For a limited time, until May 31, 2026, you can get a free copy of the e-book from Google by clicking this link: https://play.google.com/redeem?code=KVMXKDDXLHALC.

The post Published: The Storyteller Paradigm appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

Suffering In The Story

Throughout history, mankind has experienced a tremendous amount of suffering and death. This has turned many against God, but it has also brought others closer to Him. Regardless, it oftentimes results in the burning question, “Why?”

In stories we write, the main characters are not immune to pain and death. While these may form a significant and essential part of a good story, the story is not about the suffering. We sometimes ask God why we have to suffer or why a loved one had to die. What if a story character could ask his author the same thing?

(Spoiler alert!) In the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction, Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell) began hearing a voice in his head narrating his everyday life. The voice didn’t speak directly to him; it spoke of him in the third person, as if to a reader of a novel. That was strange enough. But Harold became very unsettled after his watch stopped, and he had to reset it to the time a stranger gave him. Immediately, the voice said this would result in his imminent death. What was before putting up with an annoying voice now became an urgent quest to find the source of that voice.

In time, Harold discovered the voice’s owner: Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a reclusive writer of fiction who was known for always killing off her main characters. Harold didn’t want to die, so his search for his author became more urgent.

Eventually, Harold found Karen and told her he was the main character in her story. Karen was shocked to find that Harold was a real human being. But, although she sympathized with Harold, the story had to be finished. On the advice of her assistant, Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), Emma loaned Harold the draft of the story to read. After he read it, he agreed: his death was the best possible ending to the story, and he willingly submitted to his fate.

What if God did the same with us? What if He let us see His manuscript in advance? For the apostle John, God did just that. In the book of Revelation, John saw the last part of God’s story and how it ended. He saw things get incredibly bad on earth. He saw suffering increase. But he also saw the end result for the believers: it was better than he could imagine, and worth the trouble. If we could see God’s manuscript, I believe we would agree that the bad things we suffer are for the good.

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28)

When things don’t go the way you think they should, God has not let some of His control slip. George Lucas did not lose control when Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda died. J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t lose control when Boromir and Theoden died. And C. S. Lewis didn’t lose control when Aslan died. These characters died for a purpose. Their authors didn’t hate them. Their deaths were necessary to the story.

People suffer today because it is necessary for God’s story. Job suffered tremendous loss, and he never received a satisfying answer from God as to why, but he continued to trust in Him. By the end of the book, Job, like Harold Crick, was content with his Author’s response, even though his earlier questions had not been answered.

There’s nothing wrong with doing what Harold Crick did: going to our Author and asking Him why, or asking Him to change our part of the story. Jesus did so in the Garden of Gethsemane. We may not receive the answer we want, but we need to trust that our good and faithful God knows what He’s doing. The reasons for our suffering are not usually evident because we’re still in the story, but eventually we will know. In the meantime, we must continue to trust that the Author knows best.

The post The Storyteller Paradigm to be published in May appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

The post Progress on my new book appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

As a Christian, I am absolutely convinced God exists and the Bible is His word because I have seen and tested the evidence. I have tested His promises, and He always comes through. I also have a personal relationship with Him through Jesus Christ and He often answers my prayers. But I know this is unlikely to sway you because you can’t see that. So instead I want to talk about real, hard evidence.

Much of the evidence for God and the Bible is not even on the atheist’s radar. As such, I wrote a free book for skeptics to show one such area of overlooked, testable evidence that strongly supports the existence of God and the inspiration of the Bible. Knowing my target audience is very skeptical of “religious tomfoolery,” I used the following criteria for writing the book’s contents so it would be as unbiased as possible:

I think my book, Fifty-Five Questions for Skeptics, meets these goals, although the ultimate judge of that will be the reader.

The questions in the book are used to test a wild, impossible-sounding claim: that God fulfilled His promise to return Israel to their ancestral land in 1948. I chose this claim because it consists of many modern prophecy fulfillments that the reader is an unknowing witness of or can investigate for himself. The questions were chosen such that they can be used to prove or disprove the claim. The answers to the questions can also be used to calculate the combined probability of all of the fulfillments.

