{"id":2602,"date":"2026-04-09T13:01:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T03:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/?p=2602"},"modified":"2026-04-12T13:10:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T03:10:40","slug":"the-man-of-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/2026\/04\/09\/the-man-of-destiny\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man of Destiny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The man of tragedy flees his dire destiny through action \u2014 and in those actions, completes it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a structural pattern that appears across the oldest stories of Western civilisation \u2014 in Greek tragedy, in the Hebrew Bible, and at the founding moment of the Christian faith itself. A man receives a prophecy of destruction. In fear and good conscience he takes action to prevent it. And those actions, each one reasonable, each one chosen freely, become the mechanism by which the prophecy is fulfilled. This essay traces that pattern through Oedipus, Achilles, Herod, Pharaoh, Joseph, Caiaphas, and the cross \u2014 and asks what it means when the same structure appears in the present day, among men who believe they are acting to prevent a prophesied catastrophe, in the name of a tradition whose founding texts say something precise about what they are becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Man of Destiny<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a pattern in the oldest stories. It does not announce itself. It works quietly, through the choices of men who believe they are doing what is necessary, what is right, what any reasonable person would do in their position. It has appeared enough times that it deserves a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Call it the pattern of the fleeing man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A man is told he will kill his father and marry his mother. He is horrified. He is a good man \u2014 conscientious, brave, determined to do what is right. He leaves the only home he has ever known. He goes to extraordinary lengths, puts enormous distance between himself and the people he loves, sacrifices the life he might have had. He does everything a person of genuine conscience would do to prevent a monstrous fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And those actions \u2014 each one chosen freely, each one reasonable, each one the decision a responsible person would make \u2014 become the mechanism by which the prophecy is fulfilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His name, given to him in infancy, means swollen foot. His feet had been bound and pierced as a baby by a father trying to escape the same prophecy, who left him on a hillside to die. He carried the mark of the avoidance on his body from birth without knowing what it meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the truth finally became undeniable \u2014 when the pattern closed around him and recognition could no longer be deferred \u2014 he drove his fingers into his own eyes. He could not bear to see himself clearly. The self-blinding was the final act of the fleeing man. The last thing he could do was ensure he would never have to look at himself again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Oedipus.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oedipus and the Sphinx, Attic red-figure amphora, c. 450 BCE. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.ngv.vic.gov.au\/essay\/the-riddle-of-the-sphinx-an-attic-red-figure-lekythos<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx by understanding the arc of a human life. Here is a contemporary version of Sphinx’ riddle worthy of Rex<\/em>. On the Day of Judgement, how many legs does the resurrected Man walk on \u2014 four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, or three legs in the evening?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer is at the end of this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A warrior is hidden by a mother who has received a prophecy that her son will die young at war. She disguises him among the women of a distant court, dresses him in fine cloth, keeps him from the world that will claim him. A visitor arrives bearing gifts \u2014 jewels, fabric, and hidden among them, a sword. Every woman in the court reached for the jewels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The warrior’s hand went to the sword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His own nature gave him away. The disguise could not hold against what he fundamentally was. The mother’s love, the careful concealment, the reasonable precaution \u2014 none of it was sufficient against what he carried inside him. He went to the war. He died there, as the prophecy said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Achilles.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is where the conventional reading of these stories stops short. We remember Oedipus as the man who solved the riddle and saved the city. We remember Troy as the city that fell to Greek cunning. But look more carefully at the mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oedipus did not merely answer the Sphinx \u2014 he rendered her obsolete, doing her work better than she could. She had no choice but to destroy herself. But her curse did not end with her death. It transferred. The man who out-riddled the guardian of the threshold became the very mechanism through which the curse entered the city she could never breach. He carried it inside the walls in his own body, marked in his heels from birth. The city celebrated its deliverance. The destruction walked in through the gate with the hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Troy had withstood ten years of siege. Every assault had failed. Their greatest enemy \u2014 the man who had terrorised them, who had dragged their finest warrior by the heels through the dust in front of their watching families \u2014 was dead. And then one morning the ships were gone, the plain was empty, and a vast wooden horse stood alone on the beach \u2014 a gift, an offering, a sign that the long nightmare was finally over. The city that had held its walls against everything opened its own gates and dragged the destruction inside in a moment of triumph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both cases the walls held. In both cases the city fell from within. In both cases the mechanism of entry was not force but celebration \u2014 the moment the city believed it had