Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Parable of the Ten Investment Portfolios

Posted on Wednesday, January 29, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

Given the emphasis that the president placed on “income inequality” in his 2014 SOTU speech, I thought it necessary for us to review a few things from the Bible. We have wandered so far off from the teaching of Jesus that some of this pandering seems compelling and/or compassionate to us. It is actually evil.

Allow me to say a few things in this second paragraph that will seem outrageous to some, while doing so in the hope that you will then allow me to explain myself. I have argued repeatedly that free grace creates free men, and that free men are the only ones who can create free markets. Free markets are God’s design for us. If you don’t love the idea of free markets, you don’t love Jesus rightly. Christian discipleship requires an understanding of, and deep love for, economic liberty.

So why invoke Jesus by name? Why bring Him into it?

Daily Devotional

January 31

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Each instrument its differing note may bring
To swell the symphony the Master plays

First and foremost among the causes of depression I would not hesitate to put—temperament. There are, after all, certain different types of people.... I wonder whether anybody wants to say: When you are talking about Christians, you must not introduce temperament or types. Surely Christianity does away with all that...? Now that is a very important objection, and it must be answered...; temperament, psychology, and make­up do not make the slightest difference in the matter of our salvation. That is, thank God, the very basis of our position as Christians.

Spitballing

Serious For All Of Twenty-Four Hours

Apparently Labour revenue guru, David Clark was just making things up as he went along when he pronounced that a Labour government would ban the country from using Facebook, unless it paid more tax in New Zealand.  It took only twenty-four hours for the Labour leader to put out that particular fire.  Labour and Cunliffe (who did not rule it out for twenty-four hours) and Clark now have more scorched earth on their collective face than burns from a P-lab explosion. 

This from 3News:

Banning Facebook was an extreme suggestion from Labour Party MP David Clark - and it took party leader David Cunliffe just 24 hours to shut it down.  Mr Cunliffe has now ruled it out completely, but ridicule from the Government still came hard and fast.

But here is the point.  Banning Facebook was not an extreme suggestion, at least not to the statist mindset of the New Zealand's left.  Impractical and impossible to implement to be sure.  Covered with envious bile, naturally.  But the lust to control the lives of citizens is as natural and reasonable to the statist mindset as breathing the fecund air of their back room cabals. 

Here is another example of the genre--this time from David Parker, Labour's shadow finance minister, via Hansard:

Letter From America (About Lawlessness)

The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama

In the nation's history, there is simply no precedent for an American president so wantonly ignoring federal law.

By  Ted Cruz

Jan. 28, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET

Wall Street Journal

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president's persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president's taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates." America's Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Rule of law doesn't simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." 

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce.

Daily Devotional

January 30

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Let...no man put a stumbling-block in
his brother's way (Romans 14:13)

[The Psalmist] tells us [Psalm 73:15] that he was still not clear about, and still could not understand, the difficulty that had shaken him and tempted him so severely.... So he stopped trying to solve it, saying to himself, "Well, I must leave this main problem for the time being. I will say nothing about it because I can see that if I express my thoughts it will cause me to offend against the generation of God's people. And I cannot do that. Very well; I will take my stand on what I am certain of and be content not to understand the other matter for the present."


How simple his method is, and yet how vital is every single step...; our speech must always be essentially positive. I mean that we should never be too ready to express our doubts and to proclaim our uncertainties....

Bye, Bye Facebook

The Big Bad Ban is Coming

The ban is coming back.  It is a long favoured tool of centralist authoritarian governments; it was well favoured by the previous Labour regime.  The most recent Labour leader, Helen Clark tried to ban incandescent light bulbs, long showers, and human kindness.  The present aspiring Labour regime is promising to bring out the big ban all over again.  But bans associated with global warming are so passe.  Now the ban is going to go after the really big fish.  Labour is talking about banning the internet.

Normally one associates such draconian controls with totalitarian countries, such as China, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia.  Labour wants New Zealand to join these esteemed ranks.  This, from 3News:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Let’s Watch Them for a Bit

Posted on Friday, January 24, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

A policeman doesn’t need a warrant, and shouldn’t need a warrant, to look at your house. But there is more to it.

I have noted before that many contemporary Americans are demanding privacy when what they really want is anonymity. But these are not the same thing at all. If I am walking down a city street with thousands of others, I have anonymity. I don’t have privacy. Anybody who wants to can look at me — the next guy who passes by, the cop on the corner, or the surveillance camera outside the jewelry store. And the cop has every right to follow me if he saw that I have that look on my face.

But what the digital revolution has done is create a need for some radical extensions and applications of our definitions of “inside” and “outside,” not to mention “public” and “private.” Just as I don’t mind a cop seeing the outside of my house, I don’t mind him seeing the outside of my phone. But when is he “inside”? When does he need a warrant? When does he need to show a judge probable cause? If the answer is “we don’t really do that anymore,” the follow-up retort should be “because we are now slaves.”

Daily Devotional

January 29

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

The Lamb's Book of Life

Do not announce to others in any shape or form what you are doing.... Do not even announce it to yourself.... Note that our Lord does not stop at saying you must not sound a trumpet before you and announce it to the world; you do not even announce it to yourself...; having done it in secret, you do not take your little book and put down: "Well, I have done that. Of course I haven't told anybody else that I have done it." ... In effect our Lord said: "Don't keep these books at all; don't keep spiritual ledgers; don't keep profit and loss accounts in your life; don't write a diary in this sense; just forget all about it....'

And what is the result of all this? It is glorious. This is how our Lord puts it. He says, "You must not keep the account. God does that. He sees everything and He records it all, and do you know what He will do? He will reward you openly." ... If we just forget all about it and do everything to please Him, we shall find that God will have an account.

Slow Learners

Bribery and Electoral Suborning

Since we have entered an election year, political bribery is in full swing.  At his first major announcement, the Labour leader, David Cunliffe announced new government spending that will cost well over $1 billion dollars per year.  Will the electorate be seduced by this bribe?  We will have to wait and see. 

New Zealand is just emerging from a long, dogged recession.  In the early days of the Global Financial Crisis (which hit just after our recession began in earnest) we were at risk of having a run on our banks.  The country was in a dangerous position of rapidly rising fiscal deficits at a time when no-one was lending.  Credit had dried up.  How come?  Because the previous Labour government had spent all the fiscal surplus and had committed to spending way beyond that in various electoral bribes, middle class welfare and unaffordable programmes, so that our deficit was inevitably going to become a black necklace around the nation's throat. 

