Scripture

Maybe you make new year's resolutions? Few are more important than to make a plan to read through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. You can buy a one-year Bible and that's good because you get a little bit of four things each day—some Old Testament, some New Testament, a small bit from Psalms, and a small bit from Proverbs. The McCheyne reading plan is similar. I prefer reading through the Bible because it gives you a straight-through feel for the whole special revelation of God and each day you get a strong dose of whatever book you happen to be in. This means you get a strong dose of the continuity the Holy Spirit chose including laws, genealogies, jeremiads, lamentations, Pauline defenses of pastoral authority, and apocalyptic bloodshed.

Anyhow, however you read it, read it. And if you choose to go through the Bible, always read with a pen or pencil so you can put question marks in the margin, lines under the things you find particularly helpful because they're particularly offensive to you, and themes you highlight with a letter or two in the margin. Currently, mine are "FS" for the texts helping me to see the marks of false and true shepherds, "CR" for Scriptures against cremation, "C" for every Scripture that speaks of fruitfulness of any sort, from children to apples to the righteous deeds of the saints, "F" for fatherhood, "S" for sex, and so on.

If you miss a day or two or three, don't let it keep you down. Get back on the horse and ride again.

Among magazines, none has a better reputation for rigorous fact-checking than the New Yorker. Every piece it publishes has been ripped apart and put back together only as the author's statements are verified by those who spend their lives trying to prove authors make mistakes and lie about big and little matters alike. But how do you fact-check a piece written by a boy and his father reporting that boy's experience of death and Heaven back when he was six years old? Do you pray and ask God if the story is true? If the boy really died? If Heaven is as the boy describes?

In this case, we're not talking about a magazine piece, but a book which has been on bestseller lists for years and has sold over a million copies. Published by Tyndale House Publishers (my in-laws' privately held corporation), for quite some time the boy and his mother have been trying to pull back the story of death and Heaven, but Tyndale House has declined to take action without a meeting with the boy, his father, and his mother. His father is the co-author of the book, the father and mother have been divorced for some time, and it's reported the father collects all the royalties with the son, a quadriplegic, getting none. No meeting of the three principals occurred so Tyndale House kept the book in print until this past week when the boy went public, admitting the book is a lie he made up to...