Critics have claimed the Conquest of Canaan is an example of divinely commanded genocide or ethnic cleansing. In my latest podcast episode (#193), I argue that the rationale for the Conquest had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, and is not an example of genocide. It was not an ethnic cleansing, but a moral cleansing of the land. It was mass capital punishment on those who were guilty of gross immorality. And it’s not even true that everyone was killed. God was more concerned about expelling the Canaanites from the land and destroying their religious influence on the Israelites than He was in killing the Canaanites.
Listen wherever you get podcasts, or at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1958918/episodes/18744936.
A lot of people – both Christians and non-Christians alike – see a vast difference between the way God is portrayed in the Old Testament vs. the New Testament. Some have claimed that it’s two different gods, while others think of it more like a conversion experience of the same God: The judgmental, wrathful God of the OT became the merciful, loving God of the NT. Such views of the Biblical God are based on a cherry-picking of the Biblical data. In my latest podcast episode, I demonstrate that we find a God of both love and justice in both testaments.
Christians and Jews believe the God of the Bible is morally good. Many non-believers, however, think otherwise. They claim the God of Christianity is morally evil, and thus no God at all. So is the Biblical God the epitome of moral perfection, or a moral monster? 
Many think a hypocrite is someone who fails his own moral standard. This cannot be the right definition because it would make everyone a hypocrite. We all have a moral standard we think we should live up to and fail that moral standard in one way or another.
I’ve always assumed that David had sex with Bathsheba once. However, the text says that when David first saw her, she was bathing to purify herself of her uncleanness (2 Sam 11:1-5). This is referring to the bathing a woman would undergo after her menstrual cycle ended. Since one is least fertile immediately following menstruation, this suggests that David’s fling with Bathsheba was no one-night stand. Bathsheba probably remained with David for a number of days before returning to her house, during which they had sexual relations multiple times. If so, David’s sin was not a one-time mistake, but an ongoing sin.
Here’s how a parenthetical statement can provide interesting insights about the provenance of a Biblical book. Mk 15:21 says, “And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.”
I posed a moral dilemma to a few Christian thinkers, but none were able to provide a fully satisfactory answer. While I think most ended up at the right conclusion, no one could really articulate the moral principles used to come to that conclusion. So I thought I would pose the dilemma to AI and see what it had to say. Could it provide any additional insights into Christian moral reasoning? I chose to use ChatGPT and Gemini. I will reproduce the chats below for your reading pleasure, but I would like to make several observations first.
Yesterday was the actual day Jesus ascended into heaven 1,992 years ago. To coincide with this momentous day, I published my first episode exploring the theological and practical significance of the ascension. 
Trinitarians typically baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit based on Matthew 28:19. In contrast, Oneness Pentecostals (OPs) typically baptize in the name of Jesus Christ based on Acts and the epistles. Which is the proper baptismal formula?
My podcast series on the resurrection is still going strong. I’ve recently started my last sub-series within the larger series, focused this time on the Shroud of Turin. If you have never heard of it before, it’s the purported burial cloth of Jesus Christ, bearing the image of a crucified man. Many Protestants have dismissed it as a fake Catholic relic, and most non-Christians have dismissed it as a medieval forgery due to carbon dating tests in the 1980s. However, interest in the Shroud has not gone away, and for good reason. There is much more to the story. In this sub-series, I’m examining the mountains of evidence for its authenticity, and I’ll address questions related to dating, and more.
We are all searching for significance. We want to believe that our life matters. We want to feel like we are special. We want to know that our life has made a difference in this world. That’s why people seek to do extraordinary things. It’s why people seek fame. What we need to recognize is that we are already significant. We are made in the image of God. Our significance is rooted in God. We will never truly feel significant until we are in a close relationship with God.
I’ve begun a new podcast series on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. The series will not only cover the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, but also explore alternative (naturalistic) explanations, the evidence for Jesus’ existence, the theological and practical significance of the resurrection, questions and objections, our own future resurrection, an examination of the Shroud of Turin, and a harmonization of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Four years ago, I wrote a post titled “
A lot of modern evangelism focuses on the love God. We rarely hear it preached that God is angry at us because of our moral rebellion, and we rarely hear about the coming judgment. And yet, when you look at what the early church preached in Acts, it was a lot about judgment and not a word about the love of God or inviting people to have a relationship with God (see 
An increasing number of professing Christians will acknowledge that the Bible is opposed to some practice, but then claim that God has evolved regarding the issue and the Spirit is speaking something different to the church today. Apart from the epistemological problems that such a claim entails, isn’t it interesting that the Spirit is always being more permissive today (just like our culture)? That’s quite strange, because when God has given new revelation in the past, it was not in the direction of moral permissiveness, but in the direction of moral stringency.
The truth of a doctrine is not determined by its age or by a historical consensus, and yet we naturally assign great weight to doctrinal tradition. After all, there’s something to be said for a historical consensus, and it should not be dismissed lightly. We should not ignore the understanding and insights of the majority who have preceded us. And in general, we should not dismiss a doctrinal tradition unless we have compelling reasons to do so.
Thinking to Believe 