December 1988. My family stood in Heathrow Airport waiting on a plane.

My dad was an Army Ranger, stationed in Germany. We were flying home to see my mom’s people. My brother and I were little. The flight got delayed. Then somebody figured out the service members on board needed a passport. We didn’t have it. My mom had to find someone to help her sort it. We missed the plane. They put us in a hotel.

The plane we were supposed to be on was Pan Am Flight 103.

It blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

I don’t remember the hotel. I remember the long flight home after. I’ve thought about that delay my whole life. I didn’t know what I’d been spared for. I still don’t, all the way. But I know what I’ve done with it so far. That’s what this is about.

I got saved at twelve.

My mom came home one day and said she felt washed. Something had changed and she couldn’t explain it. I wanted that. I was a kid who lived in his head. I was trying to find out how to be a warlock. A vampire. Anything with power in it. I read Revelation the day before. People cast into hell. I knew that was me. A preacher walked me through it in a back office on a Tuesday night. I went to school and told people. They thought it was weird. I thought I had the Holy Ghost in me now, guiding me. I knew almost nothing. The only Bible I had was a Precious Moments Bible.

Then came the years I don’t tell at parties.

I didn’t fit. I was the kid they made the jester so the class could laugh. I was in special ed for speech and reading and math. I brought a fake bomb to school after I watched Speed. I lit two matches in a paper room and blamed a redheaded kid. A detective sat me down and said, I know it was you. I told my mom and dad. I told him. A lawyer gave me two doors. Juvenile hall, or a place called Charter. I took Charter.

I’ve written about what happened to me in that place. I won’t do it again here.

After that no school would take me. A Catholic one did, in an old Victorian house. St. Joseph’s. The nuns were sweet old ladies. Wednesdays we did the Stations of the Cross. I went because I wanted to.

Then a small Christian school. My dad sat me down in front of the preacher who ran it. He told him everything I’d done. The man looked at my dad and said, That’s the past. It’s all new here.

I never forgot that.

I stood up in a chapel service and said I was called to preach. He said, good, you’re preaching Sunday. I did. I was not ready. I did it anyway.

I made my lifelong friends at the next school. Tim, my best friend, and I went to Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute together. One day Tim handed me a piece of paper with a girl’s name on it. You should call her, he said. She’s a Georgetown girl. (That was the name of the other COOL Christian school we all looked up to) She worked at Hallmark. He’d met her at the Chick-fil-A in the food court.

Her name was Christie. I’ve been married to her twenty-four years.

I dropped out of Bible college to get a job. A man who wants to get married provides. That’s what I was told. Lowe’s. A single-wide trailer. Pancakes and cereal. Work and sleep, work and sleep. Then Olivia was born and we were parents.

We went to Montana to help start a church. We stayed eight years and had three more kids there. Then the work dried up. A railroad job opened in Mandan, North Dakota. I loaded up the Suburban and drove out alone. Christie and the kids came on my birthday. The next day was a blizzard and we got stuck in a hotel.

A church found me there before they arrived. It became our family. That’s the church where I finally started reading the Bible for myself. Not somebody’s notes on it. The Book.

I nearly got my head taken off between two rail cars, so I left the railroad. Electrician. Delivery driver. Security guard. Then a trash man for Waste Management.

One day I was sitting outside the scale house at the landfill, waiting on my turn. I started typing devotionals on my phone to my kids and to Christie. Just for them. A few friends heard about it and asked in. Then I found Substack.

That was almost two years ago.

There are twenty-six thousand of you now.

I know some of your names. I know some of your prayers. A wife in Minnesota asked me to pray for a husband with long Covid. A woman asked me to pray for a godly husband, period. A man wrote that for decades provision was his idol. His wife and children and God got lost in his labor. Somehow they still love him. Somebody read one line about provision becoming an idol and wrote back, uffda, shot to the heart.

Every essay lands free. Every Note lands free. No ads. No sponsor reading a script in the middle of a teaching. No denomination cutting a check. After three days the archive goes to the people who pay. That’s the model. I’m not hiding it.

What holds it up is you. Nobody else.

Paul wrote it plain. “Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things.” Galatians 6:6.

One thing I’m asking.

If this work has held you at some point in the last two years, hold it up once.

Give what you want. Five dollars is the floor. Some of you will give more and I won’t pretend that doesn’t matter.

