A recent question I received: “I started reading Matthew this morning and it stood out how prominent Joseph appears in the beginning chapters compared to in Luke.  Was there a reason Matthew emphasizes the one earthly parent and Luke the other?" Answer: That’s a great and accurate observation. Probably it’s due to this: the original readers of those two Gospels were two different groups with two different sets of things that were significant for their understanding of Jesu

A friend from high school posed the question on facebook, “How can one determine truth?” Here’s part two of my response: Another commenter chimed in, writing, "The smaller our world has become and the closer we live in proximity to others with competing narratives, or myths, the more difficult it seems to coexist. You mentioned ‘artifacts’ above. I think for the archaeologist studying prehistoric cultures primarily through physical evidence, there is, as in the physical sc

A friend from high school posed the question on facebook, “How can one determine truth?” Here’s part one of my response (after I made the not-quite-on-point, but most important point of the discussion: that Jesus said that He’s the truth, and that no one gets to the Father, but through Him, from John 14:6): Practically, here are a few things I think about: 1) Do the facts seem to support it? 2) If so, if it’s testable or verifiable by lots of reliable witnesses (in the

Received this question on Jeremiah 47-48, in which God assures His people that He will, indeed, be just, accomplishing justice in the future upon those who had troubled His people in Jeremiah’s day, around 600 B.C. “Hi, John. I noticed in Jeremiah 47-48, God spent more time speaking of Moab’s coming destruction than on Egypt’s or that of the Philistines. Does this say anything about the level of sin in those nations?” Answer: We can’t be sure as to why so much space is s

From a recent agreement with a friend on facebook: John Musgrave, I am regularly flummoxed that geneticists, microbiologists, MDs, chemists, etc aren’t at the forefront of calling out macro-evolution, materialism, and Darwinism as BANKRUPT, as endeavors in science. It was one thing to somehow conjure up faith in macro-evolution during Darwin’s time, due to our limited understanding of the astonishing complexity of genetics and living cells back then. But now.....They ought to