YOU GOT WHAT I GAVE YOU
On Restraint and the Weapon
by
Nathan Christopher Sawatzky
Preface
Every capacity a person is ever handed comes with the same unstated question attached to it. Not what can this do, but what will actually be done with it. A sword, a rifle, a vial of something odorless, a fist, a sharp word aimed at exactly the right moment to do the most damage, none of them answer that question on their own. They just sit there, capable, waiting on something else to decide.
Two of those are worth holding up against each other before this goes any further, because they answer the question in opposite directions. A rifle, understood through a hunter's eyes rather than a soldier's, demands patience, distance judged correctly, a decision made about whether to take the shot at all, restraint built directly into the skill itself, since most of what separates a good hunter from a reckless one is every shot not taken. Poison demands none of that. No proximity, no confrontation, no risk assumed by the hand that administers it, no skill beyond knowing where to put it and walking away before anyone notices. History has always treated the two differently for exactly that reason, the rifle earning a grudging respect even from people who'd never touch one, poison carrying the specific reputation of cowardice, the coward's weapon, precisely because it removes every cost from the person using it.
This is the other half of what got handed down. Not the gift of thought, the weight of what a person does once they're strong enough to actually use it.
Give Your Child a Knife
There's a book built entirely around this instinct, close to give your child a knife and they'll learn how to cut themselves with it, teach them to build a fire so they can burn themselves with it, give them a car so they can crash it[1]. The actual argument underneath the provocation is that true education is born from experience, not from someone's literal aptitude at communicating an equation that's supposed to work. Every mind is different. Every experience arriving at the equation standing in front of a person is different.
I absolutely know how to load and fire a Glock. There's no reason I should know that, except that I spent years playing games built entirely around learning to do exactly that, accurately and fast, titles like Diablo, Grim Dawn, Worms Armageddon, Ghost Recon, Counter-Strike, Strike Commander, and Half-Life, an entire education in simulated violence and strategy that never once asked anything of me beyond a controller and attention. And here's what the research actually shows, tested repeatedly, across decades, in large studies: there's no reliable causal link between violent video games and real-world violent behavior[2]. Simple exposure theory, play violent content, absorb violent tendencies, has been tested directly and keeps failing to hold up. That's not an anomaly needing explanation. It's the expected finding, once capacity and compulsion are actually understood as two different things. Having the capacity to fire a weapon accurately never determined an outcome. Something else did the actual determining.
No Sword in the Garden
Go back to the garden, before any of this needed a sword at all. God doesn't hand Adam an explanation, evidence, or theory for the one instruction given. He simply says, "Don't do that." Why? It doesn't matter why, and that's not evasion. It's authority grounded in something already witnessed firsthand, breath given, a body formed, a garden already provided before a single rule was ever spoken, authority that never once needed to prove itself through force because nothing about it had been in question yet. No pain had to be inflicted on a heart that already understood exactly who it was dealing with. The instruction didn't need weight added to it. The relationship already carried all the weight it needed.
That's the actual condition under which a sword only ever becomes necessary once it's gone. Authority proven through relationship first doesn't need force to be believed. It only gets forced to reach for a blade once trust has already broken down, once the relationship that used to carry the weight on its own has stopped being enough on its own.
The Glory to Conceal
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search it out[3]. Not a loophole handed to anyone who'd rather withhold something than explain it. The text is specific about who gets which glory. Concealment belongs to God. Searching it out belongs to kings, not ordinary people claiming a borrowed authority they were never actually given. Anyone reaching for this verse to justify withholding something another person is genuinely owed is claiming a glory that was never offered to them in the first place.
But the verse still answers something real, and dismissing it just because it's been misused would be throwing away the actual claim along with the misuse. If concealment itself can be glory, not merely tolerated restraint but an actual expression of who God is, then transparency was never automatically the highest virtue this whole account has been assuming it is. Some withholding is exactly what the garden already showed, authority that doesn't need to explain itself because the relationship underneath it already carries the weight. Some withholding is something else entirely, a closed link pretending to be sealed for a good reason when it's actually just hiding a distortion nobody wants examined.
The two look identical for a moment, which is exactly why the verse gets misused as often as it gets understood. Nothing about the instant of concealment itself announces which kind a person is actually looking at.