Every gift gets a gift back. 100 Plain Questions About the Bible, the whole guide. It comes to the email you enter, with a thank-you from me. No second charge. No catch.

If you’ve read me for a year and never paid for a thing, this is the one.

If you can’t give, forward this to somebody circling the Bible. Somebody who doesn’t know where to start. That counts.

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I missed a plane once and didn’t know why.

I’m still finding out.

Adam

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Four days before Lindsay Clancy, the feminist saint, killed her three children, she asked Google where to find the carotid artery. The kind of question any homeschool mother might ask, instructing her kids.

I will say that again. Killed her three children.

That is not where it stopped. How to slit a throat so someone dies. Can you turn off the airbags on a Kia Sorento. Can you treat a sociopath. Four days of research on her own phone, all of it read out loud to a jury in Massachusetts that still has not decided if this is murder.

That is not a breakdown. That is not some psychotic snap. That is a plan. Someone sat there and planned it out.

Her children were five, three, and eight months old. Cora. Dawson. Callan. She strangled them in that basement on January 24, 2023, then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She lived. They did not.

I do not do the news. I learned why driving a garbage truck, listening to Glenn Beck tell me every morning that the world was ending. My wife and I stay out of it as much as we can.

But my whole feed is this woman now, so I am going to say the true thing, because the church was not charged with commentary. When Jesus was taken up, he charged his disciples with making disciples of men, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. They stayed around Jerusalem instead, so God sent persecution, and persecution scattered them into the uttermost parts of the world. Everywhere they landed, they carried the word on their mouths and did what they were told.

Here is the true thing. We live in a sin-corrupted world that is rolling toward the fire God promised, down to the elemental level. People are becoming brute beasts. Go to your local mall and watch. I think about Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston staring at the broken Statue of Liberty, you damn dirty apes, realizing the apes were us. That is where we are. So do not be shocked that a woman sat with her phone studying ways to kill her kids. Where the carotid artery is. How to take the airbags out of a Kia Sorento.

And do not tell me it was postpartum psychosis. The Bible said this time would come. Without natural affection, 2 Timothy 3:3. It is in a woman’s DNA to comfort, to nourish, to nurture, and to take care of things. Not to kill and destroy. When that flips, the problem is deeper than hormones.

Is the devil in it? I wrote this morning about pastors with sex drives no normal man has, four times a day and dragging other people in. The fallen angels of Genesis 6 were obsessed the same way, and it was not natural. Devils are real. The Son of Sam heard his neighbor’s dog telling him to kill people. It is always somebody else. It is always the devil made me do it. Possession is possible, but I believe we have the ability to take ourselves down these paths or not. You do not study the carotid artery on Tuesday and blame a hallucination on Friday.

The jury was never asked to decide what happened. They were asked to decide whether the story about what happened is more real than what happened. On the first of September, 2026, twelve jurors told the judge they could not agree on what to call it. Outside the courthouse, people held rallies. For her.

The knuckleheads are out too, demanding the 19th Amendment be revoked over this. We are past that point. There was a time when the family was the unit, the man carrying the outward face of the home and the woman the inward face. The founders wanted voters with land and something to lose. That world is gone, and no amendment brings it back. The problem is not in the ballot box. It is in the heart.

None of this started in that courthouse. It started in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex and named childbearing itself as the source of women’s oppression. Pregnancy is barbaric, she wrote. Her answer was artificial wombs. Children made somewhere else, by something else, so motherhood would never ask anything of anyone again. She was not a crank selling pamphlets. The book was a sensation. The serious people of that decade took the tyranny of reproduction as a real problem that needed a real solution.

Fifty-six years later, the machine they built runs on time. Feed it the worst thing a person can do, and it prints a diagnosis. Murder goes in one end, and something called a “struggle” comes out the other.

Watch who the machine will not process.

In August, in Billings, Montana, a 44-year-old man named Alan Smith killed eight members of his own family at a Sunday dinner. Four of them were children, ages twelve to fifteen. His parents had asked him to move out weeks earlier. There were no rallies for Alan Smith. Nobody called him the real victim. The machine had one word for him. It keeps a whole dictionary for her.

A mother named Mandy said the plainest sentence of the whole affair, mom to mom, woman to woman. If she were truly innocent, she would beg for death. Six hundred and forty thousand people watched her say it. The mothers know. They have carried the real thing, and they know the difference between a woman who suffers and a woman who kills.

