Call tomorrow what you will: Valentine's Day, Single's Awareness Day, Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent... All are correct. I confess, the season has snuck up on me as Easter Sunday is much earlier than normal this year. While I know that most protestants do not celebrate Ash Wednesday (or Lent), there are some good reasons they may want to. While not a Biblical event, it is a church tradition that started around a thousand years ago. It is an act the believer commits to before God that shows our gratitude for Jesus' sacrifice and reminds us of the cost of salvation.
Last week was an anomaly in content, a result of a bad illness I suffered. Unfortunately I couldn't get as deep into some of the issues I raised as I'd hoped. So I'm taking the opportunity to do so now. If you recall, I asked a question about Global Climate Change: When I say "Global Climate Change" you say...? Global warming? man-made climate change? Or how about: "For look, I am ready to create new heavens and a new earth! The former ones will not be remembered; no one will think about them anymore" (Isaiah 65.17).
I confess, I've not given the #MeToo movement enough consideration. When women started coming out with accusations against men they have worked with for sexual sin, I had two knee-jerk reactions. The first was a question: if such crimes occurred, why wait so long to report it? I was willing to dismiss the claims wo reasons: the length of time between the act and the report, and the lack of evidence for the claim. The second reaction was that it was largely a political movement, with an anti-biblical feminist agenda. While the later may be true, I was wrong to dismiss it so readily.
I was on a plane aproaching Denver International Airport when the captain came over the loudspeaker to announce that there was a problem with the plane's hydrolics and that we were going to have an "interesting landing." The woman in the seat next to me started to cry as it dawned on all the passangers at once that the hydraulics controls pretty much everything required to land a plane. Wing flaps, landing gear, they all rely on the hydraulic system. I turned to the woman with a reassuring smile. I wasn't worried; I knew my final destination was with Jesus.
We've all heard the term. It's been used by athletes, lawyers and quite frequntly by the President of the United States. One way of defining "Fake News" is any news story or rumor that appears damaging to an agency, entity or person. Another way to define it is, as Pope Francis recently did, as "evil" and "a lie." He even went so far as to compare fake news to "serpent tactics", referencing the biblical snake in the Garden of Eden that first deceived mankind. It is a fitting comparison, though the devil might prefer to call them "alternative facts".
Deep in the heart of a large American city, a man lays unconscious in a gutter, his life pumping out of his wounds and down the sewer grate. No one knows how he came to be in such a state, most don't even notice him or, if they do, avert their eyes quickly and pretend not to notice. His dark curly hair is matted with blood from a head wound. No one can tell how much longer the man will live, but less than a day for sure.
2017 was a hard year for Christians worldwide, with a large increase in persecution. In Iraq for instance, where the Christian population once numbered about 1.5 million there are only 200,000 survivors. In predominantly Muslim countries, Christian women particularly are targeted. They are kidnapped, raped, their children taken to be raised as Muslim and the women then killed , sold to sex traficers, or returned to their villages. Pastor's daughters are especially sought out as they bring more money. It is estimated that six women each day are persecuted in very real fashion each day.
Following the reading of the classic To Kill a Mocking Bird in class, a middle school in Badger, Wisconsin administrated a test to help students identify just how privileged they are. White, heterosexual males scored highest, revealing the left-leaning politics of the exam, but more important is the impact this could have on pubescent kids. School administrators defended the test stating it was an effort to show who in the class might resemble the characters in the book, and to serve as a warning to white privileged students that they need to feel what the victims of aggression experience in modern culture.
Continuing our elaboration on last weeks post, we turn to the issue of abortion. While a divisive subject in our culture, most Christians believe abortion is murder. Back in the early 1970's when the landmark Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade was passed, ignorance of the state of the child was somewhat forgivable. The science was just not there to prove what a fetus was at the various stages of development. After, only a hundred years before Charles Darwin was populating the myth that the human embryo would cycle through its entire evolutionary development before birth.
There were four days in 1944 that changed the face of the war against the Japanese. It was during the Second World War and Japan had to thsi point maintained a shield of islands between their mainland and much of the Pacific ocean. On January 31, American forces overwhelmed their enemy on the Kwajalein Atoll taking on 3,500 of the enemy and leaving only 51 survivors. It gave the American forces a foothold in the Marshall Islands and allowed them to island hop all the way to Japan. Although each battle was successively more difficult, it resulted in winning the war.
History is easy to follow. We've seen it, or at least read about it, and can place our finger on events along it's very straight timeline. We can understand what proceeded from such events. As much as people want to know the future, those events aren't really any different. The days to come will eventually become history and we'll be able to understand it as easily as all the rest of world events. If one knows what history is leading up to, the future is almost as recognizable as the past. For those who read the Bible, the future is no mystery.
It's been an enlightening journey. but now we finally, come to the seventh and final edition of divine law: Believers as living epistles. As strange as it sounds, it is what Paul relates to the church of Corinth in his second letter, chapter three, verses two and three, “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”
