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Show Notes – HeavenEarth Church Podcast

Episode: Bonus: Going Deeper with Ross Stackhouse

Title: "Deeper on 'In the Beginning There Was Revenge'"

In this thought-provoking bonus episode, Ross Stackhouse, founding pastor of HeavenEarth Church, goes deeper into his recent Sunday message, examining the foundational biblical stories of Genesis 3 and 4 and how they inform Christian views of judgment, justice, and the afterlife. Drawing from personal anecdotes and scriptural analysis, he invites listeners to approach these ancient texts with curiosity, humility, and an openness to new insights beyond inherited doctrines.

Episode Summary

The episode opens with Ross Stackhouse reflecting on the intent behind Heaven Earth Church: to be a community for those who don't fit neatly into traditional religious spaces, meeting people where they are and valuing every story as part of God's broader narrative 00:01.

The core of the episode examines how Christians often approach the Bible with preconceived doctrines—especially around original sin, judgment, and hell—potentially missing the deeper, original meanings within the stories themselves 02:00. Through an in-depth look at the Genesis accounts of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel, Ross Stackhouse unpacks the intertwined dynamics of envy, blame, and violence—and how these dynamics continue to shape human relationships and religious perspectives today. He challenges common assumptions about inherited guilt and the afterlife, advocating for a perspective that holds space for mystery, grace, and the transformative potential of these ancient texts.

Three Takeaway Points

1. Approaching Scripture with Curiosity Instead of Assumptions

Ross Stackhouse warns against approaching biblical texts with doctrines and theological assumptions already in mind, as this habit can cause us to miss the story’s actual message 04:01. He encourages listeners to bring curiosity, humility, and open-heartedness to scripture, allowing God’s voice to break through tradition and speak anew.

2. Recognizing the Pattern of Envy, Blame, and Violence

Through a close reading of Genesis 3 and 4, Ross Stackhouse traces a universal pattern in humanity: beginning with envy (wanting what is not ours), moving to blame (displacing our pain), and culminating in violence (erasing others and even ourselves) 13:07. He shows how these patterns, set in motion in the origin story, persist in the human condition and our collective spiritual ancestry—and importantly, are also reflected in the ways some Christians approach doctrines of judgment and hell.

3. Questioning Traditional Views of Judgment, Justice, and Hell

The episode challenges what Ross Stackhouse describes as the “dominant view” of the afterlife—that God sentences people to eternal punishment or reward based on doctrine or conduct. He questions the consistency and heart behind these doctrines, pointing out that erasing someone via condemnation to hell echoes the very patterns of violence and blame highlighted in Genesis 26:13. Instead, Ross Stackhouse proposes a more generous, Christ-centered approach, rooting judgment and justice in the mystery and compassion of God, whose image is revealed in Jesus 31:38.

Final Words:

Listeners are invited to continue wrestling with these questions, to savor the living and active nature of scripture, and to surrender certainty in favor of trust in God’s goodness and peacemaking purpose. Ross Stackhouse encourages everyone to follow Jesus’s example, embracing abundance and resisting the urge to limit God’s grace or understanding 32:13.

For more conversations or to connect with the community, visit heavenearthchurch.org.

What would it look like to start a community that was really— it's for the people like Jesus would be for? Welcome to Heaven Earth Church. I'm Ross Stackhouse, the founding pastor of Heaven Earth Church. From the start, our heart has been to be a church for people who don't fit neatly into church. We want to meet people where they are and know their stories, because in every story there is God's story. This podcast is just about that. It's about inviting you into the stories of the people of Heaven Earth Church. So let's turn to the story.

Here is Heaven Earth Church Pastor Ross Stackhouse going deeper on his message from October 11th, 2026, on the topic of In the Beginning There Was Revenge.

