A new Young Adult Bible Study

Next Sunday (the 24th) my roommate Jason and I will be holding a Bible Study at our house here in beautiful Sedona. I cannot express how excited I am for the opportunity the Lord has laid at our feet. Already, young men and women from many surrounding churches are planning on coming, and I pray that this fellowship and learning time will help all of us with our walk with God.

I urge you to pray that this Bible Study serve as witness to Christ, and to His glory alone should all credit go. Sedona is in need of real Christ-warriors. We are surrounded by the New Age Movement and every pervasive cult imaginable. What better place for young Christians to be brought up through the Word, prayer, study of theology and study of apologetics? Like the 10 servants to the king, I hope that the mina we have been given should be given chance to grow to many, many more!

"Some of us plant, others water, but God alone gives the increase!" (Dr. Walter Martin paraphrased)

I will be posting my lesson plans as well as commentaries about each study here. I am no theologian, nor a philosopher. If anyone reads these words and spots a blunder or misinterpretation, I pray they would bring it to my attention so that I might become a better witness to Christ.

Cheers

I'm Back

Just wanted to let you all know that I have been near completely engaged with my EMS class for the past few weeks. However, I am pleased to announce that I have passed! This means two things: I am now an EMT, and I will be able to return to regular blogging (yay!).

I have some pretty interesting topics coming up this summer including a deeper exploration of whether the Bible is historical or not, a commentary on objective reality, and a refutation of a refutation on miracles. I hope you will stay tuned for all this exciting stuff. Also, you may notice some sprucing up around the blog. I am learning how to make it more pretty.

Cheers

A Reason for the Hope Within

"You are the light of the world.... let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven." (The Sermon on the Mount, Matthes 5:14,16)

Christ called us to be a whitness to Him in everything we do. We are to live to glorify God and to help fellow man. This has been done in two, distinct ways (though they often overlap). By suffering with our brother, Christians have shown the mercy and grace of our saviour. The Red Cross, Salvation Army, YMCA, and almost every major hospital and college was founded by the sweat of Christians who felt simpathy and duty to all. Also, Jesus called us to spread the message of hope to all of the nations. To proclaim that God had paid the ransom for our depravity. The Bible has been translated into around 1,000 languages and dialects and counting! Missionaries have gone out to the world to spead the Good News... so much so that within my lifetime, there will be more Christians in Africa than in the entire western world. And yet, we see more and more hostility and blatant rejections toward the Word than ever before.

Christians in America and Europe are seen as "Bible-thumping" nitwits who refuse to see the truth. Sure, Christians have certainly spread the gospel, but we have forgotten one point along the way.

Years ago, when I first started learning about apologetics, I found a verse that I had never heard before. It was first Peter 3:15. "But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have. But do this in gentleness and respect." I found this extremely profound. Not only must Christians present the blessed hope, we must be ready to defend it from those who doubt or scorn it. The Greek word used is apologia meaning 'to give a defense'.

After learning more, The Lord struck me with my vocation... a calling if you will. Modern Christianity is in need of a wake-up call. Atheists and Yogis and Mormons are smashing down the door and we are too busy trying to save some poor sap in the bush who's doing just fine! It is time that Christians loose the tunnel-vision that has plagued it since God knows when.

The Lord bless it, 1st Peter 3:15 cannot be forgotten. God commanded his followers to not only spead His Word, but to defend it always! Right now, cultists and secularists are tearing the message to peices and us Christians are in shock. The Lord won't give you the words if you don't already know 'em. I feel that a revival is on the horizon, and it's time the body of Christ shapes up!

Anyways, I've begun to rant and it's getting late (I don't doubt the two are not somehow tied).
I am sorry I haven't posted recently... mostly because I enjoy it.

Cheers

A Cosmological Argument...

Ok, this is something I learned many years ago while listening to a Dr. Walter Martin tape in my father's Land Cruiser. I think it has stayed with me throughout all my subsequent learning because, though it is not the ultimate proof for God's existence, it is simple, to the point, and vastly intriguing.

The Statement is as follows:

"If anything now exists, then either something is eternal, or something must have come from nothing."

If you break down this statement, you come up with four possibilities for the origin of the universe:

1. The universe is illusory. This induction assumes the premise of the above statement is negative. This philosophy (known as Solipsism), instantly falls into trouble when a person suffering from the hallucinations has conversation with another person, demonstrating the fact that we share the reality we live in.
   
