Whiskey and the Writings

The Rich Man and Lazarus is the go-to proof text for hell. Flames, a great chasm, a man begging for a drop of water. But what if that’s the one question Jesus wasn’t answering? In this episode we read Luke 16 the way Luke built it. The chapter opens with “you cannot serve God and money,” then the Pharisees, who loved money, ridicule Jesus. This parable is his reply. It isn’t a map of the afterlife...

What if the Garden of Eden was never about how the world began? Around 407 BC, a Persian prince named Cyrus showed a Spartan general his royal garden, and told him he'd planted the trees with his own hands. That story opens a window into the world that shaped Genesis. The Persians called these walled royal gardens pairidaēza . It's where we get the word "paradise." In this episode we read Genesis...

Jesus didn't read Scripture like a rulebook. See how Matthew 5, the Sabbath, and the divorce texts teach us to read the Bible for wisdom.

Was hell always a place of eternal torture, or did Jesus mean something else? In Mark 9:42 to 48, Jesus talks about cutting off your hand, an unquenchable fire, and a worm that never dies. He is quoting Isaiah 66:24, and the setting he has in mind is the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. Once you know what those words meant to his first listeners, this passage sounds very different. If you grew...

Your body isn't disappearing. In Ezekiel 37, God doesn't send Israel's exiles to float away as spirits, He rebuilds bones into bodies and breathes life back into them. Paul picks up that same picture in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Corinthians 3: what gets sown gets raised, changed but not erased, and what gets tested by fire either survives or burns away. This week we're asking what that means if you'v...

Everyone told you the goal is heaven when you die. Revelation 21 says something different, new heaven and new earth coming down, God moving in with us, not us evacuating to Him. In this video I walk through Revelation 21, trace it back to Ezekiel 37 and 47 (John is riffing on Ezekiel's temple vision the entire time), and land on what this means for bodily resurrection and how we live right now. If...

Acts 15 records something most people never got told in church: the earliest Christians had a massive, unresolved fight over what following Jesus actually required. No unanimous doctrine handed down from heaven. A room full of apostles, arguing, until they reached a decision that even they framed as provisional ("it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"). In this video we break down the Jerusa...

Genesis 2:18-25 gets read as a surgery story. God knocks Adam out, pulls a rib, builds a woman. Case closed, right? Except the Hebrew word there, tsela, almost never means "rib" anywhere else it shows up in the Old Testament. It means side. And the text says God didn't just extract something, he took one whole side of the human and built the other half of creation out of it. That changes what this...

Exodus 17 says God will "wipe out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." Two verses later it says the Lord will be at war with Amalek "from generation to generation." Which one is it? This isn't about explaining away the hard parts of the Old Testament. It's about asking a better question than "did this literally happen," and asking instead, "why am I being told this story, and what kind of...

Forgiveness sounds simple until you're the one carrying it. In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, Joe sits down with Colby Stream to unpack what forgiveness actually looks like when the hurt runs deep — betrayal, abuse, years of unresolved pain. We dig into the difference between decisional forgiveness (the choice) and emotional forgiveness (the release), why the church often rushes people...

What are the Synoptic Gospels, and why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell Jesus's story so similarly, yet so differently? In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, Joe pours a glass of Yellowstone Kentucky Straight Bourbon and dives into the scholarship behind the first three Gospels.

The Gospel of Mark doesn't end with the resurrected Jesus. It ends with three terrified women running from an empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone. That's not a scribal accident, it might be the most brilliant move in the entire New Testament. In this episode we go deep into the Gospel of Mark, the shortest and most overlooked of the four Gospels, and the one modern scholarship is only now catchin...

What if everything you were taught about sin was designed to keep you afraid instead of free? In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, I sit down with my longtime friend Andrew Miller (Impact Campus Ministries) to dig into atonement theory, the doctrine that's supposed to explain how Jesus's death and resurrection actually fix our relationship with God. Except once you start looking, you reali...

Revelation isn't about predicting the future or identifying the Antichrist in today's politics. It's about who's on the throne right now. And a literary device called a chiasm reveals exactly how John structured that message. In this episode, Joe walks through how the entire Book of Revelation is organized as one giant chiasm—a mirror-structure used throughout ancient Hebrew and Greek literature t...

Most people open the book of Revelation looking for the end of the world. That's not what they find. The Greek word behind "Revelation" means "uncovering." What John is uncovering isn't a future timeline, it's who's actually sitting on the throne while everything looks like it's falling apart. In this first video of our Revelation Bible study, we cover: - What "apocalypse" actually means (it's not...

If you've ever been called a heretic, or been afraid you might be one, this episode is for you. We're digging into where the word "heretic" actually comes from, what it meant in Josephus, how Paul used it, and how it morphed into the weapon a lot of evangelical leaders use today to shut down anyone who thinks differently. Turns out the original Greek word just means "a choice you made." That chang...

What if the problem isn't that you sin too much. What if the problem is that the conversation about sin has never gone deep enough? Most of us were handed a version of sin that was flat. A list of things you did wrong, a prayer to reset it, repeat. But the biblical authors were pointing at something way bigger than that. Something that, if left unchecked, slowly makes you into something less than...

Nate Hanson built one of the most listened-to deconstruction podcasts in the Christian space. Almost Heretical drew over a million downloads from people who were done with the faith they grew up in. Then something shifted. Not a dramatic moment. Not a crisis. Just honest investigation, a lot of rabbit holes, and a slow tipping of the scales. In this conversation, Nate talks about growing up so emb...

Most of us were handed one way to read the Bible. And honestly? It worked. For a while. But if you've hit a wall where the Bible feels stale, or your theology started cracking under the weight of real questions, you're probably not broken. You just might be stuck in stage one or two. In this video I'm walking through four stages I think we all move through when we engage Scripture. Stage one is de...

Here's something the history of the Bible doesn't get talked about honestly. You've probably heard the version where Constantine got a bunch of bishops in a room, picked his favorite books, and called it Scripture. Clean story. Wrong story. The real history of how the New Testament came together is messier, slower, and honestly? More compelling. It wasn't one meeting. It wasn't one man. It was com...

We grew up in it. The WOW compilations, the youth group pecking order, the "on fire" vs. "backslidden" scoreboard. The pressure to show up every Sunday, Sunday night, and Wednesday. The feeling that doubt was failure and the world outside the church was basically the enemy. In this conversation, Joe sits down with his friend Mario to take an honest look back at evangelical Christian culture in the...

Here's something nobody really says out loud in the pew: everybody around you looks like they've got it figured out. Same songs, same prayers, same language, same faces. And somewhere along the way you start wondering if your experience of God is supposed to look exactly like theirs. It's not. The spiritual journey is one of the most personal things a human being can go through. And the church, fo...

In this conversation with Pastor Josh Kramer, we talk honestly about church hurt, why the church still matters, and what it actually means to follow the way of Jesus. What happens when the church looks nothing like Jesus? Why do some people walk away from faith communities while others stay and try to build something better?

Forgiveness is one of those things you can know you're supposed to do and still not be able to make yourself do it. This week I'm sharing something pretty vulnerable. A year of holding on, a week that forced my hand, and what Jesus and Paul actually say about what forgiveness is and what it isn't. We dig into Matthew 6 and the Lord's Prayer, where Jesus ties our forgiveness directly to our willing...

Here's something nobody preaches on Easter Sunday: even after the resurrection, Jesus's disciples weren't sure. Thomas wasn't. The two on the road to Emmaus weren't. It took Jesus 40 days of showing up, teaching, and performing miracles to convince the people who were literally there. So if you walked out of Easter weekend with more questions than answers, you're not failing at faith. You're just...