289. The Difference Between Coincidence and God | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

How do we know when something is merely a coincidence—and when it may be something more?

In this episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry Martin and Abigail Rosenthal explore spiritual discernment, divine guidance, and the challenge of recognizing meaning in ordinary life. From Sherlock Holmes and the art of observation to unexpected events that seemed to reveal a deeper pattern, they ask how we distinguish chance from providence and whether God may be present in experiences we are tempted to overlook.

The conversation includes two remarkable personal stories from Abigail's life: one involving an unexpected turn of events that transformed her academic career, and another involving what she describes as the clearest experience of divine communication she has ever received.

How do we test spiritual experiences? What does it mean to hear God's voice? And how can we remain open to the possibility that our lives may be part of a larger story?

Listen to the full episode and join the conversation.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

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Transcript

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:00:17,229 ] This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast — a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered — in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:00:58,279 ]Episode two eighty nine.  Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and we return again this week to our regular series that has come to mean a great deal to me: Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue. On this week's edition, Jerry and Abigail talk about the experiential encounter with God or the divine reality. How do we discern which thoughts and feelings are of God and how does God come to us through these thoughts and perceptions of our experience in the world?

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:01:37,989 ]Abigail tells two different stories of what she considers undeniable encounters with the divine reality in her life. One of them very recently. Here's Jerry to begin the conversation. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:01:59,419 ]Well, hello, sweetheart, and thank you for joining me again for an intimate dialogue. And let me just start with what's been on my mind. I was actually thinking the other day, I think I mentioned it in a podcast last time, that when rereading some Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story, I always love all Sherlock Holmes movies, stories, anything like that. The master detective, you know. Maybe that's because I'm an epistemologist and we're always trying to track down, like a good detective what's true and what isn't true; what's more true, what's less true. But something that struck me anew, we talk on this program a lot about spiritual discernment. As St. Paul said, test the spirits whether they be if they be of God. All kinds of spirits can come and they're not all good.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:04,529 ]Some weird spirits, and of course there are many other ways we can get swept away. And they're not spirits at all. So test the spirits. And that's again, as an epistemologist, that's the key epistemological task. Which of these deliverances that come to me, these moments that come to me or to you or to some for any of us, which ones are, as the philosophers say, veridical, which ones are truth-bearing?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:34,559 ]But I noticed in Sherlock Holmes, we always hear about the science of deduction. But when you read the stories, there's actually a first step. Before you get to any kind of deduction, you do observation. And that's why Holmes has a big magnifying glass. And in the stories, the first thing you find on a crime scene is Holmes is down on the carpet looking, looking through, is up close, what's down here? What clues are here? Oh, here's a cigarette butt. What kind of cigarette? What kind of ashes?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:09,369 ]Where is this from?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:10,279 ]What does this tell us about the other person in this crime scene? And so on, just these fine observations. And the spiritual life doesn't start with testing the spirits. It starts with taking in the divine that's coming to you. And I sometimes use the concept of appraisal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:32,779 ]which means a kind of glimpse of the divine because the way we live with God or some other conception, it does not have to be a theist to relate to this discussion, with the way we relate to the divine reality is it comes to us in subtle ways usually. It doesn't hit us on the head, it doesn't write things on our wall, you know, it doesn't send us a letter in the mail. It comes through in signs inside and outside. We may just feel, well as I asked one minister, how did you receive your call to become a minister?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:11,429 ]God laid a burden on my heart. So, it felt to him, God is laying a burden on my heart. He's a deep introvert like me. He did not want to be a minister, but God laid a burden on his heart and so he responded to that call. Sometimes it's some external thing. Somebody says something or you read something. It could be a religious thing or some other thing, or even happenstance. Or a friend is writing you a letter and ah, something comes through that has a divine element. Does that make sense to you, Sweety? So the first challenge is pay attention. You got to pay attention to your experience, otherwise you'll miss the whole story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:05:55,829 ]Yeah. It seems as if one lives with a multi-plethora, a multitude, a collection of summons and calls on one's attention and participation. Sometimes they seem to suggest it's time to relax and pick up your heels, and sometimes there's a set of duties and one has priority. The divine element sometimes is very glaring and sort of you can't get over it, you can't get around it as this spiritual song says.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:06:54,689 ]But I'm thinking, I don't know, an example that comes to mind, vindicated in what you might call a miracle, but at the outset, very questionable. I'd had this fight as we know and you know, for seven years to get my job at the Brooklyn College philosophy department restored, claiming…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:25,179 ]They keep firing you over and over. You'd win the dispute and then they'd fire you.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:07:29,069 ]Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:30,029 ]unfairly Because they had it in for you, right?