you, the physical reality that you inhabit in a body.” Every tangible thing you touch, see, and interact with has a spirit that has been divorced from it in our understanding and in our reality since the beginning. “I am sending that spirit to breathe back into you and into all creation the spirit that was always meant to be there.”

Jesus is saying this is going to come after his death, resurrection, and ascension. But after Jesus completes his death and resurrection, he’s now saying there’s a more important thing for you guys: “This spirit needs to come back and reanimate the world. I’ve made a way to reunite spirit and truth now.” Whatever technical hurdles had to be cleared in order for all creation to be redeemed, Jesus just did that in his death and resurrection. So now he can say, “It’s time for this thing to start happening. I’m leaving so I can send the spirit—the breath of the Aletheia, the pneuma of the Aletheia is coming. It’s going to re-emerge with you and with creation.”

You humans, as the focal point of all creation—as the unique and only operators of this intricate, important, beautiful design that God has created—are going to begin a process where you’re now capable again of stewarding the earth as you did in the garden, bringing this whole experience to its final conclusion. Finally, over thousands of years, God has matured and grown up mankind to reunite spirit and truth, breath and body, heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible, back in humanity so that humanity can take its place and steward creation appropriately as it was always intended to.

Mike Wolff: And Adam, in that same passage, he says, “And what will he do? He will guide you into all truth.” That’s Aletheia.

Adam Wolff: All understanding of your practical reality right around you. So we’re not going away to church to learn abstract truths that will help us someday. The Spirit is present here now and is the best teacher, counselor, and convictor that we could possibly have. Jesus is saying, “I’m going to put that inside every single human heart that will accept it.”

No more in-group and out-group, no more Jerusalem and the mountain, no more Gentiles and Jews—all people, all nations. That was always the promise of Abraham: “I’m going to set aside Abraham for myself. I’m going to build a family out of him, then build a people out of that family. Then I am going to teach that people what it means to host my spirit, what it means to be in covenant connection with me as the Father, and teach them through pain, suffering, trials, captivity, and destruction what it means to trust me and be faithful to me above all else in every situation, so that someday this can be distributed and modeled to the rest of the world.”

All people was always the plan. All of creation was always the plan. And now we’re in that time. We’re thousands of years into that time right now. It’s time for all people, all nations, everywhere, to have access to this covenant spirit.

Bob Sandberg: The thoughts that are coming to me right now are that it not only broke down the “us and them” theology into all of humanity now, but it also broke down the tiers within humanity. Because we’ve established that maybe a religious guy is in a higher tier than a school janitor. I think the only tier left, if there is one at all, is those who have learned to steward the spirit in their reality. The maturity of who we are in Christ is the only tier left. How much of him do you want in your current reality to change your reality? That’s the only tier remaining: the fullness of God. How full of God do you want to be? And he’s broken down all the barriers to achieve that.

Adam Wolff: Yeah, and I think it’s important that we understand what the endgame of all of this is. Because if we think that the story is that we die here on earth at some point, disembody, become a spirit that leaves the body, and go somewhere else to a spiritual place—heaven or whatever we want to call it—then spiritual teachings and spiritual preparations apart from the body become useful, valuable, and important because you’re preparing your spirit to be led into the good place when you die.

And so again, we’re back to legalism. We’re back to the law, measuring actions and intentions in the heart. All those things are important, but that’s not what we’re doing here, and that’s not what the biblical story is. The biblical story very clearly is a new unified heaven and earth someday.

We began in the body, in the real, in the physical. It’s the only dimension we as human beings understand. We are pre-existed and predated by spiritual beings, so there is a nature of a being that exists outside of an incarnate nature—that does exist in the abstract. It’s God’s heavenly host, the angels, his counsel, all of these beings that pre-exist and predate us as human beings that seem to exist outside of a body, or at least outside of a body that we can understand.

