Mr. Christie last month said he’d veto the legislation if it passed, saying such a fundamental change should be up to a vote of the people, and he has called for a referendum on the issue. Democratic leaders say they will not allow that, arguing that the majority should not be entrusted with minority rights.
In the chapter “Hills to Die On” White claims that most churches in our cities have more or less the same theology. The real difference is on ministry values. This conviction, more than anything, may explain the gulf between YRR and the seeker movement. One side thinks theology is to die for and in desperate need of repair. The other side thinks the theology stuff, while very important, is pretty well established in most churches. They worry that focusing much more on theological precision and knowledge may end up dividing us or pushing more people away from the church.
The poll showed that 72 percent of voters think that the state Legislature should work on other issues, while 71 percent think the voters should decide the marriage issue. Just 9 percent said that the Legislature should decide on whether same-sex couples should be able to marry.
It happens every time I try to read the Bible through in a year…Leviticus. A dread falls over me. I read the one chapter quickly to get to the other stuff on my reading list that is more pleasant to my brain. I just have not valued the time spent pondering why eating a rock badger makes one unclean while eating a locust is clean.Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. (Proverbs 30:5)The KJV actually says, “every word of God is pure.” That’s every word for those of you in Winona.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)Is that true for all of Scripture? Is there any part that is not pure? Is there any part that is not profitable?
Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. (1 Corinthians 10:11)What portion of Scripture does that directly point to? Well, that would be the three-quarters of the Bible that almost nobody reads anymore – the Old Testament. It hit me: that includes Leviticus. Leviticus, breathed out by God and profitable… Leviticus, written down for our instruction… You’ve got to be kidding.
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel, saying, ‘If a woman conceives and bears a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days. As at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. 3 And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. 4 Then she shall continue for thirty-three days in the blood of her purifying. She shall not touch anything holy, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are completed. 5 But if she bears a female child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her menstruation. And she shall continue in the blood of her purifying for sixty-six days.Kevin’s lost his mind. Go ahead, let it out, and you might be right.
6 “‘And when the days of her purifying are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting a lamb a year old for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering, 7 and he shall offer it before the LORD and make atonement for her. Then she shall be clean from the flow of her blood. This is the law for her who bears a child, either male or female. 8 And if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her, and she shall be clean.’” (Leviticus 12)
1. Grace displayed in the fact that God speaksSo, over the next few posts, think about it and feel free to add any comments where you think I’m stretching or where you see something I haven’t. What I found amazed me...Every word of God proves true...try it.
2. Grace displayed in the picture of the Gospel
If you want your “dream baby,” do not adopt or foster a child: buy a cat and make-believe. Adopting an orphan isn’t ordering a consumer item or buying a pet. Such a mindset hurts the child, and countless other children and families. Adoption is about taking on risk as cross-bearing love.
This isn’t on the scale of Piper inviting Warren. This is more akin to Augustine inviting Muhammad.Thabiti Anyabwile
In the Scriptures, believers not only pray for themselves, they ask for things. They ask God to change circumstances, to give them things, even to change his mind. In many passages, as we shall see, we are told that God, on hearing such prayers, "relented" which is not much different from saying that he "changed his mind."
But if God changes his mind, why do other passages of Scripture picture him as steadfast, reliable, immutable?
Sad to tell, we are sufficiently perverse that we can find reasons for not praying no matter what perspective we adopt. Consider missions. If you believe that God "elects" or chooses some people for eternal life, and does not choose others, you might be tempted to conclude that there is no point praying for the lost. The elect will infallibly be saved: why bother praying for them? So you have a good reason not to pray. If on the other hand you think that God has done all he can to save the lost, and now it all depends on their free will, why ask God to save them? He has already done his bit; there's very little else for him to do. Just get out there and preach the gospel. Either way you have another reason not to pray.
You can really hurt your head thinking about this sort of thing.
The Bible insists that we pray, urges us to pray, gives us examples of prayer. Something has gone wrong in our reasoning if our reasoning leads us away from prayer; something is amiss in our theology if our theology becomes a disincentive to pray. Yet sometimes that is what happens. The slightly ingenuous but enthusiastic believer may have more experience at prayer than the theologian who thinks a lot about prayer. Or again, sometimes when a Christian develops an increasing appreciation of "the doctrines of grace”– truths that underline God's sovereignty, freedom, and grace – one of the first results is a tragic decrease in the discipline of prayer. That was part of my own pilgrimage at one point. The fault was not in the doctrines themselves, but in me and in my inability to mesh them properly with other biblical teachings...
Let us grant that the Bible insists that God is utterly sovereign, and human beings are morally responsible creatures; let us grant that God himself is both transcendent and personal. Let us frankly admit that this involves a significant degree of mystery. The question we must then ask ourselves is this: How can we assure that these complementary pairs of truths operate the right way in our lives? If there is so much mystery about them, will we not always be in danger of using these truths in a way that denies the mystery or contradicts something else we should know?
The answer is simple, but has profound effects. We must do our best to ensure that these complementary truths function in our lives in the same ways they function in the lives of believers described in Scripture.
For example, how does election function in Scripture? How should election function in our lives? It never functions in Scripture to foster fatalism; it never functions to douse evangelistic zeal. Repeatedly it functions to emphasize the wonder of grace (John 6:68-70; Rom. 9). It also functions, among other things, to ensure the certainty of spiritual fruitfulness among God's people (John 15:16) and to encourage perseverance in evangelism (Acts 18:9-10).
How do the constant exhortations to believe and obey function in Scripture? They never function to picture God as fundamentally at the end of his own resources and utterly dependent on us; they never reduce God to the absolutely contingent. Rather, they function to increase our responsibility, to emphasize the urgency of the steps we must take, to show us what the only proper response is to this kind of God.
Here’s what Ehrman says in an interview found in the appendix of Misquoting Jesus (p. 252):Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions - he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not - we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement - maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
Walter Kaiser writes on OT passages; F.F. Bruce on Jesus’ sayings; and Manfred Brauch on the hard sayings of Paul.Nice...
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