About Us...

The "we" of Zephanyah consists of two people: Larry and Beth, a married couple, who live and work in an upper-Midwest American city. Born and raised in Christian homes, educated in churches and parochial schools, we each wandered through our single lives, testing,at one point or another along the way, nearly every doctrine of faith, both Christian and non-Christian.  After meeting and marrying almost twenty years ago, we finally learned the essential truth we had  so diligently pursued.  It is this: that a living, loving God speaks to us through His Word, the Bible.  He reveals Himself to us there, because He loves us, and He wants us to love Him, not merely to obey.

How would you respond if we said to you, "Here is a wonderful person, who loves you already, someone you will definitely love, no question about it.  Meet us at the altar on Tuesday, and come prepared to get married.  Trust, us, you will love this person for the rest of your life, so go on ahead and get married now, because you might regret it if you let this opportunity pass you by." ?

Would you say, "Sure, okay, I trust you.  I'll marry that  person on Tuesday, then."? Of course you wouldn't.  You wouldn't get married without knowing the person.  

This is what many evangelists ask us to do.  They want us to take their word for who God is, and trusting their recommendation, we should jump out of our seats, run down to the altar filled with emotion, pronounce our vows of chastity to Someone we don't even know.

Do we even want to change ourselves?  More important: can we?  How can we know if the preacher understands God, or not?  Sadly, many preachers, teachers, evangelists and Christian writers do not understand God very well, at all. Whether they intend to or not, they lead their flocks far away from the true pasture.  The result is that God has become a looming mystery, a mass of conflicting descriptions, completely misunderstood and misconstrued.  

Should we deny our own intellect, our own responsibility to discern the truth? As thinking beings, we cannot love God without knowing Him.  And, we cannot know Jehovah God without knowing His Bible.  It's not enough to take someone else's word for what the Bible says.  We must study it for ourselves.

The problem with that is that the Bible is not the easiest book to understand. It is filled with foreign figures of speech, obscure literary devices, allegorical nuances and prophetic symbolism.  While literal interpretation often serves us very well, it can sometimes produce bizarre results, and it is important to know when to read literally, and when to look for figurative meaning in a passage.   

That is why we created this Website.  Through long study, we have been blessed with some understanding of Scripture, and we can see more clearly the reality of God and His plan for the Salvation of mankind.   

First, we had to admit that man cannot save himself, though he may try.  There is no utopian government coming that doesn't carry with it the risk of tyranny, because there will always be tyrants who know how to acquire power. Next, we had to realize that this world is not our home.  This is self-evident, irrefutably proven by the fact that everyone must die.  Our present cultural obsession with fitness and health attempts to deny this fact, but it can't be denied.

Finally, God's Word calls us to share our studies with anyone who cares to listen. So, we offer to you our studies, and our two lifetimes of experience in philosophical thought, in hopes that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they will transform the noisy contentions of today's Christian culture into God's glory in your life.  We invite you to spend time with us on this Website, to post your views in our Community Forum, and to share them with our visitors.

We believe that we have an important job to do for the Lord, namely, to first learn and then teach the Gospel.  This commission demonstrates God's great wisdom, because in order to teach His Word, we must first diligently study it.  

Our subject is that Old Testament Gospel on which is built the New, from which Jesus taught his disciples on the road to Emmaus on the day of His Resurrection (Luke 24) - those same disciples who had been with Him for three years and still needed deeper instruction.   It is this Biblical depth that we approach with great wonder and awe.

We find corruption and Biblical illiteracy in many churches today, but we can't see the point of deriding them at the expense of their faithful members.  In our experience, there are wise and foolish people everywhere.

While our understanding of the Bible may differ from yours, in this Website, we share our study tools, so that anyone can test the Scripture for himself.  If you challenge us, please do so with sound Biblical documentation.  It may be that after you have made a case in disagreement with our teaching, we remain  in our convictions.  In that case, we pray the Lord will enlighten us all in the matter, and we will respect your right to your own views if you do the same for us.   We may not be able to respond personally to each and every e-mail contact, but we will make every effort to include your questions and answers in our FAQ pages, and we will participate in the Forum's informal discussions whenever possible.  

To those of you who reject Christianity, we ask only one question.  Is that your final answer? 

Unlike conditions of the past, in our time the Word of God has been placed directly into our hands for personal study.  In this we are blessed beyond measure.  Let us be thankful and wise to embrace it.