This time of year we hear two words everywhere. No, it’s not “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”. We hear these words related to TV shows, retail sales events and even in restaurants. The words I’m speaking of are, of course, “Christmas Special”. Hallmark Chanel has been running Christmas RomComs since Thanksgiving weekend, stores like Best Buy and Kohls engineer sales and one day or even three-hour “flash sales” events and family restaurants create menu’s filled with turkey dinners and egg nog. Are these the things that make Christmas special?
Climate change isn’t the sort of thing we normally cover here at Think-Biblically.com, but when the President declares it is a greater threat than terrorism its time to have a look at the issue.
What is the issue exactly? According the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado the temperature of the earth has risen 1.8 degrees over the last 100 years.
Christmas is coming, have you started your shopping yet? The day after Thanksgiving marks the largest shopping day of the year, known as Black Friday. Second is the Monday after, known across the land as Cyber Monday due to sales being largely on-line purchases. The focus on gift giving can put a large stress on one’s personal finances. As such, there may be no better time of the year to re-think our money matters; no better time than to think-Biblically about finances.
We’ve spent the last two days discovering and attempting to understand the one reason it is okay to spill blood, today we’ll look at the one occasion when it’s appropriate to give up one’s own life.
Last week we examined Biblical passages that expressed the sanctity of life. Human life is precious to God and as such it ought to be precious to us as well. We hear this argument frequently when contending against abortion, and sometimes when discussing capital punishment and murder, and once in a while in conversations about suicide.
Many of the readers of this site know I live in Colorado and have asked my opinion on the shooting at the Planned Parenthood building in Colorado Springs. I’ve hesitated to write about this topic but today, after 14 people were killed and 17 others injured in an attack by unlawful gunmen I think its time the issue of self-defense is addressed. News outlets across the country stream live video to our homes of the aftermath of violence and millions of Christians across the country are wondering what, if anything, they could or should do if they find themselves in a similar situation.
Today is Thanksgiving, a holiday with a short history as holiday’s go (it started in 1863). As a national holiday it is intended to bring us back to the center of what our nation is all about: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Most of us don’t limit our thankfulness to what we appreciate about our country alone, nor should we. Today we all should take a time out and think of all that we are truly thankful for. Perhaps even write them down so you can review the list when times get tough, because during the holidays times do have a tendency to become difficult, frustrating and stressful.
Ask anyone to compare the gospels and two facts will almost always be mentioned: (1) that John is the Gospel of Love, and (2) that Luke is the Historical Gospel. While it is true that John gives us a look into Jesus’ personal struggles and relates stories not contained in any other gospel account, it is not true that Luke is purely a historical account.
In part three of our series on facing violence we’ll look at the issue of self-defense. So far we’ve learned that life is precious, in part because God thinks so and in part because we are made in his image. Most of the time taking a life is deserving of capital punishment. In the case of accidental death the punishment is less severe but still very real. The only circumstance under which one may shed the blood of another is in the preservation of life, which applies directly to the most recent acts of evil perpetrated in Paris, Colorado Springs and San Bernardino.
In the Family Guide to Advent, our Christmas gift to our readers, we have a timeline of the events of Christmas. This explains what happened from the time just before Jesus’ birth to a few years after. We believe it is helpful to understand the specifics of the story that always get muddled by TV specials and manger scenes. As helpful as that is, it doesn’t address the most important issues of the story, namely “why did Jesus have to come in the flesh” in the first place. There are a great many reasons for the incarnation. Let’s try to understand it from the beginning.
Space. The final frontier. Nothing has intrigued the imagination of man more than outer space. The ancients observed the stars and followed their movements, mapping them, trying to understand all that surrounds us and our blue planet. For some lay answers to one’s personal fate and even the future of world events. For others it was a way of finding one’s place in the world, a form of navigation. Other’s believed in a religious phenomenon, believing the stars were closely associated with spiritual beings, perhaps even angels themselves.
