You have no doubt heard the term “born again” used by many people. Many people, from movie stars, to politicians, to the ordinary man on the street say they are born again. But what does it really mean? How can I experience a change that will bring peace and meaning to my life? The Bible shows the way.

SEEK A NEW LIFE . . .

“Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6).

Jesus said: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

SEEK A NEW CONFESSION . . .

“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).

SEEK A NEW MASTER . . .

Jesus said, “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).

SEEK A NEW WALK . . .

“As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him” (Colossians 2:6).

Jesus said, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed” (John 8:31).

SEEK A NEW FELLOWSHIP . . .

“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3).

“Then they that gladly received his word were baptized. And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” (Acts 2:41, 42).

“And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:24, 25).

A family in a small Virginia community lived through just such an experience. On a fairly warm, clear night in early spring, ice came plunging from the sky. A neighbor, who happened to be on his porch at the time, saw another hunk of ice splatter on a nearby roadway. He heard or saw no airplane from which the ice might have dropped.

You’ve seen hail in a summer thunderstorm. A hailstone large enough to smash through a tin roof would indeed be rare. But such a piece of ice from a clear sky would be even more bizarre.

An investigation took place, but nothing conclusive turned up to explain the destructive chunk of ice.

The story has been reported of a German boy who was struck by a pea-sized meteorite in June of 2009. If the story is true, this would be the first reported incident of someone being hit by a meteorite and living to tell about it since 1954 when a woman in Alabama was hit by a meteorite.

It seems that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity. Some blame it on “global warming” or the more current buzzwords, “climate change.” People are becoming scared about what might happen to them. On top of those fears are the disasters brought on by mankind himself—acts of terrorism and violence and the possibility of economic collapse.

No matter how safe we think we are or how well protected we are or how healthy we are, disaster could befall us at any time. The writer of Proverbs was right when he said, “Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1).

I once heard of a man who built a reinforced house of stone to guarantee he would have a safe place in case of storms and atomic attacks. But Christ is the only guaranteed shelter in the time of storm.

Nothing we can do will prevent earthquakes, tornadoes, tidal waves, falling hunks of ice, or meteorites. We must surrender our lives to God and learn to trust His will in these situations. Here are some promises God has given the believer to claim in disaster situations—and always.

God is concerned about us. He is aware of our needs. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29-31).

God will protect through dangers. Even if our lives should be taken in a disaster, God still protects us from evil and eternal death. “The Lord is faithful, who shall stablish you, and keep you from evil” (2 Thessalonians 3:3).

God won’t overtest us with trials. He never gives believers more than they can bear with His help. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

God will preserve our souls. “The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul” (Psalm 121:7).

All things work out for the good of God’s people. “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). As the songwriter has said, “God hath not promised skies always blue.” Neither does He assure us “flower-strewn pathways.” “But,” continued the hymn writer, “God hath promised strength for the day.”

The chances are small that a chunk of ice will soon come crashing through your roof. But numerous other things as disastrous or worse could happen to you at any time.

Are you prepared to surrender to whatever God may choose to teach you through the experience? If we let them, hard experiences will help us turn to God for strength and power. Trials can also be our undoing—the choice is with us.

Yes, strange things keep on happening. We think disasters will come, but certainly not to us. We never know what a day may bring forth. Look to God for help.

Roger Berry

The crane asked for the promised reward, but the fox grinned wickedly and replied: “Be content. You have put your head into a fox’s mouth and taken it out again safely. That ought to be reward enough for you.” The moral of the story is, “Gratitude and greed do not go together.”

The fox certainly pictures the person who is continually grasping for things, perhaps making a show of gratitude or thankfulness, then continuing in ungratefulness.

How many young people have you met who were like the fox? They were only too happy to ask for help when they had a desperate need. However, when you helped them they showed little or no gratitude. You felt used and unappreciated.

What Is Greed?

In the Bible, “greed” is often called covetousness. The English word comes from a Latin word meaning cupidity or desire. People want what they want, when they want it, in whatever way they can get it. They will run over other people and disrespect them in their greedy quest for what they want.

Covetousness or greed involves many areas of life. People are greedy for material possessions and money. They may cheat, lie, steal, and even murder to get the things they want. When they get it, they repeat the vicious cycle to get even more. Greed often controls sexual desire. People will do whatever they can to fulfill their desires, even if it means ruining another’s marriage to get it or using another person only to hate and discard that person after they have what they want. The Bible often links greed and immorality together and condemns them. “No whoremonger [immoral person], nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5:5).

What is the Solution to Greed?

We must beware that we be not guilty of greed and ingratitude as was the fox. Greed is sin and rebellion against God and against other people. Fleeing from greed and ingratitude will dramatically improve our relationship with other people and, most of all, with God. Taking God’s way will bring us peace and satisfaction and will give us purpose for living. Greed will be replaced by respect and appreciation for others and thankfulness to God for changing our lives. Greed will be replaced by generosity and gratitude that reach out to help others and please God.

