by HARVEYOPP | Jun 2, 2015 | Matt Powell
Bruce Jenner is not a woman. He is a man. Every single chromosome in his body records this fact. He can mutilate and poison himself all he likes, but he will remain a man. A badly damaged man, perhaps, but still a man. He can no more make himself a woman than I can make myself a giraffe.
Progressivism is basically rebellion against what is. Progressives try to rewrite human nature and human behavior to suit their preferences- not just in sexual matters but in all areas of life. When they inevitably fail, they do not reflect, do not consider that they were wrong, because the disease is not an intellectual one but a moral one. Instead they double down and seek to crush any dissenters from their utopian lie, believing those dissenters to be the cause of their failure. So now we are going to be told to believe that while homosexuality is genetic and unalterable, gender is not genetic, but purely a matter of individual choice that a person can decide for themselves, completely contrary to their actual genetics. Perhaps we will be told that there is an elusive “transgender” gene that overpowers the force of that “y” chromosome on every cell of the body.
Progressivism is organized rebellion against the law and rule of God. It is the systematic violation of the Ten Commandments. It is the rejection of the reality of the curse on man, and the attempts to overcome the effects of that curse by throwing off the law of God. It never works and will never work, because God is God, and His curse on mankind will stand, until man submits to Jesus Christ the Messiah and the remedy to the curse which He provides.
Promiscuous sex will always lead to horrible results. They can try to cure all the STDs, have expensive government programs to provide for the broken families, kill the unwanted babies, train the kids in “safe sex”, educate or force us to be approving of all the sad broken results of this madness like Bruce Jenner, pretend there is nothing weird at all about a 65 year old man calling himself Caitlyn and posing in a women’s magazine in a slinky dress, and provide psychotherapy to try to fix all the scarred and shattered souls. Finally they will set out to destroy anyone that continues to speak out against perversion and promiscuity, believing that our lack of full-throated approval for their evil is what causes all the associated ills. They think it’s our condemnation of their actions that causes those actions to have bad consequences. But breaking God’s Law, which defines reality itself, will always lead to horrible results, and no program of man can ever do more than put a bandaid on the gunshot wound. Every single person in the world could fully support and celebrate a 65-year-old man making himself a eunuch and God would still be God and the results will still be horrible. The bill will always come due in time. Math always wins, the arithmetic of God’s law doubly so.
The wages of sin is death, the Scriptures tell us. This is the reality of God’s economy, and no progressive attempts at redistribution will ever overcome God’s justice.
by HARVEYOPP | Oct 4, 2014 | Matt Powell
Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, Hymn #598
1 Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,
pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
hold me with thy pow’rful hand;
Bread of heaven, Bread of heaven,
feed me till I want no more,
feed me till I want no more.
2 Open now the crystal fountain,
whence the healing stream doth flow;
let the fire and cloudy pillar
lead me all my journey through;
strong Deliv’rer, strong Deliv’rer,
be thou still my strength and shield,
be thou still my strength and shield.
3 When I tread the verge of Jordan,
bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of death, and hell’s Destruction,
land me safe on Canaan’s side;
songs of praises, songs of praises
I will ever give to thee,
I will ever give to thee.
Our hymn this month picks up on the theme of the Exodus as a way of talking about the Christian life. “No other Old Testament motif is as crucial to understand. No other event is so basic to the fabric of both Testaments.” (Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, ed. Leland Ryken et al.) The New Testament continuously presents this life as essentially a pilgrimage, a journey from deliverance out of bondage on our way to our promised home. This theme is one of the primary themes of the Lord’s Supper, which shows us Jesus’ sustaining life-force as that which feeds and nourishes us on this pilgrimage until He comes again. 1 Corinthians 10 is just one of many passages connecting the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness to the life of the New Testament Christian.
In verse one, the hymn-writer expresses his dependence on God for everything. “I am weak but Thou art mighty; hold me with Thy powerful hand.” Our native pride constantly urges us to think, even under the guise of service to God, that He somehow needs us, that we should do something glorious and important in His service. But God doesn’t need us. We need Him. In Isaiah 46 God powerfully illustrates the difference between the gods of the pagans and the God of the Bible. The pagans carry their gods from place to place. But God carries His people and puts them where He will. He carried the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, not dependent on their mighty deeds at all. All they needed to do was trust Him.