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:07:33,259 ] I voted wrong in the department election for chair and you can't do that without getting punished and beheaded and sent to the garbage pail of American careers in academia. So finally reinstated and I hadn't had time in those seven years to keep publishing and so I was about to be the world's oldest assistant professor and you had to publish to get promoted.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:08:09,739 ] but I have this other duty which seemed to me to trump even the duty to myself too and a professional career duty to get some articles published in philosophy. And that was my father having died and left a non-published manuscript on Hobbes and Spinoza.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:08:38,659 ]I had a duty to finish what he had left unfinished, write the intros, get the bibliography and the footnotes in place, and get it published. And I owed him that. It was kind of an unspoken deathbed promise, you know. And as you probably know, filial piety, the duty of a daughter to her father, ain't very popular nowadays. People assume there's something wrong with you, you know, you've got an unmentionable...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:13,769 ]He's gone you're alive, you should move on; that's current thinking.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:09:18,869 ]Life is for the living and it's your relation to your father is a sickness and you should get cured. So, I had this sense of filial piety and I loved my father and I felt he was expecting me from the next world to do this. So I would teach when I got assigned modern philosophy, his book had been on Hobbes and Spinoza. I would teach Hobbes and Spinoza to give me a chance to get up on the latest and keep current as I was finishing the work for his book.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:09:55,059 ]So, anyway, once a year our department had a big event. We would invite a fancy lecturer to come and lecture on something. And this year the lecturer who was English visiting, his name escapes me now for some reason, but anyway, he had accepted our invitation to give a big annual lecture where the whole college and even alumni and neighbors in the neighborhood would be invited to fill the auditorium and hear his speech on a book he just published on Spinoza.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:10:33,139 ]So, the clock is ticking, he hadn't shown up for lunch, the lecture is at three, he hadn't shown up at 2:45. So at 2:50, my chair calls the department.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:10:47,489 ]He's visiting and it turns out he thought the lecture was for tomorrow, and we're cooked, our goose is cooked. And my chair says my senior professor who I was very close to said we should go up to the front of the stage and tell them that the lecturer isn't here and they should all go home.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:13,799 ]And the dean who controls money lines, supplies, says surely somebody here can speak on Spinoza, knows something about Spinoza. This is a philosophy department.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:33,649 ]So. Yeah, it's almost an insult. Are you all saying nobody can talk about Spinoza?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:11:40,189 ]And I knew all my colleagues, I was fresh on Spinoza and I really don't like to give extemporaneous talks. I'm shy, you know, I don't look for that. I'm not a public person in that sense. But I had to admit that I could say something about Spinoza. So, you know, the announcement is made that the speaker is in Schenectady or wherever he was, Syracuse, I think.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:11,959 ]And there's a kind of moan that goes through the auditorium and I get up there and together with two retired members of the department who also know a thing or two about the lens grinder from Amsterdam and so I start speaking and all the heads are bowed. And I know something, I know they'll be more interested in his interesting life, which was a philosophical life, than they will be in his abstruse metaphysical thinking.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:12:48,329 ]So I start talking about the life and the heads go up. You know, and the dean who's this powerful person is beaming. And I understand as I'm going forward that God is doing a miracle. You know, I understand that.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:13:14,089 ]Maybe somebody else would have understood what a happy coincidence. I'm not constructed that way. I understand there's a miracle, you know. And indeed it was. The president of the college said I hear Abigail saved the Machette and tells his retinue to write me commendation letters which he uses to usher me through to a promotion next year.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:13:50,349 ]and colleagues who had fired me now see that I have some right to be there after all and they tell me so. And the event is saved and people from outside the college and inside in the other departments hear a worthwhile talk. You know, and so and my dedication to my father, which is the most quixotic and unrealistic and unpractical thing about me, turns out to be the most practical thing I could have done.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:14:30,599 ]And, you know, look at all that weaving together, and it wasn't a supernatural event. But only God, you know, could do that web.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:43,789 ]Now this is a wonderful case story, sweet, case study, I should say. Wonderful case study with several lessons. For one thing, it's a perfect example of this Sherlock Holmes principle. You know, what Holmes says is people look but don't see.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:03,719 ]And you gotta take it in. Well, you gotta take it in. And that's what observation really means in this connection. And the way you said many people would just see this as coincidence. Well, this great affection many people have for the concept of coincidences, I know I read one guy on some exchange saying, "Well, they don't believe in much, but they sure believe in coincidence." You know, it's kind of their one principle that nothing they've got to make sure that nothing adds up to anything else. There may be dots all over, but you can't connect them.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:42,959 ]Even though there's an obvious story, an obvious meaning, you can't do that because it's just coincidence. But you didn't take it that way, as just coincidence.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:15:56,689 ]No, nothing could be clearer to me to imagine that such a confluence of such a thread, such a weaving together of events that by each by itself appeared to prove how absurd life is, and woven together showed the the unmistakable presence of something that occurs saliently in Hebrew scripture stories.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:30,799 ]Yes