Genuine gratitude and greed cannot exist side by side in one person. Gratitude can come only from a heart and mind that is changed and rooted in the things of God. “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:1, 2).

May we not join the masses around us who live in greed and selfishness. “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful” (Colossians 3:15).

Roger Berry

Atheists are putting on their own push with advertising on billboards and buses such as this one:

THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING
AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE

These people must believe that an actual God in the universe is something like a cancer that would keep you from enjoying your life. But if I were trying to shed my faith in God, I wouldn’t find any reassurance in such advertising. Suppose symptoms of cancer are present, but my doctor says I “probably” don’t have cancer. Wouldn’t I want a biopsy, or at least a second opinion?

In fact, these people do not understand the trade-off. God in control of the universe is the system of certainty and security. We have the resources of immutable laws of nature (for example, the assurance of harvest after planting a garden), as the means of supporting life on earth. The same God has given us the Scriptures for direction on how to live, that we might be delivered from wrongdoing that ultimately turns the mercy and loving-kindness of God into wrath and judgment.

So what is the legacy of Darwinism? It is the denial of the principle of certainty. If it were in accord with science, the Darwinist claims of evolution would have been resolved a long time ago. Scientists are good at proving things in accord with nature and finding ways to get things done. They don’t argue that the earth is round, or that the moon revolves around the sun. They simply present the evidence. They don’t speculate that men could go to the moon, or that megabytes of information could be stored in silicon chips. They explore. They engineer. They invent. All this falls within the confines of the certainty of natural law. No intelligence or ingenuity can overcome what the laws of nature cannot support.

Thus, Darwinism is embraced as the Holy Grail of the learned, not as a science, but as a philosophical foundation of a belief system. This is an awkward way of saying it, because, simply put, Darwinism is a belief system that destroys belief systems. It promises release from a moral/ethical standard which comes from God to man, to which all people are accountable. It promotes the notion of doing what you please without consequences. Theoretically, it all comes back to personal choice—doing what you want to do.

This is the lie that goes all the way back to Eden. The theory could be tried with a hundred unsupervised toddlers on a playground. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” quickly comes into play. Only the bullies “enjoy life.” The rest have plenty to worry about.

But don’t we grow out of that? Absolutely not! In reality, those who write their own rules are forever infringing on the rights of others. That is why we lock up murderers, rapists, thieves, and robbers. Darwinists in America have not learned the lessons of Stalin, Hitler, and others who elevate themselves on the corpses of their own people. Thus, what we didn’t see coming was the sophisticated in-your-face lawlessness and scandal now permeating our whole culture, and threatening our very existence. It has found its way into the highest levels of financial and political power. Honor has given way to dishonor and scandal. Policy and power is increasingly vested in the few who make our choices for us.

Thus, the cultural landscape is morphing into something that could not have been imagined even fifty years ago. True freedom of choice and godlessness are mutually exclusive, a lesson our world has yet to learn.

Christian teachings and Christian moral principles long dominated Western thought. People got married, stayed married, and carried their babies to term. They worked hard to pay their bills and their taxes, spanked their children when they misbehaved, and taught them a vocation. They ran the schools without counselors, policemen, or metal detectors, prayed and read the Bible in the home (and school), and took the whole family to church. Why did they do this? Because they believed in the certainty principle. They believed that God made Heaven and earth in six days, that He made people in His image, that honor and integrity trump pleasure, that punishment of wrong in homes and courts was but a prelude to hellfire for those who ultimately wouldn’t settle their accounts with God.

Within those bounds of personal responsibility and morality, people did enjoy freedom—freedom of press, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience. But with Darwinist uncertainty going mainstream, and conscience not informed with God-defined morality, we thought that wasn’t freedom enough. We didn’t want limits on sexual passions. This led to the rush into hedonism, and stars such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson becoming gods to us.

We altered freedom of press and of speech, to make vulgarity acceptable, and pornography indefinable. And we had to redefine even the right to life to exclude millions of inconvenient babies, thus adding murder to an acceptable lifestyle package.

Yet, any culture that lives for kicks and thrills must, of necessity, increase the dosage and the damage. Licentiousness prevails at the expense of marriage and home and a solid upbringing for children. Sexual wickedness runs itself aground and has no place to turn, but to feed on itself, male with male, and female with female. The Bible describes such cultural reversal as being “against nature,” and transpiring in the context of “evil men and seducers waxing worse and worse,” and also as a people who “treasure up wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

Thus the battle lines are newly drawn. The degrading elements of human passion that we were once expected to curb, we are now compelled to embrace. This turns to haunt us in ways we did not expect.

