Posts from — October 2003

Churches can get a 5% discount from Canon Press by linking to them.

Happy Birthday to my beautiful, gracious, and loving wife, Megan.

She’s 25 today.

Pretty good sale going on over at The Discerning Reader until the end of the week.

I love Fall. The leaves, the pumpkins, the chill in the air… ah!

Halloween is one of my favorite Christian holidays.

[edit: I just noticed that my thunder was stolen by Kevin and James Jordan]

On a messageboard I frequent, There was recently a thread about youth groups. It was actually all a response to RC Sproul Jr’s article, Farming Out the Kids. One person agreed strongly with the article, (rightly) praising the display of unity in the body when generations of God’s people worship together. I made the comment that as long as the children are being cut off from baptism or the Lord’s Supper, the unity is pretty fake, or at least minimalistic and shallow.

Here’s a response I got:

As long as infants and non-professing children are used in a sinful manner by a false church (preaching, proper administration of sacraments, and church discipline) in regard to the ceremonial laws and their gross misuse of them, it is pretty fake… or at least satanic lies and empty of any truth.

It’s news to me that the vast majority of Christendom has been beguiled by satanic lies and is empty of truth! I bet you didn’t know either, did you?!

sigh…

About 21.5% of viewers of this blog have to scroll over to see everything (they use a resolution of 800×600 or less). Is that enough to make the width of my site smaller to fit on their screens?

Yesterday on my drive home I was listening to an internet radio show where the host (who is a reformed baptist) was just taking caller questions and comments and discussing them. One caller started talking about baptism. It appeared that he had recently studied through the issue of paedobaptism, and had come out credobaptist. He went through a few of the arguments he had encountered that gave him some trouble, and how he worked his way through (or around, we might say) them.

One of the arguments that had been presented to him in favor of paedobaptism was based on 1 Corinthians 10, and went something like this…

All of Israel was baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. When we look at the Old Testament, we see that Moses asked Pharoah to let Israel go out to celebrate a festival and make sacrifices, and Pharaoh said they could go, but had to leave the women and children. And so Israel did not go without them. From what I gathered, the argument here went something like, since the Israelites demanded that the children come also, they were also baptized. And that, in turn, is reason that we should baptize our children in the Church.

Whether or not that is a good argument to use isn’t important right now, I just want to get to his response to it.

He said the problem with this argument is that the Egyptians were torturing the Israelites and beating them and killing their children. He then said, “It’s not the nature of God to let infants hang out in a murderous situation like that. In other words, God wouldn’t have said, ‘Okay, the men and women can go on the festival, but, you know, the infants we’re just going to lay them there in the sand and leave them for a few days.’ God’s not the God of major irresponsibility.”

And my only response to that is… yeah…?, with a ‘what’s the problem with that’ sort of tone.

He recongnizes that leaving a baby in the sand is cruel and irresponsible, but doesn’t seem to think that cutting them off from the blessing and promises of God is much of a problem.

Genesis 38 tells us an interesting story. Judah took a canaanite woman, and had three sons with her: Er, Onan and Shelah. Judah then took for his first son, Er, a wife named Tamar. We are told that Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and so the Lord slew him.

Judah then told his second son, Onan, to go into Tamar and give his brother a seed. That son, even though he is biologically from Onan, would be legally from Er, and would receive the inheritance of Er. Apparently Onan didn’t like this idea, so he spilled it on the ground, so as not to conceive. This displeased the Lord, so he slew Onan.

Judah then realized, ‘hey, two down, one left!’, and didn’t want his third son to die also. So he told Tamar to wait at her father’s house for his third son, Shelah, to grow up, and then he would take her as a wife. After a considerable time, we are told, Judah’s wife died. And Tamar had seen Shelah, and knew that he was grown, but she had not been given to him as a wife.

So when she learned that Judah was going to shear his sheep, she took off her widow’s clothes and dressed herself up as a prostitute. She made Judah give her his seal and his cord and his staff, which she said would be promise of payment. So Judah went into her, and she conceived.

Several months later it was discovered that Tamar had played the harlot and was pregnant. Judah called her out to be executed, but she proved that it was actually Judah’s child that she was with. Judah, to his credit, confessed his sin, and actually said that Tamar was more righteous than he. And then Tamar had twins, Perez and Zerah.

All that to say that Perez was a bastard child. Now… here’s the really cool part.

God commanded, through Moses, that a bastard child was not to hold office in Israel to the tenth generation (Deut. 23:2).

And here’s a bit of Christ’s geneaology from Matthew 1:

Judah was the father of Perez(1) and Zerah by Tamar
Perez was the father of Hezron(2),
and Hezron the father of Ram(3).
Ram was the father of Amminadab(4)
Amminadab the father of Nahshon(5),
and Nahshon the father of Salmon(6).
Salmon was the father of Boaz(7) by Rahab
Boaz was the father of Obed(8) by Ruth
and Obed the father of Jesse(9).
Jesse was the father of David(10) the king.

I thought that was a pretty cool bit of providence.

Turns out, all I really needed was to rearrange the furniture a bit.

I’m tired of blogging.

The result of disobeying Mommy and continuing to run at breakneck speeds on a rather uneven sidewalk: