Mrs. B & The Cat

MRS. B & THE CAT HAVE A NEW LOCATION!

2007-01-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

Mrs. B & The Cat posts and comments are there, and much is new: Oikos mou

That's: http://fellowprisoner.wordpress.com

Choppers

2007-01-03T09:14:00.001-08:00

I wondered why helicopters were circling our house this morning. The last time so many circled for so long was the night the FBI found the tree stump the Beltway Sniper had used for target practice, in a backyard a few miles from our neighborhood. I was about to click on the News Tribune, but the answer was on my opening page, CNN: A shooting at our local high school, just blocks from our home. News choppers are everywhere, relaying images of police cars and school buses evacuating kids. This is all taking place within a four-minute walk from my house, but I have instant video newscasts.

Good morning, Tacoma.

Flavel on Adversity

2007-01-03T08:12:00.000-08:00

I thought these quotes vital as my body demanded rest from reading, writing, thinking, and any distraction from repelling the virus in occupation. They are from an Internet version of John Flavel: Keeping the Heart.

"Though God has reserved to himself a liberty of afflicting his people, yet he has tied up his own hands by promise never to take away his loving kindness from them. Can I contemplate this scripture with a repining, discontented spirit: 'I will be his Father, and he shall be my son: if he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of man, and with the stripes of the children of men nevertheless my mercy shall not depart away from him.' O my heart, my haughty heart! dost thou well to be discontent, when God has given thee the whole tree, with all the clusters of comfort growing on it, because he suffers the wind to blow down a few leaves? Christians have two kinds of goods, the goods of the throne and the goods of the footstool; immoveables and moveables. If God has secured those, never let my heart be troubled at the loss of these: indeed, if he had cut off his love or discovenanted my soul; I had reason to be cast down; but this he hath not done, nor can he do it."

"Let your mind be deeply impressed with an apprehension of the evil nature and effects of an unsubmissive and restless temper. It grieves the Spirit of God, and induces his departure. His gracious presence and influence are enjoyed only where peace and quiet submission prevail. The indulgence of such a temper gives the adversary an advantage. Satan is an angry and discontented spirit. He finds no rest but in restless hearts. He bestirs himself when the spirits are in commotion; sometimes he fills the heart with ungrateful and rebellious thoughts; sometimes he inflames the tongue with indecent language. Again, such a temper brings great guilt upon the conscience, unfits the soul for any duty, and dishonors the Christian name. O keep your heart, and let the power and excellence of your religion be chiefly manifested when you are brought into the greatest straits."

Bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter

2007-01-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! Psalm 133:1

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20

I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine....They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. John 17:9, 16

If anyone still thinks the Chief Executive of the United States is a Christian, perhaps he should have his irises scanned so he can be returned home safely in the event that he should wander off.

But really, the President is trying to be conciliatory. Unfortunately, he is attempting to do something illogical: to reconcile the irreconcilable.

When the President asserted that he was a "man of faith," my rhetoric-navigation sensors immediately bleeped. Which faith, exactly? Church attendance, lighting Kwanzaa candles, and serving up tasty Ramadan feasts on White House china have to make one wonder. A conciliatory answer was forthcoming at one point: Jesus is the man's favorite philosopher.

Christians should be quick to correct misunderstandings among themselves and restore peace, because it is the bond of Christ that is at stake. But there is absolutely no way that Christians can live in a state of conciliation with the world. They can live peaceably, but not conciliatorily.

The world is very conciliatory. The world vision (weird that a so-called Christian organization would choose that name for its brand; but then, it also owns a teen nightclub in downtown Tacoma) is that we should all worship each other's gods, celebrate each other's holidays, and just all get along. The vapid song, "It's a Small, Small World" pops up on a National Institutes of Health website.

The Church cannot reconcile to this vision. Peace at any price is the world's capital; it's good for business and maybe people will let each other live. The Christian cares about business and about life. But he knows, or should know, that conciliation to that which is irreconcilable opposes God, faith, and life.

Multi-faith tributes are the world's means of furthering its conciliatory vision. It is certainly natural that the United States would lead this egalitarian scheme of religious fairness. If Christianity is "honored" along with Islam and the completely farcical Kwanzaa, two antichrist agendas are formally validated, but Christianity is dishonored for want of exclusivity. It is Christ who is dishonored, lest we think of Christianity as a mere religious format separate from the moral law and actual presence of God.

Exclusivity and conflict are abominations to the world. Christianity is exclusive and as such it is irreconcilable with other religions. The Mars Hill mentality prevails: philosophy is so interesting, and new things are even more so. Christianity is not a philosophy, but the expression of the truth as the identity of God.

When a head of state attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable as a matter of policy, it is a confusion: it is a confounding of like and unlike together. This is the legacy of the religiously permissive state; it is a different legacy from what we would have enjoyed at the hands of a religiously exclusive state.

The multi-faith state is where we live and work, and it employs with the fruit of our labor the leaders for whom we pray. The next phase, after a multi-faith state, is likely a no-faith state. It's the only fair thing to do; if we can't all get along, no more religious privileges. That will be largely out of our control. But we still cannot reconcile faith with falsity.

No Ketones and Cookies and Rooibos

2007-01-01T16:16:00.000-08:00

The first of the year has been surprisingly survivable. The M80s and party noisemakers from the enclave above our neighborhood that heralded the jolly day seem to have jostled my cold from my throat to my head instead of my lungs, a favorable path. The day brightened further when His Preciousness The Cat tested negative for ketones this morning. This, coupled with fair insulin response, places him in the coveted "healthy diabetic" class. His morning glucose level was 140, which doesn't scoop breath from my lungs as forcefully as 355.

I sorted through fat and ancient files and liberated several inches of space in my desk's file cupboard, taking the fruits of my task to the fire pit and burning, with great satisfaction, the chunky stack of old medical bills, bank statements, and even a college philosophy journal and a graduate school paper on disability. How little I understood in those days I would not wish to have remembered.

For whatever reason, when the Cat's diabetes flares up, he will eat only Trader Joe's Tuna. Fancy Beast is on the outs until he is regulated. Yesterday my husband picked up 14 cans of TJ's Tuna and a plastic tub of their triple-ginger cookies. The nice thing about the tuna preference is that I will get to see my friend Drew and his parents at Trader Joe's after church. The other nice thing is the ginger snaps, a few of which I just enjoyed with a mug of orange-mango-vanilla rooibos. You can't treat a cold too well.

The Year of the Child: From Milk Carton to Iris Database

2007-01-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

I really do wear sunglasses that double as blast shields for a medical reason. There is also the social reason, of course, in gaining distance from people who might otherwise stare at my eyes. Why would they do that? They're just common blue eyes. But no eyes are common; every iris is unique.

Irises are as unique as fingerprints. Iris scan technology has been "out there" for quite a while, fueling the paranoia of Marco the Beast fans.

It's for the children. It always is. Iris scan technology is going to keep all the children from getting lost. Or if they do get lost, at least their identities can be ascertained if they're found.

Galveston, Texas, near Houston, will be scanning its childrens' eyes and establishing a database. Alzheimers patients will also be scanned so that if they escape, they can be returned to their proper places. The corporation producing the scanning technology and database systems of course hopes this will catch on nationwide. For the children.

I get lost a lot. When I was in China, I took off on walks expecting to get lost. The streets follow no grid pattern, I couldn't read any signs, and everything looked alike--dusty. I would carry a matchbook from my hotel and show it to some stranger when I was ready to go back, and the friendly person could read the name of the hotel and would lead me back there, grinning and bowing and treating me like a small dumb child. The Chinese are very friendly, helpful people, and enjoy helping lost Americans. They are also fascinated by blue eyes.

As a child I was lost a lot in the sense that I didn't always show up at home on time. My irises were unscanned and there were no databases back then. My mother called my friend's parents and I was promptly extradited to my home.

But now, with the epidemic of lost, stolen, or strayed children and runaway elderly, I can see why their unique iris prints belong in databases. And for this particular project in Galveston County, a child's iris prints will be expunged from the database when the child reaches 18, unless he or she is still missing.

Just think, the moment the baby opens his eyes onto the world, his irises will be scanned and entered into a database. It will be a touching moment. He won't ever have to choose whether to place Marco the Beast on his forehead or his hand--I think that's about paying homage to the world system with the mind and works anyway. He won't have to worry about Big Brother watching him. Big brother won't have to; he can just look into his eyes from a remote computer.

Think of it--we could be a carry-free society. No money, no credit cards, no ID--just go through the scanner. Blink into your computer screen and your bank pays your bills and taxes. No passport, no background or credit checks unless the iris scanner beeps. The windows of the soul would reveal all, to anyone with a scanner and the power to motivate submission to it.

Besides, lost children have dominated our milk cartons and income tax form books long enough. It's time to put them in a database and forget about them.

Same Time, Another Year

2006-12-31T15:32:00.000-08:00

One of the first Latin proverbs I learned in Miss Shade's ninth-grade Latin class was tempus fugit, time flies. For some reason I was just remembering this while at the same time transposing it in my mind: fugitive of time. Neither really has any logical meaning. Time is really the measurable advancement of material forces, and we mark it according to our perception. If it flies, this implies some velocity compared to another, but time itself is a steady constant--isn't it? The earth, the sun, the wind--things that move--give us our sense of time with objective, measurable phenomena. We're the ones flying, or fleeing: the fugitives of time. Time is just there, measuring the years, days, hours of my flight. At death, time will cease for me. Some measure of time will probably exist in the eternal state, but it will differ from what exists now. For now, I can't actually run out of time. But I can and do run out of patience. Impatience is measuring time to an extent that displaces all other purpose at hand.

I feel rather exceptionally crummy today. I have a bad sore throat and headache. When we came home from church, I called Urgent Care, the local excuse for a halfway emergency room, and asked if they were seeing a lot of sore throats. The receptionist said they were, in fact, seeing several strep cases, so we thought it a good idea to go in and have it checked. But the wait, which looked like it would last 40 minutes to an hour, was more tiring than my discomfort. One cute little kid was prancing and yelling while his parents, somewhere between junior high and high school age, encouraged him. Another cute little kid slept across his mother's lap, a barf pan close at hand. I decided I'd rather be home drinking green-ginger tea. I've survived untreated strep and several cases of untreatable mono; this is just another Thing.

This is by no means the most demanding health crisis of the day at our house. The sound tipped me off to the much greater one, the blood-curdling sound of the Cat drinking water: a little too much, a little too long. And he was saturating his litter box every couple of days. Once again, he has become a finicky eater. Once again, I am drawing blood, monitoring his glucose levels, administering insulin injections. The Cat has come out of healthy retirement and resumed his career as a diabetic.

But I had mentioned impatience and being a fugitive of time. Today's sermon prodded us to make our calling and election sure, and Pastor Lyon exposited Ezekiel 18:30-32. I gave up trying to locate a single mark of grace anywhere in evidence in myself. Two of the eight things Pastor Lyon listed that a natural man can do is plead with God and wait. I hope I have more patience with God than with the Urgent Care health provider I didn't wait to see. I don't fear the Urgent Care provider; I do fear the One who has the power to cast me into hell.

My God has a smiling face behind every frowning providence; what works to try me works to tend me. There is life for me in pain, and there is life for me in my Cat's flawed endocrine system. We rejoice in trial and in triumph, in want and in bounty. And when I really want to be pathetic, I can even be humored by some of Solomon's somewhat unsympathetic wisdom. For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. (Ecclesiastes 9:4)

The Postmillennial Enjoyment of the Present Reign of Christ: An Exercise in Psalm 100

2006-12-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

I believe in the present reign on earth, from heaven, of the Lord Jesus Christ. I do not await the second coming of Christ for him to assert his kingship. I will likely have been in his presence in heaven for some time when the second coming occurs. I will be awaiting that event for the blessed hope of glory, and the restoration of the perfect physicality of all creation. But I believe that Christ has already asserted his kingship and is presently reigning.

Luke 22:16, 18 points to Christ's statement that he will neither eat nor drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come. While none of the gospels specifically mention Jesus drinking the fruit of the vine after his resurrection, they do mention fish, bread and honeycomb (Luke 24:42-43; John 21:13, 15). We might assume they drank something, but this detail simply is not specifically provided. The fact that he did eat should be dispositive, but Luke is a little confounding with his use of "thereof," which seems to refer to the Passover. But eating the Passover after the Resurrection doesn't make sense. So I think it likely that simply eating after the Resurrection fulfills the condition of Luke 22:16 that the Kingdom of God has arrived. And if the Kingdom is here, the King is here.

The Psalms undergird my belief in the present reign of Christ. Psalms 93, 97, and 99 open with "The Lord reigneth." Psalm 96:10 invokes the people to "say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth." Psalm 96 makes a clear temporal distinction between the time of the Lord's reign (the present) and the time of judgment (the future). And Psalm 100, and many passages of Scripture, simply assumes the propriety of tribute to a reigning King in its invocation to worship the Lord.

Psalm 100

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands.

God would not have us do this absent joyful circumstances. Circumstances among men vary. The presence of the Lord is a joyful circumstance. Therefore, the Lord is present and reigning now.

Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

The Psalmist invokes people to serve the reigning King with joy and confidence. Service is a daily, fulltime duty, and I think it is meant to imply that we are called to more than formal timely worship. We are always in the presence of the Lord, though not materially, and should be glad and joyful in it, whatever our other duties and circumstances.

Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Our relationship to God is that of subjects to a King, and much more: the works of a Creator to their Creator. Our lives are at his disposal at all times. This is an ongoing, present-time condition.

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

Christ is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is God and Creator. He is no earthly king. In addition to glad perpetual service, he is due worship. This is his law and we are his subjects. We owe him endless thanks and blessing and praise, for our existence and perpetuity are all within his providence.

For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

We are called to serve a God who is good. He has shown everlasting mercy to his creation. His truth is his identity, and he never changes, has never changed, never will change. The God of Abraham is the God of Tom Lyon and the God of those of however many generations from now are on earth at the time Christ comes to end all things, judge the earth, raise the dead from all of time, and take his own to heaven to be with him in a new and inconceivable manifestation.

The Lord reigns.

The Pen Drawer

2006-12-29T06:36:00.000-08:00

I have a new annual tradition. I took a pen from my pen drawer and found that it didn't write, so I culled my pen drawer. I decided that it would be a good idea to undertake this exercise annually, as even unused pens exhibit unpredictable useful lives at inconvenient times.

Now, you might think I am utterly out of ideas, or spend too much time alone with the Cat, but this is not the case; I simply find things interesting that most people initially would not--like culling my pen drawer.

I do not collect pens. I don't collect anything, but I have more than I need of some things. I have more teapots than friends who drink tea, and more teacups than friends. I have five pairs of cat socks, but this is not entirely my fault; once some people see you wearing cat socks, they assume that you love cat socks, and they give you cat socks. It doesn't matter that you have a drawer full of cat socks. It's the same with teacups. But pens I admit to acquiring more pro-actively.

Of the 101 pens in my pen drawer, I discarded 31 because they no longer worked; 70 still work and I kept them. I also have 10 wooden pencils, sharp and ready to write, and four mechanical pencils, with lead. I think my husband's favorite thing to tell people about me is that I do our taxes with a pencil and send a smudge-proof Xerox copy to the IRS.

I bought none of the 101 pens in the drawer. Only one, a Pelikan fountain pen, was bought for me as a gift. All the others represent individual members of that vast set of objects in the world known as free pens.

Except for the fountain pen, most of the working pens were very cheaply made. For some reason, it is the nicer ones that tend to die in the nib prematurely. The nicest of the dead free pens was, I'm sorry to say, from Western Reformed Seminary. It has a red light that comes on when clicked, but it doesn't write: all light, no write. The functional pens came from a variety of sources, and it was fun, even sentimental, going through them.

I have a habit of picking up free pens wherever they are proffered. I also have pens that came in the mail with my name or my husband's, from hopeful promoters who anticipated that we might order hundreds of pens. I have pens from hotels at which I have attended conferences over the last 20 years; a clutch of erasable pens with which I took the Bar exam in 1994; pens from hairdressers over the years, like Gigi. Gigi and her two partners were in business together almost 30 years when they lost their lease to a strip-mall developer, and they wound up going separate ways. I have pens from banks that no longer exist. I have pens from guys who repaired my car, installed our air conditioning system, even one from Harrah's, although I've never been there. Many pens outlast the advertiser whose name is imprinted on the barrel. Issuing pens with your name on them is no guarantee of immortality.

The Bar Association used to host an Expo for hopeful vendors. One vendor gave away tote bags, and I always took one of those to haul my free pens, post-it notes, staplers, mugs, and like trove. The best pens from that lot are from Birnie's Notaries. Another prime source of pens is my doctor, who gets the pens from pharmaceutical reps. Some of the worst drugs have their names on some of the best pens.

One pen has some fascinating information printed on it: King County Soils issued a free pen with a transparent Lucite cylinder in which some dirt is sealed. The barrel informs those who acquire these memorable pens that there is life in dirt, 4 billion lives in a teaspoon of dirt, to be exact.

The irony of having 70 working pens is that I don't use them. This, of course, is why they still work. Almost everything I used to do with a pen I now do with the computer, except our taxes, which, of course, I do with a pencil. I still scrawl things on paper to remember them or have them where I will see them without opening my computer.

And so, I have decided on a collateral resolution. I will no longer pick up a free pen just because it is there for the taking. I will not pick up one more pen until every last nib in the pen drawer is dry. But I expect there might be some extenuating circumstances that hinder my resolve.

Richard Sibbs on Comforting Others

2006-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

That we may be able to comfort others, let us,

(1.) Be ready to take notice of the grievance of others; as Moses went to see the afflictions of his brethren, and when he saw it, laid it to heart, Ex. iv. 31. It is a good way to go to 'the house of mourning,'Eccles. vii. 2, and not to balk and decline our Christian brethren in adversity. God ' knows our souls in adversity, Ps. xxxi. 7 ; so should we do the souls of others, if they be knit to us in any bond of kindred, or nature, or neighbourhood, or the like. That bond should provoke us; for bonds are as the veins and arteries to derive comfort. All bonds are to derive good, whether bonds of neighbourhood, or acquaintance, etc. A man should think with himself, I have this bond to do my neighbour good. It is God's providence that I should be acquainted with him, and do that to him that I cannot do to a stranger. Let us consider all bonds, and let this work upon us: let us consider their grievance is a bond to tie us.

(2.) And withal let us labour to put upon us the bowels of a father and mother, tender bowels, as God puts upon him bowels of compassion towards us. So St Paul, being an excellent comforter of others, in 1 Thess. ii. 7, he shews there how he carried himself as a father, or mother, or nurse to them. Those that will comfort others, they must put upon them the affections of tender creatures as may be. They must be patient, they must be tenderly affected, they must have love, they must have the graces of communion.

What be the graces of communion? The graces of Christian communion to fit us in the communion of saints to do good, they are a loving, meek, patient spirit. Love makes patient. As we see mothers and nurses, what can they not endure of their children, because they love them? And they must be likewise wise and furnished. They that will comfort others must get wisdom and ability. They must get humility, they must abase themselves that they may be comfortable to others, and not stand upon terms. These be the graces of communion that fit us for the communion of saints.

....It is a special goodness of God, that everything should tend to our good. Thus all things are for us. The sufferings of others tend to increase our comfort, and the comfort of others is for our comfort. There is such a sweet prudence in directing us to heaven, that God makes everything help ; not only our own troubles that we suffer ourselves, but he doth sweetly turn the troubles of others, and the comforts of others to our good.

This excerpt is from, "An Exposition of 2nd Corinthians Chapter One Verse Four," from The Works of Richard Sibbs, Edited by: Alexander B. Grosart, The Banner of Truth Trust. The full text may be found here.

And for seasons, and for days, and years

2006-12-27T06:49:00.000-08:00

Everywhere, people, corporations, and media pundits are presenting annual reports and year-end summaries of their worlds in brief. My own year has been far too interesting and full of adventures and change to begin to summarize in a brief report. But I'll try.

We acquired five, two-day-old buff Plymouth Rock hen chicks on March 15. On August 12, the one called Havilah laid the flock's first egg. They've grown into the best-looking blondes on our block.

The Cat was diagnosed with diabetes in May. I dedicated eight days to pricking his ears to check his blood glucose around the clock and measuring and administering insulin shots; his diabetes resolved completely in that time with a change in diet. He then progressed rapidly into hepatic lipidosis and received a life-saving feeding tube. For the next nine weeks, my days revolved around his bellysnacks, or tube feeding. Mostly, they revolved around keeping his tube in place despite his determination to remove it. After a few ER trips to re-insert the tube, I resorted to duct taping it down after each feeding. Thankfully, he recovered, and is now suspiciously healthy, plotting his next scheme to derail life as I prefer it.

Rachel and Nathan were married in July, a very happy thing indeed.

In late August my husband persuaded me that I should have a "blog," whatever that was. I had been wondering whether and how God might impel me to write again. And so, ending a seven-year sabbath as a recovering wordsmith, my blog became a daily discipline. I thought it might also be a way for my pastor to know I really was listening, even though I look pretty zoned out on Lord's day mornings. I launched my blog as Board Housewife & The Cat on August 28. Due to an unexpected incidence of pun-blindness in the population, I changed the title to Mrs. B & The Cat. This is my 154th post.

One blog leads to another, and I began visiting the blogs of missionaries Ruben and Heidi and their three-legged dog Zack, who wrote a Christian romance novel this year. From my experience, it is as good as anything of its genre. Ruben and Heidi and Zack became very special online friends of mine and my husband's, and we aspire somehow to actually meet them at some point when they come to the States. We would love to see them in Mexico, but the Cat has yet to clear us for travel.

Christmas came with a three-day weekend this year; it will not again until 2009 and then not again until 2017. Christmas day was a huge deal for us. My husband pruned our apple trees while a cat we'd never seen before performed some antics for him, moving toward the chicken coop. The chickens, safe in their fenced coop, batted their wings at the cat with impressive ferocity, and the little black creature retreated to the heights of our plum tree. If he's still there, he's been quiet. We walked along the waterfront and mused at the new lows in designer-gene dogs. Some of these were barely four inches off the ground.

As I was about to heat my herb-filled pillow that helps me sleep, our microwave groaned its last on Christmas night, making an absolutely horrible sound and emitting an aroma of burnt transformer insulation flesh. This required my brave husband to face the after-Christmas crowds alone on an unanticipated microwave quest.

And I learned more than I ever aspired to know about Kwanzaa from The Concerned Citizen. You probably should, too.

The Purpose-Driven Car

2006-12-26T06:42:00.000-08:00

I have a rule that I will not, no matter how egregious, flame any pastor of any church on my blog. This is a good rule, and I stand by it now. However, I will briefly comment on a non-pastoral activity by a very well known pastor. I will not comment on this man's work in or writings from his own pulpit, because I have never heard or read his work. These observations concern only his work outside his church, in his capacity as a sales vehicle for Chrysler.

Rick Warren and Better Homes & Gardens, together in one magazine advertising spectacular, are enticing you to find the 2007 Chrysler Sebring "inspiring." "Did you know that you can find inspiration in a car?" reads the ad opposite a little head shot of Rick Warren.

The ad acknowledges that some people find inspiration connecting with others, in reading books, or spending time with their families. But the ultimate inspiration would be winning this swell "ultimate weekend of inspired living" and getting to meet Rick Warren.

Yes, if you enter the contest, you could win a fabulous prize, including a "meet and greet" with Rick Warren himself at a nice restaurant in Los Angeles. Or, you could win some Rick Warren Purpose-Driven books. Other inspiring prizes include a day at a spa or a trip to Des Moines, Iowa, to visit Better Homes & Gardens Headquarters.

I think if I won any of those prizes, I'd need 40 days off.

2006-12-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

From a poem Heidi wrote...

Oh God, I am not poor enough to be Your child,

Cannot attain in all my pride to so much poverty

Been Kind of a Year

2006-12-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

Leaning into his will

2006-12-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

It seemed as though we were steering a fairly placid course this year in the City of Destiny (Tacoma's actual official nickname, though I usually metathesize it to City of Density); then, suddenly, we hit some whitewater. We tacked back and forth between frustration, activation, decision, waiting. We knew the outcome was in God's hands, and we leaned into his will. Nanny City was at the gates of our backyard. I feared she would come armed with clubs under color of law.

Nanny is considering an ordinance that could cause us to forfeit our chickens. We are in full compliance with long held land use laws. But the newspaper published rumblings that Nanny wants to change all that.

Now, unlike Woody Allen, we don't need the eggs. But our Plymouth Rock hens and their beautiful brown eggs delight us. Our quiet, confined, unobtrusive hens are good neighbors and a joy to our visitors.

We spend more to maintain our hens, especially in winter when they molt and lay few eggs, than we would ever save on eggs. They are a luxury, a delight to the senses. There is a primal joy in seeing handsome birds in our own yard: big, funny, friendly birds who relish table scraps and sing to us when we approach their coop.

Some people have roosters, and roosters make noise. We have no rooster. It amazes me how few people are aware that chickens can lay perfectly good, unfertilized eggs, without the companionship of a rooster. Public education has failed us bigtime.

I hear barking dogs, coyotes, gas leaf blowers, gas scooters, and deep-boom outdoor stereo speakers, and am made to understand that's life in the city. Chickens, despite their longstanding status as city dwellers, evidently are not.

We write letters, we consider options, we speculate on outcomes. We won't break the law. We dislike upheaval, and we dislike forfeiture. We lean harder into God's will.

Would we give up our birds? If necessary. Would we move? If necessary. We live in a city that has traditionally preserved the diversity of flyover country and urban values. It's worked, but conflict is inevitable, as each side sees the other as precluding their idea of and motives for living here.

Of course we hope the proposed livestock ban is withdrawn or defeated, or at least that hens are excepted. I've lived too long, and have owned too much property, to be told I have to give up a few chickens. It's like having a mall go up in front of your ocean view. My enjoyment of my property would not be the same.

The phone rings. The call is from a city councilman, responding to my email from earlier the same day. Not to worry: the newspaper story and the proposed ordinance were way beyond what he was trying to accomplish, which was simply to enforce existing nuisance laws. We are in accord. He will send me the new draft and keep me informed.

I have a trophy of grace in my hand. I have been competent: at once formidable, meek, and courteous, and have gained the boon of peace. Until the next wind upends our little barque.

Robots, Rights, and Consciousness

2006-12-21T06:55:00.000-08:00

Here is another item for the "End of the World As We Know It" file. Actually, it is only the beginning. If nothing else makes sense because language has been so confounded, why should we wonder why anyone is concerned about the rights of robots?

Robots are approaching the status of conscious beings, and whoever the usual suspects are, these people are preparing drafts of appropriate rights for these machines. The rights are similar to what we know as "human rights." It should not be surprising that those spearheading the effort are from the land of Locke, viz, this Financial Times report from the UK.

From this quote from the above article, it would seem that rights-for-robots advocates would let the robots dictate policy concerning their rights:

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

So, the first question is, are robots conscious? The next question is, if robots are conscious, does this mean they should have whatever they want, including what are regarded by some as fundamental human rights?

Webster's New International Dictionary (1928) assigns several meanings to "conscious." 1. Sharing knowledge; aware of that of which another is aware. 2. Aware or sensible of an inward state or outward fact. 3. Possessed with a sense of guilt; inwardly aware of fault. 4. Unduly or uncomfortably conscious of one's own personality, esp. as subject to the observation of others; self-conscious. 5. Mentally awake; psychically active or acute. 6. Deliberate, intentional. 7. Endowed with consciousness; possessing mental life, or psychical attributes. 8. Of the nature of consciousness. 9. Involving consciousness of something, as guilt or happiness.

Unfortunately, the components of these definitions require definitions within definitions, and are ultimately given to subjective interpretation. Perhaps there are machines, made by men or by other machines, that would fall into several of the categories of consciousness as defined by the dictionary. But if consciousness refers to the self-aware mind that is aware of its creator, the mind created by God in his own image, then no machine can possess consciousness.

God assigned to man dominion over the rest of creation. It was Satan in the Garden of Eden who attempted to grant a right to man that God had withheld from him for his own good purpose. A created being usurped the authority of its creator, and the Fall resulted, plunging the world into sin until God shall end what we call time.

These robot-rights people are talking about giving your computer the right to sue you for assault if you pound the keyboard in frustration. Maybe they're just scribbling at the drawing board for now, but once the idea is out, manifestation is inevitable. Much learning has made them mad.

I'm sorry, but robots are machines. Sin makes people stupid, but it would be really stupid to succumb to the fabricated notion that fabricated machines are conscious entities.

To resolve this question, I'd propose a simple test: Does sin make robots stupid?

An Acquired Taste

2006-12-20T06:45:00.000-08:00

Writing an autobiography is not something I would ever be called to do: I'm not interesting, and no one who knows me would care to read it, nor would anyone who doesn't. But if I were to write one, I'd likely title it, An Acquired Taste. I realize that describes me, especially in my capacity as a dental patient.

Dental X-rays are one of the simplest things in the world to do, because the patient does nothing but open wide, chomp, and grin. But there are objects involved, and due to a spin-off of my claustrophobia, I push them away when they approach my face. I don't mean to, but I can't restrain the impulse any more than I would discipline myself against ducking a meteorite.

I go to a terrific dentist who employs terrific hygienists. The one who lost the coin toss got me. She is infinitely patient. I think she takes something after I leave to forget I was there, because this time she asked me if I would be going to Calvary Chapel for Mass for Christmas--and was astonished when I said, "Wrong on three counts."

My hygienist is very resourceful. To relax me, she gave my hands a salon-quality hot paraffin treatment, wrapping them in plastic and then in huge terry cloth mittens. She covered me with a blanket and tucked my mitted hands beneath it. Unfortunately, this did not prevent me from preventing the X-ray film holder from approaching my face. I didn't damage it when I pushed it, but she removed my lead apron and closed her cupboard and cheerfully said that the X-rays could wait until my next visit. I hope this doesn't mean she is moving to Oklahoma in the next six months.

I am always encouraged to learn that someone I admire, a theologian or any other Christian, has or had a difficult personality. We acquired tastes, whether peers or whether we span two millennia of generations, need to stick together. My sanctification schedule evidently is not going to enable my emulation of Susannah Edwards, but Kate Von Bora Luther might qualify as an acquired taste. I admire her.

