Religious 32: How I Got Here: Three Questions That Wouldn’t Let Me Go
Eph 5:11: “...have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
Amos 3:7: “...God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.”
Why this post?
I’ve been writing whydoneit for a while now. Beasts. Timelines. Daniel. The Sabbath. The papacy. The judgement. The cosmic week. None of it landed in me overnight, and almost none of it started with a Bible study.
It started with three questions I couldn’t stop asking myself.
This post is not about the answers. The answers are everywhere else on the site. This is about the questions — and the embarrassingly slow way I worked my way toward them.
Because I think there are a lot of people sitting where I sat. In a pew. Comfortable. Sure they get it. Not asking anything in particular.
Read this if that’s you. Then decide what you want to do with it.
Something personal
I was in church since I was a child. I thought I was devoted. I thought I understood what was important. I thought I knew enough.
I didn’t.
This took me a decade. Not a weekend retreat. Not a sermon series. A decade. And along the way almost everything I thought I knew about Him, about the Word, and about His plan of salvation had to be taken apart and put back together. Not adjusted. Rebuilt. And I’ll be honest with you — pretty much everyone around me thinks I’m off my rocker. Family. Friends. People I’d sat in pews next to for years. The reaction is some mix of polite concern and visible discomfort, depending on the day.
The honest reason it took a decade is also the most uncomfortable thing to admit. I didn’t read the Bible enough. And the parts I did read, I didn’t read deeply enough. I read it the way most of us are taught to — for sermon support, for verse-of-the-day, for reassurance. Not the way it actually asks to be read. Which is the way you read a letter from someone who is trying to save your life.
I’m saying that out loud because the Bible itself tells me — over and over and over again — that the people who thought they knew are the people who consistently missed it. Adam walked with God. The chief priests in Jerusalem could quote Micah 5:2 by memory. The disciples spent three years next to Jesus. The Pharisees memorised more of scripture than I will ever know.
Hindsight is 20-20. Foresight is the test. And the Bible’s record on people passing the foresight test from inside their own moment is — let’s be honest — terrible.
So when I sat down to ask whether I would have done better, I had to be honest about what the actual evidence said.
Introduction
Three sets of questions came out. They came in this order:
The Past. Would I have spotted any of God’s major interventions if I’d been there?
The Gravity. And how bad would things have to actually get before God intervenes again?
The Warning System. If a warning was given — would I even recognise it?
I’m going to walk through them the way I walked through them. Slowly. Out loud. Without resolution. The point is to show you what the thinking actually looked like — not to dress it up as something more tidy than it was.
This isn’t a teaching post. It’s a confession.
1. The Past — Would I Have Known?
This is where it started. Not with the future. With the past.
I’d be reading the Bible — Noah, the flood, Babel, Cain, the exodus, the wilderness — and the thought would come back, every time: if I had been there, would I have seen it? Not “would I have believed when the boat was finished and the rain was falling” — anyone would believe at that point. I mean before. When it was still a man in a robe preaching while everyone else got married and ate and went on with their day.
I’d find myself stuck on the same questions:
How would Cain have known his offering was wrong? Genuinely. He brought what he had. He brought it with his own hands. He brought the produce of the ground God had told him to till. From inside Cain’s own head — was it obvious? Or did it look like devotion to him? Because we know what came next. God rejected it. And Cain — instead of asking why, instead of going back and bringing what God had actually asked for — killed his own brother over it. That’s how violent a rejection of correction can be when a man is sure he was already right.
Adam walked with God in the garden. Not heard about Him. Not read about Him. Walked with Him. And still ate. What chance did that leave for the rest of us?
The people in Noah’s day — were they monsters? I used to assume they were. The Bible says the earth was filled with violence, that every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). But sitting with it — did they know that’s what they were? Or did they think of themselves as basically good people, working hard, raising children, going about ordinary lives, with the occasional bad apple they could point to and feel better about themselves?
I think most of them thought they were fine. And Jesus actually says that the second coming will be like in Noah’s day, drinking and eating, marrying or given in marriage.
JUST LIKE TODAY.
The people building Babel weren’t trying to be wicked. They were trying to be safe. “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). That’s not cackling-villain language. That’s nation-building language. It’s We the People language. How would I have known I was in it? That I was building the tower?
Israel saw the plagues, walked through the sea, ate manna, drank from a rock — and panicked over giants. What was wrong with them? Was something wrong with them? Or was it that giants are giants, and faith from a comfortable distance is one thing, and faith with your children’s lives on the line is another, and I have absolutely no idea which side I’d have been on? They didn’t listen. And for that one moment of refusal — that one collapse of trust at the threshold of the promise — they spent the next forty years walking in circles in a desert until that whole generation died out. Forty years. For one decision made by people who had personally watched the sea split.
Moses struck the rock. Moses. The man who had been on the mountain. The man who had argued God down from destroying the whole nation. He struck a rock in frustration and didn’t enter the land. Moses. How would I have known not to strike the rock?
