Growing In Grace

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 ...

Many years have passed since the infamous  Screwtape Letters. After Wormwood was able to calm his uncle and avoid being devoured, he slowly advanced up the ranks. Eventually he moved into a different role where he organized mass attacks on Christianity as a whole. In his farewell memo he seeks to pass on the particulars of his most successful strike.  As I am quickly approaching retirement it is my aim to document what is perhaps the most effective campaign I was able to employ against the Enemy's book. Of course there have been many great attacks on the Enemy's book over the years. Anything we can do to weaken their perverse love for that evil text will vastly improve our efforts.  I am reminded of the many we led astray by focusing our attacks on convincing certain "scholars" to deny the reliability of the Enemy's book. We bolstered the platform of men like Bart Ehrman which enabled us to turn many away from even reading the book. Many children who grew ...

Most people are familiar with the Bible's opening line, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." From this verse we must recognize that before there was a beginning, God was. Clearly God could not have created something "in the beginning" if He was not already preexisting. John picks this theme up for us in the intro to his gospel. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John unfolds for us that this Word is the preexisting God come in the flesh as the God-man Jesus. John continues that everything was made "through" Him and, as the Genesis narrative continues to unfold the story of the creation account, we see that Adam was the crowning achievement of God's creation. Adam was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden and God told him to be fruitful and multiply by having dominion over the whole earth. The image is of Adam and Even expanding the perfection of the Garden to the e...

My daughter just completed Kindergarten and she has been learning to read. I love reading with her, it is such a joy! We read her "Jesus Storybook Bible" by Sally Lloyd-Jones (an excellent children's Bible!) together and she slowly makes her way through sounding out the larger words. At times she will finish reading a paragraph, point to a couple words from one sentence and say, "That doesn't make any sense." I then show her how the words fit together within the context of the sentence and then the larger context of the paragraph which can help clarify the confusion for her. On occasion she will still say that it doesn't make sense. At that point, I zoom all the way out and I remind her of the big picture that the story is telling, and then work my way back in close to explain what is being said in light of the story. This usually clears things up nicely, but sometimes confusion remains and so I have one final pedagogical (teaching) aid that I offer to...

For a number of you this is a very familiar saying, "Teaching line upon line." It is interesting to me that the saying 'line upon line, precept upon precept' seems to have been taken from the KJV translation of Isaiah 28:10&13. However as the New American Commentary says of the original Hebrew, "The message in v. 10 is made up of a series of monosyllables repeated several times. The meanings of these words are somewhat mysterious. ... They could be the stuttering words of a drunk, which makes about as much sense as the babbling of an infant." It seems that the KJV's mistranslation of the Hebrew text has become a well known part of our Christian vocab. But why? Just to clarify right at the beginning of this post, this is the method of teaching that I wholeheartedly agree with. It is my preference to teach straight through books of the Bible. I believe this approach helps us to stay true to the context of the chapters and verses found within each book ...

For about the past year I have been challenged to rethink so many views, beliefs and opinions that I have held for a long time. There have been a number of contributing factors to this "rethinking" process that I have been going through and I can't remember what the first domino was that has set off this chain, but I felt this one was of key importance. Is the Bible our Instruction Manual? Have you ever heard of the Bible referred to as the B.I.B.L.E. or the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth? While I realize this moniker has been considered helpful for Sunday School classes I feel that this may be a harmful nickname. I don't want to get overly philosophical, but I feel it is important for us to notice that if we view the Bible as our instruction manual then it becomes primarily about us. The purpose of an instruction manual is to tell you how to best use the device that the manual was written about. The instruction manual for my TV remote tells me how to prog...