Finding it difficult to believe in a God who orders the destruction of human life is not a new phenomenon. Many have found it hard to square what the Bible says about God’s love with what it says about His violence.

But if we are intellectually honest, the question shouldn't be whether the God of the Bible conforms to our personal standards of right and wrong—but whether He is the real God. If He is true, the question of whether we "like" Him becomes secondary to the question of whether He is worthy of worship.

As it turns out, it is philosophically possible to believe in a God who is both loving and vengeful. Anger is often the only appropriate response when someone you love is hurt. In fact, we wouldn't want to worship a God who didn't respond to the injustices of this world with the determination to fix them.

The apex of this "two-sided" love and anger is the Cross. There, Jesus willingly absorbed the evil of a fallen world so that His Father’s wrath could lovingly cut it out forever.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Many biblical texts teach that Jesus gives his people “eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” But the Bible also warns Christians of the possibility of apostasy, encouraging followers of Jesus to stay on guard against an “evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”

How can it be true that Christians cannot fall away and also true that they can fall away? The key is to understand the difference between the Christian’s condition as elected by God, and the lived-in experience of the Christian’s faith life. Those who are elected by God from before the foundation of the world can never finally fall away, but are assured by God that the faith which he has granted is secure. However, there are people who at one point genuinely believe that Jesus died for them, but who later in life turn away and abandon their Savior. These ultimately have no assurance of salvation, in spite of their previous baptism and confession. These do not apostasize because they “lost” their faith, as though they were faithfully following Jesus and one day realized they didn’t believe in him anymore. Instead, they sadly made a decision to abandon him and live for themselves, either implicitly or explicitly.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Some Christians worry that their Christianity is only theirs because they grew up in a Christian home. But is this a weakness, or a strength? We’re used to thinking that an idea must be individually chosen to be legitimately one’s own, and this taps into a valuable scriptural assertion–that the human individual either does or doesn’t have a relationship with the God of the universe, and that individual has an individual, personal responsibility to this relationship.

But on the other hand, the pursuit of a relationship with God as an isolated individual, as though one could know God without any insight or direction from any other human being, is a false dream. None of us can know anything without others guiding us–either personally, through writing, YouTube videos, or the like. And this reflects an even deeper biblical truth: God has created us for community, for the body of Christ. And as such, there is no way of getting around a relationship with God that is tied up inextricably with relationships with other Christians.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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The apocalyptic fears many have surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) evoke a dystopian image of robots someday ruling the world and turning humans into their slaves. But on the other hand, the dreams some have of a utopian paradise in which computers have advanced to the point where humans no longer need to work, all problems have been solved by the power of advanced computing, and a sort of millennial golden age descends upon a liberated humanity are equally as misguided. These two wildly fantastic visions are based upon a false view of humans as basically walking computers which can be improved upon (either detrimentally on the one hand or beneficially on the other) by even more powerful computers. But if the Bible is right that humans are made in the image of God, with all the personal and relational powers that reflect the internal life of the Trinity and thus are both more valuable and more complex than any computer, then such fears and hopes are mistaken.

AI, since it gathers stored data from across the internet, data quickly accessed by powerful servers, and since it can sort, analyze, and deliver this information at stunningly fast speeds; in fact, can learn to predict how that stored information has been used in past human usages and mimic that usage, is an extremely powerful tool which–in the right hands–can do much good for all of us. But since humans are unique, created by God with specific relational skills like empathy, creativity, and ethical sense, no computer can ever do more than mimic them. So humans don’t need to fear that they will ever be replaced. AI, like any tool, can be used for harm or for good, and as Christians we must resolve to use AI to love and serve each other.

• A Troubled Man, His Chatbot and a Murder-Suicide in Old Greenwich (Subscription may be required) – The Wall Street Journal (August 2025)
• The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work – MIT Sloan Research (December 2024)

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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What does an experience of the Holy Spirit actually look or feel like? Within the Christian tradition, there is often a sharp divide in how this question is answered. Some believe the Holy Spirit frequently acts independently of the Bible, providing direct instructions for specific life situations. Others maintain that the Spirit speaks exclusively through the written Word of Scripture. However, a closer look at the New Testament reveals that both positions capture a partial truth while risking a significant error.

