Today’s the big day! I just released my first book, The Atheist Conversion Manual. The Kindle edition is available, paperback and hardcover release 7/20. I’ve been talking about it all week on X and Substack, but I never told you the story behind it.

I wrote it for a son I almost lost.

Some of you have already heard this story because I shared it in an email a while ago. I decided it needs to be an article to help you understand that anything I write for you, from books, to articles, to emails, to notes, is personal at the deepest level.

Allegiant Faith Network emerged from the intense pressures of a trying test no one prepared me for. One that almost shattered me…

My wife became pregnant with our son in September of 2023. We tried to make a big deal by keeping it a secret to surprise my family at Christmas.

But because of fibroids in her womb, she started to show right away. It was still a great celebration, just not a surprise.

The only reason that December in 2023 is worth mentioning is because it was the last happy time before everything went cratering downhill.

Her pregnancy was difficult. The usual sleepless nights and cravings were exacerbated by rashes, horrid hot flashes, a cage-fight with natal diabetes (this one was the worst because my wife HATES needles and had to take insulin), and constant worry her fibroids took up too much room for our son to develop.

Turns out…our worries were justified.

8 weeks before he was due, she started having contractions. We thought they were Braxton-Hicks. Those intrepid pranksters that make you think the baby’s on the way. After all, her due date wasn’t until late June.

Then, she lost her mucus plug.

She panicked because she wasn’t sure what was happening. And since we both didn’t know, we bet on a basic trip to the doctor.

I comforted and reassured her that everything would be fine. My reassurance ended up being like Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles saying, “We’re superheroes. What could happen?”

Everything turned out fine…but we would walk through the fire first.

Her mom took her to the hospital while I stayed behind since one of our dogs had a vet appointment, and what we thought would be a simple checkup turned into the longest weekend of our lives…

When I finally made it to the hospital and got everything arranged with family to keep the dogs taken care of, the house in order, and whatever else was necessary, they had my wife and mother-in-law set up in a room, gave her a magnesium bolus shot, and set her up on a magnesium drip with a liquid diet.

They also gave her steroids to help the baby’s lungs develop.

Labor had started. WAY too early.

The doctors and nurses told us they would do everything they could to reduce contractions. And it worked…for a time.

But after midnight April 15, 2024, they picked up again. Febrile monsters on a rampage. And that’s when I panicked (hey, nobody’s perfect), called her mom to get back to the hospital, and let my family know their grandson was probably on the way.

The deal sealed when the doctor came in later that morning and tried to do a uterine exam. See what was going on. And her water broke like flood torrents from a shattered dam.

My baby boy was coming whether the world was ready or not.

His arm in the canal. Emergency C-section. NICU.

Nothing makes you ready for the unthinkable…

Everything from that moment flew past as if we were in a hundred-meter sprint.

Operating room. Bright white lights. Slice. Little bit of a fight (he didn’t want to come out that way, apparently). Shrill cries. Couple pictures.

He was alive, but his right arm was swollen like a purple balloon from trying to enter reality wrong.

32 weeks, jaundiced, lungs underdeveloped, and only 3 pounds. They wouldn’t let us hold him except for the brief photos we took because he had to be rushed down to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

Where he would spend the next 8 weeks.

By the time he was secured in his new temporary living space, surrounded by great nurses we would come to know as friends, I was an emotional wreck.

Exhausted. Confused. Worried. Thirsty.

Every inch of me covered in a thorough blanket of sweat.

Eventually, someone collected me and guided my frail soul up to where my wife was recovering from surgery (“I thought you said she almost died”?” Just wait), and just seeing her face and knowing it was over made me slump into the chair beside her bed, a jittery mess.

It took three days for her to heal and re-cooperate. During that time, we learned she had almost bled out on the table.

The two smallest fibroids in her womb were right over where our son was positioned, so they had to be removed. Her surgeons used up 5 units of blood to keep her alive. It was a literal brush with death.

I almost went home a widower.

Many today would use this opportunity to tell you, “Don’t have kids.” And they’re absolute idiots.

Because I wouldn’t trade anything I went through for the world. Here’s why…

What would’ve still been one of the happiest days of my life became so much more because of the trial I faced. And whenever I look at my son, instead of remorse, I’m overwhelmed by joy and reminded of the immeasurable grace God shows us in this fallen world.

You see, even though I believed in and followed Jesus, it was merely through obligation. I wrote because the Bible called me to. I obeyed because that’s what we’re supposed to do.

But there was little investment. Little order. Little focus.

On 4/15/2024, I went from carefree, careless child of God to a man with purpose. From timid Chris to Courageous Chris.

A spark ignited me into high gear and inspired the ministry you see before you today. This little spark:

We’ve gotten too used to comfort in this world. It’s made us weak. Because diamonds are forged through intense pressure.

If you never go through battles, you’ll never gain the resolve of a soldier.

People want to balk at God, spit in his face, crucify him because he lets evil “run amok.” But where does that get us?

God hates evil as much as you do. He despises it. Never wanted this reality for us. But he didn’t let sin and death into the world. We did. To eradicate it would be to eradicate us. To bring good from it…THAT restores greatness and glory in ways we can’t even imagine!

And you don’t realize it until you feel the pain.

So, a word of advice: Embrace the storm.

You may cry, you may get confused, you may collapse in a chair by a bedside a total wreck, wondering what the heck is going on…but if you’re available to be forged in fire by God Most High, nothing can stop you.

I love you, friends.

Get a copy of my new book, The Atheist Conversion Manual, and help support Allegiant Faith Network here:

The Atheist Conversion Manual

It’s not like most books that defend the Christian faith. I take you through my story from darkness to light and use that story as the frame to explore evidence for the existence of God and his identity as Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Here’s what early readers are saying:

• “This is one of those books you pick up to flip through just to see what it's all about and end up reading it for an hour straight. It's a well-thought-out, well-researched manual packed with relevant, easy-to-follow information.”

• “The Atheist Conversion Manual is a no-nonsense approach to defending truth. It presents a compelling case for Christianity using the classical apologetics method in a way that is practical, engaging, and easy to understand.”

• “When I need material for the purpose of solving or addressing any kind of problem, I value and respect most an author who has had to actually do it. This book and its author, fit that exactly.”

• “Chris writes apologetics the way it should be written: plain language, real stakes, and a testimony that earns the argument.”

• “Chris Wright wrote the book I wish I'd read years ago when I was an atheist.”

Because I’ve been through the fire. I know what’s at stake. And I want you to know too, so you can become a fearless soldier Christ your King and build his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

(P.S. Allegiant Faith paid subscribers will receive their own personal copy later today, 7/18.)

Our mission is to engage and thoroughly challenge culture with the Gospel of Christ Jesus, evidencing and explicating the Truth of all reality for the entire world to see. Via contributions from faithful minds from all walks of life.

Through countless hours of resources on apologetics (defending the faith), biblical theology, history, philosophy, and more, we’re forming a network of warriors for Christ who understand God’s Word, God’s creation, the evil times we face, and will take to the frontlines of the ongoing war against Satan and his minions for ages to come.

Together, we seek to live out the two greatest commandments to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves, as Christ Jesus prescribed. And we hold fast to the words of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:16-23:

“16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21 envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

But we also are not afraid to flip tables where necessary, as Christ himself did in the Temple. Christianity was born to shine the Light that defeats darkness on earth (as it is in heaven), not to be a sideline, you-do-you, love-you-guys-no-matter-what, you-can-do-no-wrong cheer club.

We, therefore, refuse to affirm or appease sin or abominations in this or any era and instead shut down evil ideas with brutal honesty…all while maintaining the humble knowledge that we too are broken sinners who are nothing without the Savior.

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We already have 124+ articles exploring and defending the Christian faith in our vault and 736 faithful warriors in the fight. You’re enlisting in an army of serious believers who choose to take Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations seriously and yearn to live for the King with courage and conviction.

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Dream of Solomon, Luca Giordano (c. 1694-95)

Much to the chagrin of all the God-haters out there, fascination with the divine is on an upward trend. So many people everywhere are curious about whether or not God exists and what he’s like.

They want to study him, get to know him, emulate him. Questions that revolve around God are taking precedence over the mundane, the natural, in this present world.

There’s a significant reason for that: God is abundantly more fascinating. He’s beyond everything this world has to offer.

Atheists don’t think so. Some on X recently said that God offers no explanatory power for anything, but that’s not what you find throughout history. Whenever the idea of God or even the very presence of God shows up, people are astounded, filled with wonder, overcome by awe, and physically, mentally, and spiritually changed in unprecedented ways. So much so that even in a cynical world like our own, the eternal and mysterious are etched into the forefront of our minds.

God is more fascinating.

Why?

We find two powerful answers for why God continues to be fascinating for us as human beings from G. K. Chesterton and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Riddles of God

Chesterton celebrates what he calls the riddles of God. And he says that they are so much more powerful and bountiful than the solutions of man.

Identifying God as a riddler tells us so much about who he is. It tells us that he has deliberately made himself cryptic to us and enjoys testing humanity. God reveals just enough of himself to be touchable but not fully comprehensible.

For atheists, that’s a problem, but for the Christian, it’s not because we understand God has made himself mysterious because he wants us to explore him. He wants us to seek him out.

A Being like that is hard for us to fathom because of our brokenness ever since the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. The sin and death unleashed on us made us finite and forced the mysteries of the heavens to be shoved far from us. God moved them out of reach for our protection.

That doesn’t mean God doesn’t want us to know him or them. In fact, he encourages us to adventure. As Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings to seek things out.” We are made to explore. Made to adventure. Made to study not just the mysteries of this world, but the mysteries beyond it as well. It’s ingrained in the very code of our DNA to puzzle over God, to explore his mysteries.

Chesterton was clever by calling the cosmic mysteries “riddles” because riddles are problems to be solved, but they’re not problems that are detrimental to survival. They’re puzzles that enlighten and stimulate the mind, that grow the character and form it into what it was made to be. Mind stimulation and formation are why we enjoy doing puzzles like Sudoku and/or just plain puzzles, putting them together piece by piece to see the image it forms. Since we are made in God’s image from the beginning, inherently we seek to understand our purpose and our design. The higher things.

What gets in the way of that journey is our infatuation with ourselves and our infatuation with this world.

Unfortunately, there’s the tendency for us to idolize the creation and knowledge itself over the Creator, as Adam and Eve did. Hence the reason for God’s protection, his making the eternal mysteries harder to work for. Scripture warns about our idolatrous potentiality all the time and tells us to steer away from it with every fiber of our being, because it doesn’t just corrode the soul, it corrodes the mind and body as well. It strips away your capacity to appreciate the mysteries of God.

If all we have is this physical world, the creation, then the very pursuit of knowledge itself has no standing. It’s not really mysterious per se. Just unknown.

But when God is in the picture, there really is a universal riddle with a glorious prize at the end. The puzzle doesn’t just stop in this world. It’s not a problem here to solve. We’re not mere survivors. We’re thrivers, and we’re meant to comprehend a kingdom greater than our wildest imaginations.

Sin and death and depravity don’t want that for us, for us to thrive, because Satan is trying to usurp the throne of the kingdom. God’s kingdom. The devil knows at this point, because of the cross, that he’s lost the battle ultimately, but if he can chip away at the kingdom piece by piece and lower its numbers, he thinks he can still prevent it from becoming everything the Creator wants it to be: an eternal kingdom filled with the goodness, justice, grace, love, power, and enlightenment of Christ.

You have the opportunity to prove him wrong.

But not just anyone can grasp the mysteries of God and stand up to the devil. Dostoevsky tells us the one person who is most capable of grasping the mysteries of the Divine, and you’ll never guess who it is…

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The secularists got ahold of American education and did everything in their power to strip away any and all notions of Christianity from our history.

That fact blares loud and clear every year when the Christian roots of these United States are balked at, denied, slandered, and/or misrepresented.

Last year, I wrote an article defending the Christian foundation of this nation and the Christian principles that make it possible and identify it as God’s country.

Now, again, I will make a case for you, so you can see clearly that this nation wasn’t founded by secular “enlightenment,” by Freemasons, or by deists. It was founded by courageous Christian men who sacrificed all to establish a free and United States.

Christian Colonies

Every colony, with maybe one exception, was founded by Christians and had its own central church reflecting the many denominations at the time. Prior to the Revolution, the colonies were in constant conflict with each other because of their denominational differences.

All were Protestant, except Catholic Maryland.

9 of the 13 colonies had explicit requirements for leadership in their local governments that you had to be a practicing, Bible-believing, church-attending Christian in order to hold a position in office.

They held faith in Christ Jesus as paramount since it was what they fled England to practice. The Puritans and Quakers were especially hated by the Crown because they stood up to King Henry VIII when he committed egregious sins and made an embarrassment of himself by taking on multiple wives and killing many of them when he grew tired of their company.

Freedom to practice their Christian faith without government interference was the bedrock of most voyages to the New World and their willingness to face whatever hardships may come. The voyagers on the Mayflower made the above intentions explicit when they included in the Mayflower Compact: “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.”

Christianity was always front and center in the colonies. For everyone.

The Founding Fathers

Contrary to popular retellings of American history, few of the Fathers were Freemasons and none of them were deists.

Only 8-9 members of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons. Five were prominent figures: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and James Monroe.

It’s debated whether or not the Masons were and are Satanic. They’ve always been secular clubs and have bizarre rituals (some of which are occult and sketchy), but the stated goal of Freemason lodges, according to their founding documents, is to make virtuous and charitable men with integrity. Perhaps it was the later emphasis that attracted some of the Founding Fathers.

Regardless, Freemasonry played little role, if at all, in the founding of these United States.

Every single one of them also believed in Divine Providence, which eliminates deism off the bat because the deistic god is inactive. Made and then abandoned the universe long ago.

Beginning with Thomas Jefferson in 1774, members of the colonies repeatedly called for fasting, prayer, and humility and organized such gatherings when able, believing God in Christ would intervene on their behalf and give them victory. They also witnessed God do so repeatedly throughout the Revolution with precise miracles that aided escapes and secured victories over the British.

None of them were secretive about their motivations or their understanding that without Christianity, these United States would fail. Here are a couple examples:

• John Adams, October 11, 1798: “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

• George Washington, Farewell Address 1796: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness… And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

“Religious” always referred to Christianity in their writings. It was THE religion. They admitted outright that a free country without a moral and religious people would not be free, and the Constitution, per John Adam’s, was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The Northwest Ordinance

In the predecessor to the U.S. Constitution ratified by the colonies, it explicitly states:

“Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

The Founders and everyone in the colonies agreed that Christianity was integral to a moral and knowledgeable education. To the formation of a civilized society. Rather than banish it, they encouraged it in every school system across the United States because Christianity curbs the evils of human passions and makes possible self-government.

Many forget the Founders knew of the atheistic-socialist French Revolution across the pond. While they called on the French for aid against the British, who helped them secure final victory by destroying the British at sea along the shores of Yorktown in October 1781, the Fathers still knew of the obscene horrors atheist socialism had enacted in French society.

The French butchered thousands upon thousands for not abandoning Christian faith and surrendering to secularism, beginning with Catholic priests and Protestant pastors.

Every Father had also heard the stories from their own ancestors of what happened in England when the kings chose to live apart from God in Christ.

That’s why when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, they began the document with “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

They appealed to God and no human authority.

Humans are despicably sinful and evil. But humans without God in Christ are even more despicably sinful and evil…without restraint.

We are made in his image for him, and when we resist our design, we corrupt ourselves and his creation. That’s the way it’s been since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden.

What About Tripoli?

Those who doubt that America is a Christian Nation love to cite what the Founders agreed to in the Treaty of Tripoli. There, they signed a statement that the United States government “was in no way founded upon the Christian religion.”

