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Who gets to say what God is like? For many, the early answers were simple: God is good, loving, and holy. But as you grow, those answers get more complicated. The Bible’s portraits of God are not one-dimensional—they include the God who liberates and loves, but also the God who floods, rages, and stays silent. The tradition itself preserves these tensions, refusing to sanitize the divine image.

In this episode, we explore how our images of God are always filtered—through culture, trauma, power, or longing. We want a God who looks like what we most need: a liberator for the oppressed, a warrior for soldiers, a philosopher’s unchanging ideal, or a gentle shepherd. But the mosaic is bigger than any single frame. Wrestling with unfamiliar or uncomfortable images of God may be the very thing that expands us.

Faith, then, isn’t about certainty—it’s about relationship, even struggle. Scripture itself makes room for bargaining, lament, doubt, and anger. What if your unraveling is actually the path to a deeper encounter with God? In a world of loss, injustice, and unanswered prayers, you don’t need a cleaned-up God. You need a God who holds light and dark together, and who isn’t afraid of your questions—because maybe God is in your questions.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

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What happens when the God you grew up with turns out to be a moving target? From the garden stroll in Genesis to the cosmic transcendence of the New Testament, the Bible presents wildly different portraits of the divine—each shaped by its time, place, and author.

In this episode, I trace the fascinating evolution of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition:

Genesis: God as an embodied human-like figure.
Exodus: Storm deity on the mountain.
Prophets: King above the nations.
Job: Unfathomable whirlwind.
Wisdom literature: Moral force woven into the universe.
New Testament & Philo: Spirit, Love, and the need for a mediator.

Along the way, we’ll explore why God became more transcendent, less human, and what that means for seekers today. This isn’t about losing faith—it’s about seeing the tradition in its full depth, complexity, and beauty.

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💬 Question for you: Which portrait of God has shaped you the most—and has it changed over time?

#FaithAndDoubt #BibleStudy #AncientWisdom #Theology #PhilosopherKings #SpiritualityDescription:

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

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Hey Text and Rockers!

Just to change it up, Mark outlines the next several episodes of Text and Rock, including an introduction to the Text and Rock Blog and a 3-part series on Faith and Doubt.

It's all about leaving the Judeo-Christian tradition so that you enter it again. How to lose old names for new names, and stop trying to fit new wine in old wineskins... If you are somewhere along the path of deconstruction and reconstruction, we hope it profoundly helps... or at least lets you know you are not alone.

As always, we hope you love it!

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

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Want to support the show, experience our best creative work, buy one of our books or give an uncommonly better gift or art and heart? Ha! Head to the TEXT AND ROCK DIGITAL PRESS.

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Mark and Eric explore the creative process behind writing poetry about ecological disasters and the prophetic role of artists in identifying problems before they become mainstream knowledge.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

TEXT AND ROCK SOCIALS.

Want to support the show, experience our best creative work, buy one of our books or give an uncommonly better gift or art and heart? Ha! Head to the TEXT AND ROCK DIGITAL PRESS.

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Mark and Eric talk about a philosophy of God that might work for you if simple answers do not. How does human religions actually work in real time? Is God something we can actually name and put in a box? Or it is a moving target of an ideal that humans cast out before themselves to deal with the difficulty of reality?

We hope you love it!

Here is a link to all our socials and our digital press... we have been quietly busy. Boom boom.

https://www.https://linktr.ee/txtandrck

And below is the poem in this episode...

Heart,
Mark and Eric

___________________________________

YOU ARE ONLY A WATCHER.

Have the humility and awareness

to open your eyes to the unseen

and you will find the face of God.

I don’t mean spirits or daemons

or old gods disguised as just another object.

No. You are invited to the thing behind all things—

big bang’s banger,

electric in lightning,

fortitude in blood cell—

the only wisdom frightening

enough to hold light and dark matter

in one weird-science jar and say, “Oh well.”

Let’s just see what you have to say

to the morning sun that brings in day.

You can predict it will arrive and leave

but that should never give you any reprieve

from the fact that you are only

an ancient-future Watcher

of the only One truly lonely

when it comes to pulling on unseen string theories;

making it all go. And so no, your existentialism

does not impress me and it draws the furies.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

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Mark and Eric talk wealth gap, systemic overhaul, and the scandal of politics in the fading western empire. Along the way, they talk about Jesus as a Second Temple Period human sage, a different kind of kingdom, and how to treat people in hard knock times.

We hope you love it!

