So what were the first Christians actually doing?

In this episode, we step into the world of the early church and uncover how something that started in homes and shared meals eventually became something very different. Because the real surprise isn’t that church looked different back then.

It’s how much our assumptions about it have changed.

BTW: I was the Pentecostal.

At the time I am a young guy on staff, still finishing up my undergrad degree in practical theology, opening the service in prayer. This is before I knew the difference between the PCA and PCUSA and thought infralapsarianism was a System of a Down lyric.

I was raised in and around church. As a child, we went up and down Pacific Coast highway attending charismatic church after charismatic church with revivals in between (the amount of church ceiling tiles I have counted). Because we were in so many churches as a kid, I experienced a wide variety in the way people prayed. From the men who would clear their throat, start praying and suddenly turn into a founding father. The Pentecostal who when they spoke in tongues raised their voice as if louder made it clearer. The prayer circle where every other word was, “Father God, thank you Father God, Father God, Father God…” Imagine doing that in normal conversation? “Steve, how you doing Steve? Steve, good to see you Steve.”

You’re not a barker. What are you doing?

Here’s what I’ve found: a lot of people find prayer hard. I often find prayer hard. One of the reasons we find it difficult is the tendency to overemphasize the model of prayer as a conversation with God. Impromptu prayer is good, conversational prayer is important. But when it’s all we have, at times it can feel like a conversation with ourselves. If I ask you a question, you respond. There’s a back and forth. With God there is too, but it’s categorically different. It’s impressions. Feelings. A sense of His presence. When impromptu conversational prayer is all we practice, it’s easy to get stuck.

The Bible presents us with another alternative. Within the architecture of scripture, there are different prayer tracks. They are like rails that you can put your prayer train on and ride. One of those tracks is the Tabernacle Prayer.2

Seven Stations

At the center of the Old Testament was the Tabernacle. The dwelling place of God, built to exact specifications. When the Israelites entered, they walked through seven stations, that followed God’s instructions to experience His presence.

We don’t need a physical tabernacle anymore. But these same seven steps form a helpful prayer model. It’s not meant to be a script. It’s a track that teaches you how to move from gratitude to petition, in a way that isn’t forced but meaningful.

1. The Outer Court (Thanksgiving and Praise)

When the Israelites entered the tabernacle, they would enter through the gate into the outer court with singing and thanks. Psalm 100:4 says, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise.”

As a model for prayer, here’s what I’ve found helpful: I will begin in prayer by taking my thanks as high as it can go. Before I thank God for my wife, my daughters, or that the Dodgers are not the Mets, before any of that, I start thanking at a cosmic level. Throughout this post are examples of how I pray like the one below.

I take my praise and gratitude as high as it can go. As I am praying I’m asking myself: where at the cosmic level have I not really thanked God? Where do I need to behold his glory anew? Once I have gone as high as I can go, I start to bring my thanks down, for my family, friends, my church, community, and so on.

I don’t have a natural bent towards gratitude, I can be very impatient with myself, others and God, in my spiritual formation this is a place my desires need to be reordered. One of the practices towards that takes places in this prayer. When I pray through this model and I start at the outer court, I will look to thank God for something I’ve never thanked Him for before. Something that I have never expressed appreciation for. It doesn’t matter how small or off the wall it may be.

As an example, I love Mexican food. I grew up in California. I don’t look it, but I’m a quarter Mexican, my last name would have been Valdez but the name was changed a number of years before I was born.

Which means yes, I appreciate good Mexican food but occasionally I want to live más.

And you don’t go to Taco Bell because you want Mexican food. You go to Taco Bell because you want Taco Bell. Same thing can be said about coffee. I’m a bit of a snob.

But sometimes I just want a little Dunkin. I don’t go to Dunkin because I want a good cup of coffee. I go to Dunkin because I want Dunkin.

What does that have to do with thanks?

When I am praying through this model, I want to end this portion by finding something I have never thanked God for.

When I dropped my girls off at school last week, the jasmine by their walkway was blooming and smelled idyllic.

When we start with thanks in prayer our heart grows three sizes that day. We will realize that perhaps our lives are better than we think. Maybe we (certainly me) need to complain less and stop being like Job. Take notice, as we begin to pray this model we don’t start with “God, help me.” We start with “God, let me glorify you for all you’ve done.” Let me begin in thanks.

2. The Brazen Altar (The Cross)

The brazen altar was where Israelites sacrificed animals for the atonement of sins. It was the first thing they’d see walking in. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore; our sins have been paid once and for all on the cross. In this prayer model the brazen altar becomes the cross. Psalm 103 says, “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from the pit, crowns you with love and compassion.” At this station, I’m not offering a sacrifice, but I am thanking God for the gift of Jesus. For His sacrifice. For His love. I’m opening myself to receive the power of the cross. Here are the five aspects of the cross I pray through.

At this stage of the prayer I am reminding myself that I am not a victim of my circumstances, and I return my mind, my heart, and my posture to the finished work of Jesus.

3. The Laver (Cleansing)

The laver was a bowl of water where people were reminded of their sinfulness and the need to be cleansed. Take notice where this comes in the prayer: it is not first. We didn’t jump right away into confession. We first made our thanks big and wide, then we focused on the cross; returning our gaze to the finished work of Christ, and now we come to the laver. Romans 12:1 says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” At the third station I’m humbly praying, God, search me, know me. During this part of the prayer, I will bring to God things I am aware of that I need to repent.

And I will stay in silence for a couple of minutes. A lot of times God brings things to my attention, things I stuffed down or things I wasn’t aware of. Sometimes He is quiet and I don’t hear anything. I have found to not worry about the silence, sometimes He leads through impressions of things that must be surrendered and other times He doesn’t. And when God does feel silent to me in that moment, it doesn’t mean He’s gone. After sitting in silence and allowing the Spirit to reveal what needs to change in my heart. I then offer myself up to Him by offering each part of my body.

I will end this portion by praying through the fruit of the Spirit, specifically walking through each aspect.

4. The Candlestick (The Holy Spirit)

Now we come to the fourth station, a seven-branched candlestick, that burned continuously in the temple as a sacred light symbolizing Gods presence. The fire today represents the Holy Spirit. In the book of John, Jesus says something Savannah Bananas wild, “I have to go, because greater things you’ll do.”

Greater. Things.

If we really believed what Jesus said in His farewell discourse how differently would we live? How differently would we pray? How differently would we show up in our marriages, our jobs, in our relationships? At this stage in the prayer, I’m asking the Holy Spirit for more of His presence and work in my life. In Isaiah 11:2 there is a prophecy describing Jesus, it says, “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord.” Isaiah expands the work of the Holy Spirit into seven expressions (they are in bold above), the number symbolizing completeness in Hebrew thought. Here I am welcoming the Holy Spirit and praying these seven expressions over myself.

As a quick aside, “let go and let God” is not good theology. Surrender matters, yes, but God isn’t asking us to go limp. He’s asking us to participate. To walk with Him. To be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. There’s a difference between giving up and showing up. This stage of the prayer is critical, we need the empowering presence and work of the Holy Spirit to guide us. To be reminded of what Jesus said in John 14.

5. The Table of Showbread (The Word)

In the tabernacle there was a table with twelve loaves of bread, representing the importance of God’s Word as daily sustenance. Joshua 1:8 tells us, “Keep this book of law always on your lips. Meditate on it day and night.”

Here’s what I’ve found: the more I’m saturated in the Word, the more the Word shows up in my prayers. I don’t have to force it. It just comes out. It becomes the language I think and pray in.

6. The Altar of Incense (Worship)

A small altar of burning incense stood at the entrance of the Holy of Holies. The people entered God’s presence by worshiping His name. Proverbs 18:10, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and are safe.” (If you grew up in church in the ‘90s, you just started singing that song. IYKYK)

At the altar, I’m thanking God that His presence is available and I’m praising His names. In Ancient Near Eastern culture, to have someone’s name meant to have a level of access and control.3 We see this when God first reveals His name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Throughout the Old Testament we learn more names of God. These names don’t mean we control God. Rather God has chosen to reveal himself to us and I can declare His names over my life. Over my situation. Bringing myself under His good reign.

7. The Ark of the Covenant (Petition)

The final place in the tabernacle was the Holy of Holies; where God’s presence dwelt. The priest would intercede there, praying on behalf of the people. And at His ascension, Jesus went to the right hand of the Father to pray and intercede for us.

In 1 Timothy 2 we find this, “I urge you, first of all, that petitions, prayers, and intercession be made for all people, for kings and all those in authority.” Here I’m joining with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in petitioning for others. At this part of the prayer I will start broad and then move in more narrow as I go.

Authority. World governments. The United States. Other countries. Then I move local to my mayor, my county, my city. What principalities and powers are over these cities? God, I want to be aware, I want see darkness pushed back in my city, I want to participate in your light shining forth, Jesus you are the king.

The marginalized. Who around me is suffering injustice? Who are the poor, widowed, and weak? Where am I missing an opportunity to be the Good Samaritan because I’m too busy? I am asking God to reveal that to my heart.

My family. Immediate and extended. Praying blessings over my wife, over my children; that they’d dwell in the house of the Lord forever. That their future husbands would be men of God who would walk with Him all the days of their lives.

My church. That we’d have boldness. Be a house of encouragement and love. That God would be exalted.

My adversaries. And listen the adversaries that take space in our thoughts probably aren’t trying to kill us. It’s Sharon at work or the neighbor who doesn’t mow their lawn as often as we want.

Why This Works

Notice how we move through six stations before we ask for anything, before we make a request; we stir up our hearts. We are positioning our desires towards God. This is a prayer model you can pray in three minutes or thirty and it’s not about the time, it’s about having a track. And if you pray it today, then pray it tomorrow, and pray it in three weeks, you will find it’s not the same prayer. You’re not repeating something rote, but bringing God in, following a model in Scripture, saying: Lord guide me through this.

Outer Court. Brazen Altar. Laver. Candlestick. Table. Altar of Incense. Ark.

Thanks. Cross. Cleansing. Spirit. Word. Worship. Petition.

Try the track. See what happens.

In 1206, a wealthy merchant’s son stood in a public square in Assisi, handed back every possession he owned—including the clothes on his back—and walked away smiling.

This is not a story about poverty. It’s a story about what happens when someone decides the thing everyone is chasing isn’t actually the thing.

Francis of Assisi was charming, comfortable, and on track for exactly the life his world said he should want. Then something shifted—a war, a prisoner-of-war cell, a leper on the road—and he started asking a question most people never let themselves ask.

What if security isn’t safety? What if accumulation isn’t freedom?

What he found on the other side of that question became one of the most disruptive spiritual movements in church history. And it still has something to say to anyone building a life they’re not entirely sure they want.

This episode is about Francis—but it’s really about what we hold onto, and why.

