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Curious denial problem on the left

07-Feb-10

Christopher Hitchens, the famously aggressive atheist, has penned an article about North Korea which is a good read in every way but one.  He claims North Korea is a right-wing regime because it has become a military dictatorship and features racial purity as a unifying political theme.  He further bases his claim on the ground that the Norks have deleted the word “communist” from their constitution.

This reflects the denial problem on the Western world’s political left, which is their incapacity to acknowledge that most of the biggest mass killings of the 20th century were perpetrated by leftist governments upon their own people.  Going on chronological order, this was true of the Communists in Russia, the National Socialists in Germany, and the Communists again in China, North Korea, and Cambodia. Only the Japanese genocides in China and Korea can justifiably be said to have a right-wing origin.  All the rest came from some kind of socialism, which seems to be the fast track to mass death.

Maybe here is Hitchens’ most effective connection with rightishness: He warns that North Korea is busily radicalizing its population into a death cult not unlike what you can read from the kamikazes of Japan and that Western leaders will soon have to reckon with a nuclear-armed version of that.  We’re already all too familiar with the Islamic suicide cult.  It’s an interesting religious question as to why the enemies of the West so often seem to share this feature.

Further, it’s a conundrum for America’s fiercely secular left and for atheists like Hitchens.  On what basis do we judge a culture of life superior to a culture of death?  Clearly, our enemies don’t share that judgment.  In fact, the view of life as a divine gift to be protected and nourished is strongly Judeo-Christian.  The danger is that the West, only nominally Christian and rapidly losing even that, is confronted by enemies with really nasty beliefs.  Lurching leftward into doddering old academic secularism won’t give us what it takes to face down such a menace as radical Islam or North Korea, the country now wearing an atomic suicide vest.  Normally I avoid pragmatic arguments for Christianity since genuine faith has to stand on the truth.  Nonetheless I’ll offer one here: Only a return to the Christian faith will save the West in the long run.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Tithing, Part 2

06-Feb-10

The Tithe, Moses-style

There were three distinct systems of tithing under the law of Moses.  The first system was founded on the agrarian nature of the Israelite economy.  It required that a tenth of the produce of the land (Lev 27:30) be given for the maintenance of the temple and priesthood which — since they were a theocracy — also functioned as their government.  An interesting tidbit about that tithe is that Israelites were not to give their best, but just get a tenth whether good or bad (Lev 27:32-33) and hand it over as “holy” or set apart for divine service.  (Lev 27:33)  So the maintenance of the theocracy was limited to a tenth of the economy.  Wouldn’t that be great if our government had such a built-in limitation?  But I digress….

The second system of tithing was the annual festival.  There the Israelites were commanded to set aside a tenth of their “increase” and consume it in a big celebration in their capital city.  (Dt 12:6-7)  The word “increase” is in quotes because it is a quote and because it means the net, not the gross.  That’s a departure from much of the modern teaching on the subject, by the way.

There is a difference of opinion about the third system of tithing.  This one is described in Deuteronomy 14:28-29 and requires that a tithe be given to the poor and the Levites every third year.  It’s not clear whether this was an additional tithe every third year or simply redirected the ordinary tithe for that year.  Either way, over the long haul, the total cost of tithing amounted to a maximum of 23 ⅓ percent of their produce, and that supported the theocratic government, the priesthood, the festivals, the triennial largesse to the poor and the Levites — everything.

The New Testament

Here is a brute fact about which there’s no space for controversy: No similar teaching is found in the New Testament.  It ain’t in there.  The reason for this is straightforward: The New Testament has no priesthood, no temple, no system of Levites, and does not encompass a theocratic government over a country.  And these things are absent because there’s no place for them in the purposes of the New Testament.  That’s not to say that the New Testament says nothing about giving, because it does.  But once we enter the realm of what Matthew Henry calls “the Gospel church,” the purposes, directions, and amounts for giving are all organized around that.

