cb.blog

Author: Chip Bennett

  • OYB 2009: 03 January

    Today´s reading:

    Genesis 5:1-7:24 ◊ Matthew 3:7-4:11 ◊ Psalm 3:1-8 ◊ Proverbs 1:10-19

    One Year Bible Blog

    The One Year Bible Blog´s comments for today, which asks:

    Are you memorizing Scripture on a regular basis? Are you bringing Scripture to mind when faced with temptation or sadness or whatever ails you? I would love to know which verses you have found useful in your life? Do you have advice on how to best go about memorizing Scripture? Will you join me in my plan to memorize more Scripture verses in 2009? Also, what verses or insights stand out to you in today’s readings?

    I have always stressed the importance of memorizing Scripture. My first year through the One Year Bible, each day I highlighted a notable Scripture, many of which I memorized. Many years in Bible Bowl, I memorized the text, which consisted of about 40 chapters of a book (or several books) of the Bible.

    That said, as I mentioned yesterday, I believe that it is not the memorization that is key, but rather an attitude or desire to have the Word ingrained in one’s heart and mind. The desire and act of memorizing Scripture is but fruit borne from that attitude/desire – important fruit, to be sure; but merely fruit, nevertheless. It is the attitude of delight in God’s Law that leads us to meditate upon it, yields a desire to know God’s Word so deeply as to memorize it, facilitates its memorization, and enables us to bring His Word to mind and to apply it in resisting temptation and mastering the sin that crouches at the door.

    Likewise with the temptation of Christ, the part of the story that is sometimes overlooked is that between Christ’s baptism and temptation is a period of fasting. Undoubtedly, during the 40 days and nights this fast, Jesus immersed Himself in prayer and meditation. I have heard some say that this forty-day fast left Jesus in a weakened physical state, and therefore more susceptible to temptation. However, I would counter that this forty-day fast left Jesus in a heightened spiritual state, and therefore better prepared to resist temptation.

  • OYB 2009: 02 January

    Today´s Reading:

    Genesis 3:1-4:26 ◊ Matthew 2:13-3:6 ◊ Psalm 2:1-12 ◊ Proverbs 1:7-9

    God’s Promises – OT:

    And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
    he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.

    Genesis 3:15 (NIV)

    God spoke these words to the Serpent (Satan) after Adam and Eve sinned, prompted by the Serpent’s deception. With these words, God is foretelling the coming and redeeming work of the Messiah: His promise of man’s salvation.

    One Year Bible Blog

    The One Year Bible Blog´s comments for today, which asks:

    What is your reaction to reading about The Fall in Genesis today? Is it painful to read about The Fall after reading about The Creation yesterday? If Satan was able to deceive Adam & Eve back then, do you think he still deceives people today? What is our remedy from the lies and deception Satan might throw our way? Do you believe reading and studying God’s Word on a daily basis might be one remedy? What are some other remedies? (prayer, going to church, being in a small community group with others, etc.?) Do you believe Jesus has saved us from The Fall? Also, what verses or insights stand out to you in today’s readings?

    My reaction to the fall is that it was inevitable, and that I am grateful that God instituted His plan for salvation even from the very beginning. It isn’t terribly painful to read about the fall after reading yesterday about the perfection of creation, because, except for man, creation was not made in God’s image. Creation even before the Fall was but a glimpse of what eternity will be like. That we now live in a fallen world is merely a further reminder of that for which we hope.

    Satan absolutely deceives people still today. The best – and only – remedy was given to us in yesterday’s reading: delight in and meditation upon God’s Law. All else springs from this foundation. It is not the action of studying God’s Word (or anything else, such as prayer, church attendance, relationships, etc.), but rather an attitude of desire to please God and to follow His Law that enables us to master the sin that crouches at the door.

  • OYB 2009: 01 January

    Today´s Reading:

    Genesis 1:1-2:25 ◊ Matthew 1:1-2:12 ◊ Psalm 1:1-6 ◊ Proverbs 1:1-6

    God’s Promises – OT:

    16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

    Genesis 2:16-17 (NIV)

    Not all of God’s promises seem pleasing to us. For example, the very first promise made by God introduces man to the concept of morality and the consequences for acting outside of God’s established moral law.

