Lessons from the Disciples

The Galatian Church

Introduction

Paul was a special case, as it were, among the disciples and apostles.

As he was a shooting star in Judaism Paul was even more of a stellar standout as a disciple of Christ. Formerly a staunch persecutor of those “belonging to the Way,”[1] his perspective, his dedication, and his devotion as a disciple was richer due to his formal training as a rabbi.

Nevertheless it was due to that training  that God had found the need to smack Paul upside the head with the proverbial two-by-four. Christ Himself proclaimed that Paul was “a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel (Acts 9: 15).”

With Paul’s rabbinical training and being a “Jew among Jews” it might seem logical that he should be the Apostle to the Jews. However that was not God’s plan. Whether from a point of retributive justice or a sense of divine humor, or both, God saw fit to send Paul to primarily make disciples of those dogs, the Gentiles.

The church at Galatia was besieged by legalism apparently brought in by “false brothers.”

When you flip a coin it comes up either heads or tails; the coin of legalism always comes up legalism, or its counterpoint traditionalism. The specific legalistic issue here was to make the Gentile Christians submit to circumcision.

This was the tradition from the Law—this was the Law . . . for Jews. Circumcision was only a sign, now that Messiah had fulfilled the law circumcision was not needed, necessary, or desired.

Tradition

Wrong-headed, non-biblical traditions instituted of men are always problematic. It is faith in God’s Word that justifies us and it is by faith we are to walk. We read that even Peter fell back into traditionalism and had cause to be reprimanded for it by Paul.

Actually in Peter’s case it was worse than mere traditionalism, it was returning to the old covenant under the law thereby negating the work of Christ and the New Covenant. Circumcision may not be the issue with us as disciples today, nevertheless there is empirical evidence that we still tend to embrace ill-gotten traditions better left alone.

In my book Before the Final Trump, I chronicle the tradition seemingly inherent in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from its inception of reinterpreted the Great Commission as meaning evangelism and missions—it is neither.

The SBC report entitled, “The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force Report and Recommendations to the Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando” posited:

“the Southern Baptist Convention came into being in 1845 in order to mobilize the energies of the Southern Baptist churches for missions and evangelism . . . . And yet there are signs that the Great Commission commitment is diminishing among us” (italics mine).^[2]

There is only one verb phrase in the Great Commission which is defined in Matthew 28:19 and that is make disciples. All other “action modifiers” are participles, i.e. go, teaching, observe, etcetera.

Christ became a curse for us to redeem us. As Christians we should know we are not justified (saved) by the law.

Paul explains it best, “‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ But the law is not of faith, rather ‘The one who does them shall live by them.’ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree . . . .’”[3]

Living by faith for many of us is not as easy as it sounds. In my own life I have trouble getting out of God’s way—heck I have trouble getting out of my way! As demonstrated above, traditions complicate the problem even farther.

Regardless whether we were raised in the church or never set foot in one until we put our trust in Jesus Christ, traditions play a part in the theology we embrace.

That is not to say, all tradition is bad. However good tradition is rooted solidly in Scripture. If it is not it should be jettisoned from the church and our theology.

Unfortunately tradition gets in the way of, or masks sound Bible interpretation. Sound Bible interpretation should always, always take precedent over tradition or even teaching.

We must know how to interpret the Bible as nearly as possible for ourselves and not rely solely on our pastors and teachers. Yet statistics show this is a huge problem in the Church today.

The Barna Group, a Christian-based research company that does extensive analysis on the trends within and without the Church. They primarily look at the cultures impact on the Christian faith.

They posted this year-end study in 2010, entitled “Six Megathemes Emerge from Barna Group Research in 2010.” The main points are instructive in themselves:

1. The Christian Church is becoming less theologically literate.
2. Christians are becoming more ingrown and less outreach-oriented.
3. Growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of learning pragmatic solutions for life.
4. Among Christians, interest in participating in community action is escalating.
5. The postmodern insistence on tolerance is winning over the Christian Church.
6. The influence of Christianity on culture and individual lives is largely invisible.[4]

Additionally it is the case that 91% of professing Christians do not even hold a Christian worldview—clearly something is very wrong.

Bible Interpretation

There are a few basics to understanding what the Bible is saying.

Firstly, recognize that when you read anything, anything at all, from your checkbook, to novel, a manual, or the Bible you are interpreting what it means, whether you are aware you are doing it or not. That might seem self-evident to most of us.