Much mischief has attended the mistaken view of the church as a budding global theocracy.  When that’s the view, the funding basis ends up with the look and feel of taxation.  Tribute money is forfeited to rulers who then decide what’s to be done with it.  No surprise, then, when the expenditures end up looking like something a government would do — churches plunge into debt for building programs and staff while other priorities go lacking.  Church members then get stuck with the bill, must endure perpetual entreaties to tithe, and on some occasions I’ve witnessed, threatened with divine wrath if they don’t pony up.

And no, there’s nothing wrong with churches having buildings, and there’s really not even anything wrong with the buildings being nice ones, and if a church gets big enough, it’s going to need some staff, and the staff will need to be paid.  The New Testament doesn’t forbid any of this.

Well, what’s your problem, then?

Jesus criticized the Pharisees concerning the “corban” custom.  Here’s how it worked.  Under the Mosaic system a person could devote anything he wanted to the Lord.  If you had a good garden spot, a favorite bull or sheep, you could dedicate that to the Lord.  If you later changed your mind about that, you could redeem it for a 20 percent fee.  (Lev 27:19)  The Jewish custom was that a thing which had been dedicated was off limits to other people even if it was redeemed (Lev 27:19).  The purpose of this stricture was to discourage people from making rash vows and then breaking them by forcing them to keep whatever they devoted to God or redeemed.  There may have also been a reaction against the pagan custom of selling in the market meats which had been offered to idols — Yahweh was not to be a marketing gimmick through selling things devoted to him.

The Pharisees used this to finagle a loophole in the law.  A man could tell his parents that he had intended to support them in their old age but then shirk his duty by saying that the money set aside for them was “corban” — devoted to God.  Under the Jewish custom of retaining what had been devoted, the could not give their parents anything whether the devoted thing had been redeemed or not.  So they’d just declare everything devoted to God, pay the fee for redeeming it, and then everything was off limits to their parents.   Alfred Edersheim remarks that certain Jewish rabbinical writings wrestled with the question of whether the corban custom justified setting aside one of the Ten Commandments and concluded that it did.

Jesus’ complaint was therefore that the customs of men had defeated the commandment of God, and he condemned them for it.  (Mark 7:9-13)  There was nothing wrong with devoting things to God, nothing forbidden about making a vow to God, and so on.  It was all acceptable… until people set their customs against the clear obligations of the Law of Moses and chose sides with their own convenience.

What 21st century Baptists need to gain from this is, I suspect, a bit uncomfortable.  We’ve got a corban going on with the custom of tithing, and it’s frustrating the weightier obligations of the New Testament.  It’s not merely the use of the tithe after it’s put into the offering plate.  No, it’s the teaching that the offering plate has got to come first, just as the corban must, even though there are more urgent duties all around us.

Shouldn’t we give to the church?

The usual formula about tithing holds that people should give to the church.  That seems simple enough, but it’s based on a theocratic misconstruction of what the church is.  It views the church as an institution separate from and somehow “above” its people.  This was how the Levites and priests operated their theocratic government.  They were specially designated under the Law of Moses as a distinct class of rulers, given no landed inheritance, and received the tithes of the people for their maintenance.  This is the philosophy Congress uses when writing tax law and sending forth its leg-breakers to collect.

The church is different.  The church is its people, not an institution distinct from them.  To say Christians ought to give their tithes to the church involves the error of assuming (without realizing it) the old Israelitish, theocratic model which the New Testament has explicitly abolished. (Heb 8:13, Heb 10:9)

Things are mostly reversed now.  The notion of supporting an institution with its outward accouterments of institution is 2000 years out of date.  It is now the church that does the giving, and it does so in a variety of ways.  God’s people should support the poor (Gal 2:10), their ministers (Gal 6:6), the widows (Acts 6:1), orphans (Jas 1:27), aged parents (1 Tim 5:16), brethren in distress (Rom 15:25-28), missionaries (Phil 4:15-18), and so on.  Typically this was done corporately (1 Cor 16:1), but there’s nothing in the New Testament to forbid individuals from taking the initiative of doing this themselves.

