Jesus died to provide the way:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

“He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life” (1 John 5:12).

“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

CHOOSE THE WAY. . .

Believe, receive, and obey Jesus:

“He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).

“He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24).

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

WALK IN THE WAY…

Continue following Jesus. Read the Bible, and join a group of faithful believers.

“If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31, 32).

“And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” (Acts 2:42).

An “overflow” crowd listened as Pope Urban II preached a persuasive sermon:

“Come forward to the defense of Christ…. Fight a just war …. Set forth, then upon the way to the holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the evil race, and keep it for yourself. . . Jerusalem, fruitful above others lands, where rested our Lord.”

Thus began a move by so-called Christian people to fight a so-called holy war against the Muslim Turks who controlled Jerusalem.

Each of the estimated quarter million Europeans who set out for Jerusalem to fight wore a cloth cross sewed or pinned on his clothing, either on his shoulder or chest. For that reason, these fighters were called crusaders, a word meaning “cross bearers.”

These “cross bearers” were also sword bearers. The words of the Bible that “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” literally came true for thousands of the crusaders. Famine overwhelmed some and killing took thousands more.

The Crusades lasted for almost 200 years. For a while crusaders controlled Jerusalem, but those who went soon lost their desire for preserving the great city. Their motives were wealth, new land, escaping work, and even prison sentences in their home countries.

Before it was all over there was even a children’s crusade. In all, more than 50,000 children, mostly under age 12, led by two young boys, set out for Jerusalem on foot. They expected the Mediterranean Sea to divide before them as the Red Sea divided before the Children of Israel. Needless to say, none of them ever reached Jerusalem.

We modern people tend to laugh at the Crusades as the result of a mixed-up, superstitious people hundreds of years ago. Surely enlightened twenty-first-century Christians would not stoop to do something so absurd in the name of religion. Or would they?

Those eleventh- and twelfth-century crusaders are surprisingly similar to many people living now.

Thousands are even now fighting crusades against governments and peoples, all in the name of Christianity. They may, in the name of Christianity, join in fighting against modern Muslims or others to “defend” Christianity or their countries from the threat. They fail to recognize that Jesus taught Christians to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

Others are fighting and protesting, not using swords or guns. Their weapons are more subtle than that! Their weapons may be so-called nonviolent demonstrations, sit-ins, self-burnings, boycotts, verbal abuse, and on and on.

Like the crusaders of old, these social-gospel people, political reformers, pacifists, or whatever they may call themselves, are out to seek some kind of earthly utopia or perfect society where everybody is “Christianized” and loves everybody else. Again, they fail to see that Christ calls Christians to preach the Gospel of truth, the only way to truly transform people’s lives.

Some, like the crusaders, may have underhanded motives for personal gain, but I’m convinced the majority are just caught up by the spirit of the age, blindly following anything that comes along.

The Crusades proved that peace and Christianity could not come by the sword or any kind of resistance. Yet modern “crusaders” have forgotten this lesson and tried again to reform the world by legislation, violence, and even nonviolence. It won’t work!

The Bible answer for reaching a corrupt society has always been and still is: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19, 20).

“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4).

The Christian’s job is to teach the all things of the Gospel. This alone will change men’s lives. Man’s pressure tactics only treat the symptoms of evil in man, not the sin that is the cause.

God needs Christians who are willing to begin a crusade, not to bring revolution in society or fight violence with weapons, but to take the Gospel to the world. It will have its effects on the way men live and treat each other! Carrying the Gospel of Christ we can be true cross bearers in a sinful world.

-by Roger L. Berry

One of the most interesting geologic events of history is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone (Gen. 19:24-28). The area around the south end of the Dead Sea is still a barren plain of salt, sulfur, and bitumen (asphalt) deposits.

In recent years the level of the Dead Sea is falling because Israel and Jordan are irrigating from the Jordan River. The southern part would be dry again if it were not for a canal that Israel has cut to let water flow through. Israel maintains a shallow lake for the large motels and health resorts in the area.

