Monthly Archives: June 2021

Quotes To Ponder (113)

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“If our feelings determine what we believe, we cannot be discerning.” – John MacArthur

“Your heart beats 72 times a minute. Every time it beats, it does so with the permission of its Creator.” – Anonymous

“’I agree with the content of what you said, but I disagree with the tone in which you said it,’ often (not always, but often) means, ‘I disagree with the content of what you said, but I don’t know how to refute it biblically, so I’m attempting to distract from the substance by discrediting the delivery.’” – Mike Riccardi

“Nobody can produce new evidence of your depravity that will make God change his mind. God justified you with his eyes open.” – J.I. Packer

“The only thing of our very own which we contribute to our salvation is the sin which makes it necessary.” – William Temple

“If his first coming does not give you eternal life, his second coming will not. If you do not hide in his wounds when he comes as your Savior, there will be no hiding place for you when he comes as your Judge.” – C. H. Spurgeon

“Jesus is both Lord (Master) and Savior you cannot separate the two. That would be like me showing up at your house and you saying Steve can come in, but keep Lawson outside.” – Steve Lawson

“When the devil accuses us and says, ‘You are a sinner and therefore damned,’ we should answer, ‘Because you say I am a sinner, I will be righteous and saved.’ ‘No,’ says the devil, ‘you will be damned.’ And I reply, ‘No, for I fly to Christ, who gave himself for my sins. Satan, you will not prevail against me when you try to terrify me by setting forth the greatness of my sins and try to bring me into heaviness, distrust, despair, hatred, contempt and blasphemy against God. On the contrary, when you say I am a sinner, you give me armor and weapons against yourself, so that with your own sword I may cut your throat and tread you under my feet, for Christ died for sinners. . . . As often as you object that I am a sinner, so often you remind me of the benefit of Christ my Redeemer, on whose shoulders, and not on mine, lie all my sins. So when you say I am a sinner, you do not terrify me but comfort me immeasurably.’” – Martin Luther, commenting on Galatians 1:4, “. . . the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins.”

“The generality of men make light work of sin; and yet in nothing doth it more appear what thoughts they have of God. He that hath slight thoughts of sin had never great thoughts of God. Indeed, men’s undervaluing of sin ariseth merely from their contempt of God.” – John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Gould, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, n.d.), 394.

“Scripture contains all the divine words needed for any aspect of human life.” – John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (P&R Publishing, 2013), 618

“Scripture is sufficient for everything for which we need a word from God.” – Dan Phillips

“Prior to the 1960s no one expected a church service to be entertaining. No one wanted to be told to touch their neighbor and repeat a trite phrase suggested by the preacher. No one thought of worship as a physical stimulation. No one dreamed of using flashing lights and smoke to set the atmosphere in a worship service. No one demanded to be told that God accepts them just the way they are. When you went to church you expected to be thoughtful and quiet—prayerful, sober, reflective. The service was ordered so that the word of God was central. It was read and proclaimed with the aim of leading you to understanding, conviction, transformation, and elevation. The structure was deliberate, and the objective was for people to have an encounter with God through an understanding of his truth, with an opportunity to express it in corporate worship.” – John MacArthur

“If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.” – R.C. Sproul

“Magicians claim to bring us something from nothing. Darwinists claim to bring us everything from nothing.” – Dr. R. C. Sproul, Jr.

“Most people who believe in neo-Darwinian evolution have no real conception of the advanced irreducible complexity of living organisms.  Education can alleviate that misconception, but it cannot remove man’s treasonous attitude of rebellion against God.  Left to our own sin nature, we would rather live in intellectual absurdity (pretending that designed things just happened by chance) than submit to the Lord.  We spiritually blind ourselves rather than see the evidence of creation all around us (Romans 1:20). Furthermore, those who hate God encourage others to hate God, and to ignore the obvious reality that God is the Creator.  It is an example of the blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14).  Fortunately, God can turn our heart around to love Him and open our spiritual eyes to see the obvious truth of His Word.” – Jason Lisle

The ‘Absurdity’ of Leviticus

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Pastor Uriesou Brito writes this, concerning the book of Leviticus:

I was trying to do the impossible this morning listening to Leviticus. I attempted to listen to it through the eyes of an atheist–to see laws about priestly purity, eye defects, dwarfs, damaged private parts, and other bodily oddities that needed to come into conformity to the holiness code. As a supposed atheist I imagined mocking such texts and the grotesque descriptions and the absurd necessity to conform to such laws simply because of our humanity. Why should purity laws apply to menstruating women when it is merely the natural function of a female body? Why make her unclean for something she has no control over? How barbaric to apply standards to the regularity of life!

But the more you read into Leviticus the more impossible it is to remove the Christian eye from its intended goal. If Leviticus borrows heavily from the strange it is because the Bible carries with it a seal of authenticity in every book, and especially Leviticus. There is an inherent “deep weird” to the Bible that Christians must embrace. We don’t embrace it because we delight in the oddity, but because for the world to be coherent, it must have elements of the strange within it. Bodily discharges—though unbearably odd to mention—is so common that only a truly Spirit-inspired book could deal with it so bluntly.

The Christian faith must be embraced as a Levitical faith; one that is not shy of rituals and impurity and rituals for purity. It must also be embraced to reveal the vast contrast between the care God has for the well-being of his people and just how uncaring the gods of this world are about our well-being. Only a true God provides a system of symbols, rituals, death, and resurrection for his people. Indeed, Leviticus provides the route to holiness and our need for a Holy God.

As Paul says in Romans, the unbeliever cannot see the truth because he is blind. Perhaps Leviticus serves as a test for ordinary Christians on whether we embrace the raw language of Scripture as God’s reality or whether we prefer to sanitize the faith to fit our preconceived notions of reality. The Leviticus code is a pointer to the cleansing of the nations. There is no life without blood and there is no atonement without holiness. Leviticus is the pathway to the cross where the Holy One absorbs all our impurities, and simultaneously it is the aroma that draws true Israelites to the house of Yahweh. For the atheist, it is sheer absurdity, but for the Christian, it is the way of life and holiness and truth.