More than 1500 years after the perfect God created his perfect world, he realized that creating humans had been a bad idea, because humans are evil. To correct his mistake, God decided to kill all the humans, and all the animals too, for some reason. But there was one righteous man in the world who God didn’t want to kill, and his name was Noah.
Continue reading The Story of Noah’s Ark—God’s people should praise him joyfully. Everyone should. That’s what righteous people do. There is no law against joy. Everyone should rejoice when they see bad things happen to bad people. That’s what righteous people do.
People should rejoice at home and in public. People should do good deeds gladly, and bring their parents and leaders joy. Don’t act like you’re mourning during religious ceremonies; you should be enjoying yourself. Even if your life is hard, you should be happy about it. Enjoying your life is the best thing you can possibly do!
God satisfies people’s desires and makes them happy. He commands people to celebrate and rejoice and to make other people happy, and he rewards them with happy lives when they do what he wants. He wants us to be glad to know that he will reward us. He rewards people for being delighted with him and for gladly doing what’s right. He even punishes people for not being joyful. God wouldn’t do those things if it wasn’t good for people to be happy, would he?
Solomon wisely wished for his son to have a happy marriage, and encouraged others to be happy too, because he knew that being cheerful is good for you. David, who always behaved just the way God wanted him to, rejoiced and celebrated a lot, and he said other people should rejoice, too. God himself is often delighted with people, particularly when they do what he wants, and he rewards them gladly. Everything God does is right, so we should follow his example.
God does not approve of people rejoicing over their enemies’ misfortune. And according to Job, that’s not the only kind of rejoicing that’s wrong; it’s also a sin to rejoice over your own fortune. Job was the most righteous person on earth, so he ought to know what he’s talking about.
You should not gratify your desires by doing what you want, because your body’s desires are perverse, and will lead to your destruction. Shun life’s pleasures, so they won’t get in the way of your spiritual growth. You must not indulge in pleasures, or you might as well be dead. God will not answer your prayers if what you’re ultimately trying to get is pleasure.
Those who love pleasure will be punished. Pleasure is not good,1 and you should have nothing to do with people who are so foolish, disobedient, flawed, and depraved as to love pleasure.
Solomon wisely advised people to refrain from laughing, because he knew that being sad is good for you. Pleasure won’t do you any good; it only brings poverty. Only a fool would go and have fun at a feast; it’s better to join the mourners instead, because you are going to die, and you should keep that in mind.
When the Babylonians rejoiced and were glad, God thought it was a shameful disgrace. God will never forgive people who insist on joyfully laughing and partying when he clearly wants them to be crying. It doesn’t matter if you’re celebrating because it’s a holy day; God will make you stop.
Jesus wants you to suffer when you don’t deserve it, just like he did. Anyone who doesn’t hate their life isn’t a real Christian. So don’t laugh, or God will make you cry. Grieve over what God is doing to those around you, or you too will be punished. Don’t even think about enjoying your life, or you will die and go to hell!
Continue reading Should people be happy?Have you ever noticed how the serpent in the garden of Eden didn’t actually tell any lies? Have you ever thought about the implications of God’s statement that Job had told the truth about him and that his friends had not? Did you spot the huge flaw in Joseph’s plan to save Egypt from the famine?
Have you noticed that despite how much the Bible tries to make him look bad, the guy with the talking donkey was a consistently obedient servant of God? Did you catch the fact that the story of Jonah is about God forcing someone to tell a lie? Or that when Daniel’s friends are disobeying the king so they won’t have to disobey God, the Bible suspiciously fails to mention what Daniel was doing at the time, and vice versa?
Probably not. Maybe you’ve never read the Bible. Maybe you’ve only read “sanitized” versions of the Bible that left out all the awkward parts. Maybe you’ve read the Bible, but you had preconceived ideas of how the stories were supposed to go and what the characters were supposed to be like, which got in the way of seeing what the Bible actually says.
Maybe you’re so familiar with certain passages that when you see them, you just recognize-and-ignore them, instead of thinking about what they’re saying. Maybe the relevant passages were just so far apart in the Bible that you forgot about one by the time you got to another, so you never realized what they imply if you put them together.
