To repent means to turn away from your disobedience to God’s Word, the Bible, in genuine sorrow. Disobedience to God’s way is called “sin.”

“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19).

CONFESS

To confess means to verbally acknowledge your sin and your need of Jesus as your Lord (controller) and Saviour (deliverer). Consider the following Bible teachings on confession:

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9).

BELIEVE

To believe means to completely accept what God has said, so you can act on it.

“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him“(Hebrews 11:6).

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31).

FOLLOW

To follow Jesus Christ daily in life means that you will want to obey what He teaches you in His Word, the Bible. Through obedience, we show the world that we belong to Christ.

“[Jesus Christ] became the author of eternal-salvation unto all them that obey him” (Hebrews 5:9).

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

German bombers swarmed the sky, carrying their deadly payloads—tons of bombs. Hitler, Germany’s bloodthirsty dictator, boasted that he would march through London within weeks.

The Londoners called the dreaded bombing raids the blitzkrieg, German for lightning. Almost miraculously, the city and country survived months of bombings almost nightly.

Later in World War II, the tables were turned and the Germans knew what it was to face invasion. This time the invasion was brutally successful. The German empire crumbled under bombings and destructive armies. Starvation, pain, death, and all that goes with war, ravaged the land.

No one can adequately understand the horrors of invasion until he has experienced it. We in Canada and the United States know nothing of what Germany experienced.

Yet, we are facing a calculated, destructive invasion just as real as that in World War II. It was planned by Satan and his diabolic hosts. This invasion has swept around the globe. Its effects are more devastating than nuclear warfare or acts of terrorism.

This invasion is taking place almost unnoticed by millions of people. Probably the most accurate name to describe this invasion is humanism.

This invading humanism is man worship. It is a philosophy, and it is a religion, winning millions of converts, even from the churches. Humanism invades in many forms. Some are obvious and some are more subtle.

One of the hideous forms humanism takes is the idea that man can do anything, given enough education and effort. Millions worship science and its achievements, hoping that man can eliminate most of his problems.

Within the last few years this type of humanism has lost some converts. As the world situation has become more hopeless, many are losing faith in man’s abilities to lift himself out of his despair. Instead of turning to God, most of these people are trying to find peace in drugs, lawlessness, and even suicide.

In one very subtle form this idea is filtering into the Christian church. How many of us trust our physical strength, our moneymaking abilities, or our built-up securities to provide all our needs? Will it take health failure or economic collapse to help us see this as crass humanism?

Another subtle form of humanism is the idea that man decides his own goals and his own future. Modern education reeks with this man-centered philosophy. The main goal of schooling and the main goal of life centers on trying to get ahead in the world and on perpetuating our materialistic, humanistic society.

It is good to learn a trade, but that is not the Christian’s main purpose in life. To be a genuine Christian and to be a testimony for Christ is more important. Our vocations should serve those Christian goals. The Apostle Paul did not spend his life amassing a fortune from the tent industry in Tarsus. He made enough to help him most effectively fulfill his evangelistic calling.

Unfortunately, some Christian schools and churches bow to humanistic goals. Spiritual things are tacked on to a moneymaking, comfort-seeking rat race.

Some claim to be working hard to make plenty of money to keep the church’s programs running. That sounds noble. If that is the case with some of us, then let’s plan to live as if our incomes were below the national average. Think how much more could go to the work of the Lord if professing Christians would sacrifice most of their pleasure equipment, lavish extras in home and car, high restaurant bills—the list could go on.

What shall you and I as Christians do about this subtle humanistic invasion?

We can escape, but the way will require sacrifice in our humanistic, materialistic society.

Hear the Bible call to deny humanism. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and, take, up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

This means denying man-centered ideas and goals. It means denying pleasures and riches to serve Christ and our fellowmen.

Stop! Evaluate your life. Check your priorities. Put Christ first. Stop the humanistic invasion in your own life. Pray for Holy Spirit power. Stop the invasion and put Christian living and witnessing above self.

“But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. I have suffered the loss of all things . . . that I may win C7irssi“(Philippians 3:7, 8).

-Roger Berry

How is a God pressed into this kind of human mold superior to no God at all?

We would first suggest that God should be consulted as to what He believes about man. This is readily accomplished when we accept the authority of the Bible as the authority of God over us. So, in contrast to the Unitarian belief, let us consider the Biblical teaching of God and the relationship between God and man.

