Tag: Christianity

The Top Ten of 2025

The top ten+ articles on Navigating By Faith in 2025

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It’s a tradition. I recount the top ten articles on blog at the end of each year. I suppose it’s only fitting to look at the mile markers over the part year, as I have been wont to review the mile markers of my lifelong journey over the years.

Over recent years, the readership of this blog has increased from 10,000 in 2019, to 20,000 in 2020, to 30,000 from 2021 through 2023, 20 61,000+ in 2024, and 112,000+ in 2025. The data demonstrates a shift in readership. according to Chat GPT, from more of a community minded, WordPress driven blog to a blog that ranks on Google and attracts a wider audience.

I have done nothing intentionally to trigger that change in readership. I suspect the change may have something to do one article that has become the most read article on the blog: Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today? It has been read over 34,400 times since I published it in September 2020, and over one third of those views (12,203) came in 2025.

The article is the result of my own angst over American Christian support of Donald Trump. It was written at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign after a conversation with my best friend from college in which I learned of his support of Trump. We both years together in a charismatic church that grew out of the Jesus People movement in the Northeast and morphed into the New Apostolic Reformation movement that melded the charismatic movement with the fundamentalist, Moral Majority.

These forces brought politics into church culture and fueled Christian political activism as a primary focus of the local, regional, and national church mission. We both left that church to go to law school, and our paths diverged.

Paul and I could pick up as if we last saw each other only a week ago, though years had gone by. Yet, our paths had taken us to very different places in our spiritual journeys. I had moved on.

From my new vantage point, Donald Trump appeared to me like a wolf in sheep’s clothing; while my good friend had embraced the prophetic excitement that fueled the support of a certain segment of the faith community for Trump. While Paul celebrated Trump like a modern incarnation of King Cyrus ordained by God to establish God’s people in the United States like a new promised land; I was convinced that Trump is like Saul, the king God’s people wanted because they rejected God as their king.

Though I was confident in my own assessment, I was deeply troubled by my good friend’s support and the prophetic fervor that fueled it. I spent many hours listening to those prophetic voices. Those voices took me into a world of faith and politics with gnostic, conspiratorial, arcane, militaristic, and occultic undertones.

The sons of Issachar “who knew the times” was a catch phrase spoken like a secret handshake among purveyors of prophetic understanding. I took my growing angst to the Bible to familiarize myself with the story of David living in exile from the paranoid King Saul where many members of the various tribes of Israel joined him, including the sons of Issachar, who knew the times.

I used writing to resolve my angst as I meditated on Scripture and sought clarity in prayer and meditation. The Sons of Issachar piece was my way of working through that angst. I was able to put a bow on my efforts with the Postscript to the Sons of Issachar Who Understood the Times, published a few days after the 2020 presidential election.

Thank you for indulging me as I recall the backstory to the most well-read article of this blog, which may also be the reason the blog ranks now on Google. Whether it is the reason (or not), it underscores how this blog characterizes my own journey and grows organically out of it. Following are the next most-read articles in 2025.

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What It Means to Know God

One sure way to know God

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The age old questions humans have asked since time immemorial are, “What is God, and how do I know God?” We have conceived of gods as animated trees, mountains, and the sun, the stars, and the moon. We have conceived of gods as a pantheon of god-men and god-women. We have conceived of God as a force that is in everything, and we have conceived of God as an aloof judge and guardian of the ever after.

The Hebrew Scripture provides a robust concept of God, the Creator of the universe, who reveals Himself to human beings, but who remains mysterious and even “hidden” to people who must seek Him. The Tanakh (the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings) that Christians call the Old Testament purports to be God’s revelation to human beings with a promise that those who seek may find Him, “though he is not far from any one of us.” (As the Apostle Paul said to the Greeks in Athens. (Acts 17:27))

Of course, the God of the universe must be greater than we could ever fully comprehend to have created such an intricately designed universe as the one in which we live. If the men who passed on the revelation of this God that has been recorded in the Bible are correct, we can know much about God even if much remains a mystery.