won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A king receives a prophecy. A child will be born who will end his reign. He is not a cruel man by nature. He is a man who has built something, who has responsibilities, who believes the order he maintains serves a purpose larger than himself. He is, in his own understanding, a defender of what matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so he acts. He does what strong men do. He is decisive where others would hesitate. He tells himself the stakes are too high for ordinary moral reasoning, that what is being protected justifies what must be done to protect it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The soldiers go out. Every male child under two years of age, in Bethlehem and in all its surrounding districts. Mothers hold their dead. The ground receives the innocent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the child he was trying to prevent grows up anyway. Everything the prophecy said comes to pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The king did not become what he became because he wanted to. He became what he became because he was afraid of becoming it. The murder of the innocents was not the act of a monster who had abandoned his conscience. It was the act of a man who was certain he was defending something sacred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The certainty was the blindness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Herod.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The pattern does not belong only to kings and warriors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A ruler fears that a deliverer will rise among an enslaved people and overturn his power. He orders every male infant among them drowned at birth. The child he is trying to prevent is drawn from the water, carried into safety, and raised inside the ruler’s own household \u2014 shaped and prepared by the very power that sought to destroy him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Pharaoh and Moses.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A young man dreams that his brothers will one day bow before him. His brothers sell him into slavery in a foreign land to prevent it. That act of prevention carries him to the exact position from which the dream is fulfilled \u2014 and from which he saves the very brothers who sold him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Joseph.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A council of elders fears that one man’s growing influence will provoke the occupying power and bring destruction down upon the nation. They move to eliminate him quietly, before the situation grows beyond control. It is, they tell themselves, a matter of necessity \u2014 better that one man die than the whole nation perish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The act of elimination becomes the founding event that carries his teaching to the ends of the earth. The movement they tried to extinguish before it spread becomes the largest in human history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of Caiaphas \u2014 and of the council that tried to suppress an idea by killing the man who embodied it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And then there is the pattern at its most complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man is crucified. The power that executes him believes the act will end the movement, silence the teaching, return order to a troubled province. The cross is the instrument of suppression. It is designed to be final.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the act of suppression becomes the central event of everything that follows. The idea they tried to bury does not stay buried. It moves through the centuries with the force of something that cannot be killed by killing \u2014 because the resurrection is not despite the attempt to destroy. It is through it. The pattern does not merely surround the faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern is the faith’s founding moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of the cross.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Each of these men was fleeing. Each was acting in good conscience. Each believed he was preventing a terrible outcome. And in each case, something accumulated in the shadow of that certainty \u2014 something shaped precisely by the force of the suppression, growing in proportion to the man’s conviction that he was the righteous one, the defender, the one standing against the darkness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man who is absolutely certain he is doing good has no aperture through which to see what his actions are making him. Doubt is the faculty of self-knowledge. Certainty seals it shut. And so the Shadow grows unseen \u2014 enacted in choices, in alliances, in the tolerance of what would not otherwise be tolerated \u2014 while the man experiences himself as its opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people around such a man occupy an uncanny position. They can see what he cannot. They watch the gap widen between what he believes he is and what his actions are making him. The pattern becomes visible to them before it becomes visible to him \u2014 if it ever does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When recognition came for Oedipus, he put out his own eyes. He could not bear to see. The self-blinding was the final act of avoidance. The last thing he could do was ensure he would never have to look at himself again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now consider the prophecies your own tradition holds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the figure whose arrival the tradition warns against \u2014 not as a distant abstraction, but as a present fear. A fear that has shaped decisions, driven alliances, justified the tolerance of things that would otherwise be intolerable. The fear of being on the wrong side. The fear of becoming, or enabling, the destructive agent the tradition names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are men acting urgently, decisively, with great certainty \u2014 men who believe they are defending something sacred, who tell themselves the stakes are too high for ordinary moral reasoning. Men who, in their own understanding, are fleeing a prophecy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask yourself whether you recognise the structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask yourself what you can see that they cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Before