Aug 16, 2017 | Theology
I recently saw this title to an article and it instantly got my attention. One of the great shortcomings of the modern Evangelical church is it’s lack of focus on the Old Testament. When I ask friends and family if they have read the Old Testament, all of it, I get hemming and hawing, and excuses. I’ll hear that it’s confusing, or hard to understand, or they imply it’s not really relevant to their faith. They are wrong on all counts. This points to a massive failure on the part of leaders in the Church. Commenting on a book about the dying Old Testament, the author of the piece confirms this:
[M]ost American Christians are relatively ignorant of basic truths about the Bible, particularly the Old Testament—and that trends in sermons and worship are contributing to the problem. For the most part, the Old Testament is ignored, and even when it isn’t, only a narrow selection of familiar texts are read, sung, or taught.
Why is this such a huge deal? Because without an understanding of the Old Testament we can’t understand Jesus! Our Lord himself rebuked his disciples after the resurrection with these words from Luke 24:
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
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Aug 13, 2017 | Theology
I bet those are two words you’ve likely never encountered in church before. What in the world do indicative and imperative have to do with Christianity? You won’t find the words in the Bible, but you will sure find what they represent, and if they get mixed up all kind of problems will creep into a Christian’s life. First let’s start with definitions, and we’ll do it in order because it matters very much which one comes first and which second in the Christian’s life.
Indicative: of, relating to, or constituting a verb form that represents the denoted act or state as an objective fact
Imperative: of, relating to, or constituting the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another, expressive of a command, entreaty, or exhortation
In short, the indicative states something that has happened, e.g., Jesus died for our sins, and the imperative exhorts us to do something, e.g., be holy. In Christianity the former always comes before the latter because the fundamental fact of Christianity is the gospel, the good news that we are saved apart from obedience to the law. If we let the indicative come first, the law for us becomes like an unpleasant drill sergeant.
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Aug 9, 2017 | Apologetics
Atheists are fond of accusing Christians of believing they can’t be moral or good just because they are atheists. Christians don’t believe this, and atheists can be moral or good, but that doesn’t keep them from saying it. Atheists can be as good and moral, or bad and evil as any other human being because they are made in God’s image and so capable of good, and are fallen sinners like the rest of us and so capable of evil. It seems, though, that even many atheists think atheists are immoral, according to a recent study. One headline on this study put it this way, “Atheists more likely to be seen as immoral, finds report.” The article chalked this up to “anti-atheist prejudice,” but it is only a valid, and inevitable, logical deduction, and not prejudice at all. According to the study, even more atheists believed this than not.
The reason people believe this?
The study found people ultimately viewed god as holding the power to be a moral buffer to deter immoral actions.
Maybe so, but thinking about the issue logically, if all we are is lucky dirt, why should we feel compelled to be moral? Why would any one piece of material reality, say a rock, be of any more moral value than another, say a human being? We all know intuitively that it’s wrong to torture babies for fun, but from a purely materialistic point of view (that the material is all there is) babies have no more moral value than the rock. If there is no standard outside of the material itself, then no standard can be appealed to for us to adjudicate the difference.
This is what is known as the moral argument for God’s existence. Where does the sense justice we all feel come from? If we think of the most heinous acts of evil, like the holocaust of the Jews by Nazi Germany in WWII, every normal non-sociopathic human being knows that such evil is absolutely wrong. We feel it viscerally: this wrong must some how be judged! But according to materialism, and thus atheism, those six million plus murdered Jews were just a bundle of atoms and molecules who for no reason at all just came to exist. So why would it be wrong to kill them all? If atheism is true, these people had no more value than six million rocks.
Of course, all rational people are repelled by such an assertion, as they should be. But this only highlights the logical poverty of atheism, and the logical power of theism. The former gives us no logical reason for moral values, the latter does. Oh, philosophers and thinkers through the ages have tried to get to morality from dirt, but they just can’t do it. You can’t get ought from is, no matter how hard you try. It seems that even many of those who hold a materialist worldview agree.
Aug 3, 2017 | Apologetics
I recently saw this headline at Real Clear Politics: “DNA Contradicts the Bible on Canaanites.” Of course I had to click on it. What I found, no surprise to me, was that DNA did no such thing.
For the last 150 plus years, skeptics have declared over and over again that that Bible has supposedly been disproved by one discovery or another. And over and over again the claims of the skeptics have been proved bogus. Such is the case with this latest DNA finding. The title on RCP site was blatantly false, and I e-mailed the editors to let them know. But the title of the actual piece is only slightly less deceiving: “DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites.” Whoever wrote this is obviously ignorant of what the Bible actually says, and that’s how lies spread in our modern popular culture, especially among those who automatically doubt the Bible’s authenticity. An accurate title would be, “DNA Confirms the Bible.” (more…)
Jul 31, 2017 | Theology
I guess this will be the last part of my little trilogy (previous two posts here and here) on the wages of sin, which Paul tells us is death. I made the claim that over the years my conviction of how we are saved has had a powerful impact on keeping our kids Christian. I previously explained the traditional Reformed tradition on soteriology (how we are saved), that we are actually spiritually dead in our sins, and that we unable to believe on the Lord Jesus until God does a supernatural work in our soul to raise us spiritually from the dead. This means that our salvation is not up to us, but to God. It is the unilateral work of our sovereign, Almighty God in Christ for us. He does not ask our permission. And thank God for that! Can you imagine if our salvation was ultimately up to us? As I argued in my last post, our sinful human nature compels us to run and hide from God, like Adam and Eve did, and the Scripture is clear that nobody seeks God.
Why is what I’ll call a God-centered perspective so powerfully persuasive to me, and to our kids? My impression of Christianity for the first six years of my faith journey was that the quality of my relationship with God was primarily dependent on what I did or didn’t do. In a positive thinking phase of my life I learned that, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me!” While certainly true in many areas of life, I’ve learned it most definitely is not true in my relationship to a holy God. Please note, though, the word “primarily.” The God-focused faith I was introduced into at 24 did not imply that what I did or didn’t do wasn’t important, or that my choices weren’t real. God’s sovereign work with human beings doesn’t destroy their nature, make of their freedom an illusion, or turn them into robots. What it does do, though, is put our confidence in the right place: him!
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