Peter Bester

Husband and father.

[Peter Bester @ptrbester]

@AttorneyF_ So powerful 🔥🔥

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

The strongest atheist argument I wrestled with for years was the geographic lottery.

An overwhelming majority of human beings die inside the religion of their birth. If birthplace so heavily dictates belief, salvation looks like an accident of geography.

The longer I sat with that deadlock, however, the clearer its hidden premise became. Underneath the critique lies an unspoken demand: if one true God exists, He should have uniformly enforced a single religious monoculture across every tribe and epoch.

But few have stopped to think through what that world actually requires.

An overwhelming, inescapable revelation that leaves zero room for doubt or searching is pure tyranny.

A universe engineered to force cognitive compliance manufactures captives rather than lovers of God. God maintains an intentional epistemic distance where truth can be discovered by the earnest, yet resisted by the proud. Divine restraint is the necessary condition for genuine free will.

Pointing to the fact that people rarely leave their inherited religious traditions indicts human comfort, not divine justice.

We never tolerate cultural osmosis as a defense anywhere else in human life.

We do not excuse a Nazi because he came of age in 1930s Berlin. We do not absolve a racist because his parents were bigots, nor do we excuse the son of a terrorist for continuing a cycle of bloodshed.

If a rapist stood before a judge and pleaded that he was born into a family of rapists, we would rightly be disgusted.

We demand that every moral agent confront their upbringing, interrogate rotten traditions, and break free the moment those traditions violate human dignity.

If imposing a universal monoculture destroys free will, and cultural inertia is no legal defense, what does God actually owe us as a just lawgiver?

He owes us the baseline: the moral law engraved directly onto the human conscience.

The reason we hold the racist or the rapist accountable is because that internal compass is already running in their chest. We are remarkably skilled at suppressing that voice, but the voice was always there.

God did not just give us the capacity to perceive the standard; He gave us the ability to recognize our own moral rot and our desperate need for rescue.

This is why Christ opens the Sermon on the Mount with a devastating diagnostic: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The currency of the kingdom is not theological pedigree, cultural privilege, or moral performance. It is the simple, humiliating admission of total bankruptcy.

That threshold is universally fair because it requires nothing more than the surrender of pride, yet pride is the exact reason we resist it.

Without that brokenness, the execution of Jesus looks like irrelevant ancient trivia.

Why should a soul in Tokyo, Varanasi, or London care about a first-century Roman crucifixion?

Because that death answers the very rot your conscience has been diagnosing all along.

The moral law reveals an unpayable debt; the Cross is God descending to settle it Himself.

Christianity refuses to be treated as a tribal philosophy passed down by osmosis. It is the collision between a universal human diagnosis and a historical event.

A specific man was publicly executed outside Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, and three days later, the tomb was empty in a city full of hostile authorities desperate to produce a corpse.

A historical event either happened in space and time, or it did not. An empty tomb has no geographic jurisdiction. Birthplace gives you your initial vocabulary, but the barrier between man and God was never a border on a map. It has always been the refusal of the human heart to honor the light it was given.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I got goosebumps studying my Bible today.

In Genesis 28, Jacob has his famous vision of a ladder stretching into heaven, with angels ascending and descending.

He wakes up trembling with awe. On his own initiative, he sets up the stone he slept on as a pillar, pours oil over it, renames the place Bethel ("House of God"), and vows to give God a tenth of everything if God protects him on the road.

Fast forward twenty years to Genesis 31.

Jacob has spent two decades being cheated, exhausted, and trapped in Laban's household.

When God finally appears to tell him it is time to return home, He does not introduce Himself with an intimidating, distant title. He does not announce Himself as the Almighty or the Creator of heaven and earth.

He looks at Jacob and says: "I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to me."

Do you realize what is happening here? God grounds His very identity in a runaway's memory.

For twenty long years, God remembered a desperate prayer spoken over a rock in the dark. He lets a flawed human encounter define holy ground, taking the name a frightened fugitive gave to a stone and adopting it as His own divine signature.

Now leap forward over a thousand years to John 1.

Philip brings his friend Nathanael to meet Jesus. When Jesus sees him coming, He says: "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit."

Remember what the name Jacob actually means. Jacob was the deceiver, the supplanter. Jesus is deliberately invoking Jacob from the very first sentence.

Startled, Nathanael asks, "How do you know me?"

Jesus answers: "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."

In Jewish life, sitting under a fig tree was the recognized place for solitary prayer, meditation, and wrestling with God in private.

