When It's All Too Much: Progressive Revelation, Identity, and Going Back to Move Forward

by Wade Fransson

Global Beatles Day landed earlier this week and, as I reflected on the “soundtrack” running under my life and work—each chapter and subheading in my trilogy titled after a Beatles or solo song—it was impossible not to feel the swirl of personal and cultural legacy. The Beatles, after all, transcended their origins as a pop group to become folklore—myth, archetype, defining a chapter of Western identity. But if Global Beatles Day is a celebration of cultural resonance, last Tuesday’s Created in the Image of God conversation with Brian Rosman—on the quirky, soul-searching Homer Calendar—brought me back, with jarring clarity, to the question of how we root ourselves at the intersection between revelation, tradition, and the constant, sometimes mindless, churn of modern culture.

Progressive Revelation: A Double-Edged Gift

If you know my path, you know that questions of revelation are the marrow of my books and my life. The opening of The People of the Sign is a wrestling match: born between worlds—kidnapped across borders, being forced to adapt—again and again—I found myself chasing some “original” truth, some pure identity. Christianity, Judaism, and yes, pop culture: all swirled into the central question—when God speaks, how do we recognize His voice, and what do we do with it?

The Baha’i Faith offers a compelling answer: Progressive Revelation. God has spoken, consistently and repeatedly throughout human history, in language and law suited for each era, each people, each stage of human development. Adam and Eve, the first rebellious children; Cain and Abel, the first lesson in envy and sacrifice; Moses and the Exodus—freedom from the enslavement we create when we don’t learn the lessons—every step, a further unveiling, tailored to where we were. As it says in Hebrews, “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets…” (Heb 1:1).

It should be simple: history advancing, light increasing, the “arc of justice” bending ever brighter. But that narrative of pure progress conceals a harsher, sobering rubber-meets-the-road truth—one that came to the fore in my discussion with Brian, and which I have circled again and again in The Hardness of the Heart and The Rod of Iron.

Jumping the Shark at Sinai

There are moments when humanity is brought to the threshold of something transformative—liberation, enlightenment, a leap in vision—only to veer wildly off course at the very brink. Ancient Israel, rescued from Egypt, was brought by Moses to Sinai for a direct encounter with God’s intent: law, order, revealed reality—etched in stone. Yet, instead of reverently receiving these foundations, Israel did what so many subsequent generations would do: in the intoxication of newfound freedom, they abandoned the old moorings, dancing around the Golden Calf and demanding something shinier, something easier, more fun. Moses returned to find the people he was leading had already, in his absence, jettisoned that for which they were liberated.

They rushed—heedlessly—blending their failure to fully comprehend the old with the poorly understood promise of the new, forgetting, even discarding, the very things they needed in order to build a future with any substance. Like college students intoxicated with liberty, “girls and boys gone wild,” they wasted their inheritance and, as Scripture says, “sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.” When the revelation became “all too much,” they didn’t dig into it—they grabbed hold of the appealing bits, the cherries on the top, replacing tradition with what the Baha’i writings call “vain imaginations and idle fancies. That which is “current among men”, distractions, and midrashic reinterpretations. And, we, like them, to enable our simplistic understanding to overcome what God is trying to actually reveal, in our inner heart, our conscience, we insist that a veil be put over the new Revelation, like the veil they demanded on Moses face, so that the actual truth might not intrude on the one we have created for ourselves.

From the Beginning, It Was Not So

Jesus saw this pattern and named it for what it was: not just a cycle of progress and recoil, but a recurring disaster of forgetting. “From the beginning it was not so,” he told the Pharisees (a chord struck again and again in The Hardness of the Heart, Ch. 7). With each new “advance,” humanity has a strange knack for abandoning the blueprint, trading the foundations handed down for a quick fix or fashionable doctrine. Jesus’ repeated return to origins—what God intended at creation—wasn’t nostalgia, but a warning: you must have a foundation, or the edifice collapses.

Josiah, too, grasped this. As king of a nation that had moved heedlessly forward—adopting new practices, losing old wisdom—he was lauded not for simply pushing ahead, but for seeking out, dusting off, and returning Israel to the ancient foundations of the law (2 Kings 22–23). Renewal never means mere novelty. It demands remembering, and oftentimes repenting for, neglected truths.

