Daily Devotional

July 09

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Forever in my great Taskmaster’s eye

[In Matthew, chapter 7] Jesus is enforcing again the all-importance of our remembering that we are walking under the Father’s eye. The particular subject He handles is one which is mainly concerned with our relationship with other people; but still the important thing to realize is that our relationship to God is the fundamental matter ... we are reminded all along that our life here is a journey and a pilgrimage, and that it is leading on to a final judgement, an ultimate assessment, and the determination and proclamation of our final and eternal destiny.

... Half our troubles are due to the fact that we live on the assumption that this is the only life and the only world. ... If we were questioned and asked whether we believe that we go on living after death, and that we shall have to face God in judgement, we would undoubtedly say ‘yes’. But as we live from hour to hour are we mindful of that? ... the thing that really differentiates God’s people from all others is that they have always been people who walk in the consciousness of their eternal destiny.

Roe v. Wade, Part II

Legal Chicanery

The Supreme Court of the United States refused to recognise certain vital principles when they decided that abortion was "constitutional".  Amongst these was the refusal to decide on the humanity of the unborn child.  The Court thus adopted a profoundly agnostic stance on the essential ethical issue.  Moreover, according to Harold O J Brown the Court also chose to ignore whether the Constitution and the Bill of Rights recognise a human being's right to life.  There is no doubt the Court chose the course of intellectual elision and dishonesty in this most devastating of decisions. 

But, in deciding that abortion was OK, ethical, and morally upstanding the Court did have some recourse to some positive moral standards.  It ruled that the unborn child could be protected by law if he or she had the "capability of meaningful life".  This is a vague term, but presumably the Court meant by "meaningful", the ability to survive outside the womb. 

Now the brute reality is simple: no newborn child has the ability to survive without the care and assistance of others.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

And Free Chocolate Milk for All . . .

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 3, 2014

The uproar on the left over the Hobby Lobby decision has an explanation. That explanation is that we have allowed our understanding of what is meant by rights and liberties to become badly degraded. In fact, to simplify, the common understanding of rights has gotten into a condition of extreme labefactation. So to speak.

The left tends to think of political rights in terms of stuff — the right to affordable housing, the right to health care, the right to contraception, and so on. Conservatives tend to think of political rights in terms of non-interference — the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to worship God freely, and so forth.

Now rights always imply corresponding obligations. If I have a right to life, others have an obligation not to shoot me. If I have a right to keep and bear arms, others have a responsibility not to take those arms away from me. If I have a right to peaceably assemble, then others have the obligation not to disrupt my peaceful assembly, and so on.

In a similar — yet strikingly different — way, if I have a right to free chocolate milk, then somebody has an obligation to provide it for me.

Daily Devotional

July 08

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

A spiritual check-up

We must learn to ... deal with ourselves faithfully. It is a vital matter in the Christian life....
First and foremost we must really confess what we have done.... We must not spare ourselves.... We must not shield ourselves in any way; we must not attempt to slide over our sin.... We must hold the facts before ourselves deliberately and say, ‘This is what I did; this is what I thought and what I said.’

But not only that. I must analyse this thing ... and consider all that it involves and implies.... We shall never really abhor ourselves unless we do that... we have to particularize and to descend to details. I know this is very painful ... it is not enough just to come to God and say, ‘God, I am a sinner’... the essence of this matter is to get right down to details, to particularize ... to put every detail down before yourself, to analyse yourself.... That is what the masters in the spiritual life have always done. Read their manuals, read the journals of the most saintly people who have adorned the life of the Church, and you will find that they have always done that.... John Fletcher not only asked twelve questions of himself before he went to sleep each night but he got his congregation to do the same. He did not content himself with a cursory general examination; he examined himself in detail, with such questions as: Do I lose my temper? Have I lost my temper? Have I made life more difficult for somebody else? Did I listen to that insinuation that the devil put into my mind, that unclean idea? Did I cling to it or immediately reject it? You go through the day and you put it all before yourself and face it. That is true self-examination. Then we must view it all in the sight of God— ‘before thee’.