These weren’t theological questions. They were — what would I have actually done with my body in that situation questions. And every honest answer I gave myself was uncomfortable.
The whole pattern that came out of sitting with this was the same: God doesn’t intervene at the obvious moment. He intervenes at the moment that, from inside, doesn’t look like the moment at all. Babel was civic. Noah’s day was normal. Egypt was the economy. Cain was worship. The wilderness was logistics. Striking the rock was a tantrum.
If I couldn’t have told from inside any of those — what made me so sure I’d tell now?
That question wouldn’t leave.
2. The Gravity — What It Takes For God To Intervene
The first question forced me into the second.
Because the thing every one of those past stories has in common is something we have a hard time admitting to ourselves: God does not intervene for small things. When He acts directly — personally, visibly, irreversibly — it is because something has become so serious that nothing short of His own hand will resolve it. We massively underestimate the gravity it takes to make that necessary.
Noah’s flood was not a bad week. It was a planet so morally collapsed that scrubbing it and starting again was the merciful option. Babel was not a building permit dispute. It was the entire post-flood population coordinating, in defiance of God’s stated command, to rebuild the very system He had just destroyed — and He moved in fast. Sodom was not a city with a problem. It was a city so far gone that fire from heaven was a quieter answer than letting it continue. Egypt was not a labour dispute. It was a civilisation that had built its identity on the bones of God’s people, and the response was ten plagues, the death of every firstborn, and the parting of a sea.
And in the last days there will be seven global ones. Global!
The cross was the same thing in the other direction. The gravity of sin was so absolute that God Himself — God Himself — had to die in the place of the people who hated Him. That is not a small intervention. That is the most expensive move in the history of the universe.
And now He says He is coming back. Personally. Visibly. With the armies of heaven. To end an age and begin a new one.
That is not a small intervention either.
Which is the question I couldn’t get past:
If God is intervening at all — what has to have happened first?
Not what I think is bad. What looks bad to Him. My version of badly was probably not His version of badly. Sodom thought it was fine. Babel thought it was building. Laodicea thought it was rich. Every previous civilisation that hit the line for divine intervention thought, right up until the day it hit, that things were basically going pretty well. They were all good people.
When you actually picture His return — does the world look like it’s in crisis, or kind of normal? Because the Bible’s answer to that is unsettling. “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them” (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Not war. Not chaos. Peace. He compares the moment to the days of Noah — eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage (Matthew 24:38). Tuesday. He’s coming on a Tuesday.
The Jerusalem priests didn’t miss Jesus the first time because they were ignorant. They missed Him because they were prepared — but prepared for the wrong thing. They were expecting a king with an army. He came as a baby in a feeding trough. They had the right Bible. They had the right verses. They had the wrong picture. And they were sure their generation wasn’t bad enough to warrant the kind of intervention He came to make. So they killed Him.
His chosen nation at that time strayed so far that He had to send His Son!
The thing that finally rattled me is this: if the people who walked in the temple every day couldn’t see how bad their generation actually was — what makes me think I can see how bad mine is?
What I had to ask myself, slowly, was: what’s my picture of His return? And where did I get it? From the Bible — or from a film, a sermon series, an inherited assumption I’d never tested?
Because if the people who had Daniel and Isaiah and Micah and Malachi could still build a picture so wrong that they killed Him when He showed up — what makes me think mine is right?
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t, fully. But the question was the thing that started forcing me to read the actual prophecies for myself. Not the cinematic version. The text.
3. The Warnings — Whether I Could Hear One If One Came
This was the last one. It came out of the other two.
Because if the past pattern is that He intervenes at the moment that doesn’t look like the moment — and the future event is one He says comes during peace and safety — then the only way anyone is ever tuned in time is by some kind of advance warning.
And the Bible is unusually direct on this. “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). Nothing. He doesn’t act without warning the prophets first. That’s not a poetic line — it’s a stated operating principle.
So the questions started piling up there too:
Every generation has thought it was the one. The Jews thought so. Christians in the year 1000 thought so. Christians in 1844 thought so. Christians today think so. How would I tell where I actually am in the timeline? What’s the difference between a generation that’s correctly seeing the signs and one that’s projecting?
If God really doesn’t act without warning — and something major is coming — where are the warnings? Are they there and I’m missing them? Or are they not there yet?
Daniel’s prophecies about Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome were astonishingly accurate. Written before Greece conquered Persia. Written before Rome existed. If the first part of the prophecy was that precise — what do I do with the part that wasn’t yet history when he wrote it? The same principle of accuracy must apply. I can’t pick and choose.
Prophets in the Bible had two jobs. a) They warned people to repent. b) They revealed what was coming. And the Bible’s record of how prophets were treated — by the religious people of their own day — is almost uniformly grim. Stoned. Sawn asunder. Imprisoned. Mocked. Killed by the people who already had the previous prophets’ books on their shelves.