In a tour of Israel in April, 2007, a group of us spent the first night at a motel on the west shore of the Dead Sea. After dusk some of us men went out for a swim. One of the young men swam a long way out and could touch bottom the whole way. The density of the water has risen to 30% solids and has an oily consistency. We could not sink in the water. When I pulled myself down to my ears I would bob up nearly to my waistline.

The Geology

The Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea are part of what is called the Great Syria-African Rift. This break in the earth’s crust extends 4,500 miles from the Lebanon Mountains to Mozambique in southeast Africa. The walls along this crack are 6,600 feet high in some places. Lake Tanganyika lies along this rift and is the world’s longest lake at 420 miles and also the second deepest at 4,708 feet deep. Lake Superior, the world’s largest fresh water lake is only 1,330 feet deep in comparison. This matches the Dead Sea, also part of this rift, at 1,312 feet deep. However, the Dead Sea is the lowest place on the earth’s surface at 1,310 feet below sea level, making the bottom 2,622 feet below sea level. Even the Sea of Galilee is 630 feet below the Mediterranean Sea. The Jordan River drops 680 feet running 67 miles down to the Dead Sea.

Formation of the Rift

There are many evidences of great geologic events found in the earth’s surface. Features such as the Grand Canyon show colossal erosion as the continents rose above the waters sometime after the worldwide flood described in Genesis 7. Creation scientists have shown where earthen barriers were breached and large lakes of water, as much as 3,000 cubic miles, were released above the Grand Canyon.

The Great Rift, in contrast, shows a rending of the earth’s crust with features such as volcanoes, lava flows, and hot springs along the rift. The extinct volcano Mt. Kilimanjaro at 19,331 feet is the highest mountain in Africa. In Israel there are hot springs along the Dead Sea and Sea of Galilee. The houses in Capernaum and around the Sea of Galilee are built of black volcanic rock.

It appears that the Great Rift occurred some years after the Genesis Flood at the event briefly touched on in Genesis 10:25: “In his days [Peleg's] was the earth divided.” The division in Peleg’s day does refer to the physical earth. The Hebrew word for divide means “to split.” An associated meaning is “a channel of water.” Peleg’s name means “earthquake.” Even secular scientists attribute the Great Rift to a time when the continental plates separated. They now speak of one original continent called Pangaea from which the present hemispheres drifted apart.

The name Josephus, a Jewish historian, used for the Dead Sea in his day was Lake Asphaltitis. Bitumen, which is found around the Dead Sea, is asphalt in its natural state. These are called fossil fuels because they are formed from buried vegetation from the first world that perished (Genesis 7). Bitumen and gas that bubbles up in the Dead Sea are evidence of petroleum deposits under the Dead Sea area that must have served as fuel in God’s judgment at Sodom.

The Cataclysm at Sodom

In Genesis 18:16-33 God came to Abraham and told him He was going to destroy Sodom for its great sins. After Abraham pled with God to spare the city, even for just ten righteous people, God went His way. After taking Lot, his wife, and two daughters out of Sodom, God rained brimstone and fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain (Genesis 19:24). Israeli geologists have proposed how oil, gas, sulfur, salt, and bitumen could have been forced up through fault lines that run along each side of the valley. The flammable substance ignited and produced an inferno that destroyed the valley, the cities, and that which grew on the ground (Genesis 19:25). Abraham gives us an eyewitness account from Hebron. When he arose, in the morning, and looked over the mountains, he saw that “the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace” (verse 28).

Sometime after Moses assembled the first five books of the Bible, the vale of Siddim was spoken of with the editorial note “which is the salt sea” (Genesis 14:3). The southern end of the Dead Sea valley is a shallow overflow area that is drying up and returning to its former state, although barren. Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain were in this area. Along the east (Jordan side) there are remains of small cities. The Wall Street Journal carried an article recently about archaeologists who were excavating sites to find Sodom. There are also salt deposits in the surrounding hills and many caves. This is the area where Lot fled from the coming holocaust on Sodom (Genesis 19:18-22). He first went to Zoar (today there is a place called Neve Zohar) then to a cave in the mountains. Visitors can see pillars of mineral salts called “Lot’s wife” in the area (Genesis 19:26).

