There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
This sermon was given by Dr. Tom Ascol on October 16, 2021 at Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, FL and is a part of his sermon series on Romans: The Grace of God in the Gospel.
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For the Lord will not cast off for ever.Lamentations 3:31
He may cast away for a season but not forever. A woman may leave off her ornaments for a few days, but she will not forget them or throw them upon the dunghill. It is not like the Lord to cast off those whom He loves, for “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” Some talk of our being in grace and out of it, as if we were like rabbits that run in and out of their burrows; but, indeed, it is not so. The Lord’s love is a far more serious and abiding matter than this.
He chose us from eternity, and He will love us throughout eternity. He loved us so as to die for us, and we may therefore be sure that His love will never die. His honor is so wrapped up in the salvation of the believer that He can no more cast him of than He can cast off His own robes of office as King of glory. No, no! The Lord Jesus, as a Head, never casts off His members; as a Husband, He never casts off His bride. Did you think you were cast off? Why did you think so evil of the Lord who has betrothed you to Himself? Cast off such thoughts, and never let them lodge in your soul again. “The Lord hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:2). “He hateth putting away” (Malachi 2:16).
“But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day“ Proverbs 4:18 (KJV).
I had just finished giving a message, challenging students and young executives to commit their lives to helping to fulfill the Great Commission when Steve approached me with words that shocked me. I had known him for a long time and believed his life to be totally committed to Christ.
“If I were to respond to your challenge to take what I have to the rest of the world,” he said, “I’m afraid not much would be accomplished, because my brand of Christianity -quite frankly – is not that attractive, exciting or fruitful.”
He went on to share how he was not experiencing the joy of the resurrection in his life. The study of the Word of God had no appeal, his prayer life was nil and it had been a long time since he had introduced anyone to Christ. His outward evidence of being a man of God was just a facade, by his own admission.
What about you? Is your brand of Christianity truly the revolutionary, first-century kind that helped turn the world upside down and that changed the course of history? If not, it can be – and that is what this daily devotional guide is all about.
Every Christian needs to echo daily the sentiments of an unknown poet:
My life shall touch a dozen lives Before this day is done, Leave countless marks of good or ill, Ere sets the evening sun. This, the wish I always wish, The prayer I always pray; Lord, may my life help other lives It touches by the way.
That goal should reign supreme during my waking hours – to touch lives for eternity. For if the all-powerful God, in the Person of His Holy Spirit, truly lives and reigns and triumphs, surely I can tap into that supernatural power and give evidence of it in my life.
Knowing that this dark world desperately needs light, I will trust God to let His light shine through me today. I pray that my life will be so radiant, joyful, attractive and fruitful for Christ that it will demonstrate the kind of Christianity that can be exported to others, to members of my family, neighbors and friends, as well as to people in other countries.
“He said to them, “Go into all the world. Preach the good news to everyone.” Mark 16:15 (NIV)
Jason had been involved with Campus Crusade for Christ in college. He was excited about his faith and wanted to share Christ with others. He soon learned that a believer’s responsibility is only to share their faith in the power of the Holy Spirit and leave the results to God.
You see, you’re not to blame when the message of God’s love goes unheeded.
Your responsibility is simply to share God’s love and forgiveness.
So with a sense of expectancy, Jason asked God to lead him to people who would come to Christ.
First a mother and son excitedly responded. Then another woman was deeply moved when she heard about having a relationship with Christ. Her sister wanted to hear about God’s love, too! Both received Christ!!!
Dear one, share the great news of God’s love and forgiveness, and leave the results to God.
This sermon was given by Dr. Tom Ascol on October 24, 2021 at Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, FL and is a part of his sermon series on Romans: The Grace of God in the Gospel.
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Watch out: Google Drive seems to be wiping files Folks posting on Google Support forums in recent days have been saying how files have been suddenly disappearing, with no apparent way to get them back. A number of users have explained how their Google Drive has shed data added after May 2023, while others said the loss goes back a couple of years. Google has acknowledged the issue
New home prices plunge 18%, surpassing 2008 depths, while defaults reach 2013 highs. In a harrowing turn, new home prices have plummeted by a staggering 18%, marking the most significant annual decline on record, surpassing even the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. The grim reality intensifies as builders face a crisis, with mortgage demand hitting its lowest since 1994, and housing defaults soaring to levels not seen since 2013. The average selling price is down almost $90,000 from last year, raising a critical question: How can this precarious situation end well?