Nonetheless a man who has been pastoring for thirty years said this to me, “your problem is you interpret what the Bible says; I just read it.”[5]

Based on some of his theology he wrote about, he definitely needed to start interpreting, and correctly. So do all of us.

Secondly it is important to recognize that the meaning of a text is the meaning poured into it by the writer, not meaning the reader pulls out of it (or read into it).

To do that you must pay attention to the context. Not merely the literary context, but the historical and cultural context. In other words who was the author’s original audience?

For example in the old earth-young earth debate those on the old earth side will use the phrase pulled from scripture that “a thousand years are as a day.” The earliest rendition of this found in Psalms 90, about 1410 B.C. penned by Moses who also wrote all the Pentateuch.[6]

The creation account in Genesis predates Moses by over two thousand year. So the elements in the creation story and beyond had to be given to Moses by God. Genesis tells us the cosmos was created in six days and God rested on the seventh day.

So how would the people of that time period have conceived of a thousand years being equivalent to a day? Indeed the verse in Psalm 90:4[7] is making a comparison illustrating the eternality of God over man’s finiteness. Also it is talking about God’s perception of a thousand years, not man’s!

I close with this quote from Sir Robert Anderson :

The cross has shut up man to grace or judgment. . . . Every effort to recover themselves is but a denial of their doom, and a denial too of the grace of God, which stoops to bring them blessing where they are and as they are.

[1] Acts 9:2 ESV

[2] The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force Report and Recommendations to the Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando, Florida (2010), 4.

[3] Galatians 3: 11-13 ESV

[4] The Barna Group, December 13, 2010.

[5] D. D. Edwards, Before the Final Trump, (Nashville: Crossbooks Publishing, 2011), 137.

[6] The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

[7] For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it passes by, Or as a watch in the night.

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A Letter from Amazonia

When I was Director of Missions at Southern Evangelical Church we supported and became friends with the Dawson family. Joe and Millie Dawson went into the jungle over 50 years ago to bring Christ to the Yanomamö Indians.  Their sons carry on their work in Venezuela today.

This is a recent etter in a day in the life, living in the jungles of Venezuela.

September 12, 2015

Dear praying friends, It seems everywhere I go, people are always asking me what a typical day is like working with the Yanomamö. To be honest, I never quite know what to say. Our days are always so non typical and the Yanomamö can take the most mundane and turn it into the most complex crises.

A case in point:

I had made plans to make a quick trip up to the village of Arata to take some medicine up to a young man who has a really bad case of lesmeniusus (my computer just says, “no guesses” on the spelling so I have none either, but it is a terrible disease caused by a living microscopic bug that literally eats the person away. In Javier’s case, it is in his nasal cavity and has already almost eaten his entire nose away and has now started on his upper lip).

Anyway, Javier lives in the village of Arata, a village that is about 250 kilometers up the Ocamo river and depending on the boat used, it can take anywhere from 8 hours to 2 or three days to get up there. Well, the boat I wanted to go in would take me 8 hours. But the day before I was to take off, 4 guys came to our village asking if they could catch a ride with me. I frowned. With the fuel I had to take, plus the two guys going with me, I could not carry anymore weight in my small boat, and I really did not want to change my plans of a quick trip. 

 “Who are you all, and how did you get here?” I asked them.

“We are Shitali”(a different dialect of Yanomamö) they told me.

“Our village is about 3 days walk inland from Arata, and we heard you were going up there. We need a ride, so we can go home. About 3 moons ago a helicopter landed in our village and we took the opportunity to come out so we could find some much needed axes and machetes for our village. The helicopter people told us they would give us a ride back on the helicopter but we have been waiting in La Esmeralda for over two moons now, and they are telling us it will be the moon of October before the helicopter comes back and we are already really tired of waiting.”

They looked at me expectantly, waiting for my answer. I did not have the heart to tell them I was in a hurry and only wanted to do a quick trip, since they had already been waiting almost three months and had another two or more months to wait, if they were waiting for the helicopter to take them home.

So I nodded my assent. “OK, you can come with me, but we are leaving really early.” I told them. The expression on their faces was almost worth the fact that I would have to take a larger boat and had just added at least two days and another barrel of gas to my own trip. 