Whatever Nathanael was carrying beneath that tree, whether an unspoken sorrow, a quiet wrestling match of the soul, or a prayer he thought had vanished into the silence, he believed he was entirely alone.

He had built no altar, poured no oil, and made no grand vows. He was simply sitting in the quiet with an ache he could not fix.

Yet that single sentence undoes him completely. Nathanael breaks: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

Then Jesus ties the entire story together:

"You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Angels ascending and descending. That is word for word the scene from Genesis 28!

Jesus is telling him that the ladder his ancestors saw was never a stone staircase in the desert, and Bethel was never just a coordinate on a map. The ladder was always a person. The bridge between heaven and earth was standing right in front of him on a dirt road in Galilee.

The contrast between these two men is striking.

Jacob’s encounter was structured. He had oil, built a stone monument, named the place, and negotiated with a formal vow.

Nathanael’s encounter was raw. He was sitting in the shadow of a tree, empty-handed, carrying a weight he had no ceremony for.

Yet God claims both as holy ground.

He is the God of Bethel, the God who honors the altars you build when you have the strength to build them.

And He is the God of the Fig Tree, the God who sees you when you are too exhausted to promise anything at all.

[GodlyAction @GodlyAction]

Peter is not the Rock, Jesus is.
Mary is not the mediator, Jesus is.
The Pope is not the head of the church, Jesus is.
The Catholic Church is not the way to heaven, Jesus is.

[Ashley Ayala @ARBAyala]

Imagine potassium chloride shot straight into your heart with zero anesthetic, pure burning agony as it stops.

Death row inmates get anesthesia first so they don’t feel that searing torture.

Babies that are aborted get the exact same chemical pumped into their hearts with none, I said NONE... NO ANESTHETIC.

Sick.

My stomach is in knots.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

Walking with Christ requires denying yourself and picking up your cross daily. It will cost you your worldly pride and selfish comfort. But what you gain in Jesus is worth far more.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

Christian, your fight against sin is proof that the Holy Spirit is at work in you.

If you weren't saved, you wouldn't be battling.

Keep fighting, and keep running to Jesus.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

Cussing matters to God.

Colossians 3:8 tells us to rid ourselves of filthy language.
Ephesians 4:29 warns us not to use unwholesome talk.

We will give an account for every word we speak. Make sure your words show people you're different from the world.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Very well said. I think it goes even deeper than most people realize.

All abortion is the taking of a human life; it is murder, plain and simple. Even when an individual commits an abortion with full awareness of God’s creative role and simply disregards it, the act remains a violation of the commandment against taking life.

But what we have done culturally and legally opens humanity up to an entirely different, unprecedented category of sin.

We often talk about abortion as "interrupting God's work," but even that understates the reality. God does not work like a human craftsman, slowly assembling a piece over nine months as if it were incomplete until birth.

When God told Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you," He revealed that His creative act is already complete in His mind before time even begins.

The womb is not where God tries to make a human being; it is where an eternal, finished divine decree unfolds in history.

To abort, then, is not merely to interrupt an evolving, incomplete process. It is to assault the mind of God Himself. It is to look at what God has already fully conceived, known, and willed into reality, and declare: "Your decree is void."

What makes our modern condition uniquely terrifying is that we haven't just tolerated this act; we have enshrined it under the banner of pure "choice and autonomy."

What began as an agonizing debate over hard, tragic cases, where people still implicitly wrestled with the heavy weight of life, has degraded into an assertion of absolute personal sovereignty. We no longer even pretend to negotiate with the Creator. We have built a cultural and legal framework that claims human authority over the divine mind itself.

That isn't just a political disagreement or a civil failure. It is a formal claim to human sovereignty over creation, displacing God from His own eternal decree.

Even for someone on the fence about God, what happens if you are wrong?

Imagine standing before the Creator of the universe, the One who knew and willed every human soul into being before the foundation of the world, and offering the defense that you weren't quite sure He existed, or that individual autonomy took precedence over His eternal mind.

There is no clever political argument or legal rationale that can withstand that moment. There is no answer to it.

If there is even a fraction of a chance that this is what is actually taking place, it should keep us awake at night. Given what is at stake, no human being can afford to be wrong about this.

[Joel Berry @JoelWBerry]

If there is a God, (and there is,) abortion remains the most existential threat to our country.

Every day God doesn’t torch the entire nation with fire and brimstone for massacring our own children is an act of mercy, and we’re living on borrowed time until we end it.

[My moms caregiver @mymomcare]

They sold their souls 👹

[Maudlynephilips @prettymaudlyne]

🚨GOD HEALED HIS BLINDNESS AFTER BAPTISM

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

The Lord’s Prayer is the single greatest reputational risk God ever took.