Faith on Trial, pp. 69–71

---

“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.”

Roe v. Wade (Part I)

A Bloody Religion

Roe v. Wade (1973) is the infamous decision of the US Supreme Court legalising abortion in the United States.  The reasoning behind the decision has been scrutinised, ridiculed and rejected ever since.  Harold O J Brown, in an article entitled "Legal Aspects of the Right to Life"  reviews the reasoning of the judicial majority.

The first reason offered by the Court to justify their decision is this: the Supreme Court rejected the Hippocratic oath, claiming it was irrelevant.  This oath traditionally defined the duty of the medical profession to "do no harm".  It had hitherto been applied by the profession to the abortion of children.  It was understood and interpreted to require an explicit refusal to perform or even advise an abortion.  But in a magisterial overreach, the Court ruled that the Hippocratic Oath was irrelevant.  On what grounds, you may ask?

In Memoriam

Louis Zamperini (1917-2014), RIP

Jul 03, 2014

Justin Taylor

Below is a profile of Louis Zamperini, who lived an amazing life and was rescued (in more than one sense) by the grace of God. He has now gone to be with the Lord.

The story is told in Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (see reviews by Collin Hansen and Tim Challies).

To read more about Zamperini’s Christian testimony, see his autobiography Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian’s Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II.

Angelina Jolie’s film version of Zamperini’s story (trailer following the profile below) arrives in theaters on Christmas Day 2014.

Daily Devotional

July 07

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)

Lift up the standard of Thy Cross
And all shall own Thou diedst for all

[The Gospel] works for everyone, for anyone, for all.... No type or kind of person is excluded from its all-embracing scope and span ... All the things about which others boasted, and in which they gloried, were sectional and partisan in their appeal and limited in the number of their adherents. They all lacked universality ... and what satisfied one was rejected by another.... The world was divided and discord prevailed....

But the gospel of Christ is different. It is for anyone, for everyone. Its secret is that it postulates nothing in man except failure and sin and weakness.... The gospel is not concerned about our natural differences. It centres on that which we share in common—sin and rebellion against God, failure in our lives, and a sense of shame. It demolishes all distinctions by placing us all together before God. And it does so, further, by postulating our weakness and helplessness, and relying for its efficacy upon the power of God Himself.

It matters not therefore who we are nor what we are. None can be too high or too low for this. There is no such thing as wise and unwise, great and small, learned and ignorant, wealthy or poor. There is no longer Jew and Gentile, Barbarian or Scythian, male or female, bond or free. God sees us as souls lost and desperate, helpless and forlorn. And He offers us the same salvation.

The Plight of Man and the Power of God, 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.”

The Webs We Weave

Conditioned to Rebellion

At present there is a brouhaha bubbling more strongly than a Rotorua mudpool over a Maori youth discharged without conviction.  The man in question just happens to be the younger son of the Maori king.  The fact that there is a Maori king will no doubt come as a surprise to many of our international readers.  It's a long story.  Suffice it to say that the "king" is an honorary figure belonging essentially to one tribe--the Tainui.  Maori remain tribal to this day in a way that the Scots, the Welsh and the English are not, but in a way that the French and the Germans are.  Which is to say tribal divisions still matter.

In any event, the swirling controversy involves the allegation that the son of the current Tainui/Maori King was released without conviction for theft because of who he is and because it may hurt his future prospects of succeeding to the throne.  The tribal under current to the controversy was neatly summarised by one Dover Samuels, a former MP:

Sickening Selective Abortion

Why Are We Killing Children With Down Syndrome?

Posted on July 2, 2014 

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

A new paper from Mark Bradford, president of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation USA, one of the world’s leading organizations that help children with down syndrome and their families, details how children with Down syndrome are being exterminated, and what policies could help end this inhumane form of violence and discrimination. You can read the paper published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute here.