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:16:31,959 ]Stories in which God helps but doesn't entirely write the story. God is a co-author. The story it it's the most intriguing evidence of our interaction with the divine that I know of, because you can sit cross-legged and read Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and I've done that.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:17:04,949 ]I I never seemed to get to crash the various chakras to get up to the top and have mystical merger, but what do you want for a couple of years, whereas you're supposed to put in a lifetime and have a wonderful guru and, you know, do it up the right way.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:17:27,109 ]So, I'm not saying it can't happen, but you get at the end of it, you may get flooded, saturated with bliss that would answer all the longings of any girl or boy on the planet. And yet, you'd miss living a story.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:50,259 ]You know, the stories happen in real life, daily life, not where you're a mystic on a mountain. There are no stories there. It's timeless. That's what you're trying to enter the timeless dimension.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:18:03,539 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:04,379 ]That's the goal. But the story is kind of down here, underneath the clouds where we live and we struggle and I'm always saying we live in an uneven terrain, which I just use as general metaphor for all the ups and downs of life. That it's not, you can't just glide across the whole story and always seems to me to be a great drama, any individual's life. We do these spiritual story interviews, recently one with Steven Specter that I may have run already by the time this runs, but his is just one that starts with a fifteen-year-old praying to God save my I think mother had something terminal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:52,229 ]And he kind of bargained with God. If you do this in a 15-year-old way, he says, if you do this for me, then I'll be good in this way and that way and the other way. And oh, she lived many years after that, far beyond what his hope, hope and the prayer was. But that's just one drama, right? But we have these dramas and bitter situations often lead to surprising turns. It's not that things always end up right side up, there's tragedy in life. There's tragedy in life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:19:30,439 ]There's comedy, there's everything in between, whatever all the other things are, the epic and the lyrical and whatever. They're all present and they're all part of our stories. They're all meaningful. They're part of our stories.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:09,569 ]One thing on my mind, as we talk, sweetheart, is the experience you had, I guess it was yesterday, reading that book. I mean, you're… I'm not Jewish, but you are. And, you know, one's experiences depend on one's situation in life. And if you're Jewish, you have a different situation than I who is a white male, whatever, whatever, in 21st century America, and just have a quite different history from what would be typical. Of course, there's more than one kind of Jewish story as well.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:20:49,519 ]But anyway, I give that as kind of preface because it seemed to me that what happened to you the other day, it wouldn't be bounded by being Jewish, but it had a central Jewish component.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:21:04,109 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:21:05,099 ]I'm happy to retell it and it'll sort of perhaps crystallize the effect in my mind because I haven't fully processed what happened. But I have been reading a book, sorry, the author's name escapes me. The title is Penelope's Bones. Penelope, the wife of the hero in the Odyssey, Odysseus, and um...

