Most businesses and churches and non-profits would love to rank #1. For anything. Most don't even rank #1 for their own name! A lot of companies pay a lot of money to try to reach #1. They pay fly-by-night SEO agencies. They pay local ad agencies who don't know much about how the web works. They also pay big money to big agencies full of experts in the field, hoping to rank well enough to get just a bit more traffic than they would naturally get.
Regular GodWords readers know about Disciples Report. I created that website as a place to share content created by others... articles and videos and podcasts by reputable writers, scholars, and apologists. It's gone now. Or is it?
Writing a definition for God is inherently difficult, and problematic. There are two main problems with each attempt to define God. The first problem is that we only know what He has revealed to us, so any definition will necessarily be incomplete. The second problem is that while we can use words to describe God, none of those words can help us actually understand Him. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
As with so many things, confusion abounds about demons. What does the Bible actually say? How are followers of Jesus to think about interacting with demons? How can we avoid falling into superstitious nonsense and - more important - how can we avoid unbiblical ideas about demons?
Shema is a very interesting word. It's commonly thought to mean "obey," but that's not the whole story. There's no Hebrew word for "obey," and there's no English equivalent for shema. It's far richer than that, so it's good to see how the writers of Scripture use it. The name Simon is related, coming from the Hebrew Shim'on. Video, 3:25.
Skeptics of Christianity often cite the so-called 'problem of evil' to indict Christians, and to indict God. How, they ask, could a loving God - or a supposedly loving follower - live a life with any joy, peace, or contentment while others suffer? Then, they ask, how could anyone be happy in Heaven when they know that others are suffering eternally in Hell? Consider this article as one example of how we might address such an objection.
The universe is vast, mind-bending, and fascinating. Scientists - religious and non-religious alike - speak of the conditions necessary for life to exist, and the numbers are mind-boggling. If the universe were only slightly different, based on a large number of different forces, no life could exist. This is a strong argument for the existence of an intelligent designer who purposely created everything. Video, 6:22
The New Testament refers a number of times to people speaking in tongues. That is, believers being enabled to speak in languages they hadn't previously learned. Many in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are taught that every believer will speak in tongues, as that is 'the initial physical evidence' of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Video, 3:14
Neo-Darwinian evolution is generally accepted by the public as fact, but that doesn't make it so. There are a lot of scientists who, with no religious agenda, acknowledge the scientific and mathematical problems inherent in evolutionary thought. Doug Axe explains simply and clearly why we have reasons to doubt one of the basic tenets of evolution: that small mutations add up to successful adaptation through unguided processes. Video, 17:02.
These days, many who claim the name of Jesus are also politically and theologically "progressive." They don't view God, Jesus, or the Bible in the traditional sense of what Christians have believed from the first century forward. They often substitute their own views for those found in Scripture. For this reason, it's important to be able to compare progressive beliefs with Scriptural truths.
Did you know there are no fossils with blowholes? As we learn more about biology, the numbers of missing evolutionary links have skyrocketed. Every new discovery brings many more questions than answers, and ever more evidence that blind evolution cannot explain the origin of life’s astonishingly sophisticated biological designs. Audio, 14:08.
Is the Bible in your hand (or on your shelf, or on your phone) inerrant? What would that mean? Can we trust that the Bible we have is the same Bible originally written? Jimmy Wallace explains what inerrancy means, and what it doesn't mean. Video, 9:54
