Storming the Fortress of a Father’s Love

Byron Yawn writes a letter to his daughter, and the last paragraph hit home and made me laugh at the same time.

By God’s grace, I have only intended my own love to serve as a high-water mark in your soul. None except Christ’s love for you will rise above mine. This way, when that man – whom I pray for everyday – comes along and exceeds your father’s love, you will willingly give him your heart. And I (secretly desiring to shoot him and bury his remains in an undisclosed location) will lovingly pass on my treasure to that man who stormed the fortress of a father’s love with a weapon as meager as a servant’s apron.

There is No Neutrality

Michael Bull rails against atheists who complain about religious instruction in schools, because their naturalistic philosophy is supposedly neutral.

But as usual, they are blinded by their pride.

In the mean time, our culture itself is eroding, and its all a great mystery why the West is crumbling.

Some quick points from the article:

  • An atheist’s faith relies on their rationality.
  • Our “secular” culture results in great pragmatic wisdom. This has been a blessing in many ways, but if pragmatism is the greatest virtue, you also open the door to horrors unimaginable.
  • When it comes to the tough questions, secular culture is bankrupt.
  • True progress requires the Word of God and the Spirit of God.
  • Our problem is that we want the Word of God to be provable before we act on it. We don’t want to rely on faith.

The End of All Stories

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

—C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle.

The Blood of Christ and Abel

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Cor. 15:16,17)(ESV)

Why is this so? Why would the sacrifice of the perfect Lamb of God lose its efficacy if the Resurrection had not happened? The shedding of blood is the shedding of blood, is it not?

And that is the point.

The writer of Hebrews says that the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Blood pollutes the land and guilt rises up to infect the inhabitants (Deut. 21:1-9), and this is intensified when we consider the blood shed from the first murder. Abel’s blood cries out against the earth itself and against God’s image bearers.

Jesus, God’s perfect image bearer, finally answers the crying out for justice with his own blood and drowns out the noise.

And yet we are left with more innocent blood. The levies of Abel’s blood were simply overwhelmed with the pure blood of Christ. And innocent blood cries out. If anything we are more doomed, and our sentence even greater, for we absorb the guilt brought on by the murder of the Son of God. The sons of Adam are all culpable. We have Christ’s blood on our hands.

Without the Resurrection, this is where are left, still in our sins. End of story.

But there is no gnostic “gospel.”  Christ bodily rose from the dead. The sentence was reversed. Death itself was swallowed up. The blood of Christ still remains sprinkled on the earth, but the song it sings is now a different tune.

Thanks to the Resurrection, the blood crying out for condemnation now cries out for mercy and atonement. Thanks be to God for this wonderful gift.

An Act of “Christian” Terrorism? Not Even Close.

Once again we have the worshipers of Reason being unreasonable. The fundamentalist who killed 76 people in Norway is being regarded as another example of the horrors of religion when not kept private. See, Christians commit acts of terrorism too. Just like Muslims. They might as well be exactly the same.

Of course, the only basis for calling him a Christian is the guy’s Facebook profile, which is about as deep as most people looked. They see a piece of ice floating on the water, and then have faith that it is actually the tip of an iceberg 300 feet tall. They don’t have to actually look, though.  After all, they have reason and science on their side by default, so they don’t have to engage in any actual freethinking.

Breivik was a fundamentalist, no doubt. But as this article points out, he was an Enlightenment fundamentalist.

 In an on-line manifesto, Breivik makes it clear that he is not a “fundamentalist Christian.”  He prefaces one comment with, “If there is a God…” and says that science should always trump religion.  So in terms of religious convictions, he sounds more like Richard Dawkins than Jerry Falwell.

The article is insightful, and I encourage you to read it, as it also highlights one of the key problems with our culture: desiring the fruit of the tree (Christendom), while wanting to do away with the root and tree itself (Christ).