What doubters fail to do for you, though, is place that quote within the broader context of history.

The United States government wasn’t founded upon the Christian religion. It was founded upon Christ himself, God Most High, and biblical principles. A significant difference.

By going to the source, they (the Fathers) ensured that no single denomination of Christianity could take total control and establish a papacy-like rule over the U.S., nor could any secular authority do the same. The checks and balances, again, could only be held together by a moral and religious people and existed to prevent any single human from assuming total power.

So, the Founders weren’t lying at Tripoli.

America was made by Christians, for Christians, but was not in any way based a particular religious viewpoint therein. Instead, America was based on the founding documents of Christianity (the Bible) and the God behind it.

Most in our days find this confusing because the atheistic division between themselves and “religion” runs rampant, even though they are just as religious as Christians.

The Founders understood that every man is religious, sinful, greedy, and arrogant when left on his own, even those who think they are not, and put safeguards in place to establish a free Republic which would thrive as long as a moral and religious people (Christians) was around and respected the principles established by the Constitution.

Without that significant feature of American society, the entire enterprise would crumble…like it is now.

What are You Going to Do?

Now you know these United States are God’s country, and that we have effectively sat back and allowed the godless to disrespect our founding principles.

No one is required to become Christian. But the Christian principles and the God acknowledged by our Fathers and written in our Constitution must be respected for there to be order.

That’s by design.

You don’t have to like it. You can even hate it. But without such respect, only chaos and death ensue, as we are seeing all over the U.S. right now.

The Founders never envisioned communists like Mamdani taking over New York or LGBTQ cultists, Muslims, Satanists, or Indian beliefs becoming centralized in America while Christians are disrespected, shoved to the sidelines, and/or slaughtered in broad daylight like Charlie Kirk.

Our founding documents cannot withstand it.

So what are you going to do? There are only two options: (1) Cling to your idols of comfort while evil runs amok and plays fast and loose with the law and the land…or (2) fight back.

Vote, protest, pray, run for office. No matter the cost. Stand up for your God, your neighbors, and your country. Or you WILL lose everything.

Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house…we will serve the Lord.

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Over the past few days, it’s come to my attention that many think all pride is evil.

That notion is both dangerous and unbiblical.

Nowhere does God in Christ condemn all pride. Like with all matters, he is concerned with proper order, proper design, the proper directing of desires and focus where they are due. With himself at the top of the hierarchical ladder.

Before we get deep into details, let’s first consider what “pride” means in the English language (and what it also means in all other languages).

It is a universal term (as in, all languages have a “pride” and various ways of describing its kinds) and is the noun form of the adjective “proud,” which means “happy, joyous, ecstatic.” To take pride in something, then, means to find happiness, joy, ecstasy in it.

The term “pride” itself is innocuous (neutral), but it can be twisted beyond recognition by bad actors. The LGBTQ movement is a case in point. They adopted pride as their banner largely because homosexuals were called “gay” by 20th-century culture, which is another term for happy, since they always give off the air of flamboyance. But what they really engage in was and is the sin of self-pride, selfishness, self-obsession, self-aggrandizement.

The central sin of all sins.

When the Bible mentions the sin of pride, the latter is to what it refers. But there is another form of pride that is both holy and commanded from every Christian everywhere…

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Ancient Hebrew and Greek Terms for “Pride”

The ancient languages of the Bible use a wide range of terms to describe pride:

Hebrew Terms (Old Testament)

• Ga’avah (גַּאֲוָה) — Pride, haughtiness, arrogance. Common in Proverbs 16:18 (“Pride goes before destruction”), Psalm 10:2, and Isaiah 16:6.

• Ga’on (גָּאוֹן) — Pride, majesty (can be positive or negative), arrogance. Used in Leviticus 26:19, Jeremiah 13:9, Ezekiel 7:24, and Zechariah 9:6.

• Zadon (זָדוֹן) — Presumptuous pride, arrogance, insolence. Found in Psalm 119:21 and Proverbs 11:2.

• Rum / Ram (רוּם / רָם) — To be high or exalted (often implying haughty pride when used negatively). Examples include Psalm 101:5 (“haughty eyes”) and Isaiah 2:11-12.

Greek Terms (New Testament)

• Hyperephania (ὑπερηφανία) — Arrogance, haughty pride. Appears in Mark 7:22 as part of a list of evils that defile a person.

• Alazoneia (ἀλαζονεία) — Boastful pride, pretentious arrogance. Found in 1 John 2:16 (“the pride of life”) and James 4:16.

• Philautia (φιλαυτία) — Self-love, selfishness. Used in 2 Timothy 3:2 (“lovers of self”) in a list of end-times characteristics.

• Physioo (φυσίω) — To puff up, become conceited or proud. Frequently used by Paul, such as in 1 Corinthians 4:6, 4:18-19, and 13:4 (“love is not puffed up”).

As you can see, pride is used to translate many different words, not all bad. The central evil is self-pride (obsession with one’s self above all else). Self-worship. Also known as arrogance, haughtiness, insolence.

The latter was the central sin of the serpent in the Garden of Eden that damned creation. He sought to usurp the throne of God, to claim what did not belong to him, to violate the established order, and we all now struggle with the same sin because Adam and Eve listened to him, disobeyed God, and committed the same violation: Attempting to strip God of his rightful rule.

The implied opposite would’ve been taking pride in or boasting in God.

Paul’s Antidote to Self-Worship

It’s okay to find happiness and joy in God’s creation. After all, it was made for us. The Bible makes clear that the danger arises when the creation replaces the Creator, when other gods and idols are put above God Most High (there’s a reason those two are forbidden in the first of God’s Ten Commandments).

Christ himself reiterated the forbiddenness of idolatry when telling us that wherever our treasure is, there will our heart be also. After first telling us to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven (God).

In lockstep with his Lord and with Hebrew Scripture, Paul reframed Jesus’s words as “boasting in the Lord.”

The apostle argues for boasting in several places throughout his epistles, but the two key spots known by almost everyone are 1 Corinthians 1:31 and then 2 Corinthians 10:17. In each, he uses the Greek term kauchaomai, which means “to boast, to glory, to exult, or to take pride in something.” Both verses quote from Jeremiah 9:23-24:

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.’”

Jeremiah uses the Hebrew word halal, which means “to shine, to boast, to praise.” Imagine someone beaming with overwhelming joy and infatuation. Adoration. God says he wants that very attitude directed toward himself first and foremost. To be exulted over everything in the Israelites’ lives.

For the Corinthians, Paul ties the idea of exulting (taking pride in) God to Christ Jesus (God-made-flesh) and emphasizes the distinction between the sin of self-pride and the proper obedience of finding one’s own happiness in Christ, the Creator and eternal King, above all else. He, his desires, and his commands take precedence over and in our lives.

One is reminded of John the Baptist saying of Christ Jesus, “He must increase and I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Indeed, the act of elevating God in Christ to his proper place is the act of humbling ourselves to our proper place.

How to Become Humble

Humility was shunned in the Greco-Roman world because it was associated with slaves, the poor, and the lowliest of the low.

The only ones who had a somewhat positive view of humility were the Jews because of the commands in the Old Testament scriptures to elevate God Most High above all, and because of many verses praising the trait of self-emptying or self-lowering. But even for them, humility was not a central practice.

So, when Jesus commanded humility from all humans in the Sermon on the Mount, it was beyond shocking.

Here are the terms used in the original languages to describe humility:

Hebrew Terms (Old Testament)

• Anav / Anaw (עָנָו) — Humble, meek, lowly, afflicted. This is the most common term for humility in the Old Testament. Examples: Numbers 12:3 (“Now the man Moses was very humble”), Psalm 37:11, Psalm 147:6, Zephaniah 2:3.

• Anavah (עֲנָוָה) — Humility, meekness. Examples: Proverbs 15:33 (“The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom, and humility comes before honor”), Proverbs 18:12, Zephaniah 2:3.

• Shaphel (שָׁפֵל) — To be low, to humble, to bring low (verb form). Often used to describe God humbling the proud or the humble being exalted. Examples: Proverbs 29:23, Isaiah 2:9-12, Daniel 4:37.

Greek Terms (New Testament)

• Tapeinophrosyne (ταπεινοφροσύνη) — Humility of mind, lowliness of mind. This is the primary New Testament term for the Christian virtue of humility. Examples: Ephesians 4:2, Philippians 2:3 (“in humility count others more significant than yourselves”), Colossians 3:12, 1 Peter 5:5.

• Tapeinosis (ταπείνωσις) — Humility, lowliness, humiliation. Examples: Luke 1:48 (Mary’s song: “he has looked on the humble estate of his servant”), Philippians 3:21, Acts 8:33.

• Tapeinoo (ταπεινόω) — To humble, to make low, to bring low (verb). Examples: Matthew 23:12 (“Whoever humbles himself will be exalted”), James 4:10 (“Humble yourselves before the Lord”), 1 Peter 5:6.

• Prautes (πραΰτης) — Meekness, gentleness (often closely associated with humility). Examples: Galatians 5:23, Ephesians 4:2, Colossians 3:12, James 1:21.

Meekness and humility are associated (and both appear in the Sermon on the Mount) because they encompass the idea of self-control. Having a character that knows its own powers and weaknesses and keeps them arranged according to Godly design. Ever vigilant against sin.

Such is holy wisdom.

Foolishness is living however you see fit, without consideration for higher order. Consider what James has to say on the matter: “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (James 1:12-15)

The fool is the one who follows his own desires (i.e. LGBTQers and anyone else who makes idols of their desires), which inevitably leads to sin and death because all humans are depraved since the Fall, but the wise man is he who empties himself of himself and follows the desires of the Creator.

From Nothing to Something

Therefore, the idea that all pride is sin is pure hogwash. What the Bible really emphasizes is what the Catholic Church calls (and for the record, I am not Catholic; I’m just calling it like I see it) ordo amoris (order of loves). Living out the hierarchy of design God built into creation.

Arranging our desires in accordance with the desires and demands of the King. Making ourselves nothing so that he can make us into something. Thereby evading the trap of forming idols from our wants.

Put another way, you and I must become allegiant to God in Christ, our eternal King…in all ways…at all times.

Such allegiance entails submitting our bodies, minds, souls...everything...unto him forevermore. We will ourselves into clay so he can mold. So he can breathe into us new life and then re-fashion us into his image, making priceless gems from the rubble of sin and death.

All of the above is what it means to take pride in Christ Jesus, and it is not only biblical, it is our holy and sacred duty.

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This week there were some on X debating the usefulness of apologetics (defending the Christian faith), and I frankly don’t get it.

OF COURSE apologetics is useful. It’s intellectually fleshing out the faith you believe in. Learning its tangible truth. Christianity’s own firm link to reality.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there’s much more beyond theology and Christian living. If we only write on those topics, people start to believe Christianity is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Apologetics saved my life. When I was in undergrad, struggling with my faith at a liberal arts university, the verse that brought me back was 1 Peter 3:15:

“...in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect...”

It teaches that Christianity is much more than another faith system. It’s an intellectual powerhouse. A giant. The TRUE faith. And we are required to defend it in the here and now. That’s part of treating Christ as holy and honoring him in our hearts.

So you are commanded to defend your faith.

But that’s not the only reason you should. Here are 5 other reasons apologetics is necessary for every Christian, including you.

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1. Apologetics Helps You Get the Record Straight

Like it or not, there are heresies out there. Paul warns again and again that false teachers would come along and try to lead the church astray into false doctrines.

Well, those false teachers don’t openly announce themselves. They come like the serpent.

You know as well as I do (or you should) that Satan comes as an angel of light. The same goes for his ideas and his followers, and if you’re caught off guard, you can be easily pulled down into darkness, away from the true Light of the Savior.

2. Apologetics Makes Your Faith Real

When you learn to defend your faith, you align it with reality and it becomes more than just a mental state or something you do.

Atheists love to accuse us Christians of having blind faith. If we never defend our faith, then they are correct. Because we will have then never thought through the implications of it and tied it to the real world.

But we don’t have to bow to their labeling since our faith is the truth of the eternal King.

It is REAL, it is KNOWABLE, it is DEFENSIBLE.

3. Apologetics Lets You Venture Into New Horizons

My personal favorite reason for studying apologetics is it forces you to take your faith into new horizons.

Christians since the beginning engaged in other topics besides the faith. In fact, it was part of taking every thought captive for Christ, as Paul commanded the church in Corinth.

I discuss in my book The Atheist Conversion Manual (releasing July 18th, 2026) how early Christians embraced the tools of philosophy and saw the thinking of the world as an avenue through which to enrich their beliefs in God Most High through Christ Jesus.

Some, like Tertullian, were resistant because they were worried that using other thinking besides the Word of God would lead people astray. Into false doctrine. And to be fair, that possibility can’t be discounted. After all, Paul even warned it could happen.

But the tools of philosophy are logic and reason, and they don’t belong to the world. They belong to God. He wrote them into the universe, into its every atom.

Philosophy is also the ground of all other knowledge. Therefore, it’s inescapable. You will use reason to some extent whether you like it or not.

Everyone does.

Christ himself reasoned with everyone he spoke to. Especially the Pharisees. Every encounter he had with them was an intellectual jousting match. People weren’t just entertained while watching. They were also enlightened and transformed beyond measure.

In lockstep with the King, the early church realized that, since reason is embedded in reality and the Savior too reasoned, it was and is worth the risk to take hold of it to advance the truth of Christ. To acknowledge its own reality.

Then there’s the two most important reasons why apologetics matters…

Read more

Atheists on X are up to their dirty tricks again. So desperate, it’s laughable.

I came across this meme comparing theism to a man walking into a pitch-black cave looking for a black cat that isn’t there, then yelling “found it.”

It’s crass, unimaginative, and on closer inspection ends up defending theism, not atheism, because the atheist doesn’t understand its actual implications.

(1) It presumes the existence of both black cats and caves without evidence

(2) It depends on prior human experience that hasn’t been confirmed

Let’s dig into each of those points deeper, and I’ll show you what I mean.

In the Shoes of the Spelunker

The meme presumes the existence of both dark caves and black cats. Someone could argue both exist because they’ve been experienced, but the same argument applies to God.

Countless people throughout history claim direct experience of him. Atheists will tell you those experiences are bunk. But if experience alone fails to establish God’s existence, experience alone fails to establish the existence of black cats and caves too, yet nobody questions caves and cats.

Talk about double standards.

Atheists could counter with the prospect of repeatability, but that doesn’t solve the problem. There are witnesses throughout history who claim repeated contact with caves, cats, and God, so we’ve circled back to square one.

Maybe invisibility is a good argument? God is invisible to the human eye, so he can’t exist. Not quite. You see, gravity and the magnetic field are both invisible. All we see are their effects. Yet no one questions their existence.

Then there’s the problem of prior knowledge. For the atheist to declare the black cat isn’t there, he needs to not just know the cat exists somewhere in reality, he must also know its location and verify the specific cat in question is the actual cat rather than a lookalike.

There is good news. If a lookalike exists, that presupposes the existence of an original cat, otherwise it couldn’t look alike to the original.

Bad news? There are lots of lookalikes to God throughout history, so they too must presuppose an original, if we’re to be consistent.

All the above considered, the man searching the cave is the real honest investigator. Sure, maybe he forgot a flashlight. But at least he has the open mind to consider the possibility of the cat and the cave as a possible haven for it.

Who’s Actually Fumbling in the Dark

The man in the meme, representing the theist, is the one acting rationally. He treats human experience as a legitimate source of evidence, despite its flaws, and searches for the truth using the tools available to him.

The atheist relying on naturalism alone is the one batting around blind for an answer he already decided isn’t there.

Thinking, perception, intelligibility, even the reliability of reasoning itself…all illusions taken on blind faith.