Indeed, the whole thrust of what Jesus said about the corban leads us to conclude that he wants us to take care of such things as obligations to parents before we drop something in the offering plate.  It’s not that corporate giving is unimportant or need not ever be done.  It’s that it’s lower in the list of God’s priorities than the theocratic taxation model would lead us to expect.  (E.g., see Matt 5:23-24.)  Paul’s direction to Timothy about the widows’ list seems to confirm that when he says that older women with living relatives should be taken care of by family so the church won’t be burdened.  (1 Tim 5:16)  Therefore, the Christian who supports his aged aunt is robbing neither the church nor God.  Rather, he is the church, and he’s giving as God has commanded.  The same is true for the guy whose brother is a missionary in Papua New Guinea and does his giving through Wycliffe or MAF.

Granted, these are exceptions to the general rule of corporate giving.  But the exceptions serve to shine a bit of light on an old custom, and the light helps us see things a little more clearly.  It might even keep us from accusing the innocent.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Primordial soup, hot and salty

04-Feb-10

Science Daily is reporting the death of a theory of life.  I mentioned a couple of days ago that one of the big gaps in evolutionary theory is the jump from minerals to life.  The original theory for how to get over that gap was that a body of water containing some basic compounds was subjected to ionizing radiation.  The radiation brought about combinations of these chemicals that would otherwise not be possible.  This happened enough times until something with the right properties formed.  The “right properties” would be something that starts water soluble, is relatively stable after it combines, an amino acid or precursor of some kind which was then able to combine with other substances.  In other words, they have no idea.

The Miller-Urey experiment conducted in the 1950s was pretty much the gold standard for defending this line of thinking.  They made a chemical soup and then passed an electric spark through it for about a week.  As creationists have pointed out for a long time, that experiment was carefully arranged to produce the desired results yet still failed.  You can read about it at Answers in Genesis, but the bottom line is that if you mix a grunch of organic chemicals together and spark them for a long time, you mostly produce a gob of tar.  Furthermore, in an atmosphere with molecular oxygen present, any amino acids which form get destroyed immediately.  Creationists have thus dubbed this failed theory as the “lightning strike in a mud hole,” a jibe which is accurate enough to outrage its proponents.

At last the evolutionists are catching up to us, sorta-kinda.  At least Science Daily has found one who no longer accepts the lightning-mud theory and has proposed a different theory.  The real story, he claims, is undersea volcanic vents.  They’ve got everything the evolutionist thinks is needed: chemicals, heat, not a lot of oxygen, and well, that’s about it.  Chemicals, heat, and not much O2.

This theory is going to go kaput for the same reason the lightning-mud theory did.  When put to the test of real experimentation, mixing chemicals and heat produces a lot of crud, most of it gray, none of it alive.

In the real world, it takes specially designed creatures to survive in the environment surrounding undersea volcanic vents.  They have to withstand complete darkness, temperatures of several hundred degrees, undersea pressures of over 4000 pounds per square inch, bizarre water chemistry, and extreme turbulence.  God equipped undersea bugs with ingenious methods of extracting energy from poisons like sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide and designed other creatures to coexist with them.

Of course I’m assuming that design implies a designer.  The evolutionist must argue clever design implies an accident that favored the outcome we presently see.  The basic outline of his argument is that a vat of salty, churning, high pressure sulfur water stacks the odds in favor of breeding — eventually — orangutans.

The creationist response is, I think, the scientific way  to approach the matter.  Based on a relentless demand for observation, the creationist humbly requests that the proponent of the undersea vent theory:  1) State a hypothesis for how this could happen based on what we know about physics and chemistry.  2) Make a prediction based on the theory.  3) Propose a controlled test.  4) Perform the test and show us the outcome.  5) Let other scientists repeat the experiment.  We’ll be waiting on the results.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Earth calling Washington!

03-Feb-10

Washington, D.C., lives in its own moral cocoon.  Nobody needs to prove that, but it is remarkable that one of the most foul-mouthed politicians of our time is finally in trouble for something he said.  It was not the traditional gaffe either, defined as someone accidentally blurting out the truth.  No, Rahm Emanuel said a bad word — bad according to the canons of Washington morality.  After years of dropping F-bombs and blasphemies everywhere and strafing conservatives with every expletive known to the maritime classes, Rahm called somebody “retarded,” meaning that the person had done something stupid.

