WHAT IS A KING–EPLILOGUE

Epilogue

How This Was Made and Who Made It Possible

(Series: What Is a King? — Section 7 of 6)

A Confession Before I Say Anything Else

When I stepped back and read the finished version of this series, the first thing I felt was: man, this is good.

The second thing I felt was: there is no way I produced this.

I want to address that head-on, because if you have followed this series this far, you might feel the same thing about your own life — about the work you are capable of doing, the things you have to say, the gifts you have been carrying around without knowing what to do with them. The voice that says you cannot have produced this — there must be some trick is the same voice that has talked you out of attempting things before. I have heard it my whole life. I am hearing it right now.

So before this epilogue does anything else, it has to do this: I did produce this. So can you.

That is the first thing this section is for. Not to brag. To invite.

The Frame That Makes the Fraud Feeling Make Sense

The reason the fraud feeling shows up is that I was operating under a quiet, false assumption — if I really did it, I should have been able to do it alone. That is Kronos again. The autonomous self that demands sole authorship of its own life. The lie we walked through in Section 2.

The right frame is the doulos frame. I am a steward. The work is real and it is mine. The raw material was borrowed. Every thread of this series came from somewhere — God's revelation, the scholars who spent their lives working through Scripture, the tools that put their work in my hands, the people who shaped me. I did not create the truth in this series. But I did the work of seeing it, assembling it, and saying it clearly. That work is real. And it is mine. The pride trap on one side is claiming I invented something I only synthesized. The pride trap on the other side is denying authorship to look humble. Both are lies. The honest version is: I am the author. I am also a steward. Those two are not in tension when the doulos knows whose household he belongs to.

Michael Heiser said this kind of thing constantly. When he was once booked on a TV show and discovered the host was promoting him as a "prophet," he canceled the appearance and said: "I'm not above anyone and have no special status in what God is doing."¹ That is the spirit. None of us who write about Scripture are producing new revelation. We are seeing what God has already said, doing the synthesis work to put it in a form other people can read, and being clear about whose shoulders we are standing on.

That is what I did here. And the fact that I am not a credentialed scholar, not a pastor, not a published theologian — that does not disqualify me from doing the work. It just means I have to be more honest about whose shoulders I am standing on.

So here is how this actually got made. And here is who made it possible.

Thank You First, Always, to God

The first thank-you is to the One the entire series is about.

I cannot write about a King I do not bow to. Everything in this series — the recognition, the doulos, the gold crown, the Aragorn lump in my throat, the hierarchy that turned out to be freedom — all of it presupposes that God is real, that He is enthroned, and that He has been at work in me whether I noticed or not.

There were long stretches of my life when I did not notice. I have grown up with Christ in my mind somewhere. Sometimes He has been right up front. Sometimes He has consumed my life. And there have been times when He has just been sitting in the back seat, asking quietly to come up to the front. I am not proud of those moments. I am grateful that He stayed in the car at all.

The veil being lifted from my eyes is not something I produced. That was God's work. The ability to bow now, while there is still time to bow on purpose, is also God's work. Every honest sentence in this series came after a moment somewhere, sometime, when the Spirit lifted enough of the veil for me to see something true. I just wrote down what He let me see.

This work is mine to write. But anything true in it comes from God.

If anything in these six sections has reached you — if any line landed, if any image stuck, if any question would not let go — that was not me. That was the Spirit doing what the Spirit does. The witness plants and waters. The growth belongs to God. (We covered that in Section 5.)

Thank You to the Scholars Who Did the Heavy Lifting

I cited many sources across this series. I want to name the most important ones here, not just for proper credit but because if any of this work was good, theirs was the work that made it possible.

Michael Heiser is the foundation. The Divine Council framework, the elohim layer, the cosmic reading of King of Kings as a courtroom claim against the spiritual rulers of the seventy nations — none of this would have existed in my reading of Scripture without his work. I came across The Unseen Realm about six months ago and it rearranged the furniture in my head permanently. I want to acknowledge that Dr. Heiser passed away in February 2023. He did not live to see the downstream effect his work has had on people like me, but his fingerprints are on every section of this series. If you have not read him, start with The Unseen Realm or its shorter companion, Supernatural. You will not be the same after.

Jonathan Pageau gave me the symbolic framework. The Heaven-and-Earth grammar, the Kronos myth applied to the autonomous self, the gold-as-heavenly-meaning insight, the fractal pattern of fairy tales pointing to the gospel. His Peterson Academy course Symbolism and Christianity is where most of his material in this series comes from. Pageau also has a YouTube channel and a podcast (The Symbolic World) that are worth your time.

