A Thought in the Mind of God

Alright, let me ask you something before we begin tonight. What if you are, right now, in this very moment, a thought in the mind of God? And I do not mean that as a figure of speech, nor as a phrase from a greeting card.

I mean it literally—literally—a thought. What if everything that exists—you, me, and the stars in the sky outside tonight—was created as a thought in the mind of God? When you look up and see the stars, or if it is daylight where you are, you can look up and see the clouds and the sun. If you are at night, you can see the moon. If you look up and see that, what if it is a thought in the mind of God?

What if the chair you are sitting in is held in the same mind and love of God, just as a thought is held in the mind? I want you to sit with that for just a moment, because if it is true—and I do believe it is true with all of my heart, with all of my heart—I believe this changes absolutely everything.

Hello, and welcome to the Pristine Grace podcast. It has been a while, and I am your host, Brandon Kraft. This is where I speak about theology, Christian living, and the deep things of God, but most of all, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. If you are new here, please take a moment to subscribe and visit my website at pristinegrace.org. To all of you who have followed me for a while, or for a long time, it is good to be back behind the microphone.

I have delayed this for a long time, and I owe you an explanation of where I have been. Some of you have noticed that I have been quiet these past several months—truly quiet. I have not released any new videos or new episodes. I want you to know it was not because I lost heart about podcasting. I love podcasting. I love creating these videos.

I really do. But I have had so much work in my life. Okay, so anyway, I have not lost heart. In fact, the opposite has been true. I have been very busy. Truth be told, busier than I think I have ever been in my entire life. For the last good while, every spare hour I could find has been going into building something that, in my opinion, is quite extraordinary. I have been building this for a very long time. And tonight, Lord willing, I think I finally get to show it to you. So we are going to, and I am really excited.

I wrote a book, okay. Now, I want to hold it up for you here. Okay, right here. This is the book. This makes me very happy to show it to you.

But this book is called A Thought in the Mind of God. And I will be honest with you, after all this time, holding it in my own two hands, it still does not feel quite real. I have made this book in many different forms. I have four different print versions of it, and I want to show you each one because I am excited about each version.

And the first one here, right here, this one right here, is the paperback, okay? That is 962 pages. And it is a systematic theology book. And I tried to make it simple, affordable, and easy to carry around. Easy to mark up with your own pen and pencil. And then we have this one right here.

This one is the hardcover version, and I have two versions of these. I am not going to show you both. I am only going to show you this one, which is nearly identical to the other one, but this version is in color. So you will see here we have color throughout. Let me see if I can find it. I will just show you the back page here. We have some color pictures. Okay.

And you can see that we have some purple charts. You do not need the color, but it is helpful. This is the hardcover edition with color. I also have one that is black and white, similar to the paperback edition. The paperback is in black and white.

Okay. The hardcover editions are intended for display on a shelf or placement on a desk. They lie flat when opened and are easy to read when placed on a desk. Paperbacks are somewhat lighter and are suitable for reading while sitting. Hardcovers are built to last, while paperbacks are not as durable. However, I believe the construction of hardcovers today is comparable in quality. It simply comes down to personal preference. Right here, this one is the largest size. It is an 8½ by 11 inch book, the standard paper size commonly used in printers. I chose this one because it is ideal for those who are serious about using it on a desk. You can see it sits securely in place and holds well. The cover is made with a premium color, and the paper is also of high quality. It is slightly thicker and slightly glossier. The paper is very good, and the book itself is very well made.

It does everything I wanted it to be, except for the spine. It is not Smyth sewn. It is glued, and you do not need to worry about that. Glued bindings are not as durable as Smyth sewn bindings, but these days it was nearly impossible for me to obtain one. Still, it is glued just like the others. And if you are not hard on it, I think it will be just fine.

But this is for the person who wants to place it on their desk. These are the three books I have shown you. Then there is the fourth one, the black and white, a seven by ten inch hardcover. You may be wondering, okay, I have been silent for several months, and now I have returned with a book.

