My first Bible had almost no Bible in it.
Big-eyed children. Little halos. A cross drawn soft enough for a nursery. A bearded, gentle, wide-eyed Jesus who looked like he had never once raised his voice.
A Precious Moments Bible. I was maybe six. Germany, or California, I cannot tell you anymore. I cannot even tell you who gave it to me.
I can tell you what it did. It lit a hunger.
It just never fed it.
I got saved at twelve. Sat in a church, heard the gospel preached, came to Christ. That part was real. But I walked back out still carrying that nursery Jesus in my head. And a boy builds with whatever he is handed.
So I built.
I added my own ideas. My own rules for how heaven must work. Without ever knowing the word for it, I made something almost Hindu out of Christianity. A little of this. A little of that. Other gods stacked in beside the real one. A Jesus assembled by a child in the dark.
The Bible has a line for exactly this.
"In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." (Judges 21:25)
No king on the throne. No king in the heart. So every man draws his own map.
That was me. King of my own little religion. And I did not even know it.
Then came the nuns.
A Catholic school. A saint a day. Stories of men and women who starved themselves, walked impossible miles, did the unthinkable, and supposedly touched God at the end of it.
The hunger flared back up. But it pointed the wrong way.
I thought holiness was a feat. Go far enough, give up enough, push hard enough, and I would earn a vision. Like a spirit quest. Walk out into the wild. Wait for the sign.
I was chasing wonders. Nobody told me the wonder already happened on a hill outside Jerusalem.
The fix was not a lightning bolt.
It was a small Christian school. A little Bible church. A man who simply opened the text and preached it. Not perfectly. Slowly. Plainly.
And here is the thing nobody warns you about.
Light does not only add. Light strips.
The more of the real Bible I took in, the more of my homemade Jesus burned off. The strange ideas. The borrowed gods. The mysticism. One by one they could not survive contact with the text. Light came in. The fog went out.
I did not need more spiritual experiences. I needed the lamp.
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." (Psalm 119:105)
Most people are not in rebellion. They are just in the dark. Handed a soft picture as a child and never shown the text as an adult. So they build their own Jesus, same as I did, and they learn to call the confusion faith.
That is why I made this.
Confusing Things in the Bible. Eleven of the questions that keep good people building in the dark. Forty-seven years of teaching, gathered from study across many sources, compiled and laid plain. Baptism. Tongues. Healing. The rapture. Tithing. Wine. The two kingdoms. Election and free will. Each one pulled out of the fog and set under the lamp.
I do not tell you what to think. I show you the text and let you decide. That is the whole point. A king back on the throne. The right one.
Bible. No politics. No names to defend.
→ Confusing Things in the Bible — deadhidden.org/store/confusing-things-in-the-bible
The Precious Moments Bible started the hunger.
It took the real one to feed it.
Adam