You have watched this run your whole life. When a man fails, you are handed his name and his guilt. When a mother kills, you are handed a brochure. You were not imagining the difference. You were taught not to say it. You have sons. You have daughters. The machine has a word ready for each of them, and it is not the same word.

I am not outside it. I have wanted softer names for my own failures. Every honest man has. The machine’s real product is not mercy for killers. It is permission for the rest of us.

Patrick Clancy buried all three of his children. Then he did the one thing the machine cannot forgive. He kept living. He did not sit in a dark room for three years dressed in black, which is the performance they wanted from him. He went back to work. He moved on. And for that, the people holding candles for his wife look at him with suspicion. A father who survives his own children is supposed to disappear quietly. The machine spends nothing on fathers. It already knows what they are for.

The Bible says the blood of Abel cried out to God from the ground. The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground, Genesis 4:10. Three children’s blood is in the ground in Duxbury. God has never once asked for the diagnosis.

The jury went home without a verdict. The searches are still in evidence.

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P.S. This week the country held rallies for a mother who killed her children. If this work has ever held you, this is where it lands.

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Recently, this past week, after watching "Death of a Pastor's Wife" and talking to several friends, I have come to a conclusion.

If it was not for my own personal walk with Jesus Christ, if my faith was based on any type of church, denomination, or system, I would probably be an atheist right now.

Because when you tie your belief into a system, that system will fail you. I have been around long enough to watch great men I admired and looked up to fall away from the faith, or get exposed for some grievous thing.

An older guy told me something once about the angels of light. He said the funny thing about them is that devils masquerade as angels. And they seem obsessed with sex. Sex perverts. Think about Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of those guys. Insane sexual drives that could not be satisfied. That is not human. That is not natural.

"And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light." 2 Corinthians 11:14

Now, my opposition to the Catholic Church is not personal. A long time ago I went to Catholic school. I had nuns as my instructors. Sweet, dear ladies. Every interaction I have ever had with a nun or a priest has been good.

But there is a huge gap between someone who follows Jesus Christ and someone who follows the Church.

People who follow a system learn to abide by a list. They check it off every single day. And Catholicism presents a very, very nice list. Do these things. Say these prayers. Buy a rosary. Say the rosary. Go to mass.

A preacher I have never met wrote a letter this week. United Pentecostal. Famous in his world. Stood behind their pulpits close to the power. If you know the IFB, you know the world he describes. Preachers who are politicians, with fans. Rules and regulations. Nepotism. Who you know. Money and prestige for the connected.

His heart broke in church. He got out. Divorce. Drugs. Gone for years. Now he is back, Eastern Orthodox, and amazed by the Eucharist. The body and blood of Jesus Christ, he says.

Here is the thing about me and my faith. I am practical and I am biblical. I do not believe a piece of bread becomes flesh. I do not believe Welch's grape juice becomes blood. When Jesus said take of my flesh and eat, take of my blood and drink, he was not inviting Hannibal Lecter. The Jews themselves were confused, because cannibalism is an abomination. Even today a man who chops somebody up and eats them goes to prison, and they make movies about him. It does not become okay in a religious setting.

Jesus settled it himself: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." John 6:63

I have dear Catholic friends who really reverence the Eucharist. It brings them to a place of meditation. I get it. I am heading to the gym right after this. I listen to certain music to get into the mindset for lifting. My grandson Blake loves the Happy Baby Song. I am not putting that on to push through a set. David Goggins ran with Going the Distance from Rocky on a loop, because a song triggers a memory, the memory triggers a feeling, and the feeling makes you do something.

Iconography does the same thing. A memory that brings a feeling you are trying to chase.

And that is addiction. Chasing a hit. The law of diminishing returns says you need more and more to get the same feeling. That is why an addict goes to rehab, dries out, comes back, takes the same hit he was on before, and ends up in a bathroom with Narcan shoved up his nose.

That is what is happening here. People are leaving the Bible, leaving a personal walk with Jesus, to get a hit from some system or some routine.

And that is what I am against.

A woman I have never met wrote her own letter this week. An atheist first. A feminist, her word, all the way in. Then the gospel. Years as a Baptist. Then a year of reading and prayer, and she walked into Rome. She told nobody. She sat in her car and her soul felt all wrong. Her husband is a man I know. He and I were Baptist together. He helped me learn to write on this app years ago and charged me nothing.

