The Bible Was Saying Something I Missed for Years

You can read a verse a hundred times and be sure you know what it says. Then you change, and the same words start saying something you had never noticed.

That happened to me with the Bible. I'm a Christian, and I'll say that up front, because what follows is not an outsider poking at scripture. I'll also be honest that I got here kicking and screaming. My rational mind has always pushed back on parts of the story, and for a long time I settled into reading much of it metaphorically.

Then I spent a few years on a completely different road: physics, the hard problem of consciousness, idealism, and eventually nonduality, the idea that reality is ultimately one consciousness appearing as many. I did not expect that road to lead back to the Bible. But it did, and when I got there, the book read differently. People often ask whether Christianity is dualistic. Much of how it is commonly taught sounds that way, with God far above and creation far below. Read again, some of its verses point somewhere much closer to nonduality.

"In hindsight after the whole physics and philosophy journey, some verses of the Bible read completely differently."

Here are the passages that changed most for me, in order: Romans 1:20, John 4:24, what happens when religion mistakes its structure for its substance, and finally the meaning of sin.

Romans 1:20 and the One Undeniable Fact

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse." (Romans 1:20, KJV)

I used to read this as a design argument: look at the stars and the trees and you will see there must be a creator.

After the philosophy journey, I read it as something more direct.

Descartes famously doubted everything he could and found the one thing he could not doubt: that he was thinking, experiencing. Every scientific theory could be wrong. The outside world could be a dream. But the fact that experience is happening is the one indisputable fact there is.

And here is the strange part. Physics does not need that fact. You could, in principle, run the whole universe as clockwork, every particle doing exactly what it does, with nobody home to feel any of it. Philosophers call such hypothetical beings "zombies." Yet we are not zombies. Pain hurts. Red looks like something. Some experiences even seem entirely unnecessary from a survival point of view; the body could have done its job without feeling anything at all.

Why would there be experience at all? That brute, inescapable fact, which no amount of scientific inquiry can produce or refute, started to look like exactly what Paul was pointing at. The invisible made plain in the most intimate thing we have. No excuse, because it is closer to you than your own breath.

John 4:24: Spirit and Truth

The verse at the top is the one that stopped me.

"In spirit and in truth." I had always heard those as near-synonyms, a bit of poetic doubling. After years in philosophy of mind, they separated into two specific things.

Truth is structure: the laws, the mathematics, the third-person description of how things behave. That is science's domain, and it is extraordinarily good at it.

Spirit is experience: the first-person, felt, what-it's-like side of reality. The part whose correlates science can describe, but which it can never get inside.

Read that way, the verse puts both domains side by side as two sides of one coin. And it opens with a statement about God's fundamental nature: God is a Spirit. Not God is a structure. Not God is a law. The verse quietly ranks them. Spirit is primary; truth is how spirit shows up as pattern.

That is almost exactly where my own metaphysics landed, by a completely different route.

Mistaking the Structure for the Thing

Then came the realization I still think about most. I remember typing it out almost breathlessly:

"Holy cow. I've just realized that religion captures this spirit truth dilemma perfectly. Spirit insights get truth structure around them, and people often mistake the structure for the thing in itself!"

A real spiritual insight arrives first as experience. Then, over generations, rules, doctrines, institutions and arguments get built around it. The structure is needed; it is how the insight survives. But people start defending the structure as if it were the point.

I think this sheds light on Jesus saying he came "not to destroy, but to fulfil" the law (Matthew 5:17). He did not throw out the structure. He fulfilled it from the spirit side, pointing back to what the law was built around.

It also explains, I think, something about our modern moment. When science rejected religion, it saw the outdated structure and threw it out, baby and bathwater together. But the baby was the point all along.

Sin as Separation

The hardest piece for me to square was judgment. If all of creation is ultimately one with the creator, how does God judge creation? Isn't that judging a slice of yourself?

What helped was noticing how often scripture frames sin not as rule-breaking but as separation. "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isaiah 59:2, KJV).

Through a nondual lens, that is precise. The core human problem is the feeling of being a separate fragment, cut off from the whole. Judgment can then be understood less as a verdict handed down and more as the logical consequence of that separation playing out, the way cause and effect plays out. Ultimate love and ultimate judgment stop contradicting each other. They become one nature seen from two sides.

I am not claiming this settles every theological question. It does not, and I still wrestle with parts of the story, especially reading the life of Jesus literally. But I no longer feel that my faith and my physics are pulling in opposite directions.

Reading Again

If you grew up with these texts and drifted away, or stayed and stopped really hearing them, try rereading a few verses with one question in mind: what if this is about experience itself?

The words have not changed. What changed for me was the reader. When you next open a passage you think you already know, what would it say to you if it were describing the plain fact that you are experiencing anything at all?