The Bible tells one story. Humanity growing up.
View the Project on GitHub trusthumankind/christianity-in-24-hours
Q: What about all the things Christianity can’t explain?
A: Honest faith doesn’t require answers to every question. It requires honesty about which ones you’re avoiding.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve encountered a version of Christianity that probably doesn’t match what you grew up hearing. God stepped back. Jesus was a prophet, not a divine override. Prayer doesn’t change outcomes. Suffering has no hidden purpose. The mission is ours to carry, with no guarantee of success.
That framework answers a lot. But it doesn’t answer everything. This chapter deals with the questions that remain — the ones that make people leave the faith, the ones that keep honest seekers on the outside, and the ones that most churches would rather you stop asking.
Start with what we know.
God created humanity. All of it. Not a chosen race with everyone else as an afterthought. Not a preferred ethnicity with the rest playing supporting roles. Every person on earth — every nation, every culture, every language — comes from the same creator with the same intent. The mission from Hour 1 was given to humanity, not to a subset.
Peter had to learn this the hard way. He grew up believing God’s covenant was for Israel. Then God gave him a vision and sent him to Cornelius, a Roman centurion — a gentile, an outsider. Peter walked into that house and said:
“Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” — Acts 10:34-35 ESV
In every nation. Anyone who does what is right. Peter didn’t say “anyone who carries the Christian label.” He said anyone who fears God and does what is right. That’s the foundation.
From that foundation, the question of other religions looks different. There are roughly 4,200 religions in the world. Christianity is the largest, but it still represents less than a third of humanity. The standard Christian answer is exclusivism: Jesus is the only way, and everyone else is wrong. The verse usually cited:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” — John 14:6 ESV
Read in context, Jesus is speaking to his disciples at the Last Supper — people who already follow him — about where he’s going and how they can follow. He’s describing the mission path, not issuing a cosmic immigration policy.
If God created everyone without partiality, then the mission was always meant for everyone. A Buddhist practicing compassion, a Muslim giving zakat, a secular humanist building clean water systems — each is contributing to the same mission, whether they use the same language or not. The specific vehicle matters less than whether someone is actually carrying the mission. The question is not what label you wear. The question is whether you’re doing what is right.
What we don’t know — and should be honest about not knowing — is the specifics of the afterlife: who gets in, who doesn’t, and by what exact mechanism. Anyone who claims certainty about the eternal fate of billions of people they’ve never met is claiming knowledge they don’t have. But God’s original intent is clear: everyone, no favorites.
God orders the destruction of entire cities. The flood kills nearly all life on earth. The Israelites are commanded to wipe out the Canaanites — men, women, children, livestock (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). These are not footnotes. They’re central narratives.
There are three honest ways to engage with this:
The developmental lens. Hour 8 described the Law as parenting on a civilizational scale — rules appropriate for a people at a specific stage. The violence of the Old Testament may reflect a similar dynamic: God working within the moral framework that ancient people could comprehend, in a world where conquest was the norm. That doesn’t make the violence good. It means the record captures where humanity was, not where God wanted humanity to end up. The entire arc of Scripture bends toward mercy — from “an eye for an eye” (a limit on vengeance, not a command to take vengeance) to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44).
The human authorship lens. The Bible is a library (Tenet 5), written by human beings in specific historical contexts. Some of those authors may have attributed their nation’s military campaigns to God’s command because that’s what ancient cultures did — every nation claimed divine mandate for its wars. Reading critically doesn’t mean dismissing the text. It means asking whether “God commanded” and “we believed God commanded” can look identical in a text written by the victors.
The tension lens. Perhaps the violence is in the text precisely because faith is not supposed to be comfortable. If you read the Bible and nothing troubles you, you’re not reading carefully. The violence forces you to wrestle — with the text, with your understanding of God, with the distance between the Old Testament world and the one Jesus described. That wrestling is not a failure of faith. It’s faith working.
The popular image of hell — eternal fire, conscious torment, pitchforks and a red devil — owes more to Dante’s Inferno and medieval art than to Scripture. The Bible’s language about judgment is varied, metaphorical, and far less specific than most sermons suggest.
Jesus used the word Gehenna (Matthew 5:22, Mark 9:43) — a reference to the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a garbage dump where refuse burned continuously. It was a vivid, local image his audience would recognize. Whether he meant it as a literal description of the afterlife or as a metaphor for the destruction of a wasted life is a question the text doesn’t settle definitively.
What the framework of the first nineteen hours suggests: the mission is collective. Humanity succeeds or fails together. The promise of eternal life described in Hour 1 is conditional on collective success, not individual performance. If that’s the structure, then hell as individual punishment for individual sins doesn’t fit the framework. What fits is this: if humanity fails the mission, we all face the consequences — not as targeted retribution, but as the natural result of collective failure.