Human beings are a very uniquely earth-and-spirit thing; that’s all we are. If we lose the body, we’re just not what we were created to be. So this whole biblical narrative has always wrapped up in a resurrected body, as resurrected people in a new heaven and a new earth. We don’t know exactly what that new heaven and new earth means—it could be a reborn, refreshed version of this heaven and earth, just like when we’re reborn of the spirit, we stay in these physical bodies, or it could be a complete overhaul. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

Someday this ends back in the body, with humans doing what we were always meant to do: appropriately stewarding a physical, incarnate reality as proper images of our Creator, existing in our environment, and being proper stewards and cultivators of that reality.

This idea that we somehow disembody, go to the good place, and stay there for eternity is very anti-biblical and anti-human. It’s just not what we are. We are breath-and-body creatures, period. If we become disembodied, we’re just not humans anymore. Human is a good thing, and God is just trying to bring us into an understanding of our nature and what our role in creation is.

Bob Sandberg: We had a discussion recently in another group about the garden. Basically, there was nothing in our minds as humans, as Adam and Eve, that would separate us from God’s presence until something happened in their own minds—which we’ve done now through generations. We’ve separated ourselves from him because of our actions, and there’s an internal thing in us that says our actions are either good or bad. That’s a good compass, but it’s not for separating us from him; it’s for drawing us to him.

I think of how that drawing to the nearness of God changes how I father, how I become a husband, and how I work. All of those things are affected because of the nearness of God. The more we can break down this separation that we think was created by God—which wasn’t, it was in our own minds—we can keep breaking down that separation here on earth to all mankind. Most people think they’re separated from him, or they’ve seen a picture of him that they don’t care to interact with anyway.

So that’s the other thing we might need to tear down: this picture of who he is as a stern father waiting to smack you around. He’s not that. What do the scriptures say? God is love. There are a lot of mental things that need to be broken down for us to not conform to the world, but be transformed to know what his will is for us. I think that’s what we’re talking about here.

Adam Wolff: We see a live demonstration of that in this article. I think that’s why we began here with this article: to try to open up all these various topics that we think are important to discuss and draw attention to. In this one action of Jesus and the woman at the well, so many important actions are carried out.

You get him crossing the barrier into Samaria, like you were saying earlier, Bob. You get him sitting at the well, honoring their heritage, and participating in the real with her. Someone like her is never going to get to sit down at the well with a prophet of any value whatsoever. If the prophet is valuable, they’re not going to be sitting at a well with this woman asking her for a drink.

In this one action, he is breaking down so many barriers between the spirit and the real, the spirit and the truth, and the practical right there in front of you. I just love how much of a demonstration this verse is, where Jesus isn’t just telling us about these concepts—he’s walking them out. He’s living them out.

As you said earlier, Bob, the way the story continues from here is that this woman has this experience of the spirit for the first time. Jesus makes this claim that you worship a God you don’t know, but we worship a God we do. Essentially, he’s not saying you don’t know God at all, but you worship him in this very practical, embodied, plainly seen way, without knowing who he is in your heart. In your mind and experience, you might know him well, but there’s a deeper connection in the heart and soul where you don’t know his name yet.

It seems like all he had to do for her was give her that experience of the deeper spirit and name that God they were so close to understanding through worshiping him in truth, in the plainly seen things. They were so close to understanding who he was, but they didn’t know his name or his essence, and they couldn’t feel his breath from within. That’s all Jesus gives to this woman, and it’s enough to make her passionately return to her people to tell them about this man she just met. Then Jesus goes on to stay with these people for days, teaching them and talking to them.

Adam Wolff: But it’s said that he did no miracles when he was with them. He showed no signs, no wonders. Now, he was telling them things about their life that he shouldn’t otherwise know, but beyond that, he’s not calming the seas and changing the weather and multiplying food and healing the sick. He’s just talking to and teaching these people, and it’s enough to cause many of them to believe.

And later when he’s back in a town in Judea, he’s talking to the Jewish people there and he’s comparing them back to the Samaritan people. He’s applauding and appreciating how little it took for Jesus to just say the words, and they believed based on the words alone. Whereas these people who come from his own heritage, his own tradition, keep asking for signs, wonders, and miracles. Prove to us again, outside of the body, in the real world, that you are the creator of all things.

