Monthly Archives: April 2013

Friday Round Up

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(1) For some reason, Jehovah’s Witnesses go to great lengths to try to say that Jesus was not crucified on a cross but impailed on a stake, with one nail going through both hands that were held above His head. However, if that was the case, in speaking of the hands of Christ, Thomas, who was all too aware of the facts concerning the death of Christ, would have used the singular word “nail” and not the plural “nails” in this text in John 20:25:

So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see IN HIS HANDS THE MARK OF THE NAILS, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

I believe there are two reasons why the JW’s speak so much on this. They want to try to show that Christians get it wrong on the most basic of issues (and therefore show how superior their knowledge is) as well as they see the two beamed cross as a symbol of idolatry. This article sheds much light: http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/cross-or-stake.php

(2) 4 Truths about Hell

(3) The resources in this week’s Friday Ligonier $5 sale are very well worth considering. Especially recommended are R. C. Sproul’s DVD series on Psalm 51, By Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me book by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, The Five Dilemmas of Calvinism book by Craig Brown, and The Promise Keeper: God of the Covenants teaching series, all found here.

Belief in a ‘Higher Power’

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In this excerpt from his “Moses and the Burning Bush” series, R.C. Sproul explains the upside and downside of believing in a “higher power.”

Transcript

It’s almost an institution, in our culture, in our nation, to describe God as a higher power, something greater than ourselves. What’s that, “the force be with you”? What is this higher power—gravity, lightning, earthquakes? Now one thing about this nebulous, amorphous, nameless, characterless power, is that first of all it is impersonal, and second of all and most important, it is amoral. See, there’s an upside and a downside to worshiping a higher power—a nameless, faceless, force like gravity, or cosmic dust, or lightning, or thunder.

Here’s the upside to a sinner. A force that is impersonal and amoral makes no ethical demands on anybody. Gravity does not make judgments about people’s behavior unless they jump out of windows six-stories high. But even at that, there is no personal condemnation that comes from gravity, or an earthquake. Gravity has no voice; it says nothing, it sees nothing, and it knows nothing. We could describe this higher force that is the god of our culture like the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Nobody’s conscience is seared by gravity. If the higher power is impersonal and amoral, that gives you a license to behave any way you want to behave, with impunity.

But what’s the downside? The downside is that there’s nobody home out there. That this force means that in the universe there is no personal god, no personal redeemer. What kind of a relationship, what kind of salvific relationship can you have with thunder? Thunder makes noise, thunder booms through the skies, but in terms of content it’s mute, it’s tongue-tied, it has no revelation, it gives no hope; and gravity has never been able to forgive anybody for their sins.