We can still hear the gleeful tones of the then Minister of Finance, Dr Michael Cullen as he taunted the Opposition with a peculiar channelling of Mother Hubbard  that the fiscal cupboard was now bare.  He had "spent it all", he chortled.

Letter From America (About Wisconsin's "Earth Shattering" News)

The ‘Earth-Shattering’ News Rush Limbaugh Says the Media Ignored, but You Need to Know

Jan. 24, 2014 4:45pm 
Jason Howerton
TheBlaze

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh expressed disgust, though not shock, that the mainstream media ignored an “earth-shattering” story out of Wisconsin that “should have caused a political earthquake.”

The state of Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is “rapidly falling” and the government’s budget ended the year with a $912 million surplus, Limbaugh explained. He says the dramatic turnaround is due in large part to the conservative policies of Gov. Scott Walker.

What’s even more amazing, he continued, is the fact that Walker is going to “rebate the money in the form of tax cuts to the people, who he said own the money.”

Daily Devotional

January 28

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

An honest gospel!

[The Christian life] is not a life which at first is fairly broad and which as you go on becomes narrower and narrower. No! The gate itself, the very way of entering into this life, is a narrow one.... Too often the impression is given that to be a Christian is after all very little different from being a non-Christian, that you must not think of Christianity as a narrow life but as something most attractive and wonderful and exciting, and that you come in in crowds.

It is not so according to our Lord. The gospel of Jesus Christ is too honest to invite anybody in that way. It does not try to persuade us that it is something very easy and that it is only later on that we shall begin to discover it is hard. The gospel of Jesus Christ openly and uncompromisingly announces itself as being something which starts with a narrow entrance, a straight gate....

Unintended, Perverse Effects

 The Paradox of Cotton Wool

The pejorative term "nannying" has achieved widespread usage in the last twenty-five years.  Surprisingly, it just happens to co-incide with the rise of the ubiquitous state and its endless "health and safety" rules.  The more the state has sought to micro-legislate and regulate our lives, the more cynical and bitter its ungrateful subjects have become.

Probably in New Zealand the nadir was reached when the infamously nannying government led by "Auntie Helen" was proposing to regulate the length of showers in the nation.  Why?  To combat the terrible, dreadful, looming threat of global warming, you plebian numbskulls.  Don't you know what's good for you. Fortunately, the people achieved a moment of rare sanity and unceremoniously voted Auntie Helen out.

There are many drivers of this malignant nannying disease in the body politic.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Hygiene Lectures From Typhoid Mary

Posted on Thursday, January 23, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

 

A bill now before the Idaho legislature raises a thorny question. The choice facing our legislators is this. If they vote yes, and they remove the religious exemption shield, then they will be seen as encroaching on the religious freedom of parents to care for their children according to their conscience. But if they vote no, they will be seen as saying that parents must take reasonable care of their children — unless the parents are religious nuts, in which case all bets are off.

All of this is just one more glaring instance that shows us how neutrality is impossible in any society. Whenever we choose to do anything, the question “by what standard” is going to be (legitimately) raised. Because I am a Christian, I want the standard that is applied to be Christian. I do not want voodoo standards to applied, for example. There is no neutrality anywhere, and when we pretend to ourselves that there might be, we only get ourselves increasingly confused.

That said, I would urge legislators to keep the religious exemption shield in place (for the present) for the following reasons.

Daily Devotional

January 27

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

He restoreth my soul

Before we begin to talk about freedom for self-expression, we must discover whether or not we have that true self which God has desired for all men. If we lack it, we cannot express it, and we shall not be able to hand it back to Him and give an account of it at the dread Day of Judgement. The one urgent question therefore confronting every man is the question, What of your self? Do you possess your soul? Is the true self still in existence? Are the vision and the divine faculty still there? Is your soul alive? ... Man cannot rehabilitate his true self. He cannot find God. Man can lose his own soul, but he can never find it again. He can kill and destroy it but he cannot create it anew.... But ... "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10).

When Only One Will Do

The Security of a Monopoly 

One of the most insidious and debilitating effects of a monopoly is that the consumer has to take what he is given.  A monopoly is Henry Ford's dictum writ large: "You can have any colour you want, as long as it's black."  A monopoly is supply driven and controlled, not demand controlled.  A monopoly reduces the consumer to the status of a "take-it or leave-it" beggar. 

Competition turns this perverse circumstance upon its head.  In a competitive market place, the consumer is king, the supplier/manufacturer is the servant.  In order to win customers the supplier must provide what the customer wants. 

One by-product of this arrangement is a perpetual discipline of cost control.  A high preference factor for most consumers is value, which translates into purchasing the best quality for the lowest possible price.  In a competitive market place, suppliers are perpetually disciplined by customers to control and even lower their costs.  Those who don't, go out of business. 

Monopolies have no regimen for cost-controls.  Since the customer is captive (he has nowhere else to go), he must end up paying whatever the monopoly ends up charging. 

Government monopolies are no exception.

Letter From Europe (About the European Parliament)

Controversial “Lunacek-Report” Draws Negative Publicity for European Parliament

Posted on | January 22, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

For many decades, the European Parliament had an image problem: it was considered unimportant and didn’t catch much attention. People had a certain interest in, and knowledge of, the politics of their own countries – but when it came to the EU’s 700 elected representatives, nobody really knew what they were doing, and, even worse, nobody actually wanted to know: it all seemed remote, boring, and irrelevant.

Over the last few years, this attitude has changed, and many people have become aware that the EU’s decisions directly affect them. There has been, in recent times, an increasing number of instances in which massively negative reactions from citizens have caused the EU to abandon ambitious policy initiatives. It began with the so-called “Bolkestein-Directive” on the free circulation of services, followed by the Software-Patenting-Directive, and ended with ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

Daily Devotional

January 25

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Taking the gospel seriously

Is it not true to say of many of us that . . . our view of the doctrine of grace is such that we scarcely ever take the plain teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ seriously? We have so emphasized the teaching that all is of grace and that we ought not to try to imitate His example in order to make our­selves Christians, that we are virtually in the position of ignoring His teaching altogether and of saying that it has nothing to do with us because we are under grace.

Now I wonder how seriously we take the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The best way of concentrating on that question is, I think, to face the Sermon on the Mount.

The Return of the Exile

Get Out of Town

The ancient classical world had a punishment in its judicial menu which has long since been discarded and until recently had become part of a long discarded past.  The rise of nation states put paid to it.  We are thinking of the punishment of exile.  When nuisance-causing citizens, or citizens causing embarrassment to rulers, or general miscreants came before the courts in the ancient world, exile was often the sentence of choice (not for slaves, or non-citizens, of course, who usually lacked legal standing of any sort). 