And so there was something profound and impactful to this idea that the Samaritans—or at least as they’re represented by that woman and by that town—were so close to understanding who Jesus and the Father were. They just needed this little connection made for them because they knew him so well in the plainly seen things of their environment, that all it took was a handful of conversations and a demonstration of the Spirit, and they were all in.

Mike Wolff: Isn’t it something that the guys who supposedly had the market cornered on truth, as we typically understand it, were the only ones that refused to acknowledge him in the real truth—in reality.

You know, the Pharisees were the guys who were supposed to have all the knowledge down: the truth of the law and the Torah. And yet they were the only ones that could not see him in reality. Talk about a different understanding of truth.

Whereas, like you just said, this woman who had no grasp, probably, of the Talmud and the Torah—maybe a very basic, infantile grasp of it—and her lifestyle was not one that was particularly religious, all he had to do was say a few words to her, and she grasped it.

But the guys who had spent their lives examining... I love one of my favorite verses where he says, “You continue to examine the scriptures thinking that in them you have eternal life, but you won’t come to me so that you may have eternal life.” They had the market cornered on the truth, but they wouldn’t come to the way, the truth, and the life so that they could really have eternal life.

Adam Wolff: Yeah, I think it’s important here that we understand who the Samaritans are, because you mentioned the Torah there a couple of times. Maybe the woman did or didn’t know the Torah well, but her people did. I didn’t know this until I started doing research for the article, but the Samaritans are made up of what used to be the northern kingdom of Israel before it was invaded and conquered by the Assyrians.

When the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom, they extracted some of the most valuable, important people out of the kingdom and brought them into their land. Then they imported a bunch of unsavory people into their newly conquered territory of northern Israel to intermix with the people there. That whole region is Samaria.

When Israel—the united Israel under David and Solomon—splits after Solomon is no longer king into the north and the south, that’s where you get the idea of the Jews in the first place. They’re in Judea, in that region that was inherited by those two tribes when they took the promised land. So you get Judea in the south and Samaria in the north: ten tribes in the north, two tribes in the south. That is Samaria, and those are the Samaritans. This interaction with Jesus is post being conquered by the Assyrians.

When the Jews were conquered by the Babylonians, they weren’t as cruel as the Assyrians, as far as I can tell. They allowed the Jews to preserve their heritage, bloodlines, and traditions more. So when the Jews leave captivity in Babylon, come back to the land, and build a temple, you now have the Jews feeling superior because their bloodlines and traditions are intact, while viewing the Samaritans as mutts and half-breeds. These are my interpretations, but the concepts are the same.

The Jews looked down on the Samaritans, but the Samaritans were as connected to the Torah and the lineage of the Israelites as the Jews were. The Samaritans were observant of the Torah. They disagreed with some of the later prophets and the rest of the Jewish tradition beyond the split of the kingdom, but they believed in Abraham. They’re sitting there at Jacob’s well—a well that is important to Israel. Jacob dug this well, Joseph’s bones are buried there at Mount Gerizim, an important mountain where Abraham built altars and offered sacrifices, and Moses was referring to that mountain. These are very important geographical places to the people of Israel.

The Samaritans felt like they had the same claim to Yahweh as the Jews did, and that’s why this was such a vicious fight between the two.

When John is writing his gospel, he could have used terms like Torah. For truth, he could have said that Jesus tells this woman that the true worshipers the Father seeks will worship in the law, instruction, or Torah, and they’ll worship in the Spirit. But he doesn’t—he says the practical ways.

It’s really important that we look at the language here and look at what Jesus is actually trying to communicate, and what John is trying to preserve for God’s people: that it’s really important these divides be healed, that spirit and truth come back together, and that we understand truth is not the Torah in the way they’re using it in this interaction. It’s not what Jesus is referring to; it’s not the insular laws and traditions of our community and our people. As long as the truth remains our insular, in-group facts, traditions, and the things we believe are true, the divide is never going to get healed.

