I’m committing to making more content this year—especially video—and my new website format will allow me to do all sorts of new things moving forward.

So please go check out JeremyJernigan.com and see for yourself!

Click here to read the first new blog post and watch the video.

Phew… just me?

Let’s just say I’ve tried to make something happen for more than seventeen years now. That’s older than any of my five kids. And it finally happened.

So this post is just a little teaser to let you know that I’m super excited to share something I’ve been working on with you. It’s almost ready. I’m so excited about it that I literally stayed up till 2:20 am this week working on it (which is WAY past my bedtime these days).

And here’s the best part: I feel like a few things are coming together at just the right time. Ideas I’ve been considering but didn’t know how to pull off are coming to fruition. If all this had happened when I wanted it to seventeen years ago it wouldn’t have worked as well as it’s going to now.

I’m going into 2023 with a new excitement and determination.

Thanks for reading and following along this journey with me, I can’t wait to share this with you soon!

In case you wanted to save this post for future reference, here is a link to all the episodes in one place. Click on any of them to go to that episode. If you use our podcast to aid you or your group in studying the book we’d love to hear about your experience.

• Episode Zero – Why are we doing this?
• Hebrews 1 – The Phantom Menace
• Hebrews 2 – Christian Veganism
• Hebrews 3 – Doubting our Doubts and Being Certain of Uncertainty
• Hebrews 4 – Rest and the Origin of the Universe
• Hebrews 5 – Hell to Pay
• Hebrews 6 – Experiencing the Quadrilateral
• Hebrews 7 – Melchizedek will Make Things Rights
• Hebrews 8 – The Enchanted Light Show
• Hebrews 9 – The Blood Dyad
• Hebrews 10 – Tribulation Force
• Hebrews 11 – Faith and Martyrdom
• Hebrews 12 – Walk the Earth
• Hebrews 13 – Concluding Words

We’ll be starting our next book in January so stay tuned! You can also follow along with us on our social media channels (and get video snippets there as well).

• Click here for our Instagram 
• Click here for our YouTube
• Click here for our Facebook
• Click here for our TikTok

Want to study the book of Hebrews? Here's your podcast companion as a pastor and a skeptic explore each chapter together.
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As I get older I seem to be more and more aware of the numerous ways in which the world doesn’t often work as it should. This is why many people want to believe in things like Karma, as it gives some sense of justice eventually (even if we never see it).

I don’t believe in Karma, and I don’t think things always balance out as they should, at least on this side of Heaven. I recently finished Cody Cassiday’s book called Who Ate the First Oyster? It’s about numerous people throughout history who were the first to try something. His retelling of the story of soap stood out to me in particular.

In 1847 Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian obstetrician working at the Vienna General Hospital, began investigating a mystery. Why did birthing mothers under the care of his doctors die at a rate five times greater than by those cared for by only his midwives? Semmelweis insisted his doctors follow every one of his midwife’s birthing techniques. He even went so far as to ban priests from ringing bells in the doctor’s wards because they didn’t in the midwives’. Nothing worked. But when a colleague of Semmelweis’s died after performing an autopsy of the same maternal fever that plagued mothers, he tried a new theory. He knew his doctors often performed autopsies before they assisted mothers, while his midwives did not. Perhaps, he reasoned, they carried some deadly particle or smell from cadavers to mothers, and thus he asked them to wash their hands.

We read this story today as a painfully obvious reality, yet it was not always this way. As we would expect, after the doctors began using soap “The death rate immediately plunged.”

But this is where the story takes a sad turn. Rather than the universal acceptance of doctors washing their hands and Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis becoming an international hero, just the opposite happened.

Semmelweis’s doctors quickly mutinied at the suggestion that they were responsible for killing their patients. He was fired, the doctors stopped washing their hands, and Semmelweis eventually perished in an insane asylum.

Sometimes you have to go against the crowd for the sake of what you know in your soul to be right, even if it means it will cost you dearly. What is accepted collectively is often not right for a number of reasons. Progress can be a slow ship to steer. Even though Semmelweis was spot on with his observation about doctors and soap, he was outdone by the established leaders in his industry who had the power to overrule him, at least in the short term. The same often happens today.

It reminds me of an interesting insight from an American Theologian named James Cone. As he reflected on the history of slavery (and its support from Christians using the Bible), he wrote that “Black theology believes that the spirit of the authentic gospel is often better expressed by ‘heretics’ than by the ‘orthodox’ tradition.” Cone observed it was those Christians who had the ‘orthodox’ faith (at that time) that were the ones who made slavery possible. It took a few heretics for change to happen.

We’re not done moving forward, making progress, and working to bring more of heaven down to earth. We need a few more outliers in the process who are willing to experience a bit of loneliness and personal cost to help us get there.

We're not done moving forward, making progress, and working to bring more of heaven down to earth. We need a few more outliers in the process who are willing to experience a bit of loneliness and personal cost to help us get there.
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