In the United States, approximately 6,000 individuals are born each year with Down syndrome (trisomy 21). The live birth incidence is about one in 700.[i] Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability, with the U.S. population estimated to be between 250,000 and 400,000 people, and the worldwide population at six million.

Down syndrome is a highly complex genetic medical condition; it is also a highly complex sociological phenomenon that is iconic in its significance to questions regarding quality of life, selective abortion, and the extent and legitimacy of research into medical treatment to enhance cognition in the intellectually disabled. Iconic, because Down syndrome provides the initial test of how society responds to difference and disability when offered increasingly sophisticated means of prenatal screening technologies in a pro-abortion culture.

Daily Devotional

July 05

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Infinite Providence

Look at the ... lilies of the field, the natural wild flowers, the grass. The authorities again spend many pages in trying to decide exactly what a ‘lily’ means. But surely He is referring to some common flowers which were growing in the fields of Palestine, and with which they were all perfectly familiar. And He says, Look at these things—consider; these do not toil, neither do they spin, and yet look at them. Look at the marvel, look at the beauty, look at the perfection. Why, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

The glory of Solomon was proverbial amongst the Jews.

Dangerous Ideas

Deathly Silence

An anonymous commentator called our attention to a piece from the Briefing at Matthias Media, commenting upon the "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" held recently at the Sydney Opera House. 

We had a talkfest here in Sydney recently called ‘The Festival of Dangerous Ideas’, at which participants could experience the frisson of discussing daring and explosive concepts with a soy latte in hand. Most of the ideas were in fact rather conventionally dangerous in a green-left sort of way, although gay activist Dan Savage received special marks for his dangerous idea that abortion should be made mandatory for 30 years to make a dent in the worldwide population problem. (The audience, having escaped the womb safely themselves, felt confident to clap.)

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Seven Theses on Penal Substitution

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

June 27, 2014 

Glancing around the Internet, I have recently noticed higher levels of interest than usual in the doctrine of penal substitution, and thought it might be worthwhile to set down a few basic principles concerning the doctrine. So here they are:

1. Penal substitution defined is the doctrine that the salvation of God’s people is secured through a propitiatory blood sacrifice that He provided for us, doing this through the death of Jesus on the cross. The holy wrath of an infinitely perfect God was propitiated in the death of Jesus Christ on that cross. We are saved from the wrath of God by the love of God as these two attributes of God collided in the agony of Jesus Christ. In that collision, the wrath was satisfied, and the love entered into resurrection joy. The wrath was punctiliar and the love is everlasting.

2. Penal substitution is human sacrifice, and is a scandal. Nothing whatever can be done about this, and it is sinful to try to undo or fix the scandalous aspects of it. God made it scandalous on purpose, in order to keep our number of refined theologians to a minimum.

Daily Devotional

July 04

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The Blessed Hope

[The Christian] finds himself guilty of sin, and at first it casts him down and makes him mourn. But that in turn drives him back to Christ; and the moment he goes back to Christ, his peace and happiness return and he is comforted.... The man who mourns truly is comforted and is happy; and thus the Christian life is spent in this way, mourning and joy, sorrow and happiness, and the one should lead to the other immediately.

But ... there is another comfort, that which we may call ‘the blessed hope’, elaborated by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8.... He says that at the present moment even we who ‘have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body’. ‘For we are saved by hope’, he continues, and we are confident that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed’ ... as the Christian looks at the world, and even as he looks at himself, he is unhappy. He groans in spirit; he knows something of the burden of sin as seen in the world which was felt by the apostles and by the Lord Himself. But he is immediately comforted. He knows there is a glory coming; he knows that a day will dawn when Christ will return, and sin will be banished from the earth. There will be ‘new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’. O blessed hope! ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 60–1

---

“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.”

