Sunday, September 12, 2010

2010-09-12

  • Phillips posts a video of the 9/11 attacks. “We should never forget. Our leaders have. The unity that the country knew after this attack was brief and passing, unlike our focused, national unity during World War 2.” http://bibchr.blogspot.com/2010/09/9112001-do-not-forget.html

  • Wallace has an early commendation for Grudem’s Politics – According to the Bible. The fascinating thing is that this book exists: He notes that conservative theologians don’t usually dive into politics with the fervor of their left-wing opponents (think seminary-trained, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Jim Wallis). “Grudem has been for a long time an outspoken defender of conservative thought—both theologically and politically. He has impeccable credentials—Harvard BA, Westminster MDiv, Cambridge PhD.” Politics According to the Bible (Dan Wallace)

  • DeYoung posts A Communion Prayer of Thanksgiving from the Didache.

  • Spurgeon: The ministers have “preached the people out of their faith in the Scriptures; they taught them to be doubters. The most mischievous servant of Satan that I know of is the minister of the gospel, who not only doubts the truth in his own soul, but propagates doubt in the minds of others by his criticisms, innuendoes, and triflings with words.” The Times Are Out of Joint

  • Creationsafaris points to an article where engineers are taking inspiration from flying fish in a wind tunnel. “The aerodynamic performance of flying fish is comparable to those of various bird wings, and the flying fish has some morphological characteristics in common with the aerodynamically designed modern aircrafts.”  “Having shown that flying fish are exceptional fliers, Choi and Park are keen to build an aeroplane that exploits ground effect aerodynamics inspired by flying fish technology,” the article ended, stating nothing about evolution or how this flight technology might have evolved. Flying Fish Tested in Wind Tunnel- Match Bird Flight

  • Bayly has this powerful quote from Spurgeon’s disciple, Archibald Brown: “The devil has seldom done a more clever thing, than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them. From speaking out the gospel, the Church has gradually toned down her testimony, then winked at and excused the frivolities of the day. Then she tolerated them in her borders. Now she has adopted them under the plea of reaching the masses! ...In vain will the epistles be searched to find any trace of the 'gospel of amusement'. Their message is, "Therefore, come out from them and separate yourselves from them... Don't touch their filthy things..." Anything approaching amusement is conspicuous by its absence. They had boundless confidence in the gospel and employed no other weapon.” iii) Edwards dealt with a woman who was zealous to share ‘messages from God’ (which included marring local pastors, and she was disrespectful to her husband. Though her witnessing was wholly inappropriate, Edwards refused to discourage her from witnessing. Instead he helped to guide her zeal to witness toward a more God-glorifying end—successfully! Edwards was not a harsh man. He was a winsome man who recognized evidences of grace in those who many pastors would readily write off. He had startling pastoral abilities that complemented his amazing theological insight. The gospel of art

  • DG: A caricature sometimes emerges that Edwards was a man with detached personality, intellectually engaged in doctrinal theory but not the practical know. That he was a poor pastor. But several stories paint a different picture. i) Edwards first pastorate was a church split. He labored to reconcile the church he was pastoring to its mother. He accomplished his aim in two years, working himself out of the pastorate. This shows incredible pastoral prowess. ii) James Davenport was a radical sensationalistic itinerant preacher engaged in great error. Everyone else wrote him off. Edwards was asked to win Davenport, and he insisted a delegation go with him. A year after this, and two weeks after Edwards met with him privately, he publically repented and attributed much of his ministry to a false spirit. “When is the last time you heard of a preacher or minister like Davenport coming around to a submissive and sound disposition?” Edwards took the time and energy to invest in this wayward minister, in such a way that actually moved him to repent. iii) The Pastoral Touch of Jonathan Edwards- Three Examples

  • CMI responds to questions of whether black holes are real, and whether Adam had another wife, Lilith. i) The evidence for black holes it very strong. “They are certainly a theoretical possibility from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Furthermore, once a star runs out of nuclear fuel, then the outward pressure would no longer match gravity. So the star must collapse.” ii) A certain star (S2) orbits around something in the galactic centre at a distance of 17 light hours (about three times that of Pluto), and period of only 15 years (Pluto’s is 248years). This is consistent with the gravitational pull of 4.1 million solar masses… the only known solar mass that could compact 4 million starts into the required volume is a black hole. iii) This Lilith idea comes from extra-biblical Jewish legends, possibly derived from Babylonian/Assyrian demoness Lilit/Lilu. There is no shred of evidence in the Bible for this. Those who claim male redactors suppressed her have no evidence whatsoever of textual tampering. http://creation.com/black-holes-lilith