In the second century, a wealthy shipowner from the Black Sea almost split Christianity in two. He read the Old Testament, then the New Testament, and reached the conclusion that these two books couldn’t possibly be describing the same God.

His name was Marcion and he had a point.

The God of the Old Testament commands Abraham to murder his son, drowns the entire world, and orders Joshua to kill every man, woman, child, and animal in Canaan. In Exodus, He personally hardens Pharaoh’s heart, then punishes Pharaoh for having a hard heart. Then you open the New Testament and Jesus says: “Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the merciful.” “God is love.”

So which is it? Here are three distinct answers to the question is the God of the Old Testament the same as the God of the New Testament?

The Marcionite Solution: Two Different Gods

Marcion’s answer (at least in his mind) was the cleanest possibility: they’re not the same God. The God of the Old Testament, he argued, was the Demiurge, a lesser creator-deity, powerful but cruel, obsessed with law and ethnic favoritism. The God Jesus called Father in the New Testament was a completely separate being, a higher hidden God of pure love, previously unknown to humanity, who sent Jesus to rescue us from the Demiurge’s world.1

The picture often painted of Marcion is one of a fringe lunatic; a wealthy man who got obsessed with some radical ideology (glad rich dudes don’t do that anymore) but that was not the case. He was educated, theologically serious, and yes—well-funded. His version of Christianity spread at a swift pace; within a few decades, Marcionite communities existed across large portions of the Roman Empire. By the time the early Church condemned him as a heretic around 144 AD, his movement had spread east and west through the empire's trade routes and urban centers. What makes this wild is the math. Christianity was barely a century old, still small, still decentralized. Yet somehow Marcion created a network with bishops, congregations, and his own canon of scripture. That last part is particularly significant because those who opposed him realized they’d never formally defined what the canon actually was. Marcion had forced them to. The Bible as a bound collection exists partly in response to him, though it would not be formalized until centuries later.2

The Biblical evidence he gave to support his perspective was real. He looked to Galatians 3:19, where Paul said the law was “ordained by angels,” not given directly by God. He pointed to Matthew 5, where Jesus repeatedly says “You have heard it was said… but I say to you,” as evidence that Jesus was overriding the old commands. A God who regrets creating humanity3 and a God who is love4 were two different beings in Marcion’s perspective.

The early Church's counter-argument was that if you cut the Old Testament, you lose the framework that makes Jesus make sense. There would no prophecy, no temple, no exile, and no covenant promise that these are my people and I will be there God.5 The cross would have nothing to do with the eternal promises of the triune God and instead be a tragic execution, rather than the climax of redemption. Further, you end up with a God who appeared out of nowhere in 30 AD, with no history and no reason to be trusted. Marcion solved the problem by amputating half the patient. Most Christians refused the surgery, but the question never went away.

The Progressive Revelation View: Same God, Different Classroom

In this view, the Old Testament and New Testament present the same God, but He reveals himself in stages, as humanity matures enough to receive him. Think of it like teaching a child to read. You don't sit a five-year-old down with War and Peace and expect them to track 1,200 pages of Russian aristocracy and Napoleonic warfare. You obviously start with Crime and Punishment. I'm kidding. You start with a Bluey picture book and work up from there.

Within this view, the Old Testament violence reflects God meeting people where they were. The surrounding cultures of Canaan practiced child sacrifice and ritual prostitution. Against that backdrop, the Torah was a dramatic moral upgrade; don’t sacrifice your children, care for the widow and orphan, free your slaves every seven years. So, to an ancient Canaanite, the Torah would have looked like radical mercy. The Old Testament scholar John Goldingay argues that if you read the Old Testament as a story in motion rather than a static rulebook, you can see God consistently pushing Israel toward a larger, more inclusive vision.6 Abraham is called to bless all nations. Jonah gets sent to Nineveh, Israel’s hated enemy. Ruth, a Moabite outsider, becomes the grandmother of David. The story keeps expanding its definition of who belongs and what love looks like. By the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t contradicting the Old Testament, He is fulfilling it, “You have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” That’s the early understanding, but here’s a fuller revelation, “But I say to you, love your enemies.” That’s where the spiritual formation arc was heading in God’s plan. He was taking a nation as His own, one that was to be different from the others: counter-cultural, holy, mature, set apart. That type of development takes time.

The objection to this view is this: if God’s character is perfectly good and unchanging, why does the revelation appear to change? The God of Judges and the Christ of the Gospels look like different gods to the modern reader (which is the wedge Marcion drove down the middle of the church).

The response of this view would be that God's character didn't change, but the way He taught met people where they were. The same way a parent tells a four-year-old the truth at a four-year-old's level, then tells more of it as the child can handle more. The revelation given to Israel was complete for that stage. Theologians call this divine accommodation. Calvin called it God’s “lisping,” speaking baby-talk to us so we could hear anything at all.7 To use a a different analogy, prescribing penicillin to someone in 1200 BC doesn’t make you a better doctor. It makes the medicine useless. There’s no germ theory, no sterile technique, no diagnostic language to make the dose make sense. The patient dies confused, holding a pill he had no framework to use. Revelation in this view works in a similar way.

The Christological Rereading: Jesus is the Lens

The third view is the most demanding, and for many modern biblical scholars, the most persuasive. In this perspective Jesus doesn’t complete the Old Testament or simply build on top of it. He reinterprets it from the inside, and in doing so, reveals the aspects that we have been misreading. The starting point is John 5:39, where Jesus says, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me.” When He speaks this, there is no New Testament. Jesus is talking about and describing the Old Testament. In Luke 24:27, after the resurrection, Jesus walks for seven miles with two disciples and goes through the entire Hebrew Bible showing how all of it points to Him. For theologians like N.T. Wright and Scot McKnight, this means Jesus is the interpretive key to the whole library of God.8 You read the Old Testament through Jesus. He becomes the lens that brings the rest of Scripture into focus, and passages are read in light of the whole canon with Christ at the center. Theologians call this the Christological hermeneutic. A fancy phrase for a simple idea: Christ is the key that unlocks the rest of the Bible.

Augustine put it like this, “the New Testament is hidden in the Old, the Old is unveiled in the New.”9

Here are a few examples of this. In Matthew 5 Jesus quotes Exodus 21, “an eye for an eye,” then carries it forward to its full conclusion, pushing a principle that already limited retaliation all the way to non-retaliation. In Mark 7, He reframes the Torah’s food laws around inner purity, a reframing the apostles later finalize in Acts 10 and 15. In Matthew 19, the Pharisees cite Moses’ allowance of divorce as God’s word; Jesus replies that Moses allowed it “because of the hardness of your hearts,” implying that even parts of the Law were concessions to human failure, not eternal commands. This means not every statement in the Old Testament carries equal divine authority. Some texts reflect where God was leading Israel. Others reflect where Israel actually was. The way you tell the difference, in this view, is by running the text through the filter of the cross. Does it look like Jesus? Does it fit a God who’d rather be crucified than retaliate?

Here’s the fair pushback on this view that you may be thinking, if Jesus overrides Moses in some places, what stops anyone from overriding the parts of the Bible they find inconvenient (Jefferson party of two, anyone)? Proponents of this view spend real effort explaining why the Christological filter is principled rather than a convenient option (done correctly it is anything but convenient). Their claim is that Jesus explicitly said He is the lens, the work is on us to have Him be our hermeneutical filter for the Bible.

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The Same Question, Three Different Shapes

All three views are arguing about different things underneath this question. Marcion was asking a character question: is the God of Joshua the same person as the God of the Sermon on the Mount? The progressive revelation view is asking a pedagogical question: is God’s teaching method consistent with how moral development actually works? The Christological rereading is asking a canonical question: which texts within Scripture get to interpret and define all the others?

What you make of God in the Old Testament depends on which question you think matters most. You won’t find a flat, simple answer. The texts are too strange and the distances too large. The God in the dock resists being managed neatly. But the question itself produced some of the most important developments in historical theology. It gave the Church its biblical canon. It gave theology the doctrine of progressive revelation. It gave Christian thought the discipline of hermeneutics. Not bad for a problem that started with one shipowner deciding the Old Testament didn’t count.

No letters. No books. No firsthand account.

And yet, billions of people trust what was written about Him.

So why?

In this episode, we explore one of the most overlooked questions in Christianity—and why the answer challenges how modern people think about truth, history, and credibility. Because the real issue isn’t that Jesus didn’t write anything.

It’s why no one thought He needed to.

I am in 8th grade, Fort King middle school. And I did it. I committed the one sin the youth pastor warned about (or at least I think I did). I was at my locker, before the next period when Trey asked if I believed in God? I froze, choked, closed the locker and sheepishly said no. I said no. The kid who grew up in church, read the Bible and served on Saturdays denied God. I lay in bed that night thinking to myself, did I just commit the unforgivable sin?

Right now someone is lying awake at 3 a.m. fixated on the spinning blades above convinced they have committed it. It’s the doubt that never disappeared, is God really out there, this can’t actually be true? It’s the sin that has tendrils suffocating their heart; they wonder, “is it too late for me?” Or perhaps they read the verses and saw their name written in the white ink.

The verses in question are Mark 3:28-29. Here is the context, Jesus has just cast out a demon. The Pharisees, unable to deny the miracle, explain it the only way that lets them clutch at the illusion of control: “He is possessed by Beelzebul. By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” Jesus responds by saying what has lead to more sleepless nights than any sentence in the Bible: “Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

Every sin and every slander can be forgiven, but not this. The God who said He would leave the ninety-nine to find the one lost, has drawn a single line in the sand (maybe that is what He was writing in John 8:61). When Jesus spoke, He intentionally used the introductory clause that carried the most prophetic weight: “Truly I tell you.”2

What exactly is the unforgivable sin? Can you commit it by accident? Have you already done it? Does the God of love place someone beyond His forgiveness? Here are three serious answers that wrestle with this question; don’t panic.

The Specific Context View (It Was One Particular Moment)

The first view argues that much of the anxiety surrounding this verse comes from ripping it out of its original context. Look specifically at who Jesus is talking to, He is not responding to a confused seeker, someone deconstructing faith, or an individual in crisis. He’s talking to the Pharisees. These were trained religious experts, who knew and taught the miracles of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). They had just watched Jesus perform an undeniable miracle, and their public theological verdict was: that power came from Satan.