I am impressed today with the words of the Prophet, Jeremiah, who provides a glimpse of who God is in the words of warning he spoke to Jehoahaz, the King of Judah,

“Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor. He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace with spacious upper rooms.’ So he makes large windows in it, panels it with cedar and decorates it in red. “Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your father [King Josiah] have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the Lord.”

Jeremiah 22:13-16

I have never noticed before that Jeremiah equates defending the cause of the poor and needy with knowing God. In defending the cause of the poor and the needy, we come to know God.

We can search for God here and there and, perhaps, never find Him. In defending the poor and needy, however, we can know the Lord. It’s that simple.

To know someone in a biblical sense is to know more than facts about someone. To know someone biblically is to know someone intimately. The ultimate example of knowing someone biblically is to know someone as a spouse.

Thus, when Jeremiah says that defending the cause of the poor and needy is to know the Lord, he is talking about an intimate, experiential knowledge of the character and nature of God. The cause of the poor and needy is close to God’s heart, and it is essential to who God is.

The Psalmist says, “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling….” (Psalm 68:5) A dwelling place is where a person is most able to be who they are. God’s holy dwelling is where God is “at home”, where God is most like Himself, and the cause of the fatherless and the widow is at the core of who God is in His most intimate place.

Thus, people can intimately know who God is by taking up the cause of the poor and the needy, the widow and the orphan, and similarly vulnerable people.

The opposite is also true. People do not know God to the extent that they do not defend the cause of the poor and needy. This was the point Jeremiah was making when he said of King Johoahaz:

The father of Jehoahaz was Josiah. “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.” (2 Kings 22:2) Josiah found the Book of the Law, reestablished Temple worship of God, and destroyed the idols in Judah. (2 Kings 22 & 23) Josiah also defended the cause of the poor and needy, according to the Prophet Jeremiah, and defending the cause of the poor and needy is what it means to know God.

Indeed, Josiah modeled the entire law that Jesus said can be summed up in these two statements: 1) love God with all your heart, mind, body, and soul; and 2) love your neighbor as yourself.

Throughout the Bible, then, we find that a sure way of knowing who God is and what it means to know God is to be concerned with the cause of the poor and needy. This is not liberal wokeness; it is the essence of who God is and what it means to know God.

“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

1 John 4:20

Jesus even goes so far as to say that we should love our enemies and so be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48) Loving others – caring for the poor and needy – is not superfluous or secondary; it is central to who God is and a key in what it means to know God.

Why I Write About Immigration Issues

The truth is complicated, but God’s heart is certain

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Mexican Border

I have friends who keep me honest, and I am grateful for that. They don’t always agree with me. In fact, they often disagree with me on various things, but they remain my friends, and I remain grateful for them.

Anyone who follows me on social media knows that I am virtually fixated on the issue of immigration right now. It may seem like a new thing—that all of a sudden I have become woke, liberal, or progressive. Some people who don’t know me well, I am sure, think that about me. The truth is more complicated than that.

I am a lifelong Republican and conservative by nature. I’m also a follower of Jesus, though, and I find that Jesus defies modern political categories and stereotypes. If Jesus looks to me like a Republican or Democrat, “my Jesus” probably is not the real Jesus, and my politics have likely influenced my view of Jesus.

Many people might look at my posts on immigration and feel like I have abandoned all sense of patriotism and national pride. They might think I have become a hater of the United States of America. Again, the truth is more complicated than that.

I grew up with a love for my country and a strong sense of patriotism and pride. I was educated, like most people my age, on the goodness of the United States of America, celebrating Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving this time of year with idyllic depictions of pioneers living in harmony with Native Americans as our forefathers lived out their manifest destiny in keeping with a divine mandate from our creator to form the greatest, freest country on earth.

I still believe we live in the greatest, freest country on earth, but the truth is messier and more complicated than I once believed. I am grateful for a strong sense of the goodness of the United States of America I learned as a child, and I appreciate the positives in that idealized memory of America. But it’s more complicated than that.

Humanity is nothing if not messy. We are fallen, sinful creatures. We know that, but our idyllic, comforting images die hard.