However, the people I admire most are not difficult; they are actually humble in that they do not appear to think they are important. I don't think I think I'm important, but what else could I be thinking if I act as if the environment needs to change because I can't possibly adjust?

I realize that spiritual calibration to life's little slaughterings, like dental X-rays, is essential. God sanctifies through his word and by his grace; we can't rush the process, but can ask for help. It's too stupid to go through life punching X-ray film holders. I've seen worse, but I don't want to be worse.

Rather, I would ask that I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way....A froward heart shall depart from me.... (Psalm 101: 2, 4)

Siloam

2006-12-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.
And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things?
I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?
I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Luke 13:1-5

This lesson on the tower of Siloam has been on my mind lately. The storm Puget Sound has just sustained left no one untouched by someone's discommodity, if not their own. Some experienced not even a flicker of their lights; others have been without electricity and water for days. Some experienced no disruption to their own routines but accommodated others; others are homeless, reeling from the sense of having barely escaped death, splintered trees lying atop their interior furnishings.

City people don't expect this. Some regard payment of their taxes and utility bills as sufficient disaster preparedness. But there are, as they say in the legal and insurance industries, "intervening causes."

Nothing seems as randomly distributed as storm damage. The untouched are not smarter, better people. Their prayers are not more or less faithful than those of people who lose property, homes, or their lives. The secret counsel of God's will is not disclosed in these situations: Snoqualmie, Washington was not under judgment more than downtown Seattle because its power grid was logistically less convenient to restore to safe operation.

Only the fact of God's sovereignty is brandished in extraordinary events, and only to those who see it in normal routine life as well. In other words, what we apprehend of God's will in normal routine life is what we will apprehend under extraordinary circumstances.

Matthew Henry observes that the tower of Siloam was built for protection, and resulted in destruction. The tower probably fell into the pool below, where debilitated people waited to be placed in the healing waters. Some of those people were probably those who died in this frightful event. But all men are under judgment for sin; all are appointed to die. The Lord is saying that those who died by the falling tower died for no greater sins than those who died by any other means, natural or extraordinarily terrible. All of these things are appointed by God, and all men are responsible to repent their own sin. We are not to judge others' sin by their providentially appointed circumstances.

Following the tsunami that took hundreds of thousands of lives in south Asia, and again following the storm that caused destruction and took life in Puget Sound last week, Pastor Lyon selected the one hundred fifteenth Psalm to be read or sung in the following service. We are called to remember that our God is in the heavens, and he doth what pleases him. While some religious leaders are frenzied trying to persuade their congregations that it's still worth coming to church--God won't abandon them if they only pray hard enough, give enough money, send enough blankets to Pakistan--we of the Reformed faith are at relative spiritual ease, knowing that God is sovereign and just and holy; that the law of the Lord is perfect, that his judgments are just and he does what he will. We are theologically equipped to weather the storm, which goes toward equipping ourselves to prepare in other ways, as well. This includes prayer and provision for brethren in need.

Any human preparation for the exigencies of life can be thwarted. Ultimately, we require a theology that glorifies God for who he is. God doesn't change with our experience of prosperity or trial. I do, which is one of a million or so ways I know I'm on the slow track of sanctification. But God doesn't change.

Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Psalm 90:15

The Climbers

2006-12-18T07:45:00.000-08:00

Update: I wrote the post below before reading a new story that just hit the wire, referring to the "intense religious faith" of the families of the lost Mt. Hood climbers. This may not be the first mention of any beliefs, but it is the first I've seen:

Family members had relied on intense religious faith along with confidence that the extensive mountaineering experience of the trio would save them from a week of blizzard storms and single-digit temperatures that kept search teams and helicopters at bay.--Yahoo! News, 12/18/06, 7:16 a.m.

I can tell from the automated ads and the clicks from my pop-up blocker when I'm reading a news story that advertisers think the whole world is reading. So I know I was keeping up with cnn.com coverage of the three lost Mt. Hood climbers along with many millions of other people. I wonder what all those people were thinking. I wonder what everyone involved with this episode has been thinking.

Pastor Lyon said Sunday that, since theology does discipline all of life, it is important to have the best theology. I certainly hope that for these suffering families, God, as revealed in his Word and interpreted by the best theology, is their mighty fortress.

What I'm seeing--and there could be much more on TV that I am not seeing--is that everyone close to the climbers thought their strength and ability could get them through anything. The individual who was quiet on the strength and ability line was actually the spokesman for the climbers' families, Frank James, brother of climber Kelly James. Frank James is president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida.

Again, I could be missing much more not having a TV, or reading more extensive coverage in a newspaper. Everything I know about what's going on in the world comes through a 12-inch laptop screen, and I don't spend much time on the news.

I certainly do not wish to cast aspersions on anyone's handling of anguish as immense as that which these climbers' families are enduring. The families have appeared well adapted to the presence of the press and public scrutiny of their emotions. Their optimism has been unflagging; their confidence in their mens' strength and ability has been unwavering, their conviction of the rescue effort's success has been remarkable.

I've been reading accounts from various Internet news sources, and have yet to see God mentioned. I have seen Frank James lead the family in a prayer. I have heard no public proclamation of God's sovereignty, or invocations of his mercy, or of the climbers' need of Gods' strength and mercy. There was the challenge of the mountain, the strength of the climbers; nothing of the glory of God.

Now, these climbers and their families could as easily have been men after God's own heart. We know from the lesson of the Tower of Siloam that God's will as to who dies and when and how is known unto God alone, and operates beyond the reckoning of man. I am certainly not implying that they perished for lack of faith or for want of public proclamation of faith by their families. I am just saying it is too bad there has been no public proclamation of the sovereignty of God, particularly given the position of the family spokesman. I have no doubt he has reasons for this; I just find it too bad that the strength and ability of the men are getting all the ink.

Rescuers recovered the body of Kelly James from a snow cave Sunday. The finality of death is settling in. Strength and ability are over.

God doesn't need press agents. Christians are commanded to proclaim the gospel in and out of season because Jesus Christ is the only name under heaven by which a man may be saved. I know I've blown a lot of opportunities. If CNN were camped at my door, I'd probably throw up into the microphone. But this was a big deal. The Air Force and National Guard and scores of mountain rescue people were out. There were Blackhawks and unmanned heat-sensing planes. There has been a tremendous show of strength and ability versus the elements. And I haven't seen the word, "God" once in any of the coverage.

This is just a thought. It may not apply to the climbers' situation at all; I'm thinking it generally. Again, I have no idea as to the beliefs of these families because the subject hasn't been on my screen. It is a political campaign tactic for a candidate not to mention the name of his opponent. To mention the opponent's name is to recognize him and increase his strength by making him more publicly visible. Perhaps, when man worships his own strength, he considers God his opponent. To mention God would be to give him power and recognition that the strength worshipper so desperately wishes to deny...as if his recognition could give God anything.

(By the way, I'd like to thank Pastor Robert Anderson for encouraging Tom Lyon to hang up his climbing ropes.)

Notes from Gordon Clark: The Johannine Logos

2006-12-18T06:58:00.000-08:00

Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. John 8:51

Head people can take heart in Gordon Clark. In this small, pithy volume, Dr. Clark considers the use of the word logos throughout the Gospel of John, as he discusses the intellection of faith and sanctification.

Clark reclaims the heart from the romanticists and post-Kantian experimentalists, and restores it to the mind; for the ancients understood the heart to be the center of understanding, the precursor to intellectual assent.

Clark holds with Augustine, citing the proto-Reformer's doctrine in De Praedestinatione Sanctorum (2,5): "To believe is to think with assent." Clark sets forth an apologetic in support of this axiom throughout his 120-page, tightly-packed, and well sequenced book, The Johannine Logos.

Logos, Clark observes, means doctrine," "logic," "word," "saying," "proposition," and "theology," among other concrete notions to be grasped with the mind. "Logos" is not an abstraction, but a factual proposition. Rheema is the Greek word for "word," which can stand as any word, without extended factual content.

Hope is an intellectual function. As Clark says,

But what is hope other than assent to and belief in certain propositions? Hope is the belief that God will receive me on the judgment day through the merits of Christ. Hope therefore is assent. (p. 119)

Jesus Christ was the Logos, the Word, the bringer of truth, the truth itself. Sanctification, a work of God's grace, deepens the understanding of the truth of the regenerated believer. Thus Clark posits, "it is knowledge of and assent to the Bible that advances the Christian life." (p. 120) There is no sentimental feeling or experience that can bring about this knowledge and assent. We can assent to, and thus believe and hope in, facts alone.

We cannot have faith in our "hearts," unless we affirm the factual propositions of the Bible with our minds. Clark concludes,

Men are rational or intellectual beings because God created them in his image. To contemn truth and to embrace the irrationalities of mystic theology--which cannot in truth be theo-logia at all--is to contemn God. (p. 121)

Road Trip: Puyallup

2006-12-16T17:37:00.000-08:00

Our animals motivate most of our major outings these days, as car travel is uncomfortable for me. Last summer I was a frequent traveler to the Cat's internist. The chickens go through a carload of white pine shavings and poultry provender about every six weeks, providing an opportunity for a road trip to the farm store.

Saturday we drove to Del's Farm Supply, a ride that took us through the soggy farmlands of Puyallup (pronounced, "pew-allup"). The name "Puyallup" is named for an Indian tribe, as well as a river of the same name, and means "generous people," for the Puyallups were known as fair traders.

Del's was busy with people picking up straw bales, feed, and seemingly just hanging out. No one was talking about any storm damage or power outages--these people would not be without generators, and they're used to weather making work. Half an hour from urban Tacoma, there is still true rural life.

We stopped at Watson's Nursery & Greenhouse for caramel apple pie and tea at their Flower Pot Tea Room on the way home, and then at Faith Dairy, hoping to catch our friends Sid and Cheryl, who own the dairy. We found Sid and his son removing their basement carpet, which storm flooding had destroyed. In high spirits, we discussed the sovereignty of God and the Tower of Siloam, and the good will God has shown to us all.

Our Adventurous Morning

2006-12-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

Some of you who do not live in the Puget Sound region may have noticed that I did not have a new post up on my blog early this morning. Our power, and that of our ISP, joined 100,000 other Tacoma Public Utilities customers, and went down in the wee hours of the morning. Our region, as you likely know from the national news, has just been through its worst windstorm in 25 years.

We remained quite comfortable through it all. We have a propane heater, kerosene lamps, and a propane stove (and fuel!). My husband boiled a pot of water outdoors on the propane stove, and I made a big pot of tea, which stayed hot for better than three hours under a thick Irish tea cozy. When daylight came, I read my Bible in the greenhouse, warmed by the propane stove. My resourceful husband got our generator working, which involved clearing a clogged fuel line and taking the carburator apart. Tom is right: the instructions for this procedure are not in the Bible, but Vic had them in his repertoir of ranch tradition. I listened to a beautiful Albioni oboe sonata on my Walkman radio to drown the noise of the loud, mid-1990s generator while I read in the greenhouse. We soon had our pellet stove going for indoor warmth, and the refrigerator and freezer were functioning. Our wireless internet router was powered, but our internet provider was still down. I even had a high-intensity reading lamp. I was about to grill steak and eggs alfresco when the power came back on. My first thought was, "I was born to this"--"this" meaning, "the indoor life full of amenities." Hot water. Indoor heat. Cooking indoors. Artificial light at night. I'm such a wuss.

Recalling Houston

2006-12-15T10:45:00.000-08:00

And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead. Exodus 12:30

For the final months that I lived in Houston, I worked for the Texas Department of Health in a VD epidemiology unit affectionately known as the Clap Club. That was back when the worst thing a health worker could get from a needle was stuck.

I have absolutely no doubt that a lot of people I encountered in those days are now dead.

Because of the way my brain sometimes works, I was thinking about Houston while reading Exodus 12. God delivered the Israelites from Egypt and left a wake of death behind them. We don't know the exact toll, but the first born of every household and their livestock had to be horrendous.

When I left Houston in 1979, the CDC estimated that one-third of the city's male population had been infected with an STD at one time or another. That was when penicillin was curative. New diseases hit the radar, medical developments eventually meet the challenge, but reprobate behavior never changes without supernatural intervention.

I've lived in several places since then, but Houston reminds me the most of Egypt. I don't know why it should; sin is sin, everywhere you go. Maybe Houston had more neighbors with gold earrings.

Wherever we hail from, Christians are part of the remnant delivered from the City of Destruction. God redeemed to himself a particular people, for whose sin Christ's death atoned. And we marvel constantly at how few people understand that. The philosophy-enchanted world thrills to its jollity as a substitute for eternal life in the joy of its Lord. Prayer is everywhere, but there is no peace.

Everywhere, man knows that because he is a sinner, he is at enmity with God. Man's sense of enmity with God is the source of all his terror, all his unrest, all his misery. It is ineradicable and universal. It must abide so long as man knows he is a sinner. But so long as it abides, he cannot be other than miserable.--B. B. Warfield, "Peace With God," in: Faith and Life, Banner of Truth, p. 333

Tumbling in the Billows of Repentance

2006-12-14T07:08:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, we never cease to cut ourselves off from you by our sins, and yet you gently urge us to repentance, and promise also to hear our prayer with favor. Grant we may not stubbornly keep in our sins and be ungrateful to your great generosity, but may return to you in such a way as to witness by our lives to the genuineness of our repentance, and may so rest in you alone as to resist being buffeted hither and thither by the perverse lust of our flesh. Rather, grant we may stand firm and fast in a right purpose and so endeavour to obey you throughout our lives, at last receiving the fruit of our obedience in your heavenly kingdom through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.--John Calvin (source: Covenant Theological Seminary course in Calvin's Institutes by Dr. David Calhoun)

Reading Psalm 84 this morning I was struck with grateful amazement at the magnitude of God's grace: that I am blessed to dwell in his house, that he will give grace and glory, that he will withhold no good thing from them that walk uprightly. But I don't walk uprightly. And so he urges me to repent, a grace that leads to glory.

There are conditions. John Owen has a most wonderful way of challenging the assumption of grace, just as he has a wonderful way of providing assurance of grace. In a sermon short-titled "The Design of Impendent Judgments" (Banner of Truth, VIII.636), he lists these requirements for repentance:

A real conviction of sin
A real sense of God's displeasure, and the approach
of desolating judgments
Real reformation, in an abstinence from all known
sin, and the avowed fruits of a reformed conversation

Accordingly, true repentance, says Owen, means:

Unless these abide and dwell in our minds,--unless they accompany us continually in all our ways and occasions,--rise and lie down with us,--we shall not cordially engage in this duty (loc. cit.).

Chapter 15 of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith deals with "Repentance Unto Life and Salvation." Paragraph 2 reads,

Whereas there is none that doth good and sinneth not, and the best of men may, through the power and deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them, with the prevalency of temptation, fall into great sins and provocations; God hath, in the covenant of grace, mercifully provided that believers so sinning and falling be renewed through repentance unto salvation.

Paragraph 5 sets forth the rationale of the necessity of repentance:

Such is the provision which God hath made through Christ in the covenant of grace for the preservation of believers unto salvation, that although there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation, yet there is no sin so great that it shall bring damnation on them that repent, which makes the constant preaching of repentance necessary.

"The constant preaching of repentance" brings something else to my mind. If you do not have a copy of a Reformed confession handy, I submit that it is likely that you also are not hearing the constant preaching of repentance. The modern antinomian church wants you to have a lot more fun than that. But that is not necessarily the best thing for your soul's growth in grace. I did not hear the constant preaching of repentance until God moved us to a Reformed church.

I know that when I am withholding necessary repentance, I am out of sorts with God and thus with myself and everything else. The Christian's objective in life is union with Christ; we can't enjoy this blessing without repentance. "[N]one of the blessings bestowed by the Father, however much the gratuitousness appears, are apart from Christ nor are they enjoyed except in union with him." (John Murray: The Epistle to the Romans, Eerdmans, p. 238)

[R]epent ye, and believe the gospel (Mark 1:15) tells me these two actions form one command. If I am unable to repent, I might be deceived about believing the gospel. If the constant preaching of repentance is necessary to repentance--and the Puritans say it is and I believe them--then placing oneself under such preaching becomes a gospel imperative.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. Deuteronomy 8:2

Strangers to Life

2006-12-13T06:33:00.000-08:00

Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted. Psalm 25:16

Not to worry; I peruse all kinds of statistics out of pure, weird fascination. This is a bit of R&R: research and reflection.

My husband and I both have had suicides in our families of origin. One of his colleagues took her life this year. Suicide has affected the lives of many of our friends. Three of my daughter's classmates committed suicide in high school. One of my best friends from high school took her life while a graduate student.

The news always drains as though it had its own, numbing physicality, as if the long unexpressed despair of the dead needed a landing place for one final split second.

Center for Disease Control statistics reveal that the oft-cited higher prevalence of inter-holiday winter suicides is anecdotal; they actually occur most frequently in the spring, and least frequently in winter. Springtime, when a young man's fancy turns to disappointment…but women are three times more prone than men. And 73% of suicides by adults over age 65 will use firearms to end their lives.

The CDC cites "cultural and religious beliefs that discourage suicide and support self-preservation instincts" as a "protective factor" against suicide. I'm trying to figure out what exactly can support instinctive behavior, but this isn't that obscure as gov-speak goes.

I agree that religious beliefs may be conducive to self-preservation, but only if those beliefs consist in faith in the saving power of the holy, sovereign, just God of the Bible who requires of his people obedience to his moral law. All other religious beliefs, including the professed absence of religious belief, are affirmatively conducive to suicide.

One cultural cliché about suicide is that it is a final act of autonomy. That's a reasonable explanation from purveyors of free will doctrines. Saul was an autonomous sort; he worried more about what would happen to him in the hands of the Philistines than about death. He forgot to hope in God's keeping providence; God had turned from him. Matthew Henry provides a quaint turn of phrase describing Saul's falling on his sword:

"with a shaking hand and an aching heart, having had his doom read him from hell, which he would not regard when it was read him from heaven….Thus fell the man that was rejected of God."

Suicide is more than self-murder, a violation of the Sixth Commandment. The act insults the suicide's Creator with total abnegation of the goodness of creation. God saw that his creation was good. The suicide in essence says it isn't good. It isn't worth sticking around for. And it never will be. Suicide is an act of extreme pessimism.

However, mental illness, or medications given for mental illness or excruciating pain may upend a Christian's faith. It would be ignorant and uncharitable to say that a suicide could not after all have been a Christian.

Christianity brings assurance of salvation, but not always optimism. God will not fully remove man's capacity to sin in this life, not even such a tragic sin as suicide. Faith strengthens optimism and reveals other options, other requirements, besides death; nevertheless, it is possible for weakness in some cases to prevail. Saving faith is protective, but not one hundred percent.

Samuel Miller preached a sermon titled, "The Guilt, Folly, and Sources of Suicide" in 1805. It is well worth reading for any Christian who has been affected by suicide. Pastor Miller notes that suicide is a sin against God; a sin against human nature because it opposes self-preservation; and against society, for God placed men to live in fellowship with other men. Pastor Miller examines his subject very thoroughly, concluding ultimately that, while suicide is not dispositive that the sinner lacks saving grace, his crime certainly indicates a want of piety. Quoting Pastor Miller:

It is possible that a child of God may be so far under the power of mental derangement, as to rush unbidden into the presence of his Father. I believe that instances of this kind have sometimes occurred; and, if so, concerning the salvation of such persons no doubt can be entertained. But it may be questioned, on very solid ground, whether a real Christian, in the exercise of his reason, ever became his own executioner.

"In the exercise of his reason" would seem to be the operative words here. Again, mental disorder or mental disruption by medications might cause the bulwark of faith to give way.

Catholic essayist G. K. Chesterton called suicide, "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence." I disagree in part with Chesterton, as I think it is not given to us to know the "ultimate and absolute evil," because it is specifically revealed in Scripture that no sin is unforgivable but blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Besides, depravity already defines our original nature. But I am in some accord that suicide is a refusal to take an interest in existence. And existence is far too engaging not to take an interest in, if one understands that it is of God: For in him we live, and move, and have our being….For we are also his offspring. (Acts 17:28) But again, illness or medications could disrupt interest.

The thought of destroying a priceless, exquisite gift in the sight of the one who gave it to me would be unbearable. But this is what a person who takes his own life does: he destroys the life his Creator has given him, impugning his Creator's right over his creation. The act is the creature's own responsibility. And his creator ultimately wills the act, a sin, through what Calvin terms second causes. But the creature is responsible. And so on.

I am not sure that human faith, even the profound, crystalline faith of John Calvin, can apprehend all possible circumstances given to all men. In other words, I don't think it is typical for a Christian to elect suicide, but none of us can say with certainty that there are not outliers who will simply be defeated in life but yet receive an eternal reward. This is a can't-know zone, and if someone thinks they have good reason to know, charity urges discretion.

Calvin rightly assures us that the devil stands under Christ's power and the Christian's assurance of victory is secure (ICR I.XIV.17,18). He says,

But because that promise to crush Satan's head pertains to Christ and all his members in common, I deny that believers can ever be conquered or overwhelmed by him. Often, indeed, are they distressed, but not so deprived of life as not to recover; they fall under violent blows, but afterward they are raised up; they are wounded, but not fatally; in short, they so toil throughout life that at the last they obtain the victory.

Suicide is a radical response to suffering--suffering God purposes us to endure for our good. Of course we are never permitted to sin knowing our sin will be forgiven. Nor do we navigate this life unarmed. Again, quoting Calvin,

Indeed, conscious of our weakness and ignorance, let us especially call upon God's help, relying upon him alone in whatever we attempt, since it is he alone who can supply us with counsel and strength, courage and armor. (ICR, I.XIV.13)

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings... Malachi 4:2

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor

2006-12-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

My blog is not available for advertising, and I delete comments that are nothing but ad drops; however, I reserve the awesome proprietorial power to promote noteworthy things from my modest forum. I frequently point to other people's work because I think it is at least as worthy of notice as my own.

Mike Pitzler has undertaken the transcription of Pastor Tom Lyon's sermons and, with Pastor Lyon's approval, posted them on his blog. I can scarcely begin to express what a generous bounty this service provides. My friends who stay in touch by Christmas card can see what I've been raving about without coming to University Place, Washington. My brethren can correct their sermon notes and read sermons preached before they came to Providence. And those unacquainted with the Reformed faith can come to know its truth and grow in their faith through this expository preaching, the method of the Puritans.

The Puritans did not invent expository preaching; it was heard at Pentecost. However, with the organization of canon that the Spirit of God has since given the Church, I dare to say the Puritans improved this method of opening Scripture, text by text. They simply had more Scripture on which to draw than did Peter: a written record of the full gospel and provision of an ecclesiological format that comports to the manner of worship set forth in the word of God.

Other sites feature audio sermons, but not Pastor Lyon's. Pastor Lyon's preaching is reserved to his own little flock; however, he has permitted Mike to post these transcripts. Please read at least Pastor Lyon's sermon on John 3:16 to gain a true exegetical understanding of this so often misapplied text. It's no substitute for live hearing, but it will save you a trip to University Place.

Phillip R. Johnson's website is dedicated to the publication of the writings and sermons of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. If you growl when the word "Calvinist" is enunciated in your hearing, please read Spurgeon's sermon,"A Defense of Calvinism" at Phil's site. If you still growl upon hearing the word "Calvinist" after giving this sermon a mindful reading, this post may be your Christmas card next year.

Happy Birthday, Providence

2006-12-11T07:46:00.000-08:00

My church celebrated its 30th year as a church this past weekend. We're Puritans; we don't do things in a fancy or very festive way; we worship according to the regulative principle and we celebrate with joy in our hearts, with unexcelled expository preaching. We have superb piano players to support our voices. We, the congregation, are the choir. No trumpets, no tambourines blasted the sanctuary with exterior expressions of our joy and gratitude for God's blessing of our church's thirty years of perseverance and Pastor Lyon's thirty years in the pulpit. We had a somewhat radical, for us, visual presentation. Our gifted archivist David made a DVD of all the people in Providence's history as a church. There weren't really that many. The very special thing was how many are still with us. My husband and I are newbies, God having delivered us to Providence only three and a half years ago.

It was fun to see the long hair and big glasses on some of my sisters. There were wedding pictures and baby pictures and pregnant pictures and picnic pictures. Our church family has been happy together for a long time.

Pastor Blackburn came up from Louisiana to celebrate with us. He told us that in his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, the average pulpit time for a man is a year and eight months. So Pastor Lyon's thirty years and our church's perseverance for thirty years is like a sighting of the promise of God's keeping providence. May all who are blessed to call Providence Reformed Baptist Church their church family be blessed with perseverance.

Thank you, trusted men who do the things of necessity that keep our Lord's day worship fruitful and ordered, week after week, year after year. Thank you, dear sisters, who faithfully undertake the provision of comfort and hospitality and keep things together with order and warmth.

Thank you, Tom. God keep you.

My Logic-Driven Bar Association: An Anecdote

2006-12-11T06:32:00.000-08:00

Lawyers in my jurisdiction must take 45 hours of continuing legal education (CLEs) every three years in order to retain their license to practice. I maintain my license to keep my practice option open. I have written before about how much fun these CLEs can be.

I recently listened to a teleconference CLE and duly reported it. The Bar duly flagged it with a blue band on my personal CLE record at its website as a "potential duplicate." I knew that wasn't possible, because I had not listened to this presentation before. So I called the Bar.

First, understand that the Bar exists to help lawyers and to protect the public from them, so you kind of get an idea of its baseline logic.

The CLE Analyst (yes, it's that big an association, in a nice skyscraper, all paid for by our prodigious public-protecting dues) told me, no problem, people don't flag duplicate records, the computer does. The computer makes its "decision" based on keywords in the CLE title that a record is a duplicate. The Bar's policy is to believe the lawyer (who submits an affidavit of attendance or listening), remove the haughty blue band from the record, and give the lawyer credit for the CLE activity. Good.

Now, we report the full title and date of each CLE. Of course the two events I reported had two different titles and dates. They had two unique "activity numbers." But the computer "noticed" the keyword "professionalism" in both titles, and "thought" "Aha!" I asked the nice CLE Analyst whether "professionalism" was such a rare term as to be useful in flagging duplicate records. He couldn't really answer that, but he assured me I had done the right thing in calling the Bar and getting it straightened out. The blue band vanished and the coveted credit was duly recorded.

Overriding human intelligence rescued me from a hostile computer with a small vocabulary. My logic-driven Bar Association will continue its expensive and vigilant service on my behalf. And my logic-driven Bar Association will continue to license me so that it can go about its business of protecting the public from me.

Dedication

2006-12-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

I am thinking of Michael, the son of one of my friends, a Marine, married last summer, about to be deployed to Afghanistan. And I am thinking of David, the young brother of one of my friends, a Marine, who is about to enter the arena of Iraq, to train Iraqi soldiers. That, I think, is a good thing to do. Maybe they won't require so many of ours.

I think of these young men because I am humbled by their willingness to do something difficult beyond my reckoning. It's true that I cannot imagine for myself the life of a soldier and being surrounded by instant death, terrifying disappearances of friends, and driving behind sapper escorts checking for land mines on a daily basis. But more than that, I can't imagine doing these things unsure of my eternal security in Christ.

I don't know the spiritual condition of these two young men. But I fear the worst. I am afraid that they were raised in faithful families and picked up on the idea that Jesus would save them. I don't know whether they have met Christ on his own terms.

I don't know whether they came to be convicted of their own hopeless sin, their need for a savior, and that Christ was their only possible hope of a savior, and that this conviction could come only from God. I don't know whether they gained on the idea that Christ, to be their savior, must be their Lord. If they did, I hope they know that their salvation was a gift of God, freely given by God's grace, and that their faith was a gift of God, not something they received from their parents, or by going to church, or decided on their own to believe.

I hope they know that if God elected them to eternal life with Christ in glory, the ultimate reward of saving faith, that they received God's mercy even though they were no different from other sinners who will be consigned to hell. I fervently hope that they know these things and see the justice of them. I pray God would be pleased to bestow his mercy on these young men.

I admit I do not like to think of Michael and David in the circumstances they are about to enter. But I know unequivocally that God is sovereign, and that his mercy can protect those whom he saves and those whom he does not. But only for this life on this earth. Once this life is over, God's mercy will protect only those whom he has saved.

If God has not yet saved these men, I pray that he will. I pray God will put into their hearts to call on him to forgive their sin and grant his blessed mercy of salvation; for those who come to him, he will in no way cast out (John 6:37). If these men believe they are called to Christ, I pray they will give diligence to make their calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10). I pray that, whatever terrain is under their feet, they will know that they are grazing in the Lord's pasture.

Thank you, reading friends. I know you know what to do.

The Logic of Patience

2006-12-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

Gordon Clark says John 1:1,4 may be paraphrased,

In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God….In Logic was life and the life was the light of men.

Dr. Clark exposits on God and Logic in an essay of that title, and more comprehensively in a small but high-density book, The Johannine Logos, as well as throughout his many writings. God is truth, and truth cannot be truth unless it is logical. Rational people know this.

Unfortunately, these people do not run the world and its things.

I realize that human reasoning suffered as soon as Eve suspended her disbelief in talking animals. The decline continues on a precipitous scale.

I was just reading a reply to an email I sent to a friend who lives abroad. I had emailed her a photo of the famous shoes I was discussing on my blog Tuesday. My subject line contained the words "gospel of peace." The body of the mail contained "shoes." So google positioned ads their random logic generator determined relevant: "Life is Good & Peace Frog," "Peace Corps Alternative," "The Walking Company," and "Pediped Infant Footwear." This is how I know our privacy is secure. Naturally, Ephesians 6:15 did not come up in Google logic. It is not something they could sell us.

I mailed out some school supplies. The postage came to $37.00 for two small boxes of zip-lock bags of pencils, erasers, and rulers. Had the packages contained the same weight in printed materials, whether school books or pornography, the postage would have been around $8.00.

I conduct all our banking online. I could write a check and empty our account and run away to Minot, North Dakota. But only my husband, who has never logged on to the account, is conferred with the truly awesome power to switch from receiving paper statements to receiving electronic statements. This is perfectly logical in the bank's institutional eyes: the paper statements, after all, come addressed to my husband.

A fence reminiscent of Auschwitz surrounds a public elementary school. A sign on the fence reads, "No Trespassing: Public Property."