• That He alone is God. That besides Him there is none else.
• That this God is the perfection of holiness. All His ways are truth and righteousness altogether.
• That this God is eternally self-existing, without beginning or end. He is not bound by the time frame He created for the world.
• That this God, in the begin ning, was the exclusive Creator of the heaven and the earth, and of all that it contains (Genesis 1:1).
• That He made man in His own image, thus set apart and over the rest of creation.
• That Adam was good (even perfect), in the day he was created.
• That Adam was commanded not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and forewarned that death would result from eating this forbidden fruit.
• That the eating of the forbid den fruit was the first cause of both sin and death in the world.

Further, let us consider what the Bible teaches about human nature.

• That the entire human race is directly subjected to a sinful nature and to death as the result of Adam’s sin. From ourselves, we have no more power over sin than we have over our physical death.
• That there is none righteous, no not one.
• All we like sheep have gone astray.
• All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Finally, we are also confronted with the consequences of our sin.

• That the wages of sin is death.
• The soul that sinneth, it shall die.
• That we must all appear before the judgment seat of a righteous God.
• That the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all nations that forget God.
• That those under the curse of sin, depart into everlasting fire, at the command of God.
• That God takes vengeance in flaming fire on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now it is commonly thought that the idea that God will judge the world, and especially the teaching of eternal hell, would be contrary to the love of God. But we must keep in mind that the loving God loves righteousness and hates its opposite—wickedness.

The Bible reveals a God who is not only loving, but a God who is good, indeed perfect in character.

Now perhaps by some stretch of the imagination, you could visualize a federal judge who so loved criminals that he would throw every case out of court and set every criminal free. However, there is no way that such a judge could also be good. For if he were good, he could not possibly ignore the laws against criminal acts. In fact, you would soon realize that his professed love for murderers and rapists proves that this judge does not love the victims or the righteousness of the law.

On the other hand, the judge who loves justice will judge impartially every case that comes before him. As you learned to know such a judge, and observe his good work, you could soon sense the seriousness of the crime by the just sentences imposed. If one case got a $50.00 fine plus $200.00 restitution, you would know that the offense was comparatively small and justice was rather easily satisfied. Now, if another defendant gets multiple life sentences with no possibility of parole, you would not accuse the judge of being unloving. You would realize that a truly heinous crime had been committed.

Likewise, we can gauge the reality of the wages of our sins in two areas. First, is the fact of physical death. Our death is a witness that sin is as real as it is portrayed in the Bible. Death may seem a long ways off, but death finally claims the very last of every generation. We are not going anywhere. This holding cell called earth, may be a pretty pleasant place, even while death rattles her sabers, and snatches another 140,000 people away every day. And those unprepared will face the terror of eternal judgment.

Secondly, we are to gauge the reality of our sin by the law of God, Without the righteous standard of law, sin is easily underrated. You can fly in a plane at 36,000 feet at 600 miles an hour, with hardly a sense of even going anywhere. But remove the wings and rev those same engines to 600 MPH on the ground. What do you have? A terrifying deadly menace, destroying everything in its path, until that plane is itself destroyed. Likewise, if we line sin up with the law of God, we see how terrifying and destructive it is.

The fact is, sin may not seem very deadly. Yet it is constantly working death in us. That is why we take you on to the only possible remedy for sin.

• Even as the only possible life for our flesh is in our blood (no circulating blood, no life).
• Since the wages of sin is death, there is no forgiveness of sin apart from the shedding of blood.
• That forgiveness of sin centers exclusively on the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross.
• That there can be salvation in no other name than in Jesus.
• That the grip of the bondage to sin must be broken.
• That this breakup of sin happens only in our repentance from all sin.
• That the salvation that tran spires at repentance and faith in Christ is followed with bap tism and formal identity with the people of God.
• That the new Christian is not only forgiven, but washed and set. free from those sins.
• That the new Christian, having received the Holy Spirit, now lives in active pursuit of the will of God, and that by faith righteousness now displaces the former lusts in which he ignorantly lived.
• That the new Christian uses the Bible as necessary food for his soul.
• That he now regards the teachings and commands of Scripture as the path of life.
• That the new Christian now welcomes adversity and trial, as a necessary component of vitality in the faith.
• That the new Christian now confesses his faith in Jesus Christ. He yearns to see others come to that same salvation he received through the precious blood of Christ.
• That the new Christian lives in reverence toward the God who saved him and lives in accountability of the day when Jesus comes again.

SUGGESTED BIBLE READINGS Genesis 1-3; Isaiah 53; Exodus 20; Romans 5-8; Acts 1, 2; Matthew 25

-Lester Troyer

Vows—do they mean anything today? Most of you who are married have made vows something like the following:

Vows for the husband: “Will you, in the presence of God and these witnesses, take to be your wedded wife. Will you love and cherish her, provide and care for her, in health and in sickness, in prosperity and adversity, exercise patience, kindness, and forbearance toward her, and live with her in peace as becometh a faithful Christian husband, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?”

