BibleThinker

Meditation is good and meditation is bad. It really depends on what you mean by "meditation." Here's a biblical perspective on it. This is just one question from a long interview I did for the moderators of the r/Bible subreddit. They asked their subreddit to send me a bunch of questions and I spent a lot of time preparing so that I would be able to offer the best answers I could. I'll be posting...

Our first question today is about the 7 tenets of Satanism. I think most people don't really understand what they are about. Let's get into it a bit. Here's that video giving a biblical evaluation of suicide: https://youtu.be/T6nlUhWJe00 To get your own questions answered, please show up at the start of the stream and type a question beginning with "Q" (or ANQ to ask anonymously), but don't send i...

"Typology" is a fancy word for how God put intricate details about Jesus throughout the stories of the Old Testament. I'm not talking about prophecy here, although there is a relationship between typology and prophecy. I'm saying that Jesus is the main topic of the Bible so much that God shaped history and people's lives so that the Bible would become a beautiful literary tapestry that shows Jesus...

Omnism, in the sense that we just pretend all religions are true, is a really nice (in the old sense of the word) religion. It has high hopes and seems to help everyone to "get along," but it depends entirely on utter irrationality and dishonest evaluations of the really important issues that religions are disagreeing on. If you have fallen for Omnism, then I hope you'll consider this a kindness a...

Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference: 0:00 - Introduction 1. 0:23 {Will Psychopaths be Judged the Same?} It has recently been scientifically proven that many psychopaths have a physical brain alteration that doesn't allow their synapses to receive the neuron chemicals for emotions such as sympathy. Oftentimes, they become violent criminals or even murderers. Will they be judged by God the same...

I'm not exaggerating when I say that some skeptics, and even some Christians, and some scholars in both categories, will teach that if Mark ends his Gospel at 16:8 then it destroys Christianity as we know it. I think this is silly. But I also think it needs a response. After going through those over the top claims we will deal with the more subtle and thoughtful claims of those who say that there...

Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference: 0:00 - Introduction 1. 0:29 {Why Didn’t Jesus Mention Paul?} Hello, I am a Christian, and it's been important to me to understand why the Lord Jesus didn't mention to the apostles or anyone that Paul would be coming to enlighten the Way for His Church. This question hasn't been addressed in any of the studies I've researched, nor by any of the pastors I li...

Today's the day. I've spent weeks trying to dig deep on the debate of whether the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark are actually part of the Gospel of Mark. We will look at manuscript evidence, translations, church fathers, lectionaries, internal evidence from vocabulary and style, and consider the question of how all this weighs in on the fact that most Christians throughout time have had thes...

Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference: 0:00 - Introduction 1. 0:37 {Conscience before the New Covenant?} Based on Jeremiah 31: 33-34, did people before the New Covenant not have a conscience (innate knowledge of God and the ability to know right from wrong as we do now)? Based on the radical changes that Jesus and the Church brought to the world, and God seemingly needing to give people constan...

Is Leviticus just offering advice about medical health? Is it identifying homosexual acts as sinful, or just potentially unhealthy? Can we calmly and carefully try to understand the passage in context? I hope so. I think that the overall context of the passage makes its application pretty clear, and even though our current culture tends to misunderstand this as condemning certain kinds of people i...

This passage is probably most well known because of its abuse by snake handling preachers in the United States. I will address that issue but it's far from the only important thing to talk about in these verses! Though the snake comments in the passage get a lot of attention from normal people, scholars are mostly interested in the question of whether the passage belongs in the Gospel of Mark at a...

Here’s the video on dealing with depression, which I mentioned during the stream: https://youtu.be/KspwQ2wyuUU Taking live questions from the YT live chat! Every Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time. While I don't pretend to know all the answers, I hope to offer some thoughts that will help you in the direction of thinking biblically about things. The BibleThinker mugs can be found here. I don't make any...