New Testament scholar D.A. Carson argues that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in this passage is specifically the act of consciously, willfully, and publicly attributing the clear, undeniable work of God to the devil.3 This act doesn’t come from a place of confusion or spiritual weakness, but is a sober minded choice to attribute the work of the Kingdom of God to the work of darkness. In this case, it was a deliberate act of hardened, eyes-wide-open rejection, performed by teachers of the law who had every possible evidence in front of them and chose to call it evil. Under this view, the sin is not something anyone stumbles into accidentally. It requires three things to take place:

This is why, proponents argue, the person lying awake at 3 a.m. almost certainly has not committed it. The Pharisees didn’t lose sleep over their verdict. The very fact that someone is terrified of having crossed a line reveals a conscience still alive and responsive to the Spirit, which is the opposite of what this sin requires. There is also a grammatical clue, though it's not in the word “blasphemes” itself. That verb in Mark 3:294 simply marks out the category of the person in view. The interpretive key comes one verse later. Mark 3:30 tells us Jesus issued this warning, “because they were saying, 'He has an unclean spirit.'” The verb “they were saying” (ἔλεγον) is imperfect, denoting ongoing, repeated speech, not a single outburst. The book of Mark frames the offense as a pattern. This is not the Pharisees having a one-time slip of the tongue, but is a sustained, settled posture of rejection. A life of looking at God's work and calling it demonic.

Now the challenge with the specific context view is that it can make the sin sound so rare and specific that it no longer carries any real weight. If the main theological context was the Pharisees in that moment, why does Jesus frame it as a general warning? The specificity is reassuring for sure, but it raises its own questions.

The Hardened Heart View (The Point of No Return)

The second view takes a longer view of the sin, not seen in a single moment or a few dramatic ones, but as a process. This perspective, held by theologians including John Calvin and more recently Scot McKnight, argue that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the final state of a heart that has spent a lifetime resisting the Spirit’s invitation until the capacity for repentance no longer functions.5

During Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed return from the South Pole, Captain Lawrence Oates developed severe frostbite in his feet. Initially he complained of the pain, then grew silent as the days passed. By the end, he could barely walk, but stopped mentioning the agony. His famous last words before walking out into the blizzard to die were, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”6 Oates suffering had gone silent before his body gave out. This is the hardened heart view. Like the effects of frostbite if exposure is repeated and ignored, the tissue gradually loses sensation. The damage is real, but the warning system is gone. Every time a person knowingly suppresses the Spirit’s conviction, the next suppression becomes easier, until they are completely numb to the process.

The sin, under this view, is not a dramatic single act. It is the accumulated result of ten thousand smaller choices to harden. The Pharisees of Mark 3 had not committed this sin in that one moment, but through years of building a theological system specifically designed to resist Jesus and the kingdom at every turn. Their public verdict was not the cause of their condition; it revealed the symptom of it.

This framework draws on several other passages for support. In Romans 1, Paul describes God “giving people over” to their desires, not as punishment, but as a consequence of sustained rejection.7 In Hebrews 6:4-6, the author warns of those who have “tasted the heavenly gift” and yet fallen away, suggesting that proximity to grace, if repeatedly refused, can harden into something irreversible.8 The danger is greatest for those who have been closest to the Truth, the ones who have felt the weight of it, who have seen it work in the lives of others and have spent years choosing deliberately, to look away.

The difficulty with this perspective, is that it can create a level of theological vertigo. If the line is drawn not by a single act but at the end of a long process, how does anyone know where they are in that process? What assurance can be held in the present?

The Paradox View (If You’re Asking, You Haven’t Done It)

The third view does not contradict the first two so much as it answers a slightly different question; not what is the unforgivable sin, but who has committed it?

Its answer: nobody who is worried about it.

Augustine was one of the first to articulate this clearly. The person who has truly blasphemed the Holy Spirit, he argued, is not anxious about forgiveness, because the defining feature of this sin is the complete absence of the desire for it.9 The Pharisees of Mark 3 were not wracked with guilt. They were not lying awake questioning themselves; but were satisfied with their verdict.

The troubling anxiety that drives people to this question is evidence they have not arrived at the answer they fear. This view draws its force from the broader New Testament picture of what the Holy Spirit does. In John 16:8, Jesus says the Spirit “will convict the world of sin.” The Spirit’s job is to create precisely the awareness and discomfort that drives people toward repentance. If you feel convicted, the Spirit is working. If you are asking whether you can be forgiven, you are demonstrating that the door is still open, because the desire to walk through it is still alive.

Charles Spurgeon, put it like this, “The sin against the Holy Ghost does not lie in a fear that you have committed it.”10 The person who has hardened past repentance does not fear they have done so—they have stopped caring. For Christians, this is not a permission slip to stop taking the warning seriously. The verse exists for a reason, and its weight is real. But the Paradox View reframes the question. Instead of asking have I committed the unforgivable sin? The more useful question is am I currently resisting the Spirit’s work in my life? That is something anyone can answer honestly.

The limitation with this view if taken too far it can flatten the warning entirely. If the mere act of worrying proves you are safe, the verse loses its sharp edge. The best version of this view holds both things at once; the genuine danger is real, and the anxiety about it is evidence you have not arrived there.

What the Question Reveals

The unforgivable sin is not a theological technicality designed to trap the careless. It is a description of what a human soul looks like when it has spent long enough moving so far from God, they can’t recognize His work even when it is in front of them. The Specific Context view says: it looked like Pharisees calling the Holy Spirit demonic. The Hardened Heart view says: it looks like years of deliberate resistance compounding into permanent blindness. The Paradox view says: it looks like a complete absence of the desire to come home.

What all agree on is this: it does not look like the person asking the question.

The fact that the verse disturbs you means the Spirit it describes is still at work. You do not mourn a door you never wanted to walk through. Which means the piece of theology that has haunted more Christians than almost any other is evidence that the door is still open.

That you’ve weighed the evidence, thought it through, and arrived at your conclusions honestly.

But what if most of what you believe… was installed?

In this piece, we explore the unsettling reality that your worldview may be less independent than you think—and why your brain is wired to defend beliefs you never actually chose. Drawing from psychology, culture, and theology, this isn’t just about how beliefs form.

It’s about how they control you.

In the Book of Exodus, God gives Moses curiously specific blueprints for a chest made of acacia wood, overlaid with pure gold, and topped with two golden Cherubim. But once the chest was built, it started behaving less like a sacred object and more like a weaponized reactor. The puzzle of the Ark of the Covenant stems from the peculiar safety protocols surrounding it. Priests had to wear special bells, carry it with long poles so they wouldn’t touch the box, and if a layman like Uzzah reached out to steady it during a bumpy cart ride? He was struck dead instantly by what the text describes as an outbreak of divine anger.

What exactly was the Ark? A symbolic throne, a sophisticated piece of ancient technology, or forensic evidence for holiness?

1. The “Mercy Seat” View (The Symbolic Throne)

This is the classic theological perspective that focuses on the Presence of God. The Ark wasn’t meant to be touched because it was the footstool of God’s throne on Earth. In the book of Exodus, God speaks to Moses and says, And there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the Testimony, about everything which I will give you in commandment to the children of Israel.1 God was establishing with His people how He would rule and lead.

Culturally in the Ancient Near East, you didn’t touch a king’s throne or his footstool without permission; this was a matter of royal protocol and honor.2 A king sat in a throne with his feet resting on a footstool. The footstool was the lowest extension of the throne where Heaven met earth. By touching God’s footstool, Uzzah became the patron saint of “I was just trying to help,” while getting hit with enough voltage to power a Cybertruck. From the Mercy Seat view, the outbreak that killed Uzzah wasn’t a mechanical failure on the part of the ark or that it had electrical power; but a supernatural boundary violation of what God had set.

Through the Ark, God was revealing to a new nation that holiness wasn’t a suggestion; but the standard. The Ark was a physical reminder that the Creator of the universe was dwelling among them, and you don’t treat the Infinite with casual familiarity, bruh.

2. The “Electrical” View (The Great Capacitor)

Here is the preferred theory of ancient tech enthusiasts and Reddit engineers. They look at the blueprints of the Ark and see a super-capacitor. Gold is one of the most efficient electrical conductors, it is highly resistant to corrosion and excellent at carrying a charge across its surface. Acacia wood, is a natural insulator: it resists the flow of electricity and can help maintain a separation of charge. When you sandwich an insulating material between conductive layers, you’re creating the basic structure of a capacitor (a system that can store electrical energy in an electric field). That’s the principle behind a Leyden Jar; an early device designed to store high-voltage static electricity. In 1746 the physicist Musschenbroek, working in the Dutch city of Leiden (where the invention gets its name) reportedly got such a violent shock during the experiment that he said he would not repeat it “for all the kingdom of France.”3 The only more violent shock than that in France would be mispronouncing croissant.

But, let’s be precise (thank you Google search and scientists who make their work simple)4, a true capacitor, like a Leyden jar requires: two conductive layers that are electrically separated, a conductive material between them and a way to introduce and maintain charge (a voltage source). Without an external charge source, you don’t automatically get stored electricity and without proper electrical separation and connections, it doesn’t function as an actual device.

Now, whether intentional or unintentional the Arks design at some level reflects principles of electrical storage that wouldn’t be formally understood until thousands of years later. Steven Spielberg seems to lean into this idea in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the film (an American classic, IMO) the Ark is packed in sand, which is a natural electrical insulator. It’s exactly the kind of material you’d use to isolate something carrying charge. And when it’s opened (spoiler alert ) the Ark becomes a conduit; something between a transmitter and a lightning rod. Not quite a machine, not quite a miracle, but something blurring the line.

As the Israelites carried the Ark through the dry, static-heavy desert air, surrounded by sand, the gold plates could naturally accumulate a massive electrical charge. The long carrying poles then acted as a safety gap. Therefore touching the box without being grounded would result in a lethal discharge of thousands of volts. In this view, the laws of holiness coincided with the laws of physics.

3. The “Covenantal Map” View (The Forensic Relic)

This view ignores how it worked and focuses on what was inside. The Ark contained three items: the Ten Commandments, a jar of Manna, and Aaron’s staff that budded. All three items were evidence of rebellion. The tablets were given after the Golden Calf; the Manna was given after they complained of hunger; the staff was given after they challenged leadership. In this perspective the Ark was like an attorneys briefcase, and Uzzah, well:

The Ark contained the evidence of human failure, but was covered by the Mercy Seat where blood was sprinkled once a year. The core idea from this perspective is that God’s presence can only dwell with flawed people if their evidence of guilt is covered by an act of mercy. Thus making the Ark a legal puzzle solved by a sacrifice that foreshadowed a once and for all sacrifice to come.

Conclusion

The Ark of the Covenant remains the most dangerous object in the Bible. Whether it was a capacitor storing static electricity, a spiritual portal for the glory of God, forensic evidence, or a bit of all three, the central message was the same: God is not to be trifled with.

The Ark was a place where the rules of the physical world met the holiness of the spiritual world. It teaches us that approaching the Divine requires more than a map; we need a mediator. The Ark was a warning that Truth, in its purest form, is too heavy for human hands to carry alone.

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?
Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

Then, on December 6th, 1273, he stopped writing. Mid-sentence. Mid-project. And when his secretary begged him to continue, he said: “Everything I have written seems like straw compared to what I have seen.”

Not incomplete. Not a rough draft. Straw.

In this episode of Theology Made, we trace what Aquinas was actually attempting and what it means that the most disciplined theological mind in history reached the edge of what reason could hold, and found that the edge wasn’t the end.