The radical move isn’t that it demands submission. Almost every religious tradition asks humans to yield their will.

The difference is structural: God did not receive this prayer. He wrote it.

Through it, Jesus teaches every human being on earth to petition for the displacement of every competing conception of the good:

“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.

That is a claim about comparative worth. And because God authored the petition, he must answer for what He asked us to demand.

The logical pressure most people miss is that a command to pray is a command embedded in expectation.

You do not tell someone to ask daily for something unless it is worth having.

It would be illogical and cruel for God to command daily prayer for His will’s triumph if that will were not significantly greater than ours.

If His kingdom were indifferent or inferior to what we already have, but He still commanded us to ask for it every day, then He would not be sovereign, He would be manipulative and that is not a minor theological problem.

The logic runs in one direction only: the command is evidence of the absolute quality of what is commanded.

"Thy will be done" is a prayer of expectation, not capitulation.

Einstein praying it concedes that however far human intelligence takes us, there is a wisdom that makes our greatest breakthroughs look like a rough draft.

Aristotle praying it concedes that his most rigorous conception of human virtue falls short of what is being asked for.

Lincoln praying it concedes that the most righteous political vision this world has produced is a shadow of a justice more complete.

The Lord’s Prayer asks the absolute best of what humanity has ever built to acknowledge itself as merely a beginning.

Americans who love America pray it. The French who love France pray it. Nigerians who love Nigeria pray it.

Every patriot, mid-prayer, is forced to confront that there is something vastly greater than everything they cherish about their country.

Why would God command us to pray for His kingdom to come if it were not better than our highest earthly loyalties?

This is what separates the Lord’s Prayer from every other petition in human history.

God did not receive it, He authored it and He commissioned it. Every time it is prayed anywhere on earth, he is being held to the standard of His own words.

He staked his reputation, his character, and his very being on a kingdom he promised but has not yet fully delivered.

He authored the measure by which he will be judged. No one in history has ever offered that kind of collateral.

[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

The tomb is empty. That’s not my opinion. That’s the hinge of history.

Strip away everything else. Here’s what remains, and what you have to explain: A crucified teacher, His followers scattered and hiding in terror. Then, within weeks, those same terrified men are preaching His resurrection openly in Jerusalem, the one city where the authorities could have ended it instantly by producing the body.

They never produced it.

Instead, the movement exploded. The disciples went to torture and execution across the known world, and not one recanted. Men die for what they believe is true all the time, but not for what they KNOW is a lie. 

They were in a position to know.

“He appeared to more than five hundred.., most of whom are still alive.” 1 Corinthians 15:6.

Go ask them, Paul said.

The best explanation for the empty tomb, the transformed disciples, and the explosion of the church is the one they gave:

“He is not here, for He has risen.” Matthew 28:6.

If He rose, then everything He said is true. Then the cross meant what He said. Then He is who He claimed.

And then the only reasonable response is to fall at His feet like Thomas: “My Lord and myGod.” John 20:28.

The tomb is empty.

What will you do with that?

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

In the Old Testament Tabernacle, there was a lampstand, a table of showbread, an altar of incense, and the Ark of the Covenant.

There was never a chair.

The Levites stood continually because their work was never finished. Animal sacrifices provided temporary covering, not permanent cleansing, so the posture of the priest was always in motion, always laboring.

So when Hebrews 1:3 declares that Jesus "sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high," the original Jewish audience would have felt the seismic magnitude of that claim.

Hebrews 10:11–12 drives the contrast home:

"Every priest stands daily at his service... offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God."

His sitting down is the divine declaration that the debt is paid, the work is finished and no more blood needs to spill.

But Jesus didn’t just become the first priest to sit down, he became the first Priest to sit on a throne.

In ancient Israel, royalty (Judah) and priesthood (Levi) were strictly separated. A Levitical priest could never sit on a king's throne. Christ shattered that boundary, merging the altar and the throne forever.

Because our High Priest sat down, your spiritual striving can end.

The righteous King stepped into our darkness, bore our sin, and completed the work, so that we could stop working for acceptance and finally rest in Him.

[Peter Bester @ptrbester]

@RennerRick Action

[Peter Bester @ptrbester]

@GuntherEagleman What a rude, ugly woman.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

A person who is truly born again will demonstrate:

• A deep hatred for personal sin
• A longing to obey God's commands
• A steady love for other Christians
• Joyful endurance in times of trial

[Peter Bester @ptrbester]

https://t.co/jJXsEwvndP