Okay, well, you're probably thinking, did he write that entire systematic theology book in a few months? Well, no, I didn't. This book took me at least twenty years. And I really do mean that—twenty years, at minimum. So let me tell you a little about how all this began, because it certainly did not start with a book deal, nor did it begin with anyone important believing in me.

Nearly thirty years ago now, I built my first website in my living room. I was in college at the time, studying away in Rolla, and I created a website called bornagain.net. This was in 1997, when the internet was still new. By then, I had already been involved in online activities for several years, and I had even written bulletin boards in the early 1990s—what were essentially the early forms of internet forums. But anyway, I started bornagain.net in 1997, and around the year 2000, I created fivesouls.org. Then, in 2003 or 2004, I launched Pristine Grace. But they were all essentially the same website, and by 2005 or 2006, I consolidated them all under predestinarian.net. All those other sites are now closed.

Only Pristine Grace remains. Anyway, I did all this—I created a forum and built a library of theological and gospel materials. At that time in history, there was very little available online, and I did everything I could to make the content as accessible as possible. I was new in the faith, young in the faith. I had no seminary degree. I was not affiliated with any denomination. I had no publisher. I had no platform, and no one was supporting me.

All I had was my Bible, a deep love for the sovereign saving grace of God, and a strong determination to write down what I was seeing in the Scriptures. So I began reading, reading, writing, and discussing with other believers on my forum about the things I was trying to understand and learning.

Oh my goodness, I learned so much. And it never really stopped. Over the years, especially in the last 20, I have written many articles and posted them on the website. I have also written many articles that I never made public.

Most of these were notes I kept on various subjects. If I wanted to learn something, I would write a note. Therefore, this book is truly an accumulation of all my theological notes that I have kept over the past 20 years. It is an accumulation of what I have learned through discussions on the forum. Everything in it was written with the goal of being as true to the scriptures as possible, based on what I found in the scriptures. Over the years, whatever I wrote or posted on the website, I did so with this intention.

It never made me popular. I have never been a popular writer. No one has ever truly liked me, except for a few individuals. When I first began, a well-known person found me. His name was Phil Johnson, and he was the assistant to John MacArthur. He discovered my website and did not agree with my theology. As a result, he listed my website, pristinegrace.org, on his public list of what he considered false teachings. He described some of my teachings as among the most dangerous and harmful ideas he had ever encountered.

And he wrote every bit of it without ever once picking up the phone to talk to me. I was about thirty years old at that time, so that was twenty-one years ago. I have to tell you, it stung—really stung. But I sat down and wrote that man back, point by point, as kindly and as carefully as I knew how and was capable of at the time, and he never really responded. He came on the forum and posted a few things, and that was it. Since then, I have just kept writing, not for his approval or for anyone else’s approval, but because I believed with all my heart that it was true. But here’s the thing I did not understand back in those days. For all those years I thought I was just writing articles one at a time on whatever was laid on my heart each week. It could be on grace, election, the covenant, or the cross. But somewhere along the way, and with much help, especially from a dear friend and brother named Bob Higby, a man from whom I learned more by sitting next to him in a church pew and on an internet forum than from most sermons I have ever heard in my entire life, I slowly began to realize something. All of it—every single article, every doctrine I had ever defended—was really just a piece of one single thing, a system, one overarching idea. The theology itself was mostly settled in my mind by the time I was in my late twenties to mid thirties, somewhere around there. It’s all a blur. But actually seeing how everything fit together, finding the one idea sitting underneath all of it—well, that took me a long time. That slow, quiet twenty-year search is exactly what finally became this book I am holding up for you tonight. The book comes down to one sentence. After twenty to thirty years of writing, all the studying, and all the wrestling, the whole thing finally came down to a single sentence about the nature of reality itself.

And here it is. This is the sentence. Pay close attention. Everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God, sustained by His will, authored by His purpose, and held together by personal covenants of love. That is all. That is the entire book in one sentence.

The rest of it—nearly 1,000 pages—is simply me following that one sentence wherever it leads, and showing you that it holds true. I gave the book a title: *A Thought in the Mind of God: A Systematic Theology*. I also introduced a new term for the idea in this book, called Operational Idealism.