Dennis Prager has been a quiet presence in the background of my Hebrew-Bible thinking for years. His Rational Bible commentary on Genesis and Exodus brings the Jewish, Torah-rooted perspective that most Christians never encounter, and his work has shaped how I read the Old Testament throughout.

N.T. Wright entered my Logos library only recently — and the moment he did, his Pauline scholarship sharpened the doulos Christou section. Wright reads Paul against the Roman imperial backdrop in a way most New Testament scholarship does not, and his caution against overreading the political subversion is what kept Section 3 honest.

Every other scholar cited in the footnotes — Beougher, Hughes, Bavinck, Bruno, Calvin, Machen, Packer, Wilson, Evans, the editors of the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery and the Lexham Theological Wordbook, and many more. They did the research. I just rearranged it.

Tolkien and CinemaStix. Tolkien gave us Aragorn — without whom Section 4 has no emotional anchor. CinemaStix made the video that started this whole conversation in the first place. Both deserve credit for doing what good art and good criticism do: making the audience feel something they did not know they had been waiting to feel.

Thank You to the Tools That Made the Research Possible

I want to be honest about something. The research in this series would have been impossible for me without the tools available right now in 2026.

Logos Bible Software is the single most important research tool I have ever owned. The amount of scholarship I had access to in seconds — multiple commentaries on every passage, lexical entries on every Hebrew and Greek word, cross-references, ancient Near Eastern background material, peer-reviewed dictionaries and theological wordbooks — would have taken me a literal lifetime to assemble in physical form, and I would still have ended up with less than what fits on my laptop. Every footnote in this series was sourced from Logos. The depth this series has, on the topics it covers, is only possible because of what Logos puts at my fingertips.

If you are serious about studying Scripture and you are not using Logos, you are working with one hand tied behind your back. They run sales constantly. I got the N.T. Wright collection mentioned earlier for about thirty dollars. The base library packages are not cheap, but they are the kind of investment that pays back forever.

Audible is the second most important tool, and this is where I have to tell you something personal. I have dyslexia. All my life. Reading has always been a struggle for me, and I spent a long time treating my dyslexia as a curse. It is the reason I never made it through long theology books in print. Then I discovered audiobooks, and then Audible, and the entire library of human knowledge opened up to me in a different way.

I have been listening to books for somewhere between twenty and thirty years. There was a stretch where I had a two-hour commute one way — for three years, I spent four hours a day in a car listening. Books. Talk radio. Sermons. Just listening. I have read more by ear than I have ever read by eye, and Audible is what made that possible. The Audible Bible specifically — being able to hear Scripture read aloud, the same way the ancient Near Eastern audiences heard it in the synagogues and on the road and in the marketplace — has changed my relationship with the text.

If you are dyslexic, or if you struggle with reading for any reason, audio is not a lesser version of reading. It is reading. The ancients did it that way for a reason.

Free online courses are the third tool, and I have written about this elsewhere. The Peterson Academy course on symbolism is where Pageau's framework came into my head. There are thousands of high-quality free resources online if you know where to dig and keep digging. Education is no longer gatekept the way it was when I was younger. If you want to learn, you can.

AI — and the actual workflow. This is the one I want to be most honest about, because it is the most likely to be misunderstood.

I did not write a prompt that said "write me a six-section series on kingship" and let the AI produce something. That is not what happened. What happened is closer to this — and I am going to lay out the full workflow because if you are going to attempt something like this, you deserve to know what it actually costs.

Step one: Obsidian. Everything starts in an Obsidian vault. The vault has been a work in progress for a long time and still is. It is basically a dumping ground for ideas as I am trying to bring them to a place where I can fully understand them. The web of thoughts in my head has to come out somewhere before it can become a document, and Obsidian is where it lands. Notes, fragments, half-finished arguments, quotes I want to remember, connections I am trying to make — it all goes in there. Most of it never becomes anything. Some of it eventually becomes a series like this one.

Step two: Logos. I have built out a Logos library of more than fifteen hundred titles. Add another four hundred or so in Audible, plus a lot of other downloaded books and resources scattered across other tools. I do not read all those books. I do not think they were ever meant to be read in full. What Logos is, for the way I use it, is a research environment — I section questions, pull references, and read what other people have thought across two thousand years of theological commentary. Two thousand years of opinions are sitting in that library. When I need to know what serious scholarship says about doulos in Romans 1:1 or about the elohim in Genesis 3:5, I can pull a half-dozen sources in seconds and weigh them against each other. That is not a shortcut. That is the only way a person without a doctorate could responsibly write at this depth.

