Oprah's cult dissected

Tolle’s book “A New Earth” is being analyzed page-by-page here:

Book Study: A New Earth

It is a 10 week effort now in week 1, so check back there regularly for updates to this worthy effort.

Hiatus

I am in the process of launching a new business. Please excuse my absence, I will be back soon.

Human wisdom…

….is of short duration and temporal.

Psa 103:15  As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field;
Psa 103:16  for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

I am amazed at how humans can profess to be all knowing and wise, making emphatic universal statements. In the context of time, our existence on earth is nothing more but a flicker, like an ember from the fireplace, a brief flash, and then nothing. Even if one professes to stand on the shoulders of prior human thinkers, it does not amount to anything but the briefest of existence.

Humans do have a concept of the eternal. If that was not the case, then we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the temporal, and the temporality of our existence. For the unbeliever, the eternal is far more abstract, and cannot be rationalized outside of the 16-billion year existence of the universe. That may seem like eternity, but it is surely just a longer flash of existence.

For the Christian, human wisdom is foolish. It is temporary, and is born out of a sinful desire to serve anything but God. Human wisdom leads to relativism, stated as universal absolute. It leads to the endless and empty pursuit of impossible human happiness, with accomplishments more fleeting than human existence.

If human existence is temporal, then why bother existing?

1Co 15:32  What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Indeed, Christians know that the temporal is just that, and that eternity awaits. What then is the purpose of existing? For the glory of God alone.

1Co 15:58  Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.  

We exist to honor and serve God, who created us. It is only by His grace that we exist in the first place, not due to some cosmic accident. If it was due to that accident, why bother existing? And by what measure do we find our musings trustworthy?

Human wisdom is foolish. Only wisdom that is from God, after His thoughts, spanning eternity, is worthy of wisdom.

May you find your eternal purpose today, and see the hopelessness and foolishness of human wisdom.

Bible recommendation

I received my copy of the Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible this week. I am truly impressed. Out of all the study Bibles in my library, this has the best notes by far, very complete, and then it contains a lot of supplementary information too.

I highly recommend it.

Wilson on Hitchens

Douglas Wilson rips apart the latest atheist offering, Christopher Hitchens “God is not great” Douglas Wilson’s blog

The True Gospel

Puritan Lad has written a great piece on the elements of the true gospel here.

Anyone who has read here more often knows my passion for the gospel, and this is a good Scriptural summary of that message.

The storm

Last night, I witnessed probably the worst storm I’ve ever seen. Here in North Texas, we experienced a Derecho. The wind blew at more than 100 miles per hour, and the rain was pounding down. It caused plenty of damage at our neighbors, but we were fortunate that we had no damage at our house.

It also raised a thought or two about storms:
“Jer 23:18 For who among them has stood in the council of the LORD to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened?
Jer 23:19 Behold, the storm of the LORD! Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest; it will burst upon the head of the wicked.
Jer 23:20 The anger of the LORD will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it clearly.”

The wrath of the Lord is described as a storm, a tempest, here raised against false prophets. God is angry to those who failed to pay attention to His Word, who failed to understand it. And these false prophets are strengthening the evildoers by misapplying God’s Word through a lack of understanding.

The result is God’s anger that His warnings have gone unheeded, that these people have chosen to “speak visons from their own minds”. God’s anger is everlasting reproach and shame, which must feel like battering and howling winds and the inescapable millions of pinpricks of the driving rain and hail.

Because we are sinners, somehow we will all disappoint God, and be deserving of His wrath. But God is merciful:
“Mat 8:24 And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep.
Mat 8:25 And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.”
Mat 8:26 And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.
Mat 8:27 And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” ”

In the storm of sin, the very essence of human struggle in vain weakness, Jesus comes to calm that storm. He takes the full brunt of God’s wrath, and by interceding for us by His witness, He causes great calm in our souls. The struggle between sin and God’s wrath is gone if we have faith in Jesus, whose blood serves as the storm shelter.

We should indeed marvel at this very unique man, who is able to put Himself in between us and God’s wrath, that violent storm of justice and righteousness. We need to wake up the fact that we are indeed perishing, and can only live if Jesus calms the storm.

Partial Christianity

The most radical choice man faces is for or against the living God, our Father in Jesus Christ. Life and world views can therefore be divided into Christian and non-Christian. This is the most fundamental division of life and world views.