Iceland volcano – live: Almost 100 earthquakes strike in seismic swarm during eruption fears Evacuation zone ‘still dangerous’ as eruption could happen with only minutes’ notice, warns civil defence official. Almost 100 earthquakes shook Iceland from midnight today, as the country remains apprehensive about an imminent eruption. The strongest earthquake with a magnitude of 3.35 hit Vatnafjoll in South Iceland this morning at 5.56am, report the Icelandic Met Office. Yesterday night a seismic swarm started around the dike intrusion just north of the evacuated town of Grindavik. The Icelandic Met Office continues to warn of the “persistent likelihood of an imminent eruption”.
Ron Paul Urges ‘Separation Of Tech & State’ Some libertarians dismiss concerns over social media companies’ suppression of news and opinions that contradict select agendas by pointing out that these platforms are private companies, not part of the government. There are two problems with this argument…….
Did Deutsche Bank Just Destroy New York AG’s Case Against Trump? David Williams, who directly worked on at least one of several loans obtained by Trump over several decades, testified on Tuesday in Manhattan that it’s “atypical, but not entirely unusual” for a bank to internally slash a client’s stated asset values by 50% and approve a loan anyway, as they did with Trump, Bloomberg reports. “It just depends on the circumstances,” said Williams, a managing director at the bank.
Putin’s peace in Ukraine hinges on outcome of November 2024 US election: US official Russian President Vladimir Putin will not make peace in Ukraine before he knows the results of the November 2024 US election, a senior US State Department official said on Tuesday, amid concerns that a potential victory for former President Donald Trump could upend Western support for Kyiv.
Senior Palestinian official says imminent West Bank conflagration ‘more violent’ than Gaza Rajoub said that “the next, more severe violence will come from the West Bank. What is happening in the West Bank, which includes 700,000 Israeli settlers, is a similar situation and is connected to all aspects of life, holy sites and even olive trees, our schools, mosques and churches. Therefore, the next oonflagration will be more violent in the West Bank.”
Amir Tsarfati: Brutality of Hamas attacks will come to America at some point Amir Tsarfati, the founder and CEO of Behold Israel, a nonprofit group that covers Israel from a biblical worldview, said on Washington Watch Monday that America’s open southern border and lax approach to national security make an attack by Hamas a matter of when not if. “They don’t even hide it. Those terrorists, they say, ‘Saturday people are first, the Sunday people are next,’”
IDF shells targets in southern Lebanon The IDF chief met with heads of authorities in the north, assuring them “we will not be able to return to the reality that existed here before the war.”
Will Hamas’s overseas terror leaders end up on Israel’s hit list? Israeli political and military leaders have signaled that Hamas’s overseas leadership is not immune from future assassination. These figures consist of terror leaders like Salah Al-Arouri, the deputy political bureau chief who is based in Lebanon,
Ten Israeli hostages freed as Hamas breaks ceasefire in Gaza Hamas released 10 Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the first of two days of the extended ceasefire-for-hostages agreement, mere hours after the terror group attacked Israeli troops in northern Gaza in violation of the deal. The Israeli hostages, all women and one minor, were handed over by Hamas terrorists to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza and were on their way to Israeli territory.
Expert on Middle East: “Arabs consider hostage deal as ‘hudna,’ Israel’s surrender’ Dr. Cohen believes that to the Arab world the hostage deal is nothing more than proof of Israel’s surrender to Hamas. For them it is a ‘hudna,’ meaning a long-term ceasefire known from Islamic history, when Prophet Muhammad made a ‘hudna’ with his enemies and signed this contract for ten years. Arab media and social networks state that according to the ‘hudna’ Israel has lost and Hamas has won – proof of this is the fact is that we were forced to release imprisoned terrorists and we have submitted to Hamas dictates regarding the drones that we were not allowed to operate during certain hours. All these bring them to the conclusion that Hamas has been victorious,” says Dr. Cohen.