Love and Cherish Her

It has been said that marriage does not need love to keep it going; love needs marriage to keep it going. Sadly, many marriages go on without love, sometimes for the sake of children. Children are a good reason for keeping a marriage intact, but we need more.

Love has to do with our emotions and these can be as changeable as the weather. We should seek to grow in our love, rather than just seeking to feel good. We see lustful infatuation so often in our day. When we settle the fact that we are married “until death do us part,” we seek to make this an experience of love. So, if you do not love your spouse, start loving her. The husband of a sweet couple shared that three years after they were married, he was sure he had the wrong wife. But they got back to God. When I learned to know them, they were a godly couple who loved each other dearly.

Provide and Care for Her

Notice that this part of the vows only applies to the husband. We live in a time when two household incomes are the norm. This was not the case in bygone years. Today, many households still make it on the husband’s income. Many Godfearing mothers happily serve at home. Christians want to take seriously 1 Timothy 5:8: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Many of us pay twice for the education of our children, because we have our own Christian schools. We take seriously helping with the needs, medical and otherwise, of our fellow believers. Even with those extra expenses, many families still make it on one income.

On July 22, 2004, I had a hip replacement. The recovery and healing of that experience were a reminder of the commitment my wife made. Many sleepless nights and restless days made it very clear that my companion was dedicated to caring for me. In November of that year, we experienced a worse calamity, when we were in an accident and both of us were “laid up” for several months. What a blessing it was to be able to share in the many sleepless nights. To talk together and to comfort each other was again a reminder of the commitment we made to each other forty years earlier.

I have read accounts of married people who left their partners because of sickness or accident. As I wrote this article, the Schiavo case was being played out on the national scene. Her husband wanted to keep the feeding tube removed, while the parents of his wife tried their best to have it reinserted. I learned that the husband had been with another woman. But what about his commitment to his wife? Jesus said, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:5, 6).

Exercise Patience, Kindness, and Forbearance Toward Her

An unkind word to our spouse should be like a clap of thunder on a clear day. If the sun were shining in a cloudless sky and we heard a loud clap of thunder, we would all wonder what’s going on. Words, when spoken, cannot be taken back into our mouths. We may, and should, apologize, but the hurt will remain for a long time. The challenge is to set a watch at our lips. Ask God to help you be patient, kind, and loving at all times.

It seems strange how easy it is to overlook our own failures and make excuses for our mistakes. We seem to have a lot of forbearance when it comes to ourselves. The story is told of a wife who left the faucet on in the barn one evening. Her husband quickly told her what a terrible mess he found the next morning. Sometime later, he made the same mistake. “Why,” he said, “it just didn’t look so bad when I did it.”

May God help us to be loving and kind to our companions and hard on ourselves. “Charity [love] suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil” (1 Corinthians 13:4, 5).

-Allan Miller

Our Changing Earth

We tend to think the earth we stand on is very solid. However, occasional catastrophic events demonstrate that it can turn fluid at times, and very quickly geologic evidences show colossal tectonic events have renovated our earth in the past (Job 12:15).

On August 17, 1959, a severe earthquake hit West Yellowstone Park in Montana. A tidal wave swept down the 7-mile Hebgan Lake and over the dam. A 20-foot wall of water continued down the Madison Valley. As it neared the mouth of the valley half of a 7,600-foot high mountain broke loose and rushed into the valley and slid up the other side like water. Eighty million tons of rock dammed the valley and forced the water back onto a campground area. Twenty-eight people were estimated drowned or buried in the slide.

Another tectonic event that shows how quickly and massive geologic change can be, took place in 1929 in the Atlantic Ocean. On that day, twelve transatlantic cables were broken one by one. More recent research has revealed that an earthquake dislodged a block of the continental shelf near Newfoundland. It slid into the deep ocean and started a turbidity current that traveled 430 miles at 60 miles per hour. It laid down a 2-3 foot thick sediment layer over a 40,000 square mile area.

Down through history, geologic events have caused tidal waves (called tsunamis in eastern countries). Submarine landslides, volcanoes, earthquakes, or extraterrestrial objects such as asteroid impacts can set off these waves. Volcanic explosions cause depressions, called calderas, in the ocean floor. From the void left by expelled material, waves are generated. Physical features in the Mediterranean region indicate that the explosion of a volcano called Santorini near Italy in 1490 B.C. left sea deposits 750 feet above sea level on a nearby island. It also deposited a thick sedimentary deposit over much of the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Geologists also have discovered about 18 impact areas where asteroids from space are thought to have struck the earth, causing tremendous waves.