• The Subjective Risk: Those who believe the Spirit always acts independently of Scripture run the risk of confusing their own emotions, bad attitudes, or selfish desires with the voice of God.
• The Restrictive Risk: Those who believe the Spirit only works through the reading of the Bible can inadvertently "imprison" the Holy Spirit, denying His power to lead and guide His people in their concrete, day‐to‐day lives.

In this episode, Chuck and Aaron explore why the work of the Spirit is almost always a "both‐and" reality. While God’s Word is our "more sure" and primary source of truth, God is not bound by the page; He often uses our conscience, our study, and our circumstances to apply His truth directly to our hearts.

Ultimately, discerning God's voice is not a mechanical three‐step process, but a relational one. To avoid deception, we must weigh our intuitions against the Bible and submit them to the wisdom of the Christian community.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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The word Paradise is used infrequently in the Bible. Jesus tells the thief on the cross that they will be together that day in Paradise, and Paul says in 2 Corinthians that he had a powerful out-of-body (maybe!) experience in Paradise. Paradise is a Persian word describing a cool, relaxing garden in an arid climate, and it looks like Jesus is using this word to describe the intermediate state to promise the thief on the cross that after death - but before the resurrection - his spirit will be in a comfortable resting place with Jesus himself. This corresponds to the place Christians typically call “heaven”, as in “going to heaven when you die.” Although this usage amongst contemporary Christians is common, the Bible never says Christians go to heaven when they die. Instead, the biblical language of “heaven” describes the realm of God - a realm which overlaps and interlocks with our human realm in the person of Jesus. In other words, heaven is a reality Christians are experiencing already, but not yet completely.

Chuck and Aaron also discuss the notion of “soul sleep” - a concept describing the possible unconscious state of believers in between their earthly deaths and the return of Jesus. Since Paul describes this state as “better” than life on earth, and as a “being” with Jesus, Chuck and Aaron both lean toward understanding this intermediate state as a conscious presence of the human spirit with Jesus while the human body remains on earth awaiting the final resurrection.

And the idea of Purgatory - common in Roman Catholicism - has no attestation in the Bible. However, the Reformers’ teaching against it by (rightly) insisting that the spirits of dead Christians are immediately with Jesus led to an unfortunate overemphasis on the intermediate state and an underemphasis on the resurrection of the dead, which they didn’t emphasize since they shared this belief with their Roman Catholic opponents.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Those who have not grieved deeply are often disturbed during the holidays by those who have, since the latter sometimes seem to refuse to participate in the jollity of the season. This notion—that the joy, lights, and merriment of Christmas ought to raise the spirits of those who have lost loved ones—betrays a shallow view of grief, which cannot be alleviated by mere happiness.

In addition, Christmas is frequently a reminder of Christmases past where the lost loved one was present.

Because of this, Christians should be aware of two things: first, the presence and power of the grief some experience at the holidays, not becoming frustrated at it or ignoring it. Second, they should be willing to walk with those who grieve, not in an attempt to make them feel better, but as a way to model and embody the presence of the God who grieves with and walks with us.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Everyone knows that it’s not possible for a virgin to get pregnant. Many have considered this impossibility as the open-and-shut reason for disbelieving in the biblical teaching of the virgin birth of Jesus. Others though, have seen this impossibility as the whole point of the story: if God exists, and he has decided to become a human being in order to save the world, then doing something radically impossible to make that happen seems like the kind of thing God would do. But what does the virgin birth mean? It can’t be the necessary ground of Jesus’ sinlessness, since Mary herself contributed her humanity to Jesus’ birth. Instead, it’s best to see the virgin birth of Jesus as an exemplary instance of God’s grace. He breaks into humanity purely of his own volition, for his own purposes, to display his own glory, and to act in love toward his own people.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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