I think, very simply, these examples typify the logic of men who have rejected the logic of God. This is what a culture that has been turned over to reliance on its own logic looks like. The scariest thing of all is that so few people are scared. And those who aren't scared aren't scared for the wrong reason.

Jesus is the Logos. He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). He is the way of salvation; without him, there would be no salvation from sin. He is the truth; without him, there is no truth. He is the life; without him, there is no life. He is logic; without him, nothing would make sense. Illogical life is not life; it is some unendurable variant we were never meant to live as creatures bearing the image of God. The absence of logic is the absence of life.

Dr. Clark (The Johannine Logos, p. 120) reminds us that regeneration must precede assent to God's logic. This means that people who deny the logic of God are dead. But we are nevertheless obligated to pay taxes to them and on their behalf.

Calvin teaches that there is joy in all of this. The petty buffetings I experience do not begin to compare to "poverty, exile, prison, insult, disease, or bereavement."

[O]ur most merciful Father consoles us also in this respect when he asserts that in the very act of afflicting us with the cross he is providing for our salvation….Therefore, in patiently suffering these tribulations, we do not yield to necessity but we consent for our own good….From this, thanksgiving also follows, which cannot exist without joy; but if the praise of the Lord and thanksgiving can come forth only from a cheerful and happy heart--and there is nothing that ought to interrupt this in us--it thus is clear how necessary it is that the bitterness of the cross be tempered with spiritual joy. (Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.VIII.11)

God grant that I might strive to remember to let the dead bury their dead and be patient with the buffetings that come from living among them. Patience means raising one's irk threshold. I listened to a sermon by Earl Blackburn on Justification and Sanctification this week. Pastor Blackburn stressed that we are as justified as we're ever going to be; our sanctification proceeds in God's good time. The encouraging thing was that his message was directed to pastors, so I thought maybe I could invoke some civilian leeway.

Calvin teaches patience. Christ teaches patience. Seventy times seven is a rational number.

Meeting Esau

2006-12-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

In Genesis 32, God sends Jacob out from his iniquitous father-in-law's place to his own country. This took him through Edom, the land of his estranged brother. Laban had tried Jacob for 20 years, but he left with wealth, two wives, and 12 children. And although Jacob acknowledged God's tending provision toward him that spared him the worst of what he could have endured at Laban's hands, he had a mortal dread of Esau.

Jacob feared Esau would destroy what was most precious to him:

Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mother with the children. Genesis 32:11

And God provided, in Calvin's words, "timely succor" in Jacob's time of dread.

Jacob arranged his servants, his cattle, his wives, and his children in order to the protect the dearest the most. Rachel and Joseph brought up the rear. Leah must have, as usual, felt terrific. Reuben evidently acted out his anger against his father later (Genesis 35:22).

Esau was given to a volatile temperament, and he'd threatened to kill Jacob when he lost the blessing of his father to his brother's deceit. But that was long ago, and God had since prospered Esau. Jacob he loved and Esau he hated, but both he blessed with earthly fortune. This likely prevented Esau's motives of aggression toward Jacob. God uses the world to bless his church, and he blesses the world through his church as well.

God brought about a peaceful meeting and full reconciliation between the estranged sons of Isaac, who would eventually close their father's eyes together. Their wealth kept them from dwelling too close for comfort. Old family tensions and resentments would otherwise have been bound to emerge from time to time. God alone gave Esau grace where none had been evident, and he greeted his estranged brother with a kiss of peace.

Some of us have ridden out to meet Esau in the scrub of Seir. We've dreaded encounters that turned out to be surprisingly pleasant; sometimes they've turned out pretty much as dreaded. And it is still hard to believe God: to believe in his good will toward us as a prevailing theme in our lives. One trek across Seir after another, we betray faith with angst and wonder whether we will be received or rejected.

Calvin points out that Esau sets out to meet Jacob with a benevolent heart, while God has willed Jacob to "be oppressed by this anxiety for a time, although without any real cause, in order the more to excite the fervour of his prayer" (Commentaries, Baker House, p. 189). I strive to remember that all outcomes are of God and thus are good. I often wish I had prayed for the outcome that I desired and received, just as I also wish I had prayed for an outcome that I desired and did not receive. God wants us to pray for the outcomes he has determined to give us.

It isn't strange at all.

Calvin offers this prayer:

Grant, Almighty God, that since we are here exposed to so many evils, which suddenly arise like violent tempests, O, grant, that with hearts raised up to heaven, we may yet acquiesce in thy hidden providence and be so tossed here and there, even though we are so tossed here and there according to the judgment of our flesh, yet to remain fixed in this truth, that thou wouldst have us believe, that all things are governed by thee
and that nothing takes place except through thy will, so that in the greatest confusions we may always clearly see thy hand and that thy counsel is altogether right and perfectly and singularly wise and just; and may we
ever call upon thee and flee to this port, that we are tossed here and there in order that thou mayest nevertheless always sustain us by thine hand until we shall at length be received into that blessed rest which has been procured for us by the blood of thine only begotten Son. Amen.

Shoes

2006-12-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

Nordstrom is in the business of conveying the impression that women love to buy shoes. For me, shoes are one of life's little traumas. Whether mall or mail order, it's not a happy thing. My feet and my spirit are at constant odds.

"They're hideous."

"They're very practical," my husband asserts, trying to be consolatory. "Very Seattle. Everyone wears those." Where does he go all day, Key Arena? I have no idea why he thinks those two points will work in the shoes' favor when they don't work for anything else.

He persists. "You look like Wonder Woman, and very feminine. Like a Ninja lawyer."

"They look like British National Health, 1941, and you know it."

But the reality is, various neuromuscular and skeletal issues have forced me to migrate from the lilt department to, ironically, the athletic department. My spine, knees, ankles, and feet have coalesced into an orthopedist's dream. My first "Curious you can walk at all" X-rays came out in 1990. In my frame, the sawbones sees his long-awaited 80' yacht. But for now, other complicating issues make sensible shoes a more practical way station. But they're still hideous.

Suffice to say, that if I find shoes in which I can walk from the car to the door without something giving way, I have found shoes that look like ones the teenage boys in my church are wearing. That does little for my morale, and possibly even less for the boys'.

I'm a verbal person, not so much visual, and visualization exercises are useless to me. I don't see myself in snazzy red heels as I pad about in athletic shoes. I can wear dresses and try to visualize my shoes comporting to a consistent visual scheme, but it's hopeless. My future in lilt is behind me.

I picked up an issue of Arthritis Today with a feature on fashion shoes for arthritics while waiting in the Cat's vet's office last summer. It was ridiculous. Heels like spindles, pointed toes, unstable platforms, unsupported flats...if I could wear those shoes, I could run the five miles to the vet with the 17.25-pound Cat on my shoulders, too. The cunning buckles on one pair were suggestive of "some assembly required" warnings.

Now, I do think of women who would be thrilled to have shoes like mine and not consider it erosive on their sense of style. Swiss women hike in long dresses and stout hiking boots. Many would be comforted and happy to have the protection from cold, and from hazards of the land. And there is Sr. Miguel, whose toes had to be amputated after his accident. I am one of the most pampered and fortunate ones of the earth. Life could certainly be worse than not liking one's shoes because they look funny with dresses. So much worse.

Yet, my unappeasable, groaning spirit misses the lilt. I think I miss the lilt more than I miss not having the pain in my spine, my knees, and the nerves of my feet. What is this lure of the lilt, anyway? Vanity. Vain attempts at contesting the providence of the appointed circumstances of one's health and aging process.

We are so unlikely to see either snazzy heels or sneakers in glory. Nothing then will be hideous, and I think it likely that cadence and lilt will in some form persevere.

But for now, I miss shoes with lilt.

And so, I invoke once more the Preacher:

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. Ecclesiastes 7:10

Secure the Climate or Mean Something

2006-12-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat? Job 12:11

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Job 38:2

I think it is important to think about words, because they are God's creation by which he reveals himself to us. I love words and I really enjoy oxymorons. Oxymorons portray paradox, and I enjoy paradoxes. Oxymorons can be meaningful for their irony; they can be humorous, or stupidly senseless. I generally prefer the first two categories.

For whatever reason, some of us generate oxymorons on contact with the atmosphere: perceptions of paradox just always seem to compass our thoughts. I've used a few in my posts recently: "random stratagems," "mindless intrigue," which is my husband's contribution; "gratuitous fidelity," &c.

Sometimes word play morphs into literature, or government policy. One presidential hopeful, for instance, has introduced a bizarre theme in his proposed candidacy: "climate security." Ye gods, stand fast, secure the climate!

This politician either believes in or is making use of others' beliefs in, "global warming." Jerusalem is still called the "Holy City," too. And consider: "gay marriage" and "artificial intelligence." The first is an oxymoron; the second is illogical blather. But "artificial intelligence" has meaning in circles in which it is discussed. We all know what it means, but it doesn't really mean anything. If intelligence isn't real, how can it be intelligence? An artificial flavor or flower is like a real flavor or flower. There is a resemblance. But what can be like intelligence? It requires real intelligence to produce artificial intelligence. Vanilla doesn't produce artificial vanilla. What about "institutional intelligence?" Nothing will ever produce that.

An old friend of mine wrote a novel in which meaningful ironies, often expressed as oxymorons, dominated his literary landscape. He produced a series of word pictures that expressed the distorted language (would "meaningless language" be an oxymoron?) that passes as policy in various nations, and how sinister this pattern really is. This writer had a theme of life that "anything you can imagine is probably true." To some extent, he was right. Everything he imagined and wrote in his novel was probably true. His novel prompted a house call from some sub-CIA agency functionary. He got mad and moved to France. Oxymorons have consequences.

It would be futile to replay the lexicon of oxymorons people swallow every day in what passes for news, weather, politics, culture, marketing, and art. My point is that we need to regain consciousness and pay attention to the way words are strung together and determine whether they make sense before acknowledging them as ideas. I hope you think "random stratagems" is funny and ironic and very Mrs. B.

I happen to think "climate security" is moronic even though it is meant to convey a serious idea. Actually, I find it densely diaphanous.

Robbins on Rand: A Review

2006-12-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is past….And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal. 1 Samuel 15:32,33

I've just finished reading a book I think is important, Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System, by John Robbins (Trinity Foundation, 1997). I think the book important because it cuts a bad philosophy in pieces, organ by organ. Sometimes this is necessary.

I quoted the verse above because Robbins's deconstruction of Rand's so-called philosophy of Objectivism brought to mind Samuel's dispatching of Agag. God said to kill all the vanquished. That did not mean to spare the king. When Saul substituted his own judgment for God's imperative, Samuel took it up with impersonal, precise, and thorough dispatch.

And so Robbins does with Rand, 14 years after her death. Somebody had to do it. Robbins has the intellect, the impeccable logic, and the motive. Rand was an enemy of truth.

The reader of this useful book need not be familiar with the work of Ayn Rand. Robbins fills in the gaps and his logic and apologetic are instructive whether or not the reader has a background in Objectivism. He explains Rand's work, demonstrates that it is derivative, exposes the defects of the philosophy from which her work springs as well as the defects in her own variation, and then explains the logical consequences. So it is a book that conducts the reader through a logical apologetic, using Rand's work as a foil.

Rand had an inordinately successful career as a novelist before she decided she could pass rhetoric off as logic and became recognized, at least nominally, as a philosopher. Young readers, in particular were drawn to her work, which was ridden with subjectivity, contradictions, and premises she professed to despise in other philosophies. She was a very confused, hardened individual. In her own small way, she epitomizes the failure of secular philosophy.

As Robbins says of Rand, "It is not her argumentation, which is hopelessly illogical, but the emotional appeal of her stories that keeps Rand's works in print" (p. 154).

It does not take Robbins long to dismiss Rand's philosophy of Objectivism as bogus. He reveals the inconsistencies of her epistemology very early, and then proceeds methodically to tear down what she thought it held up: her metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Rand was an empiricist and was too unsophisticated to recognize the flagrant contradiction between what she wrote and what she believed she represented. Worse, she was oblivious to the contradictions between her philosophy and those she professed to oppose. And what Rand opposed, she called "evil."

Despite her protestations to the contrary, Rand was very nearly an anarchist. Although she believed in the necessity of a minimal government for the purposes of courts to resolve disputes, a military to protect national borders, and a criminal justice system for punishment of crime, she consistently denied the right of the Magistrate to deploy physical force in any form at all. If this doesn't sound like full amnesty for malfeasors, I'm not sure what to make of it. Nor is Robbins, who points to "powers of subpoena, laws against perjury, arrest, and injunction, all of which are initiations of force" (p. 187).

Rand's proposition of the sovereignty of the individual is clearly at odds with Christianity. She claimed to believe in the value of a free society for the good of man. But Robbins shows the error of her politics, for its want of competent ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

She could not logically advocate a free society simply because she rejected the Christian axiom of revelation. It is only on the basis of Scripture that one may advocate a free society without self-contradiction, because one does not have to choose between the priority of the collective (totalitarianism) or the priority of the individual (anarchy). All secular political philosophy has been based on one or the other of these premises, and the mad veering of history are testimony to the inherently unstable nature of institutions established on these principles. Christianity--the propositions written in the Bible--are Christianity alone, furnishes the only logical foundation for a free and stable society. Neither the individual nor the collective is sovereign: God and God alone possesses the attribute of sovereignty (p. 203).

Rand's orbit wobbled around one theme: the individual vs. the collective. God was never in the picture except as the object of her vehement denials.

The Appendices in this book are a windfall. In all, there are eight appendices. Three are Robbins's take-downs of Objectivists Leonard Piekoff and David Kelley. By the time I had finished his demolition of Rand, I had lost interest in any more of same. But it is worthwhile, in one volume, to destroy all the Amalekites, and so he did. The other five essays are much more engaging. These are essays by Gordon Clark, "God and Logic," "Science and Truth," and "Kant and Old Testament Ethics," all excellent and well worth reading. Also there is Robbins's "Christ and Civilization" and "An Introduction to Gordon Clark," also both very good.

Like all Trinity Foundation hardcover publications, this is a quality book and a credit to any thinking Christian's library.

A lot of people don't appreciate Robbins's invective; I do. With his precise intellect and grasp of logic, he takes no prisoners when it comes to enemies of the gospel. And those enemies are all of those who spread confusion and deny truth. Rand was guilty as charged, and in this book stands justly convicted.

Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle. Psalm 109:29

Thy Exceeding Great Reward

2006-12-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. Genesis 15:1

In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion. Psalm 71

The Lord came to Abraham in a vision, and later, in the form of a man. Abraham did not have the Scriptures, but it was given him to talk with God directly. The doctrines of grace were not yet in print, but were known to those who had a relationship of faith with God.

Jesus testified of John the Baptist,

For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist; but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. Luke 7:28

John foretold the presence of the kingdom, but he did not live to see it fulfilled in Christ's resurrection. He possessed and knew the Scriptures: the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. He preached the gospel, but he did not have the whole story.

God hasn't gone anywhere and he hasn't changed. We have his word but probably no rational Christian expects to encounter him in a vision or as a man. I sometimes reflect on God's provision of the Bible as a miraculous providence. I reflect on how God is my shield and my exceeding great reward, just as he is Abraham's. As unimaginably wonderful as it must have been to encounter Jehovah face to face, I can only be grateful that I can encounter him in the Bible. Of course, he would have commanded my steadfast attention in person; I am often guilty of unfocused attention left on my own with my Bible.

Each day presents its battles, or as one friend puts it, "horseflies." God disarms my resistance to facing my little battles with his assurance that he is indeed my shield. When I read his word, or hear it preached, or take pleasure in the fellowship of my brethren, or am given to feel gratitude for my portion, I enjoy my exceeding great reward. I know anything this side of hell is mercy. And my exceeding great reward is the exceeding mercy of my portion.

Pastor Tom Lyon's sermon on glory from Romans 8:30 last Lord's day brought to remembrance that Christ prayed for his church to receive all the blessings he himself enjoyed. Throughout John 17, Christ asks the Father to give to his own the knowledge of the true God, that they would have Christ's joy fulfilled in themselves. He asked that they would be sanctified through the word of God, for God's word is truth. And he bequeathed to them his glory, that they would be made perfect in one. He prayed not only for his disciples, but for them also who would believe on him through their word. We who believe are those who have believed on him through their word. Christ secured for his church all the blessings of his own glory.

Whatever glory is, it is what Christ is, and it is Christ's to give, and we shall receive it, and we shall be as he is.

I pray this will not invite me to vain imaginings but to fullness of the blessed hope.

Random Stratagems

2006-11-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. Ecclesiastes 7:10

This verse is a test of faith when I have to deal with extrahuman intelligence. Life did used to be simpler. I won't say better. Stressors were different.

I remember E. B. White's story, "Insert Flap A and Throw It Away," about a hapless klutz assembling a Jiffy-Cloze Closet. It was hilarious, and in its day, was the height of techno-spoof.

The new day has brought new heights. I suspect a conspiracy. My husband refers to "mindless intrigue;" I lean toward the conspiracy of "random stratagems." It's what happens when simple things of life are subsumed by idolatrous technocraft.

My iBook was in Tennessee this week. The shipper picked it up Monday, it was repaired and shipped back Tuesday, and I received it back Wednesday. I'd been unable to turn it on for over a week, but didn't want it traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday. So for nearly two weeks, it was out of commission. I needed back-up. I acquired a Toshiba Satellite. So, instead of having one alien intelligence imposing its logic on mine, I had a new alien intelligence and the task of transitioning between systems.

Computers are a case of tool becoming task and ultimately taskmaster.

The transitions between Mac and XP were huge and terrible. Before the iBook gave up the ghost, I had no place to back up my files. After it gave up the ghost, I had no way to back up my files. All my email addresses are in the iBook.

Tuesday, I called Janice to ask for an email address, explaining my email address book was in Tennessee. She understood. I said I wanted my life back. My life without computers. She understood.

The posh Tosh is a great laptop, and I like it more than the Mac. XP plays well with others. I can tune in to teleconferences for live continuing legal education credit from home--a task the Mac performs with erratic displeasure. Windows Media calls this an "optimal streaming experience." Everyone else in the world probably knows all about this, but I'm new to this sector of the planet, and last week was my first optimal streaming experience. I earned three hours' credit, too.

I grew ambitious, and determined to burn some CDs for a friend. This had been a simple operation on the iBook, but I've had to hybridize somewhat and add iTunes to the posh Tosh. I thought iTunes would be the best way to burn a CD. It is, if you want to transfer one of 90 selected files to a disc. But if you intend to transfer all the selected files to a disc, iTunes will not do this on my posh Tosh. iTunes in Windows does not distinguish data from audio files. Nor could I find a way for Windows to execute this simple task.

Finally, I remembered I had deleted a lot of icons from my desktop because I didn't like the clutter. One of these was a shortcut to something called "Toshiba Disc Creator." I located the program and it was a cinch to burn all the selected files to the CD: a cinch and three hours of experimentation. I reinstated the shortcut and now I can churn out CDs faster than you could say, "All things are disciplined by theology." I felt smart for the first time in weeks.

Then I began to feel abandoned. My husband never emailed me. My friends never emailed me. And when I tried to email them, I realized our server was down. I called our ISP three times and assured them that I was still receiving error messages after lo, these 48 hours. He wanted to know whether I was getting all my mail.

"I'm getting some, but not all. I know I'm not getting all of it, because my husband sent me something that never came. It's lost." He assured me that it was not lost, because they don't consider email lost until it fails to show up for four days.

"But you are getting mail."

"Yes. Spam is reduced, but dribbling in with its usual gratuitous fidelity. If nothing else, it serves to test your service."

"How much mail are you not getting?"

"How can I know that?" Who are you, Bishop Berkeley? How can I know, how can I know….

"We're not having any other problems in your area. We were, but they're all fixed now."

"No they're not. Send a tech to my house to verify my report."

Finally I reached someone who admitted they had a "service ticket out" on a server.

So the honest fellow sent me an invitation to open a gmail account. I had no idea gmail was by invitation only. Then I probably became the first person in history who could not figure out how to open a gmail account.

Mind you, I think I have a fair claim on logic literacy. I can identify an enthymematic hypothetical destructive syllogism and my computer cannot. I doubt many computer geeks can, either.

I called the ISP back and he assured me I could set up the gmail account. Then we compared screens. "I don't see what you see," I said. It seems gmail didn't want me to type my password twice, but if I didn't, it would not open my account. I tried several times; nope. Then, the base curve of the earth shifted, the screen changed, and I could retype my password. I had a gmail account. I had entered the belly of the Google beast.

I still think of leaving computer life behind. I know Janice understands. But I hope she'd miss my blog, so I carry on.

2006-11-29T16:46:00.000-08:00

From the Get On Your Camel and Run Department

2006-11-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

Hollywood never seems to find any trick too cheap. The Nativity Story, according to a publicist, "is a film explicitly about the birth of Christ. You don't see many of those these days." I daresay not.

From the trailer I caught online, it's cheap light tricks and low-flying doves all over again. But the kicker is, the 16-year-old star who portrays Mary ("striking parallels," claim the promos) is pregnant. I watched an interview for a few seconds. For some reason, people are sore amazed and wondering whether other people notice the striking parallel.

I have to admit, it's lost on me.

Confessions of a Cosmophobe

2006-11-29T05:50:00.000-08:00

Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout O Israel; be glad and rejoice with all the heart, O daughter of Jerusalem.
The LORD hath taken away thy judgments, he hath cast out thine enemy: the king of Israel, even the LORD, is in the midst of thee: thou shalt not see evil any more.
In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Fear thou not: and to Zion, Let not thine hands be slack.
The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. Zephaniah 3:14-17

I love these passages and draw encouragement and consolation from them.

Because I cherish this text, I don't like to think that it contains blessings that God has somehow made to other people but not to me. I adhere to a covenant theology perspective that God has made a single covenant with his people--the Church--from the foundation of the world. This means that these promises of God's salvation, love, and joy over his people were made to his Church, and that I will and I do enjoy them as part of his Church. His exquisitely lyrical language was a song written as much for me as for the rest of Israel. It is only reasonable that my theology would feed my spirit and fortify my faith.

Those of other doctrinal persuasions would reassign these blessings, and with them, their encouragement and consolation, to other people, to some other "Israel," as though I were not of "Israel." For me, such a theology would be robbery.

As my pastor says, "All things are disciplined by theology." This is true: All things, from meditation on the Scriptures to eating in a restaurant, are disciplined by theology. In the secular sector, theology may be translated, "world view."

I wrote earlier about becoming waylaid by distractions when actually seeking consolation. A simple formula for distinguishing these has occurred to me: Consolation uplifts the soul, and distractions are robbery. They rob the soul of the meat of consolation and leave it hungry. They are intrusive and leave the soul with a sense of inelegance.

Unless I am vigilant, I am robbed daily. I am battered with unintelligible stimuli if I leave my house. I am battered with unintelligible stimuli if I need my computer to do something the way I think human intelligence would rationally route the task, but a computer designer has taken a different route. Ultimately, all of these robberies and batteries are traceable to world view and doctrinal collisions.

My aversion to world view and doctrinal collision keeps me out of the maelstrom more than I sometimes realize. I never understand what billboards are saying--there is some kind of universal joke I never get. I haven't watched a program on TV in 15 or 16 years. My church is blessedly small. I shrink from offers of free trips to Hawaii. I don't want to go to Hawaii. Clerks offering the free chances look stunned, perhaps dismayed, probably wondering how it is that people from my planet speak English.

When changes in my health reduced my ability to enjoy the outdoors as I used to, I had more reasons to retreat into virtual agoraphobia. Without long bicycle rides or mountain hikes, the world's beacon outside my modest home environs has dimmed. It is not unusual for me not to leave home for four days running. This is a luxury made possible by the feasibility of running many errands and maintaining fellowship over the Internet. I don't have to duck the fallout of colliding world views; I can engage or avoid, and I avoid.

Coffee shops have nothing to offer, except when we go in the evening for performances by talented members of our church. During the day, the work before me is not there. I like my own tea, I don't like chipped cups. Because the point from the shop's perspective is making and selling coffee, not letting people drink it in peace, it is too noisy for conversation. I can't bring one book to read because I always need other books for further reference. Their chairs are not ergonomic and the music and din is obnoxious. Not to mention the occasional bolthead who just wants to make sure I know I don't need to be alone. Slither along....

I have observed over the years how restaurants increasingly have taken it upon themselves to serve up some form of simulated relationship. It's creepy: It's some kind of postmodern dilution of meaning designed to make everything mean the same thing. If the restaurant can convince us that we have a "relationship" with it, we'll want to come back every night. "How was your day?" from the waiter tends to elicit a response from my husband, "I was just getting ready to tell my wife about that." But the waiter wants to be our chum. He's paid to strike up relationships, not merely to serve food. "Professional" has no meaning anymore; everyone wants to be a professional. The waiter is a professional "fine dining experience expert." In the waiter's world, it is probably very weird that we came here to eat and enjoy our own relationship, not to make new friends. The place is there to fill some void they imagine in our lives. Relationship is part of the packaging, the ambiance, and the very purpose of the place's existence. Not to us.

A neighbor comes over while we are pruning our grapes--big mistake to have anything quiet to do in the front yard--and asks what I think of the various minor scandals throughout the neighborhood. I answer her, "I don't think about them." It's true: I observe them passively, and don't think about them. I didn't obsess much over the Berlin Wall, either. I never even know who's playing in the Superbowl.

In no way do I think any of this relationship-dodging with worldly edifices makes me spiritual or pious. It neither signifies nor reinforces piety. But it does make spiritual undertakings more possible. It does conserve my limited energy for what is most important to me. By minimizing distraction and stress, I maximize my acceptance of my limits and find consolation in what I do. It makes no sense to succumb unnecessarily to the blows of robbers if one can deflect them.

I used to have a bookmark from a local bookstore with a quote, I think, from Mark Twain: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." For me, stores, banks, cafes, the neighbors, and the like, are like the inside of a dog. Freeways are like the belly of a great fish.

My husband assures me that I look well to the ways of our household, and eat not the bread of idleness (Proverbs 31:27). I slay dragons and dustbunnies that crowd our curtilage on a daily basis. I take joy in my portion.

For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God answereth him in the joy of his heart. Ecclesiastes 5:20

The Pharmaceutics of Conscience

2006-11-28T06:31:00.000-08:00

Ever have an embarrassing moment? Ever do something you regretted? Ever do something you regret that still makes you feel creepy? Is there anything in your memory that still brings on that yucky feeling even though the event wasn't "your fault?" That's because bad memories induce physiological stress, just like getting a shot of adrenaline. Well, soon you'll be able to pop a pill and feel all better about whatever it was, even a nagging memory from decades back.

I watched some online 60 Minutes clips about Propranolol yesterday. Unlike my pastor ("I read these books so you don't have to."), I watch these things because I have a weird fascination for them. Evidently, well funded medical researchers are finding this drug the most effective memory easer since faith and repentance.

Study subjects told their stories, and researchers explained their study results. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be eased. Memories of rape and terrible accidents are no longer debilitating. Embarrassing party moments could potentially be vanquished. (Wouldn't it be nice if everyone else who was at the party could be recruited for the study?)

An old man in Ruben's congregation in Mexico was run over by a bus a couple of weeks ago. He is having the toes of one foot amputated, plates installed in his jaw and arm, and has had his ankle reconstructed. He will live out the rest of his life in pain and debility. So far, this man has not expressed the wish for a pill that could erase the memory of his accident. Although his injuries are tragic and catastrophic, he knows that God is sovereign and that sometimes, for whatever reason, buses hit and kill or maim people--in his neck of the woods with more frequency than we might find comforting.

Those who have saving faith, and are victims who had no control over the circumstances that brought about severe distress, will take comfort in the sovereignty of God. They know that his purpose is good notwithstanding their circumstances. They are acquainted with the providence of suffering, and understand that they will not understand the secret counsel of God's will underlying their particular suffering. They may actually take very little comfort, but they won't likely ask for Propranolol. Perhaps they will, and this too will be a merciful provision of God. All things in good order.

Repentance comes with saving faith. When memories of awkward times and worse resurface, the assurance of God's forgiveness of sin is the Christian's refuge from distress. The Christian recognizes the accompanying humiliation as a reminder of his sinful condition. Propranolol is the world's answer: It erases the emerging recognition of sin and calms the spirit artificially.

So far, Propranolol isn't in use as a post-party panacea. It is in use for extreme trauma that has prevented people from normal functioning over a long period of time. But one scientist interviewed suggested that once pharmaceutical companies receive the go-ahead for these indications, its use would infuse the population as a bypass for conscience. Embarrassing moments would be history, and conscience unnecessary. Thankfully, this man asserted that memories are part of who we are. I would add that the way we deal with memories also goes to who we are.

I've not walked in the shoes of the people in these studies who are taking Propranolol for painful memories they had no part in incurring. But I do believe that God in his providence assigned those experiences and their attendant memories. I believe that bad experiences are meant to drive us to God because there is no other relief. I believe that turning these things over to God is easier said than done.

One scientist in the clips pointed out that probably no one would deprive a physically suffering person of painkillers, so why deprive a mentally suffering person the equivalent of painkillers? I'm not sure. Maybe it's because the body is perishable but the mind has more to do with the sphere of the soul, and is not to be tampered with. Certainly I know the conscience should not be exonerated with a pharmaceutical bypass, but should be subjected to repentance and enabled to produce the fruits thereof. I have memories I think other people might actually find more painful than I do. Other people have memories I think would be unendurable. And so I take God at his word that he does not give us trials that are greater than we can bear.

One of the study subjects was a woman who had been raped by her doctor when she was 12. The memory was debilitating to her until she took Propranolol. Then, she could recall the events without stress, as measured by elevated adrenalin levels. She was a victim of her circumstances. But is it wrong for her to come to grips with the fact that, even though she had nothing to do with the cause of her pain, she lives in a fallen world? Maybe recognition of the fact of a fallen world would lead her to recognition of the fact of her own sin. And then to her need for salvation. But she took Propranolol. Of course, I have no idea of her spiritual circumstances.

Turning to John Owen, I find this:

God's appointment of repentance unto sinners doth reveal that there is forgiveness in himself. I say, the prescription of repentance is a revelation of forgiveness. (Banner of Truth: Works of John Owen, Vol. VI, p. 437)

God reveals his own forgiveness in our repentance. And, if he reveals his own forgiveness, perhaps he also reveals the necessity of forgiveness in ourselves.

