Reading stories like this just makes me shake my head at scoffers and smile at earthly confirmation God is revealing more and more to unbelievers that He is real and so is His Holy Word, the Bible.

HIRBET QEIYAFA, Israel — An Israeli archaeologist digging at a hilltop south of Jerusalem believes a ceramic shard found in the ruins of an ancient town bears the oldest Hebrew inscription ever discovered, a find that could provide an important glimpse into the culture and language of the Holy Land at the time of the Bible.

The five lines of faded characters written 3,000 years ago, and the ruins of the fortified settlement where they were found, are indications that a powerful Israelite kingdom existed at the time of the Old Testament’s King David, says Yossi Garfinkel, the Hebrew University archaeologist in charge of the new dig at Hirbet Qeiyafa.

Other scholars are hesitant to embrace Garfinkel’s interpretation of the finds, made public on Thursday.

Why is it such a surprise to learn Jews lived in Israel when the Bible says they did?

I am constantly told by non-believers the Bible is just a collection of stories written by unknown men and is not literal. Then they insist I “prove” God exists. Duh! Look out the window and take in nature. Try to tell me it all happened by chance.

A couple of weeks ago I read that scientists now believe (at least some of them) that there is a void around the earth and that void is protecting us from objects in space. I immediately thought of Genesis 1, the story of creation and the first two verses of that book: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

If you want to know more about past, present and future happenings in the world just go to the Bible. The answers are all there if you have the eyes to read and the open mind and heart to understand.

None of these things surprise me. It only surprises me that I seem to be in the minority of people in this world, and getting that way in our country, who believes God and His Word. It disappoints me more than surprising me because I hate for someone to die and not know Christ and our Wonderful God Who loved us so much He became man while still God and shed His Godly and righteous blood that you and I can have the fellowship with Him that He has always wanted with us, but will not force upon us. We have the free will to accept or reject His message of love and salvation.

There can be no compromises. There is one God and only one way to heaven. That one way is through confession of our sins and acceptance of Jesus as God’s begotten Son, Who gave up His physical life, went to the depths of Hades, and rescued the righteous and took those souls to heaven. Until then they had been in a “holding area” of Hades because the souls couldn’t go to heaven until Jesus shed His blood.

If there is no God then we have been fooled for all our history. If I’m wrong what will happen other than I will die as a pet does and just rot in the earth? If I’m right, and I’m positive I am, I’m on my way to a place much more beautiful than this planet in all its glory.

If you are not a believer and you are right then you, too, will just rot after you die and become fertilizer. But if you are wrong…You will spend the rest of eternity in torment reserved for Satan for his rebellion. And don’t think you’ll see your buddies there because they will be in the same torment and pain and won’t have the energy to recognize you, if there is any light for them to see you. Think about it, and then pray and go to your Bible or to Bible Gateway and read the Book of John, first.

May the Holy Spirit of God open your eyes and your hearts. You’ll never again agonize over what’s going to happen because you will know there is a plan of God for everything.

Last night I joined hundreds of others at First Evangelical Free Church in Manchester, Mo., to hear and meet Hank Hanegraaff, the Bible Answer Man and president of the Christian Research Institute. Hank, as he’s usually called, is known by millions of Christians as a man with answers and a lion of the faith. He has a passion for the word of God that is rarely equaled in this age.

He’s made a lot of enemies within the faith because he practices what he preaches: Hank tests everything others preach in light of scripture. And quite often, what others preach is found wanting. Word-of-faith preachers, faith healers, end-times apocalyptics, slain-in-the-Spirit babblers and pure heretics and apostates have all come under criticism from Hank and CRI, and consequently, he is hated and persecuted and told he is going to hell.

There’s too much for me to talk about in a simple blog post, so you’d have to tune in to his Bible Answer Man radio broadcast or go to www.equip.org to learn more. I didn’t have time to stand in line to actually meet him and get his autograph, but I did get a halfway decent picture or two (though they’re a little blurry).

Last night, Hank hit on one major, overriding theme: Christians MUST know scripture and must have “a ready defense” for their faith. Otherwise, they fall for the fads of the heretics and apostates, or have no answers for the attacks of the scoffers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

“Jesus had an extraordinarily high view of scripture,” said Hank, “but in our culture, it is seriously and continually being challenged.”

For example, Hank described militant agnostic Bart D. Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus, pointing to the passage in Mark 4 where Jesus Christ uses the parable of the mustard seed to describe how the church will go from the smallest speck to spread far and wide. Here’s the passage:

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”

Ehrman takes this passage and twists it to make the ridiculous claim that Jesus couldn’t possibly be God because God would know that the mustard seed is not the smallest seed. Well, DUH! That wasn’t Jesus’ point. The smallest seed that a 1st century farmer in Palestine would know of was the mustard seed, and Jesus Christ would naturally use the most common frame of reference. What’s more, He was using an analogy to illustrate how the church would start tiny, like the mustard seed, and grow to immense proportions, like the full-grown mustard tree.