In these days, exiling would mean delivering the miscreant to another nation state, which usually has its own strict border controls and which would refuse to admit the exile.  Hence, the punishment being no longer feasible.  However, given half a chance, it returns.  Most recently we have seen a variant of it with respect to Australia and New Zealand.  Citizens of the latter country who have chosen to live in Australia (often for many years) and who fall foul of the law are finding themselves being exiled back to New Zealand. Understandably, we in New Zealand are not amused.

Another modern manifestation of the punishment of exile has surfaced in the state and city of New York.

Letter From America (About Calling Spades By Their Name)

Ted Cruz Wants to Make Sure You Didn’t Miss Brit Hume’s Anti-Abortion Piece

Jan. 23, 2014 12:39am 
Jason Howerton
TheBlaze

Fox News political analyst Brit Hume made a passionate moral argument against abortion on “Special Report” on Wednesday that just may go viral after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) uploaded it on his YouTube channel.

(Fox News)

Referencing the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Hume said the Supreme Court decided that a “generalized right to privacy that they basically invented meant that a woman has a constitutional right to snuff out an unborn life — a human being with a beating heart.”

“That’s what a fetus as young as six weeks is,” he added.  Hume expressed shock that, by some estimates, as many as 55 million abortions have occurred since the landmark ruling.  Since 1973, he continued, “science has given us an ever clearer picture of just how much of a baby a fetus is.”

Daily Devotional

January 24

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

The discipline of the Christian life

It is most important for us to realize that there is such a thing as "the discipline of the Christian life." It is not enough to say ... that, whatever may happen to us, we have just to "look to the Lord" and all will be well.... It is unscriptural teaching. Were that the only thing we have to do, many of these scrip­tures would be quite unnecessary; ...the Epistles need never have been written; but they have been written ... by men inspired by the Holy Spirit...; what they tell us ... is that there is an essential discipline in the Christian life.

Reforming a Government Monopoly

Execution is Nine Tenths of Success

The Prime Minister, John Key has announced some common sense initiatives in the government school sector--which is the monopoly provider of education in New Zealand. 

Several new positions have been announced, some with substantial pay increases.  According to the NZ Herald,

The Government will spend an extra $359 million over the next four years to support teachers and principals, which will create four new management roles in schools - executive principals, expert teachers, lead teachers and change principals.

Brief job descriptions of the new roles are:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Apologetics and the Heart

Posted on Saturday, January 18, 2014 

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

This article was originally published in Antithesis (July/August 1990). I still agree with all of this, but I must say that reading stuff of mine that is over twenty years old gives me the feeling that I used to compose my prose with flattened cardboard boxes and tin snips. Just so you know. In preparing this for the blog, I fixed a few typos, and no doubt introduced a few new ones. And all the italics refused to transfer for some reason.

Apologetics and the Heart
I must perhaps begin by explaining that I do under­stand that an (abusive) ad hominem argument is a logical fallacy. There is no reason to think we have refuted someone’s arguments simply because we have vigorously attacked their person. There is also another fallacy, closely related to the ad hominem, dubbed “Bulverism” by C.S. Lewis.[i] He pointed out the modern tendency to dismiss an argument on no stronger grounds than the fact that you had explained how your oppo­nent came to believe it.

But it does not follow from this that there is no connection between lifestyle and truth. It is inadequate to argue that the atheism of Jones cannot be true because he kicks his dog. If he offers arguments, then the arguments should be addressed. A thorough apologetic method will address arguments while at the same time understanding and taking into account their source.

As Christians, our intellectual object is to think God’s thoughts after Him. Our aim must not be a false humanistic “originality,” but rather, in one sense, submis­sion to the way things are.

Daily Devotional

January 23

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Forgetting the things which are behind...
I press on toward the goal unto the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus

If you really do bemoan the fact that you have wasted so much time in the past, the thing to do is to make up for it in the present. Is not that common sense? Here is a man who comes in utterly dejected and saying: "If only;--the time I have wasted!"  What I say to him is this: "Are you making up for that lost time? Why are you wasting this energy in telling me about the past which you cannot undo? Why don't you put your energy into the present?" I speak with vehemence because this condition has to be dealt with sternly and the last thing to do with such people is to sympathize with them.

Hopeless Confusions

Modest Propositions

Here is a modest, straightforward, orthodox Christian syllogism:

The risen Lord Jesus Christ delivers people from their sins
Homosexuality in all its forms is sinful
Therefore, the Lord delivers homosexuals from their from their homosexuality.  

There is little that can be controversial about such a syllogism, unless one wishes to make the Incarnation or the Resurrection controversial.  True, some who profess Christianity may demur or disagree.  There may be some discussion on whether the Bible teaches homosexuality is a sin--but so often such discussions rapidly fall into deeper, broader matters such as the authority and inspiration of the Bible itself, or the Deity of our Lord. But for those who receive the Bible as the very word of God and who believe in its plenary divine inspiration there can be no controversy here. 

Why, then, is the following matter regarded as so controversial?

The Return of New Math

Common Core’s Newer Math

A return to mathematical ignorance

By David G. Bonagura Jr.

January 17, 2014 12:00 PM

National Review Online  

["Common Core" represents an attempt by the powers-that-be to standardise (and thereby control) schooling in the United States.  We have seen all of this before.  Certainly in New Zealand where the State holds a virtual monopoly on education.  The outcome, if Common Core is successful is therefore predictable: a burgeoning ignorance of the general population.  David G. Bonagura Jr. illustrates how this will eventuate, using maths as a case study. Ed.]


The following sentences from the New York Times could have been written today in homage to the Common Core Standards Initiative, the recently adopted national standards for the teaching of mathematics and English-language arts in grades K–12.

“Instead of this old method, the educators would stress from the earliest grades the new concept of the unity of mathematics and an understanding of its structure, using techniques that have been developed since the turn of the century. . . . The new concepts must be taught in high school to prepare the students for the type of mathematics that they will find when they reach college.”

But the century in question here is the 20th, not the 21st. This article, written in 1961, is not about today’s Common Core, but about New Math, the program that was supposed to transform mathematics education by emphasizing concepts and theories rather than traditional computation. Instead, after a few short years of propagating ignorance of all things mathematical, New Math became the butt of jokes nationwide (the Peanuts comic strip took aim more than once) before it was unceremoniously abandoned.