What Jesus does here is invite the woman and future generations prophetically to leave their positions. They’re not going to worship from Jerusalem, and they’re not going to worship from the mountains. They’re going to worship from this new third place—this merger between spirit and truth where, just like in the garden, breath and body are going to be reunited.

These new worshipers are going to be people who go out into normal everyday life full of the spirit, faithful to the spirit just like the Jews were, but engaged in practical reality just like the Samaritans were. There won’t be a divide between the two. You don’t go do a truthful action and then go do a spiritual action; every single action becomes a unified action of true practical engagement with the reality right in front of you—animated, directed, led, and instructed by the Spirit of God inside of you.

Bob Sandberg: Yeah, and this is a big topic to open up—and probably not the right time—but I think this is at the beginning of the new covenant that was released when Jesus sacrificed himself. There was something released to all of mankind. Now, instead of a select few like the prophets or kings, there was something released on the face of the earth for all of mankind to have an inside knowledge that there’s something greater than them.

I think that’s why when Jesus comes, that presence they’ve always had an inkling existed comes into their lives and just starts setting sparks off, because there was something there already. God did an amazing thing in the creation of humanity itself to be able to receive who he is, and not think of it as something strange until we make it something strange.

Adam Wolff: We’re going to cover this in another article in the future, but another way John is trying to push this same concept all throughout the book of John is in John 3:16—one of the most well-known verses in all of human understanding. We know it as, “For God so loved the world...” We think of the world as the collection of humans on it because, again, we’re separating humanity from the body. They are the plainly seen expression of God in all of creation.

So we often think of John 3:16 as God so loved this collection of people that he sent his only Son to die for them so that they won’t perish, but have eternal life. And when we think of eternal life, we think of eternal life elsewhere in this spiritual, disembodied sense.

If you look at the terms John is using in John 3:16, the Greek word for world there is kosmos with a K. So, “For God so loved the kosmos.” The Greek term he chooses to use there means an entire, beautiful, intricate system. What John is saying here is not “God so loved people that he sent Jesus,” but “God so loved this whole entire intricate, beautiful design that he made”—of which humans sit at that main, important seat of operating this creation as image bearers of him.

Humans sit in that most important seat, but God’s not here just to save the humans, and he’s especially not here to save humans out of the world. He’s here to save the whole important, beautiful, intricate system that he created, of which humans are massively important.

If we start to re-understand what these concepts are and what the biblical authors were trying to say to us, we start to look at the earth and creation in different ways. This isn’t a bad, corrupted thing we’re trying to escape. This isn’t something that we screwed up by eating fruit from a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, breaking the system, and now needing to be saved from a broken world. There is something broken here, but it’s not the world and it’s not the system. Everything God’s doing is to bring this cosmic creation—this intricate, beautiful system and design—back into alignment and back into order. He sent Jesus to save and reunify the whole design.

Mike Wolff: Well, then, Adam, that was one other thing I wanted to get to in your article. At the very end, you quote that verse that says the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, and that made me think about John 3:16 and 17.

Our whole thrust in modern Christendom is “get people saved”—get them to pray the prayer. That’s the second part of that verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” and the second part, “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” I’m beginning to wonder if the first part isn’t the most important: “For God so loved the world”—there’s the truth—”that he sent his only begotten Son”—there’s the Spirit. It made me look at that verse in an entirely different way, because it’s always been just about salvation. Now, to me, equally—if not more important—is that first part: that God so loved the Aletheia that he sent his only begotten Son in the form of the Holy Spirit, which is what we have since Jesus left us and said, “It is good that I go.” It really made me look at that scripture in an entirely different light.

Adam Wolff: Yeah. The eternal life he’s talking about there... if you look at the Greek terms for those, there are Greek terms for a time-based existence that extends into forever, but those aren’t the words John is using there either. It has nothing to do with time; it has more to do with the fullness and quality of life.