Step three: AI — and yes, more than one. I use AI to help me align my thoughts and turn the Obsidian fragments into something coherent. I did not just dabble. I went to the deep end here too. For this work I used three AI clients — well, technically four — well, technically five. Different tools for different jobs. The main writing partner was Claude. I used a separate AI as a critic and reviewer, the one whose feedback you have seen me respond to throughout this series. I used a couple of others for spot-checking, sanity-checking, and verifying that nothing I was producing was drifting in ways I would not catch on my own. Multiple eyes on the same work, all of them tools, none of them author.

Step four: the loop. With Claude specifically, the workflow is back-and-forth. I would talk through what I was thinking — sometimes by typing, often by voice-to-text dictation. Claude would push back, ask questions, surface connections, occasionally tell me I was overreaching or being unclear. I push back when it is wrong. I send it back to Logos when I need fact-checking. I read the returned results and compare them against my Obsidian notes to keep everything in line. I revise. I argue with the AI when the draft drifts from my voice. I say no, that is not what I meant. I say yes, that is exactly it.

Step five: verify everything. Every footnote in this series came from Logos, not from the AI. Never let a tool give you a quote, a fact, or a scholarly attribution you have not personally checked. This is the discipline that saved this series from at least a dozen overreaches that would have weakened the credibility of the whole. If a tool gives you something that sounds too good to be true, it might be. Check it.

Here is the part that needs to be said clearly: this is not a shortcut. I have probably more time into this series than someone who could write at this level traditionally would have spent producing the same thing. The AI did not save me time. The AI made it possible — it let me get what was in my head out onto a page in a form other people could read, which is something I have never been able to do well on my own. But the cost of doing that was years of reading and listening before I started, a serious investment in research tools, hundreds of hours of back-and-forth dictation and revision, and the discipline to verify every claim against real sources. If you think AI is a shortcut to producing serious work, you are misunderstanding what serious work requires.

These are original thoughts. The frameworks belong to the scholars I have credited. The synthesis belongs to me. The AI helped me align things better. That is the whole of what the AI did.

If you want to know more about my full methodology, I will probably put something up eventually as its own dedicated piece. The short version is: live with the questions for years, build the vault, invest in the tools, find the writing partners, do the work, verify everything, and never confuse a tool for an author.

I want to say one more thing about this. AI is not a replacement for the Spirit. Nothing in this series came from the AI in the sense that the AI gave me the truth. The truth was in Scripture, in the scholars, in what God has been doing in me for years. The AI just helped me get it out of my head and onto the page in a form other people could read. The unveiling is still God's work. The witness is still mine. (Section 5.)

Thank You to the People

To my wife — who watches the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings with me every New Year's, who says "man, I forgot how good that was" every time, and who knows when to look away when the Aragorn scene is happening. You are why I write anything at all that matters. Most of what I think I know, I learned by trying to explain it to you across a kitchen table.

To the young man I have been mentoring — your honesty about wanting to save a hundred people gave me one of the most important moments in this whole series. I am sorry the correction probably did not land as gently as I meant it. I am grateful you stayed in the conversation anyway.

To the friends and family who have put up with me being in the deep end — thank you for not turning away when I go on and on and on about something you probably have no interest in, when I am trying to get out what I am trying to say and I cannot get there in fewer than fifty sentences. Thank you for being the room where I tested these ideas long before any of them ended up on a page. That patience is not nothing. It is the soil that this series grew out of.

My Methodology, So You Can Do This Too

I want to lay this out cleanly, because if you have read this far you might actually want to do something similar with what is in your own head.

1. Live with the questions for a long time first. This series did not come together because I sat down one day and decided to write about kingship. It came together because I had been watching, reading, listening, and thinking about this for years. The pieces were already in me. The CinemaStix video was just the spark that organized them. Do not try to write about something you have not been living with. The depth comes from the years.

2. Consume widely and consume deeply. I have a personality where I cannot dabble. I am either going into the deep end of the deep end, or I am not in the pool at all. That is a blessing and a curse — it means I miss things that require shallow grazing, but it also means when I land on a topic, I land hard. Find your version of this. Do not be afraid to be the person who has read every Heiser book or watched every Pageau lecture. Depth in something is more valuable than breadth in everything.

3. Build a vault. Use Obsidian or any tool that lets you dump the web of half-formed ideas in your head into a place you can come back to. Most of what goes in will never become anything. Some of it eventually does. The vault is where the seeds live before they have a chance to grow into something.

4. Invest in real research tools. Build out a Logos library — mine has more than fifteen hundred titles, plus another four hundred or so in Audible, and I do not regret any of it. You do not need to start there, but you do need some serious research environment if you want to write at any depth on Scripture. Logos is the gold standard. Audible is the second most important tool I own, especially if you read with your ears better than with your eyes.