With Prejudice

Dastardly Malaysians

We have argued the groundless basis for ethics, morality, and truth that encompasses our established religion of secular humanism.  Others, changing the metaphor, have argued that the ethics and morality of Unbelief hang on skyhooks.  In the end, it is just the particular prejudices that happen to be in favour in a society at some particular time that carry the day.  One generation's moral good is another generation's evil.

Try getting a card-carrying secular humanist, who believes that everything is only matter and subject to evolutionist randomness, to develop an authoritative and cogent case for scrapping the death penalty, for example, and you end up with repeated ad nauseum emphatic emotive assertions about brutality, savagery, cruelty, primitiveness, and so on, along with trite slogans such as "two wrongs do not make a right" without any foundations or over-arching principles beyond gratuitous groundless assertions.  In the end, the argument relies upon vituperative emotive repetition as its highest and final authority.  Say it loudly enough, often enough, and passionately enough and people will believe you.

Take the common appeal to "human rights" for instance.

Letter From the UK (Mocking Caliphatites)

Hey Guys, the Caliphate Has Been Declared! 

It's Time to Go Join It!

By Raheem Kassam  

30 Jun 2014, 6:25 AM PDT

Breitbart London

Islamists! Hear ye, hear ye! The Caliphate has been declared!

Rejoice amongst yourselves! Celebrate with champagne sparkling water, women loads of other blokes, and a great deal of glee confusion. Come on! It's time to go! Hey guys, the Caliphate has been declared! You've been banging on about this moment for ages now. Book your flights! You can now all finally live in the splendour squalor which you have long-imagined and campaigned for!

ISIS, those brave warriors for freedom, have said that the 'Islamic State' is now in full force. Don't you understand?

Wait... what do you mean you don't want to go?

Come on Anjem, come on Hamza, come on Jamal ...Jordan!? It is time to live under the Shariah! I'll even book your flights for you!

No? You don't want to go to an extremely dangerous region, you say?

Daily Devotional

July 03

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The years that the locust hath eaten

Remember what is perhaps one of the most comforting and wonderful things that is found anywhere in Scripture. It was spoken to the prophet Joel as he was given that great vision and understanding of the coming of Christ, the Christ that was to come. This was the word he was given to utter: ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’ (Joel 2:25). He has promised to do it; He can do it. The wasted years, the barren years, the years that the locusts and the canker-worms and the caterpillars and all these other things have devoured, until there was nothing apparently left, of them He says: ‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.’ If you think of it in terms of what you can do with your strength and power, then time is of the essence of the contract.

But we are in a realm in which that does not matter.

New World Dawning

The Pretensions and Absurdities of the Latest Caliphate

The ISIS Islamic fighters have declared a Caliphate.  It stretches (ostensibly) from Syria across to Iraq.  It has proclaimed a Caliph--the ruler of the Caliphate--one Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The last Caliphate ended just on one hundred years ago when the Ottoman Empire fell.  What is the significance of this development?  In the immediate, very little.  But it does serve to underscore a number of realities.  Firstly, a definition of the Caliphate is required.  According to Wikipedia:

A caliphate (in Arabic: خلافة‎ khilāfa, meaning "succession") is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader known as a caliph – i.e. "successor" – to Muhammad. The succession of Muslim empires that have existed in the Muslim world are usually described as "caliphates". Conceptually, a caliphate represents a sovereign polity (state) of the entire Muslim faithful (the Ummah, i.e. a sovereign nation state) ruled by a single caliph under the Constitution of Medina and Islamic law (sharia)

In Islamic doctrine and teaching, the caliphate is a sovereign state representing the entire Islamic population in the world.  In principle, the caliphate is a global government.  When it comes to its full expression, the Caliphate will be a global empire, into which all the nations and peoples of the world will have been subsumed, by conquest or surrender.

In historical terms, no such caliphate has existed; instead there have been assertions of a caliphate, but like the most recent manifestation in Iraq, they have represented little more than pretentious claims.  A caliphate in theory can command the loyalty and devotion of all Muslims everywhere, since it is a state representing the entire Muslim faithful, being ruled over by the successor to Muhammad.  Thus, not to submit and be loyal would represent rebellion against Muhammad and Allah.

