Quote of the Day

...What we see in these two incidents is that God seems relatively unconcerned with giving specific answers to the anguished questions of Habakkuk and Job.  He answers them, but not point for point.  This suggests that all our questions about God's wisdom and justice and love may not be all that important to God in the end - or at least not as important as other things.  This doesn't mean we can't ask them.  In Christ, we have the freedom to speak what's on our hearts and minds.  God isn't going to cast us from his presence because we ask him some tough questions.  It just means that we shouldn't take our questions too seriously, because apparently God doesn't take them too seriously.

It may shock us to hear it put that way.  We think pretty highly of ourselves an dour questions.  We think it's our right to ask such questions and to demand such answers, even from God.  But God does not seem to share this view.  In the Bible, whenever God is asked a question that throws into doubt his kindness or justice, he more or less refuses to answer.......As the Cross demonstrates, God takes us seriously.  he takes our sin seriously.  But he continues to show relative indifference to our questions.  He does not answer them to our intellectual satisfaction, he refuses to submit himself to our interrogations.

That's because the really important question in the Bible is not any question we ask of God but the question he asks of us.  And though it is appropriate to ponder any number of questions...our questions must always take a backseat....

- From Mark Galli's book -  God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins

Quote of the Day

It has been well said, "Nothing is easier than to doubt.  A man of moderate ability or learning can doubt more than the wisest men believe."  Faith demands knowledge, for it is an intelligent grace, able and anxious to justify itself; but infidelity is not required to give a reason for the doubt that is in it; a defiant mien and a blustering tone answer its purpose.  The acme of unbelief is to know nothing.  What is this but the apotheosis of ignorance.  A man may glide into agnosticism insensibly, and remain in it languidly; but to believe is to be alive.  Those who think faith to be a childish business will have to make considerable advance toward manliness before they are able to test their own theory.

- Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

Beware of a religion without holdfasts….

Everybody is getting to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present timeservers.

I should like to ask the divines of the broad school whether any doctrine is worth a man’s dying for it. They would have to reply, “Well, of course, if a man had to go to the stake or change his opinions, the proper way would be to state them with much diffidence, and to be extremely respectful to the opposite school.”

But suppose he is required to deny the truth?

“Well, there is much to be said on each side, and probably the negative may have a measure of truth in it as well as the positive. At any rate, it cannot be a prudent thing to incur the odium of being burned, and so it might be preferable to leave the matter an open question for the time being.”

Yes, and as these gentlemen always find it unpleasant to be unpopular, they soften down the hard threatenings of Scripture as to the world to come, and put a color upon every doctrine to which worldly-wise men object.<big>The teachers of doubt are very doubtful teachers.

 

Charles Spurgeon

Quote of the Day

Two learned doctors are angrily discussing the nature of food, and allowing their meal to lie untasted, while a simple countryman is eating as heartily as he can of that which is set before him. The religious world is full of quibblers, critics, and skeptics, who, like the doctors, fight over Christianity without profit either to themselves or others; those are far happier who imitate the farmer and feed upon the Word of God, which is the true food of the soul. Luther’s prayer was, “From nice questions the Lord deliver us.” Questioning with honesty and candor is not to be condemned, when the object is to “prove all things, and hold fast that which is good;” but to treat revelation as if it were a football to be kicked from man to man is irreverence, if not worse. Seek the true faith, by all manner of means, but do not spend a whole life in finding it, lest you be like a workman who wastes the whole day in looking for his tools. Hear the true Word of God; lay hold upon it, and spend your days not in raising hard questions, but in feasting upon precious truth.

 

Charles Spurgeon