Hey guys, Ross Stackhouse here. Pastor of Heaven Earth Church, and I just realized we have an opportunity to go deeper with the conversations we have on Sunday because really those are the tip of the iceberg. And this is an opportunity for you and I to dig into the richness of the scriptures and take next steps with those conversations in a way that helps us grow in faith and practice together. And I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and I thought particularly about how we were in Michigan recently and my kids wanted biscuits and gravy from McDonald's. And so I went up to the counter, not even thinking, I ordered some things and I mentioned biscuits and gravy, and the manager said, we don't have that. And I got reminded of how when I was 9 or 10 in Boston, I went up to the counter as a kid. Ordered biscuits and gravy. And in that experience, the person at the counter looked at me like they'd never even heard of biscuits and gravy.

And I mentioned that story because many of the people I meet today, whether they're Christian, whether they're not Christian anymore, or even anti-Christian, their feeling is that their perception is that they've experienced all of what Christianity is, almost like it's a franchise restaurant. They've been to a few locations. They know what's on the menu. They've tasted a few things on the menu and they say, okay, I've tried it. I know what Christianity is out there. I don't need to try out anymore. There's just, it just is what it is. And I think that's regrettable because what we experience in our time is not what Christianity is everywhere.

And it's not what Christianity always has been. And I want to think about that today, especially as we're exploring these concepts of judgment and justice, the end, afterlife, because so much of what we experience in our neck of the woods of Christianity has distorted, mistaken views of those things. Our views about the end, or rather Christianity's dominant views of the end, Judgment, justice, afterlife are producing rotten fruit here and now. Simply put, if we reconsider views of the end, it will positively transform, or it can positively transform our actions here and now. It can result in better fruit. And I want to think about how What I've realized with a lot of Christianity is that so often people, teachers or people sitting in the pews, they're going to scriptures looking for a doctrine or a theology that they've— they're used to hearing. It's ingrained in their thinking. So they have this doctrine that they go into the scripture with, and they're looking for that doctrine In the story such that they actually don't pay attention to the story itself.

And I want to show you how that works with Genesis 3 and 4. And it's ironic because there are so many people who would say that they're doing what is quote unquote biblical. And they would even kind of sometimes, some conservative folks, evangelicals would, would come across like they're the ones who are being biblical. They are the ones who are being orthodox. But I'd wager that if you go to the scriptures with a predetermined thought, a predetermined doctrine that you have in your head or theological stance, and you're looking for that in the story, you're dishonoring the story. You're not regarding the scripture highly. It doesn't mean that doctrines can't help. In our tradition, the United Methodist tradition, I'm an ordained United Methodist elder.

We value tradition. We think it can be a vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So don't get me wrong, I'm not throwing out doctrines, but I hope that when we go to the scriptures, we can go with a sense of curiosity, humility, an open-mindedness, open-heartedness for what God might say to us new, because as the Bible itself says, this is living and active. These words are. So take, for example, and I'm going to connect the dots for what these, these chapters in Genesis 3 and 4 have to do with the end, because you might be thinking, Ross, I thought you said we were going to talk about the end. You're going to the very beginning. Well, as I said Sunday, our origin stories, they really matter and they influence us more than we realize. We may realize how our parents influence us, We may not assume as much how our great-great-great-great-grandparents, spiritual ancestors influence us.

So the stories of the beginnings are telling us something about who we are. And so we want to listen to that, and we want to listen to it with curiosity, open-mindedness, open-heartedness. So take the story, the story of quote unquote the fall in Genesis 3. So often, so often we have heard in our— a Christian in our neck of the woods that this is a story about original sin or how we have inherited the guilt of Adam and Eve. And so sometimes when we've been in church or we've been with teachers, we go to Genesis 3 looking for that doctrine or assuming that that doctrine is what this text is. And so perhaps we actually don't listen to the story and we don't hear the new things, or not even the new things, the eternal things, the ancient things that God wants to say to us through this text. So what if we do that here today? This idea of inherited guilt, Jesus really does not, doesn't speak to. Paul does.

Paul has this concept. He highlights this, this concept that in some way, The guilt of Adam has come down to us in the bloodstream, but Paul himself does not articulate this idea of original sin, that the minute I'm born, I am born guilty of sin, and the just punishment for that sin is for me to suffer punishment forever and ever and ever in hell. We're going to get to that at the end. But in this case, what if Adam's original mistake isn't pride, for example? What if we think about Genesis 3? So he's in the garden, right? He and Eve are in the garden. God has said, like, this abundance is yours. You can eat of anything in this garden. Including there are trees in the middle of the garden. There's a tree of life and there's a tree of knowledge of good and evil.

