A Question This Book Cannot Answer for You Yet

Here the corpus this book draws from reaches its honest edge, and it is worth telling you plainly where that edge is, rather than smoothing over it the way a less careful book might. The council members described above existed for an immense span before the first human being drew breath, and it is tempting to wonder whether the governance they were assigned reaches further than earth's nations, out into whatever cosmic scope beings that old might plausibly govern. This book's author has proposed exactly that extension in earlier conversations that fed into this project. It needs to be said clearly, in the interest of the same honesty this book has asked you to bring to every other claim inside it: that extension is not something the existing written corpus behind this book actually states, and it is not settled doctrine here either. The Appendix entry "On the Cosmic-Scope Proposal" lays out the full case, and the full honest limits of it, for a reader who wants to follow that question further. What is settled, on the corpus's own terms, is smaller and no less staggering: redeemed humanity, made last, made from dust, will judge beings who watched nations rise and fall for longer than any human civilization has existed — not because of anything inherent to humanity's own worth, but because of what God breathed into the dust, and what the Son of God became on humanity's behalf.