  • Creationsafaris: The world’s best chemists are bested by plants. There is a race to make solar cells more efficient. One approach is harvesting real photosynthetic enzymes from plants and employing them on a scaffold of carbon nanotubes. Michael Strano of MIT and his team have succeeded in getting the enzymes, lipids and surfactants to self-assemble on nanotubes, a promising step that may allow for solar cells that both harvest light and can repair themselves. Oxygen, unfortunately, is very damaging to solar cells. “Plants have been doing this for quite some time, splitting water’s hydrogen apart from its oxygen, but our efforts to turn water into a source of free hydrogen fuel by mimicking them have borne no fruit.” World's Top Chemists Can’t Match a Plant

  • White again calls on Geisler and Liberty to come clean about Caner and call him to repent. Norman Geisler Remains Silent- the Cover Up is Working

  • Some thoughts on the ‘L’ in TULIP. i) Limited Atonement is not about how valuable the blood of Jesus is. Rather, it is a statement about the Son's intent in coming and laying down his life "of my own accord." The death of Christ actually put away the sins of God’s elect. ii) Believing the Father only elects some and the Spirit only draws some, while holding that Jesus died with the intention of saving all, is to create an unpleasant Trinitarian dilemma. The Son removes the sin of the elect – thus there is unity in purpose in the Godhead. iii) If Jesus really did atone for the sins of those in Hell, not only are we to accuse God of double jeopardy (punishing the same sin twice), but we have a situation where someone's sin has been removed. What sin are they punished for? If unbelief, then has not unbelief been covered by the cross too? If not, then Jesus didn’t die for all sins iv) There are plenty of verses which teach that anyone who believes will be saved, but these do not contradict Limited Atonement. v) There are many verses which teach Christ's particular intention in laying down his life. This includes Christ talking about intending to save "His sheep": John 10:11, 15; "His Church," Acts 20:28; Eph. 5:25-27; "His people," Matt. 1:21, and "the elect," Rom. 8:32-35. Furthermore, The Bible does speak of Christ's only coming to save some: "John 6:37-40; Rom. 5:8-10; Gal. 2:20; Gal. 3:13-14; Gal. 4:4-5; 1 John 4:9-10; Rev. 1:4-6; Rev. 5:9-10.. The Last Letter of the TULIP

  • Haykin points out that when William Carey went to India, he began a lifelong program of learning about the culture and history of India. Some of those who had sent Carey out to be a witness to the Christ among the millions of the Indian subcontinent thought he was wasting time on literature. Haykin does not think that Carey was mistaken: “He realized that for the gospel to make any headway in his adopted Indian culture, there had to be some understanding of that culture, and the best way to do that was to systematically study the world of India.” Thinking about Carey’s love of Bengali literature 

  • Haykin notes a quote on the demise of the wise of the world without the Spirit, and comments, “I take it as a given that an acultural Christianity is a non-entity. To be involved in the work of saving sinners, Christians must impant themselves in a culture. But what is the value of that culture? Left to itself, I can readily affirm with Macarius-Symeon that any culture will perish. But if indwelt by the Spirit, ah, there is the question?” He says, “I look forward to that day when all that is best and good and true in the kingdoms of this world will be transformed into the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus and become the Empire of the Holy Spirit.” Human cultural artifacts and the Empire of the Holy Spirit

  • Hays begins, “Because Gen 1 has become a battlefield, we tend to interpret the text with an eye on modern science, one way or another. It takes a certain conscious effort to detach the text from modern controversies and listen to the text on its own terms.” i) A striking feature of Gen. 1 is the interplay between the divine senses of speech and sight – speech is creative, while sight is evaluative. He commands and commends. ii) Contrast this with Plato’s cave, which held the sensible world of time and space as echoes and shadows of a more ultimate and perfect reality. ii) There’s a perfect match between God’s creative command and the creative effect. iii) Scripture teaches of a New Eden, of cosmic renewal, a doctrine of the Palingenesis, where in some sense the future restores the past, the end renews the beginning (Isa 35:1-10; 65-66; Ezk 47:1-12; Mt 19:28-29; Acts 3:21; Rom 8:18-23; 2 Pet 3:10-13; Rev 20-22). This is the good made better, not a cyclical thing. Echoes of God

  • Hays posts a number of scholarly comments which contradict the claim that Daniel’s prophecies are inaccurate. Antiochus Epiphanes

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