5. Use AI as a thinking partner — not as the brain. This is the one most people are going to get wrong. The AI is the assembly line. You are still the one who has to bring the parts. Multiple AI tools for different jobs — one for writing partnership, one for critique, others for spot-checking. Push back when they are wrong. Verify everything they tell you. Never let a tool give you a quote, a fact, or a scholarly attribution you have not personally checked against the source.

6. Find honest readers. I had an outside reviewer (in this case, a separate AI used as a critic) for every section of this series who pushed back when the writing was not working, who flagged when something sounded like AI, who told me when I was over-explaining. That feedback loop made the difference between a rough draft and the finished thing. Find someone — human, AI, or both — who will tell you the truth about your work.

7. Bow first. Write second. None of this works if you are not first a person who has bowed to the King you are writing about. Theology written by people who have not bowed reads like commentary on a country they have never visited. Bow first. Read your Bible. Pray. Sit in silence. Worship in a real congregation with real people. Then write.

And know what this actually costs. This was not a shortcut. I have more time invested in this series than someone who could write traditionally would have spent on the same length of work. The tools made the assembly possible. They did not make it fast. If you are looking for a way to skip the work, this is not it.

A Final Word

I am going to circle back to where this epilogue started.

When I read the finished version of this series, I felt like a fraud. I do not feel that way anymore. I feel like a steward who finally had the right tools to assemble what God had been depositing in him for forty years.

If you have made it this far, I want to leave you with this: whatever God has been depositing in you, you can assemble too. It will look different. Your topic will be different. Your voice will be different. Your tools may be different. But the same God who lifted the veil enough for me to see what I saw is the same God who is at work in you, right now, in this moment, lifting whatever veil is over your eyes today.

You are not a fraud. You are a steward. Get to work.

The King is the King. The room is being reorganized. The witnesses are being raised up. And the next person in line to assemble what God has been depositing in them might just be you.

One Last Thing — The Prayer I Have Been Praying

I have prayed about this series the whole time I have been writing it, and I am still praying about it now.

The prayer is this: Does this bring glory to God? Or does it bring glory to AI? Or does it bring glory to me?

My deepest desire is that this brings glory to God. That it helps my fellow Christians. That it helps my fellow humans. That it reaches the people out there in the world who feel something like I do — even though I am not sure there is anyone who feels exactly like me. If this brings glory to God, that is what it was for. If it does not, I did not do a very good job.

But here is where I have to land. Paul wrote in Galatians 1:10:

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ."

I cannot know whether everyone who reads this will think it brings glory to God. Some will. Some will not. Some will think I have leaned too hard on AI. Some will think I have not been ambitious enough. Some will agree with the theology. Some will push back. I cannot control any of that.

What I can do is what Paul did. Stop trying to please man. Care what God thinks.

If God is glorified by this work, the work was worth doing. If a single reader bows on purpose because of any sentence in any section, the work was worth doing. If the imago Dei in one person fires the way mine fired in front of Aragorn — and that recognition becomes a real bowing to the real King — the work was worth doing.

That is what I am praying for. That is what I have been praying for the whole time. And that is what I will keep praying for after this gets published, after the reviews come in, after the readers do whatever they do with what I made.

The witness plants. The witness waters. The growth belongs to God.

P.S. — Right Before I Hit Publish

Funny timing. As I was posting this series to the site, a Wesley Huff interview popped up in my YouTube feed — Wesley Huff is a New Testament historian who works on ancient manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the historical case for the resurrection.

You should go watch it. It is the Mikhaila Peterson Podcast, Episode 232. It is worth your time.

But here is why I am mentioning it.

In the interview, Wesley Huff walks through, from a completely different angle than this series, several of the same points I just spent six sections building. He names Gnosticism as the idea that "salvation is not external to you, it is innate, you unlock it through secret knowledge" — which is exactly what Section 4 calls the inverted indwelling. He talks about the witness/unveiling split in almost the same terms as Section 5: "that is the Spirit's job — my application to join the Trinity has been denied." He even lands on the point that liars make bad martyrs, which shows up in Section 3.

Wesley and I would disagree on some things — he leans cessationist on the gifts, and I do not — but that is not really the point.

The point is this: truth shows up in more than one place. This is not me being right. This is the truth being true, no matter who is saying it or where they started.

I am not adding this to validate the series. I am adding it because the timing made me laugh a little, and because Wesley Huff's work is worth your time whether you ever read another sentence of mine or not.

You can find Wesley Huff at apologeticscanada.com and at wesleyhuff.com.

Soli Deo Gloria.