A cluster of sunspots 15 times bigger than Earth could send a solar storm our way as early as Saturday A cluster of sunspots has rolled into view of Earth and may send a solar storm our way as early as Saturday. The cluster includes about a dozen sunspots that are around 125,000 miles wide— about 15 times bigger than our planet, Space.com reported. Space-weather experts will be keeping a close eye on the cluster as it lines up with Earth
Earth’s magnetic field protects life on Earth from radiation, but it can move, and the magnetic poles can even flip The Earth’s magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves. Scientists have studied and tracked the motion of the magnetic poles for centuries. The historical movement of these poles indicates a change in the global geometry of the Earth’s magnetic field. It may even indicate the beginning of a field reversal – a “flip” between the north and south magnetic poles.
Be thankful the Associated Press is not in charge of Israel’s war strategy Israel is being sandbagged by a familiar purveyor of biased coverage: The Associated Press. Over the years in my profession as a broadcast journalist, I have personally documented countless examples of the AP’s bias, in which this monopoly “news service” co-mingles partial facts with slanted, left-leaning political bias, especially when covering news about former U.S. President Donald J. Trump. The result is news coverage heavy on opinions and political agenda but sadly thin on objectivity and truth.
Exorcist warns against attending Taylor Swift concerts due to witchcraft Taylor Swift ‘is probably attracting a lot of demons to her concerts’ with her imitation of witchcraft, … warning that concert attendees ‘could be attacked by demonic forces.’ some fans have raised concerns about a song that she performs during concerts.
Shallow M6.5 earthquake hits near the north coast of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea A strong and shallow earthquake registered by the USGS as M6.5 hit near the north coast of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea at 21:46 UTC on November 27, 2023. The agency is reporting a depth of 8 km (5 miles). EMSC is reporting the same magnitude and depth.
Widespread damage and at least 16 fatalities, 12 missing in Eastern Europe after rapid intensification of Storm Bettina Eastern Europe is still grappling with the aftermath of Storm Bettina, a severe snowstorm that rapidly intensified over the Black Sea and impacted the region on November 26 and 27, 2023. Ukraine has reported significant casualties, with at least five deaths and 19 injuries in the Odesa region. The storm has not only disrupted life in Ukraine but also inflicted damage and caused fatalities in neighboring countries such as Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Russia.
China’s COVID Trauma Returns As Hazmat Workers Disinfect Streets Public health workers wearing full protective gear have appeared on the streets of northern China, according to footage on social media, evoking memories of the country’s stringent anti-virus measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Food Bank Demand Surges After Americans Hit with Inflation French prosecutors have launched an investigation into the death of a 12-year-old boy who collapsed minutes after receiving Gardasil’s human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in a school setting and subsequently died of head trauma, according to French media.
Bill Gates Doubles Down on ‘Cashless Societies’ and ‘Digital IDs’ in Africa Billionaire Bill Gates is aggressively pushing his plan to experiment with “cashless societies” and “digital IDs” in the African nation of Nigeria.Gates and his foundation are attempting to eliminate physical money and replace it with “digital cash” that’s linked to a global identification system.
FDA approves Pfizer’s maternal RSV vaccine despite trial safety signals of increased premature birth A recent article published in The British Medical Journal (“The BMJ”) details the debate that has broken out over whether Pfizer should have told pregnant women participating in its trial of maternal respiratory syncytial virus (“RSV”) vaccination that a trial of GSK’s similar vaccine was halted over a safety signal around pre-term birth.
New Zealand Government will inform WHO it does not agree to International Health Regulations amendments The newly sworn-in New Zealand government intends not to be pushed around by UN resolutions or by the World Health Organisation anymore. According to a coalition agreement with New Zealand First, the new government will undertake a “National Interest Test” before accepting any agreements from the United Nations or the World Health Organisation’s proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” —Thomas Jefferson (1788)
Fellow Patriots, on this day in 1929, the first airplane flight over the South Pole was conducted by Navy lieutenant commander Richard E. Byrd and his crew. Unfortunately, the Left’s politicization of the military has made recruiting difficult in today’s America. —Mark Alexander
Mandates, directives, shortages, and higher prices, all at a time of crushing inflation.
Nate Jackson
“We’re from the government. We’re here to help,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona while butchering Ronald Reagan’s famous pronouncement about “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.”