Hank’s point was to demonstrate that Christians can easily shut down such objections and criticisms but only if we read and study the Bible for all that it is worth. We need to know who, what, when, where, how and why. We need to know context. We need to know history.

We need to be able to demonstrate, with confidence, that the Bible is divine, not human, in origin. Keep in mind, Hank says, that God supernaturally preserved the Bible. The manuscript evidence has proven conclusively that there are differences in style and spelling between various ancient copies, but absolutely no differences in substance. Any mistakes we have today are errors in modern translations.

I’ll talk more in-depth about that another time. But Hank, as some may know, is not a believer in the popular view of the end times that has gripped much of the evangelical church. My understanding is mostly in line with his, and this is yet another area where Christians really need to study their Bible for all that it is worth—and do so without today’s headlines in mind. I know many Christians hold to the end times scenario promoted by many leading evangelicals, including John MacArthur, but I am increasingly convinced that it comes from a fundamental misreading of scripture. I’m preparing a series of posts to that effect, but I’ll just use Hank’s example from last night that illustrates holding to a high standard of reading the Bible for all that it’s worth.

A frequent example the atheist scoffers cite to disclaim the deity of Jesus Christ is His description of the description of Jerusalem in Matthew 24. If that chapter speaks of the destruction of Jerusalem with all of the horrible things accompanying it, AND the “Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn” and “they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory” AND “this generation will not pass away until all of these things have happened,” the scoffers claim that Jesus is a false prophet. Why? They say that Jesus did not return as He promised before “this generation” died, so therefore He is not God.

Latter-day Christians have compounded the problem by taking that passage, and combining it with other passages from Revelation and Daniel, to say that the entire chapter applies to the Second Coming.

Neither reading is correct, says Hank, and I totally agree. Jesus was forecasting the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and was using apocalyptic metaphors to describe the coming judgment upon the current generation because it was rejecting and would reject Him, the messiah. The Lord, says Hank, was employing the same kind of language that the Old Testament prophets used when prophesying judgment upon Israel, peoples and nations. Why would the Lord speak any differently than His own prophets?

Hank argues that Christians need to understand what kind of language is being used, and recognize when Jesus is speaking literally and speaking with prophetic hyperbole. I totally agree. While I don’t believe that end times debates are something to divide over (Hank says this is one of the things to debate over within the pale of orthodoxy, and not divide over) it is something that needs serious re-evaluation within evangelical circles.

So, anyway, there are more things that he said that I’ll save for another time. To sum: Christians must read scripture for all that it’s worth. If they do that, they’ll be much better “prepared to give and answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Peter 3:15)

Cross-posted at Crisis Christianity.

All my life I’ve heard about the Neanderthal Man, Homo erectus and Homo habilis being the ancestors of man.

The story went like this: First we had Homo habilis which eventually evolved into Homo erectus, which eventually evolved into Neanderthal Man, which eventually evolved into Homo sapiens or humans.

I could never quite understand why these species died out and we survived as Homo sapiens. It seemed logical to me that even though there was an evolution period some of the creatures from which we evolved would have still been around.

Like, why do we still have gorillas which look a lot to me like Neanderthal Man?

Well, bless my soul! Now comes a study that says remains of Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived within walking distance of each other at the same time!

Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.

The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens.

But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday’s journal Nature.

In 2000 Leakey found an old H. erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the H. habilis, and both dated from the same general time period.

That makes it unlikely that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis, researchers said.

It’s the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London.

The two species lived near each other, but probably didn’t interact with each other, each having their own “ecological niche,” Spoor said.

Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian and Homo erectus ate some meat, he said.

Like chimps and gorillas, “they’d just avoid each other, they don’t feel comfortable in each other’s company,” he said.

Well, glory be! I didn’t come from a monkey after all!

I have a better idea:

25And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

God didn’t say, “Let’s tool around with this and see what we come out with in the end as far as man is concerned.” He said “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”

Now, if you believe God looks like any of these other creatures then I guess this evolution garbage could be correct, but there’s a problem with that. Jesus is God Incarnate and when He came to earth He looked exactly like us! Imagine that!

Of course you have to believe in God to believe that, but that can’t be much harder than believing you came from a knuckle-dragging being that simply vanished.

This is the guy conservatives love to quote when it comes to MM.

Summer beach-reading season is just beginning, and already several books have broken out from the pack, such as Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, and Conn and Hal Iggulden’s “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”

But the biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt. “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster. Its publisher, Twelve, a fledgling imprint owned by France’s Lagardère SCA, initially printed a modest 40,000 copies. Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a “dark week.” One experienced publishing veteran suggests that Mr. Hitchens will likely earn more than $1 million on this book.

