I have not posted any new sermons for a while, because I had a sketchy internet connection that made it very difficult to upload. But I’ve got that fixed, and am going to start putting sermons back on the web. The link is on the sidebar, and I have put the sermons in a new place as well. So take a look and see what’s available. The sermons there are a little old, but I’m getting caught up.

We found out a few weeks ago that Andrea has a complication known as placenta previa, which means that her placenta is down at the bottom of her uterus instead of at the top where it’s supposed to be. This means she has to have a c-section, and also that we have to stay near a hospital due to the possibility of a hemhorrage starting at any time. So we’re staying at my mom and dad’s in the Springs until the baby is born, which will probably be in the middle of May sometime.

We’re doing OK, dealing with the inconvenience and the uncertainty. The last week has been really crazy, since Friday night when I had to rush Andrea in to the hospital because she was bleeding. I’m spending about half my time in COS and half in Limon. Andrea has some discomfort but basically feels as good as one ever does in the last month of pregnancy. Thanks a bunch to everyone who’s been helping with meals, who’s visited, who’s sent cards and called. We appreciate it.

I’m getting a really good opportunity to practice what I preach. I have told a lot of people to trust God with uncertainty and fear; that God is in control; that not a hair falls from our heads without His will. Now I get to try to live up to those expressions of trust myself. There’s nothing quite so humbling as an event like this to show one one’s utter dependence on God for everything. How quickly the plans and intentions of man are swept aside. “As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, And its place remembers it no more. But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting On those who fear Him, And His righteousness to children’s children.” (Psalm 103)

So I was in the grocery store in Colorado Springs yesterday, doing some shopping, and I had an extremely unpleasant experience. My role in the grocery shopping experience is usually limited to pushing the cart around and playing with Katie, so I wasn’t really paying much attention to my surroundings.

I saw one of those little displays that they have sticking out from the shelves, and it had a little circle of material and the display said something like “feel the softness!” So, being a compliant person by nature, I felt the softness.

Then I looked up and realized what section I was in- women’s hygiene.

Ewwwwwwwwww.

It wasn’t too long ago that the Pope was widely considered by the Protestant world to be the Antichrist. Not just “antichrist”, but THE Antichrist, big “A”, long horns, pit of hell stuff. But then the Pope in those days was slaughtering Protestants and building huge cathedrals on the false hopes of ignorant peasants enslaved to a false gospel. Of course when I say that it wasn’t too long ago, I mean it was just a couple of centuries, but that really shouldn’t be a huge period of time to properly historically-minded people who don’t think that the world began on the day they were born.

But I digress.

Pope John Paul II was a different kind of pope, it seems to me. It’s all been said, so I won’t rehearse it here, but he championed freedom, life and values. He was more responsible for the downfall of communism than anyone else in the world with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan. He was a great man.

Of course, being a great man doesn’t get you into heaven. And in regard to Catholics, I’ve often said that while there are certainly individual Roman Catholics who may truly trust Jesus as their Lord and savior, it seemed impossible to me that someone could be well-versed in Catholic theology and yet be saved, with its works requirement for salvation, its deification of Mary and other saints, its many additions to Scripture, and its bastardization of the Lord’s Supper, the one sacrament which ought to be a continuing part of every Christian’s life. Big issues, these, and how could you be said to worship the one true God and at the same time give some of that glory to Mary?

How could a man who truly knew and believed these doctrines be said to trust only in Jesus Christ for his salvation? And who would be more well-versed in Roman Catholic doctrine than the Pope?

Just as being a great man doesn’t get you into heaven, though, neither does accuracy of doctrine. Being a good Christian doesn’t mean being a good scholar. All Christians ought to be scholars as they are able, but it is faith like a little child which is the instrument by which Christ’s redemption is applied to us, and only that sacrifice and death can “get us into heaven”. Did Pope John Paul II have that faith? How on earth are we to know?

