Once saved, always saved. Cleanliness is next to godliness. God helps those who help themselves. A December twenty-fifth birth. Sunday as the Sabbath. Angels as departed believers. You have heard each of them from a pulpit, so often they have stopped needing a verse — and some of them cannot be found in the Bible at all, while others are found there saying something different from what we have made them say. Across fifteen chapters, Brother Michael Junker takes up the modern church’s most settled beliefs one at a time, and asks the question nobody asks anymore: does the Bible actually say that?

The chapters name names. One works through the common-beliefs inventory itself — faith alone, “we are all God’s children,” the idea that you can’t or shouldn’t question God. Another opens Genesis and asks where the apple came from, since the text never mentions one. Then come the sayings mistaken for Scripture — “this too shall pass,” “the lion shall lie down with the lamb,” “God won’t give you more than you can handle” — and chapters on Jesus (the stable, the three wise men, the Good Friday timeline, the married-Jesus claim), on Mary, on sin and repentance and where the seven deadly sins list actually came from, on hell and Satan, on the Sabbath and the biblical feasts, on the holidays, on culture carried into the church, on paganism wearing Christian clothes, on Lilith, on idols in plain sight, and on hatred in the pews — antisemitism, racism, and the Hebrew word behind “kill.” One chapter follows a single thread through feminism in the church, from its roots to the goddess behind the movement; another walks through the culture the church has carried in — social media, music, fashion, even amulets and talismans worn as jewelry. Woven through are three testimony chapters — “What I Have Seen” — where the author puts his own story on the table: called back, not yet done, and the sword he laid down. A glossary and a guide to words whose meaning has changed since 1611 close the book, so the reader can keep checking the old words in the old Book.

The method never changes: name the belief, ask whether the Bible actually says it, read the verses in full rather than the half-verse usually heard, then follow the text where it leads — into the Hebrew and the Greek, into Josephus and the historians, and back to the men and churches who handed the tradition down, where the record allows. Where the popular teaching is right, the verses show it; where it is not, they show that too.

Open it, and you will not be asked to take the author’s word for anything. You will be shown the verse, the context, and the trail — and left able to weigh every one of these beliefs for yourself. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV).