Growing In Grace

How Does God Know All Things?  All orthodox Christians affirm the omniscience of God - his exhaustive knowledge of all things past, present and future. We could say that God is the All-knowing Knower Who Knowingly Knows.  But in order to avoid the mistakes of fortune cookie theology we need to think a bit more about what it means for God to be omniscient or all-knowing. For example, how does God know all things? One way to answer that question is to say that God knows all things because he learned them - he has been around for so long that he just knows everything. Bill Murray pondered this picture of God in his movie "Groundhog Day" where his character Phil Connors repeated the day so many times that he came to know everything about that day and how it would unfold. He says that maybe God knows everything because he has just been around long enough to have learned everything. Historical Christianity will rightly deny this as a possibility. However, there is an import

We've all heard of cases where a thief is injured in the process of their thieving and then they turn around and sue the person they are stealing from. One of many examples can be found here . While we are familiar with the ridiculous idea that thieves would sue their victims, I have not yet found an example of a thief winning their lawsuit. Perhaps some have, but it seems that would be the rare exception. This idea of stealing from someone and then turning on them however is far more common in the world of ideas. In particular people endlessly purloin their favorite bits of the Christian worldview only to turn and pounce on the person they just plundered. A recent example can be seen in Anne Hathaway's speech when receiving the Equity Award from the Human Rights Campaign. The especially important part of the video is between 2:59-5:15 which has been edited down and is floating through the Twitterverse. A whole series of posts could be written to interact with the ideas An

In the last post on Genesis 20 I made a passing comment regarding the horrible sins of Lot's daughters. After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah Lot was afraid to live in Zoar and so he took his daughters up to live in a cave. Doubtless he was mourning the death of his wife and the loss of his home and in so doing he completely failed to consider his daughters and their future. The end of Genesis 19 details how Lot's daughters respond to Lot's selfishness with a selfishness of their own. Just as Lot only thought of himself in hiding in the cave, his daughters think only of their future and so they get their father drunk in order to become impregnated by him. They did their job well because it says Lot was so drunk that "He did not know when she lay down or when she arose" (Gen. 19:33, 35). In the last post I labeled this the "unspeakable foolishness" of Lot's daughters, but it is also rightly described as a ruthless selfishness. Thinking only

In preparation for preaching through the Torah, I am reading through Genesis and also using this as an opportunity to practice my Hebrew reading skills. I begin by maladroitly working my way through part of a chapter in Hebrew and then I switch over to English when I see that I am running out of time. The reason I mention this reading routine is that some of the most fascinating things I find in the text come from being so poor at reading the original languages. When you are forced to read a text at the same pace a drunken sloth climbs up to bed you tend to see knots on the tree you had previously passed by with little or no interest. The passage for this morning was Genesis 20. This story comes after the debacle with Lot leaving Sodom and Gomorrah and the unspeakable foolishness of Lot's daughters in Genesis 19 (no doubt that horrific tale holds numerous applications for the necessity of catechizing our children in hopes that they will trust the Lord rather than their own str

I recently finished reading Dr. Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos . Peterson is an incredibly brilliant man, I learned a great deal and I highly recommend the book for a discerning reader. However, I specify a discerning reader because Peterson has so carefully crafted his ideas that he will be quite convincing to many who have not been trained to think through these sorts of issues. Sadly, those who choose to follow his prescribed antidote for chaos will be set off on a road paved with good intentions, but one which is certainly bound for Hell. While I much prefer reading books my current schedule would not have allowed me to work this book in for a while so I opted for the audio book. Thankfully, Peterson was the reader because there were a number of points in the book where he became audibly emotional even to the point of swallowing tears. Hearing such a strong response regarding the suicide of an old friend or about the suffering his daughter experienc

While I am no film critic, in my opinion, the 2016 film Arrival was brilliant. The story line was fascinating, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Cinematography, and it won the Award for Best Sound Editing. If you have not seen the movie yet you need to stop reading this and go watch the movie, because there will be spoilers! This past weekend at church I was teaching the first part of an apologetics class on the Problem of Evil. The aim of the first class was to demonstrate how difficult the Problem of Evil is especially when we consider the doctrine of God's providence. (Here are two posts which outline the challenges regarding providence: Part 1 and Part 2 ). In the next class we will look to interact with some of the defenses which Christians have put forward for handling the Problem of Evil. Perhaps the most common defense put forward is that of the Free-Will Defense. C. S. Lewis argued for this approach by stating that if someone is free to be good then they ar