Great gift for the new year!

Click here to get J.I. Packer’s, Knowing God.  A free audio book from Christian Audio for this month.  An excellent book!

New Year’s Love

The phrase “in the beginning” comes up three times in the Bible.  Once at the start of Genesis and then twice at the start of John’s Gospel.

In Genesis it says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  And it goes on to describe God’s creation in plural terms.  The Spirit of God moves upon the waters (Genesis 1:2).  The Word of God brings everything into being.  And when this God decides to make humanity, it’s a committee decision: “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26).

In John it says: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  The same was with God in the beginning.” (John 1:1-2).

John is just refreshing our memory of Genesis.  (Something we would all do well to regularly do)  In the beginning there was one Person called “God”, who John later calls “the Father” (v14).  But there was another Person called “the Word”.  He also has the right to the title “God”.  Yet perhaps we know Him by some more familiar names: “The Son of God” (v14) and “Jesus Christ” (v17).  Later on John will also tell us about the Holy Spirit – He too was in the beginning.

So this is ultimate reality according to the Bible.  Before anything else, there was a Father loving His Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit.  We call this Trinitarian Unity.  And it means that for all eternity there was give-and-take, back-and-forth.  There was closeness, friendliness, companionship, sharing, interaction, intimacy.  In short, in the beginning there was love.

What’s the meaning of life when we understand this beginning?

Well we’re saved from nothingness and we’re saved from chaos.  But wonderfully we are not delivered into the hands of a lonely god, to be mere slaves.  God does not just create to display His power but to spread His love.  The meaning of our lives is not to cower before our creator but to be wooed by our Heavenly Loving Father.  We relate to God not, basically, by submitting to His unquestioned will but by receiving His unconditional love.

New Years’ Day is a time to think of beginnings.  Yet, before we go jumping into new resolutions to make our own beginnings, let’s remember the good news.  An ultimate beginning has been made – one that shapes everything.  The controlling reality of our lives is not fate or a force but a Fellowship.  And His unshakeable resolution is to draw us in.

Be drawn this year.

Bible Reading Plans for 2012

Here is a great article with lots of links for some very helpful Bible Reading plans for 2012

Article

This Christmas…

Thought provoking and terribly true.

To laugh and then cringe…

Sometimes you watch something that makes you laugh and then you begin to cringe… this is one of those.

Were you aware of this?

Fun little graphic on coffee.  Perhaps read with your morning or late morning, or lunch or mid-afternoon, or late afternoon cup!

Is that too much coffee?

A Father’s Pledge

No matter your take on politics… this is powerful and speaks loudly.

Bibliolatry?

The other day I was “challenged” by someone telling me that I was in danger of “bibliolatry,” with the worshiping of the bible. That I haven’t left room for the Holy Spirit to speak personally to the individual by my statements and teachings that God speaks to us through His Word, and not randomly or subjectively to us personally.  I have pondered this “charge” and believe wholeheartedly, that I am not worshiping a book, but the One who wrote it. Nevertheless, I think I am willing to come close to the charge, for such is the access to God that He gives us in the Bible, so real and intimate is His connection to His Word. Many people assume the Word is small and insignificant, of little account compared to some spectacular religious experience or display of earthly power. But we must remember that Jesus came not in glory but as a poor baby cradled in a manger, one who would grow up to die on a cross, and thus remember too that God’s ways are not our ways.  He gave us a book and it is far more intimate than some mystical feeling of esp.  Nothing is more intimate in relationship than language, and to have language you need words.

The fact that God reveals Himself in a book may seem too simple, too unspiritual, not mystical enough. One might excuse someone for thinking it too good to be true. But it is true. The God who became man has revealed Himself in human language. And His Word, recorded in a book, is the power of salvation.

Gut check

God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. He more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is far more committed to building a corporate “temple’ in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations. He is more vitally disposed to display his grace than to flatter our intelligence. He is more concerned for justice than for our ease. He is more deeply committed to stretching our faith than our popularity. He prefers that his people live in disciplined gratitude and holy joy rather than in pushy self-reliance and glitzy happiness. He wants us to pursue daily death, not self-fulfillment, for the latter leads to death, while the former leads to life. —D.A. Carson

Let your speech…

In your speech about your neighbor, with your neighbor, do you always have in mind that what you say is either a witness to the work of God in your heart and your submission to His Lordship, or it’s a witness of the work of Satan in your life?   The Old Testament says, “Remember your speech always has an impact on the community.” And on the other hand the New Testament says, “Your speech always either witnesses to the divine regeneration of your soul by the loving and gracious Heavenly Father or it witnesses to the fact that Satan is having influence on you.” Jesus makes it clear that all of our speech is said in the sight of God, and therefore all of that speech – especially speech about our neighbor – must be truthful and designed to build up our neighbor.