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:21:38,109 ]She's keeping the home fires burning while he's away fighting the battle of the Trojan War and then the Odyssey is his long voyage home. And she has managed to keep a lot of young men who want to marry her and inherit her husband's estate. She's managed to keep them at bay one way or another. So she's quite a heroine. But the book...

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:22:06,709 ]wanted to… the author promised to restore to prominence the women in Homer's Iliad and Homer's Odyssey. The wife of Hector and Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, and Cassandra, the captured consort of, what is it, uh, Agamemnon?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:22:41,389 ]But anyway, I can't remember all the proper names here, but anyway, it's a big world, a big saga, Homer's world and she contends that the women are not foregrounded. It's a man's world, a hero's world. The men fight with their swords and shields and the women have a different set of constraints and they seem to be in the background, but really there's a lot to dig up about them.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:14,229 ]Reminds us of Penelope's story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:23:16,919 ]yeah

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:23:18,319 ]It's not foregrounded. She's not off, he's off all around the world in the Mediterranean or whatever. Nevertheless, she's in a way the most important character.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:23:27,469 ]She's very key and in a sense, you know, she's kind of a heroine. Here she is very much outnumbered by the young warriors of Ithaca, the town and island, I guess, of where her husband is the commander in chief or the royal big shot or, you know, the most important man in town. And so he's been gone ten years.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:24:07,079 ]The other bachelors in Ithaca, if they can marry Penelope, they'll come into the kingdom of her husband. And she is faithfully waiting. And in order to excuse her waiting and not just have to stay stupidly, I'm waiting, maybe he's still alive. They don't have telegraph and telephone, so nobody knows what happened to the husband. She says, first I have to weave a certain cloak for, I don't know, an ancestor or something like that, a rug.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:24:46,559 ]I forget exactly what it is, but it's something she has to weave. And as soon as I'm done, I'll pick one of you fine strapping young warriors and I'll marry you, whichever one I pick. Every day she's weaving the rug, and every night she unravels it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:25:07,029 ]So, and they're too stupid to notice that this must be either the largest cloak or rug in the history of weaving, or something's being concealed from them, kept from them, and it's what she's really doing. When Odysseus finally shows up in disguise and she recognizes him, he, you know, says, mum's the word, I'm about to kill a whole bunch of young men who are the chief contenders in Ithaca.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:25:43,449 ]So take your rug and go to the women's quarters. Anyway, she's quite a substantial player in her own right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:25:57,469 ]And while he's on this long journey of ten years or whatever, he has in mind, I've got to return to Penelope. You know, it really is a long kind of love story. I've got to return to Penelope.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:26:09,989 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:26:10,629 ]And he then does and slaughters these other people and then they go to bed in the bed I believe he made before he left. So they've got a marital bed already. And they have a happy ending.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:26:25,589 ]She, I, he's able to, be recognized as the lost husband because he tells her how he made the bed and everybody knows the secret of the bed. So, yeah, and Athena, you know, brightens her cheeks and smooths out the wrinkles, a few million or ten years, and prolongs the night. So the reunion is all that either member of the couple could have hoped. And that's the story of the Odyssey.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:27:00,489 ]And so Penelope is a very good person to put in the title of this book about women in that time period, that she's one of the most famous and there's the whole raison d'être, you know, the whole goal of the Odyssey in a sense is to get back to Penelope. And so great title, Penelope's bones or something.