Daily Devotional

January 22

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Even so let your light shine before men,
that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven

The Christian life is always a matter of balance and poise. It is a life that gives the impression of being self-contradictory.... We read the Sermon on the Mount and we come across something like this: "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." Then we read, "Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be seen of them: else ye have no reward with your Father which is in heaven." And a man looking at that says, "Well, what am I to do? If I am to do all these things in secret ... how can men know I am doing these things, and how can they possibly see this light which is shining in me?"

It's a Mad Materialist World

Superstition and Avatar II

Is the world ultimately personal or impersonal?  The Christian position is clear, without ambiguity.  If a hair falls from one's head or a sparrow dies, such apparently random events are indeed ultimately personal in the sense that they are at the will, command, and direction of a person--the Living God.  When a hair falls from one's head it is from the Lord.  When the sparrow dies, it is by the Lord's will and command.  Even what appears to us to be the most random act is actually not; it is infinitely personal. 

The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

Modern man has a diametrically opposed view.  His confession of faith is that the world is ultimately random and impersonal.  Since there is no person behind it all, the universe is thoroughly and ultimately impersonal.  What is just is.  And what exists is just matter, or more precisely, matter, energy and motion.  That's it.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

There’s A Dear,

Posted on Friday, January 17, 2014  
By Douglas Wilson 
Blog and Mablog

When it comes to your “personal data” and national security issues, there are two basic layers to the question. The first has to do with the nature of the world, and the second has to do with the nature of our particular moment in history. The first asks whether anybody should be trusted with this kind of information, and the second asks whether these people should be trusted with anything. The first is a constitutional question, the second a practical one.

You would answer the first correctly if you have been taught in line with biblical principles of civic liberty. You would answer the second correctly if you haven’t been hibernating under a rock for the last decade or so.
Start with the second issue, start with where we are. Start with those who are currently governing us.

Daily Devotional

January 21

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

What do ye more than others?

There was never a man whose preaching, with its mighty emphasis upon grace, was so frequently misunderstood [as Paul]. You remember the deduction some people had been drawing in Rome and in other places. They said, "Now then, in view of the teaching of this man Paul, let us do evil that grace may abound, for, surely, this teaching ... leads to that conclusion and to no other. Paul has just been saying, 'Where sin abounded grace did much more abound'; very well, let us continue in sin that more and more grace may abound."

"God forbid," says Paul; and he is constantly having to say that.

Escaping the Welfare Trap

Bernie Madoff Should Have Been a Politician

The left wing Labour party has a scurrilous record on beneficiary dependence.  The bottom line for the Labour party when it comes to welfare dependants is, "more".  Not necessarily more financial support--although that cannot be ruled out necessarily--but more people receiving welfare payments.  That is partially why the previous Labour regime introduced Working for Families in 2004 in New Zealand, a welfare scheme targeted at the middle class.  The electoral impact is straightforward: when voters become reliant upon government largesse they will vote for the party which introduced it or continues to support it.  More beneficiaries, more votes.

The current government has made reducing long term beneficiary dependence a high priority.  It has introduced a comprehensive, integrated programme to get people back to work.  A core part of that programme is to expect solo mothers on the Domestic Purposes Benefit and others on the unemployment benefit to get a job.  If reasonable steps are not taken, benefits are reduced.  The early results are encouraging:

Letter From the UK (About Claptrap)

The people should be free to choose

This belief that the state is the sole purveyor of social goodness is Marxist claptrap 

By Janet Daley

The Telegraph

We are going to have to make the argument again – and again and again. No matter how many times we appear to have won the day, the tireless lobbies whose own career interests, or ideological fervour, or political power are under threat simply wear us down.So here we go: politicians are not superior beings, okay? They are not more morally righteous, or in possession of better judgement, than the majority of the electorate, right? That is something on which we are likely to agree. In fact, it is something with which roughly 99 per cent of the population would probably agree.

So why are so many of us apparently prepared to accept that a politician’s decision about how our money should be spent, or our schools should be run, or our hospitals should be administered is inherently virtuous? Whereas, decisions about those things made by private individuals – whether as providers or consumers – are automatically wicked.

Daily Devotional

January 20

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

O wonderful, wonderful peace,
Sweet peace—the gift of God's love

What shall we say of this phrase: "The peace of God that passeth all understanding"? (Philippians 4:7). You cannot understand this peace, you cannot imagine it, you cannot even believe it in a sense, and yet it is happening and you are experiencing it and enjoying it. It is God's peace that is in Christ Jesus.

Big Brother's Smothering Embrace

Not Just The Walls Have Ears

Things have become barrel scrapingly low when a majority of ordinary citizens no longer trust their governments.  Not that any citizen should extend trust to the government unilaterally.  "Trust, but verify" is an obligatory responsibility of all free citizens to demand and require from their governments.  Verification usually is through the oversight of separate powers of government, such as the judiciary, parliamentary committees, the courts, or special (independent) commissions.  In a free society, government agencies are mandated to watch other government agencies, reporting and accounting to separated governmental, representative powers.  Such things seem ancient history now.  Hence trust is evaporating faster than sweat in a Melbourne heat wave.  

We appear to have reached the bottom of the barrel in the trust stakes.  Here is the latest shakedown from the Snowden revelations, this time about the unwarranted, unauthorised collection of text messages, according to The Guardian:

Send Us the Judge

Keep Packer, Send us the Judge

Kerre McIvor

NZ Herald 

[Kerre McIvor had an excellent piece in the Herald On Sunday over the weekend on privilege, crime, and punishment. Ed.]

 

Some people were shocked and surprised by the sentence meted out to former Kiwi league international Russell Packer in a Sydney court this week.  If you don't follow league, you may not know Packer's name, but if I remind you of the infamous incident of a league player standing on a field, peeing copiously into his shorts, all of which was caught on camera, that may jog your memory.

Packer was in court after pleading guilty to assaulting Enoka Time outside a Sydney bar last November. Packer had been ejected from the bar and bashed Time in a drunken rage, before stamping on his face, leaving him with facial fractures.  It was a vicious, nasty assault, and the judge sentenced Packer accordingly. He described the attack as cowardly and deplorable and said he was sick and tired of alcohol-fuelled violence in the community.

He gave Packer the maximum he could under Aussie law - two years - and denied him bail while his lawyers scrambled to mount an appeal.

The people stunned by the sentence are divided into two camps.

Daily Devotional

January 18

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Man's only hope—the gospel

How tragic it is that mankind should so long have been guilty of the foolish error of reversing the true order of religion and morality! For once they are placed in their right positions the situation is entirely changed. In precisely the same way as morality alone fails, the gospel of Christ succeeds.

It starts with God and exists to glorify His holy Name. It restores man into the right relationship to Him, reconciling him to God through the blood of Christ. It tells man that he is more important than his own actions or his environment and that when he is put right, he must then proceed to put them right.