2. The universe is eternal and is the product of chance. This looks fine on paper - in fact thousands of people believe this is the fact - but is has one key fault: the second law of thermodynamics. "It is impossible by any continuous self-sustaining process for heat to be transferred from a colder to a hotter body" (Handbook of Chemistry and Physics). In laymen terms, things are getting colder. In fact, the whole universe is cooling. It is expanding and cooling off. Our own sun is not quite as hot as it was—even in our own planet, we are running out of fossil fuels. Modern scientists do not debate the fact. But what does this mean? One day, many trillions of years from now, the universe will reach absolute zero and cease to exist. We do not live in an eternal universe, but a finite one.
3. The Universe spontaneously arose from nothing. One variation of the Big Bang theory, it concludes that the universe popped into existence out of sheer probability (or lack thereof). However, the 1st Principal of Physics simply states: From nothing, nothing comes (Handbook of Chemistry and Physics). So how could the entirety of space and time suddenly come from a complete lack of anything? It couldn't! But, the secularist says, surely it could all have come from just two eternal, non-caused hydrogen atoms that happened to collide. I tell you the truth, it would take more faith to believe two atoms hug in the absence of anything for an immeasurable amount of time until they just popped out the universe than it would to believe an intelligent being created it with design.
4. The universe was created by design and is therefore finite. Keeping our original statement in mind, we must acknowledge that the universe is not an illusion, it is not infinite, and it could not have created itself. Therefore, we are forced to the position that something trancsending it in all scopes and power, caused it. Due to the laws and reason we witness in our universe dayly, we see that the initial cause must be rational. We will call this initial cause God.

And so, cosmology brings us to God. In subsequent blogs, I bring us closer to the Biblical revelation and why it is true. Many consider Christianity and all other religions as of like substance. After studying many religious docrine, teaching, and sources, I cannot hold this view.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I look forward to your comments,

Cheers

Mountains of Ignorance

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” — Robert Jastrow, astronomer

I found this quote while reading What's so great about Christianity By Dinese D'Souza and I have to say it struck me. Yes it is mildly humerous, but the depth and meaning behind the statement is what I want to talk about. It says a few things about modern science and societies view of it.

First off, I love the phrase "...his faith in the power of reason..." because it sums up my point of view on modern secularism. In the news, we are bombarded with statements like the war between faith and reason or Science versus Faith, but none of these truly embody the conflict. It is a war between ideologies. One faith opposed to another. The secular faith in reason and chance; the religious faith in reason and revelation.

The point is that it takes faith to believe that the world will be here tomorrow — that we live within an ordered system of laws keeping this lump of rock from falling into a 27,000,000 *F furnace only 93,000,000 miles away! Scientists believe that they can study and measure nature because they have faith that it is understandable. And yet, modern secular theories state that all has happened by chance — by a chaotic roll of the dice. Studying our universe has told us quite the opposite.

The crux or "punch-line" of the quote is when the scientist pulls himself over the last rock to find a bunch of theologians who had been there for centuries. Jastrow, being an astronomer, is likely referring to recent discoveries about the origin of the universe. For the large part of the 20th century, scientists have believed in some form of the steady state theory. The basic premis was that the universe is in flux. It has neither a beginning nor an end. The theory presented secularists with an option that did not include God. Its problem? In 1965, scientists discovered "background radiation" pointing, inextricably, to a beginning to the universe.

Now, the Big Bang theory and its variants have become the standard cosmological theory. But what does it mean that the universe had a beginning? We know from the laws of phisics from nothing, nothing comes. So what about the beginning of time and space? It had to have come from something transending itself and it could not have created itself as nothing can be the cause of itself. What, then?

Back to the the scientist and the theologians. What Robert Jastrow is rather deftly saying is that modern secularist, defying "crude religious beliefs" in favor of rationality, has proven what Christians have believed for centuries. A bow to science for bringing us one step closer to the true revelation of God.

Cheers

My New Blog

Well here I am, doing what I thought was impossible. I used to chuckle candidly while listening to national public radio as people on Fresh Air talked about "this new blog craze sweeping America". Everyone seemed to be doing it. Sure, I've read my fair share of other peoples blogs and I would not be honest if I didn't admit that half those people had nothing to say whatsoever. And maybe that is precisely the driving force for me not starting a blog... until now that is.

Was it the fear of finally sitting down and writing my thoughts only to discover that no one actually gave a damn? No, that's not me. I've never really cared what people think. Even if I was the last man alive, I would find a way to pick an argument with a rock and get it to agree with me. So why am I starting one now? No clue, but it seems like a good idea so what the heck.

Alright, where was I? Oh yeah, my new blog. I am a writer (yeah, I know like everyone in America is too). No I am not published yet, but that certainly is the ultimate goal. If you read my blog enough, you will undoubtedly discover that I am a Christian (AHH!). It has been my passion since high school to learn everything there is to know about philosophy, theology and history. Not there yet, but this journey has been fascinating from the start.

Last summer, I went to school in Strasbourg, France at the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights under Dr. John Warwick Montgomery. It was here, that my vocation in life became clear. But this is a story for another time. However since then, I have been working on my first novel which, like C.S. Lewis' Narnian Chronicles and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, attempts to portray Biblical truths through metaphor, allegory, and myth. Now wait, you are probably thinking "What?! Did he just compare himself to Tolkien?" The short answer is no. I am not extraordinarily brilliant nor have I invented my own language. It is my only hope that my works could somehow pay homage to his.

And so you have it. My first blog post. And one could even argue that I have become that which I so earnestly poked fun at: another American spilling his heart out... and not saying a single, damn thing.

Cheers