Even the Donkey Knew
All summer long, the board outside the church office is collecting your questions — written on sticky notes, about God, faith, the Bible, doubt, or whatever else you’ve been carrying. Each issue, I take a few and do my best to answer them.
“What do we believe about the second coming of Christ?”
“What is Revelation telling us? Is it end time prophecy? Is it a coded message for the time it was written? Or something else?”
“Why does Paul still get credit for letters scholars know he didn’t write? It gives him a bad name.”
“What language did the donkey that Balam beat speak?”
Four questions this time, and they share something in common: each one asks us to read Scripture honestly, even when honest reading gets confusing, or hard, or genuinely strange. That’s not a threat to faith. It’s what faith looks like when it’s paying attention.
Revelation, and the Second Coming
Let’s start with Revelation, since the second coming question can’t really be answered without it.
The word itself — apocalypse — means unveiling, not predicting. Revelation was written to real, struggling churches living under Roman occupation, and its strange visions were never meant as a coded countdown clock for some future headline. They were meant to pull back the curtain on what was already true: that the empire’s power, however overwhelming it looked, was never ultimate. That the Lamb — vulnerable, self-giving, slain and yet alive — holds a kind of power that outlasts every beast wearing a crown. Revelation isn’t a puzzle to decode. It’s a pastoral letter to people who needed to hear, urgently, that Rome was not God, and that God had not abandoned them.
Which brings us to the second coming. Our faith holds two things together here, at the same time, without letting go of either.
First, we have dual vision. We pay real attention to the present we’re standing in — the neighbor in front of us, the healing needed today, the justice this moment asks of us. Jesus didn’t spend his ministry describing the far future; he healed the people on the road in front of him. And in that same breath, we live toward a future that is real but not yet fully arrived. Revelation does this too — in the middle of its most chaotic visions, heaven breaks into worship before anything is resolved. The story ends not with escape from earth, but with God’s home coming down to dwell among us here. That’s the shape of Christian hope: attentive to now, oriented toward what’s coming, both at once.
Second, the second coming is mysterious — and I trust it more for that, not less. Hymns like “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending” reach for the most soaring language we have to describe something we don’t actually have literal words for. It’s beautiful. I don’t take it as a blueprint. I don’t know exactly what the second coming will look like, and I’m wary of anyone who claims certainty about the details. What I do trust is this: Christ won’t be absent from how the story ends. The real question Revelation keeps asking isn’t what will happen and when — it’s how will we live now, knowing God is already making all things new.
Paul’s Disputed Letters
Now, Paul. I want to sit with the phrase “gives him a bad name” for a second, because I don’t think it should — once we understand what was actually happening.
Biblical scholars broadly agree that several letters carrying Paul’s name were likely written after his death, by students and followers extending his teaching into situations his churches faced generations later. In the ancient world, writing under a revered teacher’s name wasn’t considered deception. It was a recognized way of carrying that teacher’s voice and authority forward — closer to a student writing in the spirit of their mentor than to forgery. Nobody reading those letters at the time would have felt tricked. If anything, attributing new writing to Paul was a form of honor: a way of saying this belongs to his legacy, and deserves to be heard alongside what he actually wrote.
So I don’t think it tarnishes him. It reflects how seriously his earliest communities took his voice — seriously enough to keep listening for it long after he was gone.
And there’s a deeper truth worth naming: a letter isn’t holy because we can prove exactly whose hand held the pen. It’s holy because of what it has done in the life of God’s people — prayed with, preached from, wrestled with, trusted, across two thousand years of a faithful community’s life. That authority doesn’t rest on winning an argument about authorship. It rests on the same foundation the whole Bible rests on, which is where we landed back on July 10: not on the humans who wrote or copied or debated the text, but on God, working through that very human process.
And Yes — Balaam’s Donkey
After all that, you’ve earned something lighter.
In Numbers 22, a donkey opens her mouth and rebukes the prophet Balaam for beating her — and whatever language passed between them, the text presumes the same tongue everyone else in the story spoke, likely a form of ancient Hebrew or a closely related regional dialect. It’s less a linguistic mystery than a narrative one: Scripture doesn’t pause to explain the mechanics, because that was never the point.
The point is this: Balaam was a professional, a prophet for hire, supposedly skilled at hearing from the divine. And God chose to speak, not through him, but through the most overlooked, unglamorous voice available — his own donkey — because Balaam had stopped noticing what was right in front of him. There’s real theology hiding in that joke. God has never been picky about the voice God uses. Sometimes it’s a prophet. Sometimes it’s a donkey. The question is always whether we’re paying enough attention to tell the difference.
Mystery, honest complexity, and a little holy humor — that’s Scripture read faithfully. None of it something to fear.
More questions are waiting on the board, and I’ll be back with another in the next issue. You can add yours on a sticky note on the board outside the main office — or send them directly to me via my contact page. Anonymous is always fine. Every question is worth asking.