But the world is left to its own devices, and Propranolol is one of those devices. Again, John Owen presents a most cogent and convincing case for the Christian principle underlying this:

Consider that of ourselves we are not able to make a right judgment of what is good for us, and what evil unto us, or what tends most directly unto our chiefest end….I doubt not but it will appear at the last day that a world of evil in the hearts of men was stifled by the destruction of their outward concernments, more by their inward troubles; that many were delivered from temptations by it, who otherwise would have been overtaken, to their ruin, and the scandal of the gospel….for God doth not send judgments on his own for judgments' sake, for punishment's sake, but always to accomplish some blessed design of grace towards them….I desire only that we would seriously consider how utterly ignorant we are of what is good for us or useful unto us in these outward things, and so leave them quietly unto God's disposal. (Ibid., p. 635-636)

I think Owen has resolved the quandaries presented in contemporary medical ethics. It is the glory of God and the gospel of Christ that merit reckoning when we experience suffering. Certainly God's glory is not diminished in the alleviation of suffering, where possible without evading responsibility for the requirements of our conscience. But our suffering has the purpose in it of "some blessed design of grace," and that is not something we should aspire to foil.

Most importantly, it is God who will remember our sin no more. It is given to us to remember our sin. It's part of who we are: Sinners, saved by grace.

But I realize the world will probably resort to Propranolol, if and when it becomes available for this purpose, to ease consciences devoid of repentance.

Two Women and Christ's Peace in Luke 7

2006-11-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city was with her.
And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not.
And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still. And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.
And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother. Luke 7:12-15

And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven….And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace. Luke 7:48,50

Here, two very different women received new life in two very different ways in two different cameos. I think both take place in Nain, probably the same day, but this is uncertain.

The widow of Nain was a good woman, with a good reputation; we can know this because she had a consort of "much people of the city" mourning with her as she followed the bier of her dead son. She had likely won the hearts of many with her good works and upstanding life. The Lord told her to "Weep not," and restored her son to life and delivered him to her. The response was overwhelming:

And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people. Luke 7:16

The widow returned glory to God, presumably with immense gratitude and joy. We don't know whether she associated the gift of new life with the forgiveness of sin. We don't know whether she knew that "Weep not" was an all-clear message from God with respect to his remembrance of sin. Certainly her son received new life, and spoke something of it when he arose. As a mercy to the widow, the Lord delivered her risen son to her, rather than taking him away as a disciple.

I like to think the widow had more than a mother's understanding of the thing, and glorified God from a renewed heart. We see that the Lord Jesus Christ transformed her mourning to joy; we can hope that she apprehended the profound implications of his raising her son: that he had truly conquered death. But we aren't specifically told.

The penitent woman who entered the house of Simon the Pharisee to anoint Jesus and weep over him had none of the social benefits that attracted supporters to the widow. She was alone. She was a lawbreaker, a "sinner" in the eyes of the Pharisee. Despite common presumption that she was an adulteress, this is probably unlikely, for she had not been stoned. She could have been a harlot. Unmarried women of the Roman Empire were often prostitutes or slaves, and their status was next to sub-human.

Whoever she was, she was a sinner; we don't know the nature of her sin. We know she knew Jesus to be worthy of her anointing, her tears, and her display of abject humility. She could not have been anointing him for his own burial, for she could have known nothing of what lay ahead for the Lord. Her anointing was an act of pure worship of her savior. It was a far more emotional and elaborate anointing than the typical anointing of hospitality that Simon neglected to bestow upon Jesus.

This woman is in mourning; she mourns her sin and her terrible shame before God. She is humbled beyond shame before men. And, as he did for the widow, Jesus turns her mourning, if not to joy, to peace. She knows he is her only hope for relief from her sin.

Jesus overhears the Pharisee's thoughts:

This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner. Luke 7:39

Jesus corrects Simon the self-righteous Pharisee with a parable of two debtors. Simon gives the correct answer to Jesus' question as to which debtor will love the creditor the most: The one who was forgiven the most. Then Jesus tells the penitent woman her sins are forgiven. He does not say the same to Simon or any of the others present. They still wonder who he is that forgives sins. She knows. Jesus tells her that her faith has saved her, and bids her go in peace. And she goes in peace, the peace of God that surpasses all understanding, the peace of forgiveness of sin and the peace of a renewed heart. Unquestionably, she knows he is the One who is able to give this to her.

Given different backgrounds, circumstances, and social habits of the time, it is unlikely that the widow and the penitent woman became social equals. It doesn't matter. Both receive mercy; it is likely both receive peace of heart and new life. Certainly the poorer woman with the lower circumstances and the greater burden of sin received the greater mercy, for she had the most to be forgiven. The widow did not neglect to give glory to God. But the penitent woman would love him much, for she had been forgiven much.

God's power to forgive sin and transform mourning into joy is boundless. Whoever we were before God imparted his mercy and imputed to us the righteousness of his Son, Jesus Christ, and transformed us with saving faith--whatever we've been, only one thing is certain: we were sinners, and we continue to sin. God has leveled those on whom he has had mercy into one people: his Church.

When we examine the magnitude of our depravity, we can begin to know the immensity of our debt to God; no debt to any creditor could ever begin to match it. Thus, much has been forgiven. The question remains: Do we love God much?

The Chickens' First Snow

2006-11-26T13:34:00.000-08:00

I don't normally post on Sundays, but the snow was so festive that greeted us with this morning's first light that I had to share it with my readers who don't live in the unpredictable Puget Sound climes.

It's just a dusting, really, but on the ferns and bamboo, seemed very dramatic. The chickens were not amused. At first, they refused to leave their coop, but stood in the hatchway. Then, one vanguard girl came out into the yard, then another, then they both went back in. Finally, all five were out, seeming to enjoy the frosted straw.

In the Tents of Kedar

2006-11-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

Psalm 65

2006-11-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

I was reading this Psalm this morning and thought it seemed to express the essense of Thanksgiving. I think it expresses the best of what is with us at any time.

1Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Sion: and unto thee shall the vow be performed.

2O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.

3Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou shalt purge them away.

4Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house, even of thy holy temple.

5By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou answer us, O God of our salvation; who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the sea:

6Which by his strength setteth fast the mountains; being girded with power:

7Which stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves, and the tumult of the people.

8They also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy tokens: thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.

9Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it.

10Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof.

11Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness.

12They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side.

13The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.

Thanksgiving and the Puritans

2006-11-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Here is a most interesting history of Thanksgiving as originated and celebrated by the Puritans, from A Puritan's Mind.

She Can Call My Husband "Darlin'" Anytime

2006-11-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

For a long time I used to take road trips. In California, I drove from the coast out to the desert. In Texas, I'd head for the Big Thicket. In Montana, I followed the pie and coffee trail. Pie and coffee is an ethos in Montana.

Road trips were a habit with both my husband and me before we met, and a shared venture afterward. We both knew the pie and coffee trail in Montana was the best road trip on the paved planet. The waitresses became a poetic icon to us.

Her name is usually Cheryl, or Madge, or Deb, or Barb. Her face is deeply lined, her age indiscernible, and her make-up fails to make the most of what is there. She hails you as "Darlin'" when you come in, and waves a wistful thanks when you go. All the while you're there, she's at your side with the coffee pot. On a quiet night, she sidles in next to you, puts her elbows on the table to support her despair-lined face, and tells you her troubles. They are many and they are hard. But they are real and they hurt. She has a multitude of thorns in her flesh, and she doesn't know why these things keep "happening" to her.

She calls my husband "Darlin'" or "Fella." She calls me "Sweetie" or "Honey." She is respectful of our couple boundaries when we're together; she has no boundaries of her own. She asks us no questions, just pours out her heart with the coffee, cup after cup. It isn't good coffee, but it's the heart that pours it that makes you come back. You keep hoping her life will be better. You keep hoping the creep who keeps doing her wrong will get lost and she'll find Mr. Right and live happily ever after. You keep hoping the Lord will nail her in her tracks and bring her to a sense of sin and hope.

You'd never have this "experience" at Starbucks. Starbucks is for poignancy rookies. Besides, Starbucks doesn't even serve pie.

"Another somebody done somebody wrong song…" That's Cheryl's, or Madge's, or Deb's, or Barb's song. It's always playing in the background at the pie and coffee place. The radio never has very good speakers, so the twang effect is more screechy than it should be. Country Western bathos is the theme of the pie and coffee ethos.

Outside, it's raining, or snowing, or dark. Inside, it's shabby and dim, and the salt shakers are covered with fingerprints. Warm efficiency and entropy coexist here.

Her cough is raspy from smoking; her breath betrays a ginny redolence. You wonder how long a life like this can go on. You thank God for his mysterious ways and try not to think about it. She compels your pity, but it's the last thing she wants. She wants only an ear to resonate her pain back to her.

She's proud of her toughness; in toughness is her righteousness. She hurdles one creep, one setback after another; one more daring escape from confrontation with the truth. She's on her own and it's made her strong. Please don't let her die alone and afraid, I offer silently, stabbing a piece of soggy apple with my fork. Please have mercy on her and reconcile her to the truth of her only hope.

But all we can really do is tip her close to twice the tab, bid her good night, and go our way.

Election in Luke 4

2006-11-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. Ephesians 1:4-6

And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country. But I tell you a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land;
But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.
And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. Luke 4:24-27

Jesus incited murderous hatred when he preached the doctrine of election. The Pharisees who had
wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth (v. 22) moments earlier,

all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. (vv. 28-29)

when they heard the truth: All are afflicted; not all will know mercy. The gentile widow of Sidon received mercy; the gentile Naaman did as well. The Pharisees knew what Jesus was talking about, and they were furious.

The idea that God is sovereign and has the power, glory, right, and will to choose his own Church, continues to elicit wrath, and I expect it will until Judgment.

My husband and I were at a Christmas gathering with some friendly Arminians a few years ago. A woman mentioned that her son's girlfriend would certainly become a Christian, because her son would explain the gospel to her. My comment, "I guess that's up to God," was not well received. In fact, my name was shrieked around the room. It continues to be a joke between my husband and me: "All I said was...."

Nearly everyone who says they believe in God will say they believe God is sovereign. Then the shrieking begins if you say that conversion to saving faith is within the secret counsel of God's will. Usually the word, "fair" is held up as dispositive that no such thing could be true. Or, conversely, everyone will be saved, so election is fair. One individual I know dismisses the doctrine of election as "a cosmic game of duck, duck, duck goose." Yet he readily accepts the grace he feels it is God's to give.

Calvin says this of the doctrine of election,

"when human understanding hears these things, its insolence is so irrepressible that it breaks forth into random and immoderate tumult as if at the blast of a battle trumpet." (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Chapter XXIII, Library of Christian Classics, John T. McNeill, Ed., p. 947)

That sounds like the Christmas party, all right. The above-cited chapter goes through the objections to the doctrine of election, and the refutations to those objections. Briefly, the objections are as follows, and I will be quoting from the above-referenced source:

The doctrine of election makes God a tyrant (ibid., p. 949;
The doctrine of election takes guilt and responsibility away from man (ibid., p. 953);
The doctrine of election leads to the view that God shows partiality toward persons (ibid., p. 958)
The doctrine of election destroys all zeal for an upright life (ibid., p. 960);
The doctrine of election makes all admonitions meaningless (ibid., p. 961).

The Reformed thinker is armed against these evilly fallacious objections. We can readily demonstrate that these objections impugn God's grace, justice, mercy, and love, all of which are inextricable from his sovereignty. But we will always meet those who hold their hands over their ears and gnash their teeth.

John Owen refers to election as "the especial fountain and spring of holiness" (Banner of Truth: The Works of John Owen, Vol. 3, p. 503-4). Owen observes that God chose his elect before the foundation of the world in order to make us holy, "that is, with a design and purpose to make us so" (ibid., p. 504). Thus, resistence to the truth of election is a resistance to holiness. This serves those who would prefer to be saved just as they are, with their sin, not from it.

The truth of election engages the wrath of the children of wrath. To object to this doctrine is to hate the very nature and truth of God himself. A Reformed Christian should know that election is an exquisite element of the doctrines of grace, without which the doctrines could not cohere. But others would be self-serving and pick and choose what they would suffer of God.

The Pharisees would have pitched the Lord over the brow of the cliff for enunciating this teaching; at another point they were ready to stone him (John 8:59). They determined to kill Jesus not for blasphemy, but because they hated God for being God. They envied those on whom he showed mercy who were not of Abraham's entitled lineage. They likely envied him his sovereignty over themselves. Blasphemy was simply a pretext they could use to turn the law to his destruction. But it was the doctrine of election that lay beneath their wrath: how dare God save anyone in their entitled stead.

Holiday gatherings may be approaching. Calvin's Institutes are good preparation.

Some Thoughts on Consolation

2006-11-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us... Hebrews 6:18

I once had a Peanuts sweatshirt featuring Schroeder at his toy piano, notes from Beethoven swirling mysteriously above the caption, "To those of us with real understanding, music is the only pure art form." Other Peanuts characters festooned a line of similar sweatshirts with dance and other activities.

Since "pure art form" consists of three subjective concepts, I have no real understanding of what it signifies. But the sweatshirt was turquoise and huge and I liked wearing it when I was 13.

If life drives us to distraction, music and dance and other "art forms" can be nice distractions to have around. Other possibilities are wars, Porsche Boxsters, rock climbing, and the news. Some extremely expensive games have come out, and grown men in business suits animatedly discuss "phantom football" over pricey lunches. But distractions are limited; ultimately, they are shallow. They don't penetrate the soul they purport to reach in and touch.

Sometimes we seek distraction simply to disengage our minds because we are fatigued. But sometimes we seek distraction when we really need consolation, and distractions are futile because they fail to console.

Consolation differs from distraction in the ways by which we attain it, although both originate outside of ourselves. I am referring here only to distractions that we seek, futilely, to bring about consolation. We can put ourselves in the way of passive forms of distraction, such as entertainment media. Shopping is a distraction if, instead of collecting useful data for promoting frugality and acquiring needed goods, we are glitz gazing or buying impulsively. In any case, it is to the distractions themselves that we look for relief from our distress. Our relief is transitory; it lasts as long as the distraction endures.

Consolation, on the other hand, we receive through nothing we do. We surrender our distress to God alone, groaning for a blessing we cannot provide for ourselves or attain any other way. Consolation can't be switched on like a TV; you can't buy tickets or equipment. Your dearest friend can't even talk you into it. You are given to rely only on the goodness of God to provide it because he knows your need.

A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. (John 3:27)

Yes, this means that an unbeliever will be unable to find consolation. He will seek distraction from pain and distress all his unbelieving days.

We know that God speaks to us through his Word; however, verse hunting can be a distraction. Texts that are meaningful to me at times of distress may be less helpful to others. The point is, if we are regularly exercised in the Word, we know where to go. If we are under regular preaching, we have substance from which to draw. We are assured we will find what we seek of Christ.

There is nothing wrong with seeking support from other people, but such support should focus on finding consolation from God, not from people.

Consolation means receiving, and it also means asking. We are responsible for asking, but incapable of asking when we most need consolation. We are most susceptible to distractions when we are least able to ask for what we need to receive.

I am briefly pondering the distinctions between distraction and consolation here, because I think the former may often be wrongly pursued in place of the latter. I am pondering this now so that I might be useful to myself and others when the desperate need for consolation emerges. I am pondering this because I know that I am distractible, and I know that I am not easily consoled even when small stuff, real or imagined, issues forth.

But really, I have had to ponder this because, when I have not been easily consoled, it was perhaps because I was seeking consolation in distractions, rather than seeking to receive it from the only source in which it is to be found.

May the Consolation of Israel keep you. And may you receive his consolation to his glory.

Those who have perished

2006-11-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

Brooke McKasson sings a haunting song, "Just Before the War," on a CD called Tripping Maggie, that The McKassons released this year. The song details the perusal of some photographs the writer finds in the attic--photos of long-gone, unknown relations.

All the old photos I have are accounted for; there aren't many. Escaping from bizarre conditions in Europe at the turn of the century didn't leave my grandparents time to smile for American posterity.

My mother is perhaps the only person in history to bear an American passport sporting a glamorous photo. I also have press photos of my father in Hollywood, smoking with seedy characters wearing pork pie hats. These are the parents I had before I was born, so to speak. By the time they were my parents, they were immersed in new things of a more reputable nature.

I was riffling through a few things in a desk drawer, and my fingers registered recognition of a thin leather folder containing my father's high school diploma. I had forgotten I had also tucked a few other papers in the folder. I discovered a contract and read it for the first time. In 1938, at the age of 22, my father contracted to produce a play in his home town for $450. I found a chart on the internet that gives the value of a dollar over time. A 1938 dollar was worth $13.96 in today's dollars, so my father was paid the equivalent of almost $6,300 to produce a play during the Depression in a small theater in a small Eastern city when he was 22. Of course, he had to split his remuneration with a union. That's what the contract was about. But I learned of an achievement of the father of the press photos.

I sometimes wonder at the providence of God in placing me in the family he did. I wonder, but I know it was for my good. With no Biblical training whatsoever, I did my best to honor them. With no Biblical training whatsoever, they did their best to bring me up in the way I should go. But with any Biblical training at all, we would have been a different family.

That was not within God's providence. It was his will that I should be born again into an entirely new life, and even into an entirely new family. I can wish fruitlessly for what was not, but I was given something else: something so new that I could not help but appreciate it. Perhaps this will encourage others who were not nourished with a Christian upbringing in their families of origin, to abandon their rue and cleave only to the newness of Christ, his doctrine, his church, and his love for his people.

God doesn't remodel our souls. He tears down the old structures and puts up new ones. He makes us new creatures (Galatians 6:15; 2 Corinthians 5:17), new men (Ephesians 2:15, 4:24). Specifically, he recreates each of us as a new man renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him (Colossians 3:10). He has given us a new and living way to himself (Hebrews 10:20). He has even given us a new name (Revelation 2:17).

Jesus did for us what he did not require of us: love unto death.

But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do. John 14:31

And so he went, teaching and praying, to Gethsemane.

Greater love hath no man than this.

Those who are perishing

2006-11-16T06:33:00.000-08:00

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1:18

Some of us are of the age at which one begins having friends die. Mike Pitzler wrote about this recently. I rejoice in God's kind providence of John Robbins's extraordinary healing from Stage IV cancer; for God is surely kind not to leave the world bereft of Dr. Robbins's incisive intellect and his work for the Reformed faith.

So far, I have been blessed that none of my friends within my own age cohort have died. But I do have friends my own age, older, and younger, confident of their eternal security, hardening, and perishing. It's sad, very sad, and there is no power in the universe but God's mighty hand that can change a thing.

I've told them all I know. But they know better. The pastor lovingly stroked their little heads with holy water when they were just days old. They take Mom to church on Christmas Eve. They've even read the Bible all the way through. They value the Bible, though they think only the lunatic fringe believes all of it; they value their baptism. Their values will save them. They're going to be okay.

Then there are the people who think heaven and hell are states of mind; you choose your thoughts, you choose your mental state, you control your destiny.

And there are some who master a granitic countenance and claim they believe nothing of this at all, none of it. No God, no god, no heaven, no hell, no judgment. Sin, if you must use the word, is just a bad decision, perhaps inappropriate conduct. Zip you're born, zip you die, it's what's in between that counts, and sometimes the fabric gets snagged in the zipper, oh well.

Then there are the babes of Christianity, who just plain refuse to grow. They do read their Bibles, in all seven fashion colors, and they do go to church, where they praise their idea of God with their mouths and their hands and as little of their minds as possible. Their prayers sound like wishlists and would probably be as effective just posted on Amazon.

I grew up as an only child; my only sibling went away to college just before I was born. I probably wasn't as spoiled as I could have been, because I was compelled to share my toys with my father. He knew what to do with them better than I did. Actually, I liked sitting and watching my father play with my toys. He always seemed to deal with them as if they presented a problem for which he already had a solution he wanted to test.

I suppose I grew up thinking there is a solution for every problem, and not necessarily a problem for every solution. I had a sense that somehow there are solutions to spare. I see now that in a way, that is true. God has more solutions than he has problems any one of us in particular will experience.

God gave me a problem: a sinful condition I could not possibly overcome myself. He gave every single soul the same problem, with as many individual variations of the problem as there are souls. And he provided solutions for all of them, and all for his glory. He hasn't always shown me how things work, or how they work together for my good. He hasn't shared all he knows. But my problems can never outdo his solutions. His solutions may not have solved my sense of my problems as yet, but they are in place.

The children of Israel who followed Moses to the Promised Land were beset with one problem after another. Some of them knew they were going to possess the land; others believed the spies and feared the giants. Why would they think God intended to deceive them and leave them to die? ...thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself... (Psalm 50:21) The Israelites thought God as pernicious as themselves. Nothing has changed. Man still wants to make God in his own image. God is fair; God is accountable to man. God keeps his promises in the way we choose to understand them, God loves and will not disappoint us, ever. But God might deceive or abandon us, too. What a nightmare is the loop that imprisons the mind captive to sin.

The Israelites under Moses thought God would abandon them. Perhaps today's children think God is powerless to abandon them.

I have no solution for my perishing friends; I have proffered the true gospel to the best of my ability. But God does; it is the right one, and I do not have to worry about it being the right one. Their outcome is foreordained; the envelope is sealed.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. Psalm 121:8

For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. Romans 10:2

Frustration

2006-11-15T08:30:00.000-08:00

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John 16:33

My computer remains narcoleptic. The Apple Genius diagnosis and repair and the two more 52-mile round trips to the dreadful mall have failed to resolve the problem.

When the thing shuts itself off when I'm writing something terribly deep and important, I feel rejected and outraged. This would imply that I attribute human traits to the object, and that I allow it to wear me down as though I were in a pathological relationship with it. I hope it doesn't come through in dreams.

Nowhere in the Bible does it instruct us in how to repair or live with a computer. But we are given help for living with frustration. Right now, I'd like to curse this computer and see it wither, but somehow I don't think that's the correct answer.

All of us will be overcome by frustration from time to time. Where do we turn? To the Word of God. To the life of Jesus Christ. My computer does frustrating things. My computer is part of the world system: it certainly isn't one of the things above. Therefore, I can expect frustration from it and deal with it the way Christ tells us to deal with the world.

Providentially, I was listening yesterday to a sermon by Ruben Zartman, formerly with the Free Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, and now serving the gospel with his wife, Heidi, in Mexico. Ruben and Heidi have become very dear friends to my husband and me, and we have met them only through the Roman road of our computers.

The sermon is titled "The Christian's Peace in the World," and is at www.sermonaudio.com. Ruben preached this sermon when he was 21 years old, and I will say that he is coming up in the tradition of Charles H. Spurgeon and Tom Lyon.

Ruben was preaching from John 16:33, expositing on the teaching that the Christian holds dual citizenship in the world and in the heavenly kingdom. We are, in essence, bilocal: we are compelled to exist in two very disparate spheres. We exist spiritually in Christ, while existing physically in the world. This is, intrinsically, a very frustrating situation. The ways of the world are not the ways of God--by very definition, they oppose Christ--and yet we must abide in the midst of them.

The peace we have in Christ is not a matter of temperament, says Ruben; it is spiritual peace, a grace of the Holy Spirit. Ruben refers to this peace as peace of conscience, and peace of heart. Christ made this peace possible by providing for our atonement with his blood. And Christ gives us his peace when we approach him for it. How? These things I have spoken unto you... He gives us peace in his word.

Christ's promises and revelation of himself in his word are the sources from which we may attain peace. The "small still voice" that revived Elijah was God revealing himself. (1 Kings 19:12) Christ's character throughout the Scriptures reveals he is true and faithful to his word, and that he will come through with his promised peace.

For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation. (Psalm 149:4)

God's word contains assurance that he does care for us depraved, distractible sinners. We are to keep our eye on the things above. When the things below distract us to the point of spiritual alienation, we have refreshment always at hand. The peace is in place; we have only to take hold once again.

Ruben tells us the Word brings us peace because faith feeds upon knowledge. The Word allays the doubts and fears that arise in tribulation. And we will have tribulation. We grow in grace as we combine revelation with faith:

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Isaiah 26:3

And faith must be combined with obedience for peace:

O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea...Isaiah 48.18

The wonderfully good news is that Christ has overcome the world; it is not even a faithful promise of a future event: He has done it. We will suffer tribulation--in my case, a low frustration threshold--but we aren't stuck in this forever. And for the time that we are, we have Christ as a peacegiver, a refuge, and an advocate.

No goosey computer can upend that.

Elton John on Hatred & Organized Religion

2006-11-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified,but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Elton John finds organized religion inconvenient because it "fuels hatred toward gays." He says that, if it were up to him--and he doesn't quite admit that it isn't--he would ban organized religion completely.

The AP copyright notice is a little daunting, so here's the link. If it doesn't work, it's at CNN.com, or take my word for it.

John says that organized religion has always tried to drum up hatred toward gays, and calls religious perpetrators "hateful lemmings," and their organizations "not really compassionate." I think he's right to a large extent, and it's unfortunate. Religion should not fuel hatred. Hatred is not a mark of grace. But I also doubt that Elton John apprehends the difference between hatred and righteous indignation.

We're called to come to grips with our own depravity and our need for release from its reign over our lives. Christians are the beneficiaries of the grace of God's forgiveness, saved from the eternal consequences of our sin: God's just condemnation and the destruction of our souls. Members of "organized religion" might be anything at all, and I don't want the rap for their hatred.

Christians are under orders not to sin. We can't do this, but we are under orders to repent and invoke God's power to keep us. We have an advocate before the Father, our savior, Jesus Christ. We are under orders, as the stinging, preserving, disinfecting, seasoning salt of the earth, to call a sin a sin, and to announce its conflict with God's moral law. But hatred is not in our orders.

Hatred is possibly a very imaginative way of passing the buck of sin when it should already have been passed. Why hate gays? Why hate any unregenerate people? Sin is sin; either it burdens the sinner, or it has been left at the cross of Christ by a divine grace in which the sinner had no part at all.

Our sin should already have been left at the cross of Christ. There is no reason to call another's sin worse than our own and to hate him for it to somehow make our own sin look better. If we're trying to shift the burden a bit by hating someone else's and calling it "worse," then maybe we haven't unburdened ourselves of our own sin and left it where it belongs. Our burden requires no lightening if it has been shed.

We aren't to fellowship with those who live in active opposition to the law of God. What fellowship has light with darkness? But we certainly are not to hate them, either. And I submit that true Christians don't hate gays, because they know that "there but for grace," they themselves could be anything hateful at all.

Salvation is not a testimony that we could never have been worse sinners than we were; it is a testimony of the "power of God unto salvation." (Romans 1:16) "...lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:9), if I may conflate.

Now the hard part. If you remain a practicing homosexual, you are not a Christian. It is impossible, because you have not repented your sin and removed yourself from it--and your practice is sin and you know all the places it says so in the Bible. Very simply, sin still dominates your life. Paul says to his Corinthians, "and such were some of you," not, "and such are some of you." You can go to church and profess love for Christ and his love for you, but it isn't happening. If you're in an "open and welcoming" church, you're in a happy lie. If you're in a true church, and your sin is open, people should talk to you about it, unless you choose to avail yourself of a church as a public accommodation and not as a place of worship. But they should not hate you.

I think Elton John is a very burdened person, given over to sin, vain imaginings of his importance and his rights, and false ideas of true religion. In his reprobate mind he his blameless. But, like everyone else, he is full of sin that needs cleansing, repentance, and forgiveness. He doesn't need hatred.

We can never merit God's gift of salvation from the dominion of sin. We cannot make ourselves worthy of the gift before or after receiving it. It's free, in spite of what we are. But we are told that if we do not forgive, our heavenly Father will not forgive us. (Matthew 6:15) The servant who was forgiven his debt to his lord, and then in turn persecuted those who owed him, was delivered to the tormentors. (Matthew 18:23-34)

Our forgiveness cannot save Elton John, or anyone else; only God's forgiveness can, and it does not seem that Mr. John has asked for forgiveness and healing. If Elton John's sin is worse than our own in our minds, it makes us look good in our own minds, and we are not good. And if we still need to look good, maybe we're still trying to hide that bundle, and we haven't laid it down as we must.

So Near And Yet So Far

2006-11-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

To the eye untuned to the gospel, the vignettes of Mark 12 could pass in a disjointed blur of trailers of Mark: The Movie, Part 12. But the passages are very connected, very much a part of one theme: mens' relation to the gospel.

The Pharisees, as usual, are either offended or they don't get it. First, they hear a parable of a vintner, and they recognize the characters: there they are, the killers of the prophets. Did they see themselves as the murderer of the Messiah as well? Evidently they identified with the end of the story, because they were certainly offended; they knew Jesus had spoken the parable against them.

Next, they sent the Delta Pharisees and Herodians to catch him in his words. (Mark 12:13) They're caught up in their legalistic little games, trying to bait Jesus with insolent questions about whether they owe taxes to Caesar. I think this is a particularly interesting example of our Lord's method of relay. He doesn't refer this team to the Scriptures, as he does even Satan in the wilderness challenge; instead, he refers them to their own sphere of knowledge: the coin of the realm. Money is the language they understand; money is where they receive their answer. They marvel.

Then come the Sadducees, who are ignorant of the Scriptures and the power of God and do not believe in the Resurrection. They work up the Pepsi Challenge about the woman who survived seven husbands under Levirate law, and they find out they have everything all wrong. Matthew records their astonishment (Matthew 22:33). Luke does not record their response, but does record an additional explanation Jesus gives: For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him. (Luke 20:38) Like it or not, believe it or not, all live unto him.

Then a scribe came up to Jesus by himself. He does not address Jesus, does not call him "Lord," but merely asks him about the first, or greatest commandment of all. Jesus tells him the first is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. (Mark 12:30) Then he tells him the second commandment is, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The scribe agrees with Jesus, adding his understanding that love of God and neighbor is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices. (Mark 12:33)

Then, Jesus says something rather cryptic: Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. (Mark 12:34) How can one be "not far" from the kingdom of God? Isn't one either in or out? Perhaps Jesus saw the scribe as being of the right spirit, but he had not yet embraced the gospel by faith. So there is a "close," that must be "closed." The scribe isn't yelling, "Lord, thou son of David!" He isn't asking for the Lord's mercy. He isn't desperate for relief from his burden of sin. He is still testing his own intellectual grasp of the law. We don't know where he wound up.