In a flash, the PeeCee police pounced on him.  Like Lewis Carroll said, “Calloo!  Callay!”  Now he’ll have to do penance the Washington way which amounts to joining some group or other organized to oppose whatever PeeCee sin was committed.  Soon the Citizens Against the R-Bomb (CARB) will have a new member.  Everyone will be chortling behind his back because nobody really believes all that PeeCee crap (oops!  Pardon my French…), and their jubilation at seen Rahm get caned is all the evidence we need.

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Rumination on the freeness of grace

01-Feb-10

The freeness of grace means God bestows his favor on us without cost.  Christ paid the entire price, fulfilling all the law to the utmost, including its penalties and curses which he suffered and did not deserve. (Heb 4:15)  Salvation comes to us, as the prophet said, without money and without price.  (Isa 55:1)

By fixing its eye on the freeness of grace, a fairly large proportion of the church has tilted into a settled opinion that there cannot be anything obligatory about the Christian life.  Nothing is to be enforceable.  To urge upon Christians any sort of necessity is to add human merit to God’s grace, thereby obliterating both as Paul described:  “And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work.”  (Rom 11:6)

Making this practical is a prickly problem

But does this teaching reflect the full-orbed doctrine of the New Testament?

My collar gets all itchy and tight when this is applied without qualifications in certain… ah… situations.  Let’s suppose, since this was the example that prompted this article, that an unmarried woman who is living with a man wants to join the church.  What to do?  The answer chosen in this particular situation sounded reasonable enough.  Every person in the congregation has sins which he or she is refusing to deal with, yet those people are members in good standing and nobody is making any fuss over those sins.  Such things as unjust anger, lust, greed and materialism are getting a pass.  How, then, do we justify telling this one person that this one sin, the sin of fornication, is beyond the pale and it is where we must draw the line?  Unable to come up with an answer that didn’t seem to be adding human works to divine grace, the church leaders punted.  “Let her join,” they said.  And it all worked out in the end when the lady married the man some time later.  “See?  God took care of it when we trusted his grace.  This lady understood grace better than any of us.”  (Seriously, no kidding, that’s what he said.)

Even pricklier than that?

But the devil is just the sort of fellow to toss a big lump of uncleanness into the punch bowl.  I’ve seen him at work, and he fights dirty.  In the first church I pastored, for example, a deacon who served as the youth minister was arrested for sexually molesting a young girl.  I and one of the deacons investigated the charges (interviewed the victim and her mother) and found them credible.  We confronted the guy, and his attitude was sassy and arrogant and exuded a smug catch-me-if-you-can.  We then went to the sheriff with our information and learned that the incident we’d heard about was by no means this guy’s first.  To shorten the story by several stages, we kicked him out of the church.  It was the right thing to do.

I’m thinking that our friends who allowed the fornicator to join would be pragmatic and worldly-wise enough to agree that leaving an unrepentant child molester in the church is both evil and stupid.  And yet, based on the principles espoused in the fornication example, how would they pick out the sin of child molesting and say that all these other sins must be ignored in the name of grace but this one sin is the place where the line has to be drawn?

See the problem?  If you accept the fornicator, then why not the molester?  And if you accept the molester, then what about the guy who beats children?  Kills them?  Or in some cases among savages, even cannibalizes them?  If we establish it as a necessary consequent of the freeness of grace that there can be no lines, then by the great horn spoon, there can be no lines.

Time to drop the A-bomb

Antinomianism is the view that there is no law for Christians.  Antinomianism says that if grace is free, then nothing must be held as obligatory or enforceable upon Christians.

The problem is that antinomianism is correct about the freeness of grace and mistaken about its implications.  There are many things God’s grace does which come across all technical sounding — atonement, forensic justification, and some guys talk about the impetration, and so on.  These refer to aspects of how God’s grace puts us right in our standing with him.  If grace stopped right there, we’d probably describe the whole deal by a word the antinomian teachers love to hate, amnesty. And yet if the antinomian view is correct, then amnesty is pretty much all there is to it because the operative concept in their view is that the freeness of grace necessarily infers the annihilation of law.