For all the RC’s faults, they believe in the trinity, the deity of Christ, and his substitutionary death on the cross for our sins. They believe that it is necessary that I have faith in that death for salvation. They believe in the afterlife, heaven and hell, even if they did add a third, utterly unbiblical state, purgatory. All of this, it seems to me, add up to the core of the gospel, even if they have dumped a truckload of other garbage on top of those beautiful doctrines, obscuring them to millions.

So I’m not willing to say. And I don’t think anybody should. I think this is the proper use of that so often abused quote from Jesus- “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” If I judge John Paul to be condemned by his impurity of doctrine, I may just be judged on the same basis myself, and I am not so big a fool as to think that I’ve earned my place in heaven by my theological acumen. I am utterly dependent on the grace and mercy of God. So is Pope John Paul II, and I am content to leave it that way. “Will not the judge of the earth do right?”

I recently purchased a 12-disc set of courses from The Teaching Company on ancient Greece. I spend a lot of time in the car, and I thought this would be a productive way to spend some of that time. They’ve been fascinating, by the way. Well worth the money.

Anyway, I just listened to the account of the forerunners of the Greeks, the Mycenaeans and the Minoans. They had a pretty amazing civilization in the 2000-1200 BC range of time, give or take. But their civilization ended rather abruptly, due to causes that are not entirely clear. And not only them- but basically all of the bronze age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean all came to an end at about the same time, followed by a dark age of a few centuries until the rise of iron age cultures in the ninth and eighth century.

I did some adding up and some remembering, and it occurred to me that the Israelites would have left Egypt and arrived in Canaan in 1400-1300 BC, depending on whose dating you use. And it was over the next two hundred years that these cultures all collapsed- Hittite, Minoan, Mycenaean, Cretan, and others. Now maybe this has been extensively said before- probably so. But the Biblical account of the Israelite invasion and destruction of the Canaanites would directly account for some of that, and indirectly it could have caused a lot of the rest of the decline too, it seems to me. The general breakdown of order caused by the destruction of those civilizations in Canaan could have caused a lot of disorder to spread to other parts of the Mediterranean world, accounting for that sudden and precipitous decline of so many civilizations at the same time. And the pinnacle of Israel under David and Solomon would then correspond to the dark ages of most other civilizations around them.

It seems to me that the Biblical account of this period would far better explain these events than a lot of the speculation I’ve heard. The Teaching Company lecturer throws some ideas out about possibilities, but admits that they are speculations and says that nobody really knows what happened. But while I haven’t studied the idea out exhaustively, I think we might just be able to add this to the long list of answers that the Bible provides us with. If I were right it would hardly be the most important issue the Bible ever solved for us- far from it. But it’s interesting, nonetheless.

I’m not sure what prompted me to think about this. I have nothing to link to. Just some random train of thoughts that jumped into my head. If economics are of no interest to you, best to skip this.

A few months ago, I completed a construction project on my house. The project planning began before the Florida hurricanes of last summer, but didn’t actually get started until after they had occurred. So the builder had to come with revised quotes before any construction had actually started, raising the prices of the lumber and shingles that I needed by a good bit. The demand for lumber and shingles had shot through the roof, because of the hurricane damage to roofs and houses. Plywood had also gone up a lot, due to all of the people boarding up windows.

I have heard this referred to as “price-gouging”, that is, companies taking advantage of disasters or calamities to charge exorbitant prices. This of course is an evil corporate thing to do, proving that they are driven only by money. Frequently, even when someone defends the practice, they defend it by saying that the company was forced by supply problems to drive up prices, so that as many people as possible would benefit from the product, which would only be possible at higher prices.

But in a free market, all economic relationships are two-way, and neither side is compelled to engage in the transaction. There is a buyer and a seller, or to look at it another way, there are two traders, both doing the same thing. Both are giving the other trader something they want more than what they have. The buyer wants the lumber more than he wants anything else he could buy with the money, and the seller wants the money more than the lumber. For a free economic exchange to take place, both sides must feel that they will benefit from the transaction. Therefore, whatever “price-gouging” occurs, both sides will still benefit.