Then Jesus starts asking questions. The Pharisees aren't quick to grasp the meaning of the 110th Psalm, as to how David's son can be David's Lord. The common people hear him gladly (Mark 12:37), but maybe that's because they're glad to see the Pharisees looking dumb. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees strongly, ending with "greater damnation." (Mark 12:40)

Lastly, we see a scene in the temple, as the Lord observes what everyone casts in to the treasury. A certain poor widow cast in two mites. Jesus lauds her act to his disciples: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. How easy it is to be dutiful and give of our abundance; how trustful to give of our want all that we have, knowing God will provide for all our needs.

That trust, the ability to give of our want, was lacking in the rich young ruler. (Mark 10:17-22) Jesus did not tell the young man that he was close to the kingdom of God, but he told him he "lacked one thing." (Mark 10:21) We know this young man went sadly away.

There is, of course, a great gulf fixed between the kingdom of God and those who will prefer the world and ultimately accept responsibility for their perdition. Whatever "not far" actually means, it is not a destination and not a safe place to abide. It is a place of mortal danger that requires urging on. We don't know what became of the inquisitive scribe. Who wants to follow in his footsteps?

Treading the Swales

2006-11-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it....And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away. Mark 11:13-14; 20-21

I was reading Mark 11, and then listening to a sermon by Joe Morecraft, a little preoccupied by pain in my knee as I walked on my treadmill. One of those providential connections clicked, as so often happens, bringing together nagging thoughts, my reading, and the sermon.

That cursed fig tree again. Is it hardened ethnic Israel? Is it just a tree that let the Lord down when he was afflicted with mortal hunger pangs? (Maybe Martha was sitting and listening to him that morning instead of fixing breakfast before sending him off from Bethany.) Or is it cold Christians who just never seem to bring forth fruit, in and out of season--like, uh-oh--me?

When the Lord rebukes hardened, unbelieving men and teaches them of the Kingdom of God, they marvel (Matthew 22:22); or they are astonished (Matthew 22:33); or they see themselves in his parables and seek to lay hands on him but fear public opinion (Matthew 21:45-46); or they are offended (Matthew 15:12); or they plot his destruction (Matthew 12:14); or they call him an ally of the devil (Matthew 9:34); or they ask him to leave so they don't lose more income from their pigs (Matthew 8:34); or they take up stones to cast at him (John 8:59).

But there are many whom God has elected to salvation. These people respond very differently: the woman at the well, Bartimaeus, the one leper of the ten, the man with the withered hand, and many others who, healed by Jesus, go on to glorify God and spread the gospel. They bear true fruit and become the branches of the true vine (John 15:1-5).

In the sermon I was listening to, Pastor Morecraft spoke of the true Christian as one who keeps his mind on Christ, always dragging it back to Christ when it wanders into temptation. And, the true Christian, he said, is always bringing new people to sit under preaching in his church. Rather withering. In more than three and one-half years, no one has shown up at my church saying, "Mrs. B sent me."

What is the nature of a fig tree? Matthew Henry examines the fig tree in Judges 9:11 to scope out the fig tree in Mark 11 and Matthew 21. He says,

"The fig-tree must lose its sweetness, its sweet retirement, sweet repose, and sweet conversation and contemplation, if it go to be promoted over the trees, and must undergo a constant fatigue."

So perhaps the Lord is annoyed with the fig for being a fig because a fig is a self-centered thing and does nothing out of its way to serve God in a moment of truth. Ouch.

But a Christian isn't--or shouldn't be--seeking promotion over his peers. If he is, he has something very terribly wrong. But he has been promoted from death into life. He didn't earn this promotion; it was given him by grace. He had no claim on any such thing; it was a gift for which he could not have even known to ask. And he should be seeking the same promotion for others.

This past week in the flooded Pacific Northwest, a lot of people have found that it isn't how high up you live, but how high the terrain is around you, that determines whether your house will be under water. If you live in a swale, even at 500 feet, you could be flooded.

It isn't just that a Christian has the blessing of salvation that makes him a Christian. He's supposed to look around, in and out of season, and see whether there are "much people in the city" in his own neighborhood. If he isn't looking around for others who need promotion from death to life, it could be that he's in a swale, with the waters about to rush in, even though he thinks he's above danger.

Tax All the Fun, Whatever That Is

2006-11-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

Someone I knew in law school had a wonderfully simple solution for life in America: Like It, Tax It. She thought everything "fun" should be taxed.

So I thought of walking along the river flats, kicking crisp fall leaves, wondering how they were going to tax me for the fun of hearing the leaves crunch under my boots.

But the guy going to the Mecca Theater--he should be taxed.

Caesar Augustus had a fair, comprehensive plan: he decreed that "all the world should be taxed." (Luke 2:1) He didn't even provide self-addressed envelopes for the taxpayers' convenience.

For a while, it was under consideration, and still might be, that my county would require a license for--effectively a tax on--every bird a person owned. This was a response to a particular incident of someone keeping more birds than they were able to care for; many birds became ill and died. If they'd had to license those birds, went the city's rationale, they would have taken better care of them, or kept fewer...or violated more counts of the law. As an owner of five unprofitable chickens I happen to find entertaining, I could be facing five new tax liabilities. For people who keep chickens as an economic necessity, such a tax would only increase their economic necessity.

But my protester's heart must retreat and acknowledge that God treats civil government as an extension of his own authority. He does not suggest reviewing government-given laws any more than he permits challenging his own. But if God-ordained authorities fail to keep God's mandates, then is rebellion legitimate? What about Cromwell taking down the monarchy of the monstrous Charles II?

It really flies in the face of our people's republic to put up with much. Or it used to. We're the children of the Minutemen. We the people would rather dunk our tea than pay the tea tax.

But when Herod ordered all the infants of Bethlehem slain in his attempt to destroy the newborn King of Israel, we do not see the formation of a rebel army; we see "lamentation , and weeping, and great mourning..." (Matthew 2:16-18). And much more was at stake than taxes.

How could we put up with such injustice unopposed? That's not who we are; this is America. Hint: I don't have an answer at the end of this post.

But we're given some clues.

I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge, and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Psalm 91:2

Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked. Psalm 91:8

It's hard: God--not the law, not the courts, not stashes of weapons, not the Constitution--God alone is our refuge. He is the object of our trust for our eternal souls and for our temporal security. We do not live in "modern times" that have been given to new means of dealing with trouble.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes: 1:9

We live in an age of comity and its prevailing theme that all have differences to be respected and all must get along. This is GIGO, but it shows no signs of death throes.

We are to oppose that which opposes God, and perhaps to be content not to be heard, or to be heard in quiet.

The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools. Ecclesiastes 9:17

Sometimes that which opposes God is our own will.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. Psalm 46:10

God will be exalted. We can relent from our ineffectual manipulations. We can relent from vain imaginings that there is power in our own faith and prayers, when there is power in God alone. Then we can ask to know his will.

More Dead for More Rights

2006-11-09T06:37:00.000-08:00

It seems abstinence proclamations aren't very effective. It also seems it is just easier for everyone if the law entitles the sinner to his and her wages: the death of another.

I think abstinence proclamations are silly. Governments don't have faith; the Holy Spirit never lighted on a government, nor did our Lord ever promise faith to any political entity. Yet our government goes about proclaiming values that are the fruits of faith, without force of law, encouraging cooperation of impulsive youth driven by a feeding frenzy of environmental stimuli to do quite the opposite. I mean really, get real.

Abstinence works where there is spiritual discipline over the flesh, upheld by faith and an environment of faith. Without faith, a "just say no" proclamation is burlesque.

Teen sex is one more thing the government has tried to take over where parents lacked competence. This is one more time the government looks very absurd. This is one more time the government has completely failed to protect preborn infants.

A flow chart of safety nets would look like this: Just say "no." But if you don't say "no," don't have unprotected sex. But if you do have unprotected sex, or if your protection fails, you can get an abortion. But if you get an abortion, don't wait too long. But if you do wait too long, well, it's messier, but you can still have an abortion. Even in states that were formerly mean-spirited about reproductive rights.

You can read for yourself which states voted to make abortion easier in what ways. Just notifying one's parents of one's intention to snuff their grandchild was considered in two jurisdictions to be unduly burdensome.

But don't worry, the Supreme Court will soon be weighing in and defining rectitude and repairing timelines that bend around rectitude to carve out rights. The Court will likely redefine "state interests" in the lives of children. Bitterly, if these children were permitted a matter of hours to be born, the "best interest of the child" would kick in. But while there is any tissue still in utero, it's the state that has the interest in whether their lives will be lived or snuffed.

It is actually maternal death rates that are worrisome to public health wonks. It seems that legal abortions have a much lower incidence of maternal death and injury than illegal abortions. ( CDC Blocks Publication of Abortion Research, Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience's Bad Medicine Columnist, LiveScience.com, Tue Nov 7, 3:55 PM ET) Therefore, legal abortions are safer. Um, okay, this might not be obvious to everyone, but the infant mortality rate in abortions, whether legal or illegal, is 100%.

I don't expect government to deal rationally with all matters of sin, notwithstanding its charge to define and punish crime. My state just reelected a Senator who identifies herself as "Roman Catholic" and as "one hundred percent pro-choice."

I oppose the idea that government has a choice in who is a person worthy of its protection and who is not. God has set before us life and death, blessing and cursing, that we and our seed might live (Deuteronomy 30:19). He intends future generations to proclaim his glory (Psalm 78:6). We are cursed indeed to give ourselves the right to choose death.

Thorns, Thistles, and a Long Monday

2006-11-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail. 1 Samuel 2:9

for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth... Genesis 8:21

I spent all day Monday in a medium-security situation learning about some of the latest devices in the evil imaginings of man.

The room air was stale and dry, and the coffee supply ran out early. Security guards were not unpleasant, but emphatic in their duty. Although the women's restroom had four operable stalls, only one person was permitted in the restroom at a time. When she came out, the guard did a "sweep," checking the restroom before admitting the next woman in line. The same drill applied to the men's restroom. A sharps container bearing the "Biohazard" logo was conveniently placed in each stall.

Welcome to the Tacoma Public Library.

The subject matter that drew a group of attorneys to this place was a continuing legal education panel on predatory lending and foreclosure rescue schemes.

Mortgage and foreclosure schemes abound and ruin the lives of the working poor and the well-to-do alike. These pirates dock in spiffy offices belonging to financial institutions, mortgage brokers, and real estate agencies. I came away with the impression that it would be more difficult to find an undissembled mortgage contract than it would be to find a Baptist in the Vatican.

Gone are the days when a homebuyer or homeowner wishing to refinance knows who holds his mortgage. Securitized trusts have replaced local banks, though local banks may execute the paperwork. Once a mortgage has been sold several times over--and all are--no one knows who Snidely Whiplash is anymore. He's a diverse, disembodied entity, the number of whose corporate identities is as the sands of the sea. If you are looking for a new mortgage, he is looking to spread a net at your feet.

Beyond the accounts of horror and woe of ill-gotten gains through fraudulent mortgages, what interested me was the presentation of evil and sin without acknowledgment of actual evil and sin. I can't know for certain, but I did not have the impression that any of the attorneys on this panel of experts knew anything of the law of God. The prevailing ethos seemed to be one of "the defenders of the weakest vs. the survival of the fittest." Crime has evolved to this point; the law, therefore, must evolve so as to stay the path of crime's destruction. Evil must have a counterpart on the side of the law.

But sin and obedience are not counterparts. They are not reeling around in a dualistic universe offsetting one another.

It is righteous to oppose sin. It is impossible to bring all sin under control. Unscrupulous destruction of another's security in his property is a trial. And only the Christian is properly equipped to apprehend the providence of affliction in God's dealings with men, which may be manifest as men's dealings with men.

Temporal security is not unimportant, and I think it would be ingenuous to hold up eternal security as complete compensation for ruinous temporal loss. We are to punish the guilty among us, and to restore, as much as possible, the innocent to their original state of wholeness. But our theology trumps our man-centered commerce, because without it, we have no notion of guilt or of wholeness. All have sinned; none are whole.

We are given mechanisms of law and government to punish some and restore others, and this is supposed to be in a way that honors God. We honor God when we seek his will. I would venture to say that discernment of God's will is little exercised by governments making and applying laws. But I digress.

Most of the world is on one sort of search-and-destroy mission or another. Christians need to do more than buckle up for safety. I think prayer is the most difficult form of activism. I don't know what else to recommend. A studied, Biblical theology is our only chart for navigating the confusion of good and evil circumscribing us; and a studied, Biblical theology requires prayer. But the world is such that we still may require legal remedies from time to time. We need to arm ourselves with information of the world to make necessary decisions and to protect ourselves from wolves. This goes to stewardship, the charge to protect our temporal blessings. These things are not in lieu of, but should be undertaken with, prayer. Probably a Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceeding should not mark one's first attempt at prayer.

Hearing a litany of some of the most evil imaginings of men's hearts all day is tiring. It takes strength to think of that much evil, much less oppose it actively. It is a good time to be a Calvinist, as it always is. It is a good time to remember that I have no strength, none at all, but what God supplies of his own, with each day's portion.

The Green Grass in the Desert Place

2006-11-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.
And they departed into a desert place by ship privately.
And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto him.
And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things.
And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him, and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed:
Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to eat.
He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and give them to eat?
He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? go and see. And when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes.
And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass. Mark 6:31-39

In a desert place they sat on green grass. They were parched of spirit, and the Water of Life preached and taught them upon the green grass. It probably wasn't really a desert in the sense of infertile sand, but a deserted place. And to this deserted place came five thousand men, and women and children as well (Matthew 14:21), a ragtag flock who moved the Lord with compassion.

The Lord began preaching and healing and feeding the multitude; he had so much compassion in his own grief. His cousin and forerunner, John the Baptist, had just been murdered to avenge the vanity of Herodias.

Matthew Henry notes that God ordered this disorderly flock; he had them number themselves and sit in companies of hundreds and fifties, because he is a God of order. And he made them recline (ανακλιναι) in a green pasture, perhaps one like that upon which David reflected in Psalm 23:1-2. Want is transformed into luxuriant fulfillment. The Lord's sheep may safely graze and leave their desert minds behind.

Then Jesus fed his hearers, multiplying five loaves and two fish into provision for the five thousand and more. We are not told that anyone marveled, or was amazed, or thanked him. They simply ate and were filled. The Bread of Life filled his hungry sheep and was then able to send them away and depart. They still had twelve baskets full of bread and fish.

His disciples did not reflect on the miracle of the loaves, for their heart was hardened. (Mark 6:52) Evidently they were more impressed that their Lord quelled the wind and sea and and restored their safety; the bread and the five thousand were out of sight, out of mind as they faced their own peril in the storm. Perhaps they had not been awfully hungry when the bread was multiplied, but they did fear the wind that distressed their ship. Worse, they feared a ghost when they beheld Jesus walking toward them on the sea. (Mark 6:49)

Matthew's account provides more detail than Mark's. Jesus beckons Peter to walk out to him on the water. And Peter flails. (Matthew 14:28-30) This would not be the last time the Lord would reprove Peter for his little faith. (Matthew 14:31) It is so entirely possible to have a desert moment immediately after leaving behind the verdant pasture.

Ι find ερημος, "deserted place," or "uninhabited region," or "desert," one of the most beautiful words in the beautiful Greek language. Its accusative form is ερεμον, which reminds me of "Erewhon," the reverse of "nowhere," and the title of a utopian satire by Samuel Butler. The desert place to which the five thousand followed Jesus was almost as if it was nowhere; but the green grass where they reclined to listen to him teach and where they ate until they were filled, made it somewhere miraculous.

Our Incredible Road Trip

2006-11-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Matthew 6:34

We're all rather under the weather at our house, including my computer, which has narcolepsy. If it is jostled in the slightest, or if I move the lid, it shuts itself down.

After spending more than three hours (most of our monthly cell minute allotment) on the phone with Apple Care representatives, I was able to speak with one who had a triple-digit IQ and who believed my theory that my G4 is not suffering from a software disease, but has a loose wire near the hinge. And so I was able to progress to an appointment with a Mac Genius at an Apple store.

The Apple store is 26 miles from our home. This meant waiting until Saturday when my husband could drive me; I haven't driven that far in several years. I haven't even sat in the car for that long in several months. So, Saturday was our big 52-mile-round-trip road trip. Friday night I determined what to wear and what to pack.

We drove to the Apple Store in a mall, a seedy suburban venue popular with young men in baggy pants, headphones, and several unmatched earrings in each ear. We arrived a bit early for our appointment, a few minutes before most of the stores in the mall opened. The people smoking outside inches from the doors did not at all mind standing aside so we could walk past them to enter the mall. They even smiled, seemingly to share the excitement of being there. My husband and I are mall grinches, and did not share their excitement.

When the cage doors lifted at the Apple store, we learned that we had a 15-minute appointment with a Genius named Dave; then we learned that one of three outcomes was possible. First, my computer could be repaired in 2-3 days without the part the Genius ordered in case I need it. Or, my computer could be repaired in 2-3 days with the part the Genius ordered in case I need it. Or, the problem is not what the Genius thinks it is, and my computer might have to go to Apple Camp in Tennessee for 7-10 days. This is not a thrilling prospect, as I do not live in Tennessee. There would be no visitation.

I brought my computer home to await the Genius's call when the part arrives, at which time we will make another 52-mile round trip to the Genius and hope very much that my computer will be fully restored to vim in 2-3 days. The repair, if all occurs according to his optimistic expectations, will actually take just a few minutes, but there is, of course, a "queue" and a "flow." In the meantime, my computer works; it just has narcolepsy and conks out if it is nudged, like on my lap. Tough machine.

Since this was our biggest road trip in nearly half a year, we decided to have breakfast at Nordstrom. The Nordstrom in this particular mall is not your usual Nordstrom; it is, like the mall it occupies, actually a tad seedy. But cold, limp toast delivered by a pleasant non-Anglophonic server was the worst of it and breakfast was pleasant overall. The Mighty Leaf tea was memorable. We enjoyed an unexpected elevator ride back down to the mall level, as the escalator was out of order.

We found our car in the parking lot, and no one had engraved his initials in my car with his keys, so we considered the trip moderately fruitful and blessedly uneventful.

Our road trip took place on a rainy Saturday, and the mall was full of people before most of the stores were open. They lined up to enter the stores before the cages were raised. This appeared to be their destination and purpose for the day. They seemed expectant, but not impatient. This was their day at the mall.

Most came self-wired with their own music, friends, and shopping bags from their last expedition. We had one errand, plus the treat of breakfast, and couldn't wait to leave the mall. For hundreds of others, this is where life happens: stuff to buy, people to watch, a place to walk around with a 24-ounce paper Starbucks cup.

We beelined past the throng and waited our long turn to exit the mall parking lot. Heading home, I worried how I will manage without my computer when I leave it with the Mac Genius next week. I haven't been so nervous since the Cat's illnesses and surgery last summer.

We all connect in one way or another: I through my computer, others with the accessories of mall life. Perhaps others watch others shopping in the mall from home on the Mall Channel.

I realize mall expeditions are routine for most people. For me they are about as routine as entering an Area 51 checkpoint. To me, everything in a mall looks like an Area 51 character store.

It frustrates me to depend on a computer that has to go to a particular place in a mall outside of my usual territorial limits for several days in order to function properly. But life has its frustrations. I still have a typewriter, but it won't launch my blog posts. I shall try to arrange a way to minimize disruption in my connections during these exigent times. I do not think I will seek consolation at the local mall.

σκανδαλον Collage

2006-11-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

"Skandalon" means, "that which causes sin, or stumbling, or trouble." Skandalons (pardon the anglicized plural) abound, within and without. I even think they can be implanted in websites and leave "devil cookies" on the brain.

I have to be very careful what I take in. I have a fragile mind. Abnormal seratonin uptake causes my brain to be easily overstimulated. I have a generous and candid nature, and I don't mind your knowing this. Overstimulation can lead very rapidly to depression, migraines, and erratic temper and thinking. No excuses, just Neurochem 101.

I do know that after perusing Richard Dawkins's website and researching the man and his ideation for my previous post, I was overcome by a skandalon episode. I don't attribute the onset to mere coincidence, nor do I excuse it by attributing it to Mr. Dawkins. I do find him revolting and I did have a seratonin crisis and migraine after I finished writing my article.

This is why I will no longer write for money; no one can pay me enough to make myself sick.

Skandalon episodes are not our finest hours. In my case, I hang out in tombs, crying and cutting myself with stones. I see Jesus afar off. I wish I had the Gadarene's sense to run and worship him. (Mark 5:5-6)

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

There is no comfort outside the Word of God. What we have to give one another, we have received. We have nothing of ourselves to give but our own sharp stones.

God provides comfort but he afflicts us sore as well. It isn't easy to think how much we deserve the afflictions and how little the comforts. I doubt these make anyone's favorite verse list, but they are inscribed in my frequented tombs:

There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.
For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness. Psalm 38:3-5

The despair of sin may lead to the sin of despair. But a way out is given.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Psalm 23:4

Job knew all about the providence of suffering, but it didn't always make him smile.

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty:
For he maketh sore and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole. Job 5:17-18

So did Paul (or Pol).

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth....But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. Hebrews 12:6,8

The ability to walk out of the tomb alive is not within ourselves.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith... Hebrews 1-2

Jesus placed us in this race and he will shepherd us to its finish. Nobody wins; his hobbled sheep all simply complete the course.

Receiving the end of your faith even the salvation of your souls. 1 Peter 1:9

We do walk out of the tomb alive. That's who we are, that's what we're called to do. We're the people who follow the One who walked out of the tomb alive. More alive than we ever were before, because we are drawn out by

him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light... 1 Peter 2:9

According to John's gospel, Jesus' first words in the New Kingdom were,

Woman, why weepest thou? John 20:15

Why, indeed.

And God will wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. Revelation 21:4-5

True and faithful. We're going to walk out of the tomb alive.

Richard Dawkins is a Small Smart Man

2006-11-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. Mark 4:12

My Unicode is messed up; the title was supposed to read, "Richard Dawkins is a Big Fat Dope." But I really don't like to call anyone that. "Richard Dawkins is a Self-Styled Militant Atheist." There, is that better?

Richard Dawkins is an heir of sensualistic philosophy, and an impoverished heir at that. He'd be a minor player but for his diligent self-promotion. But he says some cute things, like:

"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child."

Most of Dawkins's predecessors from Darwin's generation displayed significant intelligence for self-reproducing robots, albeit flawed logic. I think some intelligence genes have been lost in the descent to Dawkins. When I had to refuse to review his book, The Blind Watchmaker, because I could not give it a favorable review and the magazine editor clearly wanted a favorable review, I read far enough to realize that it was the same old monkey-at-the-typewriter model without even the benefit of a new hat for the monkey.

The capacities of abstraction and extrapolation are universally regarded marks of intelligence. Mr. Dawkins, Oxford professor of "public understanding of science," whatever that is, apparently lacks the ability to abstract sufficiently to distinguish Christianity from astrology.

One thing at which Dawkins does excel--and brilliantly--is rarified arrogance and self-adulation. If I aspired to pompous narcissism, I'd be insanely jealous of his achievement.

Okay, I'm on a tear. Please don't take my word for this. Visit Richard Dawkins's website; just please, don't click any ads so as to enrich him. I don't wish to speak about him without fully attributing my source. All quotes I use will be from his own site. There you will also find reviews of his books. I will not read or review them. I will rely fully on his own words to substantiate my testimony as to his shallowness. Let him introduce himself. He has a forum; if you are inclined to discuss the gospel with a world-famous atheist, there's your opening. But I suspect he's looking for affirmation, admiration, and adulation--his only shot at straight "A"s, and would toss you off his board.

Dawkins is as quotable as a beanbag chair. Despite all the stuffing, he doesn't hold a shape. You can read on and on and it's all stuffing and no cogent nuggets of intelligence ever cohere. Basically, his whole agenda in life is to prove that, since the brain is a great simulator and deceiver, and therefore we cannot trust our senses, then no sensory experience of God is reliable, therefore God does not exist.

Evidently, Dawkins has placed some very dense stuffing between himself and anyone with true faith. God-given faith, of course, does not rely on sensory experience. But Dawkins likes to disqualify the existent God with arguments any person of faith would also dismiss. His weapon of choice for discrediting religion out of hand is the Catholic Church, with its institutionalized superstition and widely publicized sexual abuse scandals.

In supporting a book written by Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, Dawkins appeals to the need to protect children from religion. He quotes Humphrey's book: "[I]n the same way as Amnesty [International] works tirelessly to free political prisoners the world over, we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them." Dawkins advocates the elimination of religious indoctrination of children. His intellectual ammunition appears to be that little Muslim kids are being taught to hate the West; therefore, no little kids should learn anything about any religion. But I'm merely gleaning from his sparse field of fruits; I'm sure there is much more of same in his pop-hate books. There I go again....

Here are some of Dawkins's own "quotes of note," in case you are disinclined to make a visit. He placed these on his own site; they were not on a hostile Christian site. No one is out to make him look like a fool; he is competent to indict himself.

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."--Richard Dawkins

Compare and contrast:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen....Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. Hebrews 11:1,3

Here is something profound:

"Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature."--Richard Dawkins

I paused for thought but it wasn't there.

"There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."--Richard Dawkins

I knew there would be common ground somewhere. I have a favorite:

"Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?"--Richard Dawkins

I will. And what is Mr. Dawkins's motive? Is he talking about making gospel preaching a felony?

Here's what Dawkins, a man dedicated to science, says about science:

"Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading."--Richard Dawkins

Shifting the beans, it would seem that Dawkins believes religion and science are incompatible because only one could possibly be "true, inspiring, and remarkable." Dawkins posits that the universe would look different if there were a God:

"A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different."--Richard Dawkins

I think this quote is most representative of Mr. Dawkins's sense of fairness:

"I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true." --Richard Dawkins

I think of Mr. Dawkins listening to Paul on Mars Hill:

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."--Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins takes it upon himself to simplify the world and determine that all belief that fails to pass the fictive muster of actual sensory experience is irrational and potentially dangerous. Such beliefs ultimately are all alike--magic, astrology, Christianity, Islam--they're all just so many blights on reason; they are imaginings attesting to Dawkins's conviction that "[t]he human brain runs first-class simulation software," and that what cannot be proven to his empirical satisfaction is simply, flatly, false. Not unprovable, but false.

So I call Richard Dawkins a big fat dope. But he is really a poor blind sinner in a dreadful state of nature, in active, hostile rebellion against God, as was I, as were all those to whom God showed the mercy of faith. There is no less hope for Richard Dawkins than there was for Paul of Tarsus, or for me. Dawkins is on the lam.

The bad news is, Richard Dawkins's book, The God Delusion, is currently Amazon's #3 bestseller. The better news is, of the top five Amazon bestsellers, only one received a five-star review: The Beauty Buyble. There's just no accounting for taste in this here decillionth or so generation of bacteria (why not slime molds?) Mr. Dawkins calls our ancestors.

Who is Able to Stand Before Envy?

2006-11-02T06:29:00.000-08:00

Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy? Proverbs 27:4

A sound heart is the life of the flesh; but envy the rottenness of the bones. Proverbs 14:30

For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one. Job 5:2

charity envieth not...1 Corinthians 13:4

For he knew that for envy they had delivered him. Matthew 27:18

The Bible is rife with admonitions against envy; only a very few are cited above. I can't help but think God wants to call our attention to the sin of envy that festers in the hearts of all of us. I believe it will be the last of our remaining sin to be purged at glory.

I have been reflecting on envy, as I have had the pain of seeing one of my friends as the object of an envy-driven campaign to harm her reputation and work.

Envy is such an ugly sin.

Envy likely motivated the first murder, committed by the first person born after the Fall. And Matthew and Mark tell us envy motivated the crucifixion of the Lord.

Even Pontius Pilate knew envy when he saw it and tried to wash his hands of its fruits. But he was more a crowd pleaser than a defender of innocent blood. Envy is transparent but not hard to get away with, because sin, like misery, loves company.

Envy underlies the Tenth Commandment; it is the sin from which all others ultimately stem. I think that means, if we say we don't envy, we say we don't sin. We know what that makes us.

Ultimately, lawless man envies the power of God. He envies the power of God to create and destroy. He envies any power over himself at all. Just being at God's mercy for birth and death drives some people nuts.

When man doesn't get the power he wants, he is quite capable of settling for much less. He is capable of incredible pettiness to conceal the vastness of his lust.

I have yet to meet the perfectly contented person who is without lust and envy. I'm pretty certain only one such person has ever walked the face of the earth. He wasn't treated well.

I despise and abhor the sin of envy in myself; that doesn't make me gentle about it in others. When it causes harm to people I love, I have very ungentle thoughts.

Since envy is present in every fallen soul, it always triggers remorse within us when we see it in action. That is, of course, if we are subject to remorse. Remorsefulness is a gracious blessing. We may not murder and steal every day, but we have envy pangs every day. And envy is the root of murder and theft. It hurts to think about envy. It hurts to write about it.

But God always gives us a way out; at least he does for those on whom he has mercy. His Word comforts, his people console each other. And we have that gracious remorsefulness and the heart to forebear the inevitable assaults of the flesh. We are told to "Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. (1 Corinthians 13:7)

Only to the Church is this exercise in overcoming sin given. The rest of the world is perishing. We see it happening, every day. People are spending their lives ending their lives, in misery and without hope.

And so envy might be used of God to remind us of the reason for our hope. He has given us remorse, he has given us mercy, he has saved us from perishing in our sin. Even the ugly sin of envy.

Teachability

2006-11-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

Behold, God exalteth by his power: who teacheth like him? Job 36:22

...and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; Colossians 2:2

Christians and non-Christians alike routinely mix up subjects and objects. It's bad enough to say, "to her and I," but that sort of grammar lesson isn't my present intention. My concern, because it harms the reputation of individuals and of the Church, is the use of "a Christian is a person who...."

"A Christian is a person who..." is not a proper construction. Its implications are humanistic. The correct form is: "A Christian is a person in whom God...." The Christian is not properly the subject, but the object of a work of God.

With that clear, I can proceed with what I was really thinking about: my struggle for teachability. In reflecting on teachability, subjects and objects are important.

John Owen, and other gospel fathers, are teaching me and molding me into a more teachable creature. Good friends and I ask each other where and what we would be without the teaching we receive. Like the animals whose pictures are suspended on telephone poles: “Lost, stolen, or strayed.” Let’s not deceive ourselves: We would not be coming anywhere near the “riches of the full assurance of understanding” left to “our own light.”