You can, you can eat of all this. There's only one tree that's mine, and it's the knowledge of good and evil that belongs to me. I ultimately define the parameters of good and evil. I decide what will be judged as good and judged as evil, and I am the one who will work out in the end. How, how, how that plays out. And so like there's this abundance and from the very start, humankind has all this abundance, but it wants the one thing it can't have. And so then you have this serpent. So again, doctrines throughout tradition have said this serpent is the devil.

Well, really, if you look at the story itself, there's nothing in it that says this is the devil. Nothing. If you'd never heard this story before, you didn't know the rest of the library of scriptures, you didn't know the traditions, you would not conclude that this is a devil. You would say, there's a story with a talking serpent. And you might be like, that's weird. What do I do with that? Now, let me be clear. Jesus himself likens the devil to a serpent. No doubt.

I don't think you're off base there. But again, what if we come into this with curiosity? Openness. And we ask ourselves, like, what role is the serpent playing here? What he does actually is just amplify the envy of the humans. I think it's possible that their first sort of sin, if you will, is envy— wanting what they can't have. And what is it that they want that they can't have? Well, ask yourself, what does the serpent symbolize? What if it's wisdom? Doesn't Jesus say, be as gentle as a dove and as wise as a serpent? And what is it that they want? They want the fruit of knowledge. They want this knowledge, this wisdom that they don't, and God says they can't have. And what we talked about on Sunday is that there is a connection between envy, blame, and violence. And what we're going to see in these original stories is how we have this pattern in the bloodstream of envy, blame, and violence.

And I talked about how Sunday, when we're thinking about the end, when we're thinking about judgment and justice, part of what we need to consider is perhaps that we're more violent, more vengeful, more prone to wanting vengeance than we probably want to admit. And then you see it here. So the serpent comes along and doesn't ask questions that are deceitful. The serpent just asks questions that are actually true. It's just simply like, hey, what did God say now again? The serpent asks the humans. The serpent asks these questions and trusts that the humans will deceive themselves. And that is what they do. And the serpent actually says what is true.

Actually, you won't die. You'll actually just gain this knowledge and perspective. And isn't that true? After they eat this fruit, right before, they don't notice their nakedness, and then they do. They have this change in worldview, this change of perspective. It all started with envy, and then they actually got what they wanted. And this is a story that's like, actually, sometimes getting what we want is not what we need. And sometimes, oftentimes, knowing everything is not good for us. And realizing where our limits are and being content to stay within them is a very good thing.

So right at the start, when we talk about judgment, justice, there's part of us that wants to know everything. We want to know how it all works out. And part of the great sin of Christianity is that many preachers and teachers have talked as if we can. They've talked with this degree of certainty about how judgment works out in the end, how justice is, exactly what the afterlife looks like, when here's the God's honest truth: we don't know and we can't know. That tree wasn't ours in the beginning and it still isn't ours. And admitting our limits, Is really part of where our journey with judgment and justice must begin and ultimately end—is acknowledging that God's imagination is not ours. God's judgment or justice is not limited to our logic, our theology, our doctrines. And really, friends, that's a good thing.

So you see it here: they envy what they can't have. The serpent amplifies that. And then what happens from there? Blame. Well, really, it wasn't me. It was, it was the woman, right? And Brené Brown says that blame is a discharge of pain. And so what we're going to ask, I asked his son, he's like, what's the connection between envy and now blame and then eventually violence? Well, all 3 of them erase the other person. Think about it. If I'm envying what my neighbor has, I'm not seeing my neighbor.

I'm just seeing what my neighbor has and I want it. I'm erasing them. I'm treating them as an object and I just want what they have. Blame does that too. If I'm just vomiting my pain on someone else, I'm erasing them. They're an object to me. And finally, like the next step of violence isn't too difficult once you've done that. And you might be sitting out there like, I'm not a violent person.