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:27:25,109 ]Also what it promises is to give more of the background, put more dimensions into the female characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And I consider myself a feminist, a champion of women. And women interest me. I consider the life of a woman a very interesting drama. So, I'm not just signing on to an ideological vindication project, I really think, some of the women I've known are some of the very best humans I've known. And that's the constraints around a woman are like the constraints around a play, you know, given these what you might call handicaps or whatever, vulnerabilities, let's call them.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:28:24,429 ]How does a woman play her hand?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:27,249 ]So women have very interesting stories. Yes. A guy's story often isn't. I go out to the office, I get promoted, I'm happy. I get a salary increase, I'm happy. I've got a wife who takes care of me when I go home at night.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:41,219 ]you know, you do that for twenty, thirty years and then check out. That's the guy's story. But the women have this complex story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:28:51,729 ]The best novel Pride and Prejudice as people said by Jane Austen. These are about women.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:28:58,799 ]Yeah.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:28:59,609 ]All of Jane's novels, she's called Jane, are about women and the drama, you know, the limited palette with which she painted a great canvas. So, nothing could be more interesting to me than, or a few things could be, than a book with that title, you know, what's the backstory of the women in Homer?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:29:24,289 ]So I'm reading along and, I'm discovering a little less than I thought I would discover. And I don't have to go into the little back story doesn't show up as a story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:29:47,839 ]A piece here, a piece there. There, you know, and maybe the Minoan women were terribly important with their costumes and maybe Helen had some property, Helen of Troy had some property and in Sparta or whatever. But it, you know, it isn't as if here's the real story behind the story.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:30:13,049 ]So I'm reading along.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:30:14,729 ]The author whose name unfortunately escapes me is a good writer and draws me along, draws me, draws me. Soon around the next corner we'll see something. And one of the things you see before around the next corner are a set of maps. And they are maps of the world of Homer and the world of Penelope. And that includes Canaan.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:30:44,069 ]and overlapping in the time span of Homer's heroes is of course the kingdom of Israel. It's not on that map. It's called Canaan and I don't know Phoenicia and whatever Lebanon, Libya. Um there's no Israel.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:31:10,329 ]So everybody's there, every country is there of that time except one missing one. And that's Israel has been overlooked, let's say. One missing.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:31:20,939 ]Yeah, and so I'm trying not to care. You know, I set out to read a book. The book has sufficiently hooked me so that I want to go on and so far I haven't learned that much, but maybe just around the next pillar, the next cave, we'll find something that really springs into life and into action. Map, map, map.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:31:46,879 ]No, I'm looking at the index. Under I, Israel wasn't in the index. Well, that's fine.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:31:58,859 ]And then next morning, I have a funny dream that I rather not go into, but it suggests something is rotten in this Denmark. Something bad is here, something unappetizing, I want to say unkosher, is here. And in the morning I see that the book includes a quote from one of Israel's best-known detractors, and the quote happens to be attributable to that lady. And it's not about modern Israel, it's lifted out in order to find how applicable it is to some part of the story of ancient Hellenes and Ithaca and and Troy and, Priam and Achilles and Odysseus and Penelope. But what's she doing here?

