This blog is Pastor Jay's weekly musings about God's Word, God's world, and God's call to our culture. We hope they encourage, challenge, and inform you. Sign up to recieve them in your email.
Recently, Dr. Michael Kruger, the Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, gave a great answer to this question. His answer, put in a nutshell, is that these incredibly smart people are applying all of their intellect within a certain paradigm or worldview. They have not evaluated all of the evidence and found Christianity wanti...
Keep ReadingWhen it comes to truth, everybody talks a good game. People will tell you they are "truth-seekers," that they will follow wherever the evidence leads, that they only wants the facts, that they can create a no-spin zone. On and on it goes. But truth is a big deal. It doesn't only encompass the mundane relational, societal, and political matters of life, but more important...
Keep ReadingAs those who hold to a Biblical presupposition, namely that God's Word is completely true and totally sufficient, we expect every facet of life down to the smallest details to accord with what the Bible says. This means when science or psychology make proclamations that contradict what the Bible says, we continue to hold to the Bible and tell the scientist and the psyc...
Keep ReadingIn my last post Did the Church Get it Wrong on Gay People?, where I addressed the recent article in USA Today that affirmed that very question, I made the recommendation that every Christian today needs to be able to answer a frequent challenge from the LGBT community. That challenge goes like this, "Since the Old Testament has laws you do not obey, such as certain die...
Keep ReadingOn Monday April 29th, USA Today published an opinion piece entitled American Churches Must Reject Literalism and Admit We Got It Wrong on Gay People. You can read it here. The main point of the author, Oliver Thomas, is captured well in the subtitle, "Churches will continue hemorrhaging members until we face the truth: Being a faithful Christian does not mean accepti...
Keep ReadingIn many college 101 philosophy classes there is an unstated class project underway from day one: how many freshman can be brought to doubt and then reject the Christian faith. This happens in the biology classes as well, but today our focus is the philosophy class. A common approach in the philosophy class is to put questions to the freshman that will cause a faith uph...
Keep ReadingWhat does an infant do with a diamond? Let me give you the two most likely options: 1) eat it, 2) lose it. We might show a little toddler our diamond ring, but there is no way we are going to give it to him. Why? He simply does not understand the concepts of value and rarity or how such concepts are attached to this shiny rock. There is a parallel to this when it come...
Keep ReadingThis question, "Where is God's justice?" is a frequent go-to question for the village atheist or the run-of-the-mill, God-ignoring neighbor. It is one version of asking about the problem of evil. It is also asked like this, "If God is so good and so powerful, why isn't he dealing with all the evil in the world?" There are plenty of ways to answer to this question, but...
Keep ReadingThe knee-jerk answer to that question by most Christians is "Well, of course." But in order to be Christians who do not lean on their own understanding, and do not lean on knee-jerk answers, we have to do more. The fear of the Lord calls his people to test everything by the Word of the Lord, because the Word has the final say on what we teach, and how we are corrected ...
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