Monthly Archives: March 2015

Holy Matrimony

Posted on by
1

Marriage is a hot topic in today’s culture. Whether it has to do with seeing your bride walk down the isle, your friends avoiding marriage, your friends getting married, gays trying to redefine marriage, or the government trying to define marriage, marriage is on our minds today.

Wedding

Well, Oklahoma has taken steps to get the government out of the marriage business. The reason is that the government should not be in the marriage business at all. In Genesis, God invented the institution of marriage, so it should be his followers that engage in it.

House Bill 1125, which would effectively ban all secular marriages in the state, was passed by a Republican majority and will now go to the state Senate for consideration.

“Marriage was not instituted by government. It was instituted by God. There is no reason for Oklahoma or any state to be involved in marriage,” said one of the bill’s Republican supporters Rep. Dennis Johnson, though marriage is a legal contract.

Marriage is not just a legal contract, it is a picture of God’s love for his church. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands how to love their wives,

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy by washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.

So, without redefining marriage to mean something that God never intended, how can atheists participate in marriage or fulfill its purpose? Marriage is a continual act of selflessness, and while an atheist can be selfless, there’s no reason for them to be selfless. High atheist, Richard Dawkin, even praises the virtue of selfishness at the expense of sacrifice in his book The Selfish Gene. This is the exact opposite of marriage.

The good news is that everyone can participate in marriage, because God can redeem anything. He has mercifully given his Son so that our sins can be paid. We can all enjoy fellowship with Him knowing that our debt is paid.

The Best Evidence

Posted on by
Reply

The best evidence for evolution has been shown to be incorrect…or at best outdated.

Citing the lack of support among students for embracing the Grand Theory of Evolution, two political science professors from Penn State, Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, have decided to help remedy the situation. They gathered science teachers from across the country into focus groups in an effort to find possible solutions. In the article that reported on their progress, the title photograph was Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine’s textbook, Biology.

Evolution News reports that this Biology textbook is filled with information that could best be described as misleading.

I have a copy of the 2000 “elephant cover” textbook, which features (1) a drawing of the 1953 apparatus used by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, accompanied by a caption stating that their experiment “first demonstrated how organic matter may have formed in Earth’s primitive atmosphere” (p. 344); (2) drawings of vertebrate embryos that look most similar in their early stages, showing that they evolved from common ancestors (p. 283); and (3) photographs of light- and dark-colored peppered moths resting on light- and dark-colored tree trunks, illustrating a story about natural selection in action (p. 297).

But these icons of evolution misrepresent the evidence. Among other things, the “atmosphere” used in the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment was almost certainly unlike that of the early Earth; vertebrate embryos actually look very different from each other in their early stages; and peppered moths rarely rest on tree trunks in the wild. The moth photographs were staged.

If the best evidence for evolution has to be fabricated, perpetuated, or assumed, then it’s time to try a different foundation for one’s worldview.

Swim Party on Mars

Posted on by
Reply

At least that’s what scientists would have you believe the Martians used to put on birthday invitations long long ago.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Did they find this body of water? How do they know how deep it was? These scientists were speaking with presumption unimpeachable authority, when discussing details with such exactitude, a history that they claim to be 4.5 billion years ago. And yet here on Earth it would be remarkable for someone to know for certain the contents of the Lochness Sound.

Scientists with a passion for finding extraterrestrial life are so desperate that they have postulated these huge floods Mars even though the planet has no liquid water. These same scientists join with old earth creationists in denying the Biblical worldwide flood as told in Genesis 6-9 and confirmed by Jesus (Luke 17:26-27) and Peter (I Peter 3:20, 2 Peter 2:5, 2 Peter 3:5-6).

You really can trust God’s Word when he tells us about history. Since we can trust God about history, we can also trust him about the future too.

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star

Posted on by
6

Just make sure it is the right star. I first heard this phrase (Hitch your wagon to a star) in Kenny Tamplin’s 90’s release, Get Out of My Sun. At least now you know some of my obscure musical tastes. Anyway, the idea is that if you know someone who is rich or smart or famous, then maybe you can get something that you didn’t necessarily earn. I’m going to take this on to a logical conclusion with the recognition that if you got your riches, fame, or information based on a falling star, then you too are doomed.

If you’ve hitched up to a falling star (or foundation) then your wagon (or worldview) is also bound to fail.

Titanic_OldEarth

Old Earth Creationists have been shouting the mantra of the necessity for Christians to embrace Big Bang Cosmology and other naturalistic-based ideas (evolution, deep time…) One of the more famous groups to have done this is Hugh Ross’s outfit, reasons.org. They claim that the Bible introduced the Big Bang cosmology to the world. One of the many problems with the idea of the old earth creationists is that the Bible does not have anything at all to do with the Big Bang. As noted in Genesis 1, God created dry land on day 2, plants on day 3, stars/planets on day 4, birds/fish on day 5, and land creatures on day 6 (including mankind). But the Big Bang theory describes something totally different in a totally different order in a totally different time frame. The two creation stories are completely different.

Despite the obvious differences, the old earth creationists continue to hang onto the idea that naturalistic assumptions about the universe should form the basis by which Christians should interpret scripture, and from a cursory look at their websites, they have grown adept at this method of interpreting the Bible.

Unfortunately, for them, like phlogiston, abiogenesis, and leech-blood-letting before, the Big Bang model has been tossed aside by secular scientists. In this article, the naturalistic thinkers no longer want the universe to have a beginning because this would seem to imply that there were a Higher Power, to whom they might be responsible.

Big Bang? What Big Bang? In a new theory, researchers suggest that the start of the universe may have involved no bang at all.

There’s no need for Christians to compromise the revealed Word of God to try to accommodate naturalistic assumptions about creation…especially as they have a tendency to be discarded as more information is discovered.  You can trust God’s Word as revealed in the Bible to be true and unchanging.

UPDATE:

“The science is settled! It is beyond dispute that the Big Bang never happened.”

“What?! New evidence is in, and the Big Bang never happened?”

“The science is settled! The universe is eternal. The Big Bang never happened. Those who cling to the Big Bang are science deniers!”

http://www.glennbeck.com/2015/02/10/watch-the-big-bang-never-happened/