No Grasp of Your Reality

I have decided to read through the whole Bible, from start to finish.

I was very excited to see that even as God created the earth, He had a plan for it. For example, as early as 1:11, He did not just create plants, but plants that yielded seeds — to continue a life process. He didn’t just create things to die. Same thing with the animals in 1:22 — He commanded the things that he created to “be fruitful and multiply”.

Although God had only just created Eve, He said, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall become one flesh”. This was while Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth! He had a plan for families.

God created man in His image (1:27 & 5:1). Something I hadn’t noticed before, though, was that men’s son’s are in THEIR likeness (not just an accident!) 5:3 – “When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.”

A part of the curse I can relate to: “I will great multiply your pain in childbirth, In your pain you shall bring forth your children; *YET* your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.” What a horrible catch 22 –> A woman wants to be with your husband, as a result, she gets pregnant, and the result is pain in childbirth.

Also, it was noted that it was because Adam “listened” to the voice of his wife AND ate of the fruit — not just that he ate the fruit. Part of man’s curse is the vicious cycle of his work — that he has to eat, but has to work hard to provide for the food. By blaming his wife for his eating the fruit – deferring responsibility to her- and not taking responsibility for his own actions, God created a vicious cycle of responsibility for the man. (3:15-19)

It is interesting to me how God cursed the ground (3:17) , although the ground was not a guilty party, he cursed for the sake of man. Also, in reference to the ground, He could hear Abel’s blood crying from the ground.

Matt 5:22b “Whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire.”

I love the fact that English translations never translate “Raca”… they leave it there in all it’s phonetic and scandalous glory, as a two syllable sound which could bring a person before the religious leaders. The word translated essentially means the same as “fool”, but in a different language (Syriac). It seems that the Jewish leaders of the day had made a list of the “7 Words You Can’t Say in Israel”, and “raca” was included.

So, what was Jesus’ point? The words essentially mean the same thing, but apparently Christ was pointing out some difference. The difference, in this case, was that, apparently, calling someone a fool in the common tongue was not as bad in the eyes of the Jewish leaders as using one of the “bad words”. Christ was pointing out the pietism that had crept into the thinking of the people, avoiding their dirty words, with little regard for their dirty hearts.

As Sarah wrote earlier, my son decided that since he’s not allowed to say “jerk”, that he’s going to still insult his sister by saying “JerP”. I laughed at it, but then realized how guilty we are of doing the same thing. How many of us “curse”, using the more sanitary “shoot”, “crap”, “nuts”, and the classic “Gosh Darn It!“, instead of the more powerful originals? How many parents will try to clean up the words coming out of the mouths of our children, rather than the heart that produced those words?

I find myself laughing at the rebelliousness of my children, not because their rebellion is funny, but because they’re rebelliousness is not as mature as mine. How hypocritcal am I when I “tame” the explatives, rather than repent for the heart that caused them?

Surprise, Surprise! Who best would know about the conditions of America’s public school system than the teachers who work there? If their opinions of the public schools are best observed from their actions, then their opinion is that the public schools are a bad choice.

World Magazine’s Blog has information coming out of New York that 21.5% of public school teachers nationwide send their children to private schools, while the national average is only 17.5%.

It reminds of McDonalds employees who refuse to eat at McDonalds… both examples tell a lot about the quality of the product.

Instead of calling people “jerks”, which was our three year old’s name-calling word of choice, a word we frown on here at the Albrecht house, why not just call them a “jerp” instead?

This is Thomas’ new name-calling word.

When I yelled at him today for calling his sister a “jerk”, he informed me that he “was not disobeying — he was calling her a “jerP” !!

Perhaps it is time for a general “no name-calling” revision of the rule.

Heh… the question is, what does jerp mean?

We have learned to put things, issues, problems, yes �€“ even sin in compartments with labels.

It is more convenient to put a label on something and quietly store it somewhere than it is to sort it out and deal with it directly.

We will, as individuals and as a society, never grow or be healed unless we realize that compartments make up and affect the whole �€“ and therefore cannot be separated.

Until we realize this, people will continue to be “justifiably” isolated, hated, incarcerated, medicated and aborted.

“Common good” is only as whole as the sum of its parts.

U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf said the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, was “unreasonable and not supported by substantial evidence.”

What the headlines do not say, and what you have to read further to find out is that, “his ruling applied only to abortions involving a fetus that was not viable outside the womb. He did not take a stand on whether the law was constitutional for abortions involving fetuses that would be “indisputably viable.”

My guess is that if abortion is legal, then it would follow that this sort of procedure on a baby who isn’t “viable” outside of the womb is no different than any other abortion.

Yet, this procedure is performed mostly for late-term abortions. A form of labor must be induced in order to remove the baby.