Checkable Character
The actual difference between those two doesn't show up in the moment of concealment itself. It shows up over time, in everything that was left visible while the specific reasoning stayed hidden. Trustworthy concealment has a track record that's checkable even when the particular reasoning isn't, character demonstrated consistently in whatever parts were shown, a pattern solid enough that it becomes its own kind of evidence. Unaccountable concealment offers none of that. It asks for the same blind trust and hands back nothing checkable in exchange, no consistent character on display, no cost ever borne by the one doing the concealing, no real freedom to walk away if the trust turns out to be misplaced.
That test doesn't resolve every case from the outside, in the moment, and it isn't supposed to. What it actually asks a person to do is wait, and watch, and let a pattern accumulate before deciding what kind of concealment they're looking at. Time is the only thing that has ever actually separated the two.
That same patience applies just as directly to a weapon kept sheathed as it does to a reason kept hidden. Both ask for the same thing, trust extended before full information arrives, and both earn or lose that trust by the exact same measure.
The Sheath and the Sword
A handgun removes almost all of the actual cost a weapon used to demand, no proximity, no honesty required, no real risk assumed by the one holding it, closer in that specific way to poison than to a rifle. A sword is a different education entirely, and a better one, because a sword requires proximity, skill, and a body willing to risk itself to use it at all. It's a far more honest signal of what someone was actually willing to stake personally than a trigger pull ever could be. The sword was already, on its own, a glorified and extremely efficient hole puncher. What it punched wasn't just flesh. It punched holes in an argument, and the person holding it got to decide whose argument that was.
A knife lives in a pocket the same way a sword lives in a sheath, contained, not because carrying it is shameful, but because a blade left out costs something every single time it's out. The sheath was never an argument that the sword shouldn't exist. It just insists the sword earn the specific moment it gets drawn.
That's where dominance actually comes from, and the real claim is narrower than the exaggerated version most people reach for. There's real biology underneath it, sexual selection is well documented across species, dominance correlating with mating access going back further than any human record. But dominance is the raw capacity underneath that, not the whole account of what it becomes once a person is actually asked to use it well. A sword's capacity to punch a hole in an argument is exactly the same shape as a scorpion's sting, or a trigger under a finger, capacity that says nothing yet about whether it gets exercised or restrained. What makes any of it human instead of merely animal is which one actually happens.
At His own arrest, Jesus tells the one disciple who drew a sword to put it away, then says plainly that He could call on twelve legions of angels if He wanted to, more than seventy thousand, and chooses not to[4]. That's the sword staying in its sheath made completely literal, overwhelming force sitting fully available and specifically refused, at the exact moment refusing it would cost the most. We've become so obsessed with finding a better sword, and a better means of using it, that the most powerful display available, not using it at all, keeps getting mistaken for weakness instead of what it actually is.
So why does the sword exist at all, if the pen is supposed to be mightier than it? The line itself was written for a priest, forbidden by his own vows from ever taking up arms, arguing that his writing alone could defeat enemies a blade never could reach[5]. He wasn't dismissing the sword as pointless. He was naming exactly what it's actually for, settling something once every slower, more careful tool has already failed to settle it. The sword exists because persuasion doesn't always arrive in time, and not every dispute waits patiently for someone to finish writing the letter that might have resolved it without a single drop spilled.
Augustine, and later Aquinas, laid out real criteria for when that's actually true, not an abstract permission slip, restraint built directly into the reasoning[6]. Just cause. Legitimate authority. Right intention, not conquest dressed up as necessity. Last resort, exhausted every slower tool first. Proportionality, not more force than the actual threat requires. That's not a loophole for the sword. It's the same sheath, translated into criteria instead of leather, insisting the blade still has to earn the moment it gets drawn, checked against something outside the person holding it rather than left to their own account of what felt justified in the moment.
The pen is mightier for the same reason the sheath matters more than the blade does. A pen, used consistently, across years, changes what an entire population actually believes is worth fighting over in the first place, and a conviction changed early enough never needs a sword to test it later. That's the actual promise this whole account eventually makes about where eight thousand years of both tools is supposed to end. Swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations that will not train for war anymore[7]. Not a sword destroyed in shame. A sword repurposed, the same iron finally handed a better job than the one it was originally forged for.
