Everyone agrees that some sins are worse than others, but the Bible also teaches that every human being is guilty before God. How can nice, seemingly innocent people be equally as sinful as violent, hardened criminals?

The biblical answer can best be understood by outlining the difference between the legal and the moral nature of an act. In God’s legal economy, all sins are equally wrong–God has told us not to murder, but he’s also told us not to gossip, and while murder is more damaging than gossip, both are violations of God’s rules. So, while murder is worse than gossip, it is not more wrong.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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When Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, Jesus calls him the rock on which he will build his church. Does this mean that Peter is the first Pope of the Roman Catholic Church?

While some Protestants argue that Jesus is referring to Himself as the rock rather than Peter, the wordplay on Peter’s name (which means rock) makes the connection clear. However, a key text for understanding this verse occurs just a few verses later. After Peter tells Jesus that He must not say that He’s going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, Jesus tells him to “Get behind me, Satan, because you are a stumbling block to me.” These two texts – and the way Jesus uses “rock” imagery in both – highlight Peter’s role: on the one hand, when he confesses that Jesus is the true Messiah, he is the rock on which Christ builds his church. But on the other hand, when he denies that the Messiah must suffer, he is a different kind of rock – a stumbling block.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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No teaching of Jesus is more difficult or counterintuitive than his command to love one’s enemies. Loving one’s friends makes sense, but loving one’s enemies seems pointless at best and dangerous at worst. Besides, it seems like loving those who have harmed us makes light of the pain they have caused. Won’t loving them, we inevitably think, send the message that it’s okay that they hurt us?

But loving our enemies does not excuse their sin; instead, it models what Jesus did when he loved us while we were his enemies. Far from excusing our sin, his love took our sin on himself, washed it away, and refused to pay us back for it. And when Christians love their enemies in Jesus’ name and by Jesus’ power, they break the cycle of recrimination and revenge so characteristic of a fallen and violent world. Then the self-giving love of Jesus can be seen and experienced by those who otherwise would never be aware of the radical forgiveness of God.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Christianity’s exclusive claims are controversial, but the Bible insists that Jesus is the only way to God. The main difference between Christianity and all other worldviews–that the founder of Christianity is not merely a teacher who shows the path to God, but is himself the only path to God–makes clear why this exclusive claim is an essential part of Christianity’s claims.

If God cannot be accessed by ordinary human thoughts, efforts, or experience, then he can only be knowable if he chooses to reveal himself. Because all other religions reject this core Christian belief, Christianity’s exclusivity is really just its uniqueness. In other words, any attempt to turn Christianity into just another option among many for getting right with God is an effort to make Christianity something it isn’t.

Jesus is God, and to know God is to know him, and to know him is to know God.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Christianity is a missionary religion, and Christians are expected to share their faith in Jesus with unbelievers. But how should Christians go about arguing for the truth of the biblical story? One common strategy is to offer evidence—whether through historical arguments for the resurrection, the compatibility of science with biblical cosmology, fulfilled prophecy, or archaeological discoveries that confirm biblical accounts. However, when presented with this evidence, many people will either offer counter-evidence or simply refuse to engage. It becomes clear that evidence alone is rarely enough to convince someone of the truth of Christianity.

Because of this, those who subscribe to presuppositional apologetics argue that all people hold unprovable, foundational assumptions—or presuppositions—that shape what they believe. These presuppositions serve as frameworks through which we view all evidence. If someone presupposes the existence of God, the reality of the resurrection, and the need for salvation, they are naturally receptive to Christian claims. Conversely, if someone presupposes that God does not exist, or that God becoming human is an impossibility, they will likely reject Christian claims regardless of convincing evidence. Therefore, presuppositional apologetics focuses less on proving Christianity’s claims than it does on exposing the hidden assumptions of unbelievers, reframing Christianity as a coherent worldview, and praying that the Holy Spirit transforms hearts and minds to align with God's truth.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Hebrews 2 says it pleased the Father to make Jesus perfect through suffering, but this raises an immediate question: if Jesus is the eternal second person of the Trinity, holy and righteous in his very essence, why does this verse state that until his death on the cross he was somehow imperfect? The key to understanding this text is drawing a distinction between moral perfection and vocational perfection. Jesus has always been morally perfect, completely righteous and holy, and yet that holiness and righteousness are not able to accomplish his vocation of redeeming his creation back to himself until he performs the act–in time and space–of dying on the cross. In this sense, Jesus’ suffering is his perfection, the thing his glory and exaltation depend on. This is why the Bible insists that the suffering of Christians has deep, intrinsic value: God binds the suffering of his people to his own suffering on the cross, and uses this “fellowship of suffering” to embody his redemption in his world.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Hebrews 6:1-6 seems to imply that if someone who was once genuinely converted loses that salvation they are not able to repent and return once again to the Christian faith, but how does that fit with stories of apostasy and restoration from Scripture and from the real lives of many Christians? Peter, for instance, confesses that Jesus is the true Messiah, denies him immediately before his death, and then returns to become a pillar of the earliest church. What then, does the Hebrew text mean?

The answer has to do with the historical context: threatened with persecution, at least some Christians in the church, who received the epistle of Hebrews, have been tempted to return to the safety of the currently-legal Jewish synagogue. The preacher of Hebrews warns them that by returning to an expression of faith that denies the salvific reality of the death of Jesus, they cut themselves off–however devout their synagogue worship will be–from that salvation, and by doing so they implicitly confess that the one-off sacrifice of Jesus was not good enough and that God must provide a different sacrifice. If they want to experience the grace of God, they must confess instead that Jesus is the God-man crucified for the sins of the world.

In other words, the text does not deny that those who apostasize are forever cut off from grace, but it does teach that those who apostasize can only return to God’s grace by believing in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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A common urban myth about Christian origins sometimes gets passed around when people talk about the Bible is that no one can really know what the Bible says since the translations we have now are just translations of older translations. The Bible says that all of scripture is “breathed out” by God, but does this mean that our English translations can equally lay claim to this divine origin?

Chuck and Aaron talk about how translations work and about the decisions scholars must make as they try to the best of their ability to communicate ideas written in one language into another language without changing those ideas. The different theories of how this is done - whether literally or as a dynamic equivalent - are all in pursuit of communicating as faithfully as possible the message God has in his word. In doing this, the translators do not translate from previous English translations but from the oldest and best Greek and Hebrew manuscripts we have available to us.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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