The goal of Darwinism was to escape moral judgment. The effect though, is the loss of all sound judgment. The only thing left in the unbeliever’s toolbox is man-made dogma. “Truth” becomes whatever world leaders and men in power make it to be, along with coercive regulation to enforce it. It is an awful thing to cut the reins of singular truth from the Almighty, then to vest those powers in demigods.

For example, communism has no power to engage the masses with production, prosperity, and plenty. It could finally offer only deprivation. Regulation is the only tool communism has, and regulation ultimately controls to the death.

Yet we pin our hopes on such. Even science takes the backseat to the ideas on fixing the economy, climate change, or even health care. Apparently, major, costly policy can be implemented on less research, development, and engineering agreement, than goes into a single new automobile model. There are reasons for this, of course. The world quickly rejects the problems with something on four wheels with a motor. Not so, with deeply flawed social or economic policies.

Besides Darwinism, we have raised a second barrier against returning to God. We take to the notion that all belief systems are equal and acceptable—excluding the one of moral certainty—once inscribed in stone. The exclusive righteousness of Biblical Christianity is repackaged to fit as an equal player with the other major religions of the world. We now see religious diversity as a thing to celebrate. The casualty here is truth itself, the loss of the line between good and evil. Professing Christians have been among the chief offenders, living contrary to truth, reducing faith from the responsible way to live into a bogus ticket to Heaven.

Thus like Israel of old, we reject the “fountains of living waters,” only to hew “out cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Yet, ultimately, certainty does prevail—the certainty of sore troubles, and of the judgment of God.

Lester Troyer

The Lake Missoula Washout

I was recently in Washington state and visited the Grand Coulee and the channeled scablands of eastern Washington. I found books of information on the area at Dry Falls near the west end of the coulee. (The word coulee means “dry river.”) This area is the scene of colossal catastrophic erosion from an ancient glacial lake in Montana called Lake Missoula.

Lake Missoula was formed when a lobe of an ice pack from Canada pushed down the Purcell Pass and blocked off the Flat Head River in the panhandle of Idaho. Fast-melting ice sheets at this time, especially in the warming summers, were creating floods in North America and Siberia. When the lake got high enough to float and break up its ice dam (estimated to be 30 miles across and over 2000 feet high) it released about 530 cubic miles of water. It made a horrendous wreck of the area, along with any animals or people in its path. The noise of ice blocks, boulders, trees, and crashing water would have been tremendous, heard one half hour before it arrived. Unique “belt rocks” from the Lake Missoula ice dam area are littered along the path of the washout to the continental shelf in the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River. A huge piece of this rock (moved in ice) is also stranded down in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, 500 miles from its origin.

J. Harlan Bretz was the first scientist to recognize the story told by these geologic features. He presented a paper on his view of their formation by a catastrophic flood to a group of shocked geologists in 1923. The evidence was: huge erratic boulders, some as big as small houses, channels and cliffs eroded into bed rock, dry falls 350 feet high and five times as wide as Niagara Falls, large boulders on the high hills (moved there in ice), and huge gravel bars and silt deposits. There were broad ripple marks 35 feet high and 300 feet from peak to peak on fields where lakes emptied rapidly.

Mr. Bretz was thoroughly castigated and made an outcast in the geologic community. According to one writer, the geologists “based their arguments entirely on the received textbook gospel of slow processes, weak forces, and plenty of time”—uniformitarianism. He further says, “Most scientists go through life believing what they learned in college. They resent challenges to their settled beliefs and dislike those who present them.”

Many scientists today still strongly react to anything that looks like a reversion to the catastrophism of the Biblical creation/flood view believed over 200 years ago. They consider “scientific” geology to have started in 1790. This writer says, “To this day, most geologists consider it nothing less than heresy to invoke a catastrophic explanation for a geologic event.”

Uniformitarianism Is Not New

Educators would like students to believe that slow evolution, over hundreds of millions of years, is the product of the enlightenment of modern science and new evidence. The truth is that spontaneous generation of life in a puddle of water and subsequent evolution is a reversion to beliefs held 2,000 years ago before Christianity swept across Europe.

Neither is this naturalism free from religion. The earliest Sumerian accounts of beginnings can be read on clay tablets. The “Babylonian Genesis,” called the “Enuma Elish” shows three gods representing three kinds of waters: mists, lakes, rivers and streams. It seems to portray the ordered world struggling up (evolving) out of a chaotic universe. Fighting gods kill one god and make the earth from the body, and man from its blood. Today some naturalists venerate the earth again as the body of “Ghia.”

The Bible also shows the base or origin of wickedness to be on the plains of Shinar (Zechariah 5:8-11). It was here that Nimrod likely received the Satanic cosmology (beliefs about the origin of the universe) channeled to him in his tower built to “the hosts of heaven” at Babel (Genesis 14:8-10; 11:1-4).

