How Little Is Known Of The Bible

I suppose this is a continuation of my rant from last week. I can't believe that Christians would use the word of God loudly, incorrectly, publicly, out of context, to protest something that's perfectly legal and entirely biblical. 

Yes, I'm talking about the temporary emigration restriction for seven countries whose major export is terror. As I've mentioned in the past, this temporary restriction is perfectly legal under the Constitution of the United States (Article IV, Section 4) and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. I'm not going to go into the background of the restriction, nor am I going to explore the ignorance of calling it a "Muslim ban". We need to look at the Christian reaction to this executive order.

The Christian reaction has ranged from relief that our government is finally taking steps to protect us from terrorists, to outrage that the government is finally taking steps to protect us from terrorists. This is normal because everyone paints an executive decision with their own bias, but many Christians who oppose this temporary restriction for whatever reason are attempting to use biblical quotes to support their political argument. Quite often it becomes abundantly clear that they don't fully understand the quotes they use, or they take them completely out of context. Are they doing this to spread God's word? If you study what they are doing it appears to be that instead of using God's word to enlighten the masses and save a few souls on the way, the Holy Scriptures are being used to advance a personal political agenda.

Let's start with 'vetting'. Vetting is the act of making a careful and critical examination of something. Remember the uproar over vetting Sarah Palin when she was selected as a candidate for Vice President? All we heard from the press was that she wasn't vetted properly and in the end she was more thoroughly vetted by the press than the rest of the candidates combined including the one that won an 8 year golf vacation  the presidency.

Fast forward to December 2, 2015 when two Daesh operatives shot up a Christmas party murdering 14 and severely injuring 22 friends and co-workers. The female murderer, Tashfeen Malik, was supposedly vetted and passed supposedly comprehensive background checks, none of which noticed Tashfeen's jihadist rantings and terror threats that she often posted on social media. This was a complete vetting failure and this is what the temporary emigration restriction is trying to prevent.

Random Bits

"I walk through this sinful world as a pilgrim in a foreign country" - CH Spurgeon

RANT WARNING: I am so tired of people who call themselves Christians who decide that politics is the be-all end-all of their Christian lives. Are these people simply caring people, misinformed people, or stooges for political movements? Take Jason Webb, pastor at the Elmbrook megachurch, who is one of those people who claim to be Christian. A Christian is set apart (1 Peter 2:9), is not of this world (John 17:16, John 15:19),  is different from this world (Romans 12:1-2, James 4:4, 1 John 2:15-17)  but is required to comply with this world's leaders (Romans 13:1-7, Romans 12:8, 1Timothy 2:2, Titus 3:1) So you'd figure that a Christian in a position of eldership would say "Here's the law, it doesn't violate the bible, what do we do to make it better?

Mr. Webb and his cohorts have chosen to do what they can to usurp the law of the land and are counting on the ignorance of their followers to succeed in their plans. And by ignorance I mean ignorance of civics, history, and the bible. Civics: The temporary ban on immigration from a small number of countries is legal, whereas the overturning of that ban by the 9th Circus Court of Appeals (yes, I said it: CIRCUS) was not legal. The bible: there's NOTHING in the bible about enacting immigration law. If you want to use Matthew 25 as your guide, go ahead and be kind to strangers, and if they end up in jail because they broke the law, by all means visit them, witness to them, share the word with them. As for history, historical ignorance is the leftists greatest weapon. Webb hyperventilates: "Jesus, who fled as a baby with Joseph and Mary into Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod, was also a refugee" Well, yeah. so what? Israel was a Roman state. Egypt was a Roman state. It was the legal, moral, and physical equivalent of fleeing from Ohio to Indiana. And when their reason for fleeing ended, THEY WENT BACK. When my job in New York dried up I fled to Colorado - is Jason Webb weeping and gnashing his teeth for me too? Of course not, I didn't break any law. Enough with this nonsense, let's look at the rest of the world

Christian - are you shocked that Donald Trump retained Randy Berry as the State Departments special envoy to homosexuals? Why? Donald Trump has always been pro homosexual, in fact he was the most pro homosexual candidate in the entire 2016 race. Stop the political idolatry, Trump is not your messiah, Jesus is.

Speaking of political idolitry. The scary part of this article is that the voice of reason comes from Tony Compolo

Remember Saeed Abedini - the US minister that was held in an Iranian jail for 3 years? He's back in jail

Spurgeon Thursday - Grace

Webster's dictionary describes grace as:

Unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification

In other words, God is helping us on our path to be with Him for nothing that we have physically done to earn His assistance. He's doing it out of love. And that's a pretty good definition, there are only a couple of  five syllable words in the definition, but that's far fewer polysyllabic elements of speech than any theologian worth his autographed copy of Matthew Henry's Exposition of the Old and New Testaments would use. 