And just remember Jesus’ definition of “neighbor.” Luke 10:30-37

Guarding against a modern day wolf

John MacArthur has started a series of posts that expose the harmful teaching of Rob Bell.  It is never fun to have to speak out against a person who claims to be a Christian.  However, I side with MacArthur on this one and think this man should be exposed to the very core.  It is my fear that he is the most seductive of sorts and exactly the kind of teacher Paul warns Titus to silence.

“Wow, I didn’t know I needed that!”

Of all the ten commandments, perhaps none are as easily broken as the 10th. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” (Exodus 20:17, ESV)

This is one we all can decry, “This is my sin.” “I am struggling with this.”

Well, how can we practically deal with it? Of course, the first step is to cry out to the Lord for grace, then respond to that grace by faith, and by prayer, and by self-examination, and by studying contentment. But may I share ten things that I have been exposed to that will help us properly respond to this sin in our lives.

1. We need self-awareness, and self-examination. We need to be asking ourselves, every once in a while, “Am I coveting?” “What am I coveting?” and, “Why am I coveting this?” If we are not asking ourselves that, every once in a while, we will grow blind to this blind sin!

2. We need to remember that we live in a society that wants us to be covetous. We live in a society, a consumer, materialist culture that says greed is good. Covetousness is normal. More is so much better! You don’t have to have your tv on for more than 5 minutes to realize that our society wants us to covet. It wants us to have things that we don’t have now. Our society is not a friend to contentment, and we need to stop and remember that. We literally are bombarded with this from every side… every day.

3. We need to pause and have some Godly reflection. We need to think about the relative poverty of earthly blessings. We need to think about the fact that God often heaps His greatest blessings upon those who have the least in terms of earthly blessings.

4. We need to make a conscious effort to limit occasions for coveting, and come up with strategies for checking evil desires. If there is a situation in which you find yourself, over and over, struggling with coveting, don’t go there.

5. We need to cultivate contentment. We need to determine to be happy in every circumstance, to be content with what we have. Do you believe, that the circumstance that you are in now, is the best possible circumstance under God’s providence for you? There are plenty of circumstances that people are in, where it is a challenge to believe that this situation, this circumstance is the best one for me to be in. Your Heavenly Father has ordered this. Do you really believe that this is the best circumstance for you? If you don’t, you are vulnerable to covetousness. Have you paused to think that the more you have, the more you will give account for?

6. We need to fix our desires on wholesome and lawful objects. We ought to be longing to see the spirit working in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. The Bible says that why we don’t is that we haven’t asked, because the Heavenly Father will give us these things. And so, it’s not enough to not covet the world. You have to desire that which is right.

7. We have to trust God’s providence. The root cause of covetousness is either a dissatisfaction with God’s providence, or a distrust in it, or both; not being satisfied with what God has given you, or not trusting that God really is seeking your best interest. Faith in God, trust in His providence, is a great weapon against covetousness.

8. We need to pray for God’s grace. We say that we believe that prayer is a means of grace. We need to pray for a heavenly mind. We need to ask that the Lord would give us grace to want the first things, the best things.

9. We need to cultivate our desire of God. In Psalm 63, David is in the wilderness. He has lost everything from an earthly perspective. He’s been run out from his city. He’s been run out from the capitol. He’s been “dethroned.” There is civil war on. And in the midst of that Psalm he says, Lord, Your loving kindness is better than life. I want you like a thirsty man, a man who is about to die of thirst, needs water. That is how I want You. You can take everything else from me. I want You. Do we cultivate that kind of a love for God, in our own lives?

10. We have to cultivate love.  Love, in many ways, is the opposite of covetousness. Think about it. Love seeks the best interest of another even at our own expense. Covetousness, on the other hand, desires to take from another in order to serve our own interest. So the cultivation of love, in our lives, is a weapon against covetousness. This is why we will be known by our love!

Sunday Came!

Hallelujah for the Lord our God the Omnipotent Reigns!  Christ is Alive and we worship our resurrected Lord! Let these songs lead you in exaltation of the Risen Christ!

Sunday came and THE King Arose…

When we see Jesus, indeed nothing will ever be the same again…

And indeed it is and will be a very Happy Day!