Alive and Well

Racial Stereotypes

Today's proposition for discussion is whether some people think the way they do because they are degenerate or because of their race.  The stakes are high.  If people genuinely think and act a certain way because of their race--that is, if their race is a causative factor in who they are and what they think and do--then racism is legitimate in at least some some senses and cannot be condemned or rejected out of hand.  For example, if we were to observe that all women have ovaries that result in certain determinative effects, who could accuse us of sexism?  It is simply a descriptive statement of biological fact.

So, is race determinative  of people's actions, thoughts, and words? Apparently lots of people think so--so much so, that many folk get apoplectic if they find someone of a particular race not acting and thinking the way they believe their race determines them to act or think.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Nature of Natural Law

Posted on Friday, January 10, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

Yesterday I came home from the Auburn Avenue conference for pastors, which is always a grand time. One thing that happened there was this. During his talk, Jim Jordan spent some time castigating the idea of natural law, and during the Q&A I was asked about it, because I have been making friendly noises about natural law in my blog posts for a while. Am I sidling away from Van Til, what about all my friends, what gives, etc.? I answered briefly there, but have been mulling over the whole topic some more, and wanted to add a few things.

My interest in natural law comes down to one thing — which is that I want us to confess the universal authority of Jesus Christ over everyone and all things.

Now I grant that there is a form of natural law thinking that does not want to do this at all. But there is a rejection of natural law thinking that doesn’t want to do it either, and I am wanting to avoid both of those
problems. Here is how it works.

Daily Devotional

January 17

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

History is bound up with the divine Kingdom

The key to the history of the world is the kingdom of God. The story of the other nations mentioned in the Old Testament is relevant only as it bears upon the destiny of Israel. And ultimately history today is relevant only as it bears upon the history of the Christian Church. What really matters in the world is God's kingdom.

From the very beginning, since the fall of man, God has been at work establishing a new kingdom in the world. It is His own kingdom, and He is calling people out of the world into that kingdom; and everything that happens in the world has relevance to it.... Other events are of importance as they have a bearing upon that event. The problems of today are to be understood only in its light....

Draining the Swamp

Fraud, Corruption, and Conspiracies

It is an old adage that when one is uncovering and exposing a rort one needs to follow the money.  Where is the payoff going?  Who is benefiting?  In New Zealand we have had an example recently where traditional opponents conspired together to cream off some money from the tax payers to feather their own nests. 

The cause d'jour was workplace health and safety.  The conspirators were traditional opponents--the Council of Trade Unions ("CTU") and Business NZ.  Together they persuaded the government owned Accident Compensation Corporation to pay out $20m over ten years to the respective organisations/pressure groups to "train" employees in health and safety practices.  This from the NZ Herald:

Shaky Paradigms and Hidden Languages

It Just Got Far More Complex

Over the past forty years scientists in a wide variety of fields have been confronting a material world that is far, far more complex than previous generations had ever thought. This has created consternation amongst the materialists, whose only available engine to produce said complexity is chance working over billions and billions of years.  The more complex the material world is discovered to be, the more difficult the materialists' cosmology is to sustain. 

When life in its most basic forms (for example, at the level of single cells) is demonstrated to be horrendously complex, all sorts of questions are begged, such as where are the less complex mechanisms which produced this extreme complexity in the most primitive of life forms?  The gap in the fossil record (which is damning enough) is nothing compared to the "gaps" at the micro-biological level required by the materialist cosmological theories.

And now, it has been discovered that the work of DNA--complex enough--is much, much more complex than initially thought.  Add another trillion years or so on to the age of the cosmos in order for such complexity to evolve.  What's a few trillion years amongst friends, huh?

Daily Devotional

January 16

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

His demand is total

Both [God and mammon] make a totalitarian demand upon us. Worldly things really do make a totalitarian demand as we have seen. How they tend to grip the entire personality and affect us everywhere! They demand our entire devotion; they want us to live for them absolutely.

Yes, but so does God.... Not in a material sense necessarily, but in some sense or other He says to us all, "Go, sell all that thou hast, and come, follow me." "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." It is a totalitarian demand.... It is "either—or"; compromise is completely impossible at this point. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

Dogs' Breakfasts and Demagogues

Next Election More Interesting

Ideologues and demagogues were successful in New Zealand is getting a law passed in 2007 which ostensibly outlawed all physical discipline and correction of a child.  We say "ostensibly" because the actual statute is a dog's breakfast.  It outlaws smacking, but then it doesn't.  Here is the actual text of the law:

Christian Persecution Update 2014

The 10 Absolute Worst Places in the World to Be a Christian

Jan. 8, 2014 10:13am  
Billy Hallowel
TheBlaze

Open Doors USA, an organization that monitors and exposes Christian persecution around the globe, has released its “2014 World Watch List” — a report that highlights and ranks the worst nations in the world to be a Christian.

Topping the list this year are countries known for brutal government crackdowns or for the uncontrolled and murderous tactics of extremist groups within their borders.  The absolute worst places to be a Christian this year are: North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The below graphic shows the top 10 most brutal countries for believers; the 2013 results are also present to the right, so you can see where these nations placed last year (for a full explanation on the 2013 results, read our previous coverage):

Daily Devotional

January 16

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

The tyranny of things--Matthew 6:24

Jesus warns us of ... the awful grip and power of these earthly things upon us.... He says, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.The heart! Then in [Matthew 6] verse 24 He talks about the mind. "No man can serve two masters"--;and we should notice the word "serve." These are the expressive terms He uses in order to impress upon us the terrible control that these things tend to exercise over us. Are we not all aware of them the moment we stop to think--the tyranny of persons, the tyranny of the world? ... We are all involved in this; we are all in the grip of this awful power of worldliness which really will master us unless we are aware of it.

But it is not only powerful; it is very subtle. It is the thing that really controls most men's lives. Have you seen the change, the subtle change, that tends to take place in men's lives as they succeed and prosper in this world? It does not happen to those who are truly spiritual men; but if they are not, it invariably happens. Why is it that idealism is generally associated with youth and not with middle age and old age? Why do men tend to become cynical as they get older? Why does the noble outlook upon life tend to go? It is because we all become victims of "treasures on earth," and if you watch you can see it in the lives of men.

