Quote of the Day

"A fellow lecturer told his Bible class that it did not matter whether the biblical character Job was real or fictional.  For him, the point off Job's book is to teach us about suffering, and the historicity of Job is immaterial to that lesson.  I cannot disagree more strongly, and hopefully this illustration will help clarify why. 

Suppose you are going through a difficult time in your life.  Perhaps it is from the death of a close relative or you struggle with debilitating illness. Just like the psalmist who felt abandoned by God in his deepest time of need, you feel lost and adrift in your suffering, with no sense of God's care.  In this state, you ask me to bring you wise counsel and comfort.

I tell you a story about a man who built a spaceship to travel to Venus.  Due to a technological breakthrough, he was able to equip his vessel with heat-resistant panels, making it safe to venture close to the sun.  Unfortunately, along the way the panels failed and his eyes were burned out of their sockets.  With all hope seemingly lost, in his despair he called out for help and God rescued him.

What would your reaction be to my story?  Would you thank me for the incredible comfort I gave you?  Or would you look at me with a glare, wondering how I expect this silly story to assist you?....Fiction can provide little comfort for the realities of life.  It is akin to telling someone struggling through financial difficulty, "Don't worry, you'll win the lottery."  Or to a man who lost his legs in a car accident, "Let me read you a story about a man who drank some sugar water and his legs grew back overnight."

The real God of creation acts in the real events of human history.  Our Christian faith is not rooted in esoteric platitudes or ethereal propositional truths to which we grant our mental assent.  Our faith is rooted in concrete experiences, with God breaking into history in amazing ways…"

- Victor Kuligin - From his book: Snubbing God: The High Cost of Rejecting God's Created Order

Quote/Excerpt of the Day

We do have our favorites.  They tend to fall into the general category of Scripture Encouragement.  There are many sacred words and they say many things, but it’s the Bible Balm that has caught our eye.  With a partitioned Bible preparing so many options for us, you might think it would be hard to choose.  But no.  The people have voted.  The customers know what they want. 

·        *  Jeremiah 29:11

·        *  John 10:10

·         * Philippians 4:13

·         * Joshua 1:9

If you didn’t already know, the addresses direct us to these:

·         “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”

·         “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

·         “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”

·         “Be strong and courageous.  Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”

Good, positive verses all.  But the shocking news to most people is that there is a parallel universe Bible.  It is rarely talked about and almost never explored.  In that other world every positive and negative is reversed.  Every verse has its anti-verse.  In the parallel universe Bible, the favorite anti-verses are:

·         * Deuteronomy 28:29

·         * 2 Corinthians 2:16

·         * Isaiah 49:4

·         * Deuteronomy 28:65

What? You don’t know these?  You’ve never seen them on a scenic piece of Christian framed art?  OK, well, here’s what they say:

·         “You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.”

·         “We are an aroma that brings death.”

·         “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all”

·         “The LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart.”

The real revelation may be that these anti-verses too are in the Bible (our Bible, in this universe).  They are set apart, numbered and included in the lineup just like all the rest.  It’s just that nobody ever wants to use them.  They aren’t ever selected.  They are more like bombs than balm.  But there they are.  Why?  If they are unusable, why are they there?  Do we need them for anything at all?  (And why do I have a suspicion that anyone being confronted with these verses will suddenly develop a strong interest in the original context, so as to nicely distance themselves from any unpleasant implications?)

- From "Saving the Bible from Ourselves" - By Glen Paauw

Quote of the Day

Faith is not inherently virtuous.  Its value depends on the worth of its object.  The Bible understood in context and given precedent over our own instincts and preferences , is our dependable guide for faith and practice.

- Randy Alcorn

Quote of the Day

You remember the apostle Peter's famous remark with regard to the writings of the apostle Paul. He says that there are things in them which are `hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest . . . unto their own destruction'. What he means is this. They read these Epistles of Paul, yes; but they are twisting them, they are wresting them to their own destruction. You can easily read these Epistles and be no wiser at the end than you were at the beginning because of what you have been reading into what Paul says, wresting them to your own destruction. Now that is something which we must always bear in mind with regard to the whole of the Bible. I can be seated with the Bible in front of me; I can be reading its words and going through its chapters; and yet I may be drawing a conclusion which is quite false to the pages in front of me.
There can be no doubt at all that the commonest cause of all this is our tendency so often to approach the Bible with a theory. We go to our Bibles with this theory, and everything we read is controlled by it. Now we are all quite familiar with that. There is a sense in which it is true to say that you can prove anything you like from the Bible. That is how heresies have arisen. The heretics were never dishonest men; they were mistaken men. They should not be thought of as men who were deliberately setting out to go wrong and to teach something that is wrong; they have been some of the most sincere men that the Church has ever known. What was the matter with them? Their trouble was this: they evolved a theory and they were rather pleased with it; then they went back with this theory to the Bible, and they seemed to find it everywhere. If you read half a verse and emphasize over-much some other half verse elsewhere, your theory is soon proved. Now obviously this is something of which we have to be very wary. There is nothing so dangerous as to come to the Bible with a theory, with preconceived ideas, with some pet idea of our own, because the moment we do so, we shall be tempted to overemphasize one aspect and under-emphasize another.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