 I decided to give myself the flexibility of being able to visit in villages along the way without having to stop the large boat by taking my small aluminum speed boat and getting ahead of the other boat and visiting as I wanted to. We quickly outdistanced the larger boat and were a couple hours up the Ocamo river when we passed another large boat making it’s own slow way up river. Recognizing people in the boat, we slowed down and pulled alongside at their insistent hand motions. 

 “Do you have any extra gasoline?” They begged, “We are still a long way from home and are almost out.” No, you know, these days, no one has any extra gasoline. Why didn’t you get enough before starting your trip? I am really sorry, but I only have enough to get up to where we are going.” I told them. 

 “At least let me and my mother get in with you, she is not feeling well?” A man named Pelayu pleaded. “OK,” I said. But then, along with his mother were 4 kids, and there was just no way I could fit Pelayu, his mother and 4 kids, two of which were not small. So I told Pelayu, “I have a big boat coming behind me. You and your mother can get in that boat. I don’t have room or enough power to put everyone in this boat.” “OK!” he said quickly. And we took off back up the river. 

We arrived at the first village and visited for hours. Enough hours that our big boat should have caught up with us. Remembering the big boat we had passed and Pelau’s quick agreement to staying behind,  I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Looking at the time, I realized we were not going to get to the village of Yojobä where I had wanted to sleep. Not willing to continue on up river without knowing what had happened to our big boat, I turned back downriver to see what was taking them so long, already figuring I was not going to like what I would find. 

 Sure enough! just up river from where we had left the other large boat, here came our boat, PUSHING the other boat. Oh no! I thought, How could my guys have done this to me? I pulled alongside. 

 “What are you doing?” I asked Ramon, the driver of the big boat. 

 “Pelayu said that you told him to tell me to push them up to Arata since their motor was not working good.” I looked at Pelayu and he grinned weakly. “You did say I could catch a ride with him.” He defended himself. 

 “Yes, but not your boat and everyone else! We don’t have enough gas to push both boats up there!  Where is your motor anyway?”

 “I sent it home, it was only borrowed.” But I kept three tanks of gas! He stammered.  

Ramon quickly pointed out that the motor had already been sent back down river before he had even gotten there, so when he saw them with no motor, he really had thought we had told them to stop him. I bit my tongue on the harsh words that came to mind. What should I do? What could I do? What would you do?

Remember, my 8 hour trip has already become a 2 day trip, now, with this other boat tied on, it is going to take us at least another day! But I decided sitting there in the prow of my boat, with all the people in the other boat looking at me with worried looks,  the most important question was “How would Jesus respond to people in this kind of a need?”

Oh well, I thought, what did I expect anyway. Just another typical day with the Yanomamö!. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, it started to rain and Rain and RAIN!

 A MAF pilot and a great friend, used to respond to people with poor planning by quoting, “Your lack of planning, does not constitute an emergency on my part.” All fine and good, but even as well as I speak Yanomamö I have never even tried to translate that, as it would probably just give me worse heart burn, because I can just see them looking at me like, “What do you mean lack of planning? I am here, what are you going to do with me?” And you know what? It is in unplanned issues like this, that we have the opportunity to really show God’s love. Oh, but it is hard some days… 

 In the end, this trip turned out, I am sure, just how God wanted it to, because, over the next couple of days, we not only had opportunities to show the Jesus/Passion movie to different villages, but I was also able to spend time talking to the 4 Shitali guys.

These are guys whom have never had an opportunity to hear anything about the Lord and they listened very well. After having watched the movie a few times, they had a lot of questions and to make a long story short, they have invited us to come to their village to show the movie up there.

It is a long way, two days by boat, then a three day walk one way to their village, but Lord willing, we are going to try to make a trip in there in November or so. The 4 guys said they would walk out to get us and carry our stuff. Pray for these guys and their village. May the seed sown find good soil and give good and abundant fruit. 

 Thanks for your prayers and partnership with us.

Michael, Keila and Mia Dawson

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Is Planned Parenthood’s Abortion and Organ Harvesting Business Lying about Corporate Sponsors Too?

I’ll have a baby leg with my wine.

Planned Parenthood – the largest abortion provider in America – murders babies.  It takes half a billion of our tax dollars.  And it harvests and sells baby parts to pad its “bottom line.”  But it also may have just been caught lying about a number of corporate sponsors.