Anyone familiar with philosophy may recognize the meme as a rehash of Bertrand Russell’s infamous teapot in space. He argued in 1952 that the exploration for God is akin to a teapot floating somewhere between the Sun and Mars, so tiny that not even the most advanced telescopes could find it. Russell argued the teapot might be there or it might not, but one doesn’t need to believe the person who says it’s there unless they can provide evidence.

Russell’s analogy runs into the same flaws as the black cat meme. In order to even get to the teapot in space, one has to first establish confidently the existence of teapots and space. One has to also establish with confidence the existence of the Sun and Mars and the reliability of evidence. Which can only be accomplished through human experience, the trustworthiness of which is what is being questioned.

The analogy also presumes the presence of only one witness. But what if there were multiple witnesses to the teapot being launched into space? Say at least three people saw it. Does the teapot between the Sun and Mars become more or less credible?

What if multiple witnesses saw a black cat enter the cave?

The core issue never changes. Naturalism always borrows from the order, logic, intelligibility, and reliable perception that make sense in a designed universe alone.

Strip out an intelligent source behind reality, and there’s no reason to trust senses, memory, or reasoning at all. For anything. Not even science.

The One Bizarre Movement That Gets It

Unfortunately, the LGBTQ movement grasps this contradiction better than regular atheists.

The underlying logic of the movement runs like this: If everything is unverifiable and human perception is untrustworthy, “natural” becomes whatever anyone decides it is, and one person’s word carries no more weight than another’s.

We can do whatever is right in our own eyes.

If there’s no transcendent design behind human nature, and no objective standard grounding what a body or a self actually is, then nobody has standing to call any self-identification wrong. Calling it wrong requires an objective “natural” that exists independent of personal preference. An actual cat, not a probable cat.

LGBTQers apply the existing philosophy honestly, all the way to its logical end, and arrive somewhere humans would rather not look.

• You’re a man who “loves” another man? Sleep around with him, pretend you’re married, adopt or buy a toddler and then abuse him together.

• You’re man who thinks he’s a woman? By all means, lop off your balls.

• You think you’re a pig? Go roll around in mud all day, eat beyond your appetite, fatten up so someone can sell you at the state fair or make bacon.

• You think you’re a dog? Spend all day outside, sniff and lick your butt, never bathe, and catch flees.

After all, there’s no reality except what we make, right? Gotta live your truth even if that means doing so at the expense of others. If anyone tries to contest your redefining of reality, claim victimhood, despite your choices being entirely self-directed and the consequences self-inflicted.

When God is off the table, nothing makes sense, nothing is reliable, anything goes, and humanity nosedives to hell.

No Brakes on the Way Down

Many cultures across history have recorded profound encounters with the divine that shaped ethics, laws, and civilization. These experiences have consistently pointed toward a personal reality greater than ourselves.

Dismissing them while accepting ordinary sensory data as reliable creates an inconsistent standard that undermines the atheist position from the inside out.

You can’t have your black cat and an absent God too.

Modern movements that reject fixed design in favor of self-defined reality are the product of ungrounded naturalist assumptions. Mental health struggles, disgusting perversions, bodily butchery, rampant child abuse, and generational decay become not only acceptable, but expected.

Naturalism offers no brakes against depravity because naturalism rejects transcendent accountability for rationality, experience, morality, and reality.

A worldview claiming intellectual superiority while standing on folding toothpicks doesn’t deserve one second longer in the spotlight. Time we kicked it into the dustbin of history.

You live in God’s world.

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We’ve entered “Pride” Month once again, and people are, as usual, going nuts celebrating. Although I will say it’s much different than prior years, because not as many corporations are jumping on the LGBT bandwagon.

Conservative Christian parents who saw the insanity preying on our children and said, “Not on my watch,” formed the resistance and brought “Pride” crumbling to its knees.

It’s still a battle, though no longer uphill, I think. The tide is shifting. But don’t mistake our covered ground as victory.

The woke everyone declared dead is alive and well. The movement changes face or goes underground until the chance arises for it to pop out its shriveled, ugly head. Clawing, spitting, foaming, gnashing, perverting…but never uplifting, healing, building, or renewing.

A claimed homosexual online (I forget his name, though I wouldn’t share it even if I remembered, out of respect) told me we tend to group LGBTQ together under one banner when only a few bad apples are causing problems. But the problem is and always has been the LGBTQ movement itself, the ideology, the behavior. From the LGB to the TQ and the endless viral strain of letters and numbers they dare weld to the sequence.

The alphabet mafia is acidic because the entire project is built on pride.

We all know how horrible and destructive pride is (at least, you should). The worst of all sins. The one that caused Adam and Eve to fall in the garden. Every evil, every wrong, every deceit, born of lies aimed at acquiring self-desire. Corrupting and corroding humans from the inside out.

Pride is the name, the foundation, the banner, and the battle cry. It breeds a culture of entitlement, self-destruction, and spiritual decay feigned as victimhood. No sin has caused greater harm to civilizations across the board.

They can cover it in glittery colors all they want. They’ve only succeeded in branding their religion as the disgusting, self-consuming monster we all know it is.

They Stole the Wrong Symbol

Satan was clever getting them to co-opt the rainbow, God’s own symbol of mercy and grace, twisted into a mark of faux superiority.

They unsheathed it like a shiny sword. With total confidence. Acquired for themselves special treatment nobody else receives because they believe the rest of the world must bow to them.

Ironically, they’ve branded themselves for destruction.

You and I know the rainbow is God’s symbol of grace, that he would never Flood the world again. And here’s the thing about grace: In Scripture, it lasts only for a season.

Evil is always held accountable.

The pre-Flood evildoers paid a global debt, and their fate bleeds through the rainbow. That omen now blares in every corner of the West, while the most innocent become LGBTQ victims.

So many children are ruined by their cult, and for what? To tickle the fancies of a deluded minority?

God has taken notice. Rest assured.

But even if he didn’t, their own worldview entails their cult should perish.

Anti-Evolutionary Pests

A fatal flaw for the LGBTQ movement is that it doesn’t line up with nature. At all.

Forget God for a moment and think about this:

LGBTQers are majority atheists who uphold evolution as gospel. Even those who claim some form of divine presence still tout Darwin, and Darwin’s foundational rule is survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest necessitates that the strong outlive the weak through random beneficial mutations via sexual reproduction over LONG stretches of time.

But LGBTQers can’t produce biological children of their own. Every avenue available to them, IVF, surrogacy, adoption, depends entirely on natural heterosexual reproduction. The movement relies on the very natural design its ideology undermines.

They’ve made themselves weak parasites who defy the natural order.

By the “laws” of evolution, a species producing no offspring with strong traits disappears from the gene pool. The strong, meaning heterosexual male and female humans building generations, thrive. The LGBTQers, the groomers of stolen kids, the non-reproducing subset, die.

Those are the rules.

This leaves two options. Either we (1) scrap evolution as a theory, which still offers no comfort to the LGBTQ movement because the only alternative is God created humanity as male and female to be fruitful and multiply together, or (2) we recognize the patent absurdity of an ideology failing to hold up in any way, secular or sacred.

Frankly, we should do both options. But society’ll never go for the former. Evolutionary theory is too entrenched.

So the latter is our course, and it should be executed without mercy. They’re due recompense for their wickedness.

No Action Goes Unanswered

Actions have consequences. A law built into the cosmos.

LGBTQers consider themselves the primary judges of truth, and they pretend to decide for all what is normal or good and what must be destroyed, while also maintaining truth is fluid or culturally determined.

Fluidity. A multitude of colors compressed into a single unity.

You’re meant to believe humans are the same and just have to come together. Disagree and become a target of their rage. Their cult brands anyone a threat who stands outside or opposes their agenda.

• Trust

• Accept

• Affirm

• Defend

• Celebrate

Or else…

Communism with pretty colors.

Twisted desires produce twisted behavior. The alphabet mafia built for itself a world of delusion, and within that delusion, they justify the most demented horrors imaginable. Sexual diseases, sterilization advertised as a cure, kids bought and sold like props, confused souls ripped apart from the inside out.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Whatever any of us does affects those around us, nature, the entire cosmos, and ripples into the future for better or worse.

Evil corrupts each second it’s allowed to stand. When we ignore it, or worse, identify with sin and make it a social idol, death and misery boil and infect. The West has suffered more degradation, dishonor, destruction, and debauchery than at any other time in recent memory because of the rot wrought by pride.

We’ve tried to play God too long or sat on the sidelines while demons run amok. The consequences are catching up.

This is our only chance to repent.

The Time is Now

Stand strong, Christian parent. Fight on. Because there’s still hope.

God continues to extend grace. For now.

The LGBTQ cult marked themselves for destruction, denies nature, and only drains the life from every body, mind, and soul. We’re never should’ve put up with them from the start, but we certainly shouldn’t now.

The demons overreached, we took notice, we fought, and judgment was delayed. Victory can still be ours.

We’re already winning. This is the worst “pride” month in the U.S. the LGBTQers have had in a long time, and it’s only gonna get worse for them because they’ve overstepped too many times. Came after our kids and our livelihoods so they could celebrate their damnable, disgusting, unnatural, vile, decrepit perversions at our expense.

No more!

We must, have, and will continue to expose how destructive this ideology is until it becomes an embarrassment in the history books.

Humanity’s future hangs in the balance.

There won’t be another opportunity. Either their ideology is wiped out for good or we are.

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This past week, I was told sticking to creation ex nihilo (from nothing) and using the Big Bang to do so is straw-manning.

Atheists are so confident the Big Bang doesn’t show nothing-to-something they practically accosted me on X when I dared say otherwise.

Well, it just so happens they’re all wrong, and I think it’s because atheists don’t understand what Christians mean when we say creation ex nihilo.

Prior to the beginning there was God and nothing else. Whatever could be contained in God as the eternal standard is what was. The immaterial or spiritual.

He was, is, and always will be because he has no beginning and no end. Therefore, the only something was God and his perfect nature, the ground of all being.

Ex nihilo, then, describes the formation by God of the tangible thingness of the objective material universe. From no thing to some thing.

And when we examine the Big Bang, that’s precisely what we find.

Cosmologists have only been able to measure up to what’s known as the Planck era. A split-second sliver in time where all space, time, and matter came into existence. Which means, whatever was before was spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Dispossessed of what we could consider tangible thingness.

In this article, you and I are going to walk together through what’s known by cosmologists, the theories atheists have provided to explain the pre-Planck state of reality, and determine why God’s miracle of creation ex nihilo remains the reigning champion of explanations for the existence of the cosmos.

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First A Word On Cosmology

Cosmology isn’t an exact science, and atheists tend to gloss over this.

The field rests on imaging of space, interpretations of photographs and video data, and the application of mathematics, all of which require the tools of logic and reason rather than direct observation.

Empirical method, by definition, requires direct observation, controlled testing in a lab, model-building, interpretation of results, and the ability to repeat experiments. The study of cosmology is only indirectly observable, able to be modeled, and capable of interpretation, but it can’t be tested in a lab or repeated…with the exception of samples collected from other nearby planets. But the latter sample-testing only tells us how our solar system is now, not how it was in the past or what other solar systems are like.

Therefore, it’s more accurate to label cosmology rigorous philosophy employing scientific tools.

Does that mean cosmology can’t be trusted? Absolutely not.

But almost every finding in the field is filtered through interpretation. Again, without repeatable testing. Cosmologists interpret the findings of other cosmologists, who interpreted the findings of those before them, and so on and so forth.

The whole shebang gets more complex when you realize all cosmological theories are unfalsifiable in the sense of empirical study. Because they’re dealing with the proposed history of the universe.

What this means for you is models are highly speculative, can be wrong, require revisions, and, even then, can still become entrenched via broad academic biases, which is what happens for materialist explanations (those that deny immaterial or spiritual realities) of the Big Bang.

As a reminder, here is what cosmologists, both materialists and intelligent design advocates, broadly agree on:

Spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Write those three words down, because every atheist alternative hypothesis has to contend with what they mean.

Keep all this in mind as we walk through their explanations against creation ex nihilo.

1. Stephen Hawking Needs an Architect

Stephen Hawking proposed the pre-Planck state consists of imaginary “content.” Specifically, imaginary numbers.

Imaginary numbers are hypotheticals, potentialities, represented by the lowercase letter i. Their actuality, as in their real existence, is established only by solving complex equations.

So, they represent possibility, not fact.

The strength of Hawking’s hypothesis is its having acknowledged the possible and produced a working cosmological model for the universe.

But it suffers from an insurmountable weakness. It doesn’t answer the question of what came before the Big Bang.

Since potentialities are not actualities, they’re an effective nothing. You run into the enduring question of how the actual and tangible came from the abstract intangible.

Also, what Hawking’s framework describes is a pre-Planck state made entirely of information. A blueprint encoding the instructions needed to assemble the universe. And blueprints or programs aren’t self-existent. Such specified information, by all we’ve observed in this universe, comes from minds. From designers. From programmers.

Therefore, Hawking’s model, by its own logic, implies a Mind behind the pre-Planck state. Hawking spent much of his career resisting this conclusion, but his model points there regardless.

Atheist proposals only get stranger from here…

2. Source?!!!

Some atheists have proposed energy as the answer to the pre-Planck riddle. They say energy is eternal and serves as the uncaused foundation of everything.

As you’ve surely guessed, problems abound.

First, we don’t know energy is eternal. What we know is that energy is neither created nor destroyed within our observable universe.

It IS however generated, and generation requires sources.

In our cosmos, those sources are material forces functioning as emitters.

• Solar energy traces to the sun.

• Hydroelectric energy traces to water-fueled power.

• Light energy traces to solar bodies and other heat-emitting sources.

• Gravitational fields and magnetic fields are forces tied to physical bodies (planets, asteroids, stars, comets, etc.).

Every form of energy ever studied has a source. So, to assert that energy is eternal means asserting an eternal Source. And proposing that Source to be nothing doesn’t work because a nothing-source is just nothing.

Beyond the source problem, eternal energy runs into the issue of infinite regress: an unending chain of causes with no beginning. A chain with no beginning never starts, which means nothing ever changes.

Especially in the case of inanimate matter or forces.

Energy has no agency. Energy doesn’t decide, initiate, create, move, or act on its own. Energy just is. An infinite chain of impersonal, non-agent energy would therefore remain infinite, impersonal, non-agent energy.

But atheists don’t want to fess up to that flaw because of the implied resolution.

The only category of thing ever observed producing, creating, and changing is sentient agents. So the eternal source of energy, if you follow proper methods of observation, has to be eternal, immaterial, personal, and sentient.

Or…you know…God.

But what about black holes? Do they solve the riddle of the Big Bang without God?

3. Swirling Vortex of Death

The third hypothesis materialists love suggests the universe originated from a black hole.

Pop science and science fiction have given this idea enormous exposure. As soon as I started this section, you thought of films like Star Trek and Interstellar where black holes are wormholes jumping through or twisting spacetime.

Such portrayals might fly in science fiction, but the reality of black holes is much different.

A black hole is a rip in the cosmos caused by catastrophic gravitational collapse from a dying star. Black holes pull everything within reach into permanent nothingness. They ERASE matter, energy, space, time…anything…including themselves. Like demonic vacuums to hell.

Time dilation theories have kept fictional representations of black holes alive, like revolving universe models and the multiverse theory. Also popular in fiction but found nowhere in reality.

However, let’s play devil’s advocate and say multiple universes do exist.

In that case, the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t explain how all these universes are popping into existence, since each would have its own pre-Planck state if it began. What came before remains a mystery.

And black holes only muddy the water.