If I thought I it wrong to be a Baptist, I should give it up, and become what I believed to be right.  The particular doctrine adhered to by Baptists is that they acknowledge no authority unless it comes from the Word of God.  They attach no importance to the authority of the Fathers - they care not for the authority of the mothers - if what they say does not agree with the teaching of the Evangelists, Apostles, and Prophets, and most of all, with the teaching of the Lord Himself.  If we could find infant baptism in the Word of God, we should adopt it.  It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us - that we are odd, and do not as other people do.  But we have looked well through the Bible, and cannot find it, and do not believe that it is there; nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

I would have every Christian wish to know all that he can know of revealed truth.  Somebody whispers that the secret things belong not to us.  You may be sure you will never know them if they are secret; but all that is revealed you ought to know...

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

Let it not be objected to this rigid adherence to the language of Scripture, that better and more learned men have not thought it needful, and that we may safely trust a little to their good sense and piety.  For, in conflict with scriptural powers, this scrupulous adherence will be found our only safety.  The Church of Rome may possibly dispense with the Bible, having Trent for doctrine, her anathemas for reproof, her inquisition for correction in righteousness, and her infallible pontiff for instruction in righteousness.  But with us, all these purposes must be served by Scriptures.

Charles Maitland

Quote of the Day

We are blessed to live in an age and a culture which has easy access to the Word of God.  And we are cursed to live in an age and culture which has easy access to the Word of God.  Our fathers had to internalize the Word of God.  They sang the Psalms so they would learn them...We have Bibles in every room in our homes and apps on our smart phones, but we don't hide it in our hearts.

R. C. Sproul Jr.

Quote of the Day

In respect to its present state, I should say nay to what you say, as it regards the taste of the public for religious truth.  I should certify on no light grounds, that the defection lies elsewhere; there is appetite of the whole counsel of God, but they who are left in charge, have found in their wisdom that the food is not wholesome, and they dare - I speak strongly, for I have felt it strongly - even to tears; I have felt it under their pulpits - they dare deny it to the flock they have been sent to feed.  Comes there a man in town or country, or on week-day or Sunday, who in simplicity delivers the whole of his message, and you will see how they throng his aisles, how they will steal like Nicodemus by night, to take of the desired but forbidden draught, - afraid to be blamed by their ghostly confessors if they are detected…..many are the times I have whispered in the ear of those who sit satisfied, nay, abysmally devoted to some favorite preacher of a garbled truth, that there is more behind, and have been surprised to find how well they knew it, how much they could like to have it - but it is not good for them!  The servant has grown wiser than his master; the messenger can amend his message - God can no more be trusted with the salvation of his people - Man knows a better way, and expediency is like to become the Antichrist of our land.

Caroline Wilson

Quote of the Day

If you were to get up and hum a tune then you wouldn’t get anything if you had no theology. Now I can just hear a message in song, if I know the song and I know the words of it; I can get a blessing from it. But I’m not getting it from the music; I’m getting it primarily from the word that the music is seeking to proclaim. Now if music was intended to be put on the plane of the word of God, then the Lord Jesus would have come from heaven and whistled and hummed. 

S. Lewis Johnson

Quote of the Day

 No article of faith may be based on any noncanonical work, regardless of its religious value. 

The divinely inspired and authoritative books are the sole basis for doctrine and practice.  Whatever complimentary support canonical truth derives from other books, it in no way lends canonical value to those books.  The support is purely historical and has no authoritative theological value.  The truth of inspired Scripture alone is the canon or foundation of the truths of faith.

- From the book From God to Us:  How We Got our Bible - by Norman Geisler and William Nix

Quote of the Day

…a study which is exclusively practical and devotional is necessarily imperfect.  There are many things in Scripture which do not lend themselves to an immediate practical purpose, and which in fact are as good as shut out from the circle of ordinary Bible-reading.  I know that good people often try to hide this fact from themselves by hooking on some sort of lesson to passages which they do not understand, or which do not directly touch any spiritual chord.  There is very respectable precedent for this course, which in fact is nothing else than the method of topical  exegesis that reigned supreme in the Old Catholic and Medieval Church.  The ancient fathers laid down the principle that everything in Scripture which, taken in its natural sense, appears unedifying must be made edifying by some method of typical or figurative application.  In principle this is no longer admitted in the Protestant Churches (unless perhaps for the Song of Solomon), but in practice we still get over many difficulties by tacking on a lesson which is  not really taken out of the difficult passage, but read into from some other part of Scripture.  People satisfy themselves in this way, but they do not solve the difficulty.  Let us be frank with ourselves, and admit that there are many things in Scripture in which unsystematic and merely devotional reading finds no profit.