It is obvious already that claims and assertions consistent with the ideology of the Caliphate are being made.

Books

The sad business of trying to disprove God

Charles Moore reviews 'Atheists: The Origin of the Species' by Nick Spencer 

The Daily Telegraph

30 Jun 2014

You often meet them for the first time at secondary school. The typical teenage atheist is more likely a boy than a girl, stronger on science than the arts, and at the high-ish end of the academic spectrum. He tells you that he has studied the nature of matter, the universe etc, and can prove that God does not exist.

Already, you are plunged into the thick of the problem, which is one of category. The teenage thinker treats the existence of God as a scientific matter, but it isn’t. Science can certainly disprove some claims that believers make about their God – or, to be more exact, it can prove that these claims are incompatible with science – but it can have nothing to say about something that lies outside its realm.

A few atheists realise this, and so, while trying to devise concepts of a good society without God, they give the subject of God's existence a wide berth. Charles Darwin followed this cautious approach. For the most part, however, they devote themselves to the wearisome and surprisingly difficult business of trying to prove a negative.

Daily Devotional

July 02

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

If a Creator will do so much—how much more will a Father do!

God is our Father, and if our Father takes [such] great care of the birds to whom He is related only in His general providence, how much greater, of necessity, must be His care for us. An earthly father may be kind, for instance, to the birds or to animals; but it is inconceivable that a man should provide sustenance for mere creatures and neglect his own children. If this is true of an earthly father, how much more is it true of our heavenly Father....

Shrinking the "Public Square"

Good For All of Us

The US Supreme Court has made a decision in recent days that is significant for maintaining religious liberty in the United States.  We have blogged previously (here, here, here, here, and here) about the "Hobby Lobby" case where a private company, owned by Christians, refused to comply with the Federal Government's Diktat that it must pay for abortifacient drugs for its staff.  The Court has ruled that the Hobby Lobby owners do indeed have the right to apply their religious beliefs and conscience to their business and have upheld their freedom-of-conscience right to refuse to pay for abortifacient drugs to secure abortions for any staff that might seek them. 

The Obama administration has argued that churches (as employers) could legitimately be exempted from its Diktats on the ground of religious liberty--but not businesses because they were not religious organisations.  To Christians, who believe that all of one's property--as an extension of one's life and conscience--must be conformed to Christ's lordly reign, this was a terrible overreach by the government.  The State was presuming to declare that only certain rarefied parts of human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could enjoy religious freedom.  To Christians, this was a claim in direct contravention of the command of our Sovereign Lord that whatever we do, even the most mundane things, such as eating and drinking, are all to be done to the glory of God.  (I Corinthians 10:31; Colossians 3:17; I Peter 4: 11,12). 

Thankfully, the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Hobby Lobby, which is a tremendous boon to Christians, and all people, in fact.  Pete Kasperowicz of Breitbart News reviews the case:

Letter from America (About a Double Smackdown)

Unanimous Supreme Court Ruling

It's got to be pretty bad when the US Supreme Court votes unanimously to reject the actions and decisions of President Obama and his A-team.  But so it has come to pass.  Those analysts and commentators who have called Obama lawless and a revolutionary are not so far from the mark, it would appear. 

Here is Michelle Malkin's take on the matter:

Patriotic Obstructionism

The Supreme Court has justly rebuked the president’s unconstitutional maneuvers.

By Michelle Malkin

June 27, 2014 12:00 AM

National Review Online  

 

Three cheers for right-wing obstructionism. Can we have more, please, and louder?

This week’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling on President Obama’s illegal recess appointments is a double smackdown. First, it’s a rebuke of arrogant White House power-grabbers who thought they could act with absolute impunity and interminable immunity. Second, the ruling is a reproach to all the establishment pushovers on Capitol Hill who put comity above constitutional principle.