The Simplest Possible Explanation
Occam's Razor gets stated too casually most of the time, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The actual formulation is narrower and more useful than that. Among explanations that account for the evidence equally well, don't multiply assumptions beyond what's necessary. Simplicity isn't the goal for its own sake. It's a proxy for how few unproven assumptions a person has to accept before an explanation actually works[8].
In geopolitics, in most of what actually divides people, that razor almost never resolves anything cleanly, because everyone's already starting from different assumptions before the razor even gets applied. Put a sword, or a Glock, directly against someone's heart instead, and the whole field of competing assumptions collapses almost instantly. Mortality has a way of doing that. It's often claimed that nobody stays an atheist in a foxhole, and that particular claim isn't quite as universal as it sounds, documented cases exist of people facing death directly who report no religious impulse at all[9]. But the instinct toward something larger shows up far more often, and far more urgently, than most people expect, and it's a real pattern worth taking seriously rather than dismissing because it isn't universal.
Grace, offered by somebody who wants nothing back except that it actually be believed, ends up being the explanation requiring the fewest additional assumptions, once fear has already stripped away everything else that used to look complicated. Not because grace is easy. Because everything else just got obviously harder to believe in that specific moment. Occam's Razor, run all the way to its actual conclusion instead of stopped halfway, lands exactly where the garden already started, an authority that never needed a sword to be trusted, offered again, to somebody finally in a position to recognize how simple it always was.
Pausing and the Impulse
When a war goes on inside a person without that person ever recognizing it's actually being fought, the symptom of it eventually has to show up somewhere outside, momentary or prolonged, and either way it's an inappropriate use of the exact weapon consciousness was given in the first place. That's the real difference between pausing and being impulsive, and the line between them sits in a specific, locatable place.
If a person genuinely feels threatened, actually needs to protect themselves or get away from real danger, reaching for the simplest response, fight or flee, is usually the correct one. Occam's Razor holds up fine there. But someone with the capacity to stay still, to let outside information register before it's allowed into the internal conflict at all, and then make a mature, critically examined decision about what to do with it before ever mirroring it back outward, is doing something else entirely. They're testing a consciousness that was never theirs to begin with against the one that actually is theirs, then responding consciously instead of unconsciously. In that specific case, the simplest explanation isn't actually the correct one. The correct one is the slower one, deliberately chosen over the reflex.
Epictetus named this distinction directly, two thousand years ago. Some things are up to a person, judgment, will, choice. Everything else, events, other people's actions, what actually gets thrown at someone from outside, isn't[10]. The actual pause lives exactly there, in the narrow space between what arrives and what gets done with it, the only territory a person ever really has jurisdiction over to begin with.
Fear is the tool. Pride is the weapon. Put one away, and use the other correctly, and that's not as strange a pairing as it first sounds. Fear has a real, legitimate function, information about genuine danger, the body's own warning system doing exactly what it was built to do. Put away doesn't mean destroyed or disbelieved. It means received, registered, and then set down once its actual job is finished, the same way a sword goes back in its sheath once the threat it answered has actually passed. Fear carried past that point stops being a tool and starts running the show instead, which is exactly the unconscious war this chapter already named.
Pride is harder to use correctly only because most people have only ever seen it misused. Aristotle named the actual virtue sitting between two failures of it, an honest, accurate estimation of one's own worth, neither inflated past what's true nor deflated below it[11]. That's pride used correctly, not the absence of self-regard, but self-regard calibrated against reality instead of fear. A person who knows exactly what they're actually worth doesn't need to inflate it defensively or shrink it apologetically. They can just stand there, accurately, which turns out to be the hardest version of pride to actually manage, and the only one that doesn't eventually need a weapon to defend it.
Jesus died as a direct result of an unconscious conviction, a crowd reacting, reflexively, to fear and rivalry and gossip it never examined. He was sent to us as the direct result of a conscious one, chosen deliberately, in the fullness of time, not reacted to.