Since a black hole destroys existence itself, none has ever been witnessed making anything. Also, for a black hole to form, gravity must exist first, and gravity depends on material sources. But:

• No material existed prior to the Planck epoch

• No material means no gravity

• No gravity means no black hole

Hence, we have an unresolvable chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Rendering a black hole implausible as the origin of our universe.

Atheists have one more cop-out, though…

“I Don’t Know” Isn’t An Option

One particular atheist thought he was clever in my comment section by saying, “We don’t know what happened prior to the Big Bang, and neither do you. Get used to it.”

Agnosticism. Say “I don’t know” and be comfortable leaving the question open.

But that’s intellectual laziness.

Agnosticism feels like neutrality but is really indifference, and indifference seeks no answers because it’s indecisive. If pushed into a corner, indifference would curl up and die like a weak-skinned armadillo.

Lack of curiosity and adventure kills.

Imagine our ancestors had collectively settled for indifference on the hardest questions. Nothing would’ve been accomplished. Barbarians would still govern every corner of the earth with minimal technology and zero civility. The same unanswered questions of our origin and purpose would hang over every generation with no forward progress.

You and I are taught progress matters. Are we just tossing that out the window now?

The reason some atheists suggest embracing agnosticism is because they don’t like where the answers lead. The destination. They would rather stay locked up in a comfortable, lukewarm materialist cage than consider the option of God Most High.

Indifference is where knowledge dies.

Discoveries, on the other hand, are driven by creative decisions by those who believe there’s a destination and are ready to accept whatever that destination may be. By people who refuse to accept “I don’t know.”

Lewises and Clarkes roughing and toughing wild terrains with sleepless nights, endless imagination, insatiable hunger for the truth, and a willingness to accept and overcome whatever costs may arise.

So far, the people in history with the biggest spine for adventure, who have made the greatest contributions ever known, have been Christians because we know the Maker, love him, and crave to learn more and more about the incredible universe he’s created.

Ball’s in God’s Court

Since the alternatives have been examined and found wanting, only one option remains: A spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal, intelligent, powerful God made the cosmos with purpose and intelligibility. Built a readable universe for the sentient creatures inside it (us) to explore, study, comprehend, and relish.

By design.

Why is anything legible at all unless the intent was for someone to understand the creation? The universe didn’t have to be ordered. Laws of mathematics didn’t have to describe reality with precision. Human minds didn’t have to be capable of understanding cosmic structure.

The fact these things align points toward a Mind who made the cosmos to be known. Especially by those minds mirroring his own Mind. His own imagers.

Atheists rage and resist said conclusion with ferocious energy like rabid dogs because a God fitting the description derived from cosmological study matches the God of the Bible. The Christian God. Christ Jesus. Whom many have despised with fierce and genuine passion since his incarnation into human history.

Like Greco-Roman pagan counterparts, they hate the eternal King because a personal, transcendent his existence means good and evil are real. Moral obligations are non-negotiable. And since no one defines stable ethics on personal grounds, we can’t just do whatever we want. We don’t get to be God.

Humanity violated God’s law in the Garden of Eden, and the consequence was sin and death unleashed into a creation. Chaos into order. Nothing into something. Entropy. The slow erosion of everything, perverting and consuming from within, starting at the depths of the human soul. Consumed by pride and coveting his holy throne.

A miracle made the cosmos. A curse slowly kills it.

And from this curse, we all need a Savior.

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You’ve been here before, your friend holding an innocent captive behind the blackened barrel of a silver Glock. His father’s. Faint rings of white powder crust around his nostrils like crystalized sugar, and his shoulders sag. It takes all his energy to lift his right arm, the pistol snagging gravity like a bell weight.

But he stands firm, the clerk mesmerized by those glazed eyes.

He switches hands and bumps your shoulder. “I told you he would cry, Hopscotch.” He laughs. “See.”

Hopscotch is your nickname. They gave it to you the first day, after fists beat you to the ground. The way your arms protruded and your legs were in an upside-down V made it look like the children’s game. Trevor said it was honorable, but you don’t feel it. It’s drowned out by the streams of water running the clerk’s face.

He’s Arab…or something like that. Maybe Indian. The sun-dried brown skin says so. He has yet to speak. He sinks back against display cases of cigarettes and tobacco cans, gaze fixed on the threat. He reached under the counter earlier. There’s a silent alarm sign outside. You don’t know if he tripped it, but the door won’t budge.

“Hey…Jimmy…man,” you say. “Maybe we should let him go. Just get outta here.”

He scoffs. “Come on, man. Don’t you wanna be in?” He licks his lips and wipes the sweat out of his eyes. “Jeremy was clear, man. We go back without em, he’ll hang us dry.”

Jeremy. Darkest dealer in Detroit. Some call him Fuller, the name of the street he operated from in high school, out of an abandoned shack with F*** OFF written on the side. He parks his carcass in a rundown gray wood slum east of downtown. A suburban block littered with lowly souls enduring the torture of pre-afterlife. Drugs go quick in those parts, the bodies flooding in and out of that crapshoot apartment like an assembly line. How he keeps things discreet no one knows, but some suspect it’s the abortion clinic just down the street. The pro-lifers seem to draw attention with their protesting like a bear tramping through a Dollar Tree.

Trevor got you and Jimmy stuck with Fuller. Said he had connections, could get you anywhere you wanted to go. You were wary at first, though. Trevor is really good for nothing except wiping his own pearly white cheeks, though he probably even needs a guidebook for that. But for a teenage kid whose single mother battles stage three cancer and can’t see her own reflection in the mirror, much less her only son, the idea of going somewhere was salivating to you.

Fuller sized you up that first day. Wasn’t sure a puny, Caucasian runt from San Francisco could run with the big dogs. After you survived the barrage of fists (his first test), he’d pinned you to the floor and shoved his shiny revolver between your split lips. This is what life is, kid, he’d said. The doorway to death. All it takes is a little…

He pulled the trigger. Your heart cracked.

He rolled off you, laughing hard, holding his sides. When done, he helped you up and patted your back. You got guts, kid, unlike the rest of my worms.

He sent you to the drugstore a block down, claiming the owner had failed to pay up. You weren’t sure exactly what that meant, but you agreed anyway. He promised you entry into his clique as a bagman. Said he had one on every corner of the city. They collected fees and were the best of the best, so you had to be…if you wanted him to get the word out to all his larger clients. Wealthy brokers who dealt under the table to protect their billion-dollar name tags. They were always inquiring about young protégés like you.

He only let Jimmy come along because you asked. Thought he was a danger to the operation but let it slide. Jimmy asked too many questions and seemed like the sort who would back down from confrontation, but Fuller didn’t know him like you do. It was his idea to get the Glock, his idea to walk inside and point it right at the clerk’s face. You were the coward, but you weren’t going to admit that. Not a chance in hell.

“Man, this is ridiculous. This guy hasn’t done–”

“You chickenin out on me?”

You shake your head. “I’m just saying, Jimmy–”

He points the gun at your forehead, periodically glancing at the clerk to make sure he stays put. “Get over the counter and pop the register.” His breath is fast. “Don’t you dare ruin this for us!”

You comply, reluctantly. You put your right foot on a box of candy bars and push up. They crackle under your shoe and go flat like flounders. You can picture the pieces squishing against each other, shattered. But when you look down, they still have their puff, only fractured, like your arm when you fell off your ten-speed in seventh grade.

You land beside the clerk. He’s watching you, wide-eyed. The dark stain on his blue uniform is growing. You want to tell him it’s okay, that everything will be fine, but you can’t. Not with Jimmy. With him, you never know.

Your mother never liked him. Told you he was bad vibes. But since she was always wrapped up in that mystical crap, you paid her no mind. You should’ve listened, but you couldn’t let him go.

You’ve known Jimmy since Pre-K. He was the wily sort then but never got into much trouble. It was the years that changed him, brought out his worst. His father beat his mother bad. Jimmy would come to school sharing stories with you of how he’d thrown her into the cabinets or slammed her head into the table or smashed her jaw with his wooden slugger. You asked him why she never got out of it, and he said they were coupled, whatever that meant. He just stared at the cherry trees flanking the playground, kicking rocks.

The fights always got worse. And when his father lost his job at the insurance company…

You and Jimmy were sophomores then. It was late. You heard the knock at the door, but not until it became banging. Your mother was yelling, rambling on about the ruckus in the neighborhood and how the black family next door (she called them Negros, but you never liked that word) could never keep it down. But when you opened the door, it was Jimmy. His face was covered in tears, shining as if it waxed. He was sobbing, heavy gasps that forced him to lean against the doorframe for balance.

He fell into your arms and you pulled him to the couch. He lay there heaving, water darkening the fabric, while your mother ran over, frantic and yelling Is he hurt? Where’s he hurt? You saw the first-aid kit in her hands.

You turned him over. It took effort, but he slowly rolled, still shaking. What happened? you said.

He sucked in deep. The slobbery panting of an overworked hound.

She’s dead, he said. He shot her.

Your stomach sank as he told the story…

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God is real. Angels are real. But we’ve been conditioned to ignore them.

My wife and I live two hours away from my family and used to spend every other weekend at my grandparents’ house. Have family dinners, go to the beach, visit theme parks. Normal stuff. Before our son was born.

Boring. Yet bliss.

We’re starting to get back into a similar rhythm since our son is old enough, but that’s beside the point.

One night in 2018, we experienced something we still can’t explain to this day. Something which can only be accounted for as supernatural.

All was well. We had the car packed up. Said our goodbyes.

My wife wanted to drive home since I’d driven there, and I obliged. Buckled snug into the passenger seat. Waved to my mom, dad, sister, and grandparents, who were still standing on the porch.

Suddenly they started to panic. Tried to get our attention. Because a danger was close neither of us saw.

I heard the car click into gear and my wife place her hands on the wheel, as a rumble zipped close from behind. She was about to pull out parallel into an oncoming SUV.

I went to warn her, but she didn’t budge. She must’ve seen it, I thought. Waited.

Then she turned to me and said, “Did you touch my shoulder and tell me to stop?”

Confusion set in. I hadn’t even known about the SUV until my family warned me. And I was looking the other way until it blew past us.

When I told her no, she went pale as a ghost. Here’s what she said…

Angel in the Backseat

After putting the car in gear, a hand touched her shoulder. She felt it press down, clear as day. Then someone whispered in hear ear. “Wait.”

She felt a warm draft like breath on her cheek. No one else was in the car but us and our little dog in the back seat.

She froze. Just long enough for the danger to pass.

Had she merged, she would’ve died right there. Our dog would have died. And I would have been severely injured.

Atheists want you to think my wife is delusional, imagined the hand and voice, or deliberately lied to me. Because they can’t comprehend anything beyond this mortal coil. Refuse to.

But that night still haunts us to this day.

We spent the whole drive back in shock and silence.

While a believer in Christ, my wife was not one to accept the supernatural without question. She grew up a skeptic in a family of skeptics.

My family was more open-minded, so I’ve always been more accepting of the possibility of the spiritual. But what happened puzzled us both for weeks.

We sifted through the usual answers.

1. Hallucination (but it was too real).

2. Conscience (but she was thinking about the drive home, sad to leave family again, running through tasks she needed to get done for the next day, she didn’t even notice the SUV).

3. Stranger (but there was no one else in our car; we did a thorough search, and even if someone was there, they couldn’t have gotten out without us seeing them).

Eventually, we realized any attempt to explain the hand and voice was pointless unless it involved the supernatural. Anything else required too much preposterous blind faith.

It had to be an angel.

What a Great Cloud of Witnesses

I shared this story yesterday on X and to Allegiant Faith newsletter subscribers. Worried the atheists would swarm. Mock. Slander. Browbeat. Demean me and my wife as they always do.

The exact opposite took place.

1.4 million views

9.5k likes

832 shares

467 comments

And growing. Most of them positive.

Some atheists showed up, but the majority of the responses between X and our newsletter community were people with similar encounters. Stories not easily explained away.

• ALadyofHistory said: “When my son was 19 he was driving home when a length of wire from an old fence wrapped around his car tyre. The car flipped over a drain and ended up on its roof, when my husband and I arrived on the scene they were just getting him out. I was sure he would have serious injuries. He told me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital that he felt Joe wrap his arms around him the moment the car flipped. Joe was my uncle who died in 1948. My son walked away with a scratch on his hand.”

• DandyDonnie said: “Many years ago driving home from work I was rocking to the radio when a voice clear as day said ‘put your seatbelt on’ not once but twice. I never used a seatbelt ever in my life. I reached for the seatbelt and buckled it. I remember thinking how weird wearing the seatbelt felt. A few minutes later my car was destroyed from the backend. I didn’t think about it until after I left the ER that night. To this day I still get chills thinking about that voice.”

• Funsize Hurricane said: “I was a young college grad and newly married back in early 2004. I had a very vivid dream about my beloved grandfather who had passed in early 2003. This man was my person. Losing him destroyed me. He very clearly sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed at my chest and said “You need to get that fixed girlie”. He always talked like that. I woke up immediately and told my husband. My first heart surgery was completed in 2004. I was only 28. He had 5 heart attacks, a ruptured aneurysm, fought in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and had been shot 3 different times. COPD took him from us in his late 80s. The man was tough as nails. I knew he meant it in my dream. He was right. I’ve only had one other dream of him, and it was shortly after I almost died in the ER prior to my second heart surgery at 48. He told me to quit being stubborn and fix it. He was right again. Maybe he is my guardian angel?”

• Agora Radio said: “I was walking fast while talking to myself with my head down about to step in front of speeding bus when something grabbed the back of my collar and pulled back onto the curb. When I turned around there was no one there. I caught a momentary glimpse of woman who disappeared.”

• Cole - Modern Dad Survival () said: “My wife and daughter had a similar situation about 4 years ago. They had a green light and started to go at the stop light. The car ignored… yes, it ignored my wife’s foot on the pedal. They don’t really do that. There was no mechanical symptom indicating a misfire/engine lugging or other similar system failure. No check engine light popped on after it or anything…nothing at all. About 2-3 seconds into her confusion, a massive utility vehicle, bucket truck level or higher (10k+ lbs) blew through the light at full speed. As soon as the utility truck was gone, she out her foot on the pedal and it behaved as normal. The car was only about 4 years old, low miles, no maintenance issues, and in excellent operating condition.”

• Chris Larson () said: “4 years ago next month I was in the midst of a multi car crash. Busy street at a higher traffic time, and kids decided to cross the street there and not go up to the light and crosswalk. I was the 3rd car back in the line that stopped. I looked up into my rear view mirror and saw a car coming up fast, braced myself and simply said “Lord, protect us!” That car smashed into the car behind me and took out his own right front quarter panel, and took off. He pushed her car hard into mine, taking out her front left quarter panel. Her car was totaled from the damage. My car… a 2” scratch and barely a dent with that. We didn’t move the cars at all. When the police arrived, one officer kept looking at my car and me, eyes wide, said it wasn’t possible, and that my guardian angel had to be standing between the cars as mine should be badly damaged too. I agreed with the officer and said a prayer of thanks.”

The stories are never-ending. And I fast realized God is alive and active everywhere. Seen, felt, heard, adored…awesome in power and love. People have witnessed his glory and grace.

And atheism is dying.

Atheists, with their obsession over strict empiricism and observation have lost touch with reality. They cry out that the five senses are all that matter, but they don’t mean it.

How quickly they dismiss personal encounters of the divine the moment you claim to have felt the presence of God.

They rather live in closed-minded denial…

Pure Skepticism or Closed-Minded Denial?

Feelings alone are not substantial proof of anything. Granted. Human experience is subjective, so personal claims should never be accepted without scrutiny.

But the atheist’s knee-jerk denial of spiritual experiences, without any serious study of the vast historical record or any attempt at open-minded examination…that’s blind, cultic opposition.