    God gives man every good and perfect thing to meet his every need, but this man who was created as a physically mature adult came into being also as a spiritually immature infant. In the midst of this perfect setting, God presents man with a choice, in order both to begin his moral training and also to demonstrate that man cannot meet God’s moral standard on his own.

    Adam does not understand the consequence of violating this first boundary given by God. He believes God to be referring to physical death, while in reality God is referring to spiritual death. This misunderstanding facilitates Adam’s later deception.

    God’s Promises – NT:

    20 But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

    Matthew 1:20-21 (NIV)

    The promise given here is delivered by an angel of the Lord to Joseph, but it is God’s promise to man that Jesus was to be the Christ (Messiah: the Anointed One), God come to earth as man (Emmanuel), to save man from sin (Jesus).

    God’s Promises – Psalms/Proverbs:

    1 Blessed is the man
    who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
    or stand in the way of sinners
    or sit in the seat of mockers.

    2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
    and on his law he meditates day and night.

    3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
    which yields its fruit in season
    and whose leaf does not wither.
    Whatever he does prospers.

    Psalm 1:1-3 (NIV)

    What a beautiful promise to us! When we delight not in sin but in God’s law – when we meditate not on the things of the world, but on God’s law – God promises that we will be strong, fruitful, healthy, and prosperous in all that we do.

    It is as if each one of us is presented with that same choice given to Adam in the garden: delight in God’s law, and enjoy the fruits of our fellowship with God and the right to eat from the tree of life; or delight in the world, and suffer the consequences of broken fellowship with God. (The passage goes on further to promise that this latter choice will not prevail, and that those who make the latter choice will suffer for it.)

    But even in our fallen state, we still have this promise of strength, fruitfulness, health, and prosperity when we delight in and meditate upon God’s Law. Note that these verses do not say “follow God’s Law perfectly” (for we are unable to do so), but rather to delight in and meditate on God’s Law. God is concerned primarily with our heart: our attitude, our willingness to subject our free will to the desire to be obedient to God.

    One Year Bible Blog

    The One Year Bible Blog´s comments for today.

  • My Sister 1, Al Gore 0

    While Al Gore was in Europe, predicting that “the entire North Polarized cap will disappear in 5 years” due to global warming, the southern California desert was getting blanketed in snow.

    Global-warming induced snow storm in southern California, 15 December 2008
    Photo © Julie Shropshire

    Irony, thy name is Al Gore.

    UPDATE: Thanks for the mention, Gateway Pundit.

  • Karen’s WebNursery

    Just a quick note to let everyone know that Karen’s WebNursery is now online. We should have birth announcements and pictures in the mail to everyone in about two weeks.

  • McCain on Palin: “So Long and Thanks For All the Fish”

    …and by “fish” I mean, of course, all of the conservative voters McCain reeled in by naming Palin as his Veep.

    When asked by George Stephanopoulos, McCain refused to say whether he would support Sarah Palin if she ran for president:

    “Listen I have the greatest appreciation for Gov. Palin and her family and it was a great joy to know them,” McCain said. “She invigorated our campaign and she was just down in Georgia and she invigorated their campaign.”

    “But I can’t say something like that,” McCain said, “We’ve got some great other young governors, Pawlenty, Huntsman.”

    Stephanopoulos then pressed McCain regarding why he picked Palin to begin with, to which he replied:

    “Well sure, but now we’re in a whole election cycle… Have no doubt of my admiration and respect for her and her viability… but at this stage my corpse is still warm!”

    Well, McCain has one thing right: he is a corpse – politically speaking, with respect to all of us conservatives who held our noses to cast our votes for him despite the stench of his duplicitous treatment of both conservatism and the Republican party that nominated him. And if it hadn’t been for Palin, he wouldn’t have had enough remains even to identify as a corpse.

    H/T Josh Painter at RedState, who reacted appropriately:

    The man rarely misses an opportunity to stab conservatives in the back, except when he kicks them in the stomach… Aside from his military service for his country, John McCain has proven time after time that to him, such values as honor, loyalty and respect are a one-way street.