Until yesterday, Planned Parenthood listed 41 major (and highly regarded) U.S. companies as corporate sponsors of its death business.

The Daily Signal began contacting these companies asking whether they support Planned Parenthood’s newly revealed organ harvesting business that is abhorrent to a large majority of Americans.

At least three of the biggest and best-known brands in America responded with the same thing: we don’t send Planned Parenthood any money, and they need to take our names off that list.

Wait, is Planned Parenthood lying about support from companies like Coca-Cola, Ford Motors, and Xerox?

Life News has the details:

A representative from Coca-Cola confirmed for The Daily Signal the company does not contribute to Planned Parenthood, nor does it match employee contributions to the organization.

When told that its named appeared on Planned Parenthood’s website, the Coca-Cola representative said, “We’ll ask them to correct the information.”

Disturbingly, Ford and Xerox responded the same way:

“We are making sure that Ford Motor Company is not listed as a Planned Parenthood contributor on their website,” a representative from Ford told The Daily Signal.

“In addition, we do not offer an employee match for charitable contributions,” the Ford representative said. It has been at least 10 years since Ford stopped matching employee gift contributions, the representative added.

Similarly, Xerox was listed on the Planned Parenthood website and has said it also does not donate in any way.

“We checked our files for the last 20 years and have no record of Xerox Corp. contributing to Planned Parenthood,” a representative from Xerox told The Daily Signal.

Planned Parenthood has been publicly portraying that these highly respected organizations financially support its barbaric practices, when they haven’t for at least the last ten to twenty years and maybe never have.  Planned Parenthood’s only response has been to take the entire list down.  They’ve been caught once again.

If you can’t trust Planned Parenthood to tell the truth about its corporate sponsors, how can you trust them to tell the truth about their abortion and baby harvesting practices?

Planned Parenthood may not be funded by Coca-Cola, Ford, and Xerox, but it continues to be funded by you and me the taxpayers, to the tune of over $500,000,000 a year.  Sadly that’s no misrepresentation.  But it must end.

Sign ACLJ’s petition to defund, investigate, and ban Planned Parenthood from selling baby parts.  It’s time to take them off the American taxpayer’s sponsorship list.

This article is cross-posted at RedState.com and ACLJ.

Crush Depth

The following is excerpted from the book Before the Final Trump by D. D. Edwards.

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All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmond Burke

At 9:18 a.m. on April 10, 1963, sonar operators aboard the U.S. Navy submarine rescue ship Skylark, which was accompanying the nuclear attack submarine Thresher, heard a chilling sound “like air rushing into an air tank,”. . . a piping joint in a sea water system in the engine room gave way. The resulting spray shorted out electronics and forced an automatic shutdown of the nuclear reactor. . . .
. . . When the accident occurred, Thresher was near its maximum test depth . . . . Most submarines are built to survive down to a crush depth, which can be 20 to 35 percent greater than their maximum test depth. . . . Without the reactor, the sub did not have enough power to stop itself from sinking to the bottom.
Skylark received several fragmentary, garbled messages, followed by silence. . . . As they sank, the men aboard [Thresher] . . . heard piping and fittings giving way. They . . . listened as the ship’s hull creaked and groaned, until it finally, deafeningly gave way to massive water pressure.
Thresher was no more. . . [it] had come to a cataclysmic end and all 129 men aboard perished in 8,400 feet . . . of water. . . . All lives were likely extinguished within a matter of seconds.

The Church[1] and America as well, are being squeezed and in danger of being crushed. In our decadent, self-indulgence we have tested the depths. Ancient Israel too defied and rebelled against God and God judged them. The Old Testament text is replete with incident after incident of the nation of Israel rejection God.

America is more prosperous in material wealth than any nation in the history of the world. Like Old Testament Israel, who “did evil in the sight of the LORD,” we have defied God and have gone whoring after false gods. A false god is not just a golden idol. No, when we cease to worship God in the fullness of His Simplicity we are indeed worshiping a false God. Why is that true? It is true because “we tend by secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”[2] The evangelical church has been “shorted out” by our culture. We are sinking below our test depth and are rapidly nearing our crush depth.

I believe there are three constituent overlapping dynamics squeezing the bulkhead of American churches’.

Firstly, the church is being squeezed by naturalistic, secular humanistic atheism, which has flooded America; spewing its corrosive brine into the Church, shorting out belief in the inerrancy, infallibility, and authority of the Bible and thereby accurate interpretation, and sound doctrinal teaching.