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:33:13,699 ]And why is Israel not here? Something is rotten here. You don't erase in a kind of scholarly genocide an entire block of world history. We have a what you might call Judeo-Hellenic fundament to Western civilization, to Western culture, to Western history. The Bible is a history book.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:33:49,619 ]You can dispute about the accuracy of this story or that story, but it's not read and it wasn't written by the producers of the Hebrew Bible, and of the New Testament, as a collection of legends about no place. It's about the promised land and what the people to whom the promise was issued have done to deserve the promised land or to disappoint the one who gave the promise.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:34:25,479 ]And unlike a lot of other peoples whose legends are preserved, the outstanding characteristic of the Bible is that the ones who collected the stories in the Bible did not consign to the fire those parts of the stories that are discreditable morally or spiritually. They collected unflattering as well as ego enhancing parts of a history because their motive was a spiritual motive. They thought, you can say they were wrong, God is a witness. They thought God is watching. And the God they thought was real, I happen to also think real, can't be fooled by backing and tackling and tooling and throwing because that God knows better than the most truthful truth-teller what really happened.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:35:39,909 ]So a lot of the story is the story of going back and forth, you might say, between the times the people of Israel are mainly sort of faithful and doing what God wants, and then, whoops, those times they veer away; fail. And as you say, God is watching both, and they record both.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:36:01,429 ]Yes, they record both. extraordinary it's unique. It it's unique.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:36:07,509 ]It's without parallel that I know of, you know, maybe there's some tribes I don't know of who do the same, but this is a world a world this is a highly consequential story that was preserved in its moral and factual and geographical concreteness and its spiritual lessons, its spiritual import, its spiritual consequence.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:36:38,269 ]So, I'm thinking as I read this Penelope's Bones, a piece of the story of the ancient world has been lifted out. And somebody is quoted who hates modern Israel and is known in the newspapers for her efforts. So, you know, I do my neuropathy exercises that I'm supposed to do 15 minutes every morning.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:37:13,919 ]Boring. And then I sit for meditation and prayer. And usually what I get in prayer is, you know, keep punching little fella.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:37:24,449 ]You're doing okay. Don't kick yourself because you haven't failed. You're still plugging along here. You're inside the covenant.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:37:36,959 ]You're okay. But yesterday morning, I didn't get anything like that. I felt a very strong, very close, almost like a face, a presence.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:37:51,329 ]And it said to me, throw that book out. Throw that book out.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:37:59,529 ]Don't just give it away. I gathered to someone else. We do that a lot with books because we got too many. But this was throw it away.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:38:08,589 ]Don't read another line and I thought to my… and there wasn't anything else that I received as a divine originated communication and it was closer to me than the usual, intimations of something I should do or be or think. It was right up close. And so I thought, well, let me bargain a bit. Let me dicker with this.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:38:40,049 ]Hey, wait a minute.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:38:40,999 ]You don't just throw out a book you just bought. I forget what it cost me, but you know, I waited to read this interesting book. Maybe it's not so interesting, maybe it's got a funny, anti-semitic undergirding, but surely I can take down the bibliographical information. There'll be some data here. There's a very well-educated woman, she speaks ancient Greek and I don't know what else.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:39:12,269 ]And then I… but the more I thought that, the more I thought I got a command and it wasn't a qualified command. And the more I thought to temper it and qualify it and, you know, give it certain boundary conditions so that I could get whatever else I wanted out of this book.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:39:42,949 ]Because you're thinking you could read a little bit more, maybe glance at the conclusion, and then throw it away after.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:39:49,409 ]That's right. and write down whatever, you know…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:39:53,079 ]Write down some information; follow-up.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:39:56,039 ]...But the more I thought that, the more I saw that that was not what the command, the command was a qualified one. And I couldn't put in qualifying qualifiers, you know, extenuating circumstances, limiting conditions, boundary conditions. It wasn't conditional.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:40:28,319 ]And if it had been, I wasn't the one to promote the conditions, promulgate the conditions. So I thought, okay.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:40:43,189 ]I think I hear you.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:40:48,589 ]I think I've never heard God so clearly. So I went into where I was reading the book, put it in the wastebasket, and oddly enough, as soon as it found its little home in the wastebasket, I felt unplugged from the book.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:41:12,419 ]As if it had a suction power, magnetic power, which kept promising, wait a minute, next chapter will have something worthwhile in it. Just hang in there, babe. You know, I know this isn't for nothing. This isn't just an excuse to show you a map with Israel erased. As I think our earliest archaeological reference to Israel has some local king saying, boasting of his victories, eighth or ninth century, and a little: Israel is no more. I just took care of it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:41:55,179 ]Don't worry about it. No more Israel. So, you know, that's the first we hear of Israel in an ancient context, in an ancient object. So Israel is still no more and apparently it's very important to some people to make that case. And it's very important to me to counter that case. And I did it. And behold, that the book fell on me, shriveled and collapsed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:42:31,629 ]And what's striking to me, sweetheart, about this experience was it sounds like the most frontal, up close divine encounter maybe in your life or at least that you readily recall. It was a remarkable case of divine presence and communication.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:42:53,859 ]Isn't that odd? You're absolutely correct. I have never felt the face of God, you know, whatever we call the face of God, but that's the name I would give to what I sensed. I don't even know if it was visual or auditory or simply a very powerful sense of being ordered, commanded, under authority that was not at any distance. You know, Voegelin speaks of the metaxy, the sort of in-between place where the divine