A spin-off is already in the works. Rival publisher Da Capo Press, which is owned by Perseus Books LLC, got in touch with Mr. Hitchens and signed him up to edit, “The Portable Atheist,” a compilation of essays by such writers as Mark Twain and Charles Darwin that will be published in the fall.

“This is atheism’s moment,” says David Steinberger, Perseus’s CEO. “Mr. Hitchens has written the category killer, and we’re excited about having the next book.”

Mr. Hitchens, 58 years old, is well-known in media and political circles as an erudite raconteur and essayist; his Vanity Fair columns and frequent TV appearances on political shows have raised his profile. More recently, his loud support for the Iraq war has infuriated many of his former compatriots. His unabashed affection for alcohol and tobacco has been widely chronicled — sometimes by himself. “I smoke, sure, and I can take a drink when offered,” he says. “It’s impolite to decline.”

Now he has turned his caustic gaze on God and organized religion. “A heavenly dictatorship would be like living in a celestial North Korea, except it would be worse because they could read your thoughts even when you were asleep,” said Mr. Hitchens in an interview. “At least when you die you get out of North Korea, which is the most religious state I’ve ever seen.”

Story

I have in the past 45 minutes returned from church. I did not attend Sunday School because the sermon seemed to have touched me so deeply I didn’t want to be distracted from it.

I wanted to think and pray about it and a situation that has been very painful to me.

The sermon series is about our need for friends and our need to be friends to others.

All I could think of was my former blogging partner telling me in her last email to me that she did not accept my offer of forgiveness for what she had done to me because she felt she had done nothing.

I wasn’t totally innocent in the matter, but I did ask her forgiveness for any real or perceived hurt I had caused her. She has refused to forgive me and told me God told her to do it.

She thought I was trying to make peace with God when I was trying to make peace with her. I am at peace with God.

When I responded to her very long email she wrote these words back to me:

FYI - I knew you couldn’t do it!

My husband is right. You aren’t a Christian.

That’s why appealing to your Christian spirit won’t work.

I did not read this email. Nor will I - Get thee behind me, Satan!

These words cut to my very soul and have hurt me more than anything else in my life has ever hurt me, and I must get over them.

Riding home from church in tears, two verses came to me:

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. Matthew 7:6 NASB

I tried to give my friendship and was slapped away numerous times. I was casting my pearls before swine and allowing them to be trampled under their feet by my many efforts at reconciliation.

She is neither a dog nor a swine, but using the analogy that’s exactly what I was doing.

God does not command us to be enemies, and my offer of friendship and reconciliation were sincere. She refused my offers.

The other verse is also from Matthew:

“Whoever does not receive you, nor heed your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet. Matthew 10:14 NASB

I shall now shake the dust off my feet and let the Lord sort it out whether it be here or in Heaven. Either way, He has shown me there is no fruit on that tree.

Cross-posted at The Barb Wire

As I was growing up I remember reading Bible stories from the Bible and discussing them in Sunday School or Bible School, but I don’t ever remember reading of gore in there at a young age.

Yes, I read about the parting of the Red Sea and the Pharaoh and his army all being drowned, along with their horses. Yes I read about the walls of Jericho tumbling down but I never thought of it at the time as having a big death toll.

I read of Noah’s Ark and knew all but 8 people and pairs of animals perished. I read about Isaac taking his only son Jacob up to the mountains, gathering wood and getting ready to slay him on God’s command until the angel of God stopped him.

I read all those stories and more. I read of the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Only Begotten Son of the Only God. It did not make me happy, but no one went into deep detail as to what happened and it was only until I saw Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” that I fully realized the suffering our Lord did for me and for you.

I was never traumatized by it and I’ll wager I was just as normal a kid as any other and my teaching was just as normal as the teachings of today are.

That’s why this story is so disturbing to me.

The Good Book isn’t clean enough for Hong Kong.

At least 838 complaints had been registered Wednesday with the city’s Television and Entertainment Licensing authority after an anonymous Web site, truthbible.net, said the Bible “made one tremble” with its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest, the news agency reports.

[...]
If the Bible is labeled indecent in Hong Kong, people over the age of 18 will be the only ones able to purchase the book, and it would have to be sold with a warning label wrapped around the book.

The Web site truthbible.net already includes an English-language warning: “Legal Disclaimer Warning: This Web site contains Bible material which may offend and may not be distributed, circulated, sold, hired, given, lent, shown, played or projected to a person under the age of 18 years.”

[...]
“If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it encourages those activities,” Reuters quoted Reverend Wu Chi-wai, Protestant minister, as saying. “It’s just common sense … I don’t think that criticism will have strong support from the public.”

Those things are in the Bible for a purpose, and that purpose is to show us how not to live in some instances and how to live in others.