He picks up the theme of the manna in the wilderness in the last line. God fed them in the wilderness, and He feeds us today. More important than the bread on our table is the spiritual bread from heaven, the true Bread that gives us life, Jesus Christ. The bread of the Lord’s Table is the bread of the Passover which symbolized the sustenance of God on their journey to the Promised Land. God would keep them fed on their journey, not with the milk and honey of luxury they would have in Canaan, but with what they needed to make it there. We likewise have a promise, not that we will live lives of luxury and pleasure- that will come in time. But we will be sustained by the power of God until we make it home.
The hymnist refers to the “crystal fountain,” the miraculous provision of water in the desert, water from the rock which was Christ (1 Cor. 10:4), and the pillar of cloud and fire which guided them, all ways that God sustained and preserved them in their time in the wilderness. He fills us with His Spirit and gives us His Word to guide us. The believer who trusts God will, like the hymnist, earnestly pray for and be thankful for the guidance and direction of the Lord in his life. That guidance and help from the Lord will continue until the end, until the “verge of Jordan”, when we cross into His promised rest forever, to praise and worship Him as He deserves for all eternity.
by HARVEYOPP | Jun 28, 2014 | Matt Powell
Psalm 73:17– “Until I Went Into The Sanctuary Of God; Then I Understood Their End.”
I have a photo that I took of Devils’ Tower that I particularly like. It is difficult to get a feel for just how huge the Tower is from photos, but this one is of three climbers ascending the side of the formation. When you tell people there are climbers in the picture, they have to look hard and long before they find them, perched on a ledge a little over halfway up. They are just tiny, just little specks, and seeing how small they are gives one a feeling of just how huge the Tower is.
In Psalm 73 Asaph is struggling with envy and resentment toward evil men. It often seems like people prosper by their wickedness. The richest, most famous, most powerful people in the world are usually the most evil, and that seems to really cast into doubt the truth of the Christian faith. If God is just, why do people profit from evil and suffer for doing good?
The Bible often labors to give us a right sense of perspective. The problem is that so often our perspective is so limited. If I don’t give my child food right now because we’re going to have dinner in a half an hour, he thinks he’s going to die. The thought of waiting until Christmas for a present seems like an eternity. But an adult hopefully has a better perspective on time frames, and thus does not fret about needing to wait a few minutes for dinner. Likewise, as we mature in the faith, we will recognize that our lives in the present age are, as the Scriptures say, like a flower that springs up and is blown away in the afternoon, like a mist that appears for a short while and then is blown away (James 4:14).
The worship service is a wonderful opportunity to step back and get that sense of perspective. It was in the sanctuary where Asaph got the necessary perspective on life. We spend our week with our nose pressed up against life, focused on details of the job, the family, the house, all those things. And rightly so; we should be careful in our dealings in life. But worship allows us to step back and see the big picture, to see the relative size of my life in comparison to all of eternity with God. God is infinite in might and majesty; He is grand and huge. His plans are complex, multifaceted, and long-term. He will bring justice, truth and right to the world. The wicked man may appear very successful, but he is set on a slippery slope (verse 18) and will suddenly come to ruin.
All this we will see by faith, not by sight. We need to be continually reminded of this broad perspective, like an artist that alternates between looking very closely at his painting to get the detail just right, and stepping back to look at the whole from a distance. In worship we can gain that broad perspective on our lives in this world in the context of God’s infinity and our eternal lives with Him, and be comforted and guided through the difficult tangles of this life.
by HARVEYOPP | Mar 28, 2014 | Matt Powell
The devil wants you in hell. He wants to destroy you. That is his whole mission in life. He stalks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
The devil doesn’t care about abortion, or gay marriage, or evolution. Believing in the Biblical teaching on any of those doctrines will not save you. He only cares about one thing- the cross of Christ. Only faith in the cross can save you. So the devil uses all those other things to open up chinks in the Christian’s trust in the Bible so that he can attack the one thing he really cares about.
That’s why everything the Bible says, including what it says about abortion, gay marriage or evolution matters- all of those things exist inside the wall of the infallibility of Scripture. If you let the enemy inside your wall because he promises he won’t steal your greatest treasure, but only some smaller things that you think are unimportant, don’t complain when he doesn’t stop with those things. If you let the thief in your house when he promises only to steal a little money, you have only yourself to blame when he steals it all.
Don’t let the devil inside your house. Don’t believe that he will stop with abortion, or gay marriage, or evolution, any more than Hitler stopped with the Sudetenland. He’s after the whole kit and caboodle and he won’t stop until he gets it. Defend the wall at every point, even and especially where it’s most seriously attacked. Defend the authority of Scripture on every point regardless of how unpopular it is. Because regardless of what you think is at stake, the same thing is always at stake when it comes to the authority of Scripture- the cross of Christ, and your soul.
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