Scripture

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Crossway's $500 ESV and Rupert Murdoch...

For me, it's been a long love affair with Online Bible for the Mac (OLB) and I'm happy to announce that it no longer crashes under Apple's Sierra OS—if, that is, you're enrolled in Apple's beta program and running 10.12.2. (See announcement at bottom of page.)

I started using OLB back in the eighties when it was shareware, but they had no shareware fee. They didn't require money, but only that you give away several copies of the program in your first month of use. The coders said their software was the first "Bible software based on the principle of grace rather than greed."


On the necessity of reading the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments...

(By David Wegener.)

Thy words were found and I ate them …” Jeremiah 15:16

You accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe. 1Thessalonians 2:13

  • Reading the Bible plunges us into a spiritual bath. It cleanses. It is the tool normally used by the Holy Spirit to show us our sin and bring us to repentance. God uses His word as a hammer to break us...
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Read through the Bible...

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.


The Bible no longer inspires...

When pastors approach the Bible as if every text in Scripture is simply another opportunity to preach the Gospel, it makes sense for the Bible's detailed history to be relegated to the sidelines. This sort of preaching promoted as "redemptive-historical" or "Christ-centered" provides the perfect justification for the timorous to skip out the back, Jack, and preach John 3:16 every Lords' Day of the year. Then what does it matter if Adam and Eve were the first man and woman or merely the mythological father and mother of an early tribe of hominids? If the sermon text is Scripture's "narrative" of Adam and Eve, Creation, and the Fall, those stories are only there to show...


The boy who came back from Heaven lied...

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...


Man survives 3 days at bottom of Atlantic

LAGOS, Nigeria — About 100 feet down, on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, divers had already pulled four bodies out of the sunken tugboat. Then a hand appeared on a TV screen monitoring the recovery.

Everyone assumed it was another corpse, and the diver moved toward it. But when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!