Evolution is real. The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. These are not matters of opinion — they’re conclusions supported by converging evidence from geology, biology, physics, astronomy, and genetics.
The conflict between science and faith is largely manufactured. It exists because a specific strain of Christianity — biblical literalism — insists that Genesis 1 is a scientific account of creation. It isn’t. Genesis 1 is a theological statement: God created. The universe has purpose. Humanity has a role. The “how” belongs to science. The “why” belongs to faith. They answer different questions.
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” — Psalm 139:13 ESV
The psalmist didn’t know about DNA. He didn’t need to. The point is not the mechanism — it’s the meaning. God created a universe governed by elegant, discoverable laws. The fact that those laws are intelligible — that a human mind can comprehend the mathematics of a star — is itself remarkable, and is consistent with a universe created by an intelligent being.
Faith and science conflict only when one tries to do the other’s job. When faith makes scientific claims (the earth is 6,000 years old), it embarrasses itself. When science makes theological claims (there is no purpose), it exceeds its methodology. Stay in your lane.
There are contradictions. The creation accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 describe different sequences. The gospels disagree on details of the resurrection — who arrived first, what they saw, what was said. The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke don’t match. Paul and James appear to disagree on whether faith or works saves you.
Pretending these contradictions don’t exist is dishonest. Claiming they destroy the Bible’s credibility is lazy.
The Bible is sixty-six books written by roughly forty authors across approximately 1,500 years (Tenet 5). It would be far more suspicious if they all agreed on every detail. The contradictions are evidence that the text was not centrally manufactured — no committee smoothed out the discrepancies because the early church valued preserving multiple witnesses over presenting a tidy narrative.
The contradictions in the gospels function like eyewitness testimony. If four people witness the same event, their accounts will differ on peripheral details — what time it happened, who spoke first, what was said verbatim. If all four accounts were identical, you’d suspect collusion, not accuracy. The core narrative — Jesus died, the tomb was empty, the disciples encountered something that transformed them from hiding in fear to proclaiming the resurrection at the cost of their lives — is consistent across all accounts. The differences in detail actually strengthen the historical case rather than weakening it.
As for Paul and James: Paul argues that you cannot earn salvation through rule-following (Romans 3:28). James argues that faith without action is dead (James 2:26). These are not contradictions — they’re two sides of the same coin, speaking to different audiences with different problems. Paul was fighting legalism. James was fighting complacency. Both were right.
Hour 14 addressed this: prayer is orientation, not petition. But the question lingers because it’s personal. You prayed for your mother to be healed, and she died. You prayed for guidance, and heard nothing. You prayed for strength, and felt weaker.
The honest answer: if God has stepped back and the world operates on its own laws, then prayer was never going to change the medical outcome. That’s not a failure of prayer — it’s a misunderstanding of what prayer does. Prayer changed whether you were honest about your fear, whether you examined your priorities, whether you were prepared for what came next. It didn’t change what came next.
This is unsatisfying. It should be. If you want a God who intervenes on request, the framework of these twenty hours is not going to give you that God. What it gives you instead is a God who trusted you enough to let the outcome depend on you — and a practice of prayer that builds the capacity to face whatever comes.
The institutional church treats marriage as the default expectation for adult life — and often as the prerequisite for legitimate sex, partnership, and full participation in church community. Singles ministries exist, but they’re usually holding pens for people who haven’t paired up yet. The unspoken message: being single is a phase. Marriage is the destination.
Paul disagreed.
I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. — 1 Corinthians 7:7-8 ESV
Paul actively recommended singleness — not as a consolation prize, but as a better position for carrying the mission. His reasoning was practical: married people divide their attention between the mission and their spouse. Single people can give the mission their full focus. Jesus never married. Neither did Paul. The two most influential figures in Christianity chose singleness, and the church somehow turned marriage into a requirement.
None of this means marriage is wrong. Marriage is a covenant between two people to carry the mission together — to build a household oriented toward love of God and love of neighbor. At its best, a marriage is a two-person community (Hour 15) practicing vulnerability, accountability, and showing up for each other every day. At its worst, it’s a private fortress — two people turning inward, building comfort, and using “family first” as an excuse to opt out of the broader mission.
The question is not whether you should get married. The question is what your marriage — or your singleness — is pointed toward. A single person carrying the mission is living more faithfully than a married couple accumulating comfort behind a locked front door.
“Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) is the verse most often used to argue that Christians should have children. It was spoken to the first humans on an empty earth. There are now eight billion people. The instruction has been fulfilled. Treating it as an eternal command for every individual believer misreads the context by four thousand years and several billion people.