Read the biographies. Many a young man starts out with a bright vision, but ... he becomes influenced, perhaps when he is at college, by an outlook that is essentially worldly.... He is still a very nice man and, moreover, just and wise; but he is not the man he was when he began. Something has been lost. Yes; this is a familiar phenomenon: "Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy." Do we not all know something about it? It is there; it is a prison house, and it fastens itself upon us unless we are aware of it.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 91-2

---

“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Letter From the UK (About Liars and Their Pants)

Conspiracies at the BBC

We have long had the view that the MSM has jumped into tank of global warming advocacy.  It has now come to light that the BBC overtly conspired to frame the news to promote greenist propaganda on global warming--and was funded by the taxpayer to boot. 

This from the Daily Mail:

BBC's six-year cover-up of secret 'green propaganda' training for top executives

• Pensioner forces BBC to lift veil on 2006 eco-seminar to top executives
• Papers reveal influence of top green campaigners including Greenpeace
• Then-head of news Helen Boaden said it impacted a 'broad range of output'
• Yet BBC has spent more than £20,000 in legal fees trying to keep it secret

By David Rose

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming,  The Mail on Sunday can reveal.  The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.

The story reads like a pulp thriller, with as many turns and convolutions.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

7 Tips on Hiring Millennials

Posted on Monday, January 6, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

In order to establish that this post has a more substantive point than it would have in the guise of some old geezer venting his spleen, not that this couldn’t be happening also, let me just say at the outset that I have been deeply involved in the processes that lie behind what I am going to be talking about, and have been involved with them for many decades. I have been on boards and committees in the course of countless job interviews, I have written numerous letters of recommendation, I have given pastoral counsel to young professionals and entrepreneurs on many occasions, and have pretty much seen and heard a whole bunch of stuff. You’d be a geezer too. Enough about my end.

And with regard to what I will be saying about the Millennials themselves, let me begin by qualifying that also — and doing so with some rough numbers. In every generation, you will have fifteen percent who are motivated self-starters. They work hard, and are a credit to whoever raised them. If you ask them to shine a doorknob, they will do it until they can see their grandchildren in the reflection. At the other end, you have the perennially lethargic, straight out of the book of Proverbs. If it were raining oatmeal, they would have left their bowl at home. These are those who ought to be contemplating the ways of the ant more than they do.

The flavor of each generation is set by the soft seventy percent in the middle.

Daily Devotional

January 14

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

The way of the world

This [the first Beatitude (Matthew 5:3)] is something which is not only not admired by the world; it is despised by it. You will never find a greater antithesis to the worldly spirit and outlook than that which you find in this verse. What emphasis the world places on its belief in self-reliance, self-confidence, and self-expression! Look at its literature. If you want to get on in this world, it says, believe in yourself. That idea is absolutely controlling the life of men at the present time....

What, for instance, is the essence of good salesmanship according to modern ideas? It is giving the impression of confidence and assurance.

Moderns Versus the Gospel

The War of the World(view)s

The Bible has much to say about God and about how we can come to know him.  What is says is deeply at odds with much of the thinking in the modern world.  And this fundamental difference generates differences in many other areas--differences in people's whole view of the world.  Modern worldviews are at odds with the worldview put forward in the Bible.  This difference in worldviews creates obstacles when modern people read and study the Bible  People come to the Bible with expectations that do not fit the Bible, and this clash becomes one main reason, though not the only one, why people do not find the Bible's claims acceptable. [Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), p. 14.]

It is incumbent upon Christians to understand what is going on when moderns, often with disdain and ridicule, reject the Bible.  There is not just a clash between the reader and the text.  Now the Bible is worlds apart from the modern view--or more precisely, worldviews apart.  This was not always the case.  Generally, when an Unbeliever approached the Bible during the first Christendom (roughly 800AD to 1700AD) he would come knowing about, if not believing in, a creator.  He would also come to the Bible already believing in heaven and hell, in divine judgment, in moral guilt, sin, and punishment.  Most likely he would also believe in the Christ.  In other words, he would come with the general worldview of the Bible already in situ and largely intact.

No longer.  Modernism and post-modernism have excised such beliefs from the modern Unbelieving mind.

Ebbing Tides, Part II

Report: Record 87 Surgical Abortion Clinic Closures in 2013

by Dr. Susan Berry  
30 Dec 2013
The Blaze

We posted recently on the gradual progress in the United States being made against the horrid practice of abortion.  The Blaze also reports on some additional evidence of that progress. [Ed]

A survey of abortion clinics in the United States has concluded that a record number of 87 surgical abortion clinics closed in 2013.

The survey, conducted by pro-life organization Operation Rescue, found that the total number of surgical abortion clinics remaining in the United States is now 582, a twelve percent decrease in surgical abortion clinics in 2013 alone, and a 73 percent drop from a 1991 high of 2,176.

According to Operation Rescue, of the 87 clinics that discontinued surgical abortions, 81 are permanently closed, while six stopped performing surgical abortions but continued the sale of abortion-inducing drugs. The data does not include the eleven abortion clinics that were temporarily closed this year, but later reopened.

Daily Devotional

January 13

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

He built his house on the sand (ii)
(continued from January 11)

Finally, it is a mentality that never thinks things right through; it never stops to envisage and consider possibilities and eventualities. The foolish man who built his house without a foundation and on the sand did not stop to think or to ask himself, "'Now what may happen? Is it possible that the river which is so pleasant to look at in the summer may in the winter suddenly become very swollen as the result of heavy rain or snow and I may be flooded out?" He did not stop to think of that; he just wanted a pleasant house in that particular position, and he put it up without considering any one of these things.

And if someone had come along and said, "Look here, my friend, it is no use putting up a house like that on the sand. Don't you realize what may happen in this locality? You don't know what that river is capable of doing. I have seen it like a veritable cataract. I have known storms here that bring down the best-built houses. My friend, I suggest that you dig.deep. Get down to the rock"—the foolish man would have dismissed it all and persisted in doing what he considered best for him.

In a spiritual sense, he is not interested in learning from Church history; he is not interested in what the Bible has to say; he wants to do something, and he believes it can be done in his way, and away he goes and does it. He does not consult the plans and the specifications; he does not try to look to the future and envisage certain tests that must inevitably come upon the house that is being built.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, p. 299

Government Wowsering

Up in Smoke

In New Zealand we have a messianic crusade to make the country "smoke free" by 2025.  The definition of this paradisaical state is as follows:

 What does Smokefree New Zealand 2025 mean?

• Our children and grandchildren will be free from exposure to tobacco and tobacco use
  

• The smoking prevalence across all populations will be <5%. The goal is not a ban on smoking.
  

• Tobacco will be difficult to sell and supply.  [http://smokefree.org.nz/smokefree-2025]

Of course this is being promulgated by government and its agencies, and driven by particular wowser-politicians.  We do not question the motives of said protagonists.  Smoking can cause much harm.  But we do question the wisdom of the wowsers. 