For anyone who has ever understood a great deal about God and still felt like something essential remained just out of reach.

It’s 1994. Newbury Park, California. Halloween night.

My parents are downstairs “rebuking the darkness.”

Meanwhile, I’m upstairs watching Lady and the Tramp with my younger brother… wondering what exactly we’re fighting.

Demons

The New Testament talks about demons constantly, but never clearly says where they came from. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus walks into a synagogue and when He begins teaching, a man starts screaming (only happens to me if I’m still preaching after 11:30).

A voice from inside the man shouts, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”

The demons know exactly who Jesus is. They recognize Jesus before the disciples do, before the crowd figures it out, before Peter makes his famous confession. The only characters in the Gospels who are never confused about Jesus… are the demons.

This pattern shows up again and again. Jesus heals diseases, forgives sins, raises the dead; and whenever He encounters demons, the reaction from them is immediate recognition and terror. They shout His identity and beg not to be destroyed. At one point, they even negotiate with Him, asking permission to enter a herd of pigs.1 All of which raises a question the Bible never directly answers.

Where did they come from?

For most Christians the answer is that demons are fallen angels. The Devil rebelled against God, some angels followed him, and those rebels became the demons Jesus confronts in the Gospels.

A clean, simple, Sunday School answer. The type of explanation Jimmy Carter probably taught for 40 years at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, GA.

However, this neat and tidy take wasn’t the only view ancient Christians held.2 Early believers proposed several different explanations for the origin of demons, each trying to make sense of the strange clues scattered throughout Scripture. Here are the three most influential attempts to solve the demon puzzle.

1. The Fallen Angel Theory

The explanation Christians are most familiar with today begins at a supernatural rebellion. At some point before human history, the Devil and a group of angels turned against God. The Book of Revelation describes a war in heaven in which a dragon sweeps a third of the stars down from the sky.3 Early theologians like Victorinus of Pettau4 in the 3rd century recognized the ‘stars’ cast down in Revelation 12:4 to symbolize angels who joined the Devil’s5 rebellion.

Other passages seem to reinforce this framework. The Second Epistle of Peter speaks of angels who sinned and were cast into darkness. The Epistle of Jude refers to angels who abandoned their proper dwelling. Taken together, these texts suggest that part of the angelic world became corrupted. Those fallen angels, according to this theory, are the demons encountered throughout the New Testament.

Theologians like Augustine6 and later Aquinas,7 solidified this view as it became the dominant approach within Western Christianity. It is simple, coherent, and fits naturally within the broader story of the Devil’s rebellion.

But there’s one detail that doesn’t quite fit.

In the Gospels, demons behave in a way that angels never do.

They seem desperate for bodies. When Jesus casts them out, they plead for somewhere to go. They wander through “waterless places”8 searching for rest. When given the option, they choose to inhabit animals rather than remain disembodied.

Why would angels (who are spiritual beings) need a body at all?

To answer that, some interpreters offer a stranger explanation.

2. The Nephilim Spirit Theory

The second theory begins with one of the most mysterious passages in the entire Bible. Genesis chapter six briefly describes a time when the “Sons of God” took human wives and produced offspring known as the Nephilim. The text gives almost no explanation, but it hints at a world that had become deeply corrupted before the Flood.9

In the centuries before the time of Jesus, Jewish writers expanded this story from Genesis six. Texts like the Book of Enoch10 describe a group of rebellious angels called the Watchers who descended to earth and taught humanity forbidden knowledge. Their union with human women produced giant offspring who filled the earth with violence.

When the Flood came, those giants died. But according to this interpretation, their spirits did not. Those restless spirits, stripped of their physical bodies, became the demons that roam the world. In this view, the peculiar behavior exhibited by the demons in the Gospels makes a lot more sense.

Demons wander because they are disembodied spirits. They seek human hosts because they once possessed physical form. Their desperate search for bodies reflects a lost state they can never fully recover.

This explanation was widely known in the ancient world. Several early Christian writers—including Justin Martyr,11 Tertullian, and Irenaeus12—appear to have accepted some version of it. Over time, however, this interpretation gradually faded in Western theology as the more straightforward fallen-angel explanation took precedence. Still, the Nephilim theory shows that early believers did not assume the answer to where demons came from was obvious.

3. The Corrupted Spirit Theory

A third approach takes the question in an entirely different direction.

While many traditions often focused on the origin of demons (linking them to fallen angels or the Nephilim) writers like Evagrius Ponticus did not reject this framework, but shifted the focus. For Evagrius, demons were real spiritual beings whose primary arena was the human mind; influencing thoughts, desires, and emotions rather than acting through physical corruption.13

Theologians like Evagrius cataloged the patterns of temptation they believed demons exploited: pride, anger, lust, envy, despair, and vanity. Spiritual warfare, in this framework, was less about dramatic possession stories and more about the subtle shaping of human desires. The real danger of demons was not their power to control a person, but their ability to distort what a person loves.

Within this view, the question of where demons come from mattered less than understanding how they worked. Evil did not merely appear in supernatural encounters. It appeared in ordinary human life, like illustrated in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Their work found in the slow twisting of motives, ambitions, and fears.

For this third perspective I began with Evagrius Ponticus because his approach marks a shift. While he never denied the existence of demons, his focus fell almost entirely on temptation, and what he famously called the logismoi, the intrusive ideas that shape behavior.

That move doesn’t erase the question of where demons come from, but over time, that interior focus allowed space for reinterpretation. By the modern period, thinkers like Sigmund Freud14 began explaining what earlier Christians called “temptation” in psychological terms; unconscious drives, repression, internal conflict. Figures like Carl Jung15 went further, treating spiritual realities as symbols of the psyche; archetypes rather than agents.

What were once understood as personal spiritual beings with an origin became in many modern frameworks; internal psychological dynamics at work within an individual (taken in a direction Evagrius would have never embraced). The question of the origin of demons, ceased to be relevant. The temptations remained, but the tempters vanished. Functionally, this is unfortunately where a lot of Christians tend to live.

The Puzzle That Remains

When Christians ask where demons come from, they often expect a single clear answer. But historical theology present a more nuanced approach. Some believers understood demons as fallen angels who joined Satan’s rebellion. Others saw them as the wandering spirits of the Nephilim, remnants of a violent world destroyed by the Flood. And more modern interpretations deleted the question entirely.

Each theory attempts to make sense of the same biblical clues. And maybe that uncertainty is ignificant. The Bible spends less time explaining demons than it does showing their defeat. Again and again in the Gospels, demons see Jesus and are terrified.

They recognize instantly and fear Him immediately. They never, not once, think they’re going to win.

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?
Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

How did a simple tool for eating become “The Devil’s Pitchfork”? This week, we explore the “Trial of the Fork,” a forgotten war between human innovation and Divine design. We’ll follow the fork from the scathing rebukes of Saint Peter Damian to the pasta-fueled revolution of the Renaissance, finally uncovering how a “satanic” luxury became a mandatory standard of Christian “cleanliness.”

It turns out, the history of how we eat is actually a history of how we view God.

Why Humans Keep Creating Cults

In 1978, over 900 people died in a place called Jonestown. Were they stupid or weak?

No. They believed they were right.

And before you distance yourself from them, the same forces that lured them in are still working today. And if you think you’re immune; you might be the kind of person who isn’t. Here’s the thing about cults; they don’t start with manipulation, control, or Kool-Aid. They start with three things.

Charisma. Crisis. Certainty.

That’s the formula. Almost every cult in history, from Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate to the wellness influencer with four million followers selling you a $300 snake oil supplement protocol, they all run on this engine.

Charisma

First charisma. Not charm. There’s a difference. Charm is likeable, charm is cute. We often say someone has charisma when what they really have is charm. Charisma is gravitational. It pulls you in before you’ve decided to move. Before you’ve consented to being pulled. Researchers who study high-control groups describe charismatic leaders as having an almost uncanny ability to make you feel seen; specifically seen,1 not generally appreciated, not welcome to our community. Something more precise; it feels almost supernatural.

Jim Jones did more than preach to a congregation. He would call people out by name. He’d recall details about their lives they’d mentioned once, months ago; it was a sick mother, a job loss, a fear they’d shared with someone else entirely. He made people feel chosen. Not chosen collectively, the way a congregation feels chosen as the Church, but that they were unique. Special.2

Before Jonestown, before Guyana, before the Kool-Aid, Jim Jones was a celebrated pastor. Peoples Temple in Indianapolis was genuinely progressive, one of the most racially integrated congregations in 1950s America. Jones got formal commendations. He was appointed director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission. He fed and housed people. He genuinely did real good. The charisma came first, over time the control slowly grew.

Marshall Applewhite, the founder of Heaven’s Gate,3 was a former music teacher and failed opera singer. On paper, he didn’t check the boxes of a cult leader; but he had a certain quality. Former members consistently described Applewhite as having an intense, almost penetrating gaze that made them feel personally seen; as if he could look straight through them.4 His early recruiting meetings in the 1970s drew crowds who came out of curiosity and left convinced they’d met someone touched by something beyond this world.

The Church Pipeline

Most cults in history didn’t start as cults. They started as churches, spiritual communities, a Bible study in someone’s living room with eight people. Then somewhere along the way, not in one dramatic moment, but across dozens of minor shifts, the community stopped being about God or gods or any religious presence and started being about the pastor, the guru, the leader.

There’s a reason religious institutions are uniquely vulnerable to this. From day one a church asks you to surrender your skepticism. I don’t believe this is manipulation but theological. Faith, by definition, requires believing something you cannot prove. Submitting to a higher authority. Trusting that someone or something knows more than you do. As a pastor, I believe this is true. For most people going to church, that’s a big part of the point. You are surrendering to the belief that there is a God who created the world, created you, and wants you a part of His kingdom.

But as a pastor in a church context, I can’t deny that it does create a pre-softened entry point for a charismatic personality. The congregation has already been culturally trained to receive authority from the front of the room. They’ve already been told that doubt is something to overcome, not honor. They’ve already learned that the leader has a direct line to something they don’t. A charismatic pastor doesn’t have to build the framework, it’s already embedded.

Take Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church in Seattle.5 By the early 2000s, Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America; thousands of young, educated, culturally savvy people who thought organized religion was dead until they found this. Driscoll was electrifying. Brutally funny. Theologically serious. He made Christianity feel urgent again.

I can remember being 21 years old, a senior in college and listening to a message he preached from first Peter—it was captivating. I listened to the sermon over and over again. It was about the call to be a godly man, to rise up, to make a difference. Then I graduated college, went to seminary, and became a pastor, and I was attending church conferences where he spoke and noticed as he addressed pastors it felt different. The electric charisma was there, but the tone, the authority, the way he spoke felt more like a chairman speaking to a board than a pastor encouraging other pastors.