Grace is exhaustively over defined but it's such a simple, wonderful concept - God gives us divine assistance because He wants to give us divine assistance. All we have to do is believe that he will give us His grace and he does. 

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

I've collected some nuggets of wisdom on the subject of grace by the Prince of Preachers

🕆 The bridge of grace will bear your weight, brother. Thousands of big sinners have gone across that bridge, yea, tens of thousands have gone over it. Some have been the chief of sinners and some have come at the very last of their days but the arch has never yielded beneath their weight. I will go with them trusting to the same support. It will bear me over as it has for them.

🕆 Christian, remember the goodness of God in the frost of adversity.

WWUTT Wednesday - The Shack

There's no deep meaning or slander intended in this photograph, it's an outhouse, a small shack out back, down wind, and it only has one purpose in life (ok, two purposes). This one may be old but it's not bad as outhouses go. First of all, it's a "one holer" rather than two, which is nice, and you'd know what I mean if you ever spent time in a "two holer". The flashing on the top of the roof tells me it has a ridge vent so it's not going to be an oven in the summer. I thought the item to the upper left of the door was an exterior light, but when I zoomed in I noticed that it was a red headed woodpecker, and that's pretty cool. I mention this 'little house on the prairie' because it has an actual purpose (ok, two purposes), so by all means use it. This shack has my stamp of approval. You may be squeamish but other than olfactory issues there's noting sinister about this shack, and if you leave the door open, you have a nice view of the woods which is nice in case you forget your magazine. On the other hand I cannot approve William P. Young's shack for anything except if you forget your Sears catalog when going to my shack. 

I've written about William P. Young's The Shack before here, and here, and I entertained guest columns here, and here, You may get the idea that I am not overly thrilled with The Shack and you would be right, and I'm incredibly not thrilled about the movie The Shack. The director of The Shack, Stuart Hazeldine, only has 2 other credits to his resume, Exam which was filmed 8 years ago, and the heretical short film Christian which is described as The King Of The Jews meets The Lord Of The Flies which was filmed 13 years ago. I'll let WWUTT describe the rest

Random Bits

"I walk through this sinful world as a pilgrim in a foreign country" - CH Spurgeon

It's been very busy at work so far this year and it has been very difficult for me to sit down at my blog and write something meaningful, so today I'll stick with stuff that's meaningless.  In other words mostly the Charismatics and the NAR. It's an easy thing to do, because they write themselves into my blog. I want to do meaningful subjects such as what I learned in my study of Hebrews and things like Jesus desire for peace among his followers.

Actually with my back issues when it comes to sitting down and writing something meaningful it's difficult for me to sit down at all, and with my other issues it's difficult to do much of anything once I stand up. But I see these issues as God reminding me that I am to lean on HIM and not myself. However He did send me some comfort in the guise of one of the new elders at our church. This elder whom I'll call Dick (mostly because that's his name) invited me to come along with him to 'play trains'. I've been a model railroader all of my life to at level or another but it's been years since I've been able to inspect my waybills, "whistle off", bunch up the slack, and do all the things a 1/87 (HO) scale hogger does on a Saturday afternoon. Wow - what an afternoon it was at the Colorado Model Railroad Museum! At a scale 20 mph it took us a full 2 hours to move our 50 car consist from one end of the scale pike to the other, the layout is just that huge. If you're a Christian man looking for a hobby, I heartily suggest model railroading. I better stop here before this becomes a Model Railroad blog

Is it blasphemy? Is it heresy? Some say neither, some say both, I say it's a living example of 2 Timothy 3:6-7. Edie Bayer wrote an article chock full of nonsense of breath taking proportions, telling us that Jesus Said, "You Need to Have Some Fun!" Honestly, if there's a punch line to the whole thing it's in the introduction where Steve Shultz (Founder and Publisher The Elijah List & Breaking Christian News) took this unbiblical blathering seriously. I mean come on - she claims this of Hollywood, Satan's greatest tool on earth: "the foothold that we have in Hollywood will increase exponentially in the next short while. Right now it may even look like a toehold, but will become a bona-fide stance, a Christian movement!" Clearly she hasn't seen anything that's come out of Hollywood in the past 45 years. The problem with the NAR and the Charismatics is that they claim that things are going to get so much better. They speak of "Great Outpourings" and massive "Revivals". I have a reading assignment for them. Thank you Amy for finding this nugget of... entertainment.

What do you get when you cross a fired alcoholic seeker sensitive poor exegete business man with a a Word of Faith heretic who has thousands of followers and millions of dollars? There's no punchline, this is a legitimate question