Skeptics often wonder how God can allow pain to go on in the world. This certainly is a confusing question. One of the great mysteries of life is this: if there is a God, why aren’t we all in heaven? More importantly, I think, if there is no God, why aren’t we all in hell? Continue Reading »
No one seems to know who Job was. Continue Reading »
If I remember correctly, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people quote Job’s friends with complete ingenuousness Continue Reading »
It never occurs to any of the characters of Job, with the possible exception of Job’s wife, that God might not exist or might not be good. Continue Reading »
We never find out what Satan’s reaction to Job’s faithfulness is. Continue Reading »
In Revelation 3:15-16, God tells the church at Laodicea, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one of the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” In Hebrews 12:6 (itself a reference to Proverbs 3:12) we are told that “the Lord disciplines those he loves,” and a few verse later in Revelation (3:19), we are told the same thing—”Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” God must love the church at Laodicea almost as much as he loved the cities of Soddom and Gomorrah. How, then, can we secure the blessings of punishment on ourselves that these great examples in the Bible have earned? How can we live the lives of astonishing mediocrity to which God has called us? Continue Reading »
The one-chapter book of Jude has the final say before the denouement of Revelation. Like the other later epistles, Jude’s message deals with false teachers and believers who turn away, urging the reader not to fall away or become lazy. Before we finish up the story in Revelation, God wants to make sure that we aren’t going to take his word for granted. Jude warns us to “contend for the faith,” to persevere, and to resist false teaching. In other words, the message of Jude is this:
Don’t make it bad.
Life is short. Get a helmet.
Continue Reading »
There’s a topic that I haven’t really heard much about, and I’m not sure why. I’ve never really heard of it occurring, or being prohibited. It’s just never talked about. What I mean is retroactive prayer. Okay, I did a quick Internet search. It’s talked about, I just never heard of it. But let me continue my line of thought, please. Continue Reading »
We tend to define miracles in two different ways. The first definition says that a miracle is anything that happens, because God created and controls everything. People call childbirth a miracle, and they mean it in this way. If you’re an expectant mother, you’re not really surprised when a baby comes out of you. You’d be surprised if your stomach kept growing for months and something was kicking around inside of you and then you went into labor and nothing came out, or what did come out was some sort of tabloid baby, like Elvis’s alien love child. That would be the second definition of a miracle: something that all human experience predicts will not happen. You don’t expect people to just pop up from the dead unless you recently came into possession of a monkey’s paw. You don’t expect everybody to suddenly decide that Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy after all. You don’t expect one plateful of food to feed a football stadium full of people. Those would be examples of the latter type of miracle. The apologetic sort of miracle, the kind you can use to prove God’s existence. The sort of miracle Gideon and Hezekiah requested. The sort of miracle Jesus and the apostles did. The sort of miracle the Old Testament prophets did.
The birth of Cain, which opens Genesis 4, is both types of miracles. Continue Reading »