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:43:33,209 ]And the human intersect and interact, and there's a certain ambiguity, is it me or is it God? This didn't have that distance of a Voegelin’s metaxy. It was, and there was no ambiguity whatsoever. It sure wasn't the, and it wasn't a delusion because the rest of the day I was quite functional.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:43:59,229 ]That's right.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:44:00,509 ]You're not a delusional person. That's why one of the keys to spiritual discernment is just, are you a well-functioning person? You're the instrument of your discernment. And so you first check your instruments. You know, if you've been drinking or on drugs or have some other wild enthusiasm, you know, that's come upon you maybe as part of a big group experience and you're swept away, well then then you question, but you check out, you know, the instrument. And the instrument is fine. So, trust the experience.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:44:35,199 ]You know, as fine as ever. If anybody thinks I'm loopy right now, that's as loopy as I was.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:44:42,349 ]Right, right, you're no loopier than normal.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:44:44,869 ]I can't get outside myself too, you know, there's some human norm and maybe I match it and maybe I don't, but so far as I can tell, I'm fairly reasonable person. And you know, use the usual tests of whether something matches sense experience and whether something is internally coherent that I'm being told. There's a like ethical criteria. And you know, I'm not bumping into things, I'm not falling over my feet.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:45:20,659 ]And I'm in the same human relationships I was ever in. So, I'm as normal as ever. And that was God. You know, that was God…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:45:34,139 ]That's just how it is.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:45:35,829 ]It just, I'm sorry if that offends anybody, but I'm going to let it…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:45:43,539 ]There's another lesson here, I think, that's useful for us all. When you say you don't know, here you know it's God. And you know what the content of the communication is, throw that book away.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:45:57,629 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:45:58,349 ]So, the presence of God is manifest.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:46:01,839 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:02,799 ]The content of the message is clear and you act on it and have the kind of response one would have when you do something divinely instructed.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:46:14,519 ]Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:15,389 ]But you said you didn't know if it was… the experience was auditory or if it was visual or just somehow some sense that came to you. I think it's important for people not to get fixated on, oh, if God's going to communicate with us, it's got to be in some form I recognize and understand. It can be, or I tell people they wish because I have a divine voice. You know, that's how God came to me, got the attention of this agnostic, you know, has hit me on the head with a voice to speak right up. Okay, and He wanted me to write a book.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:46:54,599 ]that made sense, but that's not the normal way. And people will write me at the website: I’ve wanted to hear God's voice and God never speaks to me and I'm deeply faithful to my particular religion and you were doing nothing when it comes to you. So unfair. But I tell people, relax, let God come to you however God comes to you. And they may be failing the observation test because God may be coming to them all the time and they're not recognizing it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:47:34,609 ]And it's often probably something rather amorphous, just a sense that comes upon you. Like that minister saying God laid a burden on my heart. I don't know what a burden on your heart feels like, but I think it's probably just kind of a sense that this was something I was supposed to do. And so it happens in all these ways, including as I told the story of Mark Groleau before, the same week three different people said, because he was he was in seminary, you should be a preacher.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:48:11,169 ]Well, if you've got three people tell you that the same week, you start connecting the dots.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:48:16,749 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:48:17,409 ]This isn't just them thinking, oh, you know, you speak well or something. There's more to this communication than just a neighborly opinion.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:48:27,369 ]Yeah, you got to know how to take a hint.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:48:31,189 ]Yeah. I'm just thinking, you know, people could say, maybe there was a time I would have said, why should God care about a particular people, a particular nationalist claim, a claim of the historicity of an ancient book.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:48:57,469 ]Isn't that trivial? Isn't omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, Godhead, you know, divinity above all these parochial matters? You know, why should God tell Joan of Arc to go and get the pretender to the French throne crown? Isn't God above nationalism? You know, isn't...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:49:32,999 ]Why does God care to save the Machette lecture and create an opportunity for Abigail? Just Abigail. There are a lot of people on this planet. And I know I talked to someone who's a very revered and respected person, a scholar of the Bible and of many other things. And he says, well, he prays, but is anyone listening? And it's not that he's a skeptical type person. It's just that he's just one person and the world of billions. And I always think, well, God's capacity for this is greater than the National Telephone Exchange, you know. That God can pay attention and care about each of us. And that's kind of hard to take in. And could care about Israel in a special way.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:50:20,813 ]Yes