John Owen discusses spiritual illumination of Scripture as a work of the Holy Spirit.

"[I]t is the Holy Spirit who teacheth us to understand aright the mind and will of God in the Scripture; without whose aid and assistance we can never do so usefully nor profitably unto our own souls." The Work of the Spirit, Vol. 4 of The Works of John Owen, Banner of Truth Press, 1995, p. 152

Owen asserts that man's natural mind assents to evidence through the senses and reason; however "full assurance of understanding" cannot come through natural revelation.

Joe Morecraft preached a sermon on Jesus' healing of Bartimaeus, in which he noted that Bartimaeus' faith preceded his ability to receive natural revelation through sight. He knew who Jesus was, the Son of David, and his Lord--he had saving faith. Then he was delivered from blindness. Pastor Morecraft explains the difference between Augustine and Aquinas with this example: Augustine declared that reason is derived from faith, that faith is necessarily the author of all reason; Aquinas asserted that reason precedes faith, and that through reason, one arrives at faith. Needless to say, Reformed Protestants are Augustinians.

John Owen says, "Men may have a knowledge of words, and the meaning of propositions in the Scripture, who have no knowledge of the things themselves designed in them. (Owen, p. 156) In other words, Owen observes, there are many competent people who can fully understand, but do not believe, the Scriptures.

"That wisdom in the mystery of the gospel, that knowledge of the mind and will of God in the Scripture, which affects the heart, and transforms the mind in the renovation of it unto the approbation of the 'good and acceptable, and perfect will of God,' as the apostle speaks, Rom. xii. 2, is alone valuable and desirable, as unto all spiritual and eternal ends." (Owen p. 157)

Of course we cannot sit passively and stare into the Scriptures anticipating spiritual illumination. Owen directs us to Hebrews 5:13-14:

For every one that useth milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

We are to aspire to strong meat. We are to exercise ourselves to make it digestible. We listen to the word preached, we read the word, we rely on the gifts of illuminated teachers. We are responsible for making ourselves teachable and for staying in teachable shape. Owen, one of the greatest gospel fathers who has lived since Paul, tells us to pray.

"[T]here is no duty which in this world we perform unto God that is more acceptable unto him than fervent prayers for a right understanding of his mind and will in his word; for hereon all the glory we give unto him, and the due performance of all our obedience, do depend." (Owen, p. 160)

Paul tells us: If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. (1 Corinthians 3:14) I cannot begin to imagine what greater work I would wish to have abide, and to build upon, and for which to receive a sure reward, than gospel teachability culminating in all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ. There is no other possible aspiration for enduring work unless one is utterly interred in self-deception.

Paul was a "father" to his churches. Again, to his Corinthians, For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. (1 Corinthians 4:15) We are not fatherless. We who are most fortunate have illuminated pastors. Others have illuminated preaching available on the internet at sermonaudio.com and Monergism. But there are few excuses for being unchurched and not hearing the word of God preached, the method of choice of God for enriching our understanding: ...it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. (1 Corinthians 1:21)

I regard my real and hardest work as praying, hearing, and studying toward teachability. It is a daunting task that is before me; it is the hardest work I have ever done and it will never end. I have been at it for some years and don't get "better" at it. Most fortunately, we who are undertaking this work have the assurance that, your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. (1 Corinthians 2:5) His mercies fail not.

Που στω: The Reformation in Plain English

2006-10-31T06:53:00.000-08:00

...for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints. Jude 3

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther hammered his “95 Theses” to the door of Wittenberg castle and launched the reclamation of the Christian faith from the Church that had hidden it in cellars and under bushels for a millennium.

The reclamation of the Christian doctrine of man’s salvation by grace alone through Christ alone, and of the Holy Scriptures as the sole authority of Christian faith and practice, were digested as the “Five Solas” that form the foundation of the Reformed faith.

Following is one contemporary digest of the Solas from the 1996 Cambridge Declaration of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

THESIS ONE: SOLA SCRIPTURA--”Scripture alone”
We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the sole source of written divine revelation,which alone can bind the conscience. The Bible alone teaches all that is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian behavior must be measured.

We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian's conscience, that the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience can ever be a vehicle of revelation.

THESIS TWO: SOLUS CHRISTUS--”of Christ alone”
We reaffirm that our salvation is accomplished by the mediatorial work of the historical Christ alone. His sinless life and substitutionary atonement alone are sufficient for our justification and reconciliation to the Father.

We deny that the gospel is preached if Christ's substitutionary work is not declared and faith in Christ and his work is not solicited.

THESIS THREE: SOLA GRATIA--”Grace alone”
We reaffirm that in salvation we are rescued from God's wrath by his grace alone. It is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit that brings us to Christ by releasing us from our bondage to sin and raising us from spiritual death to spiritual life.

We deny that salvation is in any sense a human work. Human methods, techniques or strategies by themselves cannot accomplish this transformation. Faith is not produced by our unregenerated human nature.

THESIS FOUR: SOLA FIDE--”Faith alone”
We reaffirm that justification is by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone. In justification Christ's righteousness is imputed to us as the only possible satisfaction of God's perfect justice.

We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ's righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church.

THESIS FIVE: SOLI DEO GLORIA--”For God’s glory alone”
We reaffirm that because salvation is of God and has been accomplished by God, it is for God's glory and that we must glorify him always. We must live our entire lives before the face of God, under the authority of God and for his glory alone.

We deny that we can properly glorify God if our worship is confused with entertainment, if we neglect either Law or Gospel in our preaching, or if self-improvement, self-esteem or self-fulfillment are allowed to become alternatives to the gospel.

Acknowledgment: Text of the Solas FROM: The Cambridge Declaration of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (1996). This site (www.monergism.com) contains the text of the Cambridge Declaration and a presentation of these out-takes, in addition to Reformed sermons, articles, &c.

Congress, Commandments, and Coping

2006-10-30T07:19:00.003-08:00

...for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. James 1:20

A banner election year is upon us: There are actually two candidates who will appear on the ballot for whom I will be able to conscionably vote. Both are running against incumbents; the Congressional candidate is challenging an incumbent entrenched since 1976.

Thirty years’ duration alone would be enough to set off a bit of antipathy toward one’s congressman, even though I’ve lived in his district less than half his tenure. Electing someone to Congress should not be a habit. But even that would no longer be enough for me to vote for a challenger, because I have come to believe it is a sin to vote in any case where I can knowingly see the fruits of evil coming from my vote.

Normally, I would not pitch a candidate on my blog, which I intend as a forum for my thoughts, readings, and observations. I am using this candidate as an example for my reasoning and observations on the voting process itself. I plan to vote for Doug Cloud for Congress. I will vote for Mr. Cloud because I believe, from his statements, that he is a Christian--he appears to give Christ preeminence--and because he favors classical free-market economics after Von Mises and Von Hayek.

Mr. Cloud says on his website that he finds atheism arrogant, and I think atheistic arrogance is the whole trouble with American politics in this century. I think the Christian Right has been bought cheap, used hard, and hung out to dry by people whom I perceive frankly as desiring God’s power for themselves. My perceptions will be colored by my belief that the logical extension of interfaith ecumenism is de facto atheism.

You might like to visit Doug Cloud's website. If you notice anything that causes you to think I'm overly optimistic, please let me know. On the other hand, if you don’t have anyone running in your own district for whom you can apply your conscience to vote, you might consider that, while of course you can’t vote for someone in another district, you can contribute to the campaign of anyone else in the country you think better represents your values. It is the United States Congress, not the Tacoma, Washington, or the Quincy, Illinois Congress that makes decisions that affect your tax life.

I have to wrestle with my conscience to vote for anyone these days, but I also have problems of conscience giving up on the whole process. God did provide this institution for this country, and I think it warrants our attentive obedience to participate wherever possible without actively adding to the abuses that have marred the process. In other words, I think voting should be thoughtful and pro-active. Abstaining from voting for certain offices should be a considered option. Neither voting nor not voting for particular offices or measures should be a duty to a political party, nor a mere concession to lassitude.

Doug Cloud posted these "10 Political Commandments" at his site. Their author is former United States Senator Harry P. Cain (1906-79). Mr. Cloud says he embraces these; I trust he also embraces the Ten Commandments God gave to Moses. Senator Cain's commandments do not mandate behavior, but rather express social and economic principles I think it is wise to consider. They should seem familiar--even prosaic, perhaps--but disturbingly lacking in evidence. Here they are:

1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help small men by tearing big men down.
4. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
5. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
6. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
7. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
8. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
9. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative.
10. You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Again, I am in no way actively campaigning for Doug Cloud or for anyone else; I have no way to know his or anyone's heart well enough to take that step. I simply find his positions refreshing and believe I can vote for him with my conscience intact.

Having grown up in a politically active family, I have much remaining sin when it comes to railing against dignities God has placed in government for our good. My prayer is that I be not doubleminded and that I leave those to God for judgment that I call doubleminded.

He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh;
The Lord will have them in derision. Psalm 2:4

και ο διψων ερχεσθω

2006-10-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

And he who thirsts, let him come... Revelation 22:17

He sets hearts on fire and he is the water of life.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money... Isaiah 55:1

but whosoever drinketh of this water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up unto eternal life. John 4:14

Was not our heart burning within us, while he spake to us in the way, while he opened to us the scriptures? Luke 24:32

The difference between Christians and the rest of the world is that the unchristian world is way too easily inspired. A hopeful senator seeking his fortune as a presidential candidate comes to town, and the press heralds him as "electrifying." Verily, verily, his electricity will leave us high, dry, and thirsting. Politics deploys a scorched soul policy. The soul of the people is parched, returned to the waste howling wilderness. (Deuteronomy 32:10; [nice blog title, Ruben])

The soul of the people is parched by promises of satisfaction with consumer goods; of change in representation and leadership; of more "relevant" worship. And only one thing can revive thirsty souls: the call of Christ to the willing sinner to repent and believe the gospel. It's dramatic, it's life-changing, it's satisfying, and it's the only relevant thing happening. But few are chosen to be willing.

The amenities of the Egyptian desert transfix the souls of the unwilling; and there they thirst, besotted, to death.

And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore hast thou brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst? Exodus 17:3

God provided water to his people then, and he always has. He provided for the murmurers then, as well. But he will not always strive with them. Ultimately, he will provide only for his own.

And he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, let him take the water of life freely. Revelation 22:17

He that will. This was the crux of the dialogue between Luther and Erasmus. Erasmus could not grasp that one had to be made willing, while still being required to be willing.

Mercy is freely given, but not to all. The petulant sinner intent on his rebellion claims that what he cannot have, he does not want to have anyway. But he could have it if he willed to have it. But he doesn't, because he believes himself secure in his rebellion, confident he will prevail another way. Sad, very sad. He will have his other way, but hell is not a victory.

Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe: for our God is a consuming fire. Hebrews 12:28-29

My Favorite Aorist

2006-10-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

and whom he foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified Romans 8:30

As everyone who attends my church knows, the aorist tense in Greek signals a completed action. Daniel b. Wallace, in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Zondervan, 1996), identifies seven exegetically distinct uses of the aorist tense in the New Testament. My favorite is the Proleptic (Futuristic) Aorist. (And you thought I was hard to shop for.)

Dr. Wallace defines the proleptic aorist:

“The aorist indicative can be used to describe an event that is not yet past as though it were already completed. This usage is not at all common, though several exegetically significant texts involve possible proleptic aorists.” (p. 563)

Romans 8:30 contains such a passage.

ους δε εδικαιωσεν, τουτους και εδοξασεν
and whom he justified, them he also glorified (ASV)

Dr. Wallace notes: “The glorification of those who have been declared righteous is as good as done from Paul’s perspective.” (p. 564)

John Murray concurs with Dr. Wallace’s analysis. Glorification is the consummation of our calling and justification.

“Glorification, unlike calling and justification, belongs to the future. It would not be feasible...to regard it as other than the completion of the process of salvation and, though ‘glorified’ is in the past tense, this is proleptic, intimating the certainty of its accomplishment.” (John Murray: The Epistle to the Romans, Eerdmans, 1997, p. 321)

Now, only the Reformed faith acknowledges the Biblical precept of justification by faith alone. Murray observes,

“calling, justification, and glorification are set forth as acts of God--‘he called,’ ‘he justified,’ ‘he glorified.’ The same divine monergism appears as in ‘he foreknew’ and ‘he foreordained.’ It is contrary to this emphasis to define any of these elements of the application of redemption in any other terms than those of divine action. (Murray, p. 320)

If justification by faith were to be eroded by justification by works, ordinances, tradition, liturgy, or other means--what then happens to glorification? But new perspectives cannot upend God’s counsel; however, they can mislead the ungrounded.

Paul comforts a persecuted church with this heartening, yet precise sequence. He affirms that no suffering will ever match the glory that awaits the faithful, that God’s plan is perfectly integral, is working for the good of his saints, and is inexpugnable by any enemy. Neither Nero, nor Satan--not even the saint’s own fears--can stand off glorification of the just. Their glorification is assured with their calling; it is a promise virtually fulfilled.

We have made the first cut already: We passed out of death into life when we were regenerated. John tells us our regeneration was the first resurrection:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life. John 5:24

Science extends counterfeit promises of perfection and near-immortality, casting its lure to depraved vanity. Science has no means, no power, no love; it is subordinate to the laws of God. Unitarianism proffers the bogus promise of individual and social perfection through public education (an eye-opener from Joe Morecraft). We have God’s sure promise to perfect us. He alone has the power and the love to bring us to glory, and it is by his grace that he will do so.

But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through him. Romans 5:8-9

I just happened to be thinking about this and looking into it and taking some notes....Come to think of it, Tom will be preaching on this text in a few weeks, so I’ll try to be patient.

Ethics and Embryonic Stem Cells

2006-10-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed... Deuteronomy 30:19

[E]vil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do that which is evil in the sight of Jehovah, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands. Deuteronomy 31:29

The work of mens’ hands becomes ever more masterful: “Stem cell research” has enabled man to reorganize the cellular structures of life to suit his purposes.

The purposes are touted as “good” because they bring relief from pain and disease. But are they really good? We need to know whose cells are being used for whose good and who is calling this work good.

I don’t lack empathy; however, I do believe we are given assignments of forbearance in life. These may manifest as pain and disease. But God’s gracious providence has provided relief from many grievous ailments. So why not use stem cells for relief from disease? Are they not also from God?

Embryonic stem cells are actually fertilized embryonic stem cells extracted from embryos less than a week old. There are three possible sources: embryos “discarded” and consensually donated by couples who no longer “need” them for fertilization; aborted embryos; or embryos created for research and medical applications--a source so far only under potential consideration.

The cells can be specialized and manipulated for clinical use. Until then, they are capable of natural proliferation in the same way as any embryos--as viable human life. Fertilized embryonic cells are viable human life.

Stem cell research is overseen by boards of scientists and medical ethicists. What about their moral competence?

Genetic research is done primarily by people who are scientifically and ethically bound to the premises that all life evolved from a common protoplasmic matrix, and that individuation into various branches and species was all accidental.

Either all species evolved from a common, accidental origin, or they were created as discrete species, with similar genetic substructures, because those structures were “good.” The presuppositions of one’s world view will have everything to do with which side he takes in the stem cell controversy. The opposing world views necessarily carry opposing moral premises. Both cannot be viewed as moral by the same person.

We should examine a bit of the methodology of embryonic stem cell cultivation. The ethical issue of embryonic stem cells becomes interesting when the cells are obtained and cultured. At that point, scientists take over the cells’ development. I say “cells,” because the embryo is now history in terms of its function and potential. We no longer have an embryo capable of developing into a human being. The development of the cells is now “directed” into intended specialized uses, i.e., bone marrow production, skin, neural, or muscle tissue development, &c.

The reason embryo cells are used is important. Only embryonic cells are pluripotent, or capable of development into almost any type of differentiated cell; adult cells cannot be so directed. This is why scientists hold out embryonic cells as uniquely useful for broadbased cell regeneration. Embryonic cell manipulation holds the potential for possible treatment of Type I diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease, stroke, spinal cord injuries, and burns. As usual, “millions” stand to benefit.

I don’t see the wiggle room. The harvesting of embryonic cells to generate new tissue for other people is human sacrifice. The cells exist in the first place because someone changed their mind and decided not to “use” them to have a child. Does clinical utility somehow vindicate cutting their losses and recycling the material? But since the embryos already exist, contemplating the alternatives precipitates a cascading ethical avalanche. Adopted frozen embryos have resulted in the births of children, some of whom visited President Bush this year.

If embryos are produced for research and medical use, man will become a harvester of human life. He will not be a creator, only an intermediate facilitator, using the same methods employed to assist fertility.

Only legal and ethical barriers defer the practice of “fetal farming.” Political winds could shift and the practice become accepted. “Stem cell research” implies the need for materials.

God mandated that man value life in its preborn stage. He set forth the example that, if fighting men accidentally strike a pregnant woman, and the child is miscarried without other harm, the men are fined, with compensation due the husband and the judges. If the child dies, the magistrate is empowered to administer “life for life” (Exodus 21:22-25).

The world’s ethical vantage is not the Christian’s. The world uses its own authority for determining ethical viability. Would a Christian defer to the authority of a scientist who professes the truth of evolution? The world uses relative truth--truth that works for the individual. Does a Christian believe everyone is individually equipped with his own truth, or does he believe that God defines truth, and that there is such a thing as right and wrong? The world is outcome-based; it uses a utilitarian model that what is good for the many is generally a good outcome. Does a Christian hold such a utilitarian view? Or does he see the value of individual life regardless of how useful it could be made if distributed among more people? The world loves consensus. Does a Christian worry about consensus, or does he value the word of God alone as the only “opinion” that matters?

The employment of medical ethicists neither assures nor implies a regard for moral rectitude in research applications. Christians are far better equipped to evaluate the ethics of embryonic stem cell research than medical philosophers who spend their days overlaying multi-species genome maps and overlooking the truth of the discrete creation of species. Christians are far better equipped than medical philosophers to affirm the truth of providence in suffering. Christians are far better equipped than medical philosophers to understand the role assignments in the production and harvest of human life.

Christians should be equipped to defend the truth against consensus. We have the mind of God in Christ. This should mean no ethical question is too big, too modern, or too technical for a proper countercharge.

Blogger Is Outgrowing Cyberspace

2006-10-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

One of those semi-annual the-sky-is-falling pieces came out yesterday, relaying the latest warnings that humans are using up planet Earth at a rate that will cause extinction of life as we know it by 2050. I subscribe to the Resilient Planet Theory and ignore the hype. Anyway, for once it isn’t my fault: The United Arab Emirates and Australia are outconsuming the United States to develop their arid countries in the manner to which Americans are accustomed.

Now, it seems we are even outgrowing cyberspace. Google cannot keep up its server demand--or maybe it is experiencing “technical difficulties,” like the old-fashioned TV networks that used to interrupt my Freddy Freihofer program.

Stand by. Please do not adjust your set. We are traveling at unknown velocities as fast as we can....

Sword and Buckler

2006-10-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

Thou has dealt well with thy servant,
O Jehovah, according unto thy word.
Teach me good judgment and knowledge;
For I have believed in thy commandments.
Before I was afflicted I went astray;
But now I observe thy word. Psalm 119:65-67.

I am reading Michael Yang’s book, Reconsidering Ayn Rand, sporadically. I can only take a small amount at a time, because examining Rand’s thoughts after several years have passed has become tedious and pedantic for me. Unraveling Objectivism now has become like using Mapquest to locate the house next door. First, there is no reason to. Second, the destination is right there, but the process of arriving at the destination can be wearisome and abstruse. Nevertheless, there seems to be a purpose.

Dr. Yang is far more patient than I am and unwinds the conflicted philosophy of Rand that I once found brilliant with unrelenting thoroughness. He manages to uncover the debilitating flaw in Rand’s core theory of values: that life cannot be a man’s ultimate standard of value and a means to an end at the same time.

How did I miss that? Lack of experience. I wasn’t familiar with the terrain. Even a one-eyed queen can place golden apples along the way of her realm. I was intrigued; I picked them up, and I missed the narrow way for those years. All in God’s perfect providence.

Yang’s out-takes from Rand’s work, once heroic and compelling, now seem lackluster, uncritical, and shallow. Since acclimating to a near-exclusive reading diet of systematic theology, almost nothing else has been palatable. John Owen’s effulgent exposition of the Word of God renders other writing dusky by contrast.

The value of life is set forth in the Scriptures. God values his people with love inestimable in human terms: the Atonement; heaven and immortal life and his presence with us. No higher value can be expressed than God's election of his Church.

Rand’s value of life is utilitarian and deeply flawed. It belies an ethical system lacking intrinsic morality because human achievement is its heroic epicenter. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, traces a dollar sign in the sky--the sign that the world is worth returning to--because he has secured the world on his terms. Rand’s philosophy ultimately amounted to a Mammon vigil.

I am aware that God’s call to holiness is more than leaving bad philosophy behind; it is more than a love for God’s Word and a desire to keep his law and see it kept. Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, I am beholden to address myself to the Journey, with Sword drawn in hand, for, “I know not but some other Enemy may be at hand.”

Great Beelzebub, the Captain of this Fiend
Design’d my Ruin; therefore to this end
He sent him harness’d out; and he with rage,
That hellish was, did fiercely me engage:
But blessed Michael helped me, and I,
By dint of Sword, did quickly make him fly:
Therefore to him let me give lasting Praise,
And Thank, and bless his holy Name always.
--John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress, Barbour Books, p. 64

And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God... Ephesians 6:17

Unchurched Christians: The Bane of the Church

2006-10-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another...Hebrews 10:25

Every Christian has occasion to interact, ideally with amity and unreserved cordiality, with people who are not Christians, and who may even have no interest whatever in God, much less the God of the Bible. Every Christian should know the limits of his own witness and that it is God alone who has reserved to his own will whom he will call to himself.

The church has no real quarrel with the world.

For what have I to do with judging them that are without? Do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. 1 Corinthians 5:12-13.

The church suffers less in this country at the hands of the world than at the conceited hands of its own unchurched saints.

Different polls demonstrate different spreads, but most concur that fewer than half the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians attend church weekly. According to an ABC News poll from February, the only subgroup of American self-identified Christians claiming weekly church attendance topping 50% are Southern Baptists, and even within that group, only women over age 65 urge the numbers above 50%.

This should catch no one off guard. If you don’t attend church, you realize most people you know don’t, either. If you do attend church, you realize you pass a lot of joggers, people working in their yards, and full mall parking lots on your way. Sundays are no big deal for most people, Christians included.

But nothing has changed since Moses’ trek up stormy Mt. Horeb. The Fourth Commandment remains on the books, the longest of the Ten. The short version is, Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Exodus 20:8. At verses 9-11, God details precisely how and by whom he requires his holy sabbath be kept. He specifies who is to enforce it in the household, and why he requires that it be kept. God does not often give us his reasons, but for his required sabbath he does. The sabbath is for the people of God, the Church. It is a non-expiring creation ordinance.

Please read the full text of the Fourth Commandment before telling another stranger, “They’re not the Ten Suggestions, you know!” and then fouling your testimony by taking up business as usual on the Lord’s day.

And please do not invoke “survival of the fittest” as you proceed with your work on the Lord’s day. That is not found in the Bible, but in the writings of evolutionist Herbert Spencer.

The majority of American Christians are practicing sabbath abolitionists. Disagreeing with me is unimportant; I’m not in charge of seating assignments. I’m not writing an apologetic about the sabbath--it is the responsibility of every Christian to know about it. I’m writing about those I perceive as the bane of the church for sidelining necessary attendance. If a Christian sees no reason to attend church, or permits routine hindrance to prevent his attendance, I’m not even sure he’s a bane to the church. In that case, I’m writing to urge that he examine his faith and profession. Church attendance is not optional for Christians; it is their joyful duty.

Church attendance means that one day a week is given to honoring God in his prescribed way, and to encouraging one’s Christian brethren. We receive their encouragement in turn. Do we really have more important things to do?

B. B. Warfield, in an essay titled, “The Eternal Gospel,” writes of Timothy’s church:

“What a testimony we have here to the solidarity of the church of God; or, as we prefer to put it, to the communion of the saints. And what an enforcement of the great commands that we bear one another’s burdens, that we neglect not the assembling of ourselves together, that we do not indulge the vanity of living each one to himself.”

The London Confession of 1689, Chapter 26, paragraph 5, discusses church attendance immediately following a summary of Christ’s call of his church out of the world:

”Those thus called, he commandeth to walk together in particular societies, or churches, for their mutual edification, and the due performance of that public worship, which he requireth of them in the world.”

Personal offense is not to hinder a Christian’s public worship (Ibid., paragraph 13). We’re to put up with one another and forgive as we have been forgiven. Paul had to remind a couple of women to cease their bickering.

As our pastor said in a sermon on Romans 8:28 recently, God works for the good of those who love him. Those who love God love his book, love his house, and love his people.

The plain meaning is that Christians go to church and they love to do so.

Three-Quarter Pounder Club

2006-10-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Agent Coolidge, aka Ahashuerus: Conscious, Dedicated Member of the Fancy Feast-Purina-Nestle Cabal Three-Quarter-Pounder Club

God Doesn't Play a Father on TV

2006-10-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee. Exodus 20:12

My son, hear the instruction of thy father,
And forsake not the law of thy mother... Proverbs 1:8

Hear, my sons, the instruction of a father,
And attend to know understanding:
For I give you good doctrine;
Forsake ye not my law.
For I was a son unto my father,
Tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. Proverbs 4:1-3

An obituary of Jane Wyatt, who recently died at 96, prompted me to remember the TV series, “Father Knows Best,” that ran from about 1954-1960. I watched “Father Knows Best,” along with “Leave it to Beaver” and other programs now relegated to cultural taxidermy.

I doubt very many adults or children today relate to the scenarios of “Father Knows Best.” I suspect even fewer equate obedience to their fathers with obedience to God.

“Father” in the series represented a male head of household who was married to the mother of the children of the household who took direction from their father and mother even when their friends tried to lure them into trouble.

“Knows” represented an epistemology understood by the family: conduct was based on values that were based on facts that were known. The father and mother shared these values and imparted them to their children. There were no secrets, no guesswork: there were rules, and everyone know how things worked in the family.

“Best” represented value as compared to alternative lesser values. The father had determined that his family was going to be based on the best values life had to offer; he would not settle for less from them or for them.

Given current census data about American families, I would conjecture that many viewers today, given the opportunity to see a few episodes of “Father Knows Best” would eat their popcorn and say, “Interesting lifeforms. On what planet...?”

Since a scant minority of families now have a male head of household, “Father Knows Best” would most certainly be termed “paternalistic.” This of course would carry a derogatory connotation, since paternalism implies male headship, which everyone now knows is unnecessary. Knowledge and values are out in one tub, because everything is relative and kids are encouraged to pick up what they need on their own from experience and culturally diverse sources.

Billy Gray, the actor who played the son in the Anderson family on the series, had a crisis of conscience afterward.

"I wish there was some way I could tell kids not to believe it - the dialogue, the situations, the characters - they were all totally false. The show did everybody a disservice. The girls were always trained to use their feminine wiles, to pretend to be helpless to attract men. The show contributed to a lot of the problems between men and women that we see today....I think we were all well motivated, but what we did was run a hoax." (Quote from Wikipedia)

Mr. Gray is right, in part. The use of “wiles” and a pretense of helplessness are not values that should be represented as attractive. The Biblical mandate for women is not wiliness or helplessness. She is a suitable “helper.” Helpers are not helpless, and false charm is a hindrance to the virtues of honesty and productivity. The man and woman were to help one another. When both are helping each other, neither is ever helpless, and neither should feign helplessness.

But Mr. Gray is unfair, too. Of course the dialogue, situations, and characters are contrived. That’s what sitcoms are. “Father Knows Best” was not reality TV. The question is whether, overall, the program was representative of the normative values of 1950s America. There is no question the Anderson family was flawed: Mrs. Anderson and her daughters are frequently portrayed as dominion-bent and smug when proving the men of the house wrong. Jane Wyatt, born into an aristocratic New York family, was in her element in these scenes.

The script of the original radio version of “Father Knows Best” placed a question mark at the end of the title, but co-producer and lead actor Robert Young removed it for the TV production, evidently resolving the riddle of the nature of Father’s leadership. Overall, he was a respected, if humored leader and arbiter within the family. Certainly there was no backtalk, no storming out, no open rebellion.

The show was not a clear case of “art imitates reality.” But it did attempt to suggest a model. The model was seasoned with cynical humor perhaps so the new liberals wouldn’t take too much offense.

I could recall incorrectly, but I remember nearly all the scenes in “Father Knows Best” taking place in the family’s dining room. I never saw them get ready for church. Everything was about Jim going to work and coming home from work, and the children getting ready for school and coming home from school and talking to Mom. The show was about family dynamics, with episodes focusing on individual family members.

The 1950s was the decade that America tried to get its fathers back. Proto-feminism challenged male leadership in the 1920s; the Depression diminished mens’ ability to provide in the 1930s. The Second World War took them away for long periods of time during the 1940s. By the 1960s, “Father Knows Best” was a cult classic because it presented fossilized evidence of an ideal that America had obsolesced because surging Feminism declared “paternalistic hegemony” dead.

For better or worse, and I think for the better, “Father Knows Best” endured six seasons. Today, no multinational cereal company would sponsor a show with a title suggesting such a thing as patriarchy. To caustic liberals, male headship adumbrates the link between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. But in truth, the rise in fatherless households corresponds in time with compensatory movements that speak for the damage: the self-esteem movement, the obsession with “dysfunctional families,” the blight of youth violence.

The presence of a father is no guarantee of faithful, productive children. The Bible is full of bad kids who had strong, faithful fathers. It is nonetheless, one more precept that man is forsaking to go his own way. The era that marked “Father Knows Best” quaint also marked a decline in church attendance and doctrinal Christianity. Neopaganism is burgeoning and trying to prove the Father doesn’t know best.

Ah, but he does.

Ayn Rand and the Immoral Fable

2006-10-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

And not a few of them that practised magical arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of the Lord and prevailed. Acts 19:19-20

I can’t know how many former partisans of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, have received God’s merciful pardon and become Christians. There was a time that I appreciated Rand’s work for what I saw as a rational response to the ubiquitous relativism and mysticism I found unpalatable. Objectivism promises absolutes--but only as far as the natural eye can see.