This area of prophecy fulfillment also stands up to the most common objections:

This is an update to the book I originally published in 2018. I added an appendix containing GROK‘s answers to the first eleven, non-theological questions. These questions are meant to obtain statistics about all the other nations so the reader can calculate the fulfillment probabilities for Israel later on. Until recently, these first questions have been difficult or impossible for most people to research on their own. But now, AI chatbots can give reasonably accurate and usable answers. The answers aren’t perfect, but if anything, they will err in favor the skeptic. I included GROK’s answers to these questions because, being general in nature, there is no theological bias involved. The reader is free to verify the answers, use another AI tool, or ignore them altogether.

If you’re a skeptic, I invite you to take a look at the book, do the research, and give honest answers to the questions. I matters not to me whether you sincerely want to know if the claim is true or you want to debunk it. But you can only refute the claim if you do the research.

The book is available as a free download at: https://dtjsoft.com/other/55questions.pdf. It is also available for free from Google Play. Printed copies are also available on amazon.com.

The post Hard Evidence For The Skeptic appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

But with recent advances in artificial intelligence, tools have become available that make this kind of research easy for anyone with an internet connection. Elon Musk’s GROK is quite popular now, and I have found it an ideal tool for a layman like myself to tackle those pesky questions.

I spent today feeding GROK the first eleven questions, adding the full, unedited responses to my book as a new appendix. The free downloadable PDF version of the book has been updated with GROK’s responses, which you can download here. I plan on updating the printed version soon (available through Amazon.com).

Of course, you don’t have to trust the responses I’ve added. You can ask GROK the questions yourself, or use some other AI chatbot. You can even ignore the new material and do all your research the old-fashioned way, without AI assistance. But the GROK responses are included in case you want to use them.

Update

The book is now available at amazon.com.

The post Fifty-Five Questions For Skeptics 2025 Update appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

The post New book in progress appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

The post New Page: Introduction To The Parables appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

The post New page: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

Dr. Lane said the cycle of discipleship consists of three phases:

• The first phase began with Jesus’ call for the disciples to be with Him in various situations.
• The second phase began when Jesus sent out His disciples to speak His word and do His work. They acted as His apostles or shaliachim… his legal representatives.
• The third phase was when the disciples returned to Jesus to report on all they said and did. Jesus then called them to a desert place to rest with Him. The cycle then repeated.

I found this study both interesting and beneficial in my own walk with the Lord. I wanted others to benefit as well, so I led a Bible study earlier this year where we listened to each episode and followed along in our Bibles. We then discussed what we heard and learned. The study was well received.

I’ve made all the materials we used available so anyone can use it as part of their small-group Bible study. This includes the teacher notes, student question sheets, the audio of the discussion between Dr. Lane, Wayne Shepherd, and Michael Card, and a transcription of the audio. (Permission to use the audio excerpts was obtained through the Michael Card Music Facebook page.)

You can download all of the files by clicking on the link below. This study may not be sold. It may only be redistributed for free. Please read the teacher notes for more information. Let me know if anything needs correcting or if you have any suggestions.

    The Cycle Of Discipleship Study (.zip)

The .zip file above includes the audio excerpts of the study, but you can listen to the complete radio episodes here:

• Bearers Of The Light: Part 1
• Bearers Of The Light: Part 2
• Bearers Of The Light: Part 3

The post Cycle Of Discipleship Study appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.

– Luke 11:5-7

Jesus gave a very unlikely example of a rude friend. In our culture if we went to someone at midnight and asked for some bread, we might receive a response like this guy gave because our culture is very self-centered, convenience-centered, and rude: Western culture in general does not consider hospitality as an obligation.

In the Hebrew culture, what the friend said was unexpected and shameful. He didn’t respond in kind with the word ‘friend’. All he said was ‘Don’t bother me‘—literally ‘Stop giving me troubles.’ His response would have shocked the disciples. Not to say there weren’t any people like that at the time, but the real rude person in this parable is this friend who didn’t want to be disturbed.

The next part of my series on Jesus’ parables is now available. This is on the The Shameless Friend. This series is based on messages I’ve given at Beatty Baptist Church.

The post New Page: The Shameless Friend appeared first on Andrew Bernhardt's Home Page.