What else does God’s grace do?

God’s grace changes people.  By his Spirit who comes to live in us, we become new people.  A new nature lives in us, a nature that no is longer willing to continue in sin.  The fornicator who becomes a Christian has a God-given desire to stop fornicating.  The child molester who becomes a Christian is more than just forgiven.  He is given a holy desire to abandon that sin and live his life in purity before God.  He knows he ought to do this, that it’s the right thing to do, and by the Spirit of God, he wants to do so.

God’s grace doesn’t mean that the lines between right and wrong are obliterated, nor does it mean that the church is forbidden to require its people to get on the right side.  It is a misconstruction of the biblical teaching to shrug off serious sin issues as if standards cannot coexist with grace.  In a true teaching of grace, not only do standards exist, but the grace of God moves us to walk worthy of the vocation to which we’re called  (1 Thess 2:11-12) and empowers us to make a credible go of it.  And this, by the way, doesn’t imply that Christians attain to perfection in this life.  But it means real standards of righteousness continue to exist, and the redeemed life changes in a serious way to move toward them.

Don’t ever accept a view of grace in which “Go and sin no more” is considered a betrayal of the cross.  Because it isn’t. More…

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In case you thought this was going away

31-Jan-10

Support the Reed Amendment:

No person who receives money from the government for any reason except a refund of overpayment of income tax shall be permitted to vote in the election following receipt of that money.

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Evolution’s gaps

30-Jan-10

These aren’t really gaps as that’s far too small a word.  These are more like megaparsecs or something.

1.  The gap from nothing to something.

There is nothing about nature which leads us to expect that something could ever come from nothing naturally.  Everyone is agreed that the universe had a beginning.  Now the question is how.  Christianity affirms logically enough that the beginning of the universe is supernatural.

2.  The gap from chaos to natural law.

The Big Bang theory assumes an expansion from a hot center.  What’s left unexplained is why anything in the expansion should have been governed by natural laws, physical forces, natural constants, and so on.  Even if we allow for the sake of argument the initial expansion (a huge concession!), we’re left without any reason to expect that there should have been a law of gravity, or that Planck’s constant should have turned out to be what it is, why the electron charge should have been a certain value, and so on.  Even assuming a Big Bang, why didn’t it produce sheer chaos?

3.  The gap from matter to life.

All our experience in the real world tells us that non-living matter doesn’t come to life on its own.  Even on the purely material level, the simplest living things are incomprehensibly complex.  Humans haven’t sorted out all the details concerning even the most basic, single-celled critters.  Let’s not get sidetracked into squabbles about probabilites.  Let’s just talk about what human beings have witnessed in millennia of observation: Neither clay nor seawater come to life on their own.  How, then, to explain the presence of living things?

4.  The gap from life to consciousness.

There is no particular reason why such a thing as thought should have arisen from so humble a beginning as protozoa.  The notion that cells began to team up and specialize until, through sheer complexity they gained consciousness, is sci-fi hokum.  You can network computers by the billions, and no such things as consciousness and spontaneous, self-aware thought will ever arise.

5.  The gap from consciousness to morality.

Every day we see fresh evidence that the most important things in human existence are moral and spiritual.  Yet nobody can account for categories of “right” and “wrong” on materialistic terms.  Attempts to reduce these to mere social conventions are absurd since we know instinctively that some things are objectively right and other things objectively wrong.  To deny this is to set aside the most critical wedge of our humanity and open the door to evil — real, objective evil.

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The Gospel of full disclosure

30-Jan-10

There is a danger in presenting the freeness of grace that we forget to bring along the obligations of being a child of God.  In the cross of Christ, all our sin debt is paid.  What is a debt that is paid?  It is nothing.  It is a memory, something annihilated and is no more.  Because of Christ, our salvation is complete, and nothing can be added to it.  Ye are complete in him.  (Col 2:10)

But we do a disservice to the unbaptized public when we announce this truth and stop right there as if there were nothing more to say.  The Bible continues.  Here’s an example.