The pioneers displaced the Native Americans who were here long before us. They were pushed out of their ancestral lands. They were marched in a “trail of tears” to godforsaken territories where they have had to scrape out a meager subsistence ever since then in the literal dust of the barren, rocky places to which they were consigned.

Slavery is a pox on our idyllic history. That it was supported, promoted, and defended by Christians who sought comfort in the Bible while they exploited, oppressed, and dehumanized people for the color of their skin (and wealth they could generate) is a testament to the utter bankruptcy of human beings – even religious ones.

Let’s be honest about this, also: religious people who use their religion to justify their unjust ways are not doing anything different than non-religious people who are unjust. It’s just more insidious for the fact that they contort love of neighbor to love of self.

I have learned to be honest and not to look away from these contrary images of our history and our past. God calls for repentance, and repentance requires honesty. Repentance and heart change are the only proper response to the evil of idolatry and injustice.

Honesty does not mean I do not love my country, and it does not mean that I am not thankful for being born here. I still believe that the good we have brought into the world is not any less good. It’s just complicated, and I want us to live up to the ideals we ascribe to.

In case you could not tell, I am not an idealist, though I certainly do have idealistic tendencies. Not that I am any different than anyone else. We are complicated and complex creatures; human beings. Despite the polarized simplicity of social media that pigeon holes us into two-dimensional, stereotypical ideologues, people and societies are complex.

On the issue of immigration, my “awakening” happened more than a decade ago – in 2014. During the Obama administration, as I watched the Syrian refugee crisis unfold in the news, I realized that didn’t have a robust biblical view on the subject of immigration. I have written about this often, so please bear with me if you have read what I have written before.

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An Exploration of God’s Hiddenness in the Bible

The Bible on the hiddenness of God

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Divine hiddenness is an argument suggesting that God does not exist. According to J.L. Schellenberg, if a perfectly loving God exists, He would desire a genuine relationship with every person He creates. A loving relationship requires, at minimum, awareness that God exists, so a perfectly loving God would make Himself known. Some sincere and willing people who want to know God are unable to find sufficient evidence that He exists to believe in Him. Therefore, either God does not exist or He is not perfectly loving.

I don’t buy it. I think the argument is flawed, but other people have provided robust responses to this argument, so I am not going to attempt to provide a counter argument here. I am also unconvinced that arguments are the best way to achieve understanding.

On that ground, I am intrigued by the hiddenness of God, and I am intrigued that the Bible is forthright about the hiddenness of God. The Prophet Isaiah says it plainly: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” (Is. 45:15)

The entire Book of Job is about God’s hiddenness. Job assumed that God existed and had blessed him until he lost everything. When Job sought God in the desperation of his circumstances, he lamented, “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him… I cannot behold him.” (Job 23:8-9)

David, who is held up in the Bible as a man after God’s own heart, lamented the hiddenness of God at various times in his life: “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1); “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1); and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?… I cry by day, but you do not answer.” (Ps. 22:1-2)

Those last words were famously echoed by Jesus on the cross. Imagine, Jesus, who demonstrated and expressed the deepest and most intimate relationship with the Father, experiencing the utter absence of God at the moment of his greatest need.

I saw early in a world religion class in college when I wasn’t a believer that the Bible purports to be about the unfolding story of God’s encounter and revelation of who God is to mankind. Elsewhere, I have written about how God found in Abram a man who was able to grasp that the God of the universe is not like the gods of the provincial tribes and nations with which Abram was familiar. (For example, Abraham, Isaac and Paradigm Shift; and The Story of Abraham and Isaac Revisited: Introduction)

The revelation of God unfolded slowly as God needed to dispel notions of divine arbitrariness, capriciousness, brutality, and uncaring of the gods that Abram and ancient humanity understood. The gods of human imagination are no gods at all, and God is noting like ancient Near Easterners imagined.

While it is true that God is completely OTHER, the true God who made the heavens and the earth desires the benefit of and reciprocal relationship with the pinnacle of His creation. How does a God who is so completely OTHER than His creation communication Himself?