God the Creator, Sustainer, and Judge

Sodom’s civil affairs were similar to ours today. They venerated nature, putting animals above man and God. They were violent. Children and women ruling over them (Isaiah 3:12) and an infamous list of abominations abounded (Romans 1:23-32). They changed the natural use of the body burning in their lusts one to another, women with women and men with men (Romans 1:26, 27) (sodomy—Genesis 19:5). In the midst of these sins, comes the suffering of the children, aged, and disadvantaged. Does God care? God said of Sodom, “I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me” (Gen. 18:20, 21). The judgment God brought was an act of mercy bringing the tyranny, fear, and suffering to an end.

In our day of evolutionary deception, these physical evidences are tangible evidence of God’s work in His world. The greatest physical evidence, of course, of God to whom man will give account is the 2J/2 miles (average) of fossil rock layers around the earth. Countless plant and animal life forms record the first world that perished. “The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:3-7).

God does cares and intervenes in the affairs of men. There is a place in man’s being that cannot be filled until he makes peace with his God. Few find this rest with the personal God of the Bible. The revelation of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures, the conscience God has put into man, and the evidences in our world of the things God has made (Romans 1:20) are influences that God has given man to call him to repent and be saved. “God that made the world and all things therein . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men . . . that they should seek the Lord . . . and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:24-27).

Truly God has been gracious in reaching out to reveal Himself to humankind. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

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-by Elvin Stauffer

For the first time, Polo got to see gunpowder, paper, silk cloth, and other Chinese inventions.

One of the most unusual Chinese inventions, in Marco’s opinion, was paper money. Europeans of that day used only coins made of valuable metals such as silver or gold.

Polo marveled at how the little slips of paper could be as valuable as silver and gold. It further surprised him to learn the money was valuable because the ruler, the great Kublai Kahn, said so.

The great Kahn said the money was valuable and enforced its use by law. No one dared defy the Kahn’s authority.

Today, paper money has much the same status it did in the Kahn’s empire. Our money more or less represents a certain amount of buying power. It’s only valuable because the government says it’s to be used and because people have confidence in it. In recent years, plastic money (credit cards) has taken the place of most paper money. Again, the whole system is built on trust and “faith” in the dollar, Euro, Yen, or whatever currency a person uses.

Should the government collapse or should people quit believing in our money system or should inflation go wild and unchecked, our paper and plastic money would become worthless.

We don’t need to know the shaky facts about our money system to realize that money is not the most valuable thing in life. Life’s valuables can’t be computed in dollars and cents.

The Book of Proverbs gives us God’s insight into life’s valuables. “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth un- derstanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. . . . Incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding. . . . The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.”

Money may be helpful sometimes, but true wisdom, knowing and obeying the Holy One, is all that will be important in the final analysis. Many wealthy men have died in mental and emotional turmoil. Somehow the material glitter of life became strangely dim for them.

True wisdom, the fear of the Lord, is eternally valuable. We human beings so often attach value to the valueless as far as eternity is concerned. It’s so easy to attach flimsy “paper money value” to many things in life.

Some give their money, their cars, their clothes, or their education top value. Boys sometimes value their looks or their abilities, girls their charm. These things might be all right to have if we can use them wisely. But they can easily become more valuable to us than eternal things. Of what do our lives consist—obeying God or obeying mammon (money)?

“Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). Of what does true living consist? Paul said, “For to me to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). In 1 Timothy 6:6, he emphasizes what we should seek in life, “Godliness with contentment is great gain.”

What will it be for us? paper money ethics or true wisdom and godliness? Do certain things— money, fame, beautiful physiques become so valuable because society says so?

How much better to seek godliness. Godliness is the greatest gain because God’s Word says so. God’s promises to the one seeking wisdom and holy living never lose their value.

I want to trust the true valuables, eternal things that keep their value because the King says so!

With due respect to men who acknowledged many great Biblical principles when they founded the nation, I question just what it is the evangelicals mean when they talk about the need of “taking back the country.” Do they want the return of Sunday “blue laws” that close stores and businesses for the Lord’s Day? Is it temperance laws and the laws against public profanity and indecent exposure (immodest dress)? Is it the old days when divorce meant an actual court battle? Is it to
roll back Roe vs. Wade? Or perhaps we could break new ground with legislation banning TV time for schoolchildren?