Taking live questions from the YT live chat! Every Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time. While I don't pretend to know all the answers, I hope to offer some thoughts that will help you in the direction of thinking biblically about things. The BibleThinker mugs can be found here. $5 per mug will go toward supporting different ministries I choose. For the time being, it's supporting refugees driven from th...

I know you have questions about this. I hope this helps answer them. But if my short answer isn't enough (and it's probably not) THIS is the link to my FULL teaching on the issue, where I go through many specific verses of the Bible which give us help working out the answer to this very concerning issue. I hope you will give some thought to it. https://youtu.be/IiyxpE5UBz4 This is just one questio...

They tell me that the internet is where religion goes to die, but they also tell me the internet is full of poor research and unreasonable arguments. We are going to get pretty technical today. Lots of different threads of evidence will be explained and drawn together to support the factuality of the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. This may seem like it's not a big deal if you haven't reco...

1. 0:19 {Church Leader Living in Sin? Letter vs. Spirit} I am a young adult, still living in my parents' home. My father is the pastor of our small church. One of my siblings has leadership roles, but is living in sin (cohabitation). My father has talked with him, but hasn't taken any biblical action to remove him from leadership or from church. The elders don't see a need to do anything either. W...

This matters. These lies are being absorbed by youth in our culture and they are breaking their ability to think rationally and biblically faithfully. I HIGHLY recommend that parents check out Elizabeth's foundation worldview curriculum. It's a really good tool to train your kids (and yourself while you are at it) in how to think biblically about things. Since your kids are being exposed to worldl...

This is the second part of today's stream. My internet dropped and then came back and I had to make a second video to finish things. Link to my 3 videos explaining textual variants and stuff related to why I don't think the story of the woman caught in adultery is originally part of John: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ3iRMLYFlHuzJhPtmrgqpVoXhjvqiIjW Question Time Stamps for Quick Refere...

The rest of today's stream can be found here. Sorry, I had internet issues: https://youtu.be/r8biDmivVco Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference: 0:00 - Introduction 1. 0:40 {Is Biblical Numerology Really Biblical?} What are your thoughts about “biblical numerology”? Are certain numbers in Scripture intended by God to carry hidden theological significance for us to find, or is this a man-made and...

If someone says this, you can know for sure that they are not hearing from the Holy Spirit. This is just one question from a long interview I did for the moderators of the r/Bible subreddit. They asked their subreddit to send me a bunch of questions and I spent a lot of time preparing so that I would be able to offer the best answers I could. I'll be posting these answers as individual videos so k...

It will be helpful for us to look at the account of the women finding the tomb of Jesus empty with fresh eyes. When we consider how embarrassing it was in 1st century culture to rely upon female witnesses, how important the idea of Jesus being physically raised was, and how impactful the claim of the empty tomb was, we find that what we have here is remarkable evidence for the trustworthiness of t...

Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference: 0:00 - Introduction 1. 0:36 {Should Repetitive Bible Passages Concern Us?} I'm very confused about why Psalms 14 & 53 are almost identical. Is this an error in Scripture? Are any other pairs of psalms also duplicate? This is causing me to worry about the reliability of Scripture. Please help me understand this! 2. 11:07 {How to Connect Deeply with God}...

I am by no means certain about my answer here but it does seem to be right based on my understanding of the passage in question. Initially when I was challenged to look at this passage more carefully I started to doubt that I had properly understood it in the past. But when I really examined it carefully I came to feel even more firmly about this interpretation. If any of you disagree then I hope...

Bart Ehrman has convinced more people to reject the Christian faith than almost anyone alive today. But he has done so largely through being very misleading. I'm going to provide some solid examples of this as it relates to the crucifixion of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark because I think there is a lot of benefit in dealing with misleading claims about the Bible. I'm doing a lot of apologetics relat...

I am totally open to changing my mind on this passage but I do currently think this is the right way to understand it and I didn't come to this opinion rashly. My research project on the topic of women in ministry and related issues is going to start once I'm done teaching through the Gospel of Mark (probably less than two months from now) and I hope I can offer real clarity on all this stuff. I k...