From ancient times to the present, millions of people across every culture and continent have reported encounters with something beyond the physical universe. People of varying degrees of intelligence, from the most illiterate to the wise philosopher. Moments of a clear sense of divine guidance in crisis, verifiable visions filled with knowledge that couldn’t have been gained without otherworldly revelation, transformative encounters with higher beings, and so much more.

Near-death experiences have added another layer, documenting cases in which people report vivid, coherent awareness during periods of clinically measurable brain inactivity. Details later verified by outside sources.

• A woman on an operating table sees a sticker on the upper side of a fan blade while under anesthesia

• A clinically brain-dead man at an accident scene recalls the exact conversation of his paramedics when revived

Such stories are common and inexplicable. Not by nature alone.

The sheer volume of these accounts makes fabrication or mistake an implausible universal explanation. Witnesses are separated by centuries, cultures, landmasses, and oceans. No way to coordinate their stories.

Blanket dismissal becomes absurd.

And all roads point to God…

All Things Are Possible with God

Serious examination of spiritual experiences doesn’t require abandoning reason but applying the same empirical curiosity atheists claim to value. Without limit.

When curiosity operates freely, the cumulative record of unnatural encounters that transform lives becomes a wealth of research into the possibility of the beyond.

They would prefer to call you and me liars and idiots than deal with God. It’s all about rebellion.

The Christian perspective welcomes questioning because the material and the transcendent are part of the same picture. That our universe began to exist and must have a Cause proves one miracle already occurred. Making every other claim to miracles possible.

And the only way to find out is by treating encounters as eyewitness stories until proven otherwise. Innocent until guilty.

My wife and I didn’t set out to face an angel. In fact, I didn’t face it. She alone felt the hand and heard the voice, but her face wasn’t that of a liar.

She looked like everyone who has experienced something that rocked them to their core. Completely altered how she sees the world. An event horizon. Dawning a new day. Through inescapable shock and awe. Something she knows beyond doubt was real and outside the bounds of nature.

I believe every word.

Because I know her, I know the astounding track record of miracle encounters in history, I know we didn’t come from nothing, I see the testimonies from you, and I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.

God is real. Angels are real. Stop ignoring them.

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Religion is integral to humanity. Your beliefs and how you react to them are inseparable.

Your entire life is driven by thought and reaction, and you craft rites and rituals based on your beliefs.

You can’t escape religion.

Yet many bend themselves into pretzels trying to separate religion from reality. When you look deeper, though, you quickly learn religion is more complex than realized.

Definitions exist to distinguish, categorize, and explain identities. And the best definition for religion that fulfills all three roles is:

Religion is worldview put into practice.

Atheists hate this definition because (1) they think it’s not specific enough and (2) it keeps them from elevating their own beliefs above everyone else’s.

It also doesn’t let them elevate themselves above everyone else as if they have a monopoly on intelligence.

And, to be fair, scholars have not settled the definition of religion. They continue to debate and debate and debate. I know because I’m a graduate of religious studies from a liberal arts university. I also went to seminary. And I’ve heard every definition of religion in the books.

Let me tell you, it’s all a bunch of goodwill conversation devolved into muddled confusion and nonsense.

The ONLY clear theme that keeps rearing and bucking in every debate is worldview put into practice.

From my definition you can go further and distinguish between personal religion (individual beliefs/systems around which personal rites and rituals are formed and practiced) and collective/organized religion (communal beliefs/systems accepted by a crowd around which rites and rituals are formed and practiced).

Yet “worldview put into practice” still acts as the foundation.

And rather than befuddle, religion as worldview put into practice provides the best available understanding because of what we already know about the world and human psychology.

Everyone craves to and will worship something.

I state the above definition after years of thinking over the complexities scholars, both conservative and liberal, saw in the term “religion.” And I know it will help you grasp what religion is, why it’s everywhere, and why it matters to everyone, including you.

So let’s explore it deeper…

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Worldview is Destiny

Everyone has a worldview. You do. I do. It’s the collection of beliefs and preconceptions one uses to interpret reality.

No matter how much you might try to avoid having a worldview, such lenses are inescapable.

The wise man accepts this fact and keeps his worldview open to reshaping. Instead of attempting to do away with worldview, he considers available evidence and subjects his worldview to rigorous testing and re-testing.

If his worldview seems inadequate, he changes it to align with his findings. He does so repeatedly, even if that means discarding elements of his worldview he adores and hates parting with.

A fool clings to his worldview, his religion, regardless of counterevidence. And this applies to everyone, not just a select few. Anyone can become so obsessed with his worldview that he loses any sense of self-critique.

The practices one performs under his worldview (the choices he makes, his rites and rituals of worship) form his religion. And just like everyone has a worldview, everyone also has practices they perform in servitude to that worldview.

Some atheists have argued this means anyone who has an opinion is religious. But that’s not the case.

Anyone who has an opinion is a believer in something. So, the existence of opinions proves we can’t escape beliefs. But only worldviews (the systems of beliefs/preconceptions we each use to analyze reality) about the cosmos (its origin, how it works, and our purpose within it) that lead to corresponding behaviors, rites, and rituals in accordance with said beliefs qualify as religious.

We all meet that criteria in some way, shape, or form, which means...

…everyone is religious.

Despite how obvious all the above is, atheists still revolt...

The Divinity Mistake

Atheists refuse to call religion “worldview put into practice” for several reasons.

One is because they falsely assume religion must involve a deity or the supernatural. But that’s also not the case. There are plenty of examples of religion not involving gods or the supernatural.

Here are three primary world religions from history without gods or the supernatural:

Buddhism

The central tenets of Buddhism are about escaping the world. One sheds off earthly existence to escape suffering and find peace, though meditation and willful detachment. The result is merging with the eternal energy or Nirvana, also known as “enlightenment.”

No gods are involved. In fact, Buddhism suggests that true enlightenment transcends the supernatural, as in the Hindu gods and religion.

Confucianism

Confucius constructed an honor cult. He argued Heaven is sacred moral principle, not supernatural, and one attains Heaven by practicing the 5 virtues: sincerity, wisdom, propriety, righteousness, and benevolence.

The gods, if they exist, offer no guidance and no salvation.

Taoism

Adherents of Taoism sought to unite themselves with the Tao, which was defined as an endless state of flux underlying reality, similar to Buddhist Nirvana.

The world and universe in Taoism are a relative and random illusion.

One becomes united with the Tao through meditation, astrology, qijong, feng shui, and internal alchemy. Cultivating the self and the Tao and seeking harmony were the end goal.

These examples all exclude the supernatural from their religion, yet people and scholars consider them among the chief religions of the ancient East.

Ergo, religion does not require gods or the supernatural.

But you know that doesn’t stop atheists. They still resist...

Just One Among Many

Another reason atheists refuse to accept religion as “worldview put into practice” is most of them think they’re the elite arbiters of reason. They pretend to hold a monopoly on factual knowledge.

To be considered a religion would, in their minds, link them to delusion.

Atheists, from this vantage, are immersed in an illusion of power they refuse to relinquish. Like Dorian Grey, they obsess over their feigned superiority, while suppressing truth. And whenever challenged, instead of dealing with the content of any proposed objections, most of the time their immediate reaction is to consider their opponents stupid or less educated.

An atheist who told me my definition of religion isn’t complex enough is a case in point. He wanted me to “educate myself.” Another one under a clip from an interview I did said I was “unusually stupid.”

Not only is that disrespectful, derogatory, and demeaning, it’s also what’s known as an ad hominem, attacking the person rather than the argument. A logical fallacy modern atheists enjoy immensely.

To be fair, the one who called me stupid did accompany his ad hominem with a meme dealing with my arguments, to which I responded. But afterward, when he continued to curse and demean me, I refused to go further.

Acting like animals is part of their rites and rituals because in their worldview, their collective religion, which relies heavily on naturalism or the theory of evolution, we humans are just animals.

Thankfully, we don’t have to play their games because atheists ARE NOT the arbiters of factual knowledge.

Philosophy and theology are where all other modes of knowledge originated. Factual knowledge began as belief. People tested beliefs logically with data, they regularly retested it, and at every level the findings had to be interpreted through the tools of logic and reason provided by philosophy.

Defining religion as “worldview put into practice” forces atheists to look at their portrait and deal with their poor choices.

Do you think they do that? No, they most certainly do not...

Denial

Pure and utter denial is another reason atheists don’t enjoy defining religion as “worldview put into practice.”

I encountered an example of such denial recently. An atheist said this:

“The important difference is that my ‘lack of belief in god’ is not the foundation of my worldview in the way that your belief might be for yours. Many Christians don’t seem to understand this. It’s just a thing I don’t believe, it’s not the anchor of how I see life”

The argument presented in this quote is quite common. Atheists honestly think they just “lack belief in gods.”

But all negatives have implied positive opposites.

Their negative “lack of belief in gods” is the opposite of the positive belief that “the gods are made-up fictions and the material universe is all that exists.”

There are no real atheists. Only materialists, or naturalists, as philosophers call them.

Since every negative is the opposite of a positive, everyone needs to prove every claim beyond a reasonable doubt to consider it factual knowledge. There’s no getting around a claim by stating, “It’s just a lack” or “You can’t prove a negative.”

The atheist above doesn’t understand how his own positive belief that the gods are made up and the material universe is all there is affects every single decision he makes. His interpretation of reality determines how he operates just as much as every other human on the planet.

He lives based on what he believes. Ergo, he is practicing his worldview, making it his personal religion, derived from the collective religion of atheism.

Still, atheists fight and gnash their teeth...

Nihilism

The last major reason atheists won’t acknowledge religion as “worldview put into practice” is because deep down they know there are serious flaws with their materialist worldview.

Materialism taken to its honest end leads to nihilism, the belief that nothing matters and when we die, that’s it. Poof. Gone.

The effects of nihilism are hopelessness and depression from lack of purpose and mission. Nihilism has eroded and destroyed more lives than any other belief on the planet because it’s amoral. If nihilism is true, then anything goes. It’s an every-man-for-himself world. Dog-eat-dog.

Most atheists realize if materialism is true and leads to nihilism, then one of them must be false because of how horrific an end nihilism is. So, they take one of two routes to cope:

Steal from God

Many adopt Christian morals and then claim a materialist world produced them through millions of years of human communal evolution.

Problem is, humans throughout the ages have never aligned on anything. Certain cultures think it’s good to eat other humans (still today), rape and pillage, and do any other number of heinous acts. And from a communal evolutionary perspective, if those acts work for those societies, then those acts are “good.”

So communal evolution is a very poor explanation for morality.

Also, “good” and “bad” are nouns, nominative, meaning they’re objects, and that is the case in every language. If they are objects, what are they? What specifically is being described?

Every offer from atheism to answer those questions has come up wanting.

Just the Brute Facts, Bro

Prominent figurehead atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins have taken the brute facts road by claiming that materialism and evolution are just brute facts, and you have to get over it.

Nietzsche was at least honest that nihilism is the end product of atheism, and it abhorred him. But he didn’t want God to exist, so he refused to recant from atheism.

Dawkins is also honest about nihilism, but he tries to play both sides. For him, atheism is true. But it’s also true that society needs Christianity and its moral principles to function and thrive.

In other words, Christianity isn’t true, but it IS good, if that makes any sense.

There’s another factor to consider with point two. “Just the facts, bro” is exactly the same as a Christian saying, “The Bible says it, so I believe it, and that settles it.”

Neither of the two routes provides any solid ground for atheism to stand on. Defense of the atheist position is merely deflected and/or dodged, while materialism and evolution are clung to as gospel.

And by stealing from God or saying, “It’s just the facts, bro,” atheists only prove that they follow a faith-based position. A religion.

Top of the Hill

Religion is worldview put into practice. That definition stands strong because it best incorporates all faith-based systems and their practitioners, is simple, and holds up to scrutiny.

As seen, objections to the definition have been offered from emotion and not by reason. Atheists don’t want religion to be worldview put into practice because then they can’t escape being grouped in with other religions and will be forced to admit they have no monopoly on factual knowledge. And to admit they are human interpreters just like everyone else.

Accepting the definition would also mean they must grasp with the deficiencies of their own position and provide adequate defenses in order to claim it true. They would rather mock and deride opponents, cancel them, or force them to defend their own positions, while pretending atheism is self-evident or “just a lack of belief.”

Nevertheless, they have a worldview: the view that the gods are made up fictions and the material universe is all that exists. And they live their lives according to their worldview (unless they steal from God). This means they are religious, whether they like it or not. And they must abide by the same standards of testing claims as all other faith systems.

Otherwise, they should never be taken seriously.

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I want to tell you a story.

A shop owner from a small town decided he wanted to expand his business. His popularity exploded among friends and family, and they all agreed it would be a good idea to branch out. See if he could help others with his wares.

What he offered was so life-changing, it just had to be shared.

He read online about a neighborhood in a nearby big city with people he knew would love his product. But it was in a shady place. Gangs. Endless crime. You name it.

Seemed every other day there was a fresh tale of some poor soul ripped from this world too soon.

Still…he had to try. He knew his product would change hearts and minds. Revolutionize life itself.

So he set off in a rusty rental van, filled to the brim with his gift of life. Crossed hills and plains of green, gold, sapphire, and orange. Little traffic. Only beauty and fragrance for miles.

Until he arrived…

The towering monoliths of the city swallowed the horizon. Color and beauty sapped away at the first gray city block. Somehow all light hit the buildings and streets and eroded into shadow.

He made it only two intersections before an envoy of faded brown sedans circled and blocked his van. Eight big men with bitter glares and splintery bats circled like starved vultures.

He heard the rough roar of the trailer door right as scabby hands yanked him into the stale eve and threw him to the concrete.

They beat and kicked

He recoiled and fought

But they kept going until the fighting stopped.

He lay there. A still, blooded corpse.

It took all of ten minutes. The bandits peeled away with his wares, leaving the merchant to rot.

Why is what they did wrong?

You might think that a simple question.

• “Because they killed a man”

• “They stole and murdered”

• “They preyed on a helpless, innocent guy”

Responses like that are probably flooding your mind. But those are just explanations of what happened.

Why is what they did wrong? What is wrong? What is right?

We all know what the men did is abhorrent, but few in this age can justify why. Because without God, there’s no standard.

In an atheist world…anything goes.

There MUST be an objective morality beyond us. And here’s why Christianity is the only worldview that can provide objective right and wrong…

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The Curious Case of Subjective Madness

If morality lacks an objective anchor, as atheism implies, then strong condemnations of others become nothing more than personal preferences.

Humans make up right and wrong. There’s no stable definition. No foundation. Only a never-ending slippery slope upon which we are driven and tossed by the wind.

As I’ve written elsewhere, atheists get one thing right: Value is in the eye of the beholder. The problem isn’t acknowledging subjectivity. It’s stopping there. If humans are the sole makers of morality, based on shifting value judgments, then ethics is built on ground no one controls. Anyone with enough power can redefine what is right to suit his own agenda.

The men who attacked the merchant were just dancing to their DNA. Living their true selves. Following their hearts. Carpe diem!

Without a transcendent standard, ethical claims reduce to expressions of emotion, cultural preference, raw power dynamics, or shifting social consensus. And cannot be challenged. Because rights are mere privileges granted or revoked by those who hold control, leaving the weak without protection.

You can appeal to justice or human dignity, but your appeals will have no force. Because competing opinions don’t equate to binding obligations. What one generation deems good, another deems evil, and there’s no end to the madness.

A secular world is a dog-eat-dog world. Where people become mere animals.

Atheists don’t see a problem with that because in their minds we’re just animals anyway. “Survival of the fittest!” they shout. But their view doesn’t lead to any good.