 

William Robertson Smith

I do not agree with his stance on the Old Testament(higher criticism)

Quote of the Day

We may if we please, confine our study of Scripture to what is immediately edifying, skimming lightly over all pages which do not serve a direct purpose of devotion, and ignoring every difficulty which does not yield to the faculty of practical insight, to the power of spiritual sympathy with the mind of the Spirit, which the thoughtful Christian necessarily acquires in the habitual excessive of bringing Scripture to bear on the daily needs of his own life.  This use of Scripture is full of personal profit, and raises no intellectual difficulties.  But it does not do justice to the whole Word of God.  It cannot exhaust the whole mind of the Spirit.  It is limited for every individual by the limitations of his own spiritual experience.  Reading the Bible in this way, a man comes to a very personal appreciation of so much of God's truth as is in immediate contact with the range of his own life.  But he is sure to miss many truths which belong to another range of experience, and to read into the inspired page things from his own experience which involve human error.  In this way he becomes narrow, and full of prejudice, which prevent him from seeing that the Bible is larger than his knowledge of it, and that other men whose needs are different from his may be quite in the right in getting things out of the Scripture which he does not know, does not need, and is inclined to call false or dangerous.  

William Robertson Smith

(Disclaimer:  his stance in his writings on higher criticism is wrong)

Quote of the Day

The Gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation (Rom 1:16)…Since unbelief is at heart a moral, rather than an intellectual problem, no amount of evidences will ever turn unbelief to faith.  But the revealed Word of God has inherent power to do so…

John MacArthur

Quote of the Day

Too many modern preachers are so bent on understanding the culture that they develop the mind of the culture and not the mind of Christ. They start to think like the world, and not like the Savior. Frankly, the nuances of worldly culture are virtually irrelevant to me. I want to know the mind of Christ and bring that to bear on the culture, no matter what culture I may be ministering to. If I’m going to stand up in a pulpit and be a representative of Jesus Christ, I want to know how He thinks—and that must be my message to His people too. The only way to know and proclaim the mind of Christ is by being faithful to study and preach His Word. What happens to preachers who obsess about cultural “relevancy” is that they become worldly, not godly.

John MacArthur

Quote of the Day

I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it—His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.

R. C. Sproul

Quote of the Day

Calvin believed that biblical preaching must occupy the chief place in the worship service.  What God has to say to man is infinitely more important than what man has to say to God.  If the congregation is to worship properly, if believers are to be edified, if the lost are to be converted, God's Word must be exposited.  Nothing must crowd the Scriptures out of the chief place in the public gathering.

Steven Lawson

Quote of the Day

They (Disciples/Christians) are simply the servants and instruments of the Word; they have no wish to be strong where the Word chooses to be weak.  To try and force the Word on the world by hook or by crook is to make the living Word of God into a mere idea…..Where the Word is, there shall the disciple be.  Therein lies his true wisdom and his true simplicity.  If it is obvious that the Word is being rejected, if it is forced to yield its ground, the disciple must yield with it.  But if the Word carries on the battle, the disciple must also stand his ground.

  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

A sacred regard to the authority of God ought to lead us to

reject an error, however old, sanctioned by whatever authority,

or however generally practiced.

 

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

What use is there, it may be asked, in learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew?  We can read the Bible very well in German."  "Without languages, we could not have received the Gospel…Languages are the scabbard that contains the sword of the Spirit; they are the casket that guards the jewels; they are the vessel that holds the wine; and, as the Gospel says, they are the baskets in which the loaves and fishes are kept to feed the multitude.  If we neglect the languages, we shall not only eventually lose the Gospel, but be unable to write in Latin or in German.  No sooner did men cease to cultivate them than Christendom declined, even until it fell under the power of the pope.  But now that languages are again honored, they shed such light that all the world is astonished, and every one is forced to acknowledge that our Gospel is almost as pure as that of the apostles themselves.  In former times the holy Fathers were frequently mistaken, because they were ignorant of languages; and in our days there are some who, like the Waldenses, do not think the languages to be of any use; but although their doctrine be good, they have often erred in the real meaning of the sacred text; they are without arms against error, and I feel very much that there faith will not remain pure.

Martin Luther