Over the years at Mars Hill, things shifted. Former elders and members describe a culture of total submission to Driscoll’s authority. Questioning his decisions (even privately, among leadership) was treated as spiritual rebellion. His style of preaching, which started as bold, gradually became consuming. The church’s identity and Driscoll’s identity became enmeshed and impossible to separate. When the structure finally collapsed in 2014, it wasn’t because of one scandal. It was because the entire architecture had been built around one man’s charisma and charisma, it turns out, is not load-bearing.

Or take Bill Hybels and Willow Creek or Brian Houston and Hillsong. Or the dozens of megachurch pastors whose stories follow a consistent pattern: extraordinary personal magnetism, explosive growth, a culture of unquestioned loyalty, a hidden private life, and a collapse that destroys thousands of people who genuinely believed.

The victims aren’t gullible, that’s a misnomer. They’re people who wanted community. Who wanted meaning. Who found someone who seemed to have it and they gave that person more and more of themselves until there was nothing left.

What Charisma Actually Is

Charisma isn’t magic. It’s a cluster of learnable, observable behaviors that trigger specific neurological responses.6 Eye contact held just slightly longer than normal. Mirroring body language. Speaking in cadences that rise and fall with emotional precision. Using your name. Remembering small details. Creating the experience of you feeling like you are the only person in the room.

These behaviors activate the brain’s reward circuitry, oxytocin; the bonding hormone and dopamine; the reward and motivation neurotransmitter. They are the same chemicals that make you feel safe with a person you love. A charismatic leader does more than earn your trust intellectually. Whether it’s performed knowingly or unknowingly they chemically install it. Once that bond is formed, your brain works to protect it.

This is motivated reasoning and it’s the mechanism by which intelligent, critical thinking people end up defending behavior they would have found unconscionable a year earlier.7 Because the alternative of admitting the bond was built on something false is neurologically experienced as loss. Grief. As a kind of death. So you don’t. You find reasons. You adjust your interpretation. You tell yourself that the people leaving are the ones who didn’t understand. They weren’t strong enough. They had their own issues. The charismatic figure doesn’t have to control your thinking. Your own brain does it for you.

There’s one more layer here that makes churches uniquely vulnerable. In a secular context, a charismatic leader still has to answer (at least theoretically) to something external. A board. A market. A law. Shareholders. Results.

In a religious context, the leader can claim to answer only to God. And God, conveniently, tends to agree with the pastor. The theological term for this is spiritual authority and in healthy churches, it’s real; but has boundary markers. The pastor leads, but the congregation has recourse. There is accountability through elders, a board, a denomination, an ecclesiastical structure.

But a charismatic personality over time, will erode those checks. Not necessarily maliciously, often for them it’s genuine, they really do believe they’re hearing from God. That God is doing something new and they are the one to lead into uncharted territory, others don’t fully understand, the opposition is to be expected when you are breaking new ground.

The result is a closed loop:

The leader hears from God, the congregation hears from the leader, questioning the leader is questioning God, and questioning God is the one thing you’ve been taught never to do.

That’s not a church anymore. That’s a cult with stained glass windows. Or probably more appropriate a haze machine and a green room. This is the first match strike. Charisma creates a field of influence whether in a jungle commune, a spacecraft waiting room, or a megachurch.8

Crisis

However, a match doesn’t start a fire on its own. It needs something to burn and crisis is the most flammable thing in the world. Crisis doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a label, crisis shows up as an urgent feeling. The sense that the ground beneath you is less solid than it was. That the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life might not be accurate. In that moment, you aren’t thinking about what is true, you are looking for relief. Crisis becomes the open door.

Cults don’t recruit people at their best. They recruit people at their most uncertain. In a lot of cases it’s probably not the cults strategy. It’s just that uncertain people are looking and communities built around a charismatic center are very good at being findable. Jonestown grew fastest in the early 1970s. Post-civil rights disillusionment. Post-Vietnam. Mid-Watergate. A specific kind of American who had believed, genuinely, deeply believed, in the system, in the arc of justice, in the promise that things were getting better. They had watched all of it, one headline at a time, come apart at the seams.

Jones didn’t recruit nihilists. He recruited idealists in mourning. People whose hope hadn’t died, but was orphaned and longed for somewhere to go. They still had all this capacity for belief and nowhere to put it. He offered something to believe in.

Heaven’s Gate peaked in the 1990s. Millennial anxiety and I don’t mean the generational demographic like myself, I mean actual end-of-millennium anxiety. The internet was making the world feel simultaneously infinite and hollow. Old certainties; religious, national, cultural, were dissolving faster than new ones could form. Applewhite offered a cosmological explanation for why you felt alien in your own life: because you were. Literally. You were a soul from another level of existence, temporarily housed in a human body, and the ship was coming. That’s not a crazy thing to believe when you feel crazy in your own skin.

Researchers who study cult recruitment have identified specific life transitions that create acute vulnerability.9 Divorce. Bereavement. Serious illness of yours or someone you love. Moving to a new city. Losing a job. Graduating and discovering that the structure you’d relied on for twenty-two years has evaporated. What these moments have in common is disorientation.

For the majority of people identity is largely constructed from external scaffolding; roles, relationships, routines, communities. When that scaffolding shifts or collapses, you experience something that feels like groundlessness. Like you’ve forgotten, temporarily, who you are. Into that specific gap, a charismatic community with total certainty about who you could be (who you were meant to be) is extraordinarily effective. In the context of a cult, they don’t recruit you like the Marines, they receive you.

This is called love bombing.10 The immediate, overwhelming experience of warmth, attention, and belonging that high-control groups offer to newcomers. It’s not coldly calculated, the members genuinely feel love for this new person who has found their community. But the effect is the same: you arrive empty, and you are filled. Your brain, already depleted by crisis, already desperate for relief, files this under safe. True. Home. Now everything that follows gets the benefit of that first impression.

Here’s the specific mechanism that makes churches uniquely dangerous when crisis meets charisma. Because religious communities don’t just attract people in crisis. They are purposely by design, crisis-processing centers.

What do churches offer at their best? Funerals. Hospital visits. Meals when you’ve had a baby or lost a spouse. A community of people who show up when the world stops making sense, offering confession, prayer, absolution. This is genuinely beautiful. It’s one of the reasons the religious community has persisted across every human culture in recorded history. We are creatures who need ritual and witness for our suffering. When a church is healthy, crisis brings people into community. Into a relationship with a body of people, a tradition, a theology that is larger than any one personality.

However, when a church has already been tilted by a charismatic leader, crisis brings people into dependency. Specifically, dependency on the leader, because the leader was the one who showed up. Who prayed over you. Who called when you were in the hospital. Who remembered your mother’s name. Who had the answer that nobody else could give you.

You were already chemically bonded to this person. And now they were there for you in your darkest moment. That’s one of the most powerful human bonds there is. Your crisis meets their presence. Your vulnerability finds their witness. It’s the same force at work that makes people fall in love with their therapists, doctors, or rescuers. It’s known as transference, and it is incredibly difficult to reason your way out of once it’s formed.

In a religious context this goes deeper. Many charismatic religious leaders respond to their followers crises and then proceed to interpret them. Your divorce, your cancer diagnosis, your bankruptcy, your depression, it gets folded into a larger narrative in which the leader is the translator. God is allowing this to refine you. God is breaking you open so He can rebuild you. This suffering is not random, it is preparation. And I am the one He sent to help you through it.

This reframing is, in certain circumstances, genuinely healing. The experience of meaning, even painful meaning is neurologically different from the experience of random suffering. Viktor Frankl built an entire school of psychology on this insight.

Yet, your crisis becomes evidence of the leader’s specialness. Your need for them has been elevated to the status of divine appointment. Leaving or even questioning isn’t only disloyalty to a community. It’s spiritual disobedience. It’s walking away from the thing God specifically put in your path.

Here’s the most insidious mechanism of crisis. Healthy communities help you through crisis. The goal is resolution. Healing. A return to stability. High-control groups (whether religious or secular) have a different relationship with crisis. They need it. Crisis is the fuel. Without it, the dependency weakens. Without it, people might start thinking clearly. So a charismatic leader, consciously or not, will tend to maintain a low-grade climate of crisis within the community. There is always an enemy. Always a threat. Always a reason the outside world cannot be trusted; and must not be. Always a new crisis that requires you to go deeper, give more, surrender another piece of the life you had before.

In Jonestown, Jones created what survivors describe as a permanent emergency. Random late-night meetings. Drills. Announcements of imminent persecution. White Nights, which were rehearsals for mass suicide, framed as loyalty tests, that happened repeatedly before the real one. By the time November 18th, 1978 arrived, the community had been so thoroughly marinated in manufactured crisis that the genuine article was indistinguishable from the rehearsal.

In churches, this is subtler. It looks like a culture of spiritual urgency, the sense that the stakes are always high, the enemy is always at the door, and now is not the time to be asking hard questions or pulling back your commitments. The mission is too important. The moment is too critical. Suddenly an attack against the pastor, becomes an attack against the church.

Some of the cues of this are when the sermons send you home activated rather than settled. When the community rewards emotional intensity and sidelines people who seem too calm, too skeptical, or too whole. Crisis, maintained at a low boil, is an extraordinary management tool. And the person who controls the temperature of the room controls everything in it.

One more detail related to crisis.

The crises that fuel cults used to be primarily external. Economic collapse. War. Cultural rupture. Things that happened to whole societies at once. Now, the crisis is ambient.

It lives in your phone. It appears in push notifications at 2 a.m. It is algorithmically calibrated to maintain exactly the level of anxiety that keeps you scrolling, because engagement and outrage run on the same neurochemical track.11 We are the first humans in history to live in a state of manufactured, continuous, low-grade existential crisis, delivered on demand, personalized to our specific fears.

The wellness cult knows this. The political movement knows this. The charismatic pastor with the podcast, large instagram following, conference, and book deal knows this.

You don’t have to manufacture crisis anymore. The infrastructure of modern life does it for you. All you need is someone standing in front of it, saying: “I know what this means. I know what to do. Follow me.” Charisma is the match. Crisis is the tinder. But a fire needs one more thing to truly burn out of control. It needs to convince you that the flame is light.

Certainty

At a neurological level uncertainty is more that uncomfortable. It is painful. Brain imaging studies show that uncertainty and ambiguity recruit the same core threat-processing circuits in the brain, especially the amygdala.12 Your nervous system doesn’t make clean distinctions between types of threat. “I don’t know if that’s a predator,” “I don’t know if my marriage will survive,” or “I don’t know what happens when I die.” They all flip on the danger siren.

We are embodied creatures. The same system that once kept us alive in the wild still responds to uncertainty as something urgent, something that must be resolved. Ambiguity feels unsafe. And in a world shaped by the Fall, that response often gets misdirected. In the wild, hesitation could cost you your life. The people who survived were often the ones who acted quickly, who committed to a story and moved, they didn’t sit and ponder what kind of lion this was. Though we may no longer be in the wild, the same instinct is there. We don’t just want answers. We need them. We rush to resolve uncertainty, even if the answer isn’t true.

