@Rattigan350
Your entire construction collapses the moment you open the
Bible instead of the Watchtower. Scripture never separates “covenant‑mediator”
Jesus from “prayer‑mediator” Jesus, never limits His priestly intercession to
144 000 insiders, never
treats Paul’s letters as private mail that may be
ignored, and never grants a later “Revelation
update” permission to rewrite what the apostles
had already handed on “once for all” (Jude 3).
Begin with the keystone you attempt to remove: Paul’s words
are not Scripture. The apostle Peter thought otherwise: he places “all
Paul’s epistles” beside “the rest of the Scriptures” (2 Pet 3:15‑16).
A first‑century eyewitness thus canonises the very sentence you discard: “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). Your move requires us to
believe Peter was inspired when writing his own letter yet deceived about Paul’s. That is self‑refuting.
Because that verse is Scripture, it speaks with the same
authority as Hebrews. And Hebrews teaches that Christ’s priestly
mediation and His covenant mediation are one undivided act. He “entered
once for all into the holy place by His own blood, thus obtaining
eternal redemption” (Heb 9:12).
The blood is simultaneously the covenant seal and the liturgical
offering; the priest and the victim are the same person; therefore access to
the Father in prayer flows directly from the blood of the covenant. To prise
the two apart is to mutilate the text.
Matthew 26:28 says exactly what you deny it says. The Greek
phrase to hyper pollōn ekchynnomenon eis aphesin hamartiōn unites the
clauses: this (my blood of the covenant) is poured out for
the forgiveness of sins. The covenant, the sacrifice and the remission are
inseparable. Aaron could not do that; Moses could not do that; only the God‑Man
could, and He did it “for many” without a numerical ceiling.
Nor does Hebrews confine the covenant to an elect
aristocracy. The promise cited (Jer 31:31‑34)
speaks of all the people knowing the Lord, “from the least of them to
the greatest.” When the letter explains its fulfilment, it declares that Jesus
is able to “save to the uttermost those who draw near to God
through Him” (Heb 7:25). No
hint appears of a secondary crowd admitted only to a cleaned‑up earth after the
millennium. Nearness to God—the very thing prayer expresses—is the covenant’s core
privilege; Christ “ever lives to make intercession” for everyone who comes, not for an inner ring of 0.02 % while the rest mumble “unscrambled” petitions from afar.
Your analogy of scrambled television signals is cute but
collapses under its own weight. If God cannot “hear” a human cry unless Jesus
tags it with an anointed code, how did He hear Cornelius before the
apostle arrived (Acts 10:4)?
Cornelius did not belong to any “spiritual
Israel”; he was still an uncircumcised Gentile,
yet “your prayers and alms have ascended as a
memorial before God.” The Father’s ears
were open because Christ’s priesthood is cosmic, not
parochial.
The born‑again discourse likewise demolishes your caste
system. In Greek Jesus shifts from singular to plural: “Do not marvel that I
said to you (Nicodemus) all of you (humas, second person
plural) must be born from above” (Jn 3:7).
The rebirth requirement extends beyond a first‑century Jewish audience; the
Spirit “blows where He wills,” and every believer receives “the
Spirit of adoption crying Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15). Limiting the new birth to
144 000 contradicts Christ’s own grammar.
Your dismissal of apostolic authority—“they didn’t have
Revelation yet” and “old light”—overlooks the way Revelation itself treats the
apostolic deposit. The seven churches are judged by the gospel they
already received; nothing in Revelation retracts Paul’s proclamation of a
universal mediator, nothing annuls John’s insistence that “whoever confesses
that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God” (1 Jn 4:15).
The final vision shows the nations walking inside the heavenly
Jerusalem, not orbiting it as eternal gardeners. Kings of the earth carry their
glory into the city (Rev 21:24);
the Lamb’s throne is in their midst; “His
servants shall serve Him and see His face” (22:4). That is the destiny
of the redeemed—no mezzanine level, no downgraded class.
Symbolic arithmetic cannot override explicit doctrine. The
144 000 are introduced in
hearing and immediately followed by the vision of “a great multitude
which no one could number, standing before the throne” (Rev 7:9). The juxtaposition—census list followed by limitless crowd—signals
that the numbered army and the innumerable assembly are two perspectives on the
same redeemed people. The elders in chapter 5 represent that same people under the image of
Israel’s twelve tribes and the Church’s twelve apostles; they are not a separate, superior species.
You have conflated iconography into a class system Scripture never suggests.
Finally, your theory makes the gospel incoherent. If
Christ’s blood objectively atones but subjectively applies only to a quota, the
rest of humanity remains alienated until some millennial remedial course. Yet
Paul proclaims the reconciliation already achieved: “In Christ God was reconciling
the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor 5:19). He pleads with every listener—no quotas, no exclusions—“be reconciled
to God.” That is why the Church, from Pentecost
forward, baptises all nations into the one death and one resurrection of
the one Mediator.
Christ unites in His own person everything Moses and Aaron
enacted separately, because He is both Son of God and Son of Man. Precisely
therefore He is High Priest and Covenant Mediator for the entire race He
assumed. Separate the offices, shrink the beneficiaries, and you sever the
lifeline of salvation. Leave them united, and you discover the catholic—i.e.,
universal—scope of the gospel: “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall
be saved.”