We live in an age marked by appetite for novelty and progress. New revelations—be they scientific, technological, religious, or artistic—arrive with such force that we forget where we stand, or even why these advances have meaning. So we layer new rituals, distractions, or pop culture references—anything to fill the yawning gap left by the loss of anchoring wisdom. As Brian Rosman observed, new midrash must be spun with caution over the chasm—we should be willing to assimilate culture, but not be assimilated by it. It’s easy for there to be too much entertainment, too much humor, or “Homer”—all to bridge the loss, or mask it.

Pop Culture, Simpsons, and the Masks We Wear

Brian’s Homer Calendar strikes, imho, a perfect balance—a monument to how we could blend the old with the new, embracing progress, in a conservative way. It avoids, this forgetting, this abandoning of roots only to be swept up in the whirlwind. It is, in the best sense, playful and creative, a modern effort to keep an ancient discipline alive. But it is also hints at the danger: in our effort to infuse historic meaning into modern practice we can’t so distort the history that the birth of Christ becomes nothing but a materialistic dance with Santa Clause – not only forgetting, but also perverting the intent. When we abandon the old, the world doesn’t “go blank”—culture rushes in to fill the void, with its own myths, jokes, and rituals, for better or for worse.

In my trilogy—The People of the Sign, The Hardness of the Heart, The Rod of Iron—I follow this arc over and over. We crave to be “special,” to be “chosen,” to have an identity that grounds us. But what we so often fail to see is that real identity is not created from whole cloth or achieved through the latest revelation or fad. It is received—through humility and submission to foundations that are older and deeper than we are. And we are chosen by choosing to submit, to obey, to subordinate our desires to the Divine one. The mark of maturity is not the speed of our innovation, but our willingness to return to the law, the word, and the wisdom that formed us.

Going Back to Move Forward

This is the spiral that defines both revelation and civilization. The principle of Progressive Revelation—so well expressed in the Baha’i Faith, so evident in both the Hebrew and the Christian Testaments—is never just onward and upward. It is circular, recursive, returning. Every time we leap forward without wisdom, the pattern repeats: only those who return, who remember and root themselves again in the hard bedrock foundations, receive the fruit of the new with any lasting benefit.

This is why Jesus’ “from the beginning” refrain so often echoes through my work and ministry. We are called to go back—not in stubborn nostalgia, but in radical humility—to re-examine the laws and teachings God has already given. That is what makes us ready, if ever, to truly receive what comes next.

The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Moses and Josiah—each is a fractal in the history of revelation and forgetting, of progress and prodigality. And the wisdom George Harrison penned in the Beatles’ “It’s All Too Much” rings achingly true: “The more I learn, the less I know.” Without a foundation, all is, indeed, too much.

Sneak Peek: Faith Without Works—An Independence Day Episode

Next week, in Episode 157 (airing July 1st), we pass from knowing to doing. Navy veteran Scott Arias, who survived an oil platform explosion in Iraq, will join us to share how he turned crisis into calling. He founded a national construction firm grounded in biblical values and spiritual purpose—a living reminder that faith, roots, and action belong together. The lesson? “Faith without works is dead.” On Independence Day, we’ll wrestle with what it means to build—personally, nationally, spiritually—on something that endures.

Join us for this special episode, as we discover that true freedom never means abandoning the old. Rather, it means remembering why liberty was given—and putting our hands, once more, to the work God has already set before us.

If this meditation stirs you, as it does me, subscribe or share—and let’s keep returning, together, to the only foundations that can bear the weight of all that’s new.

—Wade

“Remember the former things, those of long ago…I make known the end from the beginning.” May you find your foundation—before it’s all too much.

About The Author

Wade Fransson is an author, speaker, and host of “Created in the Image of God.” Having navigated both religious and corporate worlds, Wade reflects deeply on how spiritual themes can inspire authentic transformation for individuals and society. Through honest storytelling and analysis, he invites readers to reflect, grow, and act in pursuit of justice, compassion, and meaningful change. Subscribe and join this journey into the foundations beneath our feet.

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