Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 149
January 14, 2013
Understanding the Creation Account in Genesis (Video)
Not Always Bread, Just No Stones
John Piper gives his thoughts
on Matthew 7:9-11:
[W]hat man is there
among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone?... If you
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!
One time when my son Ben was three
or four, he asked for a cracker for snack time. I opened the box and found that
they were moldy. I said, “I’m sorry, you can’t eat these. They are covered with
fuzz.” He said, “I’ll eat the fuzz.” But I said no. He was not happy, but I
loved him and would not give him a fuzzy cracker, no matter how much he pleaded.
So when Jesus says he will give
good things, he means that. Only good things. And only he knows ultimately what
is good for us. And notice, when he says dads don’t give stones when asked for
bread, he does not say dads always give bread. Just no stones. And when he
says, dads don’t give snakes for fish, he does not say dads always give fish.
Just no snakes.
The point is this: God ignores
no prayers from his children. And he gives us what we ask for, or something
better (not necessarily easier), if we trust him.
Piper wrote his post to “overcome our skepticism” about
our prayers being answered, and so motivate us to pray. But I see yet another
application: We can trust that whatever the answer to our prayer is, no matter
how it appears to us at the time, it is not a stone.
January 13, 2013
Links Mentioned on the Show
The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:
Letter from a former atheist – Video of third-hour commentary by Greg Koukl
The Canaanites: Genocide or Judgment by Greg Koukl (PDF)
Listen to today's show or download any show for free.
January 11, 2013
Webcast!
January 10, 2013
May Event!
Be a Parable of God's Grace
I’ve been continuing this year to follow James Gray’s ideas
for mastering
the Bible (reading one book of the Bible over and over for a month—the
shorter ones sometimes sixty times or more). After only one year of this, I’ve
found that my understanding of the New Testament and love for the Person and
work of Jesus has increased exponentially, and I recommend it to you.
This month, I’m reading Titus, and I’m completely taken by
3:1-7 because of its relevance to all of us who try to persuade others about
the truth of Christianity and meet with anger or rudeness:
Remind them to be subject to
rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed, to
malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all
men. For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved
to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful,
hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for
mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in
righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and
renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus
Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs
according to the hope of eternal life.
Why are we to be “peaceable, gentle, showing every
consideration for all men,” even—no, especially—to
those who treat us poorly? Paul says it’s because when God showed His kindness
and love to us malicious, hateful human beings, He saved us completely by
grace. We weren’t righteous. We didn’t deserve it.
This is the gospel. So when we, likewise, are kind to
people, we illustrate something very important about the gospel to them. We
reflect the kindness of God that flows out from Him towards people who haven’t
earned it. This is why Paul concludes his thought by saying we need to “be
careful to engage in good deeds. These things are good and profitable for men.”
Coming at the end of this section, it would seem that a big part of why these
deeds are profitable is that they illustrate grace and the gospel to the world
around us.
Throughout salvation history, God has used visual parables
to teach people truths about Himself (the institution of marriage,
the rescue of the Israelites from ,
the temple,
etc.), and when we are gracious to others, we become part of a parable of God’s
grace. What an incredible, humbling thought! It brings new weight and depth to the
importance of being a kind and patient ambassador.
January 9, 2013
Study in France
Greg will be speaking ths summer at the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. It's a unique opportunity to study in beautiful and inspiring surroundings with some of the best teachers. Consider this unique study opportunity. The Academy has some scholarships available. Check with them for more information.
Intrinsic Human Value Has to Be Taught
For some reason, we human beings have a real problem with
the concept of intrinsic human value. If a group of people doesn’t look like
us, or has different customs, or lacks some of our abilities, we think it’s obvious they’re not truly human. Have we
ever been right about this? Ever?