Naturalistic evolution followed down through the Greek philosophers and Roman gods. The Apostle Paul met these philosophies in the Epicureans and Stoics at Athens (Acts 17:18). The Epicureans were the materialists. They believed everything is just evolving matter. The highest purpose is to enjoy oneself (like many people today). The Stoics of Bible times were like the “New Agers” of today. They believed there was a spirit force in nature. They taught bodily discipline to get the most out of life—the athletic type.

Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher, wrote, “The atoms have been rushing everlastingly throughout all space . . . undergoing myriad changes . . . till they have fallen into the particular pattern by which this world of ours is constituted.” This is a typical expression of the uniformitarian “all things continue as they were” (2 Peter 3:4). His motivation was also a reaction to religion. Lucretius wrote the poem “to free humanity from religious superstition and the fear of death” (World Book Encyclopedia).

Conflicting Worldviews

When Christianity spread across Europe, replacing paganism’s long ages, and the Reformation broke the hold of religious orthodoxy, there also came advances in science. Newton, Louis Pasteur, Boyle, and others were believers in God who established natural law and order in the universe. In America, the Christian worldview of a creation and flood catastrophe were the principles in earth science believed by the founders of Harvard and Yale.

However, Charles Lylle wrote his principles of geology in the 1930’s. “He convinced many of how inconceivably long earth history has been” (World Book Encyclopedia). Public educators began to turn back to naturalism. With the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, evolution got another boost. Teachers began to say again that all the diversity of plant and animal life in our ecosystem could self-organize from inorganic minerals. This is despite the knowledge today of more than five billion bits of information on a genome, which must be right for a normal human body. God’s Word calls this foolish and willful ignorance (Psalm14:1; 2 Peter 3:3-6) and “science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20). It is philosophy (interpretation, not facts).

Harlan Bretz was invited to present his catastrophic explanation of the channeled scabland of eastern Washington state to the geologic society of Washington, D.C., in 1927. The prominent geologists at the meeting castigated Mr. Bretz to the point of insult. Some described it as an ambush or a lynching. A young geologist, Joseph T. Pardee, was at the meeting but, out of expedience, did not speak up. However, he told a colleague, “I know where the flood came from.” It would take over forty years until a majority of new geologists would accept Mr. Bretz’s view.

More Evidence—the Water Source

Joseph Pardee studied evidence of a great lake in Montana in 1909. Shorelines indicated that its surface covered nearly 2,900 square miles. He followed the shorelines to the panhandle of Idaho where they disappeared. He figured the ice dam must have been in this region. The lake was nearly 2,000 feet deep at its ice dam. He described it in a paper in 1910 and went on to other projects.

At the end of his career, Pardee returned and studied Lake Missoula again. He published an excellent paper in 1942 of a catastrophic emptying of the lake in about 48 hours. Water would have gone over Dry Falls 200 feet deep at 60 miles an hour. The lake may have been dammed and released a few times until the ice sheets retreated north to stay. Aerial photographs show lake bottom ripple marks so big they were hard to recognize from the hills on the ground. Mr. Pardee did not mention the channeled scablands, but the lationship was so glaringly obvious it could not be missed. Harlan Bretz had his water source!

It took about forty years, until 1962, when a group of leading geologists toured Lake Missoula, Grand Coulee, and scabland areas. Afterward, they sent Harlan Bretz a message, “We are all catastrophists now.” But his harsh critics kept up their opposition into the 1970s.

Pride Destroys Objectivity

Once such a firm position is taken, it is a major blow to pride to acknowledge having erred. Bretz’s critics went to their graves insisting that weak forces and slow processes over long ages produced the Grand Coulee and channeled scab-lands. This was their textbook uniformitarian gospel from Charles Lylle, “The present is the key to the past” in understanding geologic processes. Mr. Bretz, however, outlived his detractors, nearly reaching 99 years old.

The likely reason Bretz’s explanation finally received wide acceptance is that they are still rejecting the young earth chronology of the Bible. Secular scientists hold to millions of years of geology for the average two-mile deep sedimentary layers around the earth. These also have evidence of live burial of fossils and catastrophic deposition. The standard geologic column is still accepted with its hundreds of millions of years. They still see many “ice ages” and dozens of Lake Missoula washouts over 15,000 years ago.

God, who was there, still describes the only way the oceans could unload onto the continents for an “ice age” in His record to us—the Bible. Many evidences support this sudden world climate change described in the Bible. We find evidences for rain-fed lakes and well-watered deserts in the African Sahara and American west. Evidence shows that the Arctic and Antarctic were also warm grasslands where large mammals flourished.

Resources:
“Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods” – by David Alt
“Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe” – by Steve Austin
“The Troubled Waters of Evolution” – by Henry Morris

Elvin Stauffer