Rethinking the Bible with Jack Pelham

DESCRIPTIONJack discusses the big picture of our choices here on this Earth where God set our lives. He demonstrates that basically, we have two choices, and can pretend more.

The Script for This Episode

When faced with a reality in which your spirit was created by God and will have to give an account for what you’ve done when your life is over, these are your choices, as it appears to me:

* Embrace the situation and sincerely do your best to please God, learning as you go.

* Reject the reality, and live however you want, either:

* Forthrightly denouncing the reality in full (as an atheist might),

* Being sloppy about some of the details of what God wants, and pretending that sloppiness is OK, or

* Deliberately twisting some of the details into something you like better, and pretending you’re devoted to God as you do it. (Think about it: #2 is also an example of this #3.)

Or in other words, you can live your life either:

* Really listening to God, or

* Not really listening to God.

Or in other words, still, you can live your life either:

* Trying to please God, or

* Trying to please yourself.

And if you’re into the choices I’ve highlighted above in orange, your choices seem to be either:

* To go it alone, or

* To enlist the help of any of a great many organizations ...

DESCRIPTION: Jack is a guest on the Your Church Friends Podcast, with Muireadhach (“Murdoch”) and Chris. The discussion is about how God wants us to think about the Bible, and how good we naturally are as thinkers.

DESCRIPTION: Jack reads an essay called How’s It Going At Church?. It tackles the question of whether the church member views his own church in some idealized way—as he thinks the church is supposed to be—or whether he sees it as it actually is. It raises lots of important issues and questions that you may have had call to consider yourself.

Joe surveys how things go at church and is dismayed at what seems to be a high percentage of members whose commitment to the cause is lacking.

Perhaps you are like Joe, too.

And this scares Joe, as he thinks it ought not be this way.

Perhaps you are like Joe, too.

He has noticed all this because he believes in the cause and is regularly trying to be involved in making things happen, and finds that it’s often difficult to find enthusiastic, hands-on support for the activities and programs. And even attendance—that most basic signal of involvement—seems to be considered optional for too many.

Perhaps you are like Joe, too.

But Joe rarely spends much time trying to solve this, other than simply by encouraging others to be more involved. He doesn’t spend very much time trying to understand why it is like it is, and is fairly content to sum it up conveniently as something like a “lack of commitment” or a “lack of faith”. And also, he’s a little wary of “judging” in the matter because of his view of Matthew 7:1 as he hears it e...

DESCRIPTION: Jack explores the question of whether any or all of the Bible-times miracles still exist on Earth today—and more importantly, why it is that so many Christians today don’t seem to really want the question to be settled. He looks into why many would want more of a mystical religion than a straight-forward, fact-based one.

[The following are the notes from which I recorded this episode, but surely, the actual episode will contain material that I extemporized during recording, and that is not reflected herein.]

I have friends who believe that the miracles of Bible times have ceased, and I have friends who believe they’re still going on as before. I also have friends who believe that miracles still happen,

DESCRIPTION: This unusual episode consists of nothing more than a recording of Jack reading a piece he wrote on the Christmas Truce of 1914—a most peculiar event in World War I that raises the question of just what Jesus had in mind for his true followers. Jack debuted the piece at the Montana Christmas! concert on Saturday, 17 December 2022 at the Lincoln Center in Billings, MT. It is accompanied by a digitally-produced version of a rare variation of the tune of Away in a Manger. At this point, Jack is not sure whether this is his own version of the melody, as it has congealed in his mind for over a decade before he wrote it down, or whether it’s close to some other rare version he has actually heard before.

It was in August of the year 1914 that World War I broke out—that “war to end all wars”—as the warmongers had called it.  The soldiers had all been promised they would be “home by Christmas”.  But only a liar or a fool would have promised such a thing. 

And there the humans stood in the trenches, along the Western Front—in Germany on the one side, and in Belgium and France on the other—these soldiers who had not started the thing but who were expected to give their very lives for the cause.  Many of them were volunteers, and the war had broken their families, for a time, at least—and their careers and their routines of life and their dreams.

As Christmas drew near, the promised end of the war was nowhere in sight.  The suffering of each side was heavy.  Their opposing trenches were 300 yards apart in some places,

DESCRIPTION: Jack asks why there is so much fear that typifies the Christians and their fellowships today, when Romans 8 paints a picture of the Christians being delivered from slavery to fear. It’s a hard-hitting episode, positing a question many will be tempted to ignore.

In this episode, I’ll be reading from a recent blog post of mine at jackpelham.com, and then expounding on it. We’ll get into a large portion of Romans 8, which is frequently quoted, but poorly understood and poorly executed.

So here’s the blog post:

Romans 8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

Why do so many Christians today live in fear? Who can explain that? Popular belief says that every Christian, upon coming to Jesus, receives the indwelling Holy Spirit. And the verse above seems adamant that the Holy Spirit used to have some sort of transforming effect on those in whom he lived. It seems that it transformed people from their former slavery to a life of fear into the freedom of a life of confidence, as the to-be-adopted children of God.

Yet when we look around Christian fellowships today, do we not see in them the same fears that are common among the unchurched? I don’t know about you, but where I have lived, I have seen fears like these among believers:

DESCRIPTION: Jack discusses Malachi 2:16, where some translations say that God hates divorce. He asks whether divorce is the only thing God hates, and whether there might not be some very serious issues that concern God at least as much as divorce does—and whether those other issues are being given the same weight in the churches as divorce is.

Let’s talk about divorce.

First of all, I need to point out that our culture tends to be pretty sloppy in our understandings of Bible doctrines. While the Bible has over 1,100 pages of information, we tend to draw on tiny segments of it when developing our beliefs, ignoring the full body of information and deferring to a one-liner passage here and there. And to be even more specific, it’s not the one-liner so much as our interpretation of that one-liner that’s the problem. That is to say, there are many Bible passages that could reasonably taken in more than one way. But when do we ever roll up our sleeves to consider all the reasonable interpretations of a verse before deciding that we know what the author or speaker meant to convey?

If we were considering all the reasonable interpretations of a passage of scripture, we would definitely want to know what, if anything, all the other passages of scripture have to say on the topic.

DESCRIPTION: Jack discusses the common problem of people hoping to fill up their internal emotional voids, and how Jesus’ “Golden Rule” may just provide a lot of the answer to this problem.

A professional therapist told me once that most everybody’s got an emotional void inside, along with some level of drive to fill it.

DESCRIPTION: Jack reads and discusses an article from his blog (jackpelham.com) about how so much of Christianity today is dysfunctional, with believers not turning out very much like Jesus.

DESCRIPTION: In this episode, we deal with questions that frequently arise, and that are rarely answered well. Why doesn’t God answer our prayers as we might think he should? Why are we in this world in the first place? Why is there so much suffering here?

Scriptures used in this episode will be posted soon.