21 And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled
22 in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight —
23 if indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel…  Col 1:21-23  NKJV

If you sift through the New Testament, you can find this pattern repeated at enormous length.  The grace is free, but the Christian life involves what can only be described as a duty.  Our friends who rejoice in the freeness of grace tend to say that this detracts from the liberty we have in Christ, that it foists upon us a different sort of law, a new standard of performance-oriented works-righteousness which is, though appended to the back end, nonetheless a requirement for final salvation.

To this I reply: Not at all.  My kids were born or adopted into my family gratis.  It cost them nothing and never will.  Nothing of this world can make them somehow become “not-children.”  And yet they are members of a family, and families come with all kinds of obligations.  When they were little they had to pick up their toys, and when their mother is old, they may have to pick her up.

Full and honest disclosure of the Gospel requires that when we preach the freeness of grace, we need to also explain that this leads to entrance into Christ’s kingdom and into the household of God.  Households require some participation, and opting out isn’t going to be received well in heaven.  That’s not denying grace or adding post-requisites to the Gospel.  It’s just being straightforward about what it means to become a follower of Jesus.  It means you follow.

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A full earth

30-Jan-10

No big secret here: the minor prophets are pretty heavy on death and judgment, gloom and doom.  Habakkuk follows the pattern by foretelling the Chaldean invasion and detailing the calamities of war.  The Chaldeans are bitter and hasty, coming for violence, filling up the land, and Israel will be taken prisoner by the ten-thousands captive and enslaved.  All bad news for Israel.

In the second movement of his vision, Habakkuk directs his criticism against the Chaldeans.  He calls them drunkards, invaders, covetous, insatiable, thieves, spoilers, bloody, idolaters, uncircumcised, vomiting drunkards, contagious drunkards, and pronounces woe upon those who build their houses with blood.  All bad news for the Chaldeans.

Americans are blessed in that we’ve not had a big war on our soil since 1865.  If you want to know just how blessed we are, read the accounts of the past few wars here and there — Serbia, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan.  They had massacres, traitors, rape hotels, pointless slaughters, atrocities, snipers who shot children while their mothers  scavenged for a few meager groceries.  Or spend a few minutes at Google images and imagine this candid shot of Grozny as your neighborhood, your place of business, your parent’s home.  Wars in 800 B.C. were just as destructive.  The only difference was that the invaders had to do it all by hand.  But they did it just the same.

Habakkuk doesn’t somehow insulate himself from what’s coming.  But he does say a curious thing in the middle of all the dark prophecy:  The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.  (Hab 2:14)

The surface application of his statement is that the judgment of God upon Israel comes in the form of the Chaldeans, and they will flood Israel with wrath.  Judgment begins first at the house of God and with his people (1 Pe 4:17). Even though this is the application that’s sitting right there on top, I think most preachers tend to miss it.  The verse is lifted from its context and quoted to the people as the great hope of the end times without any reference to the surrounding view of Jerusalem being plowed like a field as Micah said.  First great lesson: If you number yourself among the people of God, don’t forget to fear him.  His name is dreadful among the heathen (Mal 1:14), so there’s a serious denial of reality at work if his name is treated casually among the Christians.

The secondary application of Habakkuk’s statement is its eschatological view.  The Chaldeans were evil, and he will judge them with everlasting fire, for there is no respect of persons with God.  So there is coming a day when the Light of the World will split the sky and descend from heaven with a shout, and with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God.  He will overthrow the wicked and cast Satan into the abyss.  He will establish righteousness throughout the earth.  He will make all things new, and the saints of God will join with the angels in a shout of praise that will rattle the foundations of the world.  Grozny will look like Eden, so will Baghdad and Port au Prince, and the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of his glory like the waters cover the sea.

But between this day and that one, we have to live in this world with the Chaldeans looking on.  When God’s people are holy and following the Lord, he is their shield and no weapon formed against them can prosper (Isa 54:1).  But when God’s people leave his presence and settle their dwellings closer to Babylon than to Jerusalem, it is no great surprise if the children of the flesh persecute the children of promise. (Gal 4:29)  It’s always been this way and won’t change in our time.