you answer, sit with a question the tradition has not fully resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the bodily resurrection is literally, physically true \u2014 how does it work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider a man who lived to seventy years. He was a child once, curious and unformed. He was a young husband, full of hope. He became a father, then a grandfather. He carried within him all of these \u2014 each version shaped by the one before, all of them one life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which body rises? At what age does he stand on the restored earth? Does he rise as the child, the young man, the grandfather? And what of the child who died in faith in the first century, and the woman who came to faith in the thirteenth, and every believer across two thousand years, in every nation, in every generation, in every tongue \u2014 all at once, all in flesh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are entitled to hold this belief. You are also entitled to ask what it means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because there is another way to understand what resurrection restores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When ice crosses a threshold it does not melt one crystal at a time. The conditions change, and the transformation moves through the entire system at once. What was rigid becomes free. What was locked in one form is released into another. The water was always there, inside the ice. The threshold releases what was always present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the resurrection is the restoration of the image in which all were made \u2014 male and female, equal, together, as on the sixth day of Genesis 1, before the descent into hierarchy \u2014 then it is not a future event pending a battle. It is a phase change. A threshold. When the meaning is restored, the restoration moves through the centuries in all directions at once, releasing what was always present in every life that carried it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man of seventy does not rise as one version of himself. He is restored as the image he always was beneath every version \u2014 the image in which he was made on the sixth day, before the hierarchies that shaped him, before the suppressions that diminished him. All of him. As he always was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a mechanics that needs to be managed. It is a threshold that needs to be crossed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Now consider where that threshold was placed, and by whom, and through whom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of the story \u2014 before hierarchy entered, before the descent \u2014 on the sixth day of Genesis 1, male and female were created simultaneously, equally, in the image. This was not a detail. It was the condition of that day. The equality of the woman was not secondary or derived. It was written into the founding act of human creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then hierarchy entered. And in the moment of that entry, something precise was placed in the text that is easy to miss. The enmity against the principle that caused the descent \u2014 against the serpent, against hierarchy itself \u2014 was not given to the powerful. It was not given to kings or priests or armies. It was placed specifically between the serpent and the woman. Her seed \u2014 not his, not theirs \u2014 was named as the one who would crush the head of the principle that had diminished her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The restorative principle was placed in the one most diminished by the descent. She carries both the wound of the loss and the seed of the return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This thread does not end in Genesis. It runs forward through the entire tradition, often underground, recognised without being named. The tradition built an architecture of patriarchal authority \u2014 covenant, priesthood, lineage, law, all organised through men. And yet it encoded the transmission of identity itself through the mother. Under the law that tradition produced, a person is Jewish if their mother is Jewish, regardless of the father. The seed that carries the people forward is hers. The tradition followed the thread of Genesis 3:15 into its own identity structure across millennia without fully naming what it was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the women in the tradition are, consistently, the agents of its most critical turning points \u2014 not through official authority but through action at the moments when the official structures fail. The covenant line is secured through Rebekah’s decision, not Isaac’s intention. Tamar is vindicated by the patriarch who wronged her. Ruth chooses the tradition rather than being received into it. Esther saves the people while the men are paralysed. Deborah leads when no man is adequate to the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the cross, the women stay. The men flee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the tomb, the women arrive first. The resurrection is disclosed to them before it is disclosed to any of the twelve. The most critical moment in the entire tradition is witnessed first by those the official structures had placed at the margins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not coincidence distributed across centuries. It is the thread of Genesis 3:15 working itself out \u2014 the restorative principle placed in the woman at the moment of the descent, moving forward through the tradition toward its completion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That completion is the virgin birth. He comes through the woman, fulfilling exactly and literally the anomaly placed in the third chapter of the foundational text \u2014 her seed, not his. The gospel writers were sufficiently aware of the Davidic requirement that both Matthew and Luke constructed genealogies tracing the line from David to Joseph. The tension in the text is undeniable \u2014 if Joseph is not the biological father, the genealogy establishes Davidic lineage legally and adoptively rather than biologically. The tradition has never fully resolved this. But the virgin birth itself is unambiguous in both gospels. He comes through the woman. The one who comes to restore the equality of the sixth day of Genesis 1 arrives through the precise mechanism the text announced at the moment that equality was lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The enmity placed against hierarchy is carried by the woman from the sixth day of Genesis 1 to the empty tomb without breaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a reading imposed from outside the tradition. It is the tradition completing itself \u2014 and in places, completing itself despite its own official architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The one who returns is the same one who came. He said so himself, in the very text being used to justify the preparation for his arrival: Alpha and Omega. The First and the Last. The Beginning and the End.