Daily Devotional

July 01

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

The last becomes the first

... this is how [Paul] speaks: "Last of all He was seen of me also."... He was the last of the apostles to see the risen Lord.... They had all seen Him in different ways together. Paul was not with them then; he was a blasphemer and a persecutor at that time. So 'last of all' means the last of the apostles. But not only was he the last of the apostles, he was literally the last person of all persons to see the risen Lord. No one has ever seen the risen Lord with his naked eyes since the Apostle Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus ... he was the very last of all.... He was not like the others. The others had listened to the Lord's teaching, they had been with Him all along. They were with Him from the beginning and right through to the end. But Paul on the contrary had had a kind of unnatural, an ultimately spiritual birth; he has come, in some odd, strange way and—last of all.

That is what he says about himself. And of course he could only think of that with regret

Explaining Isis

Deadly Miasma on the Volga, the Potomac, and the Tigris

When Slate published a carefully reasoned piece on Global Warming recently it was panned and lampooned by everyone in the US whose brain was in gear before their mouth engaged.  The vastly erudite thesis offered by the writer was that Isis and the civil wars in Iraq were caused by global warming. 

To prove the point that idiocy is itself global and not restricted to national borders, the piece was subsequently reproduced in New Zealand's leading national daily, the NZ Herald.  The piece, by Eric Holthaus was entitled, Is Climate Change Destabilizing Iraq? and the answer was an in the affirmative.  On first reading, one is easily duped into thinking that the article was very clever satire.  But no, the author wants to be read without a scintilla of satire.  Here is the thesis:

Punching a Pimply Face

Contempt for Sharkey Law

Thursday, June 26, 2014
Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog

The difference between an unbelieving libertarian and an unbelieving leftist is quite simple to grasp. The unbelieving libertarian wants to go to Hell, and the unbelieving leftist wants to do the same thing, but wants me to pay for it.

Both need the gospel, and both present a problem for the evangelist. There is a spiritual problem in both instances. But the leftist, in addition to his spiritual problems, is also a public nuisance. He creates political and cultural problems, mostly having to do with various forms of coercion, compulsion, mandatory regulation, and forced labor for the pyramids. All these are covered by his all-purpose favorite euphemistic verb, which is “to ask.” We want to ask the well-off to pay their fair share. We want to ask small companies to provide health coverage they can’t afford. We want to ask the pyramid slaves to get their butts in gear.

They are the dyslexic party. They look at compulsion and read compassion.

Now none of this makes the libertine libertarian a fine fellow.

Daily Devotional

June 30

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Festina lente (hasten slowly)

Here is a man [Psalm 73] suddenly tempted, tempted to say something, or... to do something. The force of the temptation is so great that he is almost thrown off his balance. He is on the point of falling to the temptation, and he tells us what it was that saved him. Here it is: 'If I say"—he was on the point of saying something—"'If I say, I will speak thus; behold, I should offend....' What does he do? What is his method?

The first thing he does is to take himself in hand.... He just kept himself from saying what was on the tip of his tongue. It was there, but he did not say it. Now this is tremendously important. The Psalmist realized the importance of never speaking hurriedly, of never speaking on an impulse.... It is a perfectly good point for a man to make who is not a Christian at all .... there are things which we have to do in connection with this spiritual discipline that at first sight do not seem to be particularly Christian. But if they hold you, use them.

There are many people who are so anxious to be always on the mountain top in a spiritual sense that for that very reason they often find themselves falling down into the valley.

Euro-Scepticism on the Rise in the UK

Euro-Philes a Vanishing Species

We have long been Euro-sceptics.  The wider arc of history had been showing the continent of Europe to be in terminal, irrevocable decline.  Getting together into a federation or union, we believed, would end up  exacerbating the decline, not reverse it. It is falling out as we expected. 

