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.

What are the Synoptic Gospels, and why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell Jesus's story so similarly, yet so differently? In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, Joe pours a glass of Yellowstone Kentucky Straight Bourbon and dives into the scholarship behind the first three Gospels.

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.

What if everything you were taught about sin was designed to keep you afraid instead of free?

In this episode of Whiskey and the Writings, I sit down with my longtime friend Andrew Miller (Impact Campus Ministries) to dig into atonement theory, the doctrine that's supposed to explain how Jesus's death and resurrection actually fix our relationship with God. Except once you start looking, you realize there isn't just one answer. There are at least eight.

We walk through three of the major atonement theories (recapitulation, Christus Victor, and penal substitutionary atonement), and why the "chasm between you and God, bridged by the cross" image most of us grew up with isn't the only lens Christians have used for 2,000 years.

But before we can really talk atonement, we have to ask a harder question: what is sin, actually? Not the itemized list of "don't do this" we got in Sunday school, but what the Hebrew sages and Paul himself seem to be pointing at. Spoiler: it might have a lot less to do with a permanent stain on your soul than you think.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Part 2 picks up where we left off and goes deeper into how a reframed understanding of sin changes everything about how we read the cross.

Pour a glass, get curious, and let's wrestle with this one together.

Revelation isn't about predicting the future or identifying the Antichrist in today's politics. It's about who's on the throne right now. And a literary device called a chiasm reveals exactly how John structured that message. In this episode, Joe walks through how the entire Book of Revelation is organized as one giant chiasm—a mirror-structure used throughout ancient Hebrew and Greek literature to emphasize a central point. Understanding this changes everything about how you read apocalyptic literature.

Most people open the book of Revelation looking for the end of the world. That's not what they find. The Greek word behind "Revelation" means "uncovering." What John is uncovering isn't a future timeline, it's who's actually sitting on the throne while everything looks like it's falling apart. In this first video of our Revelation Bible study, we cover:

- What "apocalypse" actually means (it's not what you've been told)

- Who wrote this letter, and why we're not entirely sure

- When it was written, under Nero or under Domitian

- Why this letter almost didn't make it into the Bible

- The two worldviews every reader has to choose between: fallen Babylon or New Jerusalem

If you've ever been called a heretic, or been afraid you might be one, this episode is for you. We're digging into where the word "heretic" actually comes from, what it meant in Josephus, how Paul used it, and how it morphed into the weapon a lot of evangelical leaders use today to shut down anyone who thinks differently. Turns out the original Greek word just means "a choice you made." That changes everything about how we should hear it.

What if the problem isn't that you sin too much. What if the problem is that the conversation about sin has never gone deep enough?

Most of us were handed a version of sin that was flat. A list of things you did wrong, a prayer to reset it, repeat. But the biblical authors were pointing at something way bigger than that. Something that, if left unchecked, slowly makes you into something less than human.

In this video we dig into what sin actually is in the Bible. We look at Lamech in Genesis 4, Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, the Greek word harmatia, and what Walter White from Breaking Bad has to do with all of it. And yeah, we pour a glass of Ben Holiday along the way.

If you've carried guilt and shame around sin your whole life and it never seemed to actually fix anything, this might be the conversation you needed.