Habakkuk’s prophecy is not written as a threat.  I do believe the Gospel that there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ.  Our judgment was poured out upon the Lord Jesus once and for all at Calvary (Heb 10:10).  He won’t repeat that judgment, nor is the glory of the cross amped up with a few more rounds of human misery.

But Habakkuk’s prophecy is a reality check.  Sin has consequences down here on earth.  We do tend to reap what we’ve sown.  (Gal 6:7)  If we sell our strength by getting comfortable with evil, we’ll end up weak enough that the enemy will take advantage.  And as Paul asks in Romans 3:9, “Are we better than they?”

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From the proprietor of CREEPpl Surveillance

29-Jan-10

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The Empire State’s “massive” solar project

28-Jan-10

Governor Paterson of New York has announced he’s going to build a 100 MW solar power station.  Stations may be a better word because he’ll probably have to distribute the generation quite a bit, but there’s no ambiguity about the power level.  He says he wants 100 MW, and the news media are calling it “massive.”

By utility standards, however, massive is what it is not.  In fact, a 100 MW coal plant is so small that nobody would bother to build one.  According to the government’s EPA web site, a high rise office building with 250,000 square feet of space consumes about 1200 KW on a hot summer day.  A 100 MW power plant could supply about 83 such buildings.  If the power plant uses sunlight, it can power these buildings for part of the day, tapering off mornings and evenings, leaving them dark all night.

For size comparison, the Empire State building in New York has 2,158,000 square feet of office space in it.  Using the energy consumption estimates of the EPA, that comes to about 10.358 MW for the Empire State Building.  I looked for published figures on the Empire State Building but couldn’t find them.  Maybe a reader can help with that.  With a 100 MW power plant you could supply between 9 and 10 of these buildings.  In Manhattan where 50-story buildings aren’t rare, you could power maybe 20 of those, or to stretch things a bit, maybe 30 or 40 if the buildings were skinny.

That really doesn’t make much of a dent in New York’s power consumption.  If fact, you’d hardly detect it in Manhattan if the utility suddenly lost 100 MW of generation.

All this is to make an important point: After years of repeating windsolarbiomassrenewable like some sort of curious mantra, the greenies are finally starting to move on their dream.  And a measly 100 MW is the big dream?  And they have to puff that with media toadies calling it massive?

If this is the best they can come up with, I think New Yorkers should consider investing in some retro technology.  Coal, gas, and uranium don’t bring a lot of glamour to Manhattan night life, but they sure keep the lights on.  And if green power means solar power, the old not-green technologies will be keeping the lights on for quite some time to come.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Watch out about this

27-Jan-10

Esau married two local women whom Moses reports were “a grief of mind” to his parents, Isaac and Rebekah. (Ge 26:35)  Grief of mind, yeah, I get that.  It doesn’t say how Esau took it.  I’m betting his mind was more than a little grieved, too.  Bad spouses (spice?) don’t just make the in-laws miserable.  They spread badness far and wide and don’t rest until everybody’s got some.  A bad marriage is like salmonella — you don’t know you’ve got it until it’s too late, and it makes life sickening.  One of the agents in The Spy Next Door said, “Why get married?  Just find some woman you’re going to hate in five years and give her your house.”

The point being made in Genesis was that the people Esau married were from outside the God-fearing line.  Their behavior was so bad that Rebekah told Isaac, “I am weary of living because of these women!  If Jacob takes a wife like these, what good will my life be?” (Ge 27:46)  So when Isaac blessed Jacob and sent him away, he cautioned him not to take a wife from among the people of Canaan.  (Ge 28:1)

The Bible has other examples of what Jane Austen would regard as an improvident alliance.  Samson married a Philistine harlot, and after things fell apart with her, made a failed attempt on the gravelly heart of Delilah.  David’s wife Michal was given to him as a trap.  (1 Sam 18:21)  And think about this one: When God wanted to convince Israel of just how wicked and sinful they really were, he illustrated his message with one of the worst things in human experience, a bad marriage.  (Hos 1:2-3)

Solomon, who knew a thing or two about bad marriages, speaks of the “odious woman” when she is married (Pr 30:23 KJV) or the “brawling woman” whose companionship is worse than a life of poverty (Pr 25:24).  I don’t think the Bible is particularly cautioning men against bad women.  The lesson to be gained for both sexes is to be cautious about whom you choose as your partner in life.  If you pick wrong, you’ll soon be sounding like Rebekah asking what good her life was to her.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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Blessing mailed from India

25-Jan-10

Hey, check this out.  What a kid, eh?  Translation below.