Jim Jones claimed he could heal cancer. He staged dozens of fake healings. Paid actors. Carefully choreographed moments where someone threw away their crutches, where a tumor (actually a piece of chicken liver produced from beneath a robe) was held up as the thing that had been living inside someone’s body. And thousands of people saw it.

Were they stupid? Were they uniquely credulous?

No. They were people in pain, watching something that looked like proof, delivered by someone they had already chemically bonded with, inside a community that had become their primary source of belonging. When all of those forces align, the critical faculty doesn’t just lower its guard, but actively assists in the deception. Your brain, already committed to the leader, will work to make the evidence fit. Your mind quickly fills in the gaps.

Psychologists call this confirmation bias. In the context of a high-control group, it becomes something more like confirmation compulsion. You are not just inclined to believe. You are motivated to protect the belief because the alternative, that you were wrong, that you gave years of your life to something false, is a grief too large to approach directly.

Heaven’s Gate went further. Applewhite built a system. A full galactic architecture with its own logic. Diagrams. A glossary. A precise account of how the universe was structured, how souls were seeded on Earth, what the Next Level was, how the spacecraft worked, and what happened at the appointed time. It was specific and detailed. You could study it. You could argue within it. You could become expert in it. That specificity was the trap.

Because once you have invested significant time and effort in understanding a complex system, you have a sunk cost working against you. Leaving doesn’t just mean abandoning a belief. It means abandoning an expertise. An identity. A framework through which you understand everything. Sunk cost is the reason some of you still have a box of beanie babies in your attic.

In a religious context, doubt becomes weaponized. In a secular cult; a wellness community, a political movement, a self-help empire, if you express doubt, they have to handle it somehow. They might gaslight you. Isolate you. Pressure you socially. But they don’t have a theological framework that defines your doubt as morally wrong. Religious high-control groups do.

Doubt, in a healthy theological tradition, is treated as part of the journey. The mystics wrote about dark nights of the soul. The Psalms are full of anguished, unanswered questions hurled at a silent God. Doubt is not the opposite of faith but what faith is made of.

In a high-control religious environment, doubt gets redefined. It becomes evidence of spiritual weakness, insufficient surrender, or a foothold for the enemy; whatever the enemy is called in that particular theology. Satan. The world. Fear. Low vibration.

The message, delivered is that: your doubt is not information. Your doubt is a symptom. And the cure is more surrender. More trust. More commitment to the leader who is strong where you are weak.

This closes the loop entirely. Because now the very faculty you would use to evaluate the situation; your critical mind, your uncertainty, your instinct that something is wrong, has been pre-labeled as the problem.

Not only should you distrust your doubt. You should be ashamed of it. And shame, unlike doubt, does not push you toward investigation. Shame pushes you inward and downward. It makes you smaller. It makes you need the community more, not less, because the community is the only place where you can confess the doubt and have it taken away.

In healthy institutions whether religious or secular there are mechanisms for challenging authority. Appeal processes. Boards. The ability to go above someone’s head. The ability to leave and be okay. In a high-control religious group, these mechanisms get dismantled one by one. Rarely all at once. Usually across years, so gradually that each individual change seems like a minor adjustment.

Dissent becomes disloyal. Then, disloyalty becomes spiritual rebellion. Then, spiritual rebellion becomes dangerous; to you, to the community, to the mission.

After a while leaving becomes something people don’t do. Not because there are locks on the doors. But because what awaits outside has been so thoroughly poisoned in the community’s imagination that it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like exile.

Former members of Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill describe a culture in which questioning leadership in any form (even privately, even among trusted friends) could result in formal church discipline. Being marked. Brought before elders. Required to confess and repent of your skepticism as though it were sin. Think about what that does to a person’s internal life? Every doubt becomes a private emergency. Every hesitation becomes evidence of your own corruption. Your inner world, the place where healthy people process uncertainty, possess a locus of control, and arrive at their own conclusions, becomes a minefield.

So, what do you do? You stop thinking. Because thinking hurts. And when thinking hurts, certainty feels like relief. Certainty becomes the mechanism that makes this self-perpetuating. After enough time inside a high-certainty system, the certainty stops being something you have and becomes something you are. Your worldview, your social world, your language, your daily rhythms, your understanding of history and morality and your own past, all of it has been filtered through and organized by this framework. You don’t just believe it. You think in it. Which means an attack on the belief is experienced as an attack on the self and the self defends.

This is why former members often describe a period of profound disorientation after leaving, sometimes lasting years. It’s not just grief for the community, though that’s real. It’s the experience of having to rebuild cognition from the ground up. Of learning to tolerate uncertainty again, in a nervous system that has been trained, over years, to treat uncertainty as emergency.

Steven Hassan, one of the foremost researchers on cult recovery, describes it as the existence of two selves within a cult member: the authentic self; the person they were before, with their own preferences, doubts, values, and humor, and the cult self, the identity constructed by and for the group.13

This not a historical curiosity of something people in the past were susceptible to, that we regard in chronological snobbery;14 it is a present reality. We live in what you could call a certainty market. On one side: a population experiencing unprecedented levels of ambient uncertainty, information overload, institutional distrust, and meaning deficit. On the other side: an explosion of charismatic figures across religion, wellness, politics, finance, self-help, fitness, offering complete, confident, actionable frameworks for understanding everything.

The market is enormous. The suppliers are sophisticated. And the barriers to entry have never been lower. You used to need a physical space to build a high-control group. A church. A compound. A commune. You needed bodies in a room. Now you need a smartphone and a consistent brand aesthetic.

The wellness leader sells you a protocol. A complete one; sleep, diet, supplements, mindset, community, morning routine. Every variable in your life has an answer. The certainty is comprehensive. The political movement gives you an epistemology. Not just policies (a way of knowing what’s true), but a designated set of sources to trust and a longer list of sources to dismiss. Once you’ve adopted the epistemology, new information gets sorted automatically. Anything that confirms the framework is a signal. Anything that challenges it is propaganda.

The megachurch (that lacks humility and accountability) gives you a God who is specific, personal, and conveniently interpretable only through the pastor standing between you and Him. The group changes but the function stays the same. Complete certainty. Delivered with charisma. Into a crisis that has left you raw and open and desperate for solid ground.

Here is the hard reality of solid ground.

There is no solid ground, at least not the kind they’re selling.

The actual human condition, the one every philosophical tradition, every serious theology, every honest scientist will confirm, is one of irreducible uncertainty. We do not know fully what consciousness is. We do not know what happens when we die. As a Christian I have a belief system of what happens, but I can’t fully prove it to you, it requires faith. I wholeheartedly believe we spend eternity with God, but I can’t give you undeniable proof. We do not know, with anything approaching completeness, why we suffer. This is not a failure of knowledge that will eventually be corrected while we are breathing. It’s simply the passport stamp for being alive.

And the capacity to remain present and functional and even joyful inside that uncertainty; to tolerate the groundlessness without filling it with something false, is one of the hardest things a human being can do. It is also, the evidence suggests, the only way to stay free. Because the moment you trade uncertainty for certainty, the moment you accept someone else’s complete answer in exchange for the discomfort of your own incomplete question, you have handed them something you may not get back easily.

You have handed them the inside of your mind. And the lock clicks shut. This is how the three ingredients complete their work. Charisma opens the door. You feel seen. You feel safe. Your neurochemistry bonds before your reason can intervene. Crisis gets you through it. You were already looking. Already depleted. Already willing to try something you might have questioned in a more settled moment. Certainty then locks the door behind you. It gives you a framework so complete, so satisfying, so load-bearing in your daily life, that dismantling it would mean dismantling yourself. Then somewhere in there, at a moment you can never quite identify later, the community stopped being something you belonged to and became who you were.

The fire didn’t feel like you were burning. It felt like warmth.

Why This Keeps Happening

Here’s the part I wish wasn’t true.

These three ingredients (charisma, crisis, certainty) aren’t going away. If anything, the conditions for cults are improving. We are living through one of the most prolonged periods of institutional distrust in recorded history. Trust in major institutions like government and media has declined globally, with growing fragmentation and loss of shared authority across countries.15 We are simultaneously more connected and more lonely than any humans who have ever lived. Social media gives you the sensation of community while systematically replacing the depth of it. We are drowning in information that rather than producing clarity produces a permanent, low-grade hum of uncertainty. About your health. About the economy. About what you should eat, believe, vote for, fear.

You could not design a better petri dish. And so new forms keep emerging. The wellness cult doesn’t have a compound. It has a Substack and a supplement line. It recruits not with promises of salvation but with before-and-after photos and a waiting list for the online community. The political cult doesn’t call itself a cult. It calls itself a movement. A tribe. The only people who see what’s really going on. The guru doesn’t wear robes. He has a podcast. She has a retreat in aspen. They have a framework—a proprietary, trademarked, certified framework, for becoming your highest self all for under 2k.

Here’s where I want to leave you.

The question is not: how could those people have fallen for that?

The question is: what are the crises in my own life that I haven’t fully reckoned with?

Because that’s the open door. That’s where the charismatic figure walks in.

The person who feels lost after a career collapse is not weaker than you. The person who joins a community after a devastating breakup is not more naive than you. The person who finds themselves, slowly, over years, adopting the complete worldview of a single leader they trust absolutely; that person started somewhere recognizable.

They started uncertain.

Researchers who study cult survivors use a framework called the BITE model: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.16 The defining feature of a high-control group isn’t one dramatic moment of coercion. It’s a slow accumulation of small surrenders, each one individually reasonable, collectively devastating.

You don’t wake up and decide to join a cult. You decide to attend one more meeting. To try the protocol for thirty days. To give the community a chance. To trust, just this once, someone who seems to have answers you don’t. And at each step, that seems reasonable. Until it isn’t.

918 people died in Jonestown. Most of them had joined Peoples Temple because it was, genuinely, one of the most racially integrated, socially progressive communities in the 1960s. They were idealists. They were people who wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. That impulse to belong, to believe, to be certain is not pathological, it’s human.

When we hear the word “atheist” today, we think of someone who denies the existence of the divine. But to a 2nd-century Roman, an atheist wasn’t someone who lacked an inner belief—it was someone who lacked a public practice.

In this episode, we dismantle our modern assumptions about religion and return to a world where “God” was woven into every marketplace, military oath, and political assembly. We explore why the Roman system—which was famously tolerant of thousands of local deities—could not tolerate the exclusive worship of Jesus.

Ghost Stories

King Saul thinks he is backed into a corner. The Philistine army is closing in, God has gone silent, and the prophet Samuel is dead. In desperation, Saul does the unthinkable. The king who outlawed witchcraft goes on the hunt for a witch.

Saul disguises himself and travels by night to the village of Endor. The king of Israel once anointed by the prophet Samuel, chosen by God, meant to stand in the light, is now sneaking through the darkness to consult a forbidden medium. The king himself had driven necromancers out of the land earlier in his reign. Yet on this night, that same man knocked on a witch’s door.

