• The atomic bomb brought a swift end to World War II sixty-three years ago. The whole world welcomed the peace (?).
• For forty-some years Yugoslavia enjoyed peace (?) under the strong communist dictator Tito. Many years later, with the butchery going on among the various ethnic groups of Croatia and Bosnia, did we understand what simmering hatred Tito was able to suppress?
• Many husbands and wives fight. Their children’s lives are torn up until in some cases peace (?) is restored through divorce.

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Marriage, by God’s design, takes place when a single (not divorced) man and woman contract holy matrimony until death separates them (Matthew 19:4-6). Within the context of this lifelong commitment, married partners may bring up children in a secure environment we call “home.”

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It’s never been done, but folks keep trying. Many live as if they would have already pulled the wool over God’s eyes, but it turns out every time that instead of fooling God, they have only deceived themselves.

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The only sure thing about life is that it will end. And the one thing sure about death is that it scares us. It wasn’t always so, but we’re all too young to remember when folks lived without the fear of death. When God first created Adam and Eve, and placed them in Eden, death was no threat, except if they should sin. They did disobey God and thus sinned, and death has hung like a threatening cloud over every life since. The rest of us sinned like Adam, so we all share in the responsibility for death coming into the world. We are now mortal, and all come under God’s righteous sen- tence: “The soul that sinneth it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4).

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Adam and Eve disobeyed what seemed a minor regulation and brought death upon themselves and our race (Genesis 3). Ananias and Sapphira lied, and for their cunning fell dead on the spot (Acts 5:1-10).

What do we learn from these examples? That God is absolute, and that He holds truth to be inviolable. Men do well to doubt their own opinions, respect each other’s points of view, and seek consensuses on non-moral issues. However, with God there is no room for debate. He does not change. Truth cannot be reinterpreted. To lie, to disobey God, or to sin otherwise inevitably leads to death.

God is sovereign. He answers to no one. He needed no one’s counsel when He brought the worlds into existence. (Job 38) When mankind became wicked, God overthrew the first world with a flood (Genesis 6-8). He brought His Son into the world to die as our Saviour. He decreed that there can be no salvation but by faith in Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). He has set a day in which He will bring the world, as we know it, to a fiery end. He will judge every human being that ever lived, and will seal our eternal destiny (Acts 17:31).

God is just. He has given us His Word in black and white. The Bible that is so available to you is His infallible Book. Every effort to contradict or eradicate it has, in the end, discredited its opponents and validated its claims. You may read it, understand it, and stake you eternal salvation upon its most obvious meaning.

Neither Adam and Eve, nor yet Ananias and Sapphira would have had to die. But they chose to test the absolute. They tried to bend the unmovable.

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The Old Testament Philistines captured the Ark of God from the Jews and brought it into the temple of their god Dagon (1 Samuel 5). Dagon was an idol cast in the image of a fish, but with a man’s head and hands. Next morning, the Philistines had to have a look at the trophy they had stolen from Israel and this strange pair of gods in their temple. What they saw was sobering. Dagon had fallen down before the Ark of God.

The Ark was a wooden box covered with gold and crowned with a mercy seat and cherubim [angel representations]. God had strictly forbidden any effort to make an image of Himself (Deuteronomy 4:15-19). He said that His invisible presence would be found between the cherubim above the mercy seat over the Ark, which had now fallen into Philistine hands. So it was deeply significant that men’s efforts to create a god (Dagon) now lay prostrate in the presence of the God of all the earth whose likeness could not be depicted by human art (Acts 17:29).

The Philistines picked up their lifeless, subordinate god and set him again in his place. Next morning they found him in the same posture of worship, but this time with his head and his hands broken off. All that was left of Dagon was the fishy part.

There is something “fishy” about our idols today, too — the singers, the sport figures, the actors, the writers of trashy novels, and even the more glitzy politicians. The unfolding revelations of performance-enhancing drug used by numerous sports figures is just the latest case of the fall of our idols. Their priests and worshipers scramble to restore them again to the place so many have made for them in their hearts. “Solutions” to the steroids problem are being debated on the floor of the Senate. Isn’t there something fishy about that august assembly concerning themselves with the transgressions of boys playing ball?

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There are professional listeners around. Some have doctors’ degrees. They have a way of drawing us out and making us feel better for having talked. But experts charge for their services and tend to keep us coming back.

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Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said that Psalm 15 describes the perfect Continue reading →

Esau was a profane man and a fornicator (Hebrews 12:16). He’s been dead for eons now, but fornication and profanity are alive yet today, and as with Esau, they are most often found in the same character. Indecent people like indecent talk.

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Some years ago, the Vatican published a 125-page document critical of the literal interpretation of the Scriptures. The document warns that “the fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life.” Tho emphasis of the Vatican statement was that since fallible men wrote the Scriptures, there has to be some discrepancy between what God really said and what was finally written down for our benefit. Of course, the church was happy to supply the “missing link” between what the Scriptures say, and what God must have meant. The document was aimed at fundamentalist groups which have been making headway in converting Catholics throughout Latin America. But everyone—Catholics, fundamentalists, and the rest of us—should be shocked at the arrogance that sets any human authority above the Word of God.

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