Consider a God who could make our universe with its vastness and detailed complexity down to the minutia of the precise intricacy of living cells and the unseeable building blocks of the physical world, like neutrinos, that are so small they can pass through your body and the core of the earth without hitting another particle. How does such a God who created such a world reveal Himself to finite creatures who live on a tiny planet in a tiny solar system among more stars, planets, and whole solar systems than such a creature can even imagine – how does such a God reveal himself to delicate, ephemeral creatures with limited perspective?

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What If AI Destroys Our Confidence in Knowing the Truth about Anything?

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

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I recently listened to Glen Scrivener on his Speak Life podcast episode, AI Destroys Everything, Including Atheism. What caught my attention was his replay of some observations by Kurzgesagt on AI, AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. Kurzgesagt is a website dedicated to “a science-based, humanist and optimistic worldview,” which is interesting in light of its pessimistic view of the future with AI.

This is what the folks at Kurzgesagt say:

“In an online world where money is made with attention, fake users spread their slop in review sections, generate fake traffic, or poison discourse. AI has supercharged this and made slop much harder to spot. Today, about half of internet traffic is bots. The majority of them are used for destructive purposes. It’s never been easier to make mediocre content, from the black hole of meaninglessness that is linked in, low-effort short videos just engaging enough to hypnotize kids and fry their attention spans, to endless soullessly rewritten books on Amazon. AI music is invading streaming platforms. Google AI is summarizing websites instead of sending traffic to them. On YouTube, new channels publish long-form videos multiple times a week with AI-generated thumbnails, voices, and scripts. True crime, video essays, science, no space is safe. We’re in the golden era of soulless slop.”

The Kurzgesagt folks speak with learned experience about the effort and amount of time it takes to produce a thoroughly fact-checked video on science, which is what they do, spending on average 100 hours fact-checking and compiling sources for each video. They use firsthand sources and engage experts for input and critique before they post a video.

When AI became available, the folks at Kurszgesagt were excited to employ AI to cut down on all that time and effort to produce content. This is what they found:

“When AI appeared, we were very excited. A mechanical brain able to super quickly collect information. So we went to work, and it looked amazing. And then we started fact-checking. We didn’t expect it to be perfect, but it was way worse than we thought. Confidently incorrect. AI is so bad at this.”

The video provides an example of the ways in which AI invents truths that are not truths, and then untruths are added to the source code that the next generation of AI is going to use and assume is true. The falsehoods continue to be repeated. As this happens, “more and more of the slop is built up”, and the falsehoods becomes entrenched.

It seems pretty bleak. AI is running away with falsehoods that are becoming entrenched and may become impossible to weed out. But it gets worse, according to Kurzgesagt:

“When you catch it lying, it immediately admits it, vows to never do it again, and then it does it again. As eloquent as current language models feel, there’s nobody home. No greater intelligence or consciousness is talking back to you. Current AI is a very complex hammer that doesn’t understand what it’s doing or what nails are. But we’re letting it add new shelves to the library of human knowledge.”

Accordingly, “it may become impossible to know what’s true or not!” It’s an insidious problem. AI seems to be “confidently correct” even when it’s “casually lying to your face often very subtly.”

But it gets worse still. People are learning how to manipulate AI. “Just in July 2025, it was discovered that a number of researchers had started to sneak hidden messages into their papers. In white text, or too small for the human eye, they prompted AIs to review them positively and not point out flaws.”

Whether it’s intentional manipulation or lazy, careless dependence on AI, our ability to decipher truth may be severely compromised. “As more and more people are using AI carelessly, the library of human knowledge is getting less and less reliable.”

Of course, AI may get better. That is ultimately the confidence and hope of a science-based, humanist, optimistic worldview – that man is ever advancing and progressing and will overcome all obstacles. As I Christian, I don’t share that hope or confidence in the progress of mankind. My hope is in the redemption and saving grace of God.

What if, then, it doesn’t get better? What if AI so takes over the Internet and so entrenches the “slop” that we can not truly tell fact from fiction? What if AI gets so good at fooling us and churning out confidently packaged falsehoods faster than human fact-checking can debunk them, and takes over the Internet? What if our confidence in knowing the truth about anything is destroyed as AI takes over the world?

Paul has an antidote to that, and the antidote is love. Let me explain.

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