I know that when a person like me uses a phrase like that, some of you may want to leave. But please stay with me. It is not as complex as it sounds. It simply means this: the world is not primarily made of matter. It is made of mind—God’s mind.

Reality is more like a thought, a word, or a piece of information than it is like a rock. A rock is real. Of course it is. You can hold a rock. It is real. I do not have a rock here to show you. But consider this: imagine this small object. There is rock in it. The rock is real. Of course it is. But the rock is real because God is thinking it into existence. God is thinking this rock into existence right now. He is upholding it at this very moment. I must tell you, this is not a strange new idea I have invented. I did not create this idea on my own.

This is what the Bible says, in my opinion. Paul, when he stood on Mars Hill, said that in God we live and move and have our being. Colossians tells us that by Him all things consist, that all things hold together in Christ. Hebrews says that He is upholding all things by the word of His power. I am simply taking the Bible at its word and following it all the way to its foundation.

Now, perhaps you have encountered something like this before. Maybe you took a philosophy class once, or you read a little here and there, and you are thinking, well, Brandon, this sounds very much like the old idea known as idealism—the belief that everything is ultimately just ideas, merely thoughts in the mind. I would agree with you to some extent. You would be partly correct. Some very wise people throughout history came close to this idea and had a deep sense that the world is more like a thought than like a collection of lifeless matter. And that sense was a good one.

But here is where what I am saying differs. And the difference is essential. First, those ancient philosophers usually meant the human mind or else some distant, impersonal, and cold kind of mind. I am not speaking of your mind holding the world together. I am not speaking of some distant force. I am speaking of the mind of a personal God, our Father who knows your name. You do not uphold reality by thinking about it, and thank God for that. He upholds it. He upholds you.

Whether you are wide awake or sound asleep, whether you are paying attention or not paying attention at all. Second, much of that idealism leads to the claim that the world is not really there at all. That it is merely an illusion, like a dream from which one must wake. You hear this idea often in Eastern religions as well. I want to say this as clearly as I know how: that is not what I am saying, and that is not what the Bible teaches.

The world is real. Your body is real. This rock is real. It is not an illusion. It is a real expression of a real thought of a real and living God. And when God made it, he looked at it and called it good. Third, and this is the most important point, the philosophers tried to hold the universe together through logic, or through reason, or through cold, abstract ideas.

And I want you to listen to that very last part of my sentence one more time. Held together by personal covenants of love. Love! Love! The thing holding you in being this very second is not a force, and it is not an equation on a chalkboard. It is the personal covenant love of God Almighty. And that is the part the philosophers never had. That is the heart they left completely out of their thinking. And that is why I do not just call it idealism; I call it operational idealism, because it is how God actually operates the whole creation.

Moment by moment, like an author writing a story he deeply loves, holding every character and every being on every single page. And let me give you one more way this is different, and we will try to wrap this up soon. And honestly, this one might be my favorite, because it is the most practical of them all. This is not merely an idea you sit around and debate, then set aside. It is a real, working law of how reality actually operates.

And this is the idea that I have not seen any other theologian write about. This is my understanding, which I have learned from reading the scriptures. And the Lord opened my eyes to it. Once He did, I began to notice it running through nearly everything I observed. Because I am a software developer, I like to find patterns. And that is what I do—find patterns in everything. And here is a pattern I found, one so prevalent that it truly is a law. I looked through all my Bible study and through my own ordinary life, and here is that law, as simply as I know how to express it.

The invisible always comes before the visible. The thought always comes before the thing. The unseen, the real substance, comes first. And then, and only then, does it become rendered into something you can see, touch, and hold. Just think about that for a minute. God thought the whole world before He ever spoke one word of it into being. And the Bible says it plainly in Hebrews chapter 11 that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. And the seen came right out of the unseen every single time. This is not only true in the beginning of creation, as described in the book of Genesis.

You see the same principle at work throughout Scripture. The covenant comes before the wedding. The blueprint comes before the house. The word in your heart comes before the deed of your hands. Love comes before the gift. And in your Bible, and right there in your own room, the real, unseen thing always comes first. The thing you can finally see is simply that real thing made visible, brought into the world where you live. And this same principle runs through the deepest matters of God.