And remember again, there are two parties to any transaction and different kinds of disasters or calamities can affect the seller as much as the buyer. Have you ever been to a “going out of business” sale? Or a hail sale? Or an estate sale? How is that different than a natural disaster driving up prices? In those cases, personal, economic or natural misfortunes are driving down the price of goods, and now the buyer is benefitting from those misfortunes instead of the seller. And yet nobody ever accuses the buyer of price gouging. Why not? The economics of the situation are pretty much the same. I know a number of people who will never pay full retail for anything, but prefer to wait for such sales. I try to take advantage of them myself. Is this wrong? Isn’t this being “driven by money?” If it’s wrong for a company to be driven by profit considerations in their economic choices, isn’t it wrong for the individual consumer to be driven by the same thing? If not, then why is it wrong for a business to take advantage of and make a profit from events that drive up people’s demand for certain goods, such as a hurricane?

Competition will ensure that the pricing in such an event doesn’t get too out of control. If one lumber company doubles its prices after a hurricane, for example, another lumber company will only raise their prices by 90%, ensuring that they get all the business they can handle and still making a fat profit. And a third company will undercut that company’s pricing, and so forth, driving costs down to the real cost of supplying the good. As long as there are lots of companies competing, customers will still get the best deal possible. But the statist solution to the problem, which usually is putting price caps on the products, is the best way to limit the profit possibilities of the companies, driving many of them out of business and thereby ensuring that there is less competition. It is the customers in this case which will pay the highest price, as the government-created shortage of supply ensures higher prices because of a lack of competition than would otherwise have been the case.

Just another example of how personal liberty almost always produces better results than collective statist solutions to economic problems (and most other problems too).

A man with cerebral palsy, named Joe Ford, has written an excellent article for the Harvard Crimson on American attitudes toward the disabled and how this attitude relates to the Schiavo case.

The result of this disrespect is the devaluation of lives of people like Terri Schiavo. In the Schiavo case and others like it, non-disabled decision makers assert that the disabled person should die because he or she—ordinarily a person who had little or no experience with disability before acquiring one—“would not want to live like this.” In the Schiavo case, the family is forced to argue that Terri should be kept alive because she might “get better”—that is, might be able to regain or to communicate her cognitive processes. The mere assertion that disability (particularly cognitive disability, sometimes called “mental retardation”) is present seems to provide ample proof that death is desirable.

Essentially, then, we have arrived at the point where we starve people to death because he or she cannot communicate their experiences to us. What is this but sheer egotism? Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, this is obviously an attempt to play God.

I know people who relate being terrified of retarded people when they were kids. I knew a retarded man from the time I was very small, and never have experienced that fear. I confess to being sometimes uncomfortable, though, with people who are severely disabled. But I wonder how many people would support putting Terri Schiavo to death for no other reason than people in the state she’s in make them uncomfortable. The fact that so many people are willing to make the decision that Terri’s life is not worth living, without knowing her or even what exact condition she’s in, makes me believe that a great many people have taken the position they have for that reason. They don’t want to have to deal with that pain, or be helpful, supportive or compassionate, and so they decide for someone else that their life is not worth living. And like the Nazi doctors quoted in the article, they will believe that they are being compassionate by ending the life of someone in such a state, regardless of the wishes of the person in the state.

Terri’s life is worth living, whatever condition she’s in and whether or not she ever gets better. Life is a blessing from God, and she’s not dead. Not yet, anyway.

(Article via Powerline.)

Dad has posted a lengthy article by the Rev. Warren Embree on the doctrine of the fourth commandment, contrasting the continental position (which he holds) with the Sabbatarian position. It’s very interesting. Warren takes the position that I take myself, and his scholarship is thorough, examining not only the Scriptural issues but also the church history aspect of the debate. Highly recommended.