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:50:21,583 ]God tells me at one point we had a history together.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:50:25,193 ]Yeah, I, you know, several of my, well, this is maybe the second of what you might call miracle encounters. This doesn't qualify by any miracle set of criteria, but for me it was a miracle. But it was the second one that had this what people would call parochial, you know, special interest. I'm Jewish. I'm not as Jewish as a lot of people who give it their all are, you know, I won't go through all the requirements of being Jewish that I do not fulfill. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:51:18,723 ]This isn't confessions. You're not going to confess your failures.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:51:24,093 ]You know, but the list would fill a Torah scroll.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:51:30,303 ]But nevertheless, I certainly feel not only a heritage, but an obligation that is historical, that is on the timeline, that no other religion that I know of matches because other religions you can vault up the ceiling and into the sky, and the real story is partly above it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:52:02,553 ]But the characteristic motif of Jewish memory and Jewish existence is stay on the timeline, keep one foot in front of another. Chronology adds up to history and history is where revelation occurs, insofar as you're either Jewish or you get the message about what the Jewish influence tells us.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:52:40,553 ]You do not in Jewish eyes have to be Jewish to be on God's good side.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:52:51,343 ]Or sharing history with God. Being God's partner in His history and action in the world. Yeah, they...

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:52:59,663 ]And it's terribly important. It's where we are. It's memory from day one to end of our days. It's our timeline and we keep studying it. If we're in some condition of shock, we lose some connection with the timeline. If we're hiding something, we repress what happened on the timeline. We conceal it, we hope nobody can see it. We're sorry to hear maybe God can still see it.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:53:40,033 ]But, you know, it's where the drama, the theater, the story, which is always chronological, of our lives is occurring. So, I consider the Jewish vocation of the greatest import in the human vocation. Now, it's certainly not the only store- not the only angle from which the divine can tell us about us and the divine, but it's indispensable. It is not to be erased as the author of Penelope's Bones wants to do. Sorry, erasure will not happen on my watch.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:30,633 ]Right. Right. Well, nor on mine.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:54:34,993 ]I believe you. Yeah. You know, and when you talk like that, there's a third party listening.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:43,773 ]Yes.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:54:44,573 ]We got a minute.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:45,493 ]Yes, it's a bit of a promise.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:54:47,943 ]Yeah.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:48,823 ]Not just to you but higher up.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:54:52,313 ]Yeah, it's a higher up promise. It's a vertical promise on the horizontal.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:54:58,433 ]Well, thank you, sweetheart. This has been very illuminating for me. I hope for somebody else as well. Or others as well.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:55:08,133 ]I thank you.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:55:11,493 ]You were a good friend as well as the man I love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:55:15,133 ]Yeah. Well, we're gonna stick together.

Dr. Abigail L Martin

[ 00:55:18,363 ]Okay. I guess that’s a promise.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:55:28,283 ]Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with Episode 1 of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted — God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher — available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I’ll see you next time.