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This claim is not made by the historical Jesus in Galilee. It is made by the risen Christ in Revelation \u2014 the book that is the source of the prophecy being acted upon. And the claim is explicitly about existing outside linear time. Not a figure who lived, departed, and will return on a future timeline. A presence that encompasses all of time simultaneously, from beginning to end, the First and the Last at once. Before Abraham was, he said elsewhere, I am. Not I was. Present tense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which means the conventional framing \u2014 Jesus departed, Jesus will come back, and the interval between can be managed and accelerated by human action \u2014 imposes a linear timeline onto a figure who explicitly claims to stand outside linear time. The second coming is not a return journey. It is a recognition. A change in perspective \u2014 our perspective \u2014 of what was always already present. The Jesus of two thousand years ago and the Jesus of the second coming are the same person, in the same moment of history, seen from a different angle of understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You cannot engineer the arrival of someone who, by his own testimony, has never been absent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the one who is present, unchanged, from the beginning to the end \u2014 the one whose character does not shift between the first arrival and the second \u2014 is the one who said blessed are the peacemakers. The one who was executed by an imperial military power. The one who refused political kingship when it was offered to him directly. The one born outside every structure of human authority, recognised first by outsiders following a sign, whose resurrection was announced first to those the official structures had marginalised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpha and Omega. The same one. Unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To prepare for his return using the instruments of everything he stood against is not faithfulness to the tradition. It is a category error. It is the hand that reaches, in the end, for the sword. It is Herod’s soldiers going out in the name of protection. It is the council deciding that one man must die for the sake of order. It is the cross \u2014 except this time, the men driving it believe they are on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask yourself which side of the enmity placed in Genesis 3 that preparation stands on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The pattern of the fleeing man does not require wickedness. It requires fear, and the willingness to act on that fear without looking clearly at what the actions are becoming. It requires the certainty that closes the aperture. It requires a Shadow that grows in proportion to the conviction that one is standing against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man who has blinded himself upon recognition cannot be reached by argument or appeal. The recognition, if it came, would require him to see \u2014 at once \u2014 everything the blinding was protecting him from seeing. That door does not open from the outside. He will not look. He cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is not addressed to the fleeing man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is addressed to those around him. The people who have not yet put out their eyes. The ones who can see the pattern forming, who know somewhere that the children dying in places the faith was born are not an abstraction. Who understand that the figure whose return is being prepared for would not recognise the preparation. Who carry the sight that the man at the centre of this has refused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tradition you belong to is larger than the fear driving some of those within it. It contains people of genuine conscience, genuine faith, genuine love for something worth protecting. A tradition can survive opposition from the outside. What it cannot as easily survive is the Shadow cast by those acting in its name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herod did not set out to be Herod. He set out to protect something. He was certain he was doing what the situation required. The soldiers he sent were following orders from a man who believed he was defending the sacred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people around him could see what he was becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question is not whether they saw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question is what they did with that sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the story of \u2014<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A contemporary riddle worthy of Rex Oedipus<\/em>: The resurrected Man walks on none of those legs, and on all of them. He is not the infant, not the adult, not the elder. He is the whole lived life, every moment held simultaneously, fully known from outside time. The riddle has no answer within the literal reading because the literal reading assumes a body frozen at one stage. The resurrection is not that. It is the complete life \u2014 same person, same life \u2014 known at last as it truly was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don’t let the republic fall from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The man of tragedy flees his dire destiny through action \u2014 and in those actions, completes it. There is a structural pattern that appears across the oldest stories of Western civilisation \u2014 in Greek tragedy, in the Hebrew Bible, and at the founding moment of the Christian faith itself. A man receives a prophecy of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2602"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2634,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2602\/revisions\/2634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}