Moreover, we are also deeply sceptical of government promoted programmes and causes where the underlying object is to restrain government spending on health (as is the case of the anti-tobacco movement).  The reason is straightforward: when an entire population (that is, more than 5 percent) is dependant upon government provided healthcare, the government has been given a license to control human behaviour to an extraordinary extent for its own ends.  In this case, the broader campaign against smoking shows every sign of not being driven primarily by concern over smokers welfare, but by a desire to restrain public health expenditure.

Letter From America (About Scouting)

Former Boy Scout and Scoutmaster Ron Orr stands outside his home in North Richland Hills, Texas on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2013. Orr, a business consultant, is signing up local units for a new conservative alternative to the Boy Scouts of America called Trail Life USA, after the BSA, in the most contentious change of membership policy in their 103-year history, opened their ranks to openly gay boys. Orr is part of a family that has four generations of Eagle Scouts. His older son recently earned his Eagle rank and his younger son was on the verge of doing likewise. But Orr said he could not stand by after the policy change. (AP/LM Otero)

Bible-Based Alternative to Boy Scouts Launches After Policy Change for Gay Scouts

Jan. 2, 2014 9:00pm
Fred Lucas 
The Blaze

With the new year came a new group for youth, based on Christian principles, as a response to the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to allow gay scouts. Trail Life USA formally began operating Jan. 1.

The new organization’s motto is “Walk Worthy,” taken from Colossians 1:10 “that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.”

“Our vision is to be the premier national character development organization for young men which produces godly and responsible husbands, fathers and citizens,” the organization’s website states.

Though it’s based on Christian and biblical principles, its open to people of all faiths.

“While the program is undergirded by Biblical values and unapologetically reflects a Christian worldview, there is also a clearly defined inclusion policy for youth,” according to the membership standards. “Accordingly, all boys are welcome irrespective of religion, race, national origin or socio-economic status. Our goal is for parents and families of every faith to be able to place their boys in a youth program that endeavors to provide moral consistency and ethical integrity in its adult leaders.”

Daily Devotional

January 11

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

He built his house on the sand (i)

What are the characteristics of the foolish man? The first is that he is in a hurry. Foolish people are always in a hurry; they want to do everything at once; they have no time to wait. How often does the Scripture warn us against this! It tells us that the godly, righteous man "shall not make haste." He is never subject to flurry and excitement and hurry. He knows God and he knows that the decrees and purposes and plan of God are eternal and immutable. But the foolish man is impatient; he never takes time; he is always interested in short cuts and quick results.... We are all familiar with this kind of person in ordinary life and quite apart from Christianity. He is the type of man who says, "I must have a house at once; there is no time for foundations." He is always in a hurry.

Religion and Afghani Culture

The Fruit Tells the Tree's Story

The media has picked up on the story of an Afghan girl, believed 10, who was forced by her family into becoming a suicide bomber.  Oftentimes news reports on events of this kind are untrustworthy, but at present it appears fairly well corroborated--and there are other reported instances besides.

Here is a report of the incident, with cross references to other news media as well.

Afghan Girl Believed to Be 10 Was Detained With Suicide Vest…but That’s Not the Saddest Part of the Story

Jan. 7, 2014 8:14am
Sharona Schwartz
The Blaze

An Afghan girl believed to be 10-years-old says that her brother and his friend forced her to wear a suicide vest and carry out an attack on police.  The BBC reported that the girl, named Spogmai, could be as young as eight and is the sister of a prominent Taliban commander known as Zahir.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Getting Lost in the Deep Weed

Posted on Friday, January 3, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

I have written before on the sinfulness of recreational marijuana use. In an appendix to Future Men, entitled “Liberty and Marijuana,” I argued that the one use for alcohol that is prohibited in Scripture is a condition remarkably similar to the effects of marijuana — and to the extent that there is a distinction between being drunk and being stoned, marijuana is demonstrably worse. For more detailed argumentation on that issue, I refer you to that place. So it is a sin to get stoned.

At the same time, I have also repeatedly urged us to remember the distinction between sins and crimes. Not everything that is sinful ought to be against the law. Granted that marijuana use is sinful — although many Christians today are muddled enough to not understand that — ought it to remain against the law? I believe so.

Now I say this acknowledging that many of our current penalties for pot use have been draconian, and I believe that our “war on drugs” has been an over-reaching and very expensive joke.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

January 10

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled. —Colossians 1:21

Devotional:
For if it were not clearly expressed that we are obnoxious to the wrath and vengeance of God, and to eternal death, we should not so fully discover how miserable we must be without the Divine mercy, nor should we so highly estimate the blessing of deliverance.

For example, let any man be addressed in the following manner: "If, while you remained a sinner, God had hated you, and rejected you according to your demerits, horrible destruction would have befallen you; but because he has voluntarily, and of his own gratuitous kindness, retained you in his favor, and not permitted you to be alienated from him, he has thus delivered you from that danger"; he will be affected, and will in some measure perceive how much he is indebted to Divine mercy.

But if, on the contrary, he be told what the Scripture teaches, "that he was alienated from God by sin, an heir of wrath, obnoxious to the punishment of eternal death, excluded from all hope of salvation, a total stranger to the Divine blessing, a slave to Satan, a captive under the yoke of sin, and, in a word, condemned to, and already involved in, a horrible destruction;

Ebbing Tides, Part I

More Obstacles to the Horrid Practice

It is noted with thankfulness that the United States became more pro-life over the past twelve months.  Whilst it is true that abortions are down in New Zealand, we cannot attribute it to any one event (for example, the passing of more restrictive legislation) nor even to a change in sentiment amongst the population at large.  And research is not performed on such things Downunder.  It's not the done thing, whereas plenty of money is always available for research projects indirectly promoting abortion.

We wonder whether our national conscience is being pricked and that the tap, tap, tap of information about the real live human being, fearfully and wonderfully made, in the womb of a woman is gradually causing a change in sentiment.  Also, there is evidence that the medical profession is uneasy about abortion: it's very difficult to get medical staff to participate in the practice in some areas of the country--and that has to have an effect.

We read that in the United States significant progress was made in 2013 against the horrid practice.  But the kind of progress was piecemeal, gradual, here a little, there a little.  No king hits.  And that's the way we expect that we will finally be rid of this monstrosity.  Breitbart provides us with the following "state of play" account:

Spurgeon's Conversion

Look!