You see it everywhere online. They post memes about how Christianity is allegedly responsible for all evil while in the same breath cursing, spitting, foaming at the mouth, raging, and calling anyone with beliefs contrary to atheism idiots.

History shows that, given the opportunity, they’ll happily become the gangsters in the faded brown vans…

Take a Look at that Body Count

The worst outcomes of subjectivism have not played out in religious societies. They’ve played out in explicitly atheistic ones.

Because leaders and movements rejecting fixed moral norms have repeatedly justified widespread harm by redefining ethics according to ideological whims.

The death toll from communism and socialism stretching from the French Revolution through the end of the 20th century numbers in the tens of millions. Jack Prosobiec and Joshua Lisec summarize the death-toll estimates in their book Unhumans:

• French Revolution: 100,000

• Hatian Revolution: 345,000

• Soviet Union: 20,000,000

• Spanish Civil War: 500,000

• Maoist China: 50,000,000

• 1960s U.S. Cultural Marxism: 1000+ deaths; 4.5 million ethnically cleansed

• Soviet-Sponsored Wars: 4,000,000

• Communist Africa: 50,000+ deaths; 1.5 million ethnically cleansed

Those figures don’t include the millions more who were tortured, abused, stripped of their homes, and robbed of their livelihoods. The atheist communists/socialists first went after Christians, and then everyone else, through executions, engineered famines, forced labor, purges, and systematic oppression. And the numbers are backed up by demographic studies, archival records, survivor accounts, and international comparative analysis.

Religious conflicts have caused real suffering. No one denies that. But their scale is notably smaller when measured against the industrialized mass killings carried out under explicitly anti-religious political systems in the last century alone.

By a long shot!

Add to the above tallies the billions of babies slaughtered through the genocide of abortion since the 1960s Sexual Revolution, and the overall impact against human life from atheist regimes proves to be the most extensive in recorded history.

Because humans can’t figure out “don’t murder Dave” on their own…

Don’t Murder Dave

In a strict material universe, the idea “don’t murder Dave” is mere vapor. It can’t exist as truth or binding obligation. No “oughts” or “ought nots” can exist at all.

Prohibitions exist only as social agreements, and social agreements shift with changing majorities and systems of power. In a universe reduced to blind matter and chance, moral obligations become chemical reactions in brains carrying no binding authority beyond convention.

Arbitrary.

Atheists understand this, even though they deny it. And they reveal their understanding when they engage in victimhood, oppressor-vs-oppressed narratives.

Victimhood paradigms are all we’re capable of developing if there’s no set universal standard of morality because they are the outward expression of “survival of the fittest,” strong-vs-weak.

Communists and socialists (who always go atheist or emerge from atheism) pretend they want the weak to win, but that’s always turned out to be a ploy. An engineered distraction devised so the “enlightened” few can gain control over the “idiot” many.

That secret knowledge (Gnosticism) should sound familiar. It’s exactly what atheists do: Pretend they are the only rational ones, and anyone who disagrees with them is stupid.

And in a world without universal right and wrong, who’s to condemn them?

The issue is exacerbated by misunderstanding the problem of evil…

The Nothing of Evil

Evil has no standalone existence. Evil is the absence of good. A corruption or lack within what is fundamentally right.

Sure, there may be additional causes (criminals, viruses, bacteria, etc.), but what is evil is the effects, the corruption of true and good.

Apologist Frank Turek uses the analogy of a rusty car. Rust can’t overcome nothing. You can have the car without the rust, but you can’t have rust without the car. Because rust (decay) is the slow dissolving of the creation (car).

In the cosmos, the same phenomenon is sometimes labeled “entropy.” Atheists want you to think it’s built into the system. But if entropy is built into the system, then it’s there as part of the program and not an error. A feature, not a bug. Which doesn’t make sense since, based on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy would have caused a heat death of the universe by now. Yet we’re still here.

What also makes little sense is for us to despise entropy. Yet we all do. We hate that everything decays in this world and eventually comes to an end, and we want to change it. Humans even think we can change it.

You do

I do

But if it’s part of the system, then it doesn’t need changing. It just is. No value judgment can coherently be ascribed to the entropy we face…unless it is the corruption of the very-good design by an ultimate Designer. In which case it is absolute evil.

The Bible provides the best explanation. Adam and Eve rejected the perfect Maker, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil before the appropriate time, and their rebellion destroyed the barrier against chaos and disorder (nothingness). They tried to take a shortcut and ruined everything.

Their turning away from good allowed the absence of good to spread into what God had made (the nothing to consume the something). Sin and death. Entropy.

What the atheist calls evidence against God, the presence of suffering and disorder, is precisely what the Bible predicts follows from human rebellion. The symptoms and the diagnosis match.

We can debate how the presence of evil relates to the character of God. But without a transcendent God, without an ultimate good, the entirety of truth, existence, and morality collapses…

Laws and the Lawmaker

Objective values require a source beyond human opinion. Philosophers across traditions have long recognized this.

Laws defining right and wrong require a Lawgiver whose character defines goodness itself.

God’s transcendent (“above all else”) perfect nature is what makes the cosmos and morality possible. The eternal, personal source of right and wrong derives from the source of reality itself.

Without a transcendent Lawmaker, ethics collapse into preference and coercion. Narrow opinions. Either morality is grounded in something or Someone beyond everything else, or the strongest in the room wins. Might makes right.

Some have tried to argue that since God is the most powerful Being, he too makes morality via “might makes right,” but if his perfect character is what defines reality, then he’s not making up right and wrong from arbitrary opinion. Truth is solidified (objective) in his necessary Being.

“Might makes right” is only a problem if the mighty is part of the creation, not the Creator. Because then the imperfect and unnecessary tries to enslave what doesn’t belong to him with co-opted, pseudo-authority. Stealing from the Almighty.

Christianity offers the only coherent worldview. Morality is real and grounded, not merely a cultural artifact, because the everlasting Beholder who designed the universe established the moral order within the cosmos based upon his holy character.

The man who insists he is good without God deceives himself.

God made us in his image, gave us free will so we could relate to and commune with him, and we rebelled. Broke the very-good creation.

The universal human intuition pointing toward certain acts as wrong (not inconvenient or unpopular) and the persistent failure of pure human systems to uphold justice consistently across time find their place inside a biblical world alone.

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Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re in a debate with someone online about something. Anything. Take your pick.

You and your opponent give each other powerful arguments.

You see the pros and cons of each side, have tons to think about, but neither of you has taken the ultimate victory. In fact, there’s still room for enough doubt you could choose either side with a measurable degree of confidence.

Suddenly, your opponent flushes red and blasts out, “You can’t prove I’m wrong! That means I’m right!”

Does that help or ruin his case?

When we let emotion get the best of us, it’s easy to shoot off thoughtless quips. Done enough times, others begin to think we’re careless, mindless fools. And that’s exactly what happened in the 90s and early 2000s when Christians said to atheists, “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” Most would use it without providing a positive case for God.

While true (atheists can’t prove without a doubt God doesn’t exist), that statement isn’t a defense for the existence of God. Relying on it alone makes us Christians look insane because it’s an argument from silence.

Silence tells us nothing. In the absence of evidence, speculation fills the void, and any speculation that beelines to a conclusion without support is mere noise.

Christians quickly abandoned the tactic. However, it didn’t stop atheists from slipping the claim “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” into their moth-ridden pockets to abuse as a smear. Many of them still believe it’s one of our only options to argue for the existence of God.

Here’s why they’re wrong and why you must tear down their petty straw man whenever you see it.

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Gavel for Your Thoughts

By outright portraying the Christian as someone clinging to unprovable assertions, the atheist skeptic positions himself as the rational one from the start. Allegedly standing on evidence while his opponent operates on blind faith.

His move is effective in casual conversation, hollow under scrutiny.

Naturalism (the atheist position that the material universe is all that exists) is no neutral default. It’s a worldview making specific claims about the fundamental character of reality, and it deserves the same rigorous critique you would apply to any other position.

Presenting materialism/naturalism as self-evident while demanding exhaustive proof from the Christian is an equivalent argument from silence. And it doesn’t make much sense.

The logic goes like this:

You’re dumb and have no evidence for your position

SO

You have to prove it, and I don’t have to do anything

That kind of “reasoning” (if it can be called so) doesn’t even work in a courtroom.

Imagine you’re accused of a crime, spend the night in a musty jail, are then dragged before the judge by brawny bailiffs, take your seat beside your attorney and see they have mounds of impeccable evidence to prove your innocence, but the prosecutor across the aisle is disheveled, filthy, and holding a scant manila folder with one measly piece of paper. He then says to the judge, “They’re the dumb one accused of the crime. We don’t have to argue anything.”

Does the judge accept their case? Of course not!

Read more

Atheists love to cite things like trees and photosynthesis, and then laugh off Intelligent Design…as if whatever they select is a sure-fire testament to simple, random, unguided evolution.

But that’s just lazy acceptance without evidence.

There’s nothing remotely simple about trees or photosynthesis. And the deeper you look into nature, the more and more complex lifeforms and their processes get…while simplicity becomes suspect.

The irreducible specified complexity within everything (living and non-living, though mainly focused on living) raptures attention. Irreducible complexity identifies systems made up of many precisely arranged parts, each one essential for the whole to function at all.

No credible ID advocates rest their case on a walk in the woods. Our argument entails vast and incredible systems of specified, complex information systems, the likes of which make AI and computers look like tin buckets.

But what exactly is irreducible complexity? And why does it point to a Designer?

Let’s find out.

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Get with the Program

A system is irreducibly complex when its components express specificity (intelligible information) and are so precisely arranged and mutually dependent that removal of any single piece causes the whole mechanism to collapse.

Not degrade. Not slow down. Die!

These systems appear throughout the living world as deep as molecular ecosystems. Every known system in every known organism operates with complexity, with layers of interdependent parts whose coordination produces functions none of the parts produce alone.

Centuries of work across biology, chemistry, and physics have reinforced that such specified complexity (complexity which carries functional information like blueprints, messages, codes, etc.) resides everywhere in nature. And irreducible specified complexity has only been observed to originate from intelligent agency.

No researcher has documented undirected natural processes generating information-rich structures. Not once.

Look at a few examples…

Special Examples of Complexity

A single living cell contains machinery sophisticated enough to challenge the most advanced engineers.

• Molecular motors transport cargo along cellular highways

• Error-correcting mechanisms proofread genetic code with pristine accuracy

• Regulatory networks coordinate thousands of simultaneous chemical reactions without a central processor

Recent extra-high-definition imagery depicts the interworkings of a cell to be akin to the largest high-traffic city on the planet. One can also imagine digital city-scapes from the Tron movies. A vast, sophisticated program of hardware producing an equally advanced software (life).

ALL parts of every cell fail in isolation.

Each depends on the others in a tightly integrated cohesion, and the absence of any piece wedges a wrench in the entire operation.

Consider other kindred complexities:

• The blood-clotting process preventing fatal bleeding, another example, requires multiple proteins, each with specific roles, fulfilling set obligations and working in tandem to fully seal wounds.

• The eye processes light into meaningful vision through layered membranes, vessels, and nerves, whose partial formation would confer no survival advantage at any perceived intermediate stage. In fact, any absence would guarantee blindness.

These curiosities are representative samples of a pattern found at every level of biological organization. The higher the resolution of the microscope, the more coordinated and complex the machinery appears.

Which makes slow, random evolution through trial-and-error mutations for survival highly problematic…

Dunce Cap for Darwin

Intermediate stages in any evolutionary scenario would lack the coordinated functions needed for survival, leaving organisms vulnerable at the exact moments when partial development occurs.

A system whose function depends on all parts being present offers nothing to natural selection until all parts exist. And, since survival of the fittest is the alleged name of the game, that's a death shot at evolution, no mere handicap. Because no thing, now or ever, would be fit.

Mathematical models shove the knife deeper. Mutation rates, population dynamics, and required waiting periods have been studied in detail, and the calculations consistently show the alleged duration of Earth’s history falls dramatically short for producing observed complexity through blind mechanisms. Even when tallied at millions of years!

Probabilities fall into the range of practical impossibility…without something directing the process. Without a Guide.

And no attempted atheist “loophole” fixes that issue…

A Moldy Excuse

Some atheists bring up mold as evidence that a careless or malicious designer has done something unintentional. Their argument intends to show the universe must be random and unintelligent, otherwise Somebody made big mistakes.

But mold examined seriously instead of dismissed as a biological uh-oh turns out to be incredibly sophisticated.

Mold organisms produce enzymes capable of breaking down a wide array of materials, generate spores engineered for dispersal across diverse environments, maintain internal regulatory systems responding to changing conditions in real time, and operate with genetic instructions precise enough to reproduce said coordinated functions reliably across generations.

Far from a crude accident growing on last week’s expired bread, mold displays the same hallmarks of design found throughout nature, scaled down and thriving in conditions most organisms find uninhabitable.

Atheists choose mold as an example to argue against design because they find mold repugnant and dangerous. And it is, to some extent. The real question is: Why would mold exist in a world created by a perfect Creator?

It’s a worthy question to ask. One philosophy and the Bible both have answers to. But to even get to that argument, one has to presume the existence of a Creator, or the entire question is unintelligible. So…atheists shoot themselves in the foot.

This particular backfire is worth noting because the same foot-shooting occurs across nearly every counterexample critics reach for.

Such examples become especially easy to explain when one steps beyond complexity into fine-tuning…

God’s Eternal Fingerprint

The design argument extends well past specified complexity. Astronomers have documented the fine-tuning of physical constants across the universe with astonishing precision.

Laws governing matter and energy, the ratios between fundamental forces, and the initial conditions of the universe appear calibrated within margins so narrow, slight variations in any direction would produce a cosmos incapable of sustaining stars, planets, complex chemistry, or life.

We live in what’s known as the Goldilocks Zone of the cosmos. Because our own placement, planet, and its interrelated bodies in this tiny corner of the Milky Way meet 100s upon 100s of requirements necessary for life. Requirements so precise that even microscopic change threatens the whole solar system. It’s as if we were put here BY DESIGN.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these:

1. Cosmological Constant: Determination of the precise energy output required to ensure formation of galaxies. On the Planck scale, it factors to 1 in 10^122. That’s 10 with 122 zeroes after it. Any increase between the Big Bang and now and the universe would move too fast, preventing formation and/or continuity of galaxies; any decrease, and the universe would implode.

2. Gravitational Force: Responsible for elemental formation and planetary stability. Tuned to 1 in 10^34 (10 with 34 zeroes). Slightest increase stars burn out quickly and planets become unlivable hellscapes; slightest decrease and no stars or heavy elements can form at all.

3. Strong Nuclear Force: Ensures universal chemical balance. Tuned to 0.007. If it reaches 0.006 or lower, no anatomical bonds besides those of hydrogen can form because all other nuclei are destroyed; 0.008 or higher and hydrogen is wiped out, alongside carbon and oxygen.

These are only three of the many constants we find finely tuned throughout our own planet and the cosmos.

DNA adds another layer. Information theorists have noted the genetic code functions as a genuine language system, complete with syntax and semantics. Encoded instructions for building proteins with a specificity no known natural process has been shown to generate from scratch.

It’s the precise, finely-tuned direction system and blueprint for all living things, and each organism has its own specific DNA.

A language system without a speaker doesn’t happen. Period. The origin of the code itself remains one of the most pressing unsolved problems in biology, and materialist explanations haven’t closed the gap.

Physical constants and genetic code combined with mountains of specified complex structures point in only one direction: Design by a master Designer.

You’re in God’s World Now

The Intelligent Design perspective rests on a consistent pattern observed across multiple scientific disciplines.

Biology, astronomy, chemistry, and information theory don’t coordinate their conclusions. Their convergence comes from independent lines of inquiry, and all of them find favor in divine creation over blind assembly.