My Coward Heart

Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys.  I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

A Prayer by A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

What Really Happens When We Meet God

The presence of the Lord is perhaps the most used phrase in the Christian’s vocabulary.  We are always talking about being in the “presence.”  This Sunday I wrap up a 14 week study on the Ten Commandments and I have been struck with the response of God’s people once they were “in” the presence of the Lord.  Exodus 21:18 evokes a surprising and fascinating response.

The presence of the Lord provoked total fear and trembling in Israel. Israel was scared to death when God came to meet with her. God’s nearness can be a terrifying thing for sinners. Moses emphasizes this at the beginning of the encounter with the people in Ex 19:16-25. He tells about all the displays, the lightening, the thunder, the various pyrotechnics that God put on display to emphasize His majesty, and Moses tells us that the conclusion of God’s word was also characterized by these thunderous rolls, and shaking, and lightening strikes.

Now what’s significant about this?

They’re in the presence of God and yet their reaction is fear and trembling, and furthermore they stampede!  This is amazing because in just the previous chapter, the story starts with the children of Israel crowding in around Mount Sinai. They wanted to gaze… they wanted to get so close to the action. They wanted to look. So much so, that God said to Moses, “Don’t let them step on the mountain because I will bring immediate judgment and destruction on anyone who sets foot on My mountain. Don’t let them crowd in. Tell them don’t touch!” Now at the end of the Ten Commands, we find out they are at a distance. They had been met with the true presence of God and had gone from next to the mountain to as far away as they could get from the mountain. God came and met with them and they ran.

Intimacy with God can be a frightening thing for a sinner. Today we often long for intimacy with God, but we miss out on the reverence and awe of God in that intimacy.  I periodically check in with iTunes to see the status of current Christian music.  After fifteen or so minutes I am usually struck with the apparent desperation so many worship bands are trying to evoke.  Desperate attempts to draw near to the Almighty.  When I see some of the music offerings called worship, I cannot help but be drawn back to this passage.  Sometimes I wonder, I really do wonder, if they have ever entered into the awe inspiring and complete dread of the Almighty.  The children of Israel got the message of God’s holiness and glory and might and power and sovereignty and transcendence loud and clear when He came and spoke to them Himself. God’s nearness can be terrifying for sinners.

And yet, though we are sinners, we have also had the immeasurable and unbelievable favor of this Almighty God’s grace through Jesus Christ.  Oh to think that we don’t have to fear God in a scary way if we are believers, but we never stop truly fearing God in the terrifying way as his children.  We had better remember that to draw near to God is a truly fearful experience.  There is therefore now no condemnation to be sure, but don’t ever stop remembering Who God is and the sheer thought of that drives us to holy and humble meditative praise.

If you’re in the presence of God, and you think that you are just fine in and of yourself, then you haven’t seen God, or you haven’t seen yourself, or both. The children of Israel see God’s holiness, they see their sin, and they know they need a mediator. We have much to learn from them.

G.O.S.P.E.L.

I don’t know if I’m suppose to do this in the “blogosphere” but I just watched this again this morning and thought it was worthy of a second posting.  I posted back in April but sufficiently moved to post again!

Excellent!

The Mercy of God in the Psalms

Logos Bible study software is a wonderful thing. Here is a feature that allows you to see more visually how certain words are used in Scripture. Thought this was worth posting as I was looking up mercy this morning.

The Veil of Self

A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God is a strong antidote for lethargy. Here are a few thoughts that struck me as I read chapter three.

Self can live unrebuked at the very altar. It can watch the bleeding Victim die and not be in the least affected by what it sees. It can fight for the faith of the Reformers and preach eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain strength by its efforts.
To tell all the truth, it seems actually to feed upon orthodoxy and is more at home in a Bible Conference than in a tavern. Our very state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under which to thrive and grow.

Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful.

The cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective.

Do you know “about” God or “of” Him?

“Knowing God is more than knowing about Him; it is a matter of dealing with Him as He opens up to you, and being dealt with by Him as He takes knowledge of you. Knowing about Him is a necessary precondition of trusting in Him, but the width of our knowledge about Him is no gauge of our knowledge of Him.” J.I. Packer, Knowing God

How easy it is for us to make this mistake.  We continue to fill our minds with knowledge about God and yet so few of us really stop long enough to let the knowledge about God become knowledge of God.  This may be the very thing that made David so close to God.  When you look at the big picture of his life you are left saying, sure he was a great warrior and he must have been a tremendously winsome personality to keep all those worthless mighty men following him, but what a failure in so many other ways.  Bad husband (name any one of his wives), bad father (just ask Amnon, Absalom, or Adonijah), bad friend (to Uriah), bad leader (census).  I don’t want to pick on David, he arguably is one of the greatest characters in the Bible.  However, what made David so precious in God’s sight?  Well number one, Grace.  Number two has to be along the lines of David loved, and I mean loved, God’s Word.  He grew in his knowledge of His Rock and Redeemer through God’s Word which left David filled enough by the Holy Spirit to write inspired psalms of praise.  These psalms still benefit us today like none other and are perhaps the greatest, and most direct, line for knowledge about God that leads us to true knowledge of God.