However, because there are Christian worldviews wherein syncretistic fundamentally non-Christian beliefs are incorporated, and, alternatively, where there are non-Christian worldviews that incorporate fundamental Christian beliefs, the fundamental division cannot always be applied consistently. These syncretisms are rife with internal conflicts and dialectic tension because they try to accommodate conflicting foundations.

Dr. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian, offers a principle that applies to the Christian part of the description above, namely that of universal or totalitarian Christianity as opposed to partial Christianity. Universal Christianity maintains that the Christian truth is universally valid for the whole creation, including all of the human life.

Partial Christianity accepts that the Christian truth is valid for the churchly, religious and moral parts of human life, but that the rest of creation, including the other spheres of human life (including science, art, economics, politics, technology, sport etc), are religiously neutral. Partial Christianity states that these areas are neither Christian nor non-Christian.

In the modern church, this is all too apparent. In the modern movement, Christianity applies only to that which is self-serving to human interest. It seeks to accommodate a bewildering array of non-Chistian worldviews under the guise of neutrality. We see acceptance of primitive and paganistic worldviews. Jewish, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist beliefs are tolerated and respected in favor of world peace and unity. Atheistic, pantheistic, pancosmological, humanistic and naturalistic principles are generally considered neutral middle ground. Cultural and geographically diverse worldviews are built into the “give the audience what they want” quasi-religious systems.

The reformed faith (or Calvinism), on the other hand, is a universal Christian faith, that rests on the Scriptural truth that God created all that is, and He maintains, decrees and completes all of creation. That includes the following three principles:

1. From, through and to God are all things.
2. Everything that God created belongs to Him.
3. God is absolutely sovereign over everything He created.

It is clear then, that there is a conflict between these three statements, and that which seeks to accommodate beliefs that are in conflict with God’s sovereignity. It is easy to see how a self-serving culture can deny these principles.

We do not belong to ourselves. We, with our whole existence, and with everything we have and do, belongs to God: All our possibilities, nature, structures and talents, functions and behavior, our control of the cosmos, and resultant ourforming of culture, including pre-scientific knowledge as well as science, forming and use of language, creation and appreciation of art, manufacturing and use of consumer-goods, definition and enforcement of laws, morality, attitudes, motives and actions.

We take care of humankind in and for marriage, family, nation and state, in education, industry and healthcare; all our education, work, and rest and entertainment, our forming of history, our entire religious and churchly life, our all-inclusive calling-fulfilling service to God, our entire life on all terrains, belong not to us, but to God.

Our choices should reflect the stewardship we have. Live your life in the full knowledge that you and all you affect are possessions of God, through His creation.

John MacArthur on Why we believe the Bible is true

Pastor MacArthur has a hard-hitting message for the modern church here. He examines the culture of mediocrity, and how that has found its way into the church of today. This is one of the best messages I’ve heard on this topic. Please take the time to read it.

“But that’s not what they get most of the time. Serious study of the Word of God, diligent hard labor in the text of Scripture in the original languages and racing throughout the analogia scriptura, the analogy of Scripture as it explains itself across the sixty-six books, the diligence required for that to bring up the rich treasure is not the interest of most pop Christian personalities. It was years ago that Jim Packer characterized evangelicalism in a way that I found to be exactly the way it could be characterized today. Nothing much is changed in the several decades since he originally wrote this. This he wrote in the preface to a reprint of Richard Baxter’s Christian directory. This is what Packer said in characterizing evangelicalism. He said, “It is ego-centric, zany, simplistic, degenerate, half-magic spell casting which is all the world sees when it watches religious television or looks directly at the professed evangelical community.” Pretty strong language from an Anglican. He further said this, “Our how-tos, how to have a wonderful family, great sex, financial success in a Christian way, how to cope with grief, life passages, crises, fears, frustrating relationships and what not else give us formula to be followed by a series of supposedly simple actions on our part in the manner of painting by numbers.”

Read the whole message here

Partial birth abortion is not about abortion

Greg Koukl from Stands to Reason Ministries wrote a good article about the underlying motives and battleground of abortion.

“If there is no good reason to allow partial-birth abortion, then why the intense resistance? Why the repeated challenges to a Federal ban on these procedures? Why do so many–mothers, doctors, Senators, members of Congress–accept such bad reasons for this barbaric practice?”

Read the rest here