Fear and Trembling

My favorite Christmas Carol this year is Joy to the World.  (Please note that this changes each year.)   This hymn stands out to me as the one song we sing at Christmas time that has a missions focus and a focus on end-times.  The lyrics, with commentary inserted, are below. Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare Him room. And heaven and nature sing, And heaven and nature sing, And heaven, and heaven and nature sing. This is a straight-forward request for us to receive the living Christ into our hearts by faith and repentance.  Every heart should prepare Him room. Joy to the world! The Savior reigns. Let men their songs employ. While fields and floods, Rocks, hills and plains, Repeat the sounding joy, Repeat the sounding joy, Repeat, repeat the sounding joy. This is a call to unashamed praise to the Christ, the Savior of the world. No more let sin and sorrow grow, Nor thorns infest ...

This is part three of a multi-part series on “He Has Spoken,” a study published by  The Colson Cente r.  This post discusses the second presentation and discussion in the five lesson DVD curriculum.  This lecture is titled “Being Biblical: How We Miss the Point of Scripture.” John Stonestreet comments that we often hear misconceptions about the Bible’s authority, what the Bible is.  Two of these misconceptions could be called ‘the Bible as a rulebook’ or ‘the Bible as a collection of inspirational nuggets.’  But these misconceptions do not explain the Bible’s non-inspirational portions, which Stonestreet calls “scary."  Some describe the Bible as God’s love-letter to His people, but even that relatively accurate description does not account for the descriptions of God’s wrath and the stories of how that works out in history.  The Bible is also often seen as a book that tells stories about heroes of the faith, but these heroes are often flawed. ...

(This is an article written for our local paper.) A Christian view of death and dying sounds very strange to the modern ear.  This is especially true because Christianity has long seen death as true and right in one sense and evil and wrong in another.  It is seen as not a part of God’s perfect will, but it is seen as a part of his decretive will. God’s perfect will, or will of desire, is expressed in His commandments as contained in the Bible.  It does not contain sin or the consequences of sin.  God’s perfect will is what He would have, not what He would allow. God’s decretive will contains those things which He does not desire in and of themselves, but those things which He allows.  This will includes all things that actually happen (Ephesians 1: 11).  God allows death in this sense, and He allows death for good reasons. In Christianity, seen from God’s perfect will, death is an enemy to be destroyed, not an event to be accepted. Christ ha...