Feed on the Psalms regularly and your knowledge about God will be more likely transformed into a knowledge of God as He keeps His precious Words to us.

“Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! ” (Psalm 34:3, ESV)

The Path of Christ

Someone near you right now has lost his way.

Someone near you is feeling lonely.  Someone near you is feeling overwhelmed.  Someone right next to you is being tempted to abandon God’s way.  Someone near you is struggling with serious doubts about Christianity.  Someone near you is struggling with the truth that God is love.

If you have embraced the Gospel and called upon Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, then the God who is love is currently residing within you.  He is enabling you to love even as you have been loved.  He specifically chose you and graced you with eyes to behold and ears to hear.  He has marked and selected you to be His ambassador or messenger, literally being the incarnation of Himself today.  Open up your eyes and open up your ears, open up your heart and open up your mind to those who are near you, those whom God has purposely placed you near.

This is what it means to love one another.  Many have lost their way and need to be shown the love of Christ.  Help point them back to the path of Christ.

“Dazzling to the Mind”

J.I. Packer characterized evangelicalism several decades ago in a way I thought was extremely profound.  He never has claimed to be a “prophet” but much of what he has written could be defined as “prophetic.”  When he wrote the preface to a reprint of Richard Baxter’s Christian directory, this is what Packer said in characterizing evangelicalism.

“It is ego-centric, zany, simplistic, degenerate, half-magic spell casting which is all the world sees when it watches religious television or looks directly at the professed evangelical community… Our how-tos, how to have a wonderful family, great sex, financial success in a Christian way, how to cope with grief, life passages, crises, fears, frustrating relationships and what not else give us formula to be followed by a series of supposedly simple actions on our part in the manner of painting by numbers. Baxter’s work is a high-level of intelligent Bible-based theologically integrated wisdom with unfailing, unimpaired clarity that is dazzling to the mind.”

What have you read lately that has dazzled your mind regarding the glories of God?  Are you exposing yourself to that which exposes God for who He is or that which you want Him to be?

Necessary questions…

Mike McKinley has posted some very helpful videos on some very important questions.  See them all here.

A True Independence Day Message

I was reminded of this message that never grows old or tired.  I remember the very first time I heard this sermon.  I was driving along route 101 somewhere out of Raymond, NH.  Hearing this brief but critical message nearly (literally) stopped me in my tracks.  After several angry cars passed me, I hit the rewind button again and listened all over again.  Here is that same message repeated yet again for another conference.  How timely for what we will be celebrating here in the States this weekend.  Independence Day and with it the birth of the American Dream.  I thank God for living in a free country and I thank God for the blessings we have here in America.  I am not thankful however, for how the American Dream has destroyed so many people’s zeal for Christ and His Bride.  How it has become a very cruel master to most Christians here in the States.  May God fill these words yet again with His Spirit and may we heed the true message of Christ so that we are not, in the end, a tragedy.

A Helpful Distinction

I just started reading Sam Crabtree’s, Practicing Affirmation. I thought a very helpful distinction that he made in chapter one was the following:

The apostle Paul was always thanking people.  Well, no, the apostle Paul wasn’t.  You will not find the apostle Paul doing such a thing in the Scriptures.  He didn’t thank people for things;  he thanked God for people.  Paul’s practice is, “I thank God for you.”  Yes, the person is refreshed by the expression of gratitude, but God gets the glory.  We are wise to give God-centered thank-yous and God-centered affirmations.

I thought worthy to meditate on!  Who are you glorifying when you speak about people and to people?  Why do you compliment and affirm?

