Bully's Blog

There is a lot of truth in theonomy. But things have changed since the time of Moses. At that point, the church and state were basically one.

After the exile, things were different. The role of the Jews was to be priests within the Gentile state. They no longer had the right to administer capital punishment. When they witnessed faithfully, there was a Jew at the emperor’s right hand, steering the empire for God’s people and their stand for the truth.

By the time of Christ, instead of a Joseph, Daniel or Mordecai, the Jews had a Haman, a Herod. Instead of being a nation of priests, they wanted a king like the Gentiles. This makes Herod even more culpable for his role in the death of Christ, standing (legally) at the right hand of the power.

I believe the church today is exactly the same. The church administers ‘inhouse’ justice through excommunication. When the church is faithful in disciplining itself, and thus witnesses faithfully, it stands side by side with the state in administering capital punishment. Our failure to witness has led to ‘life’ for murderers and death for the innocent.

The Bible is clear on the shedding of innocent blood. A murderer dies to atone for the blood he shed. It is judicial. Correlating capital punishment with abortion is a total misunderstanding of justice.

As in AD70, perhaps all the innocent blood shed in this gospel age will be atoned for by the final generation. The murderers are marked like Cain for now, but Abel’s blood will be atoned for.

“Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say to him: ‘You are like a young lion among the nations, And you are like a monster in the seas, Bursting forth in your rivers, Troubling the waters with your feet, And fouling their rivers.’ “Thus says the Lord GOD: ‘I will therefore spread My net over you with a company of many people, And they will draw you up in My net. Then I will leave you on the land; I will cast you out on the open fields, And cause to settle on you all the birds of the heavens. And with you I will fill the beasts of the whole Land.” (Ezekiel 32:2-5)

The beast referred to might not be a modern-day crocodile. The sarcosuchus imperator (often called “Supercroc”) weighed up to ten tons, had a 1.8 metre long skull with over a hundred teeth, scales like roofing tiles, and a bulbous structure at the end of its snout with an enormous cavity under the nostrils. This could have been part of a biological mechanism to produce flames and smoke, like the bombadier beetle. If so, Supercroc is possibly the Leviathan of Job 41:18-21, a fire-breathing dragon.

Land beast

The Lord showed Job that He was not only the all-knowing architect of the universe, but also its all-powerful manager. He asked Job to look at Behemoth and Leviathan, not look them up in a book, which indicates that these huge animals still existed.

Based on their detailed descriptions, these two beasts were what we now call dinosaurs, and the Lord made the point that He was the only one who could control them, either with His sword, or by pulling them with a hook (40:19, 24). Behemoth was a huge marsh-dwelling land beast that answered to no one but God. He was the king of the Land, sustained by “springs of water.”

Sea beast

In the Creation account, the word used for “created” (as opposed to “made”) is only used of three things—the three most wonderful things: heaven and earth, man—and the great sea dragons. The sailors who drew such things on their maps saw these awe inspiring creatures. Leviathan was a sea beast that no one dared provoke. He was the king of the sea, and his description is terrifying (Job 41).

The Bible uses these great sea beasts as metaphors for Gentile nations, including Egypt and Babylon. This language was perfect to convey the hostility of the world under Satan, ready to rush over the boundaries of the Land like a flood of monsters from the deep.

One word used to describe these is also the word for “pride” (Rahab). As Leviathan was the king over all the “children of Rahab” (the other beasts, Job 41:34), so the “allies of Rahab” cower before God’s throne (Job 9:13). Like Solomon, the Lord has terrible beasts guarding His throne in heaven. Israel was His throne on earth, so the terrifying beast nations that surrounded Israel were there for her protection—until she disobeyed and He let them off the leash.

Darwin’s Joker
by Gary DeMar

There are no spoilers in this review. I saw The Dark Knight, the new Batman film, this weekend. It’s everything the reviewers have been saying about it and more. Heath Ledger’s performance is certainly worthy of an Academy Award and not because of sentimentality over his premature death. The role was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and he played it perfectly. You will believe he is the Joker. I suspect that Ledger called on some of his below-the-surface struggles, his own demons if you will, to bring the character to life. We all have the potential to play the Joker, but we keep it in check because of the “work of the law” written on our heart (Rom. 2:15).

The movie is disturbing. It’s meant to be. I don’t know the worldview of Christopher Nolan, director, co-writer, and co-producer with an impressive film pedigree, but he got so much right in depicting fallen human nature and the consistency of living out the implications of a worldview without a moral rudder.

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“The Psalms are not full of citations from the Torah. The Prophets are not full of quotations from the Torah and the Psalms. But the New Testament is filled with quotations and paraphrases of the earlier Scriptures. What does this mean?

It means that the renewal of civilisation comes only when we become totally saturated with the written Word of God. This is always true, of course, generation after generation. But it is particularly true at times of crisis, when the wineskin breaks in a dramatic way. Jesus ushered in His New History by calling on men to become radically and totally steeped in the Bible. This is the fountainhead of the whole cycle of civilisation. It all flows from the Grand Imperative of God’s Word. God’s Imperative produces history, and recharges it at every crisis.”

– James B. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity and the Christian Future. 
Booklet available from www.biblicalhorizons.com

‘Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint—and Mr [sic] Gish is but one of many to make it—the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

‘… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.’

Reference: Ruse, M., How evolution became a religion: creationists correct? National Post, pp. B1,B3,B7 May 13, 2000.

Michael Ruse was professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph, Canada (recently moved to Florida), He was the leading anti-creationist philosopher whose (flawed) arguments seemed to convince the biased judge to rule against the Arkansas ‘balanced treatment’ (of creation and evolution in schools) bill in 1981/2. At the trial, he and the other the anti-creationists loftily dismissed the claim that evolution was an anti-god religion.

“We are not born desiring truth, but rather milk. Truth is not found primarily through the reflections of trained philosophers and scientists. It is found primarily through faithful mothers diligently spanking bottoms. We are designed and created by God to grow up into truth. The idea that we could ever dispassionately approach the search for truth with a detached Cartesian spirit is an idea which dies hard. We must learn our theology and worldview from the high chair, and, more than this, we must learn that this is how we are supposed to learn them.”

Angels In The Architecture, by Doug Wilson and Doug Jones, p. 188-189.

“…one of the most important Christian virtues possessed by the effective evangelist is hospitality. The practice of household hospitality by Christian saints and elders is an image or copy of God’s hospitality, seen as He invites us into His house to eat at His table. Because the modern church does not understand the importance of the Lord’s table, and because Christ’s supper is not visibly displayed week by week, the virtue of hospitality is not clearly understood in our day. As a result, numerous less-than-effective evangelistic techniques have developed that do not take advantage of the Biblical model. In order to reform our evangelism, we need to reform our churches, so that God’s hospitality is made visible to all.”

James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p.221

“It fails to make men God-centred in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be ‘helpful’ to man—to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was ‘helpful’, too – more so, indeed, than is the new—but (so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God… Its centre of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel the centre of reference is man… Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach people to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed.”

–J.I. Packer

“Worship is not a cozy time with Jesus. Worship is a ritual act that involves bringing all creation into God’s presence and asking Him to change it.”

James B. Jordan, The Offertory, Rite Reasons No. 97. www.biblicalhorizons.com

“I am a Christian. Every sermon I preach should be a Christian sermon. If a Jewish person, a Muslim person or a Hindu person likes my sermon, I did something wrong. Christ is to be exalted in this church, all the time, and not ambiguously.”

- John Piper, Songs That Shape the Heart and Mind, podcast sermon 25/5/08. www.desiringgod.org