Attacks against a weakened version of the design argument, one built around trees and emotional appeals to suffering, avoid the strongest evidence on the table. At every level, from subatomic constants to the architecture of the eye, the findings exhibit purposeful arrangement, not accumulated accident.

Though the Designer’s identity isn’t found in science, specified complexity and fine-tuning powerfully support the inference that a Mind stands behind the cosmos rather than nothing at all.

You’re in God’s world.

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Yet it drove many others away from faith in Christ.

Why?

Because instead of answering hard questions, it dodges them.

Few serious Christians use the slogan anymore when speaking to skeptics. For the precise reason atheists outline: It’s circular.

The mantra assumes the Bible is the ultimate authority without first establishing why. It skips the foundational questions any thoughtful person, believer or not, should wrestle with before accepting any document, ancient or otherwise, as reliable.

In everyday conversation, it comes across as the crass refusal to think it is, and skeptics rightly push back against it and any other shortcuts that refuse to provide evidence.

BUT atheists also mistake “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” as the only explanation Christians have for placing trust in Scripture. And THAT is a false straw man easily debunked.

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Corpus Christus

The Bible isn’t just one book. It’s a series of books written over thousands of years with multiple authors from different walks of life across many nations and three separate continents.

Our biblical anthology spans roughly 1600 years or more, with contributions from at least forty individual writers who lived in distinct and divided cultural settings and social positions.

Some were kings and rulers. Others were shepherds tending flocks in silent hills. Still others were fishermen plumbing the depths of a wicked sea, a tax collector handling Roman accounts, a trained physician, prophets who spoke in and defied royal courts, and scribes who detailed the experiences of their people in times of terror, exile, and disaster.

These writers composed their works in three languages, drawing from their own realities. The earliest writings reach back far into the second millennium before Christ, while the latest books in the collection come from the first century after Christ. Materials originated across the Ancient Near East, extending into parts of Africa and even touching early Europeans via the spread of the early church.

Generations of human experience, observation, and reflection shape the collection, all while maintaining a strikingly coherent, interconnected story. No other documents compare.

What best explains this phenomenon?

Read more

Jacob Wrestles Angel, Alexander Louis Leloir

Atheists and liberals conditioned you to treat the Bible as meaningless fiction. But even today, it resists their hostility.

Its interconnections between millennia of documentation always form a coherent story of God on a rescue mission to save humanity and creation from certain sin and death. Verified by external witness and archaeology.

No other collection of documents compares.

And the stories of Jacob seeing the throne room of God and wrestling with God in human form stand as a precipice, where the interconnections of the Bible converge and root God’s loving salvation in a prophetic lineage that stands the test of time.

Long before Moses views the burning bush, stands on the mountain of God, face shining, tablets in hand, a desperate fugitive receives something more astonishing: Two distinct, overwhelming encounters with the living God. A breathtaking vision of a massive stairway bridging heaven and earth, angels traversing its massive steps, and a fierce, all-night battle in darkness with God himself, who loses…on purpose.

Jacob sees and feels God, receives the covenant promises in fresh power, renames the very ground beneath his feet for God, and walks away forever marked…a new name and a lifelong limp. As God’s chosen one.

What begins in fear, deception, and midnight struggle unfolds into the blueprint for Israel’s election, the coming of the true Israel, and the final victory over sin, death, and the powers of darkness through the Son of Man.

Jacob’s story fuses together the election of God’s own nation with the sacrifice of Christ Jesus, God-made-flesh, in incredible ways you’ve never noticed before.

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Forgotten Prophet

Many traditions name Moses as the first prophet. The Jews saw him as the father of prophecy, and his encounters with God at Sinai cemented the reputation across generations.

But Moses wasn’t the first. Jacob was.

Throughout the Old Testament, prophets receive visions of God and the heavens. Abraham comes close to qualifying. He met the Godhead in person shortly before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a face-to-face encounter of extraordinary weight. But Abraham received only a personal visit, with no vision of the highest heaven.

Jacob receives both. A vision of God’s throne and a separate, physical encounter with God in human form. Two distinct modes of divine contact, two separate occasions.

After each one, he names or renames a specific location in Canaan, the same creative task God assigned to Adam in the garden: Name creation and rule the earth with God Most High.

No other figure in Genesis gets double interactions with God akin to Jacob’s, and the implications of this must be fleshed out.

God’s Anointed Stairway

The vision most people call Jacob’s ladder was not a ladder. The Hebrew word evokes a stairway. And the most immediate parallel from the ancient world is a ziggurat, the massive stepped temples built to connect heaven and earth, with priests ascending toward the gods. Jacob most likely saw a symbolic ziggurat linking the heavens to the ground beneath him.

Two points of meaning emerge from the image, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first connects back to Babel. When humans built the great ziggurat at Babel, they were attempting to reach the heavens by force. Temples across the ancient world were understood as intersections between the divine and the mundane, and movement within and about them almost always ran in one direction.

Humans ascended toward the gods. The gods did not come down.

Jacob’s vision reverses the pattern. The angels in the vision don’t just ascend, they also descend.

God Most High dispatches spiritual beings into the world to carry out his purposes. He sends his loyal messengers wherever he requires, from both the unseen and the seen world.

Melchizedek is one example from the seen world, stationed in Salem, the city of peace and future Jerusalem, known as priest of God Most High, famous for breaking bread and drinking wine with Abraham long before the Last Supper of Christ.

The God of Jacob sends his representatives down, and the question of why any god would choose descent over making us come to him continues to be an awkward puzzle for the world.

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His Holy Throne Room

Jacob’s vision has a direct parallel to Isaiah 6. Placing the two encounters side by side reveals something incredible.

In Isaiah’s vision, the throne room of God opens before him. Seraphim circle the throne and issue continuous praise, covering their faces against the brightness and holiness radiating from the One seated overhead. Isaiah’s immediate response is to bend beneath his own inferiority. An overwhelming recognition of his smallness and sin in the presence of sheer perfection.

The Hebrew word seraph means “fiery one” or “shining one.” Depicted as serpentine figures in the ancient world, tied to the nachash of Genesis 3. With dual possibilities of nachash (serpent) or nochesh (diviner), the creature who deceived Adam and Eve is most likely a seraph.

The serpent of the garden, later identified with Satan, fell and corrupted creation, whereas the others Isaiah witnesses retain their status as throne room guardians of the highest heaven, loyal to God Most High. And Jacob saw them too.

Jacob’s experience at Luz follows the same arc as Isaiah’s. He sees what are seraphim moving up and down between the physical and spiritual realms. God grants him access to himself and the highest heaven at close to their full intensity, and he survives. Stamping into reality the eternal significance of the covenant promises, upon Jacob’s mind and soul.

A fugitive, a man driven out by his own failures the way Adam and Eve were driven from the garden. From his homeland.

God restores and resolves what is lost.

From Stars to Dust

When God speaks to Jacob at Bethel, he introduces himself as the God of Abraham and Isaac and repeats the covenant promise. The land and its inheritance belong to Jacob’s children who will bless all nations. With one crucial change.

God told Abraham his descendants would outnumber the stars (shining ones, aka the sons of God). In the ancient world, stars were widely understood as representations of divine beings, celestial powers, the gods themselves. The promise to Abraham was vast and celestial, focused on the spiritual and physical resurrection and realignment of the cosmos.

To Jacob, God says his descendants will be like the dust of the earth.

The shift from stars to dust isn’t a demotion. Dust points toward the land itself, the ground of Canaan and the physical substance from which man himself was formed and fashioned into the image of God. Where Abraham’s promise pointed everywhere, Jacob’s points downward and outward, into and from the soil (from dust you were made and to dust you shall return).

Jacob’s descendants will become not only numerous but embedded in the earth as God’s representatives, his priests unto the whole world, through whom salvation will arrive. Upon the ground beneath his feet, salvation for all creation from sin and death is to come.

Jacob wakes, anoints the stone on which he slept, and names the place Bethel (“house of God”).

Archaeologists has identified the Bethel in northern Israel, west of the Sea of Galilee and south of the former city of Dan. Close to Nazareth, where Jesus would one day enter the world, and the exact location of Jacob’s Well, where Jesus sat with the Samaritan woman in John 4 and declared himself the “living water.”

Promises of the covenant become prophecies of the Savior.

Abraham and Isaac staked God’s claims in the south and middle of Canaan divine providence. The anointed stone at Bethel extends the claim northward. And the promised land is surrounded by God, stone by stone, infused with the grand mission of cosmic rescue.

And then comes the dogfight with God…

Dogfight With God

The Jabbok River runs 60 to 80 miles through the central Jordan basin. Its banks are dense with vegetation, its waters blue and severe as the river winds like an angry snake between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee.

It splits the Gilead highlands: Israel to the west, Jordan to the east. Along its length, multiple fords narrow the river enough to cross, and archaeologists have identified two twin mounds called Tulul adh-Dhahab as the strongest candidates for Peniel (ash-Sharqi) and its sister camp, Mahanaim (al-Gharbi).

Because the Jabbok offered the most accessible crossing of the Jordan River, it served as the same route when Joshua later led the Israelites from Transjordan into Canaan. The Ark of the Covenant ahead of them, Jericho waiting on the other side.

Jacob arrives at the Jabbok in fear, after years away on northern Mesopotamia. He sends his family ahead into Canaan toward what would become Mahanaim, dividing his camps because he’s terrified of his brother Esau. The man he wronged years before. His mother Rebekah helped him steal Isaac’s blessing through deception, a pattern echoing what Eve set in motion with Adam in the garden, but this time in a mother-son dynamic.

Jacob never faced Esau again after the theft. He stands now on the eastern bank, alone, between the life he built and the reckoning he avoided for years.

At Bethel, Jacob was a young man in flight, a fugitive shaped entirely by deception. Years in Paddan-Aram, the region of northern Mesopotamia/Assyria, changed him. He served under his uncle Laban, was deceived by his own kin, endured loss after loss, but came out the other side with wealth and something much more valuable: Wisdom earned through suffering.

He wrestled with men and won.

Now, at Peniel, God initiates a new encounter. In human form. Struggles with Jacob the entire night until daybreak. This time Jacob secures blessing not through deception but through refusal to quit. Sheer, exhaustive endurance.

He doesn’t know who he’s fighting. He asks the man to tell him his name, and the question is met with a question in return: Why do you ask? The man’s question implies Jacob should already know. Because he’s already seen God before. But he doesn’t know. Jacob likely believed he was facing an angel. One of the messengers (seraphim) who descended the stairway. Which, while still unnerving, lessened the impact.

God renames Jacob Israel. Because now he has struggled with God and with humans and has overcome. The name (“he who wrestles with God”) serves as the badge of his election, the everlasting namesake of God’s mission of redemption. And Israel’s third and final forefather names the location Peniel (“face of God”).

Jacob’s descendants would spend generations like their forefather, falling and returning, wrestling with the God who chose them from the nations. And the face of God (Peniel) would one day enter the world through his people.

God strikes Jacob’s hip and leaves a permanent mark. A limp that will not heal. Evidence the election of God’s own nation through Jacob will be the permanent vehicle by which he intends to rescue the rest of the cosmos after intense pain and torment.

He (God) shall struggle with humanity and lose, yet emerge victorious…

God Lost…On Purpose

The wrestling match at Peniel raises an obvious question: If God is all-powerful, why did God not simply overpower Jacob?

Atheists love to read the text as evidence of divine limitation. God wrestled Jacob and did not win outright. Therefore God is weak, beatable, and worthless. But that reading ignores everything established before the match began.

At Bethel, God arrived to a young fugitive’s campfire. At Peniel, God arrived to a strong, wise man bred from years of overwhelming toil and struggle. The logic of both events is identical. Jacob saw, fought, and conquered, just as God would latter see, fight, and conquer through the Son of Man. Allowing Jacob to win was the point of the encounter and no concession to Jacob’s strength.

God works with cause.

Jacob had to feel the weight of his election in body and soul, not merely in understanding. The permanent limp he carried afterward was the physical sign of the real fight, in flesh and bone, that had taken place and would resurface when Christ again wrestled in the final victory against gods and men.

Jacob’s descendants would feel the weight of their election through centuries of struggle, defeat, exile, and return, culminating in a full overcoming of the forces of darkness in the seen and unseen realms. God would again lose on purpose, lay down his own life, and rise again to destroy forever the stranglehold of sin and death, chaos and corruption, and re-establish access to the Tree of Life for all creation.

A full-fledged restoration of Eden.

With Peniel east of the Jordan and Bethel to the north and Abraham’s and Isaac’s markers in the south and middle, Canaan was now surrounded. God’s stakes covered every side. The cosmic conflict between the God of Israel and the fallen sons of God who held ancient claim to the land and all nations would center on this people (Israel) and this territory (Nephilim land).

His Everlasting Salvation

In the dust of Bethel and the midnight shadows of Peniel, a forgotten prophet rises, and the entire story of redemption snaps into focus.

Jacob’s story is no footnote. He stands as the first to receive both a heavenly vision and a physical encounter with God Most High. A towering stairway where angels descend at God’s command (reversing the arrogant climb of Babel), a throne-room glimpse of fiery seraphim striking fear and awe, and a weary wrestling with God himself after years of conflict with humanity.

From stars to dust, the covenant promise shifts from celestial vastness to earthly embedding. Jacob’s descendants will take root in the soil of Canaan as priests for the world. He anoints stones, renames places, and leaves markers across the land that prophetically encircle the future battlefield of cosmic rescue.

God then “loses” on purpose so Jacob can gain the name Israel (“he who wrestles with God”) and a lifelong limp as proof God’s election is forged through struggle, not comfort.

We are made witnesses to God’s divine strategy through his story. Meeting a deceiver on the run, transforming him through suffering and perseverance, and staking claim in the very ground where the Son of Man would one day walk, become living water for outcasts, and finish the fight against sin, death, and the fallen powers and principalities of darkness.

Each of us lives in this story because it belongs to us.

Divine election works through weakness and makes it strength. The same God who sent angels downward still descends to meet you in your wilderness. The permanent limp of struggle becomes the badge of belonging. And the promises made over dusty ground still stand.

God embeds His people in broken places to bring blessing to the nations. When life feels like an endless night fight, perseverance wins the blessing. When you feel unseen or unworthy, the God of Bethel still opens heaven over ordinary stones.

Without him, there’s no purpose. No way. No meaning. Only hopeless, pitiful randomness and annihilation. We all know it, even though so many pretend they don’t.

But for those who hold fast to Christ, God-made-flesh entered the world through Israel, took on gods (the fallen sons of God) and men, defeated sin and death, and brought to completion what the covenant, law, and prophets foresaw. A full resurrection of the cosmos to eternal life.

The war behind the war at Peniel became your salvation.

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Is God the villain?

Ask many people in our world, and they’ll blast a resounding, “YES!!!” But their absolute hatred for him comes from misreading and mistreatment of the Bible.

The stories of Hagar and Ishmael at the wells are a case in point. In Genesis 16 and 21, modern readers find what they think is a ready-made smoking gun of divine evil: Abraham, the patriarch, and God and the “oppressive” system they represent.

Hagar and Ishmael are helpless victims, atheists and feminists say, crushed beneath the weight of male power and ancient patriarchy. The victimhood feels familiar, almost comforting in its simplicity.

But the full context of Scripture tears their script apart.

Sarah, mother of the son of promise and the very heart of the covenant line, is the one who introduces Hagar as a surrogate, then turns on her with ruthless contempt once she conceives. Demands the expulsion of mother and child. Even as Abraham himself resist.

Raw human jealousy and possessive fear unleashed, the Fall again on an intimate and devastating scale.

And the abuse which starts the saga doesn’t reign supreme. A runaway Egyptian servant, scorned and cast out, suddenly stands at the center of divine attention. Names God. Receives blessing.

