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September 2, 2019 - July 7, 2020
By asserting the existence of a Creator, the opening words of Genesis constitute a frontal attack on the materialist atheist philosophy that dominates so much of the Western world today.
The Word is primary; the material universe is derivative and not the other way around, as popular secularism imagines.
This Genesis account goes to the heart of the age-old complex and often impassioned debate about determinism and free will or the parallel, though not completely identical, debate about the relationship between the sovereignty of God and human responsibility.4 It is to be noted that there are two separate questions here: 1. Does Scripture teach both that God rules and that humans have a certain degree of freedom? 2. If the answer is yes, how can this be so? If we do not distinguish between these questions, there is a danger that failure to find a satisfactory answer to question 2 leads to
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Hence, another way of looking at the first part of Genesis is to see it as anticipating three major Christian doctrines: (1) creation; (2) sin and redemption; and (3) judgment and the last things.
The fatal wrong turn away from God consisted in putting trust in a voice other than God’s—a constant danger for all of us in a world where we are bombarded with a multitude of voices all clamoring for our undivided attention. The way back to God must therefore be learning to listen to his voice and to trust what he says.
Salvation is by grace; it is a magnificent gift of God, but it is appropriated by exercising the capacity to trust, which is another of God’s great gifts to us, a gift that defines our very humanity as fashioned in God’s image.
Even when God appears and offers his guidance and direction, and we know it is real, there may linger that deceitful, essentially devilish idea that God will cramp our style in some way.
God’s interest and concern for the minutest detail of our everyday, even humdrum, lives that can make our experiences of eternal significance.
Jacob’s opponent asked, “What is your name?” (32:27). We cannot help thinking back to the time when Jacob’s almost blind father Isaac had asked him the same question, and Jacob had lied. “I am Esau,” he had said. He had lied to gain his father’s blessing. But now, in this close encounter with God, lying was no longer possible. He would get no blessing from God that way. He had to admit who he was—the scheming, manipulating, supplanting, heel-grasping Jacob.
Scripture can have the same effect for us as the transfiguration (or Peniel) had for those involved.
God does not always do what we might think he should do. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways not our ways.
we can derive a deep encouragement from the story of Joseph because the fact that he could be used by God to achieve so much in later life may well be connected with his trust in God in the absence of the dramatic.
Esau’s philosophy was made clear when he sold his birthright to Jacob for a plate of stew: immediate satisfaction of his appetite for food with no sense of the importance of his intangible birthright. Hebrews talks about Esau in the context of sexual immorality, which also is characterized by the same attitude—satisfaction of the appetite now, no matter what the consequences, no matter what parameters God may have set down about it. Nothing is sacred for the man who is driven by immediate satisfaction of his desires.
It is one thing when God sends dreams; it is a completely different thing when people imagine that every dream that they have has some kind of spiritual significance so that in the end they unbalance and become more interested in their dreams than in reading Scripture and praying. Such imaginings can lead to spiritual and moral shipwreck.
Judah’s action also reminds us of another man, Judas (which is a Hellenized version of Judah), who betrayed the Savior of the world for thirty pieces of silver—a Savior who is otherwise, and remarkably, known as the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
I covet that, don’t you? That people around us can see that we are different, that the Lord is with us, and they wish to know why.
Paul himself was grateful to those who supported him financially, Christians who had learned to serve God and use money in his service. The problem with the human heart is that it can so easily reverse this and try to serve money and use God as some kind of spiritual magician to get out of trouble.
According to Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, this is the rise of the so-called “culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
Christians have to be aware of such dangers and be careful not to precipitate accusations of microaggression. They also need to be careful to avoid being infected by our culture, since the concept of dealing with every little complaint by appealing to third parties and proclaiming your victimhood is not the way taught by Jesus and his apostles.
They ascribe the success of the West hitherto to six principal ideas: Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism, and individualism. These, they aver, have suffered a century of sustained attack, and now where cynicism, pessimism, and carelessness abound, a drift toward collective suicide is evident. Their take on Christianity is fascinating: Christianity comprised one overarching belief. . . . The overarching belief was that God became man, lived, suffered, died and rejoined the divine realm. This wonderful news moved humankind and God together. . . . As a result the whole
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anger is often an expression of sin but is not necessarily so: “Be angry and do not sin,” says Paul (Eph. 4:26).
suppose that I have been wronged in some way, hurt or offended, and am faced with the question of forgiving the one who hurt me. I have two things to think about, one inward and the other outward. The first is to get to the stage where I can prevent the wrong from damaging me by letting it go inwardly. This involves being prepared to let it go outwardly when appropriate. And when is that? When the offender repents. Then I must (as a Christian, certainly) let it go publicly so that the repentant wrongdoer knows that I have forgiven him.
The fundamental Christian confession is “Jesus Christ is Lord,” not, “He wants to be Lord,” or, “He should be Lord.” We may assume that he is guiding us in life; we don’t have to persuade him since he is more interested in our life than we are. It follows that if we make what turns out to be a false step, we can trust him to continue to guide us and bring us to see the right thing to do.