How the Snowpocalypse of 1850 Led to Spurgeon’s Conversion 164 Years Ago Today

Justin Taylor
January 06, 2014

164 years ago today—January 6, 1850—15-year-old Charles Spurgeon was trudging up Hythe Hill in Colchester, on his way to church. When the blizzard prevented him from going further, he turned the corner and made his way into a small Primitive Methodist Church on Artillery Street.

He recounted the story hundreds of time, each time a bit differently. But here is one of his most vivid recollections:

I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair now, had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm one Sunday morning, when I was going to a place of worship.

When I could go no further, I turned down a court and came to a little Primitive Methodist Chapel.

In that chapel there might be a dozen or fifteen people.

The minister did not come that morning: snowed up, I suppose.

A poor man, a shoemaker, a tailor, or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

January 09

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. —Isaiah 42:3

Devotional:
"Nor will he quench the smoking flax." Isaiah ascribes to Christ that forbearance by which he bears with our weakness, which we find to be actually fulfilled in him; for wherever any spark of piety is seen, he strengthens and kindles it, and if he were to act towards us with the utmost rigor, we should be reduced to nothing.

Although men therefore totter and stumble, although they are even shaken out of joint, yet he does not at once cast them off as utterly useless, but bears long, till he makes them stronger and more steadfast.

Not only did he act in this manner when he was manifested to the world, but this is what he daily shows himself to be by the gospel. Following this example, the ministers of the gospel, who are his deputies, ought to show themselves to be meek, and to support the weak, and gently to lead them in the way, so as not to extinguish in them the feeblest spark of piety, but, on the contrary, to kindle them with all their might. —Commentaries

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John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.

A Much Needed Corrective, Part IV

Final Notes and Unfinished Business

We strongly recommend to our New Zealand readers in particular that they read Keith Newman's Bible and Treaty: Missionaries Among the Maori--a New Perspective (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  It is part of our heritage with which all New Zealand Christians ought be familiar. 

In this final post, we want to call attention to three aspects of Newman's book which are worth considering. 

The first is the deleterious role of the New Zealand Company ("NZC")--a company largely associated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield formed to promote and profit from British colonial settlement in New Zealand.  In order to trade, NZC needed to secure supply of land.  Settlers from Great Britain were offered land upon which to settle in New Zealand.  NZC actively went around trying to secure that land in order to on-sell it.  They bought it from Maori. 

The Company was not at all scrupulous in patiently working through the complex issues of buying land from Maori, where title was a nebulous concept and contentious historical reality.

Letter From Australia (About Nothing to See Here)

A Word or Two About Truth

TIM BLAIR
The Daily Telegraph
January 06, 2014 12:00AM

BY now, we're all familiar with the media ritual that follows your standard Islamic bombing, massacre, shooting or beheading. First there is the incident itself. Some mad-for-martyrdom devotee of Muhammad decides it's time to hit the jihadi switch and kill a few infidels, frequently howling Islamic oaths or otherwise informing everybody about his holy motivation. 
 
And then the media pretends not to notice anything Islamic, or otherwise downplays any evidence suggesting that a devoted son of Allah might have been involved. It can be quite a spectacle, if you're into ducking and dodging and general hot-footed evasion.


Forget the elephant in the room. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, some in the media could weave their way through a pantry packed with pachyderms.

Line of the Day

Shades of Bob Hope

Doug Powers, writing at Michelle Malkin, as he struggles with the Big Cold in the US:

A Coast Guard ice breaker is currently en route in an attempt to free my car from the frigid grip of Boreas:

On Travelocity earlier I clicked the “go somewhere warmer” button and it booked me a room on the Akademik Shokalskiy.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

January 08

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Then the angel of the Lord answered and said, O Lord of hosts, how long wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah, against which thou hast had indignation these threescore and ten years? —Zechariah 1:12

Devotional:
Why does Scripture testify that angels supplicate God for us? Is it that each of us may flee to them? By no means; but that being assured of God's paternal love, we may entertain more hope and confidence; yea, that we may courageously fight, being certain of victory, since celestial hosts contend for us, according to what appears from many examples.

For when the servant of Elisha saw not the chariots flying in the air, he became almost lost in despair; but his despair was instantly removed when he saw so many angels ready at hand for help; so whenever God declares that angels are ministers for our safety, he means to animate our faith; at the same time he does not send us to angels; but this one thing is sufficient for us, that when God is propitious to us, all the angels have a care for our salvation.

For Shame

Ecclesiastical Paddling Poolers

There are parts of the church--far too many for comfort--which crave acceptance from outsiders--otherwise known as Unbelievers.  Some speak of churches needing to be "seeker friendly"; others appeal for relevance, clarity, plain speaking. 

What might clarity and plain speaking look like where we live?  To make people feel at home in a church service one would need to use "f . . .k" every third or fourth word, because that's how folk speak at home around here.  Mind you, then folk would say, "Why f . . . bother going to f. . .  church--it's just like f. . . . home anyf....ingway."  Point well taken.  We think this stuff risks becoming so loopy it belongs in the asylum.  That's what a craven lust for acceptance will do to you. 

The Church of England risks becoming a poster boy for this kind of inane worldliness.

Greenpeace Chutzpah

Self-Righteous Hooligans

At last.  Maybe.  Julie Bishop, Australia's foreign minister, has indicated that the Australian government may require Greenpeace to pay the costs to the Australian government of one of their staffers getting arrested in Russian waters.  It amounts to around $35,000.  We hope the New Zealand government is paying attention. 

It is normal for diplomatic resources to swing in to support citizens in trouble overseas.  But ought they--when the reckless actions of citizens gets them into trouble.  If citizens travelling overseas ignore travel advisory warnings, break the local laws, commit crimes--should the tax payer foot the bill?  Maybe.  It's arguable, but not a slam-dunk one.  Far less justifiable is when a citizen deliberately plans to go overseas and break the law.  To our mind any costs incurred by the taxpayers must be reimbursed. 

One of the "activists" Greenpeace put forward to help climb up on to a Russian arctic drilling platform was Tasmanian, Colin Russell.  Upon returning home after a relatively short stint in the Russian penal system, he had the gall to complain that the Aussie government had not done enough to support him.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

January 07

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. —Matthew 5:11

Devotional:
If we are not satisfied with that, he shows us that as much as our faith is more precious than gold or silver, so it is the more reasonable that it should be tried. Also it is by this means that we are mortified, in order not to be rooted in our love for this world, and more evil affections than we can imagine are thus corrected, were it but to teach us humility and bring down that pride which is always greater in us than it ought to be. By it he also wishes to put us in mind of the esteem in which we ought to hold his word; for if it cost us nothing we should not know its worth.