After the e-book of Spirit and Truth: Third Reformation went up on Amazon, a friend read the free sample and stopped at my encounter with the divine Presence in Chapter 4. He told me that since the Person never introduced Himself as Jesus Christ, He could have been anybody. He also pointed me to a darker possibility:

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

—2 Corinthians 11:14 (ESV)

Let’s set the discomfort aside. Could he be right? A faith worth holding faces that kind of question, reasons it through, and settles it by Scripture rather than by personal expectation or preference. So I did not take offense at my friend’s concern. I treated it as a claim to be tested.

The identification was not mine to begin with. I shared the experience with my spouse and with a brother from my Bible study group. It was he, after hearing the whole account, who said: “Maybe this was an encounter with the Lord Jesus Himself!” I had not dared to put it that way.

While writing the book, I set out the alternatives: the Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit, an angel, or an evil power. Then I worked through them one at a time.

First and foremost, that was not an evil power in disguise. After my conversion, every demonic presence I met had fled instantly at a command to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. I did the same with this Presence. Nothing happened.

Not the Holy Spirit either. The Spirit indwells the believer. He does not approach from outside as a separate Person standing over against me.

Nor an angel. An angel has no such authority over a believer’s soul and would have stopped what happened next, because I was brought into a posture of worship. When John fell at an angel’s feet in Revelation 19:10, the angel refused him outright.

What remains is the Lord Jesus Himself: the One with authority over a soul the Spirit indwells, who received the worship an angel would have refused, and who set me on a white horse out of Revelation 19, where the armies of heaven follow their King.

I also put the reasoning to two AI systems—not to let them decide it, but to see whether the elimination held together under questioning. It did.

My friend took the silence as a gap in the evidence. I have come to see it differently. A father does not introduce himself to his own child. The risen Lord did not announce Himself to Mary at the tomb—He said her name, and she knew. “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27, ESV).

The account of that encounter is in Chapter 4 of my book, Spirit and Truth: Third Reformation, available now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HLLJ39JK