Jesus at 2AM - A Humorous, Intelligent Look at the Bible, Church History & the Life of Faith

Why was Jesus crucified?  Was the cross an act of God (to satisfy the divine wrath)?  Was it simply the inevitable result of Jesus’s challenge to the Sadducees and Pharisees?  Was he betrayed by followers who felt he had failed his promises to deliver a political kingdom?  Or was this an act of sin itself […]

No symbol is more associated with Christianity than the cross.  And for good reason.  As we will see, the cross is indeed where God’s salvation is accomplished.  But too often the cross has been interpreted mainly in terms of Jesus’s physical suffering – as though the means of salvation is the physical torture of the Messiah. […]

One of the most troubling images in Jesus’s teaching is the sorting of the sheep and the goats (the “sheep” being the “righteous” who are rewarded with eternal life, the goats the “unrighteous” condemned to punishment).  At first glance the stakes appear to be “heaven” and “hell,” with our human actions the determining factor in […]

While Jesus certainly gave some famous speeches, most of Jesus’s public teaching was done by means of parables.  These short, fictional stories were intended as both calls to action and as a means of offering a vision of an alternative reality- the kingdom of God.  Yet they are more than illustrations, stories to be distilled down to their […]

This episode is guaranteed to make you SMILE!  And, if you’ll let it, it might just change your life.  Because today we hear the story of one, self-described “ordinary guy” who decided it was time to make the world a better place.  That guy is Todd Miller, co-founder (along with his lovely wife) of Global […]

“Who do you say that I am?”  This questions forms a turning point in the Gospel narratives and remains a central question for students of the Bible in every generation.  Precisely who is this Jesus of Nazareth?   As we’ve discussed before,  those who encountered Jesus would have understood him as a prophet (one sent […]

Is there such at thing as Evil?  Not just as an adjective – describing the character of an act or even a person – but as a thing in and of itself; evil with a capital “E”?   From the biblical perspective, the answer is:  yes.  There is a force, a drive within creation that […]

While the biblical story centers on God’s rescue of humanity, Gen. 3 (the Garden of Eden story) makes is clear that the entire cosmos has been affected by the curse of sin. Nature itself is broken, and thus the project of salvation must include the restoration the entire created order.  In this episode we take […]

An elemental consequence of sin is alienation – alienation between people, between  humanity and creation, and, most profoundly, alienation between humanity and God (see part 2 of this series for more detail).  And thus central to the project of salvation is reconciliation – bringing creation back to healthy, loving relationship, beginning with the relationship between God […]

The miracles of Jesus were only slightly less of an intellectual challenge to citizens of the 1st century than they are to us.  Raising a dead girl to life, for example, was no more common in ancient Israel than it is now!  And thus it was Jesus’s ability to perform such “signs and wonders” that […]