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Using a hornet nest for a piñata

25-Jan-10

My opinions on tithing have shifted around over the years.  Okay, so I’m unstable and I admit it.  But one thing has remained stable since I read Deuteronomy 14 a long time ago.  The average Christian is shocked, shocked when he discovers what the Bible actually says about tithing.  He is even more shocked when he comes to the point of realizing what the Bible never says about tithing.

The Old Testament practice of tithing originated with the patriarchs who, for reasons not stated in Scripture, settled on the figure of 10 percent as a benchmark for giving.  That figure remained constant until the advent of the New Testament when it was changed twice, the first time to 100 percent (Ac 2:44, Ac 4:32) and the second time, much later, when numerical figures were abolished and the standard become what a man has “purposed in his heart.” (2 Co 9:7)

What’s stated above should not be controversial, but it is.  What provokes the outcry is the notion that the practice of giving has somehow changed.  I think churchmen perceive a threat in the dispensational idea that the rules about giving have shifted, thinking that holding onto the present custom of putting 10 percent of one’s income into the offering plate is holding on to an ancient thing that harks back to Abraham.  To state it another way, they think the best defense of the modern custom of tithing is to argue that God’s people have always done this.  Maybe it makes them feel a bit more confident about the financial situation of their churches.

But it’s clearly mistaken to take Abraham as the pattern for tithing, and one need look no farther than Abraham himself to see this.  His gift was a one-time offering of the spoils of war to Melchizedek, the priest who lived in Salem (Jerusalem).  No preacher wants his folks thinking tithing is to be done once in a lifetime, nor that it should be derived from some kind of windfall as Abraham’s tithe was, nor that it should be given to somebody like Melchizedek about whom we know precious little.  No, the Abraham pattern won’t do.

And neither will the pattern from the Law of Moses suffice.  The words speak for themselves.  Try to imagine this doctrine being taught on Sunday morning just before the offering plate comes ’round:

22 “You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year.23 And you shall eat before the Lord your God, in the place where He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.24 But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the Lord your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, when the Lord your God has blessed you,25 then you shall exchange it for money, take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the Lord your God chooses.26 And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.  (Deut 14:22-26)

So they used tithing to finance a national block party where they spent their own tithes on pleasures for themselves?  (Hint: That’s what the text says.  The KJV is even more intense on v26 as it says “strong drink” rather than “similar drink.”  Go figure.)

On and on this goes until at last the Bible student tires of combing his way through the Old Testament trying to defend the custom on the basis of its antiquity.  He betakes himself to the New Testament to defend this cherished doctrine and comes up — dare I say it? — empty.  Brethren, it’s just not there.  This is the real shocker to folks who honestly dig into modern customs about tithing.  People have the impression that tithing is one of the easy, simple, straightforward doctrines of the Bible, and when they discover that there is not so much as a textual inference to hang it on, they’re flabbergasted.  And to be honest, I’m not sure I have the guts to say this to Baptists any more.  It’s like using a hornet nest for a piñata.  Been there, done that, got the grief to prove it.

But does this mean Christians are relieved from any responsibility to contribute to the work of the Lord?  Well, no, not at all.  It just means the basis for it is all different now.  Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to all who believe  (Ro 10:4), and that means people are going to need a different motive.  It also means there may be new directions for giving.  Heaping it up in the storehouse may not be the best use of our resources while there are orphans around or Haitians sleeping in open fields.  Just a thought.  More to come… when I catch my breath again.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

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General note to phone users

25-Jan-10

There is no need to shout at people who are at a distance.  One reason we use telephones is so that will no longer be necessary.

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