Aug 3, 2017 | Apologetics
I recently saw this headline at Real Clear Politics: “DNA Contradicts the Bible on Canaanites.” Of course I had to click on it. What I found, no surprise to me, was that DNA did no such thing.
For the last 150 plus years, skeptics have declared over and over again that that Bible has supposedly been disproved by one discovery or another. And over and over again the claims of the skeptics have been proved bogus. Such is the case with this latest DNA finding. The title on RCP site was blatantly false, and I e-mailed the editors to let them know. But the title of the actual piece is only slightly less deceiving: “DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites.” Whoever wrote this is obviously ignorant of what the Bible actually says, and that’s how lies spread in our modern popular culture, especially among those who automatically doubt the Bible’s authenticity. An accurate title would be, “DNA Confirms the Bible.” (more…)
Jul 31, 2017 | Theology
I guess this will be the last part of my little trilogy (previous two posts here and here) on the wages of sin, which Paul tells us is death. I made the claim that over the years my conviction of how we are saved has had a powerful impact on keeping our kids Christian. I previously explained the traditional Reformed tradition on soteriology (how we are saved), that we are actually spiritually dead in our sins, and that we unable to believe on the Lord Jesus until God does a supernatural work in our soul to raise us spiritually from the dead. This means that our salvation is not up to us, but to God. It is the unilateral work of our sovereign, Almighty God in Christ for us. He does not ask our permission. And thank God for that! Can you imagine if our salvation was ultimately up to us? As I argued in my last post, our sinful human nature compels us to run and hide from God, like Adam and Eve did, and the Scripture is clear that nobody seeks God.
Why is what I’ll call a God-centered perspective so powerfully persuasive to me, and to our kids? My impression of Christianity for the first six years of my faith journey was that the quality of my relationship with God was primarily dependent on what I did or didn’t do. In a positive thinking phase of my life I learned that, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me!” While certainly true in many areas of life, I’ve learned it most definitely is not true in my relationship to a holy God. Please note, though, the word “primarily.” The God-focused faith I was introduced into at 24 did not imply that what I did or didn’t do wasn’t important, or that my choices weren’t real. God’s sovereign work with human beings doesn’t destroy their nature, make of their freedom an illusion, or turn them into robots. What it does do, though, is put our confidence in the right place: him!
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Jul 28, 2017 | Theology
In my previous post I talked about the wages of sin as it related to the movie Dunkirk. In this post I want discuss how the wages of sin relates to our salvation from sin, and specifically what in theology is called the doctrine of soteriology. Over the years I’ve found that my conviction of how we are saved has had a powerful impact on keeping our kids Christian.
Most Evangelical Christians are not well versed in theology in general, and likely not soteriology. The basic idea taught overtly and implied in most conservative Christian Protestant churches is that we are saved from sin because we believe on the Lord Jesus. This is of course true, as Paul declares in Romans 10:
If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
But a question arose over the course of Church history about the nature of this belief: Where does the power or ability to believe come from? Many of my brothers and sisters in Christ would think this is if not a silly question, then at least an unnecessary one. Who cares, they might think. We’re presented with the gospel, then we either believe or we don’t. But it’s not that simple.
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Jul 23, 2017 | Explanatory Power
When we came out of the movie theater having just watched the very intense and entertaining hit movie Dunkirk, all I could think of was the Apostle Paul’s phrase in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death.” This phrase about sin’s ultimate consequences points back to the Lord God telling Adam in Genesis 2 that he may eat from any tree in the garden, but that he cannot eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that if he does he “will surely die.” We know that when Adam and Eve ate of the tree they did not instantly drop dead, so this death God spoke of was something more profound than just physical death. Yes, physical death entered the human race, but something much more sinister entered: sin, the cause of death, which is spiritual separation from man’s creator, God.
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Jul 20, 2017 | Explanatory Power
When I read a (long) piece recently titled, “Can We Be Good Without God? On the political meaning of Christianity,” I was reminded yet again that ideas have consequences, and that there is no neutral space where ideas inspired by “religion” do not have implications for life, including politics.
You may wonder why I put quotes around the word religion. I do that because all human beings are fundamentally “religious” in that every person lives by faith. For those uncritically marinated in secular Western culture, they actually believe that only “religious” people require “faith.” And I put faith in quotes because our secular culture defines “faith” as something only “religious” people need. How convenient, for the secularists: only those irrational religious people need faith. And they define faith, conveniently for themselves as believing despite inadequate or no evidence. Now that is doubly convenient!
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