I'm not going to kill anybody. I'm not even going to assault anyone. Ah, this is where Jesus, his teachings are central to us. I saw a sign on a church this past Sunday, Christ, the only creed. At the end of the day, he is the center for us. And he says, if you have anger in your heart, you're committing murder. So harboring anger, feeling anger, not wrong, very human, very healthy. Harboring anger is violent.

Letting yourself like sit with your bitterness and resentment and your anger. Now it's festering. And now the next step of violence isn't too difficult. Right? And so these 3 things, violence, Blame, envy. It's just erasing a person. And really, when you think about it with our spiritual ancestors, if we take this seriously, these stories are inviting us to consider that we have wanted what we cannot have, even though there is abundance all around us from the very beginning. Even if we are sitting in abundance, we tend towards scarcity. We want what we can't have.

And then we get what we can't have, but we've made it so we can by some device, some scheme, perhaps with a little bit of help. We get what we couldn't have. Now we can have it, and it's our undoing. We actually went past our limits, and it starts to unravel us spiritually. And then the move toward violence is not as difficult as we think. Those things are in our bloodstream. They are in us, and we see it in the very next chapter. Chapter 4.

Like father, like son. Adam and Eve have a son named Cain and a son named Abel. One is a farmer and one is a shepherd. And we'll see from this story, like, envy is in the, is in the, in between the words of Cain and Abel from the start. Though being a farmer is a very noble profession, Uh, not worse or better than a shepherd. In fact, by the, by, by the time of Jesus, and even before that, shepherds were viewed as mangy, dirty, uh, people you didn't want to hang out with. It could be saying that— said that Cain has, has the better vocation than his brother Abel.

But something in this story says that he's bitter and bitterness has been festering inside him. And maybe he wants what his brother has. He thinks to himself, gosh, if I were a shepherd, my life would be significant then. See, look what happens with envy. I said that envy erases the other person. What this story shows us is that it erases us. If I want your job and I think if I had that job, then I'd be somebody. If I had what they make, then I'd be somebody.

If I had the approval that people have for them, then I'd be somebody. Envy doesn't just erase the other person, it erases me. It erases my worth and my significance. And folks, when shame starts festering, there are so many mistakes and sins that are possible. So many. And so Cain and Abel bring these offerings to God in the course of time. Uh, chapter 4, verse 3, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. What we can't see in that is that it just says that Cain brought a, an offering of fruit from the ground.

There's just a little contextual thing there where Abel doesn't just bring An offering. He brings it from the firstlings of his flock and their fat portions. If you're like, I have no idea what that means, it means that Cain or Abel brought the best of the very best. But really, I don't even think that's where the offerings are different. What I imagine based on how God responds is there's something in their heart. And it says to us, if envy and bitterness and blame are festering in our hearts, we've erased us. We've erased them, but we've also clouded our vision of God. And so Cain brings his offering, Abel brings him, and it says God had regard for Abel's.

He did not have regard for Abel. Another day we'll talk about that verse. There's a whole other conversation about that kind of tension there. But for today, if we have open-mindedness, And our open hearts, we don't just bring our doctrines and theology into the text, but we kind of come to it like curious children. It says to me that maybe Cain was just going through the motions. He's not really present to himself. He's not present with God. And so God kind of asks him after his countenance falls, because— Of God's regard for the offerings.

God says, why are you angry? Why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? Boy, that's a hard question to hear from God's lips, because doesn't that say, if I do righteous things, then God will accept me and care about me? A simple tool for scripture. If we were to conclude that from that one verse, It would not be supported by the rest of the library of scriptures, especially the life of Jesus and the movement thereafter him. It's reversed there. Grace is this truth that God deems us worthy and accepts us before we've done anything. Take very simply the life of Jesus. When he is baptized in the Jordan River and comes up out of the Jordan River, God says, this is my Son with whom I am well pleased. When that happens, Jesus has not preached one sermon. He has not taught one thing.