Before the Emotion Arrives
Once expression is actually understood this way, art enters the equation, because art is one of the clearest channels a person has for taking what's internal and testing it honestly before sending it back outward. Which also means it's exactly what gets targeted first, whenever somebody wants to silence a person without appearing to silence them directly.
The most effective tool for silencing either conscious or unconscious artistic expression was never censorship in the obvious sense. It's attacking the validity of the thought before the emotion attached to it ever gets the chance to do anything. Discredit the reasoning first, quietly, before anyone's watching for it, and by the time the expression actually arrives, all anyone downstream can see is the emotion, and a person apparently acting on nothing but that. The thought that actually produced it has already been erased from the record, and what's left looks like instability instead of conviction.
Understood Before It's Used
A camera, a sword, a set of drumsticks, tools this account has already named, exist for expression, and none of them can be used well by someone who hasn't first understood what they actually are. That understanding has to come before the use, not get assembled afterward as justification for whatever already happened. Heidegger made this same point about tools generally. Something's real nature only shows up properly in skilled use, not in staring at it from a distance, a hammer understood by hammering, not by description[12]. But skilled use still requires the skill first. A blade drawn by someone who never learned what it's actually for isn't expression. It's noise wearing the shape of a decision.
Mindless reproduction, repeating a gesture because it's been repeated before, without ever understanding what the gesture was originally for, doesn't make something worthy of being repeated again. It just makes the repetition louder. Promotion and repetition were never the actual measure of whether something deserved either. Understanding was, arrived at honestly, before the tool ever left its sheath, its case, its pocket, or its stand.
One Root, Three Branches
The same curiosity produced all three. Refined stone tools and the earliest known symbolic artifacts, ochre markings, engraved patterns, deliberately shaped ornaments, show up together in the archaeological record, not sequentially, the same incremental sharpening that made a spearpoint deadlier running alongside the same growing sophistication that made a mark on a cave wall mean something[13]. Weapons and expression were never two separate inventions arriving at different points in human history. They're one underlying capacity, abstraction, planning, the ability to hold something in mind that isn't physically present yet, showing up in two directions at once, aimed with equal skill at ending a life efficiently and at representing one meaningfully.
That's the actual reason both keep developing together, faster and more precisely, century after century, never really two different projects running in parallel. One capacity, exercised without much discrimination about which direction it got pointed. Communication, generation, tolerance, procreation, humanity has gotten remarkably good at all of it, and gotten just as remarkably good, at the same pace, at ending each other efficiently, one person at a time or an entire population at once, because the curve was never actually two curves.
What hasn't kept pace, not remotely, is the answer to the question sitting underneath every branch of that same root. Why live, why create, why speak, why paint, at all. Not to act efficiently and then die, though an enormous share of human ingenuity keeps getting redirected toward exactly that, faster and more efficient means of ending things, individually and globally, as if efficiency itself were the actual goal rather than a tool still waiting on a purpose large enough to justify using it. Everything under the sun is vanity, a chasing after wind, pursued without ever answering what any of it was actually for[14]. The tools kept multiplying. The answer to why never multiplied at anywhere near the same rate.
The Closed Loop
A chain can't actually be a chain without closed loops. A physical link only holds because it's closed on itself first, before it's capable of interlocking with anything else. An open link isn't a weaker link. It's not a link at all, just bent wire, incapable of holding what comes next, only capable of passing along whatever's still unresolved and distorted in it.
That's the actual mechanism underneath everything already argued here. Capacity received and simply passed forward, without ever being closed, completed, reconciled with its own source first, doesn't transmit cleanly. It transmits exactly as open as it was received, deformed a little further with each new hand it passes through. A withheld validation doesn't disappear once it's handed to the next person down the line. It passes forward exactly as unclosed as it arrived, and the next hand inherits an open link mistaking it for a closed one, because nothing about receiving distortion announces itself as distortion at the time.
Closing a loop requires something more than receiving, and more than passing along. It requires completing the circuit back toward whatever formed it, trust extended, and trust actually returned, before that link is capable of holding the next one honestly. That's the whole difference between a sword staying sheathed because a relationship already carries the weight, and a sword drawn because nothing was ever completed enough to carry any weight at all. Restraint was never really about willpower holding a blade back. It was always about whether the loop above it had actually closed.