Regeneration comes before conversion. The unseen comes before the seen. The Lord makes a dead sinner alive on the inside before that sinner ever turns and believes on the outside. The Spirit comes before the water. The new birth comes first, and then baptism follows. Baptism only ever pictures what the Spirit had already done.

And here is something that may speak to you: justification comes before faith. You are declared righteous in Christ before you ever wake up and lay hold of it by believing. Election—sovereign election—comes before you were called. God’s choosing of His people comes long before they ever come to Him. And underneath all of this, every last part of it, the love of God comes before our love. For just as Scripture says, we love Him because He first loved us.

The unseen always comes first, every time. The seen always comes after. In the kitchen, in your conversation, in your conversion. It is the same. It is the very same principle. And that is what makes this so practical. It is not some philosophy you have to sit and debate. It is a key. And it opens door after door, both in the scriptures and in your everyday life. And that is what I mean by operational idealism. It does not just sit there and look pretty. It operates. And here's why I believe this book is different from anything that has been put out before.

There have been many good theology books put out, and I love many of them, but most of them start in the middle. They start with a doctrine here or a doctrine there, but this book starts at the very beginning with one sentence about what reality actually is, and then it builds everything up from there. Creation, the fall of man, the cross, grace, the church, your marriage, heaven— all of it. And it shows you how every last piece hangs together as one single thought of God. And I have never once seen a theology book done this way, not quite this way.

And that is not me trying to boast. That is just me telling you why I gave 20 years to it. Now, I am not going to dump the whole book on you tonight, but let me give you a little taste of a few things you will find inside, so that you know what kind of journey you are in for. We went over the invisible always preceding the visible, but you will find that the covenant always comes before the ceremony, that the real thing comes before the paperwork in marriage and salvation and everything that matters.

And you will find that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, right now, today. You will see why this is true, all the way down to the foundation. You will find a chapter in which I discuss the simulation argument with scientists and others who question whether we might be living within a computer simulation. I will tell them that they are nearly correct, and I will show them exactly where they are mistaken. Underneath every part of this, from the first page to the last, you will find the same truth I have been preaching for the past twenty years: the free, sovereign, saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. This is the purpose of everything. Let me say this last point clearly, because I do not want a single person to be frightened away tonight. You do not need a philosophy degree to read this book. You do not need to be a genius.

If you love Jesus, or even if you are just a little bit curious about him, there is something in this book for you. The deep truths are not the foundation; the foundation is the gospel. It is the same Jesus you already know, seen more clearly. Now here is the part I am most happy to share. I did not write this book to become wealthy. I wrote it because I believe with all my heart that it is true. I want people to have it. Therefore, I am giving it away. The entire book, all of it, is free to read online and free to download as a PDF. You do not need to pay me anything.

Just go to InTheMindOfGod.com. That is InTheMindOfGod.com, and it is right there waiting for you. You can read the entire book for free, with no strings attached. Starting on July 1st, which is just a few hours from now as I record this, the printed editions will go on sale. These include the paperback, the black-and-white hardcover, the color hardcover, and the deluxe desktop edition. These are the ones I showed you. If the book blesses you, a printed copy is a fine way to keep it close, and it helps me continue this work. But the words themselves are free, and they always will be.

So here is what I ask of you tonight: go to InTheMindOfGod.com and read that one sentence, then read a little further, and see if that does not open something in you about how vast, how personal, and how near our God truly is. Because at the end of the day, this entire book is simply a long way of saying something very simple: you are not an accident. You are not alone, and you are not forgotten. You are a thought in the mind of God, held in existence this very moment by His will, His purpose, and His love. And if you are in Christ, then you are held there forever. Nothing in heaven or on earth can ever pluck you out of His hand. That is the book, and that is why I was silent these last few months, and that is why I am now back. Thank you for listening. It is so very good to be back with you. Go ahead and read the book. It is free. Stay tuned, because I have much more to say in the days ahead. Grace and peace to you. Good night.

A Thought in the Mind of God

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A Thought in the Mind of God

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About Brandan Kraft

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