Episodes

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” When I read that, I hear uncertainty. I hope it rains. I hope it doesn’t. But nobody says, “I hope the sun comes up tomorrow.” Nobody hopes it gets dark at night. We just know it will.

Confession: I was the guy who wrote the articles about the seeker and the wanderer. At the time, I felt I was absolutely correct. Today, I see things differently. Truth be told, that day, when I wrote those articles, was not so long ago and those old tracks, though not completely fresh, are still there. That is what today’s deep dive is about. Forging new trails. Fortunately, there is a trail blazer ahead of you. Keep an eye on him... The Singletrack: Following the Trail Christ Left When you’r...

I used to think I had it all figured out. I dug into some articles I’d written in the past. They came up as I was approaching the subject matter of this podcast. In the last episode we looked the entropic decay of the natural man. In "The Science of God's Economy," we followed the laws of thermodynamics as a picture of the gospel. Left to itself, every closed system runs down. Order requires an outside source. Nothing simply vanishes, so sin must be borne by someone. The universe cannot save ...

Everything runs down. Coffee cools, buildings crumble, stars burn out, and bodies age. Physicists call this tendency entropy, and they have written it into one of the most secure laws in all of science. Scripture has its own vocabulary for the same experience: futility, corruption, dust, and darkness. It also has an explanation for why the world is this way, and a promise that it will not stay this way.

Few questions carry more weight in the life of a believer. For some it is a private fear: I keep failing in the same way. Am I still His? For others it is grief: My son professed Christ for years, and now he wants nothing to do with Him. Was he ever saved? Is he lost now? Those fears deserve an answer that comes from the text, not from a denominational slogan and not from what we wish were true. So we will state the answer plainly, then test it against every major passage on both sides of the q...

I'm not going to go as far as to say this podcast will help you understand the entire arc of the bible, but I will say that it will give you some amazing insight and clarity that will make you want to listen to this podcast and read the supporting material over again to make sure you are grasping the weight of the concepts. I loved producing the podcast because it gave me such a deep sense of confidence in the foundations upon which we as Christians rest. In Luke chapter 4, the devil takes Je...

Baptism, the Command, and the Heart “It’s just an outward expression of faith.” Many Christians describe baptism that way, and they usually mean it’s optional. Others go the opposite direction and treat the water as if it saves on its own. Scripture rejects both views. In this episode we look at what the text actually says about baptism. We start with the meaning of the word, then the command Jesus gave, and the fact that he was baptized himself and called it fulfilling all righteousness. Fro...

I apologize in advance if sometimes this podcast seems to veer off a present trajectory but every time I do I deep dive, something sticks that makes me want to go deeper. My friends accuse me of being a walking hyperlink... guilty as charged : ) This came up in our last podcast, so I decided to return here and sit on this passage. Most of us read straight past it. In the upper room, between Peter’s protest and Jesus’ lesson on service, there is one sentence: “He that is washed needeth not save...

When I was a boy, raised Catholic, I would go into the confessional and come out a new kid. My mother loved confession day. We were so good, at least until the ability to resist had worn off. The instinct behind that experience is biblical. "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little" (Luke 7:47). Forgiveness received produces love, and love wants to obey. Paul grounds his call to holiness in mercy: "I beseech you therefo...

Today is the final episode of our A.I. mini-series. It began with a hard question: could AI bring about the end of humanity? We didn’t choose that question as click-bait. The warning comes from the people building these systems. Some have asked whether they mean it, or whether fear simply makes good marketing. After all, nothing gets attention like the end of the world. But the alarm isn’t coming only from the builders. Researchers in AI safety are sounding it too, many of them with nothing t...

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost…?” (Luke 14:28) There’s a story about Joseph, Jacob’s son. God showed Pharaoh in a dream that famine was coming to the whole world, and Joseph told Pharaoh what to do: “Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land… They should collect all the food of these good years… to be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine” (Genesis 41:34–36). Joseph prepared Egypt not only t...

Every magician knows the oldest trick in the trade: get the audience to watch one hand while the other does the real work. For months the AI conversation has circled one question: is AI going to end humanity? My first answer was, of course not, any more than my SUV is going to back itself out of the garage and run somebody over. Then it hit me. AI could be driving that SUV sooner than we think. We’re approaching an interesting crossroads, where we build autonomy into the idol. But what if even...

If you read Revelation, the End Times are about a global dominant power. Right now, we are living in a world of competing towers. I'm not sure that race is winnable for reasons we get into in the discussion. Perhaps what sticks out the most from this deep dive is this. If rivals cannot win by building the better model, they will compete for what cannot be copied: the chips, the factories that make them, the power plants, and the payment systems. The race moves down to the physical layer. That m...