Secondly, America is being squeezed by rise of Islamofascism. Islam with all of its attendant, barbarous, archaic imperialistic traditions has, like a giant squid, been stirred. This roused monster is fastening it tentacles upon the western nations and is beginning to squeeze.

Lastly, there are powerful and largely unrecognized geopolitical and geo-economic forces arrayed against us. None of these perils operates in a vacuum. Indeed, their force is exponentially cumulative.

Individually these forces are formidable. Collectively, they present a singular, threat to the world never before encountered. What makes the essence of this collective threat so historically terrifying is that the church is virtually unconscious it exists.

The balance of this chapter will be an overview of the three perils pressing in on America and on the contemporary church. Then in the chapters that follow I will illuminate some of the specific dangers of these threats. An entire book could be written about each, but it is my objective to illuminate the urgent peril we are in as a church. When I speak of the church I am speaking of those that have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and what is applicable to the church corporately is usually applicable to members in her body.

Like the Thresher, we are seemingly in a powerless, spiraling, free-dive toward the bottomless abyss of fallen and forgotten civilizations. Like the Thresher, we are ultimately crushed from forces without, enabled by chronic, systemic weakness within. Regrettably, neither this nation, or its leaders or the Church recognizes the exigency of the moment.

Who is to blame? Where does the fault lie? Can this impending disaster be averted? If so, what is the solution?

I will address these questions and hopefully develop the answers through the lens of a Biblical Worldview. Because the Bible is true, written about Christ who is Truth, that worldview will get us closer to the truth; closer to reality than any other.

If I have written aright hopefully I am transmitting a call-to-arms and a solution. Whether we have the moral tenacity or whether there is time enough, only God knows. Nonetheless, we may all take heart in the fact that whatever happens will be in the sovereign control of God’s will. Our Father’s will is that we be focused on, and working at His business until He takes us out of this world.

The Seeds of 21^st Century America

The atheist looks at evil and declares “there is no God; “a loving God would not permit ‘evil.’” To the atheist Christianity is internally incoherent. Of course, they never proclaim that because there is evil there must be a Satan or that because there is good in the world there must be a God. To be fair, many solid Christians ask the same question, “How can God allow evil?” That was Job’s conundrum in millennia past.

Obviously this is not the question simmering in today’s society. “How can Christians claim there is only one way to heaven?” “How can you believe the Bible when it’s riddled with error?”

Liberty or License

The secular humanists are all for “freedom” and “choice,” but it is really license they crave. License is an out-of-control freedom to break the established, time honored, societal rules, and mores. They employ license to justify a woman’s “right” to kill the unborn, extramarital sex with members of whatever sex charms them; man or woman. It never occurs to the “natural” man that God designed into us freewill because God loves us and wants us to love Him freely. That is why He honors our will to choose, even when the choice is wrong.

Forced love is no love at all. God “chose not annihilate sin, but rather to defeat it. . . . Defeating evil without destroying freedom, while at the same time perfecting free creatures . . . appears to be at the heart of God’s plan.”[1] When you really think about it, it must be allow that for a man who spends his whole life hating and fighting God it would be cruel indeed to make him spend eternity in God’s presence and ruled by the person he hates.

The Neo-Darwinists

The atheistic Darwinian instituted belief system does not allow for a hint of this God stuff. No, to macro-evolutionists (renamed natural selection) man is evolving to a “higher” state, he is improving; a better, smarter animal (but an animal nonetheless). But really, is that true? No it is not! The truth is poverty, disease, war, avarice, and cruelty are with us still and arguably in larger quantities than previously.

One has only to look at the headlines today. In one a man throws his four children off a bridge. Why?” In yet an even more ghoulish and macabre case, U.S. Marshalls served eviction papers on Banita Jacks at her house and found all four of her children inside—dead. “Authorities estimate the four girls — ages 5 to 17 — had been dead for at least two weeks. Jacks [the children’s mother, a drug addict] told police they [the children] were ‘possessed by demons’ and had died in their sleep, one by one, within a week of each other . . .”. All of this and Jacks was still living in the house with the decomposing bodies of her children she had murdered. In fact, so badly decomposed the coroner could not discover how they were murdered.[1] This is the species rising to the next level of higher development? I don’t think so Tim. This sounds hideously more like temporal and spiritual bondage than liberty or freedom.