A Conflict Never Starts With Two
A conflict doesn't start with two people. It starts with three, and it always has. The anthropologist René Girard called this mimetic desire, and the structure is always a triangle, never a straight line, a person, an object, and a third point, a model, whose own wanting is what taught the first person to want the object in the first place. Two people competing over one thing is never actually the starting configuration. It's always two people and whatever third thing taught them both to want it.
Run that back through everything already sitting in this account. The garden isn't Adam and Eve. It's Adam, Eve, and the serpent, the third party reframing what was worth wanting before either of them ever reached for it. Cain and Abel isn't two brothers. It's Cain, Abel, and God's regard, the actual object both offerings were competing for, which means the third point of that triangle was never optional. It was the whole reason the other two ever came into contact at all.
Two people rarely actually fight over each other. They fight over a third thing, an approval, a regard, a resource, a god's favor, that both of them were taught to want by watching someone else want it first. Which means real de-escalation was never really about getting two parties to stop looking at each other. It's about getting both of them to stop looking at the same third thing the same borrowed way, and recognizing whose weapon actually belongs to whom before either one gets used.
Cain and the Confused Generation
Humans aren't perfect. That much has already been established. The problem was never in the compulsion. It's in the capacity to keep doing what got learned because somebody said it was the right answer, whether that somebody was another person or a mind repeating an old lesson back to itself. An education born on an understanding of God is unusually easy to replicate across generations, because it always has an absolute to fall back on. It has a zero. A reference point that doesn't move is what makes something reliably transmissible at all, the same reason a measuring system needs a fixed point to mean the same thing to everyone using it.
Go back to Cain. The problem was never that one generation was uniquely flawed. It's that the previous generation gets confused about what it's actually supposed to pass down versus what it merely thinks it should. Using the same capacity for something good that was once turned toward strategizing killing isn't so different from what actually happens at the trial of a woman caught in adultery. The text doesn't split cleanly into accusers wanting violence and a separate crowd choosing peace. It's the same accusers, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees who set the trap in the first place, who begin to leave one at a time, the oldest first, once they're confronted with their own capacity for exactly what they were about to do[15]. Nobody rescued them from outside. They recognized it themselves, presumably because age had given them the longest look at their own record. Capacity for both violence and restraint, sitting in the same people, the same generation, the same moment, character deciding which one actually gets acted on.
Pain as Educator
The knowledge of how to cause pain is very different from the knowledge of what happens once that understanding gets implemented into a real action, and someone has to directly witness the consequences of it. Every human has a private, innate understanding of what pain feels like to them specifically, and no other person, education, system, or attempted conversion is ever going to properly measure it from outside. Philosophers call this the problem of other minds, and Wittgenstein pushed it further, arguing a purely private sensation can never be fully verified or communicated to anyone else, only gestured toward[16].
It's almost impossible to fully grasp the irony of the cross. Humans arrived at a misguided, uneducated conclusion about how much pain needed applying to something none of us actually understood. The sequence ran dismissal, then challenge, then intentional misrepresentation, then collective adoption of that misrepresentation, false witnesses distorting what He'd actually said into something He never claimed[17], a crowd persuaded into demanding His death by the same leaders who'd been dismissing Him from the start[18].
We used iron, mined and refined, and the resistance of a body against it, to force the most complete instance of human character history has ever recorded to die slowly, intentionally, on His knees. What actually killed Him wasn't the spear, which came after He was already dead, confirming rather than causing it[19]. It was the mechanism crucifixion was engineered to produce, pushing up on nailed feet and pierced wrists just to relieve enough pressure to breathe, over and over, for hours, until exhaustion made the push impossible. His own body labored for every breath until it simply couldn't anymore. We knew exactly what we were doing, and we didn't even know it. His own words from the cross already hold both halves of that same paradox. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing[20]. Full culpability and full ignorance, true at the same time, which is close to the actual, uncomfortable center grace has always had to reckon with.
Final Thoughts
Every weapon in this essay, a Glock, a sword, a stone in a crowd's hand, a razor used to strip away every assumption but one, was capable of doing damage the entire time. None of that capacity is the actual story. The story is what happened once restraint got tested, in a garden that never needed a blade, in an arrest where seventy thousand angels stayed exactly where they were, in a courtroom where the oldest accusers were the first to recognize their own hands were just as capable as the one they'd come to punish.