Good people. Both of them. I mean that.

Why do they go? They get turned off by people. Turned off by a system that constantly fails them. They know Jesus is real and they know he is holy, but they are not seeing him in church. So they go to a church that gives them the form of it.

I understand the pull. As a kid we toured the great cathedrals of Europe. Austria. Germany. You walk in and you take your hat off. The stained glass. The quiet. It felt holy. It felt different than outside. Human beings need reverence. The Native Americans had sweat lodges for the same reason. We are built to want awe.

But reverence is a feeling, and a feeling is a hit. The Book is not a feeling.

They did not leave the machine. They traded it for an older one.

The convert blogs call it "coming home." It is not home. It is a bigger machine with older paint.

The roots are not in Rome. They are not in Constantinople either.

They are in the Book on your table.

"Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition." Mark 7:9

"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." 1 Timothy 2:5

You know the itch. You have sat in a pew and felt the whole thing hum like a business. You have thought, there has to be more than this.

There is. It is in your lap.

You do not need a bishop. You need the Book, and the guts to believe it over every collar, every council, and every man with a title.

I would rather be lonely with the Book than at home in any machine.

They went looking for an older house.

I went looking for an older faith.

The Book holds.

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P.S. This part is plain. This work is my livelihood. I do not make a lot of money doing it, and I am not trying to. I do it to get the word of God out, to help people, and to feed my family. If it has held you, help carry it:

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There is an image going around X right now.

Some whacked out account made it with AI. A woman in a wheelchair, supposed to be Lindsay Clancy. Three children gathered around her. Angel wings drawn on. Matching pajamas, like somebody cared to dress them for the picture. And a caption.

I stand with Lindsay.

Three children. Let me tell you which three. Cora, five years old. Dawson, three. Callan, eight months.

Murdered. By their mother.

I have heard of kids killed by their fathers. A drunk kicks in the door and takes a hammer to his family. It is evil, and everybody knows what to call it.

But when it is mom, the culture reaches for Photoshop.

January 24, 2023. Duxbury, Massachusetts. She strangled them in the basement. Do not pass over that word. She did not pick up a knife or a gun and end it quick. She put exercise bands around three little necks and pulled the breath out of them.

Jesus said it would be better for a man that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea, than to offend one of these little ones. Matthew 18:6.

I have written on postpartum depression before. It is real. I have been open about my own fights in the dark. It is not an excuse for killing somebody.

And a jury is still in a room deciding what to name it.

It is called murder.

Under the image, readers had to add one sentence so the picture would quit lying.

Lindsay Clancy is alone because she killed her three children.

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Isaiah 5:20

The woe is not first for the woman in the wheelchair. Prayer can still go there. The woe is for the people who needed the wings. The people who cannot look at three dead children without a filter.

Feminism is the AIDS of the culture. It turns the body's defenses against the body. That is how you get a crowd rallying around a mother who killed her three children, and attacking anyone who says what she did.

We are not meant to walk this world alone.

The sentence is true. She was not alone in that house. Three children were there. She is alone now because she chose the basement.

The children do not need feathers drawn on. They need their names said.

Cora. Dawson. Callan.

They need what happened in that basement called what it was.

She killed her babies.

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P.S. Strange place for a PS I know, but hey I’m strange… I mentioned earlier I’m running a fundraiser right now to help my family, this ministry. I’m not Jerry’s kids or Kenneth Copeland. I’m just a man with a bunch of stories and ideas in his head trying to point folks back to the Bible. I set this link up so that once you give any amount, you’ll be sent a guide from our store. God bless and thank you

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I had this acquaintance that was telling me their story . Pleasure. Drink. Screaming. Even love. And they told me what waits behind each one. The emptiness does not leave. It waits till you're done. It waits till the next day, like a migraine in your left eye. It sucks you dry.

Then it starts talking.

“What a real cluster you’ve made. How could anybody put up with you?"

If you have heard that voice, you know it does not shout. It reasons. It has your own thoughts doing its work for it. My friend had one piece of advice for this. Don't worship that pit you dug.

I know I wrote about this yesterday but it needs repeating, if not for you for me. The loneliest man in the Bible lived in a graveyard.

Mark 5. The country of the Gadarenes. "A man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains." They had tried. "He had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him."

So the town adjusted. That is what towns do. They learned his schedule. They learned which paths to avoid after dark. "And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones."