    John McCain: you are but a fraction of the person Sarah Palin is. You also aren’t half the presidential prospect she is – something the conservative base you alienated will prove to you in four years should Palin decide to run. You can take your stinking corpse and your disrespect, and shove them both back into your RINO senate seat.

  • The Vatican and Stem Cells: A Tale of Two Headlines

    The Vatican recently issued a statement on bioethical issues, entitled Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of the Person), which serves as the authoritative ruling for the Catholic Church in condemning, among other things, embryo-destructive stem-cell research and human cloning.

    The foundational tenet for the ruling is, as astute readers may surmise, the inherent dignity of the human being. The statement makes this point explicit in its opening sentence (pg. 1 of 23):

    The dignity of a person must be recognized in every human being from conception to natural death.

    The statement attempts to differentiate between human dignity, which has inherent moral value, and scientific research, which does not have inherent moral value apart from the moral implications of the applications of that research. The statement goes so far as to reiterate the church’s support for and participation in such research (pg. 2 of 23):

    The church therefore views scientific research with hope and desires that many Christians will dedicate themselves to the progress of biomedicine and will bear witness to their faith in this field.

    Having made clear this differentiation, the statement lays out the foundation of its ruling: 1) all human life has inherent dignity and moral worth, 2) life begins at conception, therefore 3) human life at the embryonic stage of development deserves all the dignity and respect due human life at all other stages of development (pg. 3 of 23):

    The body of a human being, from its very first stages of development, can never be reduced merely to a group of cells. The embryonic human body develops progressively according to a well-defined program with its proper finality, as is apparent in the birth of every baby.

    It is appropriate to recall the fundamental ethical criterion expressed in the Instruction Donum Vitae in order to evaluate all moral questions which relate to procedures involving the human embryo: ‘Thus the fruit of human generation, from the first moment of its existence, that is to say, from the moment the zygote has formed, demands the unconditional respect that is morally due to the human being in his bodily and spiritual totality. The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life.’

    From this foundational position, the statement makes the logical conclusion that embryo-destructive pursuits (including embryonic stem cell research) are immoral.

    So, given this position, I would expect a headline such as “Vatican document condemns cloning, stem cell research“, just as a matter of course. But how do the ostensibly upstanding journalists at the Honolulu Advertiser portray the ruling? Why, “Vatican condemns modern science research“, of course.

    Contrast that gem of journalistic integrity with the (Minneapolis/St. Paul) Star-Tribune’s take: “‘Dignity of a person’ reinforced in Vatican bioethics document.”

    Well now, that sounds just a little bit more accurate.

  • WordPress 2.7

    The latest version of WordPress, 2.7, was released earlier this week. The release, code/nick-named “Coltrane”, brings several major back-end improvements:

    Lorelle lists several reasons to upgrade immediately. Ryan Boren discusses the release, including what features were moved to the 2.8 (or later) blueprint. He also notes that WordPress 2.7 was downloaded 100,000 times in the first 20 hours after release (the counter reads 195,849 downloads at the time of this post), and that some bug fixes are already making it into the planned 2.7.1 release.

    I upgraded late last night, and the upgrade went apparently smoothly. As always, let me know if you notice anything amiss. I will be working on some of the new features, such as nested/paged comments, in the near future.

  • Lily and Karen: Separated at Birth?

    I mentioned previously that Karen looks just like Lily did when she was born, except for their hair. Well, let me show you just how much alike they really look:

    Lily and Karen: Separated at Birth?

    Can you tell which one is Lily, and which one is Karen?
    Photo © Chip Bennett

  • Welcome to the World, Baby Karen!

    This morning, at 8:09, we welcomed into the world Karen Elizabeth Bennett:

    Karen 00 Months - December 015

    Karen Elizabeth Bennett (Karen 00 Months Flickr set)
    Photo © Chip Bennett

    She was born via c-section at 8:09am; she weighed 6lbs, 10oz, and was 20″ long. Both baby and mommy are doing well, and are recovering.

    Nana and Papaw brought her Big Sister Lily to the hospital to meet her this afternoon. We’ll have more pictures up soon.