God is trying to save the kosmos with a K—the intricate, beautiful machine, design, or reality that he has crafted and created. He wants to save all of that. He’s not saving it for unlimited time forever—at least that’s not what John’s saying here in John 3:16. That may also be true, but that’s not what John’s saying. He’s saying he’s coming to realign it and save it so that it could live into its fullness, so that it can experience the fullness of its design and what it’s intended to be.

When we’ve heard these verses and terms so many times and inherited all this understanding around them because people we trusted told us this is what they mean, we’re just trying to stay faithful to what they were told was the truth. But we’re starting to see these concepts break down in reality. When Christians are living as though some other spiritual, non-physical place is the good place, and we’re trying to prepare ourselves for there, we’re pulling ourselves out of the very game that God created for us. We’re pulling ourselves out of the very commission that he’s given us, which is to be here on this physical earth and steward it.

You get this image—we’re going to talk about this later too in the series—in Romans 8:19 where Paul speaks about how all of creation is eagerly awaiting for the sons of God to be revealed: these spirit and truth worshipers, worshipers the Father seeks, who are as in tune with the spirit, covenant connection, and faithfulness to God as they are with the plainly seen realities that are physically embodied around them. When I think of all creation eagerly awaiting in anticipation, I just see creation saying, “Come on humans, be who you’re meant to be. You are uniquely designed and created as the operators and stewards over this whole environment, this whole beautiful, intricate system God has designed. As long as you stay confused and detached from who you are and what your purpose is here, we’re going to sit here and suffer because no one can steward us like you.

“Until you’re realigned by the spirit, and until your bad ways of thinking and misunderstandings about who you are, who God is, and what this creation is are fixed, we don’t have a proper operator to come and steward us. All of creation is just begging humanity to grow up and become what you’re meant to be. We belong to you and you belong to us. If your highest goal here is to develop spiritual principles so you can evacuate this physical reality and go somewhere else, we’re terrified as creation—because you weren’t created to be somewhere else. You’re created to be right here in the dirt, right here in the earth, stewarding, cultivating, and caring for this place. If you don’t do it, no one else will and nothing else can.

“So as long as you’re distracted by some made-up game you’ve created—which is that heaven is somewhere else, abstract, ethereal, and disembodied—this earth, where you’re supposed to be working as image bearers of God and stewarding appropriately, will go on suffering while you continue to engage in these illusions.”

It really is important. Merging spirit and truth aren’t just new, interesting teachings or a good look back at old, important, forgotten teachings. Maybe they’re both, but these are existential realities that humanity has to come into grasp with. We have to start living as embodied spirit and truth, breath and body, made in the image of God here on the earth people again. If we don’t, we’re just going to continue to suffer.

The world is quickly becoming very complicated, complex, and high resolution. If we can’t upgrade ourselves as the people of God in our understandings to steward these very confusing, difficult realities of complete global interconnectedness, social media, cameras everywhere, and being exposed to everything that’s going on all the time... if we can’t become higher resolution people in our understanding to steward more complex, difficult realities than we’ve ever had to contend with, then creation will go on suffering. We’re just going to keep spinning up this misaligned machine to higher and higher RPMs. If you do that for too long, something breaks that you don’t want to break, and we’re headed towards that. People have to realize this stuff is important. We have to become a spirit and truth people again. It’s not an option. All of creation is waiting, and our own existential realities are on the line here if we can’t, as the host of the Spirit of God, start caring about the plainly seen things right in front of us again.

That might be a good place to wrap this up. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Again, if you haven’t seen the article Jesus and the Woman at the Well on Substack, go ahead and check that out. We want to try to expand these podcasts and articles even into live interactions over the coming weeks and months where we begin to discuss these things together and see where God leads us by his spirit as a people.

Thanks for joining us, thanks for being here, and keep an eye out for our newest articles on Substack. We’re going to try to release them every couple of weeks and then do a podcast with each release. Thanks for being here.