It’s easy to miss a lot of surprising things like these in the Bible, for one reason or another. In this monthly series of summarized Bible stories, I’m going to be making those things a lot harder to miss.
I will include a moral at the end of each story. Not all of them are good morals, and not all of them are ideas that Christians are likely to agree with, but they are all lessons that can be learned from the Bible’s stories. For the Parables, I will also include an interpretation at the end, so you can easily see what everything in the story represents.
Below is a list of the Bible stories I’ve published on this blog so far, as well as the rest of the stories I’ll be posting in the future. If you like these stories, you can subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get to read more stories as they come out each month. There are several ways you can stay updated, so find something that works for you:
Or if you don’t want to wait a month for each new story, you can read more of my Bible stories right now on Patreon.
Continue reading Bible storiesIt is written: Workers deserve their wages. Payment for work is not an optional gift; it’s an obligation. After all, the whole point of working is to be able to reap the benefits. If even people who don’t work have a right to be fed, how much more those who do? God does not approve when people make other people work for nothing. You must pay your workers without delay, or God will take away everything you have.
Continue reading Do workers deserve payment?Adam and Eve’s first two sons were Cain, who grew plants, and Abel, who raised animals. They offered some of their plants and animals to God, but God only liked Abel’s meat, and didn’t like Cain’s fruits. Cain got very angry, and the all-knowing God couldn’t figure out why.
Continue reading The Story of Cain and Abel—It is written: God’s people should let their light shine by doing good deeds in front of others, so everyone can see how good God is. They should do what is right in view of everyone, displaying their good works to both believers and nonbelievers. Hiding your good deeds would be stupid,3 like lighting a lamp only to cover it up. Only evil people are afraid to let their deeds be exposed.
Continue reading Should people do good things publicly?The Bible has a lot of rules about who you shouldn’t have sex with. There are whole chapters devoted to the subject. But there are also a lot of sex rules surprisingly absent from the Bible. In this post, I’ll be listing some of the latter.
Important note: By including something on this list, I am not necessarily saying it should be forbidden, nor am I necessarily saying it should not be forbidden. I am including both acceptable acts and unacceptable acts in this list.
The things that should be forbidden are interesting to note because you’d think a supposedly good and infallible God wouldn’t forget to include those things in his laws. There are some pretty important rules missing!
And the things that should not be forbidden are also interesting because there are probably a lot of people who think it’s wrong to do some of these things, but the only reason they have for that belief is the false assumption that those things are forbidden by the Bible.
So here’s the list. As far as I can tell, there are no rules in the Bible4 against having sex with…
Continue reading Sex partners the Bible doesn’t forbidThe author of Ecclesiastes (who claims to be Solomon, the wisest man of all time) advises young people to follow their hearts, and to follow whatever their eyes see. Everything else the Bible says about following your heart or your eyes is very much against it, though. Righteous Job, for instance, believes that people who let themselves be led by their eyes don’t deserve to eat.
Continue reading Should people follow their hearts and eyes?Jesus says you should do to others as you would have them do to you.5 This is known as the Golden Rule. Sounds like a pretty good rule, right? As long as you don’t think about what it’s actually saying. But it’s really a very bad rule. Let’s look at an example to see why.
A man would like to have sex with a certain woman. But that woman is not willing to have sex with him. What should the man do? Well, what would he want that unwilling woman to do to him? He would want her to have sex with him. So according to the Golden Rule, he should go ahead and have sex with her.
That’s right, actually following this nice-sounding rule would lead to rape. What went wrong?
Continue reading Why the Golden Rule is a bad ruleThe first chapter of the book of Daniel establishes that Daniel is not willing to ever eat choice food or drink wine. Daniel makes a big deal out of this. He has religious reasons for his dietary restrictions, as well as health reasons. He insists on eating nothing but vegetables and drinking nothing but water, even if doing so risks incurring the wrath of the king.
Continue reading Did Daniel normally eat choice food, meat, and wine?