@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.”