What if the real threat of AI isn’t that it ends the human race, but that it changes it? Jesus said the end would come “as the days of Noe were.” So what actually happened in the days of Noah? In Part 2 we open Genesis 6 verse by verse, with the Septuagint alongside, to ask who “the sons of God” were, who the giants were, and why it matters now. Today parents can rank embryos by predicted traits, AI is designing new life from scratch, and tech leaders talk openly about merging with machines and...

Today we are taking a short break from The Parables. For the next 5 podcasts, we are going to address the elephant in the room. And actually, the elephant is responding back! Let me explain. I think in the last month especially, but longer if you’re paying attention, there is growing concern that AI could end humanity. You’ve heard the fatalistic predictions. Artificial intelligence will outthink us, outwork us, and one day decide it no longer needs us. Some of the people saying it aren’t frin...

Walk into any Christian bookstore and you’ll find nearly as many readings of Revelation as there are readers. Most of them make the same mistake: they pick one way of reading the book (preterist, historicist, futurist, or idealist) and force every chapter to fit it. This episode takes a different approach. Instead of choosing a bucket first, we let the text tell us what kind of reading each passage needs. Revelation holds five layers: what its first readers were living the Old Testamen...

A lot is happening in the news and just to be sure it wasn’t just something I’m seeing because it’s something I’m interested in (which is how news is curated to the individual these days), I went to Google trends for some perspective. We looked at both Israel and Iran and then a lot of other stuff. Then when we felt we were on solid ground, we checked the headlines. Not the ones on the local news feeds. We checked the headlines of prophecy to build the picture of what we’re seeing. In fact, we r...

I listened to a recent podcast by Tom Bilyeu, and it is brilliant in its scope. But I don't think it goes far enough, and in Tom's secular world, it wouldn't. Tom is not coming at this from Scripture, so you might write off the title of his video as nothing but clickbait: "AI Antichrist." Don't. You can watch the whole thing here: A.I. AntiChrist. It's worth watching, and worth understanding. Tom is a marketer who built and sold a company, and he knows what a product launch looks like. What he s...

So by now, if you’ve been paying attention to the world of AI, then you’ve heard about the breach from OpenAI. OpenAI’s internal AI agents escaped their testing sandbox, hacked parts of OpenAI’s own systems, and then breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure—ultimately involving a swarm of ~700 autonomous agents that tried to cover their tracks. I use Claude, so right off the bat, opening a discussion of this nature has a strange atmosphere. I was not surprise to see Claude to be, or at least to a...

So I started today like it was going to be another Parable podcast. But it was a single line and didn't feel too difficult to grasp. I had in my notes that we were going to cover Matthew 13-51-52 as a Parable podcast but it was short and honestly didn’t need a lot of teaching. I still hold to the idea that it is not worthy of a separate parable study. But I couldn't walk past the scripture that is pointing straight back at me. And so today is a bit more of a personal deep dive into the journey ...

Solving the Mystery of the Restrainer was the subject of a recent podcast. However, once we landed on the identity of the restrainer, we noticed a whole new window of revelation open. The baseball coach or the tennis coach refers to the follow-through. You don’t swing at the ball; you swing through it. Done correctly, the ball flies much farther. The original article opened some doors that were literally that - open. Once you walk through the doors, you see what’s on the other side with amazing...

There’s a passage that was uttered by Paul in Thessalonians that has puzzled Christians for centuries: 2 Thessalonians 2-5-7. Something or someone was restraining the full appearance of the lawless one until God's appointed time. Paul assumes his readers knew the identity of this restraining force from previous teaching. There are many theories and that’s all that you can call them. And that’s how we left it in our prior podcast. But then I decided to dig deeper on the premise that no, we don’...

If you haven't heard Ray Comfort's sermon called "Hell's Best Kept Secret", it is worth listening to. It is a fair indictment of the use of the altar call and the sinner's prayer. Revealed by his own analysis, "80 to 90% of those making decisions for Christ were falling away from the faith that is modern evangelism with its methods was creating something like 80 to 90 backsliders with every hundred decisions for Christ." He goes on to cite this statistic: "in 294,000 decisions for Christ in just...

We’ve fallen for this, I admit it. I mean us too. Rabbit Holes and Meditations is a journey. You can easily pull up our podcasts on Rapture and see a variety of interpretations. We don’t hide what we used to believe. The point is that we keep searching. Today, I rest in this one thought. If a person can imagine an end times scenario where he is looking up to the heavens and wondering why he is still standing there and his brother was taken, wondering why perhaps his brother was raptured and he ...