And, how many commandments are there anyhow?

Check out this chart on how many commandments there are according to whom. Apparently everyone agrees there are ten, but they have a hard time agreeing which is which. Jews, Catholics and Lutherans combine the ones about making idols and having other Gods. To make ten the Catholics and Lutherans divide the commandment about coveting your neighbor’s house and wife into two commandments. No, I didn’t just make that up. Jews make ten by counting ‘I am the Lord your God’ at the beginning as a commandment. I thought that was pretty interesting. Protestants count the one about idoos and the one about no other gods as two. As a result, the one about coveting houses and wives need not be split and the statement that God is God at the beginning need not be construed as a commandment.

Anyhow, to the point at hand: is God required to obey the ten commandments? I say no. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided I no longer like sovereign grace. It’s a redundancy.

There’s a legend told by the Roman historian Livy in his history of Rome called Ex Urbe Condita. In the 6th century BC, Rome was invaded by an Etruscan king, Lars Porsena. Porsena laid siege to the city of Rome. Seeing the city hard pressed and starving, a number of youth were outraged and determined to deliver Rome from the catastrophe and restore the honor and glory of their city. They swore themselves to assassinate Porsena. They drew lots and each would attempt in the order of their lot to kill the enemy king. Read the rest of this entry »

I think one of the greatest obstacles to folk’s belief in a God who’s in charge of the world in the way He claims to be is the sense everyone has that they choose freely. How can God rightly be said to know and ordain all that comes to pass if we’re free to choose? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading a little booklet by Ken Sande’s Peacemaker Ministries, and it’s got some useful stuff. I read the first section today. It began looking at peacemaking by discussing conflict not as the problem, but as an opportunity to glorify God. Sin is the problem and conflict can be an opportunity for growth and repentance if it is handled in a God-glorifying way. The substance of the booklet will be to examine how to do this. I think it’s based on Ken’s book, The Peacemaker.

Another related issue is that peace is not the absence of conflict. This is the conception most of us use functionally in our daily lives, and it’s the conception underlying most struggles for peace. The truth is that if peace were the absence of conflict, none of us could have peace here and now because conflict will always happen. Peace is part of the work of God within His people. God enables them to have peace in the midst of conflict, and also to achieve peace with others through conflict resolution. This conflict resolution involves beginning by seeing conflict as an opportunity to obey and glorify God, humbling myself and acknowledging my contribution to the problem. This acknowledgement isn’t merely a formality but a spiritual discipline that must change my perspective on the conflict and on the contributions of others to it.

<< Kenosis Part 1, the Classical View

See Phillippians 2:6-11

The difficulty Reymond finds with what he calls the classical view is that
if the statement that Jesus “being in very nature God,” “made Himself
nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.” refers to His incarnation as
the classical view holds, then we are presented with difficulty by the
phrase that comes between these two statements, specifically that He, “did
not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” Read the rest of this entry »

I remember working at Hume Lake while the camp band was Everybody Duck. I really liked them. I still do. They have some really good songs. They do a great job of God-centered worship leading. Darin McWatters is a great guy and I really appreciated his wisdom on the few occasions when I talked to him back then. There’s one song in particular that I remember especially enjoying. I still sing it in the shower sometimes to be honest. I’m not sure if it’s their original work or if somebody else wrote it, but in any case it’s called I’m Sustained. One part of the song reads, “I know what I’m worth, I remember the cross.” I never really thought too much about this but recently I’ve run into a lot of passages of scripture that seem to refute this way of looking at the cross. Is. 48:9-11 comes to mind. Read the rest of this entry »