If a prophet showed up today — would I do better? Or would I be the one explaining, calmly and with scriptural-sounding reasons, why this one couldn’t be from God?
The Bible wasn’t a bound book yet when most of those prophets spoke. It was scrolls and letters and oral preaching. How did anyone in that moment know a prophet was a prophet? They had Deuteronomy 13 and 18 — the test of fulfilled prediction, the test of pointing to the true God. They had to weigh, in their own moment, whether to listen. And most of the time, they didn’t.
And then there’s the question I struggled with the longest. We do have a modern prophet. I’m not going to argue that here — that argument is elsewhere, weighed against the Deuteronomy tests, the Isaiah 8 tests, the fruit-and-fulfilment tests. What I want to point out is the pattern. She has been mostly rejected. By the same kinds of establishments that rejected every prophet before her. For the same kinds of reasons. With the same kinds of justifications. Not enough time has yet passed for us to know with the clarity of distance whether some of her work also belongs alongside scripture — and why would it not? It is the same Holy Spirit. The same Spirit that spoke through Moses spoke through Isaiah spoke through Daniel spoke through John on Patmos. There is no scriptural reason to assume that Spirit went silent the moment Revelation 22 closed. There is only tradition that assumes it.
That was the hardest one for me. Because the moment I let that question stand — even just stand, not yet answered — I had to admit that the religious establishment of every generation in the Bible has been wrong about its prophet, and there is no automatic reason mine should be the first to get it right.
How would I know I was deceived? Not theoretically. Practically. The thing about deception is that, by definition, the deceived person doesn’t know. If they knew, they wouldn’t be deceived. So “I would know” is exactly the answer the deceived person gives. The only way out is some kind of standard outside myself — “to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20). The word as ruler. Me as the thing being measured.
Mark Twain : "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled"
The three angels of Revelation 14 call for separation. Come out. Out of what? Out of a system most of the people inside it don’t even recognise as a system. The Protestant Reformation was a coming-out. The Bible suggests there’s another one still owed and Revelation recorded that that false prophet speaks like a lamb - this then includes all protestant churches. Am I in the thing I’m supposed to come out of, and I just don’t know it because I’ve never been outside it long enough to see its shape?
These weren’t comfortable questions. They were the ones that finally pushed me out of “the Bible is interesting” mode and into “I need to actually understand prophecy or I’ll miss whatever is coming.”
Whydoneit
So — why am I doing this?
Because I sat in a pew for decades thinking I had the gist of it.
Because the gist is what Cain had. The gist is what Adam had. The gist is what the chief priests had when they handed Herod the verse for Bethlehem and then went back to bed. The gist is the most dangerous spiritual condition there is, because it feels exactly like understanding.
I am a good person, I pay my taxes, I love my wife and my kids. I toil everyday. I am not selfish or evil like the next guy.
Because it took me a decade of slowly, painfully, having my picture of God and the Word and His plan of salvation taken apart and rebuilt. Not adjusted. Rebuilt. And I cannot pretend the people I love haven’t watched that happen with growing concern. To most of them I am, in plain terms, off my rocker. I have made peace with that. I’d rather be off my rocker and reading the Bible as if my soul depended on it than well-regarded and reading it as a comfort blanket. Modern day’s providence preaching…
Because almost nothing about this required information I didn’t already have. The Bible was on my shelf the entire time. I just hadn’t read it enough — and the parts I had read, I hadn’t read deeply enough — to let it do the thing it was designed to do. Which is to show you what you cannot see by looking at yourself.
Because reading the Bible is not enough. The Pharisees did that. Information is not enough. The chief priests had Bethlehem memorised. Sincerity is not enough. Saul of Tarsus was sincere when he held the coats. Religious training is not enough. Religious experts have missed God in every generation in the book.
What seems to actually produce discernment is something narrower. It is the Holy Spirit, working through the Word, in someone willing to be wrong, willing to be hated, willing to leave. To come out. That’s the part nobody warns you about in church. The price of seeing clearly is the willingness to discover that you didn’t.
It’s almost insurmountable to change your world view.
So I write whydoneit for the version of me who was sitting in that pew years ago. Sure he was fine. Sure he had the basics. Vaguely uneasy about something he couldn’t name. Not yet asking the questions out loud.
If that’s you — even slightly — sit with this post. Don’t rush to react. Don’t immediately reach for the explanation that lets you stay where you are.
Ask the questions. Read the prophecies for yourself, not the version you were handed. Read the modern prophet’s work too with the Deuteronomy tests in one hand and an honest heart in the other. Find out whether the picture you have of God’s return is His picture, or someone else’s.
I might still be wrong about a lot of this. I almost certainly am, somewhere. But I’d rather be wrong, be scorned, be ridiculed, but still go home…
And the list of pending prophecies is short.
That’s how I got here.
1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”