The world says coincidence and means accident. Random. Meaningless — two things that happened to fall in the same place with no one behind them.

But the word did not start there. Buried inside it is its opposite: co- (together) and -incidere (to fall) — to fall together into one place, to meet at a single point. Coincidence is the moment the divine and the mortal coincide: the eternal piercing the temporal, the hand of God in your life.

In Episode 8 of The Spark and The Fire, Kent E. Nielsen takes up the warning Isaiah gave eight centuries before Christ — "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil… that put darkness for light, and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20) — and shows it is not only a moral warning but a linguistic one. In the last days, sacred words get hollowed out and refilled with their opposite. Pride is dressed up as virtue. Lust borrows the name of love. And coincidence — once a word for the meeting place of heaven and earth — is emptied into "accident."

This episode is about turning the word right side up.

You'll hear:
• Why the Restoration is also a restoration of language
• How coincidence connects to last week's word, endowment — and why the eyes that see God's hand are a gift of the Spirit
• What discernment actually is: seeing the meeting place where the natural man sees only the surface
• How to read your own life with endowed eyes

The teacher who said the right thing on the right day. The book that fell off the shelf the moment you needed it. The friend who reached out the week your soul was breaking. Those were not accidents. They were coincidences — the hand of God in your life before you had eyes to see it.

Next episode, the whole arc comes home to the one word beneath all these words: love.

—
The spark is to live the teachings of Christ. The fire is to be perfected in Him. Come, do greater works than these.

Scripture: Isaiah 5:20 · More at dogreaterworks.com

• (00:00:00) - God's hand in Kent Nielsen's life
• (00:00:45) - Endowment: Words turned bad in the last days
• (00:04:37) - 13 Reasons for Coincidence
• (00:06:42) - The Whole Ark