He's not healed anybody. Before he does anything, God approves of him. And that is true about us as well. God says to Cain then, if you do not do well, that's a— ooh, there's the truth right there. If you do not do well, if your heart is, is is bound up with bitterness and resentment and envy, sin is lurking at the door. In other words, the next sins are easy. It makes me think of baseball a lot. I coach baseball.

I teach my kids, don't let your strikeout turn into an error in the field, which I did all the time in high school until I wised up a little bit. God is saying to, uh, Cain here, like, hey, the minute that you let bitterness and envy and blame reside and take up residence in your heart, these, these more egregious sins are much easier. And then it shows up. Cain says to his brother Abel, let's go out to the field. And Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Envy erases your neighbor, your brother. Violence is not too difficult from there. Violence definitely erases your brother.

And to show that he erased him, the Lord said to Cain, where is your brother Abel? In verse 9 of chapter 4. And he said, I don't know. Am I my brother's keeper? He'd erased him. Absolved himself of any responsibility for his brother, any stewardship of his brother's life. It started with insecurity, shame, blame, envy. Violence is easy from there. And God says, what have you done? Your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground. What does this have to do with judgment and justice? You might be asking.

Well, again, if we read these stories and we don't just like go looking for doctrines that we inherited from dominant Christianity, again, this concept of original sin that became, that really got amplified with Augustine and then got carried down to us and really played up in the 16th century and now is dominant in our neck of the woods. Jesus really doesn't speak that thought into existence, this idea of original sin. In fact, you have this God sort of saying in the Torah, the first 5 books, like, if you violate my instructions, I'll punish you to the 3rd and 4th generation. By the time you get to the prophets, sort of the end of the Old Testament, Ezekiel says, stop saying things like that. God punishes each man according to his sin. And then when Jesus's disciples are following him, they see a man that is born blind. They have heard from their tradition that means he's received some curse. Disability is a sign of God's curse.

That came from their tradition. And if you're cursed, that means you've sinned, another thing they had received from tradition. And so they asked Jesus, why is he blind? AKA, or, or in other words, why is he cursed? Who sinned, him or his parents? In other words, like, help us understand which way to think. Like it says in Torah or like it says in the prophets, which one is it? And Jesus says, neither. So this concept of like inheriting the sin of your ancestors, Jesus ain't for it. Not. So like we have to be careful of how we, we, we read doctrines on it. Again, doctrines can be helpful.

They can be guides, very good guides. As, as I say, for my, my, my traditions, we say tradition can be a vehicle of the Holy Spirit, but we also have to be able to sit with these texts, be curious, open-hearted, open-minded with this living, An active word, and let the Holy Spirit speak to us individually and in community to unearth truth for us now. And so with this story, these 2 chapters today, you ask like, what do, how do they connect to our views of judgment and judgment, uh, uh, justice now? Well, here we go. Hell, let's just jump right to it. Think about it. Dominant views of Christianity, how judgment works in the end. Justice. How God makes things right.

And if judgment is like what God says about a person's good and their evil, in the end, what God does about it is justice. How does God make wrong things right? Justice. Judgment is what things are wrong, what things are right, who committed the wrongs, who committed the rights. Justice is what is God going to do about it? How is God going to make the wrong things right? Well, popular teaching is at the end of the day, like, I get to the end, God makes a statement about like how I lived, what I believed, and then Jesus says, you're either going to hell or you're going to heaven. Based on how I live, I'm either going to eternal punishment or eternal paradise. I'm either gonna be punished forever and ever and ever without end, or I'm gonna experience paradise, golden streets, passing through pearly gates forever and ever and ever and ever. Well, let me ask you this. Isn't assigning someone to hell just erasing them? Whatever your view of hell is, sending someone to hell is erasing their life.

Just like envy, just like blame, just like violence. And you know what we, you know, I see in Christianity, here's the truth. As much as Christians will be like, we want to get people out of hell. What I see in a lot of Christianity is a lot of people want some people to go to hell. They want to see him erased. And honestly, that's not the heart of Jesus. But, but the people would say like, Ross, but he says these very clear things in, in like Matthew chapter 5. He says, you know, like, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Be better to walk throughout life maimed or blind than to wander into, uh, hell. And, and people said like, there it is right there, Ross. That's how judgment and justice work. There it is. You see what we just did there? We read a doctrine into the passage. We already had a preconceived thought about how judgment works. And we assume that's what's going on in the passage.