So, what did Saul encounter? Was this a demon in a Samuel mask? A psychological breakdown? Or did the witch conjure up the prophet? Here are the three theories for the Bible’s only ghost story.

1. The “Divine Interruption” View (The Real Samuel)

This is the straightforward—yet most perplexing—literal reading of the text. The verse specifically says, “When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice.”1 It doesn’t say she saw a spirit or a demon. Furthermore, the figure gives a 100% accurate prophecy of Saul’s death, which is something usually reserved for God’s true prophets.

The message itself also sounds exactly like Samuel. The prophet rebukes Saul for disturbing him and repeats the judgment Saul had already heard before: “The Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to David.”2 If this was a demon or spirit, it’s unlikely it would say that the kingdom would go to David. Then there is Samuel’s crushing final line: “Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me.”3 Within a day Saul and his sons would die on Mount Gilboa, just as the voice predicted.

In this view, the witch didn’t actually summon Samuel; God interrupted her ritual. It’s as if someone performing a stage trick suddenly finds themselves standing in front of the real person they were pretending to summon. The witch is terrified because she expected a parlor trick, but instead, God allowed the real Samuel to cross back over just long enough to deliver a final, crushing verdict to a king who had lost his way.

2. The “Demonic Deepfake” View (The Impersonator)

If the idea of a witch commanding a prophet feels like spiritual thin-ice, this theory suggests that Saul experienced a high-level spiritual deception. Saul never actually “sees” the figure. He asks the woman, “What is his appearance?” and she describes an “old man wrapped in a robe.” Saul assumes it is Samuel based on her description.

Supporters of this view point to the Bible’s strong condemnation of necromancy. Because Deuteronomy explicitly forbids consulting the dead, theologians such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,4 and John Calvin5 argued that the figure could not have been the real Samuel but was more likely a demonic impersonation permitted by God as judgment on Saul. In this perspective, the scene represents a demonic imitation exploiting Saul’s desperation.6 Proponents argue that a demon took on Samuel’s form to drive Saul into total despair. Since demons are ancient observers, they could easily mimic Samuel’s voice and repeat prophecies Saul had already heard years earlier. The views see this as a demonic “deepfake” designed to push a broken man over the edge into suicide.

3. The “Psychological Shadow” View (The Archetypal Projection)

This view looks at the psychology of guilt. Saul had spent his entire reign craving Samuel’s approval. Saul was already in the middle of a mental health crisis (the “evil spirit from the Lord” mentioned earlier in 1 Samuel). In the darkness of the cave, under extreme stress, Saul’s subconscious mind projected the one authority figure he feared most. The witch may simply have been a skilled manipulator who sensed Saul’s desperation. The prophecy wasn’t supernatural insight; but a mental breakdown. Anyone looking at Saul’s military position and mental state could have predicted he wasn’t going to survive the next day’s battle. The “ghost” was the personification of Saul’s own conscience stripping him down.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann noted the scene ultimately highlights Saul’s tragic isolation: the king who once received God’s word through prophets now turns to a forbidden medium because he has no access to the word of Yahweh.7 Many modern scholars read the Endor episode primarily as a dramatic portrayal of Saul’s collapse rather than a report meant to explain exactly how the apparition occurred.8 By this point in the narrative Saul has already descended into paranoia, jealousy, and rage toward David. His earlier episodes of torment by an “evil spirit” suggest a leader unraveling under pressure. In this interpretation, the séance scene functions less as a supernatural event and more as the final moment when Saul’s guilt and fear take visible form.

Conclusion

The real power in the story isn’t the occult. It’s the silence of God.

Saul tried to force an answer because he could not endure heaven’s silence. Whether it was the real Samuel or a demonic mirror, the result was the same: Saul was forced to confront the reality he had been running from. The Witch of Endor teaches us that when we try to hack the afterlife, to find a shortcut to the truth, we usually end up face-to-face with the very thing we were trying to avoid.

The tragedy of Saul’s story is that he searched for answers everywhere except the place God had already provided. Earlier in his reign Saul had access to prophets, priests, and the sacred means Israel used to seek God’s guidance. But over time he rejected those voices. By the night he arrived at Endor, the silence of heaven was a consequence of a long history of disobedience.

Saul went looking for a ghost and instead found his judgment.

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?
Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

The Most Brutal Execution Ever Designed

Crucifixion was designed to be the most painful death a human being could experience.

The Romans did not invent it, but they perfected it. Their goal was to create a form of execution that produced the maximum amount of suffering while prolonging death as long as possible.

Victims typically died from exhaustion asphyxiation compounded by severe shock and blood loss.

Every breath required them to push their body upward against nails driven through their feet and wrists. When exhaustion finally made that impossible, the lungs filled with fluid and the victim slowly suffocated.

This is the death Jesus willingly endured. And it is far worse than most people imagine.

The Scourging Before the Cross

In 1986, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a landmark medical analysis titled “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” which examined the physiological mechanics of Roman crucifixion.1

Jesus was first stripped naked, mocked, and then scourged. Scourging on its own was such a painful event that some people died from it before ever making it to the cross.

Jesus’ hands would have been chained above his head, exposing his back and legs to a Roman scourge called a flagrum, a whip with leather thongs embed with metal or bone, this would tear deep into the skin and muscle of the victim.

The barbs would go down to the nerves, the damage could be so deep that muscle and tissue were torn open, leaving the victim in severe shock even before reaching the cross.

With His back bloodied and hanging in strips of ribbons, Jesus carried the heavy rough cross-bar weighing well over 100 pounds on his back to the hill where He would die.

Physically devastated from a sleepless night, miles of walking, and the severe beating, Jesus collapsed under the weight of the cross. Jesus laid covered in the very dirt He created, not having the strength to get up on his own.

Upon arriving at his place of crucifixion, they would have spit on him, mocked him; in front of all his friends and his family.

The Moment of Crucifixion

The carpenter who had hammered many nails into wood, now had nails driven through His wrists and feet. 5 to 7-inch rough spikes beaten into His body, likely piercing major nerves and causing intense pain. As Jesus was nailed to a cross, His body would have twitched involuntarily; withered in agony.

The death of crucifixion would likely come from Jesus’ lungs being filled with fluid. To breathe He had to lift up His body, requiring that He placed His full weight on the spikes in his feet. The spikes would tear through the nerves between the metatarsal bones. By flexing His elbows and shoulders, He lifted Himself upward, pushing His torn and stripped back against the rough splintered wood of the cross. The twisting of elbows caused rotation of His wrist and the turning of His hands, produced a fiery pain along His nerves.

Every time He breathed this is what He went through. Eventually the victim could no longer push upward to breathe. When exhaustion finally made that impossible, the body sagged downward and breathing became progressively more difficult until suffocation likely occurred.

This explains why the Gospel of John records the soldiers breaking the legs of the other victims. Without the ability to push upward, death would come quickly.

The Final Hours on the Cross

Jesus not only lived through all this, but spoke lucidly and clearly with enough volume for those to hear. These short utterances would have been difficult and painful to utter. Jesus used His final moments to declare his victory over sin.

He would have hung on the cross for around 6 hours.

It was not just physical pain that Jesus felt on the cross, but also emotional and spiritual pain. On the cross, Jesus took upon Himself the judgment that sin deserved. As the sky turned black like a bruised lung gasping, Jesus bore the weight and gravity of human sin. Hanging from the wooden tree, Jesus took every sin we have committed and every sin we will ever commit and carried it on His bruised and tattered back so we could be free.

The Meaning of the Cross

Jesus bore one of the most excruciating deaths the world has ever known. But He was not a helpless victim. It is tempting to look upon the crucified Christ and want to plug our ears, we don’t want to hear this; it’s too intense, too sad, it’s just too much.

But Jesus was not caught in the wrong place on the wrong day.

He was not unprepared—nor shocked.

No, Jesus clawed his way to Calvary. Nothing would stop the Lion of Judah from climbing that tree to experience an excruciating death, knowing He was setting His brothers and sisters free.

Nothing would keep the Son of Man from dying for His family. In the book of John, Jesus says, No one takes my life, I lay it down, and I will rise in victory.

Jesus now looks at us and says, you were worth every drop of pain. You were worth every second of agony.

You... Were... Worth... It…

The cross is not only a statement of the ugliness of sin and its seriousness before a holy Judge. But the proclamation of God’s unending love for His people. At the cross Jesus was saying, I love you, you were worth suffering for, I want you for eternity.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.2

Jesus is not looking for your pity over the immense pain of his death. The Son of Man did not die to be pitied, He died to set captives free.

If you found this article helpful, you might also like:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• Genesis and the 900-Year Lifespans

The One Where a Lady Turned to Salt

In the Book of Genesis, we find the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, these are more than just ancient cities of decay; they have served as a moral warning for 4,000 years. The text says “The Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire... out of heaven.”1 By morning, Abraham looked toward the valley and saw “the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”2

For centuries, this was viewed as a purely supernatural bolt from the blue.3 In the last few decades, however, researchers have revisited the Dead Sea basin with a forensic lens; reassessing candidate sites and asking what kinds of natural catastrophes (seismic activity, fire, regional collapse) could match the scale of the biblical story.4

The question in this article, isn’t whether God acted. The question is how He acted. Was it through direct intervention, natural forces, or a combination of both? When we apply Biblical logic to the ruins, we find four unique theories to explain one of the wilder stories in Genesis.

1. The Traditional Biblical View (The “Divine Rain” Theory)

The traditional view takes the text at its literal face value: God intervened directly in time and space to execute judgment. The text specifies that the fire came “out of heaven.” This isn’t described as an earthquake from below, but a targeted strike from above. Proponents of this view argue that trying to find a natural cause misses the point.5 This event was timed to allow Lot to escape and cast judgment, suggesting a controlled application of force from God above.

In recent years, some independent explorers working in the southern Dead Sea region have pointed to small sulfur deposits found near proposed Sodom sites. They describe rounded fragments embedded in ashy soil and claim they have unusually high sulfur purity compared to typical volcanic material. These reports have circulated widely in documentaries and apologetics media.6

However, such findings have not been confirmed in the major peer-reviewed excavation reports from the region. The Dead Sea basin does contain natural bitumen, sulfur, seismic activity, and fire destruction layers documented at several Bronze Age sites.7 But whether any specific sulfur deposits can be directly connected to the Biblical destruction remains unproven. For those who read the account literally, these deposits have been seen as possible physical remnants of the “rain of sulfur” described in Genesis. However, for most proponents of this view, “proof” of the deposits are not needed to support a miraculous act of God in the text. If God chose to act in judgment from heaven, He doesn’t need to leave “miracle evidence” still visible 4,000 years later (BTW, turns out you can buy some of your own sulfur balls on Ebay).