Define “viable”. Every day, it seems that babies have an better chance of surviving. For example, my cousins – Katherine and Jonathan – were born nearly 2 months early. The Bissell twins were 3 1/2 months early : they were still in the second trimester of gestation! Though the Bissell twins do have birth defects, many children who are born just as prematurely — many who even have websites as testimonies to their amazing journey entering this world — are now healthy, normal children. Furthermore, many “defects” are now treatable through various forms of therapy. Viable is often diminished from “life” to a human-defined standard for “quality of life. ”

“Mother’s health in danger.” This term, too, has become very broad. In a society where you can easily put preschoolers on mind-altering drugs to control their yet un-trained behavior to make them easier for parents and educators to manage, it is just as easy for a doctor to say that a woman’s “mental” health would be endangered by a baby. It is quite easy to come up with “health issues” these days.

“Unconstitutional”. What about the rights of a baby? Not to have scissors stuck in their skull and their brains sucked out? How come the “blessings of liberty” do not apply to them?

Well, the PCA web-magazine, By Faith Online may actually have restored a little bit of my faith in it. For a while, it seems that the magazine has been publishing a lot of fluff, and not much real content, but a recent article by Rev. Alistair Begg entitled What Happened to Expository Preaching? is an excellently meaty article on the lost art of expository preaching, that is, the reading of scripture as central to the sermon. Expository preaching will preach through scripture sequentially, and explain and expound upon what is read, rather than choosing a subject to preach on, and finding random verses through scripture that speak to that subject.

One of the things that I think scares many pastors from preaching expositionally through the “obscure” parts of the Bible is that pastors feel obligated to preach “the gospel” in their sermons. The problem is not their desire to preach the gospel… the problem is that many pastors have limited “the gospel” to the last few chapters of John. However, God’s Word is just as much in Leviticus as it is in Matthew. The Gospel was in God’s words to Abraham, just as it was in God’s words to Peter.

This line, for me, though an aside in the article, was well worth reading:

On the other side of the fence we discover others [preachers], equally mistaken, who claim to know better. They are committed to the faithful exposition of Scripture but are so buried in the text that they are completely divorced from the culture to which they have been called to preach. They are like those John Stott describes who shoot arrows from the island of the biblical text but fail to hit the island of contemporary culture. The arrows go straight up and come down on their own heads. These well-meaning and faithful students of the Word are so tied up in their �€œsystems�€� that they do not discover what happens when one makes a reasonable attempt to bring together the two horizons of biblical theology and contemporary culture.

So, what is pietism, and why is it evil? Doug Wilson defines it by saying, “though piety is nothing more than simple godliness, pietism is a thorough-going sentimentalist idolatry. It is evil.” His article in the latest Credenda Agenda, on pietism explains well why protecting our children from the evils in the world will not keep them safe from sin.

Sin comes from Adam. It arises in our hearts, unbidden. It does the same thing in the hearts of our children. It cannot be fixed by means of quarantine. When we keep our children away from the government school cooties, we are sometimes astonished when our kids figure out how to lie all by themselves. Only Christ can save us, and when He does this, He does it His way.

Credenda Agenda has a new issue online with a powerful photograph on their front cover of a coyote’s corpse dangling on a barbed wire fence. The author then uses the image as a reminder of the futilty of atheistic thinking:

Some might consider it a disturbing image. But we didn’t do it. We didn’t put the fence there. We didn’t make the coyote jump and we certainly didn’t make the coyote, though our mother’s meat loaf is excellent. Truthfully, we had nothing to do with any of it. However, it does seem to have been done on purpose. “Almost,” as the agnostic once said, “as if there were a god/higher power at work.” The atheist never said anything like that. He knows who’s responsible for the dead coyote and he would like to speak to the supervisor. Only there isn’t one. That’s the trouble. That, in fact, is the primary reason why he is depressed and determines to right global mismanagement himself. Of course, because he’s as much a character in this story as the coyote, all he does is start an organic farm for ideological reasons only to sell out and become a capitalist as the money rolls in. Then one day, while driving a Honda Element around his cabbage patch, he glances over at the fence beside his road and sees this coyote. Life is suffering, he says, and becomes a Buddhist.

Is not a moment of reality more interesting than all of the blogs in the world combined?

As Sarah and I were driving home this past Sunday from my sister-in-law’s wedding, we were discussing the nature of marriage. I think the conversation came up because Bethany and Mike had a mini communion service in the middle of the ceremony (for just the two of them), and I had a knee-jerk “THAT’S CATHOLIC!!!” reaction.

Of course, a Roman Catholic wedding will almost always serve the Eucharist, since, in the RC church, marriage is a sacrament and must be performed during a mass. In the few Protestant weddings I’ve attended, the service isn’t considered a “worship service”, nor are those attending considered a “congregation”, so communion hasn’t been served. This was the first non-Catholic wedding I’ve seen where they’ve had any sort of a communion service, limited as it was to the two getting married.