Night and day. Crying. Cutting himself with stones. That is where the doors end. Pleasure did not close over him. Drink did not close over him. Noise did not close over him. When every door fails, a man stops knocking and moves into the graveyard. He starts keeping hours with the dead. He digs, and then he lives in it, and after a while he tends it like it is his.

That is the worship my friend is talking about. Not love. Maintenance.

And in that graveyard the accuser's voice had multiplied. When Jesus asked his name, the answer came back: "My name is Legion: for we are many." Not one voice. Many. The emptiness had been left alone so long it had organized.

Then Jesus stepped off the boat.

Notice what He did not do. He did not shout advice from the water. He did not wait on the shore for the man to get himself together. He came into the graveyard, at the man's own hour, and stood there. The spirits knew His name before the town had ever learned the man's. Legion begged. The herd ran. And when the town came out to see, they found the man "sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind."

And they were afraid.

Thats the part nobody really sits with. The town could sleep through the screaming. They could not sleep through the healing. They had adjusted to a broken man; a whole one wrecked the arrangement, and they begged Jesus to leave their coasts. Some towns love the graveyard, because the graveyard explains why nobody has to change.

The healed man begged to go with Him. Jesus said no, and it was mercy: "Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." So he went back to the very towns that had learned to sleep through his screaming, "and he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel."

My friend/acquaintance (I’ve never heard from them again) got almost all of it right. Every door you can name, he named. The voice that reasons with you at night, he named. The grave you dug yourself and now keep clean, he named.

He only missed the ending.

The story he shared ended with advice, and advice waits for you to climb out. The gospel ends with a Man walking into the graveyard after you, at night, on purpose.

That is the difference.

I’ve been writing to you guys for nearly two years now. You’ve seen my struggles, my journey, and to be frank, it’s one of the reasons I write. I’m at an impasse and maybe it’s just my head. But if you guys appreciate these “Substacks”, emails, whatever you want to call them. I am running a “fundraiser” this week. Unfortunately this doesn’t run itself. I can’t passively feed my life to Chat GPT to make “money”. Anyone telling you that is lying. Ai is a tool, but in a lot of ways it’s sus. I don’t fully trust it. Learned the hard way. So if you can give, give any amount it helps, and I mean that. I appreciate you all and hope you do me.

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Mark 5 gives us tombs. Chains. Screaming in the dark. A man living among the dead.

They knew him by what he broke. Chains. Fetters. Himself.

The town bound him again and again. He tore through it and went back among the tombs. Day and night he cried from the mountains. He cut himself with stones.

A person can become a problem. Then a problem becomes a soun…

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Last night Christie and I watched Death of the Pastor’s Wife, the Netflix series about Mica Miller.

I am not writing a review. I am not here to pick through another man’s wreckage and call it discernment.

But I kept getting sick to my stomach.

Not at one ugly fact. At the whole familiar smell of it. A Bible near the table. Holy language in the mouth. A man…

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You can pray over the page, then walk past the person you need to face.

Wednesday night’s message set a new standard for my own life. A good gift can become a hiding place.

Jesus described a man at the altar, gift in hand, brother on his conscience. He had come to honor God. Jesus told him to leave before the gift was off…

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The first sentence is easy.

“We need to talk.”

The second sentence is where parents freeze.

What do you say about puberty?

When do you name pornography?

Which words do you use for abuse?

How does marriage frame sex?

Parents already know the conversation matters. The problem is words, timing, and order. One answer opens three more questions, and one enormous “t…

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Has anyone written the field guide for the woman in that fight?

I answered in three words.

My wife has.

Christie has done the work. The study exists.

Another reader asked “Is there a KJV Bible study guide with answers to questions that can help women?”

She described herself as “dreading the future and waiting on God.” She wanted the King James Bible because…

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Dolly Parton died in a cancer center in Nashville.

Tim Curry died at home in Los Angeles.

Same Tuesday. August 25, 2026.

Same age. Eighty.

One left rhinestones, gospel records, songs, and books in children’s hands.

The other left greasepaint, fishnets, a killer clown, and a hundred strange voices.

Then came the verdicts.

Of course they did.

Under Curry’s memori…

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Simon the Pharisee is watching a woman cry on his floor.

She is not supposed to be here. Everybody in the room knows her file. She came in off the street with an alabaster box, and now she is on the ground behind a traveling preacher, wetting his feet with tears and wiping them with her hair, and the dinner is ruined. Simon is doing what religious men do…

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I was thirty-four years old the first time I opened a Bible and read it for myself.