“so whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Cor 10:31

Parent Traps

I just read this article over at Counseling Solutions.  I don’t know the site well enough to recommend it yet, however, this was a very helpful article.  Allow me to share just a tid bit with you…

Your parenting will be affected and to some degree determined by your focus. If you are trusting God primarily then you can parent with faith, grace, courage, and joy.  If you are more focused on what they are doing or not doing, then you will be tempted to fall into all kinds of parenting traps. Here are a few of the more common ones:

• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will be tempted to control their children.
• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will be more authoritarian in their parenting approach.
• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will be self-sufficient rather than God-dependent.
• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will be more fearful.
• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will overreact when their kids misbehave.
• The parent who is not humbly trusting God will over-shelter their children.

A key to remember is that you are not trying to rear the perfect 6-year old or 10-year old or even a 15-year old. You must keep the end in mind. If you don’t, you’ll become a worrying and possibly angry micro-manager.

God Is worshipped!

I highly recommend viewing this message.  It is so Christ exalting you will be moved and blessed.

tohu wa bohu

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” (Genesis 1:2–3, ESV)

I have been reading Genesis one and thought I would simply post some of my thoughts as I work through this passage again.  I confess right up front that I hold to a six day creation, and that evolution on any macro level is an absolute impossibility, and far worse, robs God of glory He specially attributes to Himself.  Having said that, I realize my bias and in a spirit of trying to understand why Genesis is so controversial today (and why I personally get so emotionally charged with the subject), I simply wanted to go back and restudy these critical chapters.  Are they really that unclear?  Have I missed something that so many have “seen” and I just haven’t?  Is there really allowance for billions of years between verse one and two?  Does morning and evening, the ___ day mean what is says or does it mean something it doesn’t say?  I don’t know how many posts I will give or how often, but I do hope to add my findings to this blog, for better or worse!

I find it important to mention immediately that there are three phrases that are used to describe day one creation.
1. Earth was without form and void,
2. Darkness was over the face of the deep,
3. The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Those three give us the condition of creation on day one.

Let’s just look at the first one today, “The earth was without form and void,”:

In the Hebrew language, it is important to know, that whenever the subject comes before the verb, its purpose is to emphasize something new about it. It is right to think of it this way, “As to the earth, it was formless and void.” God centers His attention first and foremost to this new planet He spoke into existence and thus the whole geocentric saga of redemption begins.  It was new thing, it was tohu wa bohu (in Hebrew).

Without form and void. Jewish commentator, Umberto Cassuto writes these thoughts, tohu means wilderness, a devastated place or waste place. Bohu means empty. It was an empty waste place. Where else, if any is this phrase used in Scripture?  A major way we can properly interpret Scripture is when we take the time to determine context and where else the word or phrase is used in Scripture. Tohu and bohu are indeed used together in other passages of Scripture.

Jeremiah 4:23, “I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.”  Here is Jeremiah and he is going through a period of devastation that the Lord is having him witness and prophesy about.  He says in verses 19-21, “My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent, for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Crash follows hard on crash; the whole land is laid waste. Suddenly my tents are laid waste, my curtains in a moment. How long must I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?” (Jeremiah 4:19–21)

What’s happening here is the destruction of Judah. Jeremiah in his misery, can’t think of any other terms of emptiness than what he knows of creation and borrows from Genesis 1:2.  He gets to verse 23 and it was tohu wa bohu. I looked to the heavens and they had no light.

Jeremiah is seeing a land devastated by a foreign army, a land smoldering, burning, a land where the birds have fled away from the smoke and the devastation, a land where there’s nobody left, they’ve been slaughtered or they’ve been taken into captivity. Jeremiah helps us understand that, tohu wa bohu describe a wasted, devastated place without any inhabitants. It doesn’t have any form or beauty.

Isaiah helps us as well, “But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it, the owl and the raven shall dwell in it. He shall stretch the line of confusion over it, and the plumb line of emptiness.” (Isaiah 34:11) Isaiah prophesies about some things that are going to happen to the animals, and then in verse 11, the middle of the verse, “He shall stretch the line of confusion,” the line of tohu, “and the plumb line of emptiness” of bohu. We get the picture!

These are the only times in the Old Testament that these two words are used together.  When we see the words tohu wa bohu in Genesis, it’s not some tricky technicality that we are seeing, it’s just the word for confusion/devastation and emptiness. It was a waste place and there was no life there. That’s exactly and all that it means.

Perhaps it’s best to understand it as the earth was unfinished as to its shape and unpopulated. The material was there. There was time and there was space and there was matter (all verse one which is taking place on day one), but it was unformed and unpopulated. The created elements mentioned in verse 1, time, the beginning; space, the heavens; and matter, the earth. God created them, God spoke them into existence but they were unseparated, unorganized and uninhabited. God had not yet shaped them and God had not populated the cosmos.

