Apr 20, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
In the soon to be blockbuster best-seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I tell the story of “the clicker.” Yes, that clicker, more commonly known as the remote control. As you’ll read in the book, the clicker is a great tool for engaging popular culture with our children, and teaching them the incredible explanatory power of the Christian worldview. An example comes from a movie we recently watched called Conspiracy. This gut wrenching film dramatizes a day long conference that took place on January 20, 1942, where Nazi officials discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish question.” This solution was of course the attempt to murder all Jews in Germany, and it was hoped beyond. The cold, calculating demeanor of most of the participants as portrayed in the film is chilling. To figure out who would be included, they discussed blood percentages, parentage, and whether they were German citizens or not. The goal was complete extermination, and it was difficult at times to realize they were talking about human beings, not animals or something less. The clicker got a good workout.
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Apr 14, 2018 | Epistemology - Trust, Explanatory Power
According to the current secularist worldview the only sure epistemological foundation (basis for knowing) is science. At some point in the last hundred or so years through popular culture, education, and media, science replaced religion in the modern imagination as the governing authority of how we’re to run our lives. But something unexpected has happened on the way to the coronation of King Science.
It has long been been assumed by secular, educated Western cultural elites that growing scientific knowledge would one day make religion superfluous. Science would supposedly tell us everything we need to know, and once we knew everything God would no longer be necessary to explain what can’t be explained. Scientific knowledge, however, is increasingly leading us in just the opposite direction. On both the micro and macro level, from the tiniest nano particle, to the existence of the universe itself, the amazing explosion of scientific knowledge is leading to very uncomfortable, for the secularist, metaphysical questions.
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Apr 4, 2018 | Explanatory Power
A popular narrative in secular Western culture goes like this. There was a time called The Dark Ages when religion reigned in Western civilization, and all people were benighted, miserable, and poor. Then came a Renaissance when ancient literature and languages were rediscovered after religion had ruined everything. Once Western thinkers realized that reason was the highest form of attaining knowledge, religion and God were superfluous. This period of time was of course called The Enlightenment. During these years math and science made great strides in knowledge and discovery, and it was obvious to Western educated elites that religion’s days were numbered because math and science could tell us everything we need to know about reality.
The fundamental assumption of secular elites, and the narrative pushed in many overt and covert ways, has been that the more science advances, the less plausible religion becomes, and one day it will fade into irrelevance. Unfortunately for these elites that is proving, for them, to be uncomfortably wrong. In fact, the explosion of scientific knowledge has completely turned this secularist narrative on its head! Why? Because the fundamental assumption upon which their worldview is based is proving increasingly implausible and impossible to defend. That would be materialism.
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Mar 31, 2018 | Apologetics
The whole of Christianity and it’s validity rests on one simple historical event that we celebrate this Easter weekend, that Jesus of Nazareth was killed and came back to life.
As I immersed myself back into apologetics over that last eight or so years, I’ve learned that the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most well attested historical fact of the ancient world. There is more solid evidence for this having actually happened than that Cesar existed and was murdered by the Roman Senate, or that Alexander the Great conquered the known world of the time, or that Plato and Aristotle were real ancient Greek philosophers. Unless a person is a complete historical skeptic, the honest seeker will take this evidence seriously.
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Mar 28, 2018 | Theology
In my last post I began to look at an Old Testament take on sin, and it’s not a pretty picture. Until we understand the gravity of sin, and its horrific consequences in human existence, we’ll have a hard time understanding and accepting that God could be angry about it, and that wrath is an understandable response of a holy God. We can’t know this through human speculation, although we all know the anger against horrible injustice when we see or experience it. Multiply that anger by infinity because God is omniscient, and he knows the ultimate injustice of every act of rebellion against him, in thought, word, or deed. Where human speculation ends, we must depend on God’s revelation to us in Scripture to educate us about sin, and his attitude toward it.
This gravity struck me, powerfully, when reading through Exodus several years ago, and an event recounted in chapter 4. There are no accidental words in the Bible, no fluff; everything is there for a reason. The story is about Moses, and the Lord has commanded him to go back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh. This is a big deal, the beginning of the Exodus of God’s people from 400 years(!) of slavery, and a powerful metaphor God used over and over throughout redemptive history to point his people to his power to deliver them from the slavery of sin. Then we read these bizarre words:
24 At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. 26 So the Lord let him alone. (At that time she said “bridegroom of blood,” referring to circumcision.)
Seriously? The Lord is going to kill Moses? And he was fully ready to do it? The same Moses he just commissioned to go to Egypt to set his people free? It sure looks like it.
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