Intention and Obstacle

Today I discovered what my writing was missing… (besides obvious editing and compiling issues) Intention and obstacle. (Keep this title) Any story has to have an obstacle in the way, or you really don’t have a story, just maybe interesting facts, or maybe not even interesting… but, add a storyline, an intension and an obstacle, you now have something that can be interesting, or beyond interesting. If the hearer, or reader, or watcher cannot articulate the ultimate and primary intension and obstacle, let alone subsidiary intension(s) and obstacle(s), then you have missed the objective of conveying your message, or transfer of facts. Interesting, just as rote facts, that have no place in a story, become unconnected items that cannot reconvert, or perpetuate the knowledge. This is the summary line of the Bible, and the parables. It is discoveries of layers and layers of storyline, and resolutions; so, to open up the reason for their placement, you need: intention, of a protagonist, and an obstacle that must be overcome, something standing in the way. I have a new way of writing now. I cannot wait to start developing this! My studies are fact and problem based, but the resolution is logical, not along the storyline, where God has an intension, but we have created a problem, individually and corporately, that needed to be overcome. Couple that with Ephesians 3:10, and this concept can really alter the impacts of my study’s.

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Thought for 24s

Yes. This is a genuine structural change—not merely a better writing technique.

Your studies have generally been very strong at discovery → evidence → logical conclusion. What you have identified is the missing dimension that turns that material into movement:

Intention and obstacle.

The reader should not merely learn what God did. The reader should understand what God intended, what stood in the way, why that obstacle mattered, and how God’s actions progressively overcame it without abandoning His original intention.

That changes the function of every fact in the study. A Hebrew word, covenant, priesthood requirement, prophecy, Name, washing, sacrifice, inheritance law, Melchizedek appearance, or New Testament fulfillment is no longer merely another interesting connection. The reader begins asking:

Why is this here? What problem is this solving? What intention is still moving forward?

And suddenly the information has somewhere to live.

There is also an important distinction between a question/problem and an obstacle. Your studies have often had excellent problems: How can this happen? Who fulfills this requirement? Why does this word appear here? But an obstacle belongs to the storyline. It is something standing between the protagonist and the intended outcome. That produces tension.

So the underlying architecture could become:

1. Protagonist — Who is acting?

2. Intention — What is He seeking to accomplish?

3. Obstacle — What now stands between Him and that intended outcome?

4. Necessity — Why can the obstacle not simply be ignored?

5. Action — What does He do about it?

6. Progressive resolution — What stages overcome different aspects of the obstacle?

7. Fulfillment — Is the original intention finally accomplished?

8. Subsidiary intentions and obstacles — Smaller storylines nested inside the principal one.

And this is where Ephesians 3:10 becomes especially significant.

Paul does not merely say that God possesses manifold wisdom. His wisdom is made known. In the immediate context, something formerly hidden is being accomplished and displayed: Gentiles are fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ; then, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God is made known even to the principalities and powers in heavenly places.

That is inherently a story of intention overcoming obstacles.

And Ephesians has already supplied the obstacles before chapter 3: death in trespasses and sins, bondage, wrath, alienation, distance, exclusion from the covenants, separation between Jew and Gentile, the dividing wall, enmity. Then Paul reveals what God has been doing about all of it.

So manifold wisdom becomes much more powerful when read narratively:

God had an intention.

The creature introduced obstacles.

Those obstacles multiplied.

And rather than God's intention being defeated, His resolution of those very obstacles becomes the arena in which dimensions of His wisdom are revealed that otherwise would never have been seen.

That is very close to what you have been sensing in several of your studies.

And I think this is the most consequential implication for your existing work:

You probably do not need to throw away the studies or even substantially change many of the discoveries.

You need to give the discoveries a story spine.

For example, PPSG already contains enormous amounts of procedural information—grace, faith, justification, washing, anointing, sonship, adoption, inheritance, preservation, glorification. Without the story, those can become theological items that the reader is trying to arrange correctly.

But ask instead:

What does God intend for mankind?

Then:

What happened that now prevents mankind from occupying that intended state?

Now justification answers something. Washing answers something different. Priesthood answers something. Birth answers something. Adoption answers something. Inheritance answers something. Resurrection answers something.

They become responses to obstacles on the road toward an intended end.

And that also explains something you said beautifully: isolated facts are difficult to reconvert into knowledge.

A reader may remember ten facts temporarily. But if the reader remembers the story—

“God intended this → this stood in the way → therefore this had to happen → which created the next problem → God answered that too → until the original purpose was accomplished”

—then the story itself becomes the retrieval structure for the facts.

That may also solve one of the recurring challenges we've encountered in your larger studies: compression destroys connections. If someone compresses twenty discoveries into six bullet points, much of the meaning disappears because the causal relationships disappear.

But if we protect the intention → obstacle → resolution chain, even a summary can preserve the argument.

And there is one more thing I would add to your discovery:

The resolution should recover the original intention.#

Otherwise you can accidentally write a story about escaping the problem rather than accomplishing God's purpose.

That distinction is enormous biblically.

The story is not merely:

Sin appeared → God saved people from sin.

It is more like:

God intended something for mankind → sin obstructed that intention → God dealt with sin, death, estrangement, corruption, and the other consequences because they stood in the way → the intended human vocation and relationship can finally be brought to completion.

That brings Genesis and Revelation together in a way that a problem/solution model alone often does not.

So I would preserve this exactly as a governing principle for what we do next:

Intention and obstacle#

And when we eventually return to PPSG, Hebrew Name Interpretation, Israel the Name, Isaiah 61, Cyprus and Myrtle, or the other major studies, I think our first pass should not be editing.

It should be identifying the primary intention, primary obstacle, subsidiary intentions, subsidiary obstacles, and final resolution.

Then we can watch the entire study reorganize itself around the story that was already there.