My post on Terri Schiavo, from a month ago, has received hundreds of hits from especially Google searches and also Yahoo and MSN. Normally my little blog receives far less than that, even when posting on matters of intense interest to the public at large.

In this particular case, I mis-spelled Mrs. Schiavo’s first name. I spelled it Terry. A natural mistake, and one which apparently many Googlers have made as well. If I had spelled it right, I would have received nowhere near this many hits, since there are many more prominent sites than mine discussing this issue. An interesting accident, which has resulted in my opinion about the case being seen by perhaps hundreds of people. How’s that for irony? A mistake that I made results in my opinion being far more widely distributed than would otherwise have been the case.

The old question of judicial overreach, long a concern of conservatives, seems to be taking a turn for the worse right now. With the Republicans in the Senate trying to break a deadlock over nominees, one judge in Florida has taken it upon himself to decide that Terri Schiavo should die. I’ve written before about the Terri Schiavo case here, but I’ve been thinking (and listening to Rush Limbaugh) a lot over the last few days, as I drove up to South Dakota and back. There is something about the current approach to the judicial problem, which focuses almost entirely on nominating the right judges, it seems, which bothers me. And over the many hours I’ve spent in the car in the last four days, I think I know what it is that bothers me about this approach.

You know the old saying, of course, “Power corrupts.” I don’t think this is quite accurate, since God has absolute power and He is not in the slightest corrupted. But given the sinful human nature, it’s not too far off the mark. Perhaps it might be better said, “Power reveals.” That is, power shows what’s in a man’s heart. I am convinced that this is the reason why celebrities and athletes seem to so frequently have such terrible morals. I don’t think they’re really worse than other people; it’s just that their money and fame remove most obstacles to doing whatever they want to do.

In the case of judges, this principle would seem to explain why judges tend to drift leftward. Conservatism hold strongly to the principle of limited government, and it is modern day liberalism which looks to government to solve all problems, and therefore modern liberal political theory which offers any politician more power. If a conservative senator or a representative tries to seize power this way, his constituency can remove him. But there is no check on a judge except higher courts, and of course the highest court of all, the Supreme court, is just as susceptible to this problem as the others. A number of judges in recent years have drifted leftward, like Souter and O’Connor, but I don’t think any have become more conservative over the years.

This means that in order to correct the problem of judicial tyranny, the nominations process is not enough. There has to be some accountability for judges after they are appointed; even Supreme Court judges. The constitution of the United States set up various levels of government to act as checks on each other, and some were more democratic and some less. The judicial branch is the least democratic of all- they are not elected and are appointed for life. But this does not mean they are unaccountable. Their jurisdiction can be limited, and they can be impeached. Further, they depend on other branches to enforce their decisions.

If I were the governor of Florida I would use my executive power to protect the life of Terri Schiavo, and I wouldn’t care what some judge said. Judges are supposed to interpret law. But if a judge oversteps his authority, I would not allow myself to be subject to his tyranny. It’s one thing to have a difference of opinion. It’s another for a judge to seize power that is not his.

And if I were a congressman, I would push to impeach the judge that allowed Schiavo to be killed, whether a federal judge or a supreme court judge. I think that the other branches of government have to step in to rein in out of control judges, using their legitimate constitutional powers. They’re called “checks and balances” for a reason. This problem will not be solved just through the nominations process, because a lot of judges that are nominated will naturally abuse their power, if there are no consequences for them doing so, and it doesn’t matter what their political leanings are going in. It’s human nature, and it’s why we all have to be accountable.

I am neither a governor nor a senator, of course. I’m a pastor, so I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, which is preaching the gospel and teaching people God’s principles of right and wrong. But Republicans had better start paying attention. Many of us support them because they seem to be the party that is better in touch with human nature, being limited and imperfect, which is why limited government is so important. But if they become the party of government solutions for all problems (just different solutions), they will lose a lot of support.

Start reining in those judges. Don’t just appoint ones you like better. Start slapping down the ones who overstep their authority. Otherwise, the problem will never go away.