I got saved at twelve. That is twenty-two years between the prayer and the page.

Here is what I had instead.

TULIP was written in the front of my Bible. I believed a man was graveyard dead until the Holy Spirit came and breathed on him. I believed women should wear dresses.…

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Waffle house, back end of July, plates still on the table. Somebody asked me a plain question about the Bible.

I do not remember what I said. I remember reaching for my phone. That is the part I want on the record. Not the question. The reach. I have done it more than once.

Somebody asks, and I give them the shape of an answer, the general contour of on…

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I published something this morning about an argument I almost joined and a door nobody is guarding.

Then the coffee went cold.

The truck quietly kept rolling down hwy 83.

Romans 10 was not finished with me.

Say the door is open. Say the invitation covers what he did. Say nobody is standing there with a list.

He still has to hear there is a door.

Paul did not …

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It is just before eight on a Sunday morning and I have been reading an argument about who Christ died for.

Not a sermon. An argument. Screenshots of screenshots, quote posts stacked under quote posts, men with worn Bibles going at each other over whether the blood was poured out for the whole world or only for a list drawn up before the world began.

I am …

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I kept a list.

Not on paper. I was never that organized. But I could have written it out any day of the week for twenty years, and it would have come out the same.

Did I tithe.

Did I read my Bible, and did I read enough of it.

Did I say the right words, at the right time, in front of the right people.

Was I dressed right. Was my wife dressed right.

Did I list…

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I have a memory from when I was six, maybe seven. One of my earliest. We were in California visiting, I think. My dad was stationed at Fort Lewis up in Washington, and we had come down to see my grandparents, somewhere around San Diego, Oceanside, that stretch of coast. Then again it might have been Florida. Memory at that age keeps the feeling and lose…

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You got saved. You know it was real.

But nobody handed you a plain map of what happened and what comes next.

So you picked up pieces.

A sermon here. A verse there.

You feel the gaps when your child asks a question and you reach for words you do not fully own.

Twelve Plain Lessons closes that gap.

Thirteen chapters. Each one has a lesson map, a plain-words sec…

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Most Christians were handed a flat map of the dead.

Saved people die and go up. Lost people die and go down. That is where the lesson ends.

But that is not the map Jesus described before Calvary. It is not the route His own soul took after the cross. And it cannot explain why graves opened in Jerusalem and dead saints walked into the city after His resurrection.

The phrase “Jesus emptied hell” needs one correction, not an eraser.

He did not empty the place of torment.

He emptied Abraham’s Bosom.

Before Calvary, paradise was below

Jesus did not describe the rich man and Lazarus as two men floating in a vague spiritual mist. He gave them locations.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. (Luke 16:22-23)

Lazarus was comforted. The rich man was tormented. They could see across the distance, but they could not cross it.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed. (Luke 16:26)

That is the old map. Torment on one side. Abraham’s Bosom on the other. A great gulf fixed between them. Both below.

The righteous dead were not paying for their sins in some Catholic purgatory. They were comforted. But the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins. The full price had not yet been offered. So Abraham, David, and the Old Testament saints waited below for the Lamb of God to finish what every animal sacrifice had only pointed toward.

That is why Jesus could tell the dying thief, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), then say His own soul would spend three days and three nights “in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).

Paradise was down.

His body, spirit, and soul did not go to the same place

The body of Jesus went into Joseph’s tomb.

His spirit went to the Father.

Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. (Luke 23:46)

His soul went into the lower parts of the earth.

He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption. (Acts 2:31)

Peter did not say His soul never went there. He said it was not left there.

Paul says the same route plainly:

Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? (Ephesians 4:9)

While men guarded a body behind a stone, the Son of God went down into the world of the dead.

The prison and the waiting room were not the same place

Peter tells us Christ had another appointment below.

By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah. (1 Peter 3:19-20)

Those spirits were not Abraham and David. Peter identifies them with the rebellion of Noah’s day. They were imprisoned rebels. Christ did not go there to offer them a second chance. He proclaimed the victory they had failed to stop.

Do not merge the spirits in prison with the saints in Abraham’s Bosom. The Book does not.

One company heard the announcement of conquest.

The other had waited for the Conqueror.

See the Whole Map of the Dead

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