Sovereign God works breathtaking mercy through the very failures and fractures caused by those closest to his promise.

Blesses

Arranges

Prepares

Delivers

The Living One…through living waters.

What begins in cruelty and exile becomes the path to cosmic restoration.

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Servants and Masters

Throughout both chapters, the Hebrew term for Hagar is shifchah (“maidservant” or “handmaid”), not the word typically associated with chattel slavery in modern imaginations. In the ancient Near East, shifchah often described female household servants or indentured workers who provided domestic or agricultural labor in exchange for support.

Biblical usage across Genesis and beyond shows it as a relational term of service under a household head. Distinct from the harsher connotations of perpetual ownership.

Abraham saw Hagar as family.

Second Temple sources, including traditions reflected in Josephus and later Rabbinic writings, suggest Hagar entered Abraham’s household as part of the wealth Pharaoh bestowed on him after the events of Genesis 12 (when Abraham, in fear, passed Sarah off as his sister). Some Midrashic expansions even portray Hagar as a gift or high-status Egyptian attendant, though the biblical text itself leaves her former life a mystery.

Feminist readers have long highlighted the stories of Hagar and Ishmael at the wells (Genesis 16 and 21) as stark examples of patriarchal abuse. But is that what we really see?

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The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the most epic tales in the Bible. Fire falls from the sky, a woman turns into a pillar of salt, and God decimates two wicked cities in a fit of divine wrath.

It’s one of the most retold and examined stories in history, and most people treat it as a settled, cautionary tale about sexual sin. End of discussion.

But there’s so much more.

The cities are real. The event that destroyed them was so violent it turned pottery into nuclear glass. And six major threads emerge from their demise that add significant layers to understanding God’s Word:

Who were the three men who visited Abraham in Hebron? Why does God warn Abraham of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Does God not know the evils they were committing and make a best guess? Why barter with Abraham over the righteous in the two cities? What was the major sin committed by the men of the cities? And how does the calamity link to the Passover?

These questions all have incredible answers. And you’ll love where they lead.

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Cities of the Plain

Scholars still like to debate the location of Sodom and Gomorrah. But it’s mostly opinionated bickering over minor details.

The chief candidate for Sodom is Tall el-Hammam, east of the Jordan River, directly north of the Dead Sea within the Kikkar Valley.

The site matches the biblical description and experienced an extraordinary cataclysmic event. Almost the entire plain was super-heated to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a matter of seconds, decimating everything.

Scientists know because pottery shards found there fused into green glass on one side. Trinitite. The same glass discovered in the Mojave Desert after the Oppenheimer nuclear tests during World War II.

Tall el-Hammam went uninhabited for over 700 years after the catastrophe, while surrounding societies continued to flourish and grow. And Ancient Near Eastern sources describe the place as cursed, a wasteland of mourning.

No better explanation has been offered for the catastrophe besides divine conflagration.

The only dent in Tall el-Hammam is dating. Recent archaeological discoveries place the Israelites in Egypt prior to 1400 B.C., posing a problem for conventional timelines.

Scholars date the destruction of Tall el-Hammam to around 1700 B.C., but if the Israelites were truly in Egypt for 400 years after Joseph, that timeline collapses. The real timeline for the catastrophe in the plain would be sometime prior to 1800 B.C., likely around or before 2000 B.C.

The dating itself is what must be wrong, though, because the weight of the other evidence discovered there suggests it IS the site of ancient Sodom. Without question.

The cities are real, were destroyed as described, and their significance goes beyond archaeology…

Three Men, One Lord

The first two of the six threads found in Genesis 18-19…the identity of the three men and God’s revelation to Abraham…are intertwined.

Contrary to common critiques of Genesis 18, the men who visit Abraham aren’t separate figures from the Lord. They’re one and the same.

The opening verse functions as a blanket statement, the same literary move made in Genesis 1, where God creates the heavens and the earth without a timeframe or method.

All we’re provided is the general “what.”

Details come after.

In 18:1, “the Lord appears to Abraham” sets the scene. God, three-in-one, comes to Abraham in human form, familiar and accessible. Tangible.

The Trinitarian reading finds confirmation later in the chapter when two of the party leave toward Sodom while the Lord (the Father) continues speaking face to face with Abraham.

Genesis gives no number when they depart Abraham, but chapter 19 opens with only two men approaching Sodom, where Lot meets them at the gate. The narrative flows without interruption from the previous chapter, making plain that these two belong to the original group.

God grants Abraham a full vision of his unity. Why?

The visit occurs immediately after the formalization of the covenant and the granting of the covenant sign of blood: circumcision (Genesis 15-17).

Up to this point, God had revealed nothing of his plans to Abraham beyond the promise of a great nation and a blessing on all peoples. The covenant now sealed in flesh becomes the reason God grants Abraham deeper knowledge of the future. Abraham is God’s official elected lower-case messiah.

There’s also a dimension of witness in Genesis 18. When God pronounces judgment, he does so openly, with Abraham watching.

So, the question of the three men and the subsequent revelation is really about what kind of God shows up in human form, eats a meal at a stranger’s table, and then destroys two cities. Genesis doesn’t provide a comfortable answer…

Big Crimes Court

God’s phrasing in Genesis 18:20-21 confuses readers who move too quickly. Or without proper context.

Then the LORD said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.”

Atheists think God speaks as though going down to see whether the reports match reality because he’s uncertain of their crimes…or reality…or both.

Wrong.

God knows full well the Sodomites’ crimes (and reality) and sets up a trial for their benefit. Because it’s his desire that none should perish.

God performs a similar operation in Job. There, the satan, a title meaning “accuser,” moves back and forth across the earth and reports on human affairs to the heavenly council. This figure witnesses and accuses, receiving limited power to enact tests where God permits. Despite God’s oversight and full knowledge.

In other words, God is communal. He seeks participation in his affairs from his creation. Especially its sentient members.

In Genesis 18, outcry against Sodom reaches God. A report rises from the heavenly council, an accusation lodged by an accuser(s).

God gives Sodom and Gomorrah one last opportunity before destruction, as he gave humanity time before the Flood. The Nephilim and their violent human counterparts pushed the world to a breaking point before God resorted to annihilation.

Sodom takes the same trajectory at smaller scale.

Involving Abraham in the last act of patience shows God’s communal desire stretches to the earth. Abraham enters the trial as the covenant elect. Lower-case messiah appointed by God. A position not earned. Witness and mediator.

Having dealt with Sodom before during the kings’ wars in chapter 14, Abraham also knows firsthand how bad Sodom is. Got a taste of their depravity. And is in a position to know the truth.

As messiah, Abraham must provide their defense…

Ten is the Lowliest Number

Atheists also read the bargaining between Abraham and God as evidence of divine uncertainty. But God is no more undecided here than he is unknowing of Job’s innocence or Sodom’s crimes.

The back-and-forth between Abraham and God is the courtroom proceeding itself. Abraham as advocate, God as presiding judge.

Abraham builds his case based upon the nature of God. He appeals to divine mercy and to God’s desire to uplift the righteous and destroy the wicked and successfully whittles the number down to 10 righteous men. The threshold that would prevent Godly destruction. Then stops there.

Genesis 18 offers no explicit reason. The implication is Abraham reached a threshold below which no argument for mercy holds. If ten righteous people are not found in Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities are consumed by demonic evil and will receive a just judgment.

Think about how vile and corrupt they must’ve been that they couldn’t even meet that requirement.

Yet the limitation set by Abraham isn’t as far as God will go.

What Abraham doesn’t know is God already accounted for the only righteous household in Sodom. Lot and his family were never going to be swept into the judgment (except Lot’s wife, who chooses to look back in disobedience and becomes a pillar of salt).

Understood as courtroom proceedings, the bargain makes much more sense. It serves to contrast God’s own goodness and generosity against a kingdom so wicked not even ten righteous men compose its ranks.

Genesis 19 then solidifies their depravity and condemnation…

Sexual Perversion and Violence: A Pre-Flood Reversion

Lot is sitting at the gate of Sodom when the two men arrive. In the Ancient Near East, the gate was the seat of civic authority, the place where elders judged disputes and held influence.

A righteous man had standing in the most corrupt city of the Trans-Jordan, where decisions were made, and still the city was beyond saving. How deep the rot had to run for a righteous elder at the gate to change nothing.

He prevents the strangers from going to an inn at the town square because knows how grotesque and depraved the men of Sodom are. And like it or not, the number one sin highlighted is same-sex relations.

Not lack of hospitality. Not mere violence.

Same-sex relations. Specifically same-sex rape.

The men of Sodom demand to have sex with the two visitors. By force.

Other passages of Scripture verify that there were many sins the Sodomites committed, but only one is called “abomination” and/or “strange flesh” (see Ezekiel 16:49-50; Jude 7; and 2 Peter 2:6-8). God’s Law also names same-sex acts an “abomination,” the same category of language used for the sexual perversion and violence of the Nephilim before the Flood.

The connection is deliberate. Jesus himself, the ultimate Messiah, notes it in the Gospel of Luke:

For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left (17:24-35).

Careless frivolity.

Sodom’s condemnation (and soon the world’s) goes beyond a single instance of wickedness. Like the pre-Flood world, they were consumed with twisted sexual perversions, chief of which was same-sex rape, and violence…all…the…time. Every second of every day.

An endless “party” in which the weak and innocent were the “plaything” of the strong and most brutal. Until they too became perverted by the same twisted desires.

The whole crowd of men comes to Lot’s door demanding the visitors be released to them. For forced defilement. Lot calls the act despicable, understanding the grotesqueness of what they are demanding. He offers his daughters instead, a disturbing move (a failure from fear he shares with Abraham and Isaac).

But nowhere near as debased as the Sodomites’ demands.

The men of Sodom want to use members of the Godhead as objects of sexual violence and degradation, a deliberate contempt for both God and his creation. “Demonic” is too small a word.

When the mob refuses to relent, the angelic visitors strike them blind. The sentence the city earned becomes visible in a single instant. And leads to an astonishing connection you never saw coming…

Bread Baked for a Fast Break

Lot makes bread for the two men when they arrive. No yeast. The text treats this as a practical detail: quick bread for unexpected guests. But it opens into something much larger.

Around 800 years earlier, Lot and his household are rushed from Sodom for the same reason Israel is rushed from Egypt. To escape slavery and live.

In Exodus, God commands the Israelites to bake unleavened bread on the night of the final plague, the death of Egypt’s firstborn. They eat in haste because they are about to be rushed from the land. Bread without yeast becomes the bread of urgency.

The Pharaohs, in their cruelty, enslaved God’s people and killed their children, threatening to obliterate them into oblivion until they ceased to exist as a people. Ruining God’s plans for creation.

Sodom and Gomorrah enact the same hatred on a more concentrated scale. A regime given over to crushing what God built and violating those God called his own.

The Passover carries the echo of Lot’s bread, baked without yeast, on the night the fire came down, and unites it with God’s later deliverance of his people through the death of the firstborn.

Both stories end with what comes after the fire. God’s patience and God’s severity work toward the same end. His glory and the rescue of the righteous.

From the world. And from themselves.

First with grace, then with power.

The Paradox of Deliverance

In the smoldering ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, where pottery fused into nuclear glass and an entire plain was scorched by heaven’s fury, we encounter the breathtaking complexity of a God who is terrifyingly just and relentlessly merciful.

The story is far more than a cautionary tale about sexual sin.

You saw real cities reduced to ash; you saw God step into history, sit down with his elect, speak face to face, then judge without error; you watched a courtroom unfold where nothing was hidden, where mercy stretched further than anyone expected, and where even ten righteous men could not be found; you followed the thread of corruption from private vice to a public system that fed on the weak and celebrated violence; and you traced the quiet detail of bread baked in haste, the quiet, unleavened bread linking Sodom’s daybreak destruction to Israel’s deliverance and the greater Passover to come.

Archaeology confirms the cities of the plain were real. The Bible reveals why they fell. And the living God shows us how he governs with both mercy and judgment in perfect wisdom. Never guessing, never uncertain, but always longing that none should perish.

Yet even as the fire falls and Lot’s wife becomes a pillar of salt, the story refuses to end in ashes.

The ruins of Sodom still speak.

They warn us. They humble us. They invite us to examine our own cities, our own hearts, our own desperate need for the God who saves the righteous while refusing to leave evil unchecked.

Perhaps most powerful of all, Sodom’s story leaves us hungry for the rest of the story.

It points forward. To a greater Messiah who would one day stand in the place of the guilty. A greater Deliverer who would break the bread of urgency with His own broken body. A final Day when the Son of Man is revealed like lightning across the sky, judges the wicked once and for all, and restores fallen creation.

God’s justice is real. His mercy astonishing.

And the best chapters of his dealings with humanity are yet to unfold.

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A cowardly husband calls his wife “sister” and hands her over to a foreign king to save his own skin.

Sounds like a soap opera. Or some ridiculous Bravo TV show.

Yet it happens in the Bible. Twice with Abraham, once with Isaac.

Feminists carry Genesis 12:10-20 and chapters 20 and 26 around in their Gucci bags as fodder to beat down men, destroy the family, and castrate God’s church.

Bible defenders squirm. Critics sharpen their pens. And the whole fiasco gets filed under “proof the patriarchs were horrible men God should have fired.”

But such a reading misses about 90% of what is happening. Buried inside three of the most uncomfortable passages in Genesis is a prophetic architecture so precise it should stop you cold.

These stories aren’t just about human failure. They’re about which nations would spend centuries trying to destroy Israel, why they failed, and how God embedded the entire trajectory of that conflict into a series of domestic scandals before the nation of Israel even existed.

To prove that where humans fail, God redeems.

Abraham lies. Isaac repeats the lie. God protects both of them anyway because the promises he made required it. And the foreign kings caught in the middle? They walk away from each encounter knowing something unsettling: There’s a force at work in this family the world can’t outmaneuver.

What follows is a close look at all three episodes, what they share, where they diverge, and why the details most readers skim over paint the picture of a God who cares, fights for, and defends his own…including you.

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The Doom Cycle of Fear

It’s easy to fixate on what Abraham and Isaac did to their wives in Egypt and with Abimelech. Calling them sisters and handing them over as if they were property to be traded.

It was wrong. No one’s defending it.

As noted, skeptics, especially those of a feminist persuasion, love to use these passages to portray men as patriarchal oppressors and blame God for not stopping Abraham and Isaac. Before they betrayed their wives and almost caused international meltdowns.

Their criticism is understandable on the surface. But it requires ignoring context entirely.

We know their behavior was despicable because we live post-Christ, in a world revolutionized by Christian morals. Abraham and Isaac lived in a radically different time.

It wasn’t uncommon for humans to participate in acts God would later reveal as sins.

Ancient kings had a tendency to kill foreign men and take their wives and children as slaves. Violence everywhere, all the time, a continuance of pre-flood bloodshed. It was enough to instill fear in even the most courageous of men.

So, the fear of the forefathers was understandable. The choices made? Not so much.

Abraham and Isaac had God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth on their side. That intimate connection with the eternal Maker should’ve butched them up.

Instead, they folded like unwrapped Slim Jims. And nowhere does God endorse their deceptions. He doesn’t applaud Abraham for his cunning or reward Isaac for following his father’s playbook.

What he does instead is intervene at the precise moment the lies threaten to dismantle his holy mission through total loss of his elected children.

God bestows grace.

Human fear, left to its own devices, drifts toward self-preservation at someone else’s expense. And God moves to protect Abraham, Isaac, and the nations from the fallout of one man’s fear.

The Allegiance of God Most High

There’s a theological current running through all three stories, and once you see it, the individual episodes feel less like embarrassing footnotes and instead reveal a deliberate pattern.

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