If this is what we want, we don’t need the government to do it. Christians can take Sunday to remind ourselves that God made the world and everything in it, that He is holy, and that ultimately His Word prevails. We are also perfectly free not to go shopping, dine out, or even to visit the newly opened Creation Museum on Sunday. And since Christians will answer to God for profanity and violence, we can shut down the device(s) that endlessly spue this awful stuff on us and our children (thus agreeing with God concerning the things He hates).

It gets even better from here. We who are married can refuse to become fools. How? By keeping the vows made at the first marriage altar. We can give our children the security of knowing that Father and Mother will never divorce. “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:8; Mark 10:9). Pastors will perform a vital role by refusing to perform marriages for those with a former partner still living. Who do we think we are, to open the gates that Jesus Himself firmly closed? “If, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress” (Romans 7:3).

We also can move to protect church youth groups. “But fornication, . . . let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints ” (Ephesians 5:3). This clearly calls for a controlled atmosphere of modesty and decency, with a code of conduct conducive to keeping youthful lusts in check. We cannot reveal the body in ways that should be concealed. (If I’m reaching concerned mothers in the readership, there are online sources that specialize in modest clothing.) We cannot break down for entertainment or pleasure the sacredness of sexuality. We need to rebuild healthy reserve between young men and young women. Many have taken vows of chastity, only to break them later. However sincere, young people who run among wild horses are bound to get trampled.

I share these things because the verdict is already in. These are recent statistics as given by a psychologist:

• The average young person watches 4½ hours of TV daily. There is no way parental teaching can compete against the moral filth and violence portrayed as normal.
• American teens are the most violent in the world. In the U.S., 50% of all felonies are committed by males 15-21 years of age.
• 80% of high school seniors have been drunk.
• 50% of seniors have tried drugs.
• The number of sexually active 15-year-old girls has doubled since 1990.
• 10% of 15- to 19-year-old girls become pregnant every year. U.S. teen pregnancies and abortions are among the highest in the world.

The present moral climate results in two things: Young girls learn that they are throwaway commodities of pleasure with neither the value nor the holding power for the lifetime commitment of a responsible man. Young men fall into the self-centered pursuit of instant gratification at the expense of real manhood, marriage, and fatherhood (in that order). Young men who are good husband material are becoming an endangered species.

Is the young generation happy with this order of things? Consider this: The suicide rate has doubled since 1970. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among teens (after car crashes). It is seriously considered by 1/3 of teens.

Our young people have been duped. According to a recent poll reported by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the biggest factors of happiness for people aged 13-24 are good relationships (family and friends), and faith. And on the negative side: booze, drugs, and sex.

Young men were once taught trades in preparation for courtship and marriage. The girls learned their own set of responsibilities. They could cook a meal, keep the house, and plant a garden. Both sexes knew that life and love and marriage and children were a challenge. They took it on, were equal to the task, and were fulfilled in doing it. The church culture supported this system. Today the culture undermines this system.

I think it is us elders (even church elders), who are responsible for the confusion. Many chose to make temporary the marriage God made permanent. God did it for good reasons. Those reasons are Tony and Tammy and Marsha and Kristina and Chad and Craig and Will and James and Jered. Yes, these are real young people with their real names who have fallen through the cracks. These are just a few of many I have known personally. Their real numbers run in the millions. They are the reason I am passionate about this subject. The church may not be directly responsible for many of these. But the breakup of marriage and family surely is. And to whom should people be able to look, if not to those who claim to know God?

It is not the government we need to take back. It begins with my commitment, my integrity, and my fidelity. How else will we answer to God for the loss of a generation?

We end up paying double if we despise the law of God. We pay a fearsome price as the very foundation of the culture comes apart.

Unless we turn, we pay yet again when we face judgment before an angry God. “Come, and let us return unto the lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up” (Hosea 6:1).

-by Lester Troyer