2. The Archaeological Theory (The “Tallah el-Hammam” Airburst)

In 2021, a team of scientists published a paper in Scientific Reports analyzing the ruins of Tall el-Hamman.8 The proposal has generated significant debate. Some archaeologists question whether the site was actually Sodom, while others argue the evidence for an airburst remains inconclusive.

They analyzed the ruins of Tall el-Hammam; a massive Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea. The city was abruptly destroyed around 1650 BC. The team found a charcoal-rich destruction layer containing melted pottery, shocked quartz, and diamond-like carbon.

These materials only form under intense heat and pressure; specifically, temperatures exceeding 2,000°C (hotter than a blast furnace). The theory is that a cosmic airburst (like a meteor similar to the 1908 Tunguska event) exploded over the valley. The resulting heat wave would have flash-incinerated the cities, while the shockwave would have leveled the walls instantly. The airburst may have lofted large amounts of salt and brine into the atmosphere, which then fell back over the region. This explains why the region remained unculturable for centuries.9 This could provide a possible natural context for the Biblical description of Lot’s wife becoming a “pillar of salt.”10

3. The Geological Theory (The “Bitumen Pressure Cooker”)

This view looks at the geological context of the Dead Sea. The area sits on a massive fault line and is one of the most oil-and-gas-rich regions in the ancient world. Ancient writers like Strabo and Josephus describe the region as prone to earthquakes and burning asphalt pits.11 The Dead Sea is famous for bitumen (asphalt) that occasionally bubbles to the surface. In this perspective, a massive earthquake triggered a seismic purging of the earth.12

High-pressure pockets of natural gas and petroleum were forced up through the fault lines. Once ignited (perhaps by a lightning strike13) the valley became a natural pressure cooker. The rain of fire wasn’t falling from the stars; it was being ejected from the earth and falling back down as flaming tar and sulfur. This could explain why Abraham saw the smoke “rising like a furnace.” A furnace implies a subterranean heat source, consistent with a massive petrochemical fire fueled by the earth’s own reservoirs.

4. The Ezekiel Reframe

For centuries, the most contested question about Sodom wasn’t geological but, hermeneutical: what exactly was the sin?

The traditional answer has been so dominant that many readers assume it’s the only answer. But the Bible itself offers a counter-interpretation and it comes from one of its own prophets. In Ezekiel 16:49, God speaks directly about Sodom’s sin:

“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

No sexuality mentioned, but pride. Excess. Indifference to the poor.

This isn’t a liberal revision of the text. It’s a later biblical writer looking back at the same event and naming a different center of gravity. Ezekiel doesn’t contradict the Genesis passage; instead he reframes what the text was about. The destruction wasn’t primarily a response to a particular sexual act. It was the culmination of a society that had turned inward, hoarded its resources, and had stopped seeing the people at its gates.

Which makes the story significantly more uncomfortable than its traditional reading.

Because a Sodom defined by sexual sin is easier to keep at a distance. A Sodom defined by wealth, comfort, and neglect of the vulnerable is a city that looks recognizable. It looks like cities today. It might look like your city. It might look like your church.

The four theories in this piece are all trying to answer the same question Abraham was asking from the hillside. Not just what happened, but what does it mean?

And Ezekiel’s answer is the one that has the longest reach.

Conclusion

We often treat the story of Lot’s wife as a strange moral legend; the woman who became a pillar of salt, like a bizarre footnote in the Bible’s index. But when you look at the Dead Sea basin through the lens of history, geology, archaeology, and hermeneutics the image becomes more complex.

If the destruction was a direct act of divine judgment, then the pillar of salt stands as a symbol of disobedience frozen in time.

If the catastrophe was the result of earthquakes and ignited petroleum deposits, then the valley may have erupted in burning asphalt and sulfur, turning the landscape itself into a furnace.

And if the airburst theory is correct, a massive atmospheric explosion could have blasted salt and brine across the basin, encasing everything in a mineral storm.

Each explanation; miracle, geology, or cosmic catastrophe, tries to account for the same ancient history: a city destroyed so violently that what rose was “like the smoke of a furnace” and the land itself became a monument to the event.

Four thousand years later, the ruins of the Dead Sea valley still invite the same question Abraham asked as he gazed across the plain. Not just what happened, but what it means when God’s physical world and God’s moral world crash together.

Because in Genesis, judgment is never just an idea. It leaves a landscape as a reminder.

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?
Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

This week, we’re deconstructing our “90s red-letter” assumptions to look at the oral, lived reality of the first Christians. From Paul’s letters being heard as “events” to the “reversal” that the Church actually recognized the Bible into existence, we discuss why treating the Bible as a standalone object might be limiting its power. It was never meant to be a reference manual; it was meant to be a story that shapes us together.

The Tower of Babel

Following the Flood in Genesis, the survivors were given a familiar command: “be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth.”1 Instead, they did the exact opposite. They huddled together in a plain called Shinar and built a “city and a tower with its top in the heavens.”2

And God was not happy about it.

Sounds like a strange reason for God to get angry. Why would the Creator of the universe be threatened by a pile of bricks? If God didn’t like tall buildings, He’d have a serious problem with Dubai or New York City.

The puzzle of Babel was not about the height of the building. At the foundation of the project laid this blueprint: “Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the earth.”3 The issue with Babel wasn’t about architecture. It was a massive cultural and technological shift that threatened the future of the human race and spit directly in God’s face. Here are three views on what Babel was about.

1. The Technological Theory (The “Bricks vs. Stone” View)

The text gives a specific construction detail in Genesis 11:3 that feels minor at first, “They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.” In the ancient world, stone was the standard.4 Stone was something you found; you didn’t “make” it. But bricks were a human-made technology. By moving to kiln-fired bricks, humanity was essentially inventing the Industrial Revolution of their age.5

Enter the birth of the autonomous city. By using tar (bitumen) as mortar, they were creating a waterproof, indestructible structure. The tower was going to be a Flood-proof fortress. It was a technological middle finger to heaven—a way of saying, “We don’t need to trust God’s promise never to flood the earth again. We’ve built our own safety.”

The answer to the Babel puzzle in this view wasn’t an issue of innovation in architecture. It was innovation leveraged to resist God’s command. Innovation that thought it could move beyond its Creator.

2. The Political Theory (The “Ziggurat & Centralization” View)

Now to view two. Archaeology gives a strong clue about what the Tower of Babel likely was: a ziggurat.6

These weren’t overpriced residential towers overlooking St. Pete pier7 or monuments to human achievement. Ziggurats were temple structures. They were massive stepped pyramids built as meeting points between heaven and earth.

At the top was a shrine where priests performed rituals to host and manage the presence of the divine. From this perspective, Babel was an attempt to centralize access to God.8 The tower wasn’t humanity trying to connect to God. It was humanity trying to put God under new management. Because where religion is centralized, power follows.

In ancient cities, the temple controlled the economy, the calendar, the workforce, and political order. By building a single city with a single tower, humanity wasn’t just uniting culturally, but creating a system where spiritual authority, political power, and social life were all concentrated in one place.

Genesis tells us the people had “one language and the same words.”

Which meant there could be complete coordination. A unified population, organized around a single vision, led by a centralized system with no friction, no disagreement, and no reason to spread out.

God’s judgment of confusing the languages broke the system before human unity hardened into something capable of scaling pride without limits. The confusion wasn’t chaos for its own sake, or that God was offended. It was restraint.

Diversity disrupted the concentration of power before human unity hardened into something dangerous.

3. The Historical/Babylonian Theory (The “Etemenanki” Connection)

Similar to the second theory, here is what a Babel-scale project may have looked like in history and why it would fall apart.

In the center of ancient Babylon stood a massive structure called Etemenanki,9 a towering ziggurat whose name meant “The House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.” Ancient inscriptions from kings like Nebuchadnezzar describe rebuilding this tower, claiming it had fallen into ruin in earlier generations and needed to be restored.

The parallels with Genesis are worth noting. The Bible places Babel in the land of Shinar;10 the same region where Babylon later rose to power. It describes a tower intended to reach the heavens and a unified population organized around a single massive project. Some scholars believe the Babel story reflects Israel’s theological memory of Babylonian culture; its architecture, ambition, and claim that human systems could bridge heaven and earth.11

Projects like building an Etemenanki, were also fragile.

Massive building efforts required political unity, economic stability, and a coordinated labor force (just imagine the HR nightmare). When empires fractured, supply chains collapsed. Workers disappeared. Funding dried up. Construction stopped. Ancient cities are full of unfinished monuments. The remnants of systems that lost the ability to hold themselves together.

In this view, what Genesis describes as the confusion of languages may reflect social collapse: the sudden breakdown of shared identity, coordination, and trust. When people no longer share the same vision, same loyalties, or the same story, the largest projects become impossible.

This could have been a civilization that simply stopped agreeing on who they were and what they were building.

4. The Theological Reversal

The story of Babel doesn’t end in Genesis. In Acts 2, the nations gather again—Jews, Medes, Egyptians, Romans—people from across the scattered world. But this time, something different happens.

At Babel, unity produced an empire with a single center. At Pentecost, the Spirit didn't restore that unity, instead He created something new: a community defined not by a common language or a single location, but by a shared Lord. The scattered nations weren't linguistically reunited. They were constituted into something Babel could never build; a people whose center was not a tower, but a Person. God didn’t erase the diversity of language. He spoke through it.

Babel was uniformity built on human ambition. Pentecost was unity created by the Spirit. Humanity tried to reach heaven by building a tower. At Pentecost, heaven came down.

Conclusion

So what does Babel look like today?

It looks like any system—a church, a company, a culture, a family—where one vision, one voice, and one power structure has quietly made God optional. The question worth sitting with isn't whether Babel is ancient history. It's asking if there are spaces where you've stopped needing to trust? Babel shows us that God isn’t afraid of our buildings; He’s concerned about our concentration of power.

And the gospel doesn't guarantee that institutions built in its name escape Babel's blueprint.

When humanity gathers in one place with one mind and one ego, we eventually decide we don’t need a Creator. God didn’t destroy the tower because it reached the clouds; He confused the language because He knew that if we stayed unified in our pride, there would be no limit to the damage done.

At Babel, humanity said: “We will rise.”

In the Gospel, God says: “I will come down.”

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?
Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

In this episode, we dismantle the myth of the “Christian Conquest.” We explore why the Roman Empire (a world saturated with gods, hierarchy, and power) wasn’t looking for a Savior, and why the early Christians were viewed not as heroes, but as dangerous “atheists” and social disruptors.

Inside this episode:

• The “Atheist” Christians: Why refusing to burn incense was considered an act of treason.

• Pliny’s Dilemma: The survives letters of a Roman governor who couldn’t find a crime, yet still ordered executions.

• The Radical Table: How slave and free, man and woman, reshaped the meaning of “human” in a stratified world.

• The Constantine Reality Check: Why the Emperor didn’t “create” Christian influence, but merely finally recognized it.