Of course Objectivism is irredeemably flawed, as any philosophy with an atheistic thesis must necessarily be. Nor is the system original, despite Rand’s pretense to innovation.

Objectivism piloted my world view for a few years. I didn’t see through its smokescreen until Christ opened my eyes.

My conversion brought total aversion to Rand’s novels (and all novels) and philosophy. As Tom Lyon says, “theology disciplines all of life.” Philosophy is not harmless. Perhaps it is even less so when couched in art.

Rand called art “the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.” This is not an easy definition to refute, and its implications are frightening for many reasons. For one thing, she raised the novel to a philosophical art form. Her novels are competent and engaging by any literary standards. They appeal to the young who are searching for meaning, truth, and a world view. Moreover, Rand’s moral ideals are antichrist, and she claims rationality as her exclusive domain. (But: I think Harry Potter is at least as malign for not laying claim on reality.)

As a Puritan probably not showered with blessings of moderation, I tend to think that anything that competes with a Scriptural world view is evil. This is not about carburetor repair manuals, but it is about art, and philosophy, which encompasses epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. So, one fine day, some years after our conversions, my husband and I decided to take all of our Ayn Rand books to the used-book purveyors and sell them. We did not receive 50,000 pieces of silver, but $25.00, and were able to go to lunch at the Red Robin.

For several years, that was the end of Ayn Rand at our house.

Now, for some reason, I have decided to read Michael Yang’s book, Reconsidering Ayn Rand, which relates his experience with Objectivism and subsequent conversion to Christianity.

It seems to me that Dr. Yang really went about leaving Objectivism the hard way. He became a Christian, but for some reason, that wasn’t the end of it. His book seems to target people who really need to understand why Objectivism is defective--people who cannot simply dismiss Objectivism for its flawed epistemology and ethics. I am finding the book actually tedious.

I was interested in Yang’s book because I wanted to see how a Christian would go about deconstructing Rand. John Robbins wrote a much more concise and definitive book that cuts through Objectivism leaving no standing timbers. But I thought Dr. Yang’s account would be more “personal.” Dr. Yang is an ophthalmologist, which likely accounts for his obsessive precision and over-reliance on Venn diagrams.

Dr. Yang points out that Objectivism is actually a spawn of empiricism. Rand, despite her vehement protestations against the empiricists, shared their view that reality could be known only through the senses. She held their notion of the tabula rasa, or blank slate mind without a priori input, thus impaling objective reality for want of the means of conscious perception, while claiming that objective existence requires conscious validation. Dr. Yang explores this flaw very thoroughly, with many Venn diagrams.

Interestingly, the Ayn Rand Institute itself reveals Rand was also a gnostic. Rand called Objectivism “a philosophy for living on earth.” Secret knowledge, anyone? Referring to the principles of her philosophy, her disciples reveal:

“If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought.” (www.aynrand.org)

Thus, Rand has hoist her Objectivism on the gnostic petard. She intended Objectivism as a religion, to guide the course of your life. Her antipathy toward Christianity was total and vicious. (Perhaps her hatred was commercially motivated as well as philosophical--there is some evidence that only the Bible has influenced more readers than her novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Objectivism, as John Robbins implies in his title, Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System, is leaving the scene, just as the Pharisee Gamaliel predicted it would, two thousand years ago:

for if...this work be of men, it will be overthrown: but if it is of God, ye will not be able to overthrow them, lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God. Acts 5:38-39

Ayn Rand fought against God. She fought artfully but badly, and she lost the fight.

2006-10-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:10

O Jehovah, our Lord,
How excellent is thy name in all the earth! Psalm 8:1,9

”What was it all for?”--Ayn Rand

Judgment

2006-10-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

All they that go down to the dust shall bow before him,
Even he that cannot keep his soul alive. Psalm 22:29

Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name;
that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth,
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Philippians 2:9-11

And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15

Think about Judgment. Everyone--atheist, agnostic, universalist, New Age veggie wonk--everyone knows Judgment is for real, no matter how deeply he tries to tamp the thought down with denials, drumming, derision, or dope. So, just for now, suspend your disbelief mechanisms and think about Judgment.

A few things are on the docket for Judgment. The world ends. Everything melts down and burns up. Then, there will be a new creation. The new creation will be populated with the same souls who populated the present creation from the beginning--but only those who persevered as followers of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. But it gets better.

The good news is these same souls won’t have the same afflictions they had in this creation: They won’t be arthritic, they won’t get cancer, and they won’t be nags or smug or grumpy or self-centered. Their sin will have been laid bare before all, and they will be humbled. They will be free of their sin and all defect for all time. They will be glorified souls capable of glorifying God, which has been their end all the while. They will enjoy God and the fellowship of the saints forever in a rich, full heaven.

Those who would not pray for God’s deliverance from their disbelief also have immortal souls, and they too will be restored to immortal physical bodies at the end of this creation. However, they will not follow the Lamb to Heaven; they will follow their Dragon to Hell. They followed him in life, and they will follow him in death. Hard, but true, and very well documented by the very highest authority: the Author of the Word of God.

Joe Morecraft says that every person in the world follows one of two gospels: Everyone follows either the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or the gospel of Judas Iscariot. That’s right: If you are not with him, you are against him. If you are against Christ, it doesn’t matter how good a person you are; you are a follower of Judas. You have betrayed your savior, who was your only hope. Another hard thing. But the pooh-bah likely catches in your throat.

Judgment, regardless of your eschatological orientation or none at all, is really pretty simple. I think it’s ill-advised to get caught up in the logistics of what happens and the architecture, landscaping, and amenities of Heaven and the torments of Hell. Heaven is a good destiny and is forever; Hell is a horrific destiny and it, too, is forever. The point is, there are two kinds of people. All will be resurrected in immortal human bodies for their respective destinies. Figures of “sheep” and “goats” are used to denote their separate destinies at Judgment. Sheep are followers of the Lamb. Goats are followers of the Dragon--the serpent, Satan, the father of lies. If you think he’s not so bad, and that Hell will be a good time because all your friends will be there, you are whistling in the graveyard.

Judgment will prove who really is a follower of the Lamb. Those who profess “deep faith” in supernatural goodness will not be found in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Christ alone is the way of salvation. Claiming you would take his side in the event of real conflict is not enough: Faith in Christ as your only hope for redemption from sin, and knowledge that you truly are a hopeless and helpless sinner is what he requires.

Followers of the dragon will glorify Christ in the end, but he will not glorify them. Every knee will bow. All will know his truth and his glory. But for the dragon’s brood, it will be their final act before condemnation to Hell. It will be too late.

Judgment will happen. It will happen once and then be over. There will be no second interviews, no chance to retake the exam.

When all is revealed, the sins of the condemned will be no worse than the sins of the saved. But the sins of the lost will not be forgiven. The sin of the unforgiven is eternal. And the penalty for eternal sin is eternal punishment.

Between Hell and Heaven--condemnation and salvation--is a great gulf fixed. The gulf is unbreachable--except the sinner take two steps: Repent, and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked? saith the Lord Jehovah; and not rather that he should return from his way, and live? Ezekiel 18:23

A Comedy of Comity

2006-10-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hot off the Whitehouse press:

THE PRESIDENT: Please be seated. Good evening and "Ramadan Karim." Welcome to the White House. Laura and I are really glad you're here. This is the sixth year that we have been pleased to host an Iftaar at the White House. We're honored to be with you and once again we're honored to pay tribute to the month of Ramadan.

Islam is a religion that brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people around the world. It has transcended racial and ethnic divisions. It has given birth to a rich culture of learning and literature and science. And tonight we honor the traditions of a great faith by hosting the Iftaar here at the White House.

I'm so pleased our Secretary of State, Condi Rice, has joined us. Thank you, Madam Secretary. I'm pleased that Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who is the Director of the NIH, is with us. Good to see you, Elias. I thank Imam Eid, from the Islamic Institute of Boston, is with us. I welcome all the ambassadors and other members of the Diplomatic Corps.

Ramadan is the holiest month in the Muslim calendar. For Muslims in America and around the world, Ramadan is a special time of prayer and fasting, contemplation of God's greatness, and charity and service to those in need. And for people of all faiths, it is a good time to reflect on the values we hold in common, including love of family, gratitude to God, the importance of community, and a commitment to tolerance and religious freedom.

America is a land of many faiths, and we welcome and honor the Muslim faith in our nation. Our society is enriched by our Muslim citizens. Your commitment to your faith reminds us all of the precious gift of religious freedom in our country. America is a more hopeful nation because of the talents and generosity and compassion of our Muslim citizens.

Tonight we have with us a group of special guests -- American Muslims who are serving our country. We have with us New York City police officers and a EMT worker who risked their lives to save their fellow citizens on 9/11; a military doctor and a member of the Navy's Chaplain Corps; members of our Foreign Service; and military veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect our country and help those nations build free and democratic futures.

One of our guests is Farooq Muhammed. Farooq is the son of Pakistani immigrants, and was born and raised in Brooklyn. He spent the past decade with the New York City Fire Department, first as an emergency medical technician and now as a paramedic. Farooq was at the World Trade Center on 9/11, treating victims when the towers collapsed -- he narrowly escaped death himself. He also recently volunteered in the mountains of Kashmir, where he helped treat the victims of last year's devastating South Asian earthquake. Farooq's courage and compassion represent the best of the American spirit.

Paramedic Muhammed is a proud Muslim; he is a patriotic American. And those are characteristics he shares with the other special American guests gathered in this room. All of you bring credit to your faith. You make America a better and stronger country, and we're honored by your presence tonight. (Applause.)

The United States also appreciates the many Muslim nations who stand with us in the war on terror -- some of whom are represented here tonight. You know that the majority of the victims of the terrorists have been innocent Muslims, and many of you have seen terrorist violence in your own cities and your streets. We welcome you here. We are proud to work with you to defeat the terrorists and extremists, and help bring a brighter future to millions of Muslim people throughout the world who yearn for moderation and peace.

On this special evening, we celebrate the millions of Muslims that we are proud to call American citizens. We honor the many Islamic nations that America is proud to call friends. And we renew the ties of friendship that should bind all who trace their faith back to God's call on Abraham.

Laura and I are grateful that you're here. Once again, I wish you a blessed Ramadan. And now Imam Eid will say the blessing.

END 6:58 P.M. EDT

Return to this article at:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061016-6.html

Taxes, Wrath, and Conscience

2006-10-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

My husband wrote a thoughtful piece at Grapes and Figs on grace and taxes: not a common juxtaposition, though Congress routinely deploys the dyad in its imperious apologia.

Matthew 17:24-28 contains a vignette in which the Lord exemplifies his will for the duty of a citizen to pay the sovereign the taxes it claims. The facts presented are: The kings of the earth receive tribute from strangers, not sons; therefore sons are free; Peter was asked whether his master paid the temple shekel; Jesus and his disciples wished not to cause the tax collectors to stumble; God provided the money to pay the tax through a miracle; they paid the tax.

Matthew Henry observes that the demanded tax in this episode was the temple tax, not a government levy. The Geneva Bible commentators note that the Gospel does not displace civil authority; nor, presumably, church authority. Jesus, as the Son of God, was a son of the house of God, and as such was justly exempt from the temple tribute. But in order to set a proper example for subject-sovereign duty, and to keep the tax-taker from stumbling, the Lord paid the demanded tax.

Christ had made himself poor for us (2 Corinthians 8:9), and had not the money to pay the tax. However, he lived, as he directs us to do, by the gracious providence of God. And so, he instructed Peter to catch a fish and find a stater within it; and it was as he said. Peter extracted the coin from the fish and paid the tax.

This should not be taken to mean that we can blow our money in whatsoever manner we please and that God will come up with the funds required of us at tax time. That is not what this text is about at all. Jesus showed willingness to pay a tax demanded of him, even though by all rights he did not owe it.

What the passage suggests to me actually has less to do with taxes than citizenship. Christians’ citizenship is rightly of heaven (Philippians 3:20), where we will dwell and work untaxed, because our tribute will be the perfected ability to give God the glory rightly due him. This is the same God who all along has desired “the sacrifice of praise” (Hebrews 13:15), and “spiritual sacrifices” (1 Peter 2:5).

However, we are also earthly citizens, and we have God-given sovereigns to whom we are required to pay taxes. Paul discusses the legitimacy of the magistrate and its right to exact tribute at Romans 13:1-7: “For this cause ye pay tribute also; for they are ministers of God’s service...Render to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due...” (vv. 6,7).

Resistance to civil authority is disobedience to God: “Therefore he that resisteth the power, withstandeth the ordinance of God: and they that withstand shall receive to themselves judgment” (Romans 13:2).

Significantly, this duty is to be executed “not only because of the wrath, but also for conscience’ sake” (Romans 13:5). I think of the fullness of conscience, reverence, and duty with which Abraham tithed to Melchizedek. We are to render obedience to the God-appointed sovereign as a duty to God. We are to muster not only the obedience but the conscience to do what comes least naturally to us: to submit to authority even though we may despise or distrust those whom God has placed over us. We won’t often see a Melchizedek in office, but our duty does not change.

I am not good at this; it is an area of ongoing work and repentance in my life. If I held my motives even to a dim light, I’m certain I’d see myself doing our taxes more to avoid the wrath than for conscience’ sake.

We are to pray for leaders in order “that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and gravity” (1 Timothy 2:1,2). It is easy to think the leaders of our day are unworthy, but God’s instructions have not changed since the reign of Rehoboam.

Whether given Ahab or Asa, or their modern equivalents, the same “supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings” (1 Timothy 2:1) are due. I’m not going to say it’s an easy assignment. But regardless of our feelings and our reactions to world opinion and events, God ordained the Civil Magistrate “for his own glory and the public good” (1689 London Confession, Chapter 24, para. 1) and conferred upon us the duty of “subjection, in all lawful things commanded by them” (ibid., para. 3). Taxes in this country are “lawful things.” (Check out 26 U.S.C. Sec. 1 and then I can provide further reading.)

Jesus paid his poll tax by his own grace. Thus, the taxes we pay and the income we conserve ultimately reflect God’s grace. As obedient citizens of the Kingdom of God, we pay our taxes to the sovereign because God has graciously provided us the ability to earn and a Civil Magistrate “for his own glory and the public good.”

And so, to the sovereign go our shekels; to God alone the glory.

Concluding Thoughts on R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy

2006-10-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

The philosophy of the nineteenth-century sensualists and positivists--particularly Comte, Hobbes, and Mill--assaulted God and science with the same club. Thus, in deconstructing the premises of this philosophical strain, Robert L. Dabney upheld the causes both of God and science.

Evolution theory is not simply unprovable and wrong. The theory attacked the foundations of Christianity: God creating Man in his own image, placing him at the head of an ordered Creation, with a foreknown Fall and Redemption, all for his glory.

Evolution theory turned man into a soulless beast. Its proponents claimed solid, observable facts which were neither. The theory offered nothing to account for man’s God-directed spirit; and so, it attempted to gainsay the existence of both man’s spirit and God. The theory enthusiastically embraced random forces in lieu of God’s infinite wisdom and personal nature.

Dabney refuted evolution theory’s adjunct, the evolution of civilizations, with historical examples. He denied that man progressed in development from savage to high civilization over time, but rather, that

”All the advancements made have been under the operation of moral causes: and these have always come by conquest, colonization, or in some other way, from some higher race without.” (R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Press, 2003, p. 272.)

Dabney vehemently denied that the human mind is an organism, as evolutionists posit, but defended its structural unity as a “spiritual monad.” Dabney defended the human spirit as the center of consciousness against evolution theory’s relegation of consciousness to nerve bundles and organic processes. Evolution attributes the works of the mind to experience and environment; Dabney defended the mind as the efficient cause of perception. This is extremely important, because if the mind’s operations are subject to the vicissitudes of experience and environment, it can hardly be rational, reliable, or useful toward one’s advancement.

Hedonism is the logical outcome of evolution. If all perfecting of consciousness comes through experience, and pleasurable experience is the most adaptive and likely to be repeated, then clearly hedonism is most conducive to jumpstarting the species. However, this is not observed in nature, and thus is problematic for evolutionists.

No conflict exists between God and true science. “Nature implies the supernatural” is axiomatic to Dabney. God’s work manifests only absolute logic, reason, perfection, and virtue.

Evolution is a theory that denies God and proper science because it posits in their place unconscious forces spinning off randomly occurring organisms. These, in turn, compete for survival in randomly assigned environments in a somehow self-existent world in which virtue is relative because it is defined solely by experience. The only good news evolution really offers is that you have no immortal soul that must endure this travesty of fatalistic flukes forever.

Without God-given reason, man has no ethical worries. Brutes have little faculty or use for moral responsibility, merit, or rational motives above instinctive impulses. But the sensualists whose philosophy underlies evolution do assign man ethical and moral responsibility. Therefore, their own arguments fail for want of acceptable conclusions.

Dabney enumerates some of the products of man’s consciousness we’d be missing if we were brutes who’d made it through Evolution 101:

“The spiritual love of Christian mothers, the heavenly charity which delights to bless an enemy, the aspirations of faith for the lofty sanctity of the skies, and even the redeeming love and divine holiness of Jesus of Nazareth are generically but enlargements of animal appetites in apes!” (p. 284).

Further,

”The spirit which looked out through a Newton’s eye and read through the riddles of the phenomenal world the secrets of eternal truth and the glories of an infinite God, went out as utterly in everlasting night as the gleam in the eye of the owl or the bat which could only blink at the sunlight” (p. 284).

Evolution theory is maddening to a Christian. It affronts God; it denies his work and perfect intelligence, and it cancels man’s promised destiny of glorious liberty with him.

Nevertheless, Dabney counsels that we “be angry and sin not,” and refrain from “the gall of personal spite” (p. 248). Dabney does, however, raise his own indignation to a fair level, asserting, “Man’s soul is formed by its Maker not only to see moral truth, but to love it upon seeing it. It is an unnatural soul, a psychological monstrosity, which does not” (p. 249).

It is sad indeed that an evolutionist might apprehend little more of the Gospel than one of his elevated simian prototypes, or “anthropoid higher apes.” Dabney presaged our own postmodern era, one in which Godless philosophy would drag science down with it and declare Man the lucky winner in a battle of dexterous digits. Postmodern man is still searching the ravines for those transitional thumb bones.

Dr. Dabney ends this particular book without optimism.

Is Marriage America’s Next Walking Fish?

2006-10-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

People are living longer and enjoying each other less. This trend has put marriage on the skids. In other words, some observers say, marriage is “evolving.”

Newly released census data reveal that slightly more households termed “families” now consist of unmarried cohabitants, both homosexual and heterosexual. Since hardly anyone bucks just one tradition, both adults in these households typically work--which often leaves children with fewer family ties than children of traditional families to define the consequences of marriageless households.

As usual, children can wait to have parents.

Increased longevity Americans have gained since WW2 is a factor behind the trend toward marriageless living arrangements, because, according to Stephanie Coontz of the Council on Contemporary Families, couples have more time together after the last child leaves home, and are thus “less willing to put up with an unhappy marriage, while women’s economic independence makes it less essential for them to do so.” (“For first time, unmarried households reign in US,” Maxim Kniazkov, AFP, Sun. Oct. 15, 2006.)

Evidently, “economic independence” overrides any commitment a couple made to sustain their marriage. The subjection, obedience, honor, and tenderheartedness to which the Spirit of God refers at 1 Peter 3:1-9 are sacrificed on the altar of personal happiness. Marriage was just a trend all along, and now the pendulum has simply swung the other way.

American Enterprise Institute sociologist Douglas Besharov observes, “the only question” is whether the trend away from marriage is “catastrophic or just evolutionary” (Ibid.). “Evolutionary” implies a foregone progressive prognosis, whereas “trends” can leave orbit and return. I’m concerned that either Mr. Besharov’s language is imprecise, and that he actually means “trend,” and not “evolutionary,” or that he actually thinks marriage is leaving America’s spiritual, social, and cultural orbit for good.

The trend is problematic for political party platform engineers, who have to recalibrate their spin on “family values” and repackage politics to appeal to unmarried couples. My husband preserved this news vignette in his “The End of the World As We Know It File”: As First Lady Laura Bush looked on, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice swore in a homosexual man as the nation’s new “global AIDS coordinator.” Secretary Rice also introduced the coordinator’s “partner,” and his partner’s mother, to whom Rice referred as the coordinator’s “mother-in-law” (from a story in USAToday.com by Kathy Kiely, Oct. 12, 2006). This touching ceremony came in the immediate wake of Congressman Mark Foley’s exposure as a homosexual harrasser of Congressional pages.

Cut to scene of women weeping for Tammuz....

“Hast thou seen this, O son of man? thou shalt again see yet greater abominations than these.” Ezekiel 8:14-15

It isn’t hard to date the origin of marriage: It began with the creation of the second person on earth, as detailed at Genesis 2:18-24. God made the woman because “it was not good for the man to be alone” (v. 18). God “brought her unto the man” (v. 22). There was never any question of whether it was good for the woman to be alone. She came into a world already made and a husband already provided for her. They were to be “one flesh” (v. 24), and the man was to “cleave unto his wife” (v. 24). Woman was not meant to be alone, and she was meant to have a husband. Man was not meant to be alone, and he was meant to have a wife.

There is no such thing as an alternative lifestyle. A lifestyle inconsistent with the Word of God is not alternative--it is defiant. Slightly more than one-half of American households are living in defiance of God.

God blessed the man and woman (Genesis 1:28) and gave them dominion over all the rest of the earth. If marriage brings about God’s blessing over the man and the woman and the land, what will its refutation bring?

Controversy is Christian

2006-10-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

In 1965, Tom Lehrer released an album titled, “That Was the Year That Was,” that proved dispositively that liberals do have a sense of humor. He took on everybody: peaceniks, warhawks, math-heads, Catholics, celebrities, Hubert Humphrey, and Wehrner Von Braun. Lehrer’s limited vocal aptitude was even a way of laughing at himself. I listened to the record probably hundreds of times and laughed to tears every time.

Lehrer made fun of liberals and conservatives, but he made an art of contending for the decency of conviction. He made fun of the pokerfaced absurd. With agile humor, he tried to push people to stand up for something besides getting themselves in the news.

Lehrer had a joke between numbers: “People today are always bemoaning about how they can’t communicate. Well, I say, if you can’t communicate, the least you can do is to shut up.”

If Tom Lehrer was singing in the year that was, we are living in a year that isn’t. We have no Tom Lehrer to make fun of those who refuse to tell us what they stand for or else sit down and shut up. Standing for something is controversial, judgmental, passé, and rude. Far be it that we should judge anyone’s behavior. We mustn’t argue; everyone is entitled to his or her (or whatever intermediate pronoun is inevitably going to have to become fashionable) opinion. Contention is synonymous with tension.

A criminal defendant who does not choose to enter a guilty plea but neither wishes to enter a plea of not guilty because he knows conviction at trial is inevitable, may enter a plea traditionally called “no volo contendere,” “I do not wish to contend.” This means he understands the State has sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction but he nevertheless withholds admission of guilt. A no volo plea results in conviction and sentencing. The defendant invokes this plea because it typically results in a lighter sentence than he might receive at trial.

Increasingly, in faith, in politics, and in life, we are becoming a people who wish not to contend. Standing for anything carries a sentence--controversy--and we have a phobia of controversy. The news is Pablum, most churches spoon up Pablum, politics is Pablum, and, appallingly, even atrocity coverage is Pablum. We are rescued everywhere from the impacts of reality, going through life with seatbelts fastened, braced in crash position. But how fast is it possible to accellerate from 0 to 70 in neutral?

I am grateful for my church and some refreshing people, to one of whom I am married, who assert reality and pursue controversy. Jesus Christ was and is the most controversial person the world has ever known, and he instructed us to pick up our crosses and follow him. His way is one of controversy, not of hiding from its consequences. To shun controversy is to shut up, and to shut up is deny Christ.

Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?...
[He] in whose eyes a reprobate is despised... Ps 15:1,4

How can we know a reprobate if we refuse to judge? Matthew 7:1, the sanctuary of the controversy-shy Christian as well as the unbeliever, does not enjoin us from assessing another’s conduct; but rather, it enjoins us from, according to Calvin,

“depraved eagerness for biting, censuring, and slandering.” Calvin continues, “It is not necessary that believers should become blind, and perceive nothing, but only that they should refrain from an undue eagerness to judge: for otherwise the proper bounds of rigour will be exceeded by every man who desires to pass sentence on his brethren.”

We are enjoined from faultfinding in others and neglecting to consider and correct the mites in our own eyes. We are not enjoined from controversy, from being the salt of the earth--which stings, preserves, disinfects, and seasons--nor from giving glory to God in a world hostile to him.

Jesus caused a lot of trouble wherever he went. So did his disciples; so did the grateful Gerasene (Luke 8), whose healing from demonic possession doubtless caused social upheaval when he returned home and told of the Lord’s mercy toward him. His townfellows were so upset about their lost pigs that they banished the Lord from their borders.

It is so controversial to give God the glory he is due.

The Beam

2006-10-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

Cruelly pitched the savage beam
crushed earthen nob called skull;
blood flowed upon the roughstripped beam
to redeem us from sin’s lull.

The evening and the morning star
set long and rose forever,
and dead told lively wonderers
of bonds he’d never sever.

The beam applied the skull
a mortal blow that sunless day;
While bleeding yet so pure a flow
sin held no hope of sway;

A flow so pure, fault he transformed;
and to his merit he conformed
our failure to perfection.

The skull reposes, crushed afoot,
the beam avenged stands beacon;
To consummation will it stand
Though we shall surely weaken.

Afterword: Why Nobel-Lauded Capital Can’t Cure Poverty

2006-10-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

In yesterday’s Post (“Loan Sharking Added to Nobel Peace Categories”), I presented a few bare facts about Muhammed Yunus’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize for his microloan system. Now I’d like to present some thoughts on why, although perhaps helpful on a small individual scale, capital infusion alone cannot eliminate poverty. I think it might even prolong poverty, absent other essential factors.

The Nobel Committee’s language in conferring the Peace Prize on Mr. Yunus and Grameen Bank was, "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below." I was caught by the similarity to the image of Christ reaching down into the abyss of sin to lift up the soul and bring him into the light of faith. With faith comes healing and ability, and competence follows brokenness. I will not here rehearse all of the accounts in which this very thing takes place in Scripture; they fill the New Testament.

Why are people in Bangladesh so poor? I don’t know; I don’t know about all the factors there that make farming next to impossible and seem to keep industry from taking hold. I do observe things that are missing in Bangladesh. All are particulars of Calvinism, and all are crucial elements of capitalism. Calvinism has been the founding premise in nations where capitalism has flourished.

Calvinism is Biblical Christianity, and its social premises are the rule of law, strong church, and family, each a distinct sphere, with all spheres interfacing according to Biblical precepts. The civil magistrate exercises legal authority in which all may prosper because life is valued and protected, and private property rights are regarded and protected. The family sphere provides for the confluence of economic, social, and spiritual stability. The church administers Biblically ordained ordinances and spiritual edification that enhance the well-being of the individual and the social order.

Nearly all of Mr. Yunus’s microloan recipients are women attempting to become modest subsistence entrepreneurs. This demonstrates a lack of supportive family structure. Their subsistence efforts are necessary because they have received no protection from the law and no support from a proper family structure. And no church is present to advance those values.

So, the question remains until proven otherwise: Can poverty be eliminated by capital infusion alone, or are other factors--rule of law, stable families, and solid churches--necessary to “create economic and social development from below.”

For now, I am of the opinion that the Nobel Committee is lauding a substitute for the God-ordained order of society, and that its intentions are misguided and its advancement will not succeed.

Loan Sharking Added to Nobel Peace Categories

2006-10-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

More than once a day, I do a quick check of the headlines to see whether we’ve lost any cities. Usually something absurd catches my eye and I click it on and read the full story. This typically incites a “Huh?" experience.

A “socially progressive” economist-banker, Muhammed Yunus, and his bank, just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his development of “microloans.” These are small loans for terribly poor people to buy enough livestock, or a cell phone, to lift them from the burdens of abject poverty and into small business. It seems like a great idea, but this peacemaker is making 15-35 percent interest on these loans. It’s what the market will bear, of course. A typical loan is around $200, and the payback rate is around 99%. “Peer groups of lenders” monitor the loans. I’m not arguing with success; the borrowers have gotten ahead because of these small loans. Mr. Yunus is Bangladeshi as are his borrowers.

There is a Nobel Prize in Economics, but for some reason, Mr. Yunus and his Grameen Bank are the co-recipients of the Peace Prize. Yunus and Grameen Bank won the Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below." The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." This year's Prize, by the way, awards 10,000,000 Swedish Krona, or $1,346,855.76 U.S.D.

I thought it was interesting that a loanshark and his bank would win the Peace Prize this year. I guess there were no competing claims on it.

Light Stuff

2006-10-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

My Favorite Poem

My parents required only one thing of me as a child: adulthood. And so I was not exposed to Mother Goose, but to Ogden Nash, and for this I am grateful. This is my favorite poem by Ogden Nash (actually it is my favorite poem by anyone):

The Turtle

The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

--Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

I memorized “The Turtle” when I was perhaps seven. It is wonderful to have it still in my memory.

I do think it clever of the turtle in such a fix to be so fertile. The turtle’s fixes are overcome for him. Arrangements for his proliferation have already been made. And there is a hint (Is 34:15-16) of a promise in the book of Jehovah, that the clever turtle will persevere.

****************************************************
Things I Don’t Have to Worry About as a Calvinist

1. Losing my salvation;
2. Making arrangements for the Cat’s post-Rapture care;
3. Wondering “what kind of God” would permit fire, famine, rape, war, tsunamis, &c;
4. Filling (or standing) in “the gap” where God leaves off;
5. Molding my face with PermaSmile;
6. Which head of state is the Antichrist.

Things I have to worry about as a Calvinist

1. Honoring God as he reveals himself in Scripture alone;
2. Obeying God’s law as it is revealed throughout Scripture;
3. Following the short list.

Christian Nation? Maybe, for a brief moment in time

2006-10-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

"Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the fast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element."--William Bradford, writing c. 1650, on the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620

The Puritans who founded Plymouth Plantation in 1627 were not proponents of religious freedom and toleration. They did not come to North America to build mosques and temples and cathedrals and to find peace and amity with neighbors who did. They came to worship the God of the Bible and to live in the light of the laws of the God of the Bible, without the bane of capricious tyrants inventing laws under which to persecute them.