You got what I gave you. Now the only question left is what gets done with it.
-Nate
Postscript
Trace the actual track record, since that's what checkable character requires, and concealment has been part of it from the very first instruction onward, not an occasional exception. The garden never got an explanation, only don't do that, reasoning withheld entirely. A name at a burning bush answers a direct question with something that reveals almost nothing while somehow saying everything, I am who I am, concealment and revelation delivered in the same breath[21]. Parables get told to a crowd specifically so that some in it would hear without understanding, seeing without perceiving, Jesus's own words, not an accident of teaching style but a deliberate choice about what got concealed and from whom[22]. Even the exact hour of His own return stays withheld, by His own account, known to the Father alone[23].
That's not a pattern of evasion. It's a pattern of proportion, concealment matched consistently to what could actually be carried at each given moment, never once used to extract something, never once costing anyone but the one doing the concealing, a garden's instruction that cost Him nothing while costing Adam everything to ignore, a name that gave Moses exactly enough to go and nothing more to hide behind, a parable that let the ones actually listening keep listening while the ones who'd already decided not to hear stayed exactly where they already were.
That's the actual ask underneath everything else in this essay. Not explain yourself completely, not concealment has no cost, not even understand every reason before trusting any of it. Trust Him. The track record was never hidden. Only the reasoning inside it was, and the reasoning was never what the relationship was actually asking anyone to run on in the first place.
-Nate
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-References and footnotes
1. Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler, 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) (2011).
2. Multiple large-scale meta-analyses, including reviews by Christopher Ferguson and others, have found no reliable causal link between violent video game exposure and real-world violent behavior.
3. Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search it out."
4. Matthew 26:51-53. A disciple draws a sword at Jesus's arrest; Jesus tells him to put it away, saying, "Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?"
5. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy (1839), Act II, Scene II, "The pen is mightier than the sword," spoken by Cardinal Richelieu, a priest forbidden by his vows from taking up arms.
6. Just War theory, developed by Augustine of Hippo and systematized by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 40), sets criteria including just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, and proportionality for the moral use of force.
7. Isaiah 2:4, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."
8. William of Ockham's principle, often summarized as "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity," holds that among explanations accounting equally well for the evidence, the one requiring the fewest additional assumptions is preferable, simplicity as a proxy for fewer unproven claims rather than simplicity for its own sake.
9. The claim that "there are no atheists in foxholes" is widely repeated but disputed; documented cases and survey data show some people facing mortal danger report no religious response at all, though the broader pattern of turning toward something larger under acute threat is well attested.
10. Epictetus, Enchiridion, opening lines, distinguishing what is "up to us" (opinion, motivation, desire, aversion) from what is not (body, property, reputation, external events).
11. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, on megalopsychia ("greatness of soul"), the virtue of an accurate estimation of one's own worth, a mean between vanity (excess) and undue humility (deficiency).
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), on "readiness-to-hand" (Zuhandenheit), the claim that a tool's nature is disclosed through skilled use rather than detached observation.
13. Archaeological evidence indicates refined stone toolmaking and the earliest known symbolic artifacts (ochre pigments, engraved patterns, ornaments) emerge together across the same periods and often the same sites, suggesting both draw on the same underlying cognitive capacity for abstraction and planning rather than representing separate developments.
14. Ecclesiastes 1:2, 1:14, "Meaningless! Meaningless!... Everything is meaningless... a chasing after the wind."
15. John 8:3-9. Those who heard Him "began to go away one at a time, the older ones first," after Jesus says, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone."
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), the private language argument.
17. Matthew 26:60-61. False witnesses distort Jesus's statement about the temple.
18. Matthew 27:20. The chief priests and elders persuade the crowd to demand Jesus's execution.
19. John 19:31-34. Soldiers find Jesus already dead and do not break His legs; a spear is used afterward to confirm death.
20. Luke 23:34, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
21. Exodus 3:14, "God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.'"
22. Matthew 13:10-13. Asked why he teaches in parables, Jesus answers, "Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand."
23. Matthew 24:36, "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."