I came across this appalling description of the early days
of Australia in Bill Bryson’s In
a Sunburned Country:
For most Europeans the Aborigines
were simply something that was in the way—“one of the natural hazards,” as the
scientist and natural historian Tim Flannery has described it. It helped to
regard them as essentially subhuman, a view that persisted well into the
twentieth century. As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes,
Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to “feral
jungle creatures”…. Such was the marginalization of the native peoples that
until 1967 the federal government did not even include them in national
censuses—did not, in other words, count them as people.
In Taming the Great South Land William J. Lines details examples
of the most appalling cruelty by settlers toward the natives—of Aborigines
butchered for dog food;…of another chased up a tree and tormented from below
with rifle shots…. What is perhaps most shocking is how casually so much of
this was done, and at all levels of society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania,
written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day
with “a respectable young gentleman” to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend,
the young gentleman spied a form crouched in hiding behind a fallen tree.
Stepping over to investigate and “finding it only to be a native,” the appalled
Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native’s breast “and
shot him dead on the spot.”
Such behavior was virtually never treated
as a crime—indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805 the acting
judge advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the
land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for
courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances,
settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and “inflict such
punishment as they may merit”—as open an invitation to genocide as can be found
in English law…. Sometimes, under the pretense of compassion, Aborigines were
offered food that had been dosed with poison (pp 187-188).
Subhuman, not counted as people, openly and casually killed
because they were “in the way.” This is what human beings do to other human
beings. The group of people being disposed of might change from century to
century and place to place, but the reasoning used against them remains the
same: they don’t look like us, they can’t do what we do, they’re not fully
human.
In Australia in the 1800s, there was a culturally accepted
standard for qualifying as a human being, and the Aborigines didn’t meet it.
When, for the first time, white people were convicted and hanged for slaughtering
a group of them, “two of the accused protested, with evident sincerity, that
they hadn’t known killing Aborigines was illegal” (p. 189).
How is it possible they didn’t know they were committing
murder? Can you see our capacity for deceiving ourselves when it comes to the
subject of which human beings are "truly human"? After all the evidence of our
past egregious failures, why would any of us trust ourselves to set a line
defining who’s in and who’s out? And yet, we do. We are.
We always recognize the horror of defining human beings out
of the human family after the
fact, once we no longer have anything to gain by oppressing those
particular people. But how can we prevent these atrocities from occurring in
the first place? How can we end the one we’re in the middle of? We have to recognize
and then fight the human tendency we have to deny the value of people who are
different from us. We have to teach
intrinsic human value—the value of every human being, regardless of his looks,
his size, or his ability—because our selfish drive to remove people who are “in
our way” prevents us from naturally seeing and accepting universal human
rights.
January 8, 2013
An Addition to STR's Faculty
If you’re a fan of homicide “who done it” reenactments on
programs like NBC’s “Dateline,” you may have noticed a number of cases solved
featuring a wiry cold-case detective from the Torrance, CA, P.D. named J.
Warner Wallace.
Wallace is so skilled at showing where evidence leads that
when he recently brought a tough 1981 murder case to trial—there was no body
and no murder weapon—he got a “guilty” verdict from the jury in less than five
hours of deliberation.
You may also have noticed the same J. Warner Wallace filling
in for Greg on STR’s radio program when he's been out of town. Out of the gate, he was the best radio
sub we've ever had.
So, after 25 years cracking tough cases and vigorously
advancing the Kingdom in his off hours (Wallace started a dynamic youth group
called “Rising Tide” and for years hosted pleaseconvinceme.com with a regular
following of 13,000 people ), J. Warner is coming on board full time with Stand
to Reason.
As a former atheist, he took the
forensic skills he used to solve the toughest crimes—homicides with a trail
that’s been cold for decades—and applied them to the eyewitness testimony and
circumstantial evidence for the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
A long time student of STR, Wallace is a fabulous
communicator and a wizard with multi-media presentations. His new book, Cold Case Christianity, is simply the most clever and compelling
defense I’ve ever read for the reliability of the New Testament record.
J. Warner will be teaching for STR as our fourth faculty
member, and also contributing online with written, audio, and video resources.
We are all thrilled to welcome J. Warner Wallace to the STR
team.