The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 24, section 3, articulately explains the context of the Lord’s Supper, and limiting it’s rightful place to the worship service.

The Lord Jesus hath, in this ordinance, appointed his ministers to declare his word of institution to the people, to pray, and bless the elements of bread and wine, and thereby to set them apart from a common to an holy use; and to take and break the bread, to take the cup, and (they communicating also themselves) to give both to the communicants; but to none who are not then present in the congregation.

So, it got me thinking… why do most Protestant weddings (at least the one’s I’ve attended) appear to be worship services without the sacraments? Most weddings are officiated by a pastor, who gives a mini-sermon to the marrying couple. There is a ceremony, and the pastor pronounces the couple married. But why is that?

In recent years, there seems to be a noticable shift in the authority of marriage from the ecclesiastical to the civil. The fact that this has not always been the case is evidenced in a post on Jonathan Barlow‘s blog, where he quotes the president of Yale University in 1795.

“… let me solemnly warn you, that if you intend to accomplish anything, if you mean not to labour in vain and to spend your strength for nought, you must take your side … Will you teach your children that death is an eternal sleap (rather than union with God and loved ones in heaven)? that the end sanctifies the means? that moral obligation is a dream? Religion (biblical truth) a farce? and your Savior the spurious offspring of pollution (rather than of a virgin birth)? Will you send your daughters abroad in the attire of a female Greek (with a gown cut so low as to expose half her breasts)? … Will you make marriage the mockery of a register’s office (in a civil ceremony)? … Will you burn your bibles? Will you crucify your Redeemer? Will you deny your God?” (emphasis mine)

I don’t see any justification for marriage to be either a civil or religious ceremony. The only religious part of the ceremony should be the oaths made by the couple, as the only lawful oaths are those solemnly made before God. Against, quoting the Westminster Confession, chapter 22, section 1

A lawful oath is a part of religious worship, wherein upon just occasion, the person swearing solemnly calleth God to witness what he asserteth or promiseth; and to judge him according to the truth or falsehood of what he sweareth.

Now, I’m not quite sure I agree that an oath should exclusively be part of a religious worship, although that could be the justification for turning a wedding into a worship service, nor am I even sure that my interpretation of the WCF is correct, as one would need to turn a civil trial (where oaths are lawful) into a worship service every time a new witness takes the stand. But I digress.

My brother and sister-in-law were married before a judge, and no one would question whether they are married. If a couple came to church and said, “We were married in a church in front of witnesses, but have no marriage certificate”, we may encourage them to get one, but we wouldn’t accuse them of fornication. So, what is needed for a couple to be “married”? As I see it, marriage is a covenant between two people before God in front of witnesses, to devote themselves to one other. It is mutual oath that can be affirmed by others. I can see no reason to add any more elements than this.

The Memory Hole wrote up a quick little investigation into an instance of the United States Justice Department‘s attempt at hiding information. “Redaction” is the fine art of “cleaning up” information for public release. For example, oftentimes, police reports containing information about minors will have their names blacked out to protect them.

However, the recent actions by the DOJ are rather surprising. In the ongoing Supreme Court case between the ACLU and the DOJ regarding parts of the PATRIOT Act, the DOJ tried to black out portions of the ACLU’s court filings, using the excuse that they were “protecting the security interests of the United States”. This would be an honorable goal if the hidden items were truly dangerous in the hands of the public, but the Supreme Court decided that the “threatening” words were not worthy of being hidden.

So, what were the hidden words? How about a quote from a Supreme Court decision:

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.” – US vs. US District Court for the Eastern Dist. of Mich., 407 U.S. 297,314 (1972)

I’m a little bit upset with my Internet setup at home. While I was down in Australia, I discovered that the website went down. As if that’s not enough of a pain, Sarah had already left for Indiana when it went down. My brother was sitting the house, and Sarah asked him to reboot the server (as though my server could possibly be unstable!), but that still didn’t fix the problem. When we finally got home yesterday, I quickly discovered that it was the router that had disconnected to the Internet.

So, now we’re looking into a better Internet solution than what we have. I haven’t heard back from Speakeasy after I wrote my letter to them. I may need to bite the bullet and upgrade my Verizon DSL to a business contract, and get a real connection.

Maybe then the Comments button will work…

Simon World has an informal list of dos and donts for bloggers. Some of the interesting ones include #15 “Learn to spell or how to use a spell-checker.” and #22 “[P]lagiarising is encouraged” Although… I think my favorite is #36, “Logic and reason are for the weak. Knee-jerk and off-the-cuff reactions are for the blogger.”

There is also a useful bibliography of blogging links that make good references.