Water “Overturns the Earth”

The catastrophic geologic upheaval of world destruction in Noah’s flood (Genesis 7) deposited sedimentary rock layers an average of two miles deep around the world. Some of these layers contain numberless fossil life forms of plant and animal life. This was a hydraulic event in which “all the fountains of the great deep [were] broken up, and the win-dows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). Waters covered the highest mountains and “prevailed exceedingly” upon the earth for 150 days (nearly half a year). Currents flowing back and forth exerted tremendous forces. After a year, the waters receded and the “mountains ascended and the valleys descended” (Psalm 104:8 [original Hebrew]). God “set a bound” (v. 9) by different elevations and gravity, that the waters would not overflow the land again. The continental plates now remain largely exposed.

The tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean on the morning after Christmas, December 26, 2004, was set off by a deep-ocean earthquake near Sumatra. It sent about a 90-foot wave across northern Sumatra and a wave up to 30 feet as far away as Sri Lanka southeast of India. It reached Africa where many died along the coasts in Somalia and Tanzania. No one will ever know the exact death toll of people living on coasts and islands around the Indian Ocean. Estimates are that 175,000 were killed and 106,000 were missing.

The cause of all this havoc was a shift in the deep Sunda Trench off the east coast of Sumatra. Within three or four minutes a 750-mile length of the sea floor ruptured and displaced a section half the size of California up about six feet. The power exerted was equal to about 100 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Since water can’t be compressed, a shock wave was generated. It could travel as fast as 480 miles per hour. This force, though imperceptible in the deep ocean, built up to a plateau of water as it climbed the shore and inundated the land.

The multitudes of lives snuffed out and the magnitude of suffering and grief caused by such an event raises a moral question in many people’s minds. If there is a Creator God, who can control the elements, why does He do this?

The Big “Why” Question

For those who deny God, this of course should not make a problem. To evolutionists, we are just material elements, like the earth, with no purpose and no future. They advise getting over it by talking a lot about it, then moving on. Some use drugs to numb the feelings of the moment and forget it. Without God, people often harden their hearts to human agony and to God’s call in a disaster (Psalms 90:3).

Is there a moral question, or do things just happen? Since God is Creator and Sustainer of the universe, why such misery and loss of life from natural events (and human atrocities)? Jewish people in Israel are also asking, “does God care” when their children, women, and men are blown to pieces. Even Americans can be back to business in a few minutes when another suicide bombing hits the news. Innocent people being killed, maimed, and mangled doesn’t appall us as it once did.

Our Western society today, with its sanitized version of Christianity, cannot tolerate the concept of a God who will turn the wicked “into hell, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17). Most think “surely my lying, hatred, stealing, adultery, abortion, and so forth is not that bad. God loves me.”

God and Satan Are at Work

In a world where the Ten Commandments are ignored and wicked acts and relationships are condoned, good and evil are reversed (Isaiah 5:20). People follow Satan in sin and then, in rebellion, accuse God for trouble that comes. This is implied in a U. S. News column titled, “Mother Nature, Terrorist.” While events such as the Indian Ocean tsunami are called “acts of God,” we do not equate Him with evil, merciless killers. Terrorists follow an ideology of intimidation, fear, and murder until all submit to their idea of God. Their doctrine says, “If any turn back, then seize them and kill them, wherever you find them.”

It is Satan who uses the fear of physical death to bind people (Hebrews 2:15). Jesus never did anything Mke that. He is the minister of life. His children are to return gi/_ d for evil, turn the other cheek, and suffer wrong (1 Corinthians 6:7). God is merciful and kind. Even in these “acts of God,” he turns “man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men” (Psalm 90:3). If God, with a word, raises the ocean and brings a warning to millions through the death of hundreds of thousands, it is God’s call to repent. In Indonesia, Asia, and Africa churches are being burned and Christians are being killed by the thousands for confessing Jesus. (The media doesn’t seem to notice.)

Terrorist threats of death are nothing compared to what God will finally do to a world rejecting His Saviour. To God, “The nations are as a drop of a bucket” (Isaiah 40:15). Although God’s judgments are certain, He is compassionate and offers men a plan for salvation or deliverance. In the days before the destruction of humanity by a worldwide flood (Genesis 7), God’s longsuffering waited 120 years (1 Peter 3:20). Actually, the truly innocent, through the shed blood of Christ, are released from the horrors of heathen cultures and are the largest population in heaven.

The proof of the true Creator God is that He loves His work. Job says, “Thou shall call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands” (Job 14:15). Will you accept His call? Unlike the terrorists, God is merciful and gives you a voluntary choice in life. But man does not determine the consequences.

Resources: “The Night the Mountain Fell,” Ed Christopherson, Acts and Facts—April 2005, Impact article #382.

-By Elvin Stauffer