The basis for European comity once lay in  the shared Christian belief structures of the Continent.  But the wars of kings, and of religion, and of struggles over absolute versus limited constitutional government, together with the rapid rise of Enlightenment rationalism meant that the Europe of the twentieth century was as divided as it had ever been.  The French hated the English and vice versa.  The Germans and French maintained a reciprocal antipathy.  The Mediterranean belt was hopelessly servile to corruption.

Post-war European federalism was an elite-driven, top down attempt to paper over these realities to make Europe (that is, European elites) really important in a global sense.  Europe as an economic bloc would rival the United States, Japan, China and the emerging economies of Asia.  Its currency would become the default currency of trade for the European bloc, possibly even eclipsing the US dollar as the world default currency.  These millenarian utopian dreams required a real unity of culture, world-view, and purpose to have any hope of success, but it simply did not exist, and never has--at least in the modern period.

It seems almost inevitable now that the UK will move away from these European federal ambitions.

Letter From Australia (About Self-Loathing)

This self-loathing insults Australian values

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 26, 2014

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.  Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men. . . .

In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”. 

Yes, to see Westerners criticise an “Oriental” woman-killer was to see “the powerful condemn the powerless”, according to the blurb approved by Badar. Pity those powerless murderers.

Daily Devotional

June 28

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

God knows: God undertakes

We cannot do better than remind ourselves again of... the faith of God's people throughout the centuries. That is the faith and teaching to be found, for example, in the hymns of Philip Doddridge. A typical example is found in his great hymn:

O God of Bethel, by whose hand
Thy people still are fed;
Who through this weary pilgrimage
Hast all our fathers led.

That is his great argument, based ultimately upon the sover­eignty of God, that God is the Ruler of the Universe, and we are known to Him one by one, and are in a personal relation­ship to Him. It was the faith of all the great heroes of the faith described in Hebrews 11.

Madness Replacing Reason

Indictments From the Common Lawyers

What does a Christian society look like?  What might be some of the key features of the Second Christendom when it emerges in redemptive history?  There are many.  One central feature will be the grounding of civil and criminal law upon the higher law of God.  This, of course, is not novel.  It is the way it used to be in the First Christendom.

F E Dowrick describes how biblical law (both written and inscribed in the creation itself) was deeply embedded in the English legal tradition.  He writes:

The Giants

Foundational Literature of Western Civilization

June 24, 2014

Justin Taylor

 

 

In his book The Case for Classic Christian Education (Crossway, 2003), Doug Wilson offers a list of “foundational” books for Western Civilization (some of which, but not all, would make their way onto his desert-island reading list.)
I’ve reproduced his list below, along with my own parenthetical recommendations on some translations, editions for kids, etc.

The Scriptures
Of course, the Scriptures are not included in the list of twenty-five books. The Bible is necessarily in a class by itself and forms the center of every class a student takes. But at the same time, the Bible is an important part of our broader literary heritage, particularly in the Authorized Version, popularly known as the King James. . . .

The Iliad
Written by Homer (c. 750 B.C.), this great work is about the fall of Hector in one sense, as well as the tragic fall of Achilles during the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is the setting, but this is not what The Iliad is about. Homer’s poetic gifts were great, but we should remember C. S. Lewis’s comment that it was his giftedness that made his granite despair shine as though it were marble.

[See Robert Fagles's translation. For kids, see Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling, The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey---or wait until July 2014 for a new edition of this retelling with illustrations by Alan Lee. For a Christian literary guide to the book, see Leland Ryken's work.]

The Odyssey
Mark Twain once quipped that we now know that Homer was not the author of these works, but they were rather to be attributed to another blind Greek poet with the same name. The Odyssey, more accessible to many modern readers than The Iliad, is about the return of Odysseus from a life of freebooting to his home country and his adventures on the way.

[See Robert Fagles's translation. For children, see Rosemary Sutcliff's Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of 'The Iliad.' Or wait till August 2014 to get her version with Alan Lee's illustrations.]