Here is a link to all our socials and our digital press... we have been quietly busy. Boom boom.

https://www.https://linktr.ee/txtandrck

And below is the poem in this episode...

Heart,
Mark and Eric

_______________________________________

MR. SMITH STAYS HOME.

I’ll save all of my Hallelujahs,
for a world without hunger
and all of my thoughts and prayers
for the younger generation,
in a private room where I con—fess
just how scared I am to be blessed
by the modern world and all its current religions.
Conservative or Liberal,
Democrat or Republican,
all the same, there and back again,
whatever the name—
The churches in the capitol city
raise praise to capitalism
and corporate identity
while ignoring the fact that
we know all their ideologies,
are just dressed up in their best
for the funeral of the old West.
We are in an Age
of great overturning and rage;
some of us are prophets
intuiting your profits, Mr. Senator,
or at least we can see,
that yours is a labyrinth free
of any real threat of a minotaur.
I ony see Uncle Scar
and a pack of scrapping hyenas
lost to the realities of the hunt;
a troop of foreign policy runts.
And besides, a modern Mr. Smith
stays home alone like Kevin,
or dreaming of heaven—
he already learned and replied—
a good man can never go to Washington
and remain virtuous inside.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

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Want to support the show, experience our best creative work, buy one of our books or give an uncommonly better gift or art and heart? Ha! Head to the TEXT AND ROCK DIGITAL PRESS.

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Mark and Eric kick around the idea of awareness as a philosophical pillar for meaning, life, and even divinity, before performing an original poem entitled "Awareness."

We hope you love it!

Here is a link to all our socials and our digital press... we have been quietly busy. Boom boom.

https://www.https://linktr.ee/txtandrck

And below is the poem in this episode...

Heart,
Mark and Eric

AWARENESS.

Awareness is the first and greatest gift of God. Look, traveller:

in an age that worships intellectual knowing,

be mindful of the primal gift of awareness,

constantly observing the empirical evidence

in the first place. What is the I that thinks and feels?

You can thank Rene Descartes, for the idea’s first expression.

Or think of Yahweh’s words to Moshe,

or recall Jesus’ allusion to that same theophany—

all are naming existence before any other discernible fact.

Awareness is the means you have for observing.

No experiment is possible without the observing eye;

no observation of tree line or big sky comes

without center of self and mystic intuition under the mind.

All this is theoretical and heady, but think of the implications

when you actually taste the spaghetti:

Who says you are old or young?

Who says you’ve been here only this long?

Who says when you leave you are really ever gone?

Who says where awareness goes when the body expires?

Who says you have this short time—so make the best of it?

Who says there is no such thing as a silver thread?

God says the answers to all these questions,

but is not interested to spoil the surprise.

Instead, God provides and sustains your awareness

so you can marvel, wonder, and take in the dawn.

If you are an enlightened one,

you have realized the absurdity of assumed finality.

You wonder how you came to the House of the World,

and how many times, and where you might go next.

Now when you read, “in the beginning”

you ask with the rabbis, “which beginning?” and laugh.

Your cosmology and individuality dances with the idea,

that awareness is the first heavenly light:

A star factory divided into a billion souls across the ages.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

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Want to support the show, experience our best creative work, buy one of our books or give an uncommonly better gift or art and heart? Ha! Head to the TEXT AND ROCK DIGITAL PRESS.

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Mark and Eric talk about how to have peace in a world of uncertainty. We hope you LOVE it!

Here is a link to all our socials and our digital press... we have been quietly busy. Boom boom.

https://www.https://linktr.ee/txtandrck

And below is the poem in this episode...

Heart,
Mark and Eric

...PEACE...

Peace comes when you are ready,
and she is not all that heady—
just quietly turns off the news
because you’ll hear about it later,
and besides, nothing can surprise you,
at least not at this point.

She gives you wealth from your own account:
maxims and mantras
from the wisdom you collected
reading books and watching films,
learning from the older ones, and experiences—
especially the times you tried and failed.

She loves blue dawn and amber dusk
because the horizon is clearest
and the impossible things that are possible
and nearest to your minds-eye.
I found that Lady Peace was elusive
for almost every mile of my youth,

but now I never walk alone,
and she reminds me that we don’t do drama.

For Text and Rock Poetry, Podcasts, and Video Content or to contact Mark and Eric, visit us at www.textandrock.com.

You can find all of social handles here:

TEXT AND ROCK SOCIALS.

Want to support the show, experience our best creative work, buy one of our books or give an uncommonly better gift or art and heart? Ha! Head to the TEXT AND ROCK DIGITAL PRESS.