The Puritans brought to America a vision of proselytizing the Indians who had preceded them to the continent. They endured setbacks, but overall the little colony of 41 families initially prospered and established an orderly government. Their founding document was the Mayflower Compact.

The Preamble of the Mayflower Compact names God four times, and puts forth the “Advancement of the Christian Faith” as a prime objective guiding their voyage and colonization of Virginia, a territory more extensive than the present-day state. The Pilgrims’ destination had been the southern environs of colonial Virginia, but God providentially redirected their course to Massachusetts, where they encountered a stiff northeastern winter.

The providence of the Puritans’ arrival in New England, which lay outside the jurisdiction of the London Company, gave them the liberty to establish their own government. The settlers of Plymouth Plantation established a majoritarian model of civil government that preserved their allegiance to the King of England.

The Pilgrims’ premise may have contained the seed of humanism and the transition to sectarian government. Their suffering under tyranny led them to establish a majoritarian charter that was partially Biblical, stippled with elements of Hobbes’s social contract and Locke’s notion of the natural law of liberty expressed in consent of the governed. Still, it was a good beginning.

Above all, the Mayflower Compact appears to have been the commitment of Christian people to govern themselves “In the name of God,” “for the Glory of God,” in the Presence of God.” Following is the text of the Preamble to the Mayflower Compact:

"In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of England, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, e&. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620."

Note that the Pilgrims promised “all due submission and obedience” to the Colony.

One hundred sixty-seven years later, America, influenced by the French Revolution, was more diverse, tolerant of non-Biblical deism, and decidedly humanistic in its political sensibilities. God does not appear in the perfunctory Preamble of the Constitution of the United States (1787):

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Man took back his power and reasserted himself in God’s place. Since then, God has made only a few token appearances in our appurtenances of government. The name “God” appears on American currency and in the national motto, but not in the context of “grace” and “glory” and “presence” that evoke the God of the Bible.

There is not a Christian nation on earth today. God calls his church apart as individuals, not as nations. Individuals evangelize other individuals; nations do not present the gospel of Christ to other nations. God conducts nations through courses just as he does individual lives: Israel, Moab, Babylon--no nation ever enjoyed a steady course of unperturbed peace. It was never given to any nation to persevere in obedience to God.

Historian Paul Johnson, in A History of the American People (Harper Collins, 1999), actually champions the factors leading to the decline of American Puritanism. He cites an “American form of Christianity--undogmatic, moralistic rather than credal, tolerant but strong, and all-pervasive of society” as heralding the “Great Awakening” (to which other historians refer as the “Great Revival”), led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. These factors, Johnson seems to be saying, displaced “the old Calvinist dogmas--and the controversies they bred” (p.109).

Heaven forbid that Christianity should ever be controversial. However, Jonathan Edwards, whom Johnson calls “the first major thinker in American history (p. 111), was certainly controversial--particularly with his own congregation, which relieved him of his pulpit for adhering to the doctrine that only believers should receive the Lord’s Supper.

God caused strong preaching-centered churches to thrive throughout the Great Revival of the 18th century, but Puritanism was shopworn by the time of the Industrial Revolution. The Revival did not penetrate the cities; it was a movement of the countryside, preaching taking place in fields and small churches with circuit preachers. The Revival stirred the need to promote literacy to enable rural people to read the Bible, and frontier schools sprang up for this purpose.

Sensualistic philosophy and its progeny followed the Great Revival. Using the date Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, 1871, as an index, it took precisely 251 years for America to descend from commitment to a government under God to conviction of a universe under man.

Unimportance

2006-10-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men... Ephesians 6:6-7

The Bible often represents sin as sickness, and healing as removal of the sinner from the dominion of sin to the dominion of grace: The man born blind, the leper, the Gerasene demoniac, Mary of Magdalene, beset with seven demons, &c. Others are healed from sickness but were apparently already removed from the dominion of sin: Eutychus, revived from death by Paul; Dorcas, revived from death by Peter, and Peter’s mother, whom the Lord Jesus healed from a fever. A Gentile centurion, whose faith the Lord found unmatched by any of Israel, asked for and received the healing of his servant. Peter and John brought about the healing of a lame man in the name of Jesus Christ. The man leaped up, stood, walked, entered the temple, and praised God before witnesses (Acts 3:1-9). Jesus healed ten lepers; one thanked him. The other nine evidently took the cookies and didn’t stay for the service.

Interestingly, none of these people, upon being restored or enabled, inaugurated a church committee. No one got a ladies’ auxiliary underway, or a coffee ministry, or a babysitting ministry. All either offered simple thanks and praise, or returned to their discreet and discrete capacities of simple service. Large undertakings, such as famine relief, were conducted by the whole church and shepherded by two clearly chosen leaders. The ever-expanding litany of “ministries” that keep busy people busier on the Lord’s day are absent from the Word of God.

Spying out several multiple-ministry churches online appears to confirm my theory that the point of multiple ministries is “connectedness.” For some reason, it seems more “connected” in these settings to meet socially outside of church, along age, gender, and interest lines, than in church for worship and prayer.

Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother and her repair to her duty all take place in one sentence: And he touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she arose, and ministered unto him Mt 8:15. She ministered unto the Lord; evidently it was her routine to do so.

Martha wears herself out ministering to Jesus while her sister Mary simply sits at his feet and listens to him. Martha wants Jesus to reprimand Mary, but Jesus assures Martha that her sister is no slouch--and, in fact, has “the better part.”

It is positively necessary that things be done in a church, and it takes people to do them. It takes people, not ministries. Everything that must be done must, in its way, support the essential ministry: the ministry of the Word of God. There are no other ministries, only tasks before those who willingly undertake them.

The emphasis on so-called ministries--women’s, music, education, chair-setting--that engage as much participation as possible--is inversely proportional to the emphasis on the centrality of preaching. Not only are the ancillary ministries we see in so many growth-oriented churches today non-Biblical--they may be anti-Biblical.

These ministries are anti-Biblical when they lead focus away from worship and preaching, and onto individual importance for everyone, something known as “menpleasing” in the Bible (Ep 6:6). Service is essential, but is to be tempered by necessity and focus.

The simple blessing of undistracted religion is not enhanced by committee efforts.

To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world James 1:27;

And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and of prayers Acts 2:42.

To arise, to thank God for his mercy in delivering us from the reign of sin to the reign of grace, and to minister unto Christ with our minds and hearts and time is the explicit imperative of Scripture. We grow in grace hearing the Word preached.

The Puritans, who held unembellished worship services inviting participation in nothing but the hearing of the Word, brought forth the greatest theologians and, consequentially, the best social and economic systems of all time. Purity of worship was tied to purity of doctrine. Both led to a competent social order.

The downgrade that has led to more participatory worship has led to more participatory doctrine--which, ultimately, is no doctrine. Where worship and doctrine are weakened, social and economic conditions correspondingly weaken. When the church seeks to incorporate more ways of the world in its worship, the church degrades itself and the world. Relevance is a very erosive force.

In the final chapter of his epistle to the Romans, Paul recites names of servants of the early church who served outside the primary callings of teachers and deacons. These people risked their lives to transport letters across dangerous territory and served the Gospel under circumstances of extraordinary hardship. They were the first servants of the church. God chose to name them in his Word. They are special. They are important. No one since the closure of canon is special and important in the same way. Paul commends Aquila and Priscilla as a married couple; all others he commends as individuals. No committee or representative of a ministry is acknowledged.

The dominant feature on the landscape of many churches today is importance: everyone’s importance is what is important. God does not require us to be important. He sees through our silly schemes to try to make ourselves more important to him--as if he thought in petty human comparatives--and to each other. He does require us to know that he is important.

Be still and know that I am God Ps 46:10.

Ayn Rand: The Failure of Mind as God

2006-10-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was the great white hope of atheists determined to commandeer rationality. Her philosophy, “Objectivism,” was unique in its separation from the sensualists and its rejection of relativism. She did, nevertheless, hold man’s “own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,” and thus hearkens to John Stuart Mill.

Rand was influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Nietzsche; from Aristotle she took the rational premise, “A is A.” She vehemently attacked every type of gnosticism and every form of empiricism, refuting the notion of what she called “the primacy of consciousness.” The primacy of consciousness is the cornerstone of postmodern thought: the notion that man’s conscious perception defines reality. Thus in this arena, Rand and Dabney were allies.

Unfortunately, Rand’s Objectivism is an atheistic system. While appearing rational in its propounding of an objective reality independent of consciousness, Objectivism also advocates that no divine consciousness underlies reality. Perception does not define reality, but neither is there a creator, nor a soul. The human mind is the moving force behind man’s potential, and man’s potential as a fully self-actuated individual is the only object of interest to the Objectivist. Nothing that came before is of any interest at all.

Rand rejected religion, as she did postmodern philosophy, as “evil” and “irrational.” She dismissed religion categorically as irrational because its premise is altruistic. Rand likened the alliance she perceived between church and state to “Attila and the Witch Doctor”--perhaps one of her more compelling insights.

The mind of man, according to Objectivism, is simply here, a priori, the most important thing in the universe, and not to be hindered. There is nothing higher and nothing more potentially rational. “Potentially” is the operative term here; Rand considered virtually everyone outside of her small coterie of followers to be irrational.

Rand was untroubled by any considerations of “where it all came from.” In an interview with Bill Moyers, Moyers asked Rand whether she was not impressed with all the things of creation around her. Her candid response: “Not really, no.” That which did not originate within her mind was unworthy of the further exercise of her mind.

Although Rand faulted Hobbes, her philosophy, as did his, held self-interest to be the bonding force of civilization. Self-interest was the greatest virtue in the Objectivist scheme, and altruism the greatest evil. She differed from Hobbes largely because of her “Benevolent Universe” world view. By what algorithm she reconciled benevolence with a contempt for altruism is unclear. As for the “why” behind the benevolent universe, she would not be accountable. It simply was. Self-existence implies self-existent properties.

Rand’s novels depict heroic humans with godlike brilliance of achievement; they are, in fact, creators. Titanic battles take place between creators and destroyers. Meekness was not the key to the Objectivist kingdom.

Rand, who emigrated from Bolshevik Russia, held strong anti-Communist convictions. The prevailing theme in her novels, as well her nonfiction, is the individual pitted against the collective. While rightly vilifying the unthinking and parasitic collective, Rand wrongly deified the mind. Sadly, she failed to apprehend atheism as the fatal essence of Communism.

Unfortunately, Rand’s scenarios are stage-set after a staunch Calvinist work ethic; but rather than accountability to God for one’s moral parameters, there is accountability only to the “rational self-interest” of her creator-heroes. Nor do her heroes lean toward a Calvinist chastity ethic. And they occasionally find it justifiable to kill someone who gets in their way.

An affair with her protégé undid Rand’s moral credibility, and with it, the credibility of Objectivism as a moral system sustained in self-will. Atheism lost a paragon in which to billet its cause.

Rand was right: Reality is objective. It is not subject to change according to men’s whims or perceptions. But Rand was wrong: Rational self-interest is unavailable to the perception of the natural man. The natural man’s self-interest cannot be rational because the natural man is not rational. He does not seek God because he believes he can live by his own reasoned righteousness. Man’s only true rational self-interest lies in his salvation from sin through belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, Objectivism is a philosophy of self-will, self-interest, and self-undoing.

Ayn Rand was buried, at her own request, wearing her wedding ring, a photograph of her husband placed in her hands.

"A Constellation of Graces"

2006-10-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

I am unsure why the idea of beauty embarrasses me, as though my thoughts are too defective to confess. Often it seems to me that my beauty receptors process input in blunt chunks.

Objects--dwellings, clothing, the stuff of life--engage me with their utility, and beauty somehow is optional. The miraculous intricacies of creation--animal, botanical, and mineral, of the earth, sea, and visible heavens--captivate me; nevertheless, I fear my appreciation is terribly analytical.

But that isn’t what distresses me. The huge and terrible question is: Do I find beauty in Christ? This is where diffidence grips and I fear I am casehardened.

Certainly I find beauty in his Word. But, “He is altogether lovely” (SS 5:16) refers to a Person, not to a Word. But this Person is the Word...is the Word the sole repository of his beauty? Is seeing beauty in the Word sufficient to apprehend “the beauty of Christ,” the altogether loveliness? And, I can be analytical with the Word....

So in my distraction I turn to my therapist, Dr. John Owen, who died in 1683, but left a therapeutic legacy of systematic theology. Owen, always on deck with a lifeline, assures me that Christ is indeed beautiful, and his beauty is something I can begin to take in. His beauty is in his Word, because he is there. His beauty is his wisdom, his pondering the “hidden man of the heart;” it is his eminency, his strength, his faithfulness, and his stability. Dr. Owen wrote that prescription for me.

Owen writes more than 20 pages specifically on the subject of the beauty of Christ in Vol. II, Communion With God (Banner of Truth) pp. 56-78. The rest of this volume and much of his other work is also rife with the subject, if not as specifically. I am not given to typing exercises, but he lists 11 ways in which Christ is “lovely.” From Owen’s exposition on the beauty of Christ, I will here extract one crystalline sentence:

“There is light in him, and life in him, and power in him, and all consolation in him;--a constellation of graces, shining with glory and beauty.” (The Works of John Owen, Banner of Truth, Vol. II, p. 75)

That, I find beautiful.

I remain diffident about my blunt chunk approach. I am consoled that this has little to do with beauty in a way that I need to understand it.

To know something of the light and the life and the power and the consolation of Christ is to know something of his beauty.

Autumn Color and the Death of the Amish Children

2006-10-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

Thou art good, and doest good...Ps 119:68

Colors converge toward copper here, passing red, not quite gold. Our chickens are deep golden-buff and scarlet-combed. Crimson-leaved blueberries and cayenne-orange mountain ash berries, saturated in mid-autumn sun, hang on, closer to life than dormancy.

Even in my pleasant garden, I am never unaware of perturbation. Intermittent sirens and helicopters herald the presence of sin and pain and need.

This week a small Amish community in Pennsylvania buried five schoolgirls, murdered despite the girls’ likely compliance with their killer’s demand that they pray for him to protect him from carrying out his horrific crime.

Today, as are all days, is a good day to be a Calvinist.

Only a Calvinist sees events like this in a light that comports with God’s own testimony: the absolute sovereignty of his perfect will. God’s sovereignty prevails over peace and over perturbation.

Does this make Calvinists callous? That is a testy and ignorant misconception. We grieve the grievous. We know the grievous could always be more grievous. We see restraint present in the world, despite sin. We understand the end of all things, including ourselves, is the glory of God. To God alone the glory.

Is God implacable? No; he is merciful. His law and his judgments are perfect and righteous (Ps 19:7; Ps 119:7). Our God is in the heavens, and he hath done whatsoever he pleased (Ps 115:3).

Did it please God to have a crazed reprobate kill five children? Behold the evidence. Yes, it did. It pleased him to have crazed reprobates kill his own son. Had it not, our sin would be unredeemed, and we would justly suffer in hell, just as surely as crazed reprobate killers of little girls.

A hard thing. But sin is sin, and death is death, and death does not always come packaged neatly wrapped in human poetic justice.

Our faith rests in him whose righteous judgments are perfect.

God is a righteous judge,
Yea, a God that hath indignation every day Ps 7:11.

I will give thanks unto Jehovah according to his righteousness,
And will sing praise to the name of Jehovah Most High Ps 7:17.

Upward Descent and Other Amazing Deviations: Dabney Dissects Darwin

2006-10-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

Mid-nineteenth-century evolution theory was a fission bomb forever sundering two ways of understanding life: Either we are related through Adam and unrelated to cantaloupe; or, we are related through protoplasm to both.

Dabney’s chapter, “Evolution Theory” is the Cat’s favorite thus far. He resents any implication that he is descended from inferior wild cats. If left to the wild habitats of his so-called ancestors, the Cat would most probably make his way to the nearest doorstep and yowl for cat food. Notwithstanding the Cat’s defective (though sensorially impeccable) epistemology, he understands that he is a discrete creation made to be a companion to man. This places the Cat far ahead of evolutionary theorists.

Dabney was a contemporary of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and thus the beneficiary of the same classical intellectual heritage from which Darwin drew. He penetrated the flaws in Darwin’s scheme, and deftly deconstructed them.

Darwin’s contribution (The Origin of Species, 1859; The Descent of Man, 1871) to evolution theory was his systematizing of classical atomic (as in atoms as components of matter) theory, using laws inferable from nature: multiplication, limitation, heredity, variation, and equilibrium. Behavior, too, would be an operative variable effecting survival. Ultimately, success is determined by chance, because these laws are driven by blind atomic causation. The ultimate victor in this animalistic struggle is he who accumulates the most brain convolutions and mechanistic impulses to survive. This happened to be man, but in a chance system, it could just as easily have been a speck of mold. An evolutionist perhaps would not put it this way, because he would likely fail to perceive the logical outcome of his theory.

Dr. Thomas Huxley and Professor John Tyndall took up the creatorless cause after Darwin. Nothing happens by chance, according to Tyndall; every occurrence is caused, and therefore necessary. Tyndall’s definition of the soul (yes, he acknowledged its existence) is well worth quoting: “The soul consists of fine, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. These are the most mobile of all [atoms]. They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their motions the phenomena of life arise” (R. L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy Naphtali Press, 2003, p. 91).

One readily sees why humanists are still forum-shopping.

Compare and contrast: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Ge 2:7

Do you feel the Force? Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) did. He refined evolutionary science to theoretical linear perfection. “Force” moved matter from protoplasm to mollusk to the mind of Isaac Newton in so many increments over so much time. In Spencer’s model, “Force” equals motion, and is the single causative agency in the universe. Spencer’s reason for calling his material cause “Force,” according to Dabney, was simple distaste for the Christian notion of God and his own soul.

Spencer’s Force is infinite, impersonal and unknowable, but it gets things done. Problematically, Spencer attributes a multitude of properties and doctrines to this “unknowable” Force. Dissecting probe in hand, Dabney exposes this inconsistency. He further notes that Spencer attempts to place an epistemological embargo on knowledge of the “unknowable” God. Apparently, it is possible to know things about some unknowable things, but not about others.

Spencer’s Force is unknowable but at the same time, Spencer insists, it is inferable--through, of course, the usual sensualistic means: our senses. Since the Force is impersonal as well as unknowable, we cannot know whether it is benevolent or malevolent.

God, on the other hand, is infinite, personal, and truly unknowable, but because of his personal benevolence toward us, he makes himself knowable to us, albeit in a finite way due to our finite consciousness.

How can we trust an unknowable Force? Dabney points out that we cannot presume it is intelligent, rational, logical, interested, or possessed of any other properties, benevolent or otherwise, if it is truly unknowable. We do know that God is all-intelligent and capable of manifesting himself to us. Once a scientist signs on with the unknowable, doctrine and reason are defenestrated.

One point on which I admit confusion is Spencer’s concept of time, which “is but experienced succession” (Dabney, p. 100). Does Spencer mean that before man, the only creature capable of experiencing time, there was no time? Then when did all these things occur--protoplasm to mollusk to Newton--that required so much time?

Spencer inspires further wonder when he says that “material motion is simply the consciousness of matter in successive positions in time” (Dabney, p. 100). Now, this is priceless. Matter is conscious, but the Force propelling it might not be conscious--we don’t know, because it is unknowable. If this doesn’t convince you to take your fish for a walk, nothing will.

I suspect that Spencer and Comte (see my “The Pontiff of Humanity" post below) might have been drinking buddies.

At some point, our atomic clock ceases ticking; the little flame of atoms is extinguished, and we die. Or, as Spencer really said, the “absorption of motion and diffusion of matter” take place (Dabney, p. 102). There could not possibly be a provision in his materialist scheme for resurrection once matter is thus debased. The impersonal Force makes no claims, no promise of eternal life.

Spencer’s gods--matter, motion, and force--“symbols of the Unknown Reality”--in the end, are subject to death.

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Ps 14:1; Ps 53:1

Trends

2006-10-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

"There is nothing permanent except change."
— attributed to Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BC)

My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change... Pr 24:21

My memory is shot. More and more, I tap into my ancillary brain, aka my husband. I tend to assume he is on tap 24/7. For instance, sometime in the middle of the other night, I happened to wonder something and was unable to recall the details of the circumstances.

“Why wasn’t Sirhan Sirhan executed? Isn’t the United States Attorney General very important?”

“He killed Kennedy during a window of time when California had suspended the death penalty.”

“So why is he in Vacaville? Why isn’t he in some federal prison?”

“Because back then there were no federal murder statutes.”

Right...states still had jurisdiction over murder back then...even assassinations of United States Attorney Generals...even Presidents. It had always been that way. There were no federal laws against murder.

Today there are 39 statutes against murder implanted throughout Titles 8, 18, 21, and 49 of the United States Code, all of which carry the death penalty. I’m certainly no death penalty opponent, but 39 new ways to be executed by the fed is not uninteresting, either.

The implication is a trend of the Federal Government asserting jurisdiction that traditionally, by Constitutional implication, belonged to the States. This transfer of power was not effected because States were not doing their job; it was effected because “enemies of the people” were promoted to being enemies of more people--an entire nation unified against a common, abstract, enemy named “Terrorism.” Note the difficulty of executing “isms.”

You may think this consolidates things more neatly; or, you may think it represents an undesirable advance in federal powers in violation of the Constitutional principle of powers reserved to the States. You may find the “common defense” provision of the Constitution consistent with federal prosecution of terrorist-related crimes.

But what are the crimes over which the federal government has assumed jurisdiction? Few have anything to do with actual “terrorism," or acts intended to cause or capable of causing mass killing and/or destruction. Murder related to a carjacking (18 U.S.C. 2119), for instance. Now, I would unreservedly advocate the death penalty for this offense. But I see no rational justification for its removal from the state in which the heinous crime occurred to the federal criminal justice system. The justification, of course, is “domestic terrorism,” which now simply means “crime.”

Combine the removal of these offenses to the federal criminal system with the undermining of the doctrine of habeas corpus, and rights of unconvicted defendants are suddenly, subtly, and significantly diminished. (See: “Compare and Contrast” at Grapes and Figs, and Comment by Benjamin there. Link is on sidebar at left if this one doesn't work.) Remember, these are people who have been charged but not yet convicted, and the foundation of our liberty is innocence until proof of guilt. We began as, in the words of John Adams, “a nation of laws, not of men.”

Journalist Ronald L. Caravan (Between the Lines, ‘Nation of laws, not of men’ becoming more a ‘nation of trends’ Valley News, Fulton, NY, Feb. 21, 2004) observes that we are becoming a “nation of trends,” and I wish I’d said it first. Mr. Caravan refers to a trend toward a normalization of homosexuality that leaves lawmakers scurrying for a practical solution in light of opinion they perceive as popular merely because it is vocal and given ink in a liberal press. I think Mr. Caravan is precisely right.

I see a trend in the diminution of justice in favor of an expansion of the oversight of justice. If this is hard to understand, I recommend reading Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. It is very short and straightforward.

Another current trend is globalism. “Global” is the latest prefix. “Global warming.” “Global trade.” And now, even a former United States Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, who, mercifully, recently retired, advocates “global law.” The trend is that the United States should be “partnering” with the rest of the world, respecting traditions and laws completely alien to our own, and melding our legal infrastructures with those of the rest of the world, including those of our most hostile enemies. With terrorists.

Another trend is secularization. This of course dovetails with globalism, because people get along better if their religions are compatible, and Christianity doesn’t meld; God demands exclusive rights. Thus, God must be waylaid in favor of thriving human relationships.

Relationships, by the way, are another trend. Marriage is kind of passé; children can wait to have parents.

Ultimately, there is only one trend that blights mankind: his departure from God. ...if my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land 2 Ch 7:14. God help us if this text has become hackneyed in our sight.

True Confessions in Ms.

2006-10-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

It is an execration, a hissing, and an astonishment.

My friend just sent me a press release. The coming issue of Ms. Magazine will feature a cover story, “We Had Abortions.” Thousands of women will sign a petition and tell their story.

According to Eleanor Smeal, publisher of Ms., "We have to get away from what the politicians are saying, and get women's lives back in the picture." By “politicians,” Smeal means lawmakers. As for “women’s lives,” I can only take it that she limits her reference to those fortunate enough to have made it out of the womb alive. Clearly she is unconcerned about the lives of those she advocates will not.

I just can’t say any more about this. People resent the consequences of actions they willingly undertake. Then they resent deprivation of the consequences.

My pastor told me there would be days like this: “Sin ruins everything.”

"The Pontiff of Humanity"

2006-10-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Advisory: Scary content.

The Cat enjoys scaring his friend Zack. He has urged me, therefore, to write about Positivism’s arch scion, Auguste Comte, about whom we were just reading in Dabney. Comte had the modest aspiration of becoming “Pontiff of Humanity.”

Ideas that reject sources of knowledge can get very weird, and Comte quite possibly attained the zenith of weirdness. If we owe our ideas to no sources of knowledge outside of our own experience of phenomena, we tend to become a bit obsessed with ourselves. Thus, atheism is the predictable logical consequence of positivism.

Positivism denies the supernatural, even in light of the evidence of supernatural facts. Thus, the documented miracles that Christ performed on earth before thousands of witnesses would be denied or explained naturally--an impossibility untroubling to a positivist mind.

The cosmological implication of this is, or should be, terribly frightening: self-existence without God. As Dabney puts it so well, “Thus, matter is clothed with the attributes of God” (Robert L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Books, 2003, p. 81).

Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857, was certainly not the first person to attempt to recreate God; nor was he original in his attempt to introduce worship of himself. However, there is a certain novelty to his approach of denying the existence of any god, while introducing a religious system of worship with himself as the center, and expecting liberty-enjoying people to go along with it.

To the psychotic Comte, a religion without God was a reasonable concept. His religion included the necessary element of worshipers. To ensure a prodigious number of them, he devised a congregation known as the “Great Being,” consisting of all humanity, living, dead, and those who will live. Evidently hip to the utility of liturgical worship principles, Comte devised a system of worship with 84 holy days in a year and nine sacraments (p. 83).

Comte’s system was to consist of a “spiritual order” of positivist philosophers and educators (reminiscent of Plato’s philosopher kings, but in Plato’s gnostic model, at least knowledge was understood to come from without the visible world). These people would be presumed infallible and defiance of their dicta would not be tolerated. Above the oligarchy would be the Pontiff of Humanity, with Comte, of course, to be the first to hold this office. The Pontiff, imbued with unsurpassed wisdom, would select his own successor.

Comte had a plan for the United States of America, wherein three bankers were to govern each of the States. The spiritual order would be absolute in its authority, and its authority would be absolute in its sphere of human control--social, spiritual, educational, and, economic.

Comte suffered from manic depression in addition to his obvious megalomania, and was rescued in the course of several suicide attempts. But consider the burden under which he labored--the pressure of ruling every soul that ever lived, did live, and ever would live--equipped only with the laws of nature directly sensible to him. No wonder he held such a hopeless, fatalistic world view, holding “intellectual skepticism as the most advantageous state of mind” (Dabney, p. 84). The irony was likely lost on him that he could not even trust the validity of his own “infallible” ideas.

Unchallenged deference to experts because they are experts, regardless of competence, is a current manifestation of Comte’s positivist world view. I would submit that Comte’s view is not extreme, but rather the logical outcome of positivism, and that it exists around us more than makes us comfortable to think.

Dabney said this in the 19th century, and it is as true in our day as it was in his: Positivism’s “most deplorable result is the impulse which it gives to irreligion and open atheism. Thousands of shallow persons, who have no understanding of any connected philosophy, and are too indolent and inattentive to acquire it, are emboldened to babble materialism and impiety, by hearing it said that the ‘positive philosophy’ has exploded the supernatural” (Dabney, p. 85).

Adherence to positivism and its sequelae is shallow and uncomplicated; it is a giving over to a reprobate mind. Paul presaged the philosophy long before Dabney warned America: ”for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator...” Ro 1:25. ”And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting...” Ro 1:28.

Positivists would profess that their philosophy advocates nothing specifically immoral, that nature itself is sufficient revelation of proper moral conduct. Whose nature--Auguste Comte’s? Their scheme forecloses any moral source outside of nature and sensibility; therefore, how can morality be known? But this is a rude question to ask an all-knowing Pontiff of Humanity.

The Be Nice to Atheists Day Party: Those People Don’t Know How to Have a Good Time and They Aren’t Even Any Fun

2006-10-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Saturday I hosted a “Be Nice to Atheists Day” party here at my blog. It was kind of a dud.

I thought it was pretty nice of me to cite some of their outstanding achievements, like the French Revolution, the quest for conquering space, and the obsession with uncreating something into nothing.

Alas, a taut-necked guest showed up early, whistling loudly in the dark he brought along for company, taunting in the spirit of Sennacharib, calling me and my guests “religious loonies,” bemoaning my “dripping sarcasm and condescension,” and railing that we needed to get a sense of humor.

One of my dear guests who came to help serve and clean up commented that sometimes sarcasm (mine, I’m afraid) is well-placed (she’s a very dear friend) and hits the terribly sensitive terribly close to home. I daresay it did, and I have somewhat repented my repentance.

I removed the post, because the party was “just for today.” I also regretted my atheist-baiting, because, for one thing, I am not very good at it, but mostly because I would never wish to bring dishonor on the church, or incur irrational unintended consequential site visits upon my own church in particular.

The guest moved the party to Grapes and Figs, where he retreated into a whining humor of his own, hoping the whole thing would be taken as a “joke.”

I have visited a few blogsites of such people, and they are all similar: incredibly comprehensive self-absorption as far as the eye can see. It is difficult for me to pray for such people; but after all, I was once a denier of the true God too, and the darkness and vitriolic vehemence of their denials of the truth are no more deadly to themselves than were mine. As my friend Jim says, “dead’s dead.”

By grace I live in Christ and have been given a new heart, a new life, and the promise of enjoying him forever. But I must not sully this wondrous gift of grace, and I risk doing so if I berate someone who has not received it. I do covet this cinder-hearted person for the Kingdom. I fear he has been exposed to the truth and rejected it, and thus awaits the worst of penalties. I have no idea how to pray for this person. And so I am grateful for the enabling Spirit of God who will remove my inept groans to the throne of God, if indeed, they serve his will.