So we begin, day one of the earth’s creation, as unfinished as to shape and unpopulated as to inhabitant.

We will look next time at the second phrase of verse two.

“Darkness over face of the deep”

Continuing from yesterday,

The second phrase God uses to describe day one creation is, “Darkness was over the surface of the deep.” The reason why darkness was over the face of the deep was that God hadn’t created light.
Up to this point throughout all of eternity there had been no created light. We know God is light, (“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” 1 John 1:5) So God is referring to created light, obviously not His light as we will have in the New Heavens and New Earth (“And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” Revelation 22:5)

The earth then in this shapeless and in uninhabited form, was engulfed in total, absolute darkness. There was no created light at all, darkness was spread over everything. That’s what it says, over the surface of…and it doesn’t say the earth…but of the deep (tehom).

What is this “deep”? Deep is a synonym used in Scripture for the sea. In fact, look later in verse 2, darkness is over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was also moving over the surface of the waters. And here God through the Holy Spirit defines the deep as water. You can see that, for example, in Job 28:13; Psalm 106:9; Isaiah 51:9-10.

We have the “earth” engulfed in darkness which in touching the surface of the earth touches the surface of water. The entire surface of the earth is water, a deep sea, it’s a global, primordial ocean surrounded by universal darkness. That is referred to also in Psalm 104:5-6, “He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved. You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.” (Psalm 104:5–6) The unformed earth was literally covered with water.

So we see creator God taking His creation from darkness to light and begins to shape it.  And this, by the way, is what Peter is referring to in 2 Peter 3:5, “For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God,”.

The earth was formed out of water and may I say by water, referring to the Flood. Proverbs 8:27 says, “He drew a circle over the face of the deep.”  God’s created matter became spherical as He began to fashion it. This leads us up to the third phrase, “The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” But that’s for tomorrow…

Woman at the well

I love typography… especially typography with a worthy message.

This is one..

The Gospel and Evolution

As I drag my thoughts along regarding evolution verses day one creation, another thought comes to bear.  The Church has always sought not only to declare the gospel to a lost world but also to offer support, comfort and insight to people dealing with the problems of life.  Pastors typically spend a good amount of their time in hospitals, homes of bereaved, people in crisis, all seeking desperately to apply God’s loving care in difficult times.  However, if Christianity is to embrace evolution (and I fully realize it already has in mass) we must consider what the most appropriate way we should be offering help and counsel to the hurting.

Of course, historically, counsel and comfort have been expressed in the context of a fallen world that currently was not God’s design and where death, our Lord’s enemy, has been allowed to rule.  Jesus Christ came into the world to confront and overcome death in order that it might ultimately be destroyed.  Now think with me, if, however, the fall had no impact on the natural order, and sickness (a principle evolutionist must embrace, and of course do) suffering and death are the chosen order of God to develop life, then our pastoral message needs to change drastically.

Furthermore, it is fair to ask if it is even the pastor who is best equipped to help grieving and suffering people.  Certainly, scientists at this point would be far more effective and best placed to give support, those who understand properly the evolutionary theory.  Surely those who know how the death and decay of millions of years have brought about the wellness of the human race today are better then equipped to help the parents of a dying six year old.  As elderly parents lie dying in agony from body-destroying diseases, shouldn’t we be explaining the evolutionary advance that may one day come from the mutations destroying their very bodies.  This certainly would be legitimate would it not if indeed evolution is true?

You see, evil must be and is, understood very very differently by evolutionists than it is by those committed to the supremacy of Scripture.  The Bible is teaching very clearly that Christ came into the world to destroy the works of the evil one and his greatest weapon, death.  Jesus demonstrated this habitually as He healed those who were afflicted by disease and sickness, showing His creation power and the nature of a kingdom yet to come.

Jesus also said, “the thief comes to kill and destroy” (John 10:10), but not according to Darwin!  Darwinian evolution says it is evolution that kills and destroys.  According to those urging Christians to embrace evolution this killing and destruction is the design of God for the development of life.  A complete and utter contradiction to the theme of Scripture.

When one wants, or shall I say insists upon, embracing evolution, there is far more at stake than simply suggesting an alternative view of interpreting the creation passage in Genesis one.  A clear understanding of the theory is typically missing from those in a hurry to try to embrace both modern science and Scripture.  To embrace evolution is to let go the Word of God.  You cannot hold them both equally… and be honest.  The supremacy of Scripture will not allow the embracing of any aspect of evolution that compromises the key themes of the biblical text, any more than any other false religion.