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A Site to See
There’s a new website for the Raggant Fiction Festival that includes audio and video for all seven talks. You can also download an audiobook of the whole kit.
My talk is here: The Testimony of an Unlikely Convert.
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New Soil
As sons of Adam we have his sin. We don’t need to learn sin, in the words of our modern theologian Lady Gaga, we are born this way. Being born this way, where every intention of the thoughts of our hearts is only evil continually, is not an excuse for sin, like the Lady intended, but it is the reason we need a savior from sin.
When God saves us He doesn’t just pull up the weeds.
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A Long Drive
In our categories for sin, when we weigh which are the heavier matters, we often put discontent in the chaff pile. “Awww, shucks.” Discontent doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, maybe because we’ve gotten used to living with a low-level of it always idling in the background.
But discontent is a gateway into a minefield of destruction. To want, and be mad not to have, is a hunger that starts wars.
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It's Happening
“When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God” (Genesis 5:1). When Adam sinned, he did not lose this likeness completely, but the image was completely bent. In Jesus, we not only see the image of God fully and perfectly, but through Jesus and the Spirit we are in the process of that image being restored.
We are being transformed into the image from one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:18).
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Running Dark
From Genesis 5 and Hebrews 11 we know that Enoch walked in the presence of God. From Jude we know that Enoch also prophesied about the judgement of God. Jude appealed to his readers to contend for the faith against ungodly men who perverted God’s grace and denied Christ’s Lordship (verse 4). After listing some examples, Jude wrote:
It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.
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Complex Carbohydrates
God chose man-made products to represent something that man could not do for himself. Bread and wine are modest when compared to Solomon’s daily menu, yet bread and wine are too elaborate to be found in the world unprocessed.
Joe Rigney writes about this in chapter 7 of his book, The Things of Earth.
God mediates grace to us through created goods that have been cultivated and transformed by human effort.
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Slipping the Hold
For all our Kuyperian talk about culture and cultural advances and the importance of the things of earth, we do want to take seriously God’s warnings about worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. One brick-through-the-window sort of warning comes in 1 John 2.
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (1 John 2:15)
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Raggant Fiction Festival
The first ever Raggant Fiction Festival happens Saturday and today is the last day to register.
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Two Kinds of Worldlings
There is a kind of worldling with whom believers can associate and another kind with whom we must not. We can appreciate all true image-bearing contributions from unbelievers and we can associate with them while recognizing their sinfulness. Paul’s instruction to the Corinthians is clear on the matter.
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—-not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
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The World as God
The early chapters of Genesis call for significant attention not only on God’s command to men to marry and multiply and make but also on our imitative nature as multipliers and makers. When we worship we see what God is like and what our reflections of Him should look like. From the beginning it has been so. We glorify God by consuming in thankfulness what He’s given and also by producing in reflectiveness.
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Making a Contribution
I had a roommate in college who loved to play SimCity. Even though I’ve never been a huge video game sort of guy, he let me play every so often and it was strangely fascinating. At that time, SimCity was a fairly new game without the niche variations available today.
“Sim” in SimCity stands for “simulation.” It means to imitate or make a computer model of something. The goal of the game is to build a thriving city, keeping digital citizens happy and maintaining a stable budget.
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Blood Speaks
Blood speaks. God made the world in such a way that the shedding of blood reverberates.
Cain killed his brother Abel in a field far away from earshot. No one knew because no one could hear Abel yell, or so Cain thought. But God said, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” The blood cry isn’t a certain pitch, like a dog whistle, that only certain ears can hear.
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Driven by Jealousy
Last week I pointed out that God’s call to love one another started in Genesis not with Jesus. The apostle John wrote that this message was “from the beginning” and illustrated how not to do it via Cain’s example. “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother” (1 John 3:12a). Getting mad and murdering is an old story.
Cain killed his own brother.
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Offerings That Please God
When it comes to offerings that please God, Abel’s was the first, but Jesus’ was the greatest.
Abel offered the first and fattest of his flock. He brought more than leftovers and whatevers like his brother. The cost of Abel’s sacrifice was great, the cost of Christ’s even greater. The offering was “the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19). Our High Priest was “holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Hebrews 7:26).
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As Old as Dirt Made into Man
Jesus commanded His disciples to love one another. He told them that such love would identify them in the world and that He His life was the standard of love. Love for your brother is a distinctive of believers but was actually meant for every image bearer from the beginning.
For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. (1 John 3:11)
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Sharing in the Symbols
When we partake of the cup and the bread we partake in the nature of the Lord. To share in the symbols of His sacrifice is to identify with the God who sacrifices.
This is one of the reasons why Paul forbids idolatry before he gives instructions about communion in 1 Corinthians 10. Many of the Jews were idolators and he warns the believers to “flee idolatry” (verse 14). Behind idols are demons and “you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (verse 21).
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Which One Looks the Most Shady
As Paul described the “old self” in Ephesians chapter 4 he compared it to the life of the Gentiles. Unbelievers are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, hard-hearted, calloused, and greedy for impurity. Then he said:
But that is not the way you learned Christ…to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, (Ephesians 4:20–22)
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The Lifeblood of Fiction
My mom really wanted me to read when I was a kid. She taught English before I was born, then she stayed home to care for me (and my sister who joined us two years later). Summers included weekly trips to the public library where, as I remember, my sister would return her borrowed stack and collect a new tower for the following week while I thought about whether or not I really wanted to read the next McGurk mystery.
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That Sickening Feeling
We can be thankful to God for the work of the Center for Medical Progress and their exposure of Planned Parenthood. Many Christians have been fighting on behalf of the unborn for decades and the calloused nature shown in the recently released videos have spread that sickening feeling. May the Lord grant our nation repentance before another boy or girl is killed.
Christians have hope that righteousness will ultimately prevail because another Son was murdered.
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It's Already Hitting the Fan
When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.