Cardona not only missed the entire point of The Gipper’s too-true joke, he exemplified it. So too does Joe Biden’s new White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience.
The administration’s “fact sheet” about his supply chain gang lists a bunch of focus-grouped bromides: “These actions will help Americans get the products they need when they need them, enable reliable deliveries for businesses, strengthen our agriculture and food systems, and support good-paying, union jobs here at home.” And it will be co-chaired by basically Biden’s entire Cabinet.
What could go wrong?
Plenty. The supply chain woes that beset Americans with higher prices and shortages of goods in recent years were largely caused by the government response to COVID. To be sure, that began before Biden’s election, when Democrat governors and mayors around the nation were following the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci. But Team Biden took an economy well on the way to recovering and saddled it with massive government spending and regulation, igniting a wildfire of inflation.
To sum up the “new” White House plan, it’s the same as the old plan — to utilize the force of government to control supplies and processes. That will only mean big government control, intrusive mandates, and bureaucratic direction of everything you consume, followed by more distorted supplies and higher prices.
In some ways, we’re left wondering why Biden thinks this is necessary when his economy is going just swimmingly. He said so during his announcement of this supply chain council:
You know, from turkey, to air travel, to a tank of gas, costs went down. They went down. Now, to people making a lot of money, that doesn’t matter a whole lot because the costs are relatively small compared to wealthy incomes. In fact, as a share of earnings, this Thanksgiving dinner was the fourth-cheapest ever on record. And I want you all to know that. … Wages for working families have gone up while inflation has come down 65% — giving families a little more money in their pockets and a little more breathing room this holiday season.
Virtually every word of that is false.
Wages have gone up, but not as fast as inflation. By “costs went down” and “inflation has come down 65%,” Biden means that the annual rate of inflation has slowed somewhat since its peak of 9.1% in June 2022. And to say that “Thanksgiving dinner was the fourth-cheapest ever on record” is a really twisted reading of the statistics from the American Farm Bureau Federation. The same report from the Federation said “a Thanksgiving meal is still 25% higher than it was in 2019, which highlights the impact high supply costs and inflation have had on food prices since before the pandemic.”
Not to worry; Biden’s supply chain gang will fix it!
In any case, we’ve written till we’re blue in the face about inflation, usually making sure to put monthly numbers in broader context of cumulative inflation. The Leftmedia, by contrast, is busy churning out pieces with titles like “The economy is great, so why doesn’t everyone love Joe Biden?” Thus we were gratified to see a couple of mainstream media outlets finally do what we’ve been doing — at virtually the same time Biden was telling lies.
“It now requires $119.27 to buy the same goods and services a family could afford with $100 before the pandemic,” reports Bloomberg. “Since early 2020, prices have risen about as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the health emergency.”
Moreover: “It’s hard to find an area of a household budget that’s been spared: Groceries are up 25% since January 2020. Same with electricity. Used-car prices have climbed 35%, auto insurance 33% and rents roughly 20%.”
Care to guess how much grocery prices increased in the four years before the pandemic? Less than 1%.
Another mainstream media report, this time from CBS News, corroborates the misery: “The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs.”
And the conclusion is obvious: “Those figures help explain why Americans continue to register strong dissatisfaction with the economy,” Bloomberg added. “Consumers’ daily routines have largely returned to their pre-pandemic normal, but the cost of living has not.”
As Peter Doocy so artfully asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “So, is it your sense that when people are home for Thanksgiving, catching up with their family members, they were saying to each other, ‘Can you believe how much more affordable things have gotten?’”
All KJP could do was stammer her way to huffing, “It’s not a joke to us.”
Team Biden totally screwing up the economy isn’t a joke to us either.
Back to Biden’s supply chain gang, one notable supply issue is the glut of electric vehicles, thanks to government “incentives” and diktats outpacing market demand. Nearly 4,000 car dealers wrote to the Biden administration Tuesday appealing for relief because unwanted and very expensive EVs are sitting on dealer lots for nearly twice the average time for gas cars. We can expect Biden’s management of the rest of the supply chain to work just as well.
Meanwhile, the president also tipped his hand with one thing we expect will be a focus of his supply chain council: greedy corporations. “Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned.
In other words, the