False Freedom’s Fount

Charles Lyell,[2] Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Immanuel Kant are a few of the “pioneers” that planted the seeds we are reaping today. Darwin’s “theory of Evolution,” so-called, blossomed from the seeds sown by Lyell enabling Darwin to create a construct providing society with an alternative “creator” to God; Chance was his name.

Nietzsche is credited with “killing” God, declaring “God is dead,” but the bullet must have ricocheted. In the end, it was Nietzsche that died—God still lives. Kant, on the other hand, declared “reality was unknowable” and also decided God’s doorbell was broken, therefore man could not know God. These are, however, but a small part of the roster of historical farmers that sowed crops of deconstructionism and postmodernism we harvest today

The Islamic Connection

Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and now ISIS and  all other Islamofascists’ groups have taken advantage of America’s and the world’s politically correct thrashing about.  It has unarguably played nicely into their latest campaign for world domination.

For the most part, everyone’s attention, for or against, is on the war in Iraq or to some extent Afghanistan. The Bush Administration, the press, and the liberals did not and have not taken the time really, to understand the truth about Islam. Neither has anyone understood that or at least verbalized the fact Obama’s foreign machinations are because Obama is Muslim. He has facilitated Islams vicious acts which is why the Muslims terror threat is not just going away.

While all eyes are on the battles being fought in the middle-east; while the media and the “libs” are bemoaning the death toll on one hand and blaming America for 9/11 as well as Iraq, Muslims Brotherhood operatives are going daily to their high placed government jobs, including the Homeland Security Department. Islamic organizations are allowed to set the curriculum in the FBI, CIA, and even our schools from the lower grades through colleges. They are even mandating politically-correct, Islam supportive training regimens in our intelligence agencies. This is the second counter-force trying to crush America and the Christian church. Don’t discount these assertions out of hand.

Does the U.S. have the strength of character, morally, spiritually, or even metaphysically to stand against the hoards of Allah? That is the prime question. That is the challenge facing our country, the United States of America. I believe in the end we stand alone. Canada, the other Americas, and Western Europe cannot or will not stand with us. But these are not the only threats arrayed against us.

We are caught on the horns of a dilemma. One horn is our battle combating the secular, postmodern cancer. Another horn is a really, I believe, a largely unrecognized struggle against the resumption of Islam’s imperialistic march for global domination. There is a third horn emerging.

What in the World is Going On?

Islam is systemic today. Even those that do not perceive Islam to be a threat or pay much attention to world events and politics are aware of its existence. It is easy to detect because it is thrust upon us daily in the news.

Postmodernism is also systemic, but is more monolithic than Islam. Therefore, it is invisible to most of our culture. It influences all strata of society, yet society, for the most part, is not cognizant of its existence. It is like water running through a hose laid out to water a shrub—you can’t see it, so you are not aware of it until you get to the end of the hose and see the water spilling out and saturating the roots.

There is yet an additional force, the third horn that is emerging is in fact a group of forces and is not as easily perceived, though it is there to see for the perspicacious. But to detect it is one thing; to comprehend it on a cognitive level is more difficult. Most of us do not see it, because most of us are too busy “living” our lives. We have a million things to do and just do not take the time.

This is unfortunate, without an understanding of the realities of our world around us we cannot make solid, informed decisions that affect our core beliefs and our family’s welfare. In America, we are more worried about our next vacation, or what “toy” should we buy.

What is this third crushing force? We will delve into that next time.

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[1] FoxNews.com, Thursday, February 28, 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,333539,00.html., accessed on 4/1/2008.

[2] Charles Lyell posited the theory of uniformitarianism, and devised the Geological Column. “In addition to uniformitarianism, Lyell’s Principles of Geology contained some ideas that seem absurd today, though they struck him as quite reasonable at the time. Lyell concluded that, because the earth undergoes periodic changes in climate and because animals are adapted to certain climates, “huge Iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaurs in the sea, while pterodactyl [sic] might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree ferns.” From Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick. ( http://www.strangescience.net/lyell.htm).

[1] Geisler, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2004), 152.

[1] When I speak of “the Church,” I mean both corporately as the Body of Christ and individually as members of the Body of Christ that make up primarily the Church in America.

[2] A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1961), 2.