This is definitely R-rated in some of the language but it is necessary to see what our children are growing up with. This hurts my heart.
What Makes a Christian Martyr Different?
I appreciate this question and answer.
An Analysis of Celebrate Recovery
Very informative and helpful.
Why Does God Leave People Such a Mess?
An excellent answer to a common question.
Ever wonder why stepping on LEGO hurts so much?
Last week I started off with the angst of the fall and sin’s effects on our lives. Each of us knows deep in our hearts that the way the world works is not things should be. The present state of affairs is not the ideal state of affairs. Our very recognition of death as bad and mourning those who have died points to the intrinsic knowledge that there is something greater and that death is our enemy. Indeed, in the Garden death was not the guaranteed end of all men. That is, until the Fall.
In The Garden
In Genesis we begin with an explosion of creation by God. The Earth, the heavens, the multitude of stars including our sun, are spoken into existence by the omnipotent will of God. All plants and animals spring forth at the word of God. The Earth is now teeming with life! This good land is ripe for a caretaker. Into this creation, which God has called good, God creates mankind. He forms man from the dust and personally breathes life into him. “Adam,” as he is called, had a purpose. Genesis 2:15 says that man was placed in the Garden of Eden to work and keep the garden.
Man is made by God to work.
As soon as Adam is placed in the Garden, God gives him conditions for his life. He is allowed to eat of all trees in the Garden except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He is told if he eats of that tree he “shall surely die.” Adam enjoyed unbroken fellowship with God. Verse 18 continues the narrative with God including Adam in his creative acts by delegating authority to Adam to name the animals God has created.
Pause.
Not only was God not distant at all before the Fall, but man worked alongside him. How wonderful that God not only fellowshiped with Adam, but included him in His work. Almost as if this was the first “bring your child to work” day. Except, instead of occupying the child with coloring books or a smartphone, Adam is naming the animals God has created. Into this God creates Woman, recognizing that man should not be alone. Adam, and now Eve, enjoy glorious, sinless, open, and unhindered fellowship with the Creator God of the universe.
The Serpent
Into this comes the Serpent. The Devil. He tempts Adam and Eve to transgress the single command of God. God has given one command to them, and Satan tempts them by calling God a liar. “You shall not surely die,” he says. He directly contradicts Almighty God. Further, he claims that man will become like God which is the very thing Satan desired for himself. (Isaiah 14:12-14) Our Parents ignored God’s command and in so doing sinned against him.
In Adam All Die
Man sinned against God and in so doing death entered. Man died spiritually at the point of sin and now as a result of sin he would also die physically. Sin also had the crushing consequence of breaking man’s fellowship with God. Genesis 3:8ff relates how God walked in the Garden in the cool of the day and man hid from him. He walked in his Garden in the time of the day most desirable, when the air had cooled, and I imagine it would have been most pleasurable for man. Yet they hid.
Adam and Eve had fellowship with God but because of sin they now hid from their loving Creator. Sin breaks our fellowship with God. Not just Adam and Eve, but all of their children. Us. God made clothing for Adam and Eve from skins. For the first time, something died and blood was shed as penalty for sin. The blood of atonement is foreshadowed. The Gospel is preached in the protoevangelion in Genesis 3:15.
Paul later tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 that through one man death came to all. In Adam, death entered and now affects all mankind.
Sinful By Nature
Through this original sin, all men are sinful by nature. We merit hell because we are sinners. We sin because we are sinners, not that we are sinners because we sin. What I mean is, we do not enter life guiltless. All are guilty from the womb to the tomb. We sin because it is our nature to do so. We are totally depraved as it would come to be called. That does not mean that we are as evil as can possibly be, but that our nature is so corrupted by sin that we cannot do good apart from God.
We sin because we are sinners. We shake our fists at a holy God because our nature is corrupted by sin. The Earth groans (romans 8:22) as it awaits the coming redemption of God. All of Creation was affected by sin. To what extent is still unclear. What is clear is because of sin God’s wrath and judgment hangs over all of us. Our sin merits nothing but our damnation and judgment. Because of our sin and total corruption of our nature we cannot choose to do good. We choose evil. Only. Continually.
We are under judgment and incapable of escaping it.
“For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
1 Corinthians 15:21-22
We all died in Adam. Will we all be made alive in Christ?
I’m glad that Tim shared this list it gave me a few blogs to follow that I hadn’t been following previously.
The Man Who Made a Million Empires
I haven’t played a Civilization game in a while but I still remember the name Sid Meier.
5 Reasons You Should Prioritize Family Worship
This area is such a struggle for me.
Justification Is the Gate, Not the Garden
What a wonderful title, and a fantastic article.
I don’t know why I found this so interesting:
I posted something ridiculous the other day about Big Foot. I said, “What if Big Foot is real and we’re all just part of his dream?”
It’s an absurd statement. But such a thing has often been used by atheist to disprove Christianity. It’s better known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. After all how can you disprove that the world wasn’t created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster? And so why not give an equal hearing in classrooms to this particular teaching? Adherents would say such a thing is just as valid as Intelligent Design.
But this is not a valid argument. Let me explain.
I believe that I am real and I am relatively certain that Big Foot only survives in monster truck form. Or to put that negatively I do not believe that I am just a figment of Bigfoot’s imagination.
Now it is possible that I am wrong. I cannot disprove this ridiculous assertion. But just because I cannot disprove this—or disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster—it does not make it necessarily true that I am wrong. And yes, you can turn this on the believer as well. It cannot be definitively disproven that the God of the Bible actually exists.
I like what Paul Copan says on this:
The skeptic has to do more than suggest the possibility that I’m wrong; he must give reasons for believing I’m wrong in this particular instance. The skeptic wrongly thinks he must be refuted first before we can claim to know. But we can seek, with God’s help, to rebut the skeptic by saying, “You haven’t convincingly shown that I’m wrong.” Why think we have to bear the burden by showing that the skeptic’s position is false?
That ridiculous thought on Big Foot is able to survive in our day because we have lost the ability to understand that there are differing degrees of belief. Think Mythbusters. Some things are busted, plausible, and confirmed. But in our day and age if something cannot be absolutely proven then it finds itself in the land of misfit beliefs along with ridiculous notions about Big Foot.
This is why so many folks believe that the only things which are actually true are those which can be observed by science. (Oddly enough a belief which cannot be observed by science). The result of this, as stated earlier, is that there is no way to differentiate between really ludicrous things and things which are quite plausible.
Yes, it is true that I could quite possibly be all part of Bigfoot’s dream. But certainly such a thing isn’t quite as plausible as the idea that these desires and such within my heart are evidence of something much greater than mere evolutionary process.
I’m not staking my soul on something as ridiculous as a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’m staking my soul on the real verifiable claims of a man named Jesus who was raised from the dead. Yes, I’m staking my soul on the world’s most falsifiable religion. You find a bag of bones in Jerusalem and Christianity will fall out of the category of plausible and into the dumpster heap of all things busted. In the same way when my King comes on the clouds and judges the living and the dead at that moment it’ll move from plausible into the land of confirmed.
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Photo source: here