Jesus didn’t have children. Paul didn’t have children. Paul recommended singleness. Jesus said anyone who follows him must be willing to leave family behind (Luke 14:26). The New Testament consistently prioritizes the mission over the biological family — not against it, but above it.
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” — Matthew 12:48-50 ESV
Jesus redefined family as the people carrying the mission. Blood relation is not the primary bond. Shared commitment is.
So should you have children? That’s between you, your partner, and your honest assessment of what you’re building. If you’re having children because you want to raise people who carry the mission — who learn to love their neighbor, question injustice, and hold their lives with open hands — that’s a reason. If you’re having children because it’s expected, because your parents want grandchildren, because you want someone to take care of you when you’re old — examine whether those reasons serve the mission or serve yourself.
And if you choose not to have children — because the mission needs your full attention, because the world you’d bring them into isn’t ready, because you know yourself well enough to know parenthood isn’t your calling — that is not a failure of faith. It may be the clearest expression of it.
The mission needs parents who raise children for the world, not for themselves. It also needs people who give everything to the mission without the weight of family obligations. Both paths serve. Neither is default.
Few topics generate more heat and less honesty than this one. The institutional church treats it as a litmus test — the single issue that determines whether you’re a real Christian. The political world treats it the same way from the opposite side. Both camps demand a one-word answer. The Bible doesn’t give one.
Scripture says remarkably little about abortion directly. The passages most often cited:
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” — Psalm 139:13 ESV
This is a poem about God’s intimate knowledge of a person. It is not legislation. Jeremiah 1:5 — “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” — describes God’s foreknowledge of a specific prophet, not a universal policy statement. These verses affirm that life is sacred. They do not define the moment it begins or settle what a woman should do when every option in front of her involves suffering.
Meanwhile, Exodus 21:22-25 prescribes different penalties for harming a pregnant woman versus causing the loss of her pregnancy — a distinction the text draws without commentary. And Numbers 5 describes a ritual administered by a priest to a woman suspected of adultery, the outcome of which may terminate a pregnancy. It is prescribed by God, in the text. These passages don’t settle the debate either, but they complicate the claim that Scripture speaks with one voice on the subject.
Here is what Scripture does say clearly: love your neighbor.
Consider a real situation. A couple with two children agrees their family is complete. They’re not always careful. One month, a scare — she might be pregnant. She tells her husband plainly: if the test is positive, she’s ending the pregnancy. She asks how he’d feel.
He tells her he understands. He respects her decision. All he says is that he’d prefer she keep the child.
No lecture. No scripture quoted. No ultimatum. Just a preference stated with honesty, and a woman’s autonomy respected with love. That interaction — quiet, mutual, agonizing — is closer to what faith looks like in practice than any political platform or protest sign.
But notice what’s missing from that story: a community. If a village of people living the mission surrounded that family — sharing the cost of childcare, guaranteeing healthcare, ensuring no family drowns under the weight of another mouth to feed — the calculus changes. Not the woman’s right to choose. The pressure that makes the choice feel impossible.
This is where the institutional church fails most visibly. The same voices that say “abortion is murder” overwhelmingly oppose universal healthcare, paid family leave, free childcare, and the social infrastructure that would make keeping an unplanned child survivable. They demand the birth and then disappear. That is not pro-life. It is pro-birth. And the difference is the entire mission.
The honest framework: life is sacred, and so is the woman carrying it. She is your neighbor. Her impossible choice is not a political talking point — it is a failure of the community that was supposed to be there and wasn’t. The grown-up response to abortion is not to police individual decisions. It is to build the world where fewer people face the decision at all — and to love, without judgment, the ones who do.
This is why the mission matters. The victory conditions from Hour 24 — food security, housing security, education, a community that actually carries each other — are not abstractions. They are the answer to this question. Build the village, and the impossible choices get fewer.
Every hard question has the same thing underneath it: can I trust this?
Can I trust a God who allows suffering? Can I trust a Bible with contradictions? Can I trust a faith that can’t prove itself scientifically? Can I trust a religion that claims to be right when thousands of others make the same claim?
The answer from Hour 19: real faith means sitting with these questions, honestly considering the possibility that the answer is no, and choosing to act anyway. Not because the doubts have been resolved, but because the mission — love God, love your neighbor, overcome your fears and vices — is worth carrying even in the presence of doubt.
The questions don’t go away. A faith that requires them to go away is fragile. A faith that carries them is the only kind that lasts.
← Hour 19: Fake Faith · Table of Contents · Hour 21: Christianity and the World →