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

Was hell always a place of eternal torture, or did Jesus mean something else? In Mark 9:42 to 48, Jesus talks about cutting off your hand, an unquenchable fire, and a worm that never dies. He is quoting Isaiah 66:24, and the setting he has in mind is the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem. Once you know what those words meant to his first listeners, this passage sounds very different. If you grew up hearing this passage as a threat, this breakdown is for you. We look at Gehenna in the Bible, what the Valley of Hinnom was, where Isaiah's image comes from, and why Jesus opens the whole passage with a warning about harming the vulnerable.

Acts 15 records something most people never got told in church: the earliest Christians had a massive, unresolved fight over what following Jesus actually required. No unanimous doctrine handed down from heaven. A room full of apostles, arguing, until they reached a decision that even they framed as provisional ("it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"). In this video we break down the Jerusalem Council: who was arguing, what was actually at stake (circumcision, Torah observance, Gentile inclusion), and why the outcome undercuts the idea that Christian doctrine has always been one clear, agreed-upon thing. If you grew up being told the Bible is simple and settled, this passage says otherwise, from the very first generation of the church.

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

Genesis 2:18-25 gets read as a surgery story. God knocks Adam out, pulls a rib, builds a woman. Case closed, right? Except the Hebrew word there, tsela, almost never means "rib" anywhere else it shows up in the Old Testament. It means side. And the text says God didn't just extract something, he took one whole side of the human and built the other half of creation out of it. That changes what this passage is actually doing. It's not explaining where women came from as an afterthought. It's saying humanity wasn't finished until both halves existed side by side. The man doesn't understand himself until he sees the half that was missing.

Exodus 17 says God will "wipe out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." Two verses later it says the Lord will be at war with Amalek "from generation to generation." Which one is it?

This isn't about explaining away the hard parts of the Old Testament. It's about asking a better question than "did this literally happen," and asking instead, "why am I being told this story, and what kind of story is it." Once you see this pattern in Exodus 17, you start noticing it everywhere else, including in the conquest of Jericho.

Forgiveness sounds simple until you're the one carrying it. In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, Joe sits down with Colby Stream to unpack what forgiveness actually looks like when the hurt runs deep — betrayal, abuse, years of unresolved pain. We dig into the difference between decisional forgiveness (the choice) and emotional forgiveness (the release), why the church often rushes people past both, and what Matthew 18 and Mark 11 actually teach about God's timeline versus ours. This isn't a "just forgive and move on" conversation — it's an honest look at what it means to say "I can't forgive yet, but I'm getting there," and why that's an okay place to be.

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