You know what's funny about that? Even people who are like hyper-literal, they say the Bible is inerrant, there's— it's truth without error. They will look at that verse and they say, well, he's exaggerating about the hand and the eye. He doesn't want us to cut off our hand or gouge out our eye. He's just trying to relate to us the seriousness of our sin. But then the part about hell, they're like, oh, that's literal. That part's literal. That part's exaggeration. Same sentence.

That part's exaggeration. That's literal. Really? Isn't that funny? Like how we make those decisions and people say, I'm just doing what the Bible says. I'm just thinking about what the Bible says. That doesn't sound very consistent to me. Doesn't seem consistent with the heart of God throughout scriptures. And it's not reading that, those verses consistently. Is there a more consistent reading? I think so.

Could be like this. The Hinnom Valley is a valley south of Jerusalem, AKA Gehenna. That is the Greek word we translate as hell. So when you see the word hell in the New Testament, basically that's the Greek word Gehenna, which corresponds to a physical, literal valley called the Hinnom valley. Yes, in Jesus's time, they would talk about Gehenna as this apocalyptic concept. For sure, that's in there. In Jesus's time, they would burn trash in this valley. In previous generations, other cultures would sacrifice children in this valley.

What if Jesus is being hyperbolic in both instances, or he's trying to shake us loose, shake the cobwebs loose, trying to pierce the veil, the clouds that are sitting around our heads and our hearts? And he's saying like, hey, your life is valuable. Your life is significant. God created you with God's image inside you. Your life is meant to have this great high purpose with God. And I have come here to awaken that in you. I have come to bring the kingdom of the heavens near. I have come to adopt you, like bring you into God's family, incorporate you into this new family that's begun. Everybody's a part of it.

I've come to start this new creation. Every person who's in me is a new creation, and they are meant to build this new creation with me, to restore everything here. Your life is not meant to be wasted. It's not meant to go off into destruction. But some of you are not taking seriously how wayward you've been, how lost you are. It's this serious. If your right hand is causing you to lead this life of destruction, chop it off for Pete's sakes. If your eye is causing you to sin, gouge that thing out.

Heck, it would be better to lose those things than to wander into that valley over there where they burn trash, where they used to sacrifice children. That's where you're going to end up. You're going to end up in that apocalyptic fire, for God's sake. Don't do that. Wake up. Follow me. Live this life of significance. That's consistent.

Saying that's hyperbole and that's not is not. So like before, if we're going to consider judgment and justice, we need to think about how we're prone to violence, vengeance, and views of hell are directly connected to that. We take our tendency to violence and vengeance And we make God in our image. Let's let that go. Let's stay in our lane, embrace our limits. Maybe we can't know everything. Maybe we need to look at that tree of knowledge and good and evil and say, you know what? I'm glad that's God's because God is good. God looks like Jesus.

Good, holy, compassionate, just, peacemaking, the restorer of all things, the renewer of all things. I'm going to keep judgment in his hands. I'm going to eat of the tree of life, enjoy the other abundance, follow him, trust him, let his Spirit shape my spirit, and I'm going to do what he's called me to do. I think that we can do that. We can continue to explore judgment and justice as we will in the coming weeks. We'll look at what the rest of the Bible says, what we can know. There are some things we can't know, but we're going to keep pushing up against our limits, and we need to surrender the things that we can't know. So thanks for listening today, friends.

Please keep tuning into the conversations on Sundays, and we're going to do more of this. Where you can dig in with me and you can send me questions that we can address on these Podcast and also on Sundays. Thanks for listening. We want to thank you for spending time with us today. My name is Ross Stackhouse, the pastor of Heaven and Earth Church, and you may think out there that your story is over, but in fact, your faith story may just be beginning. If you want more information about our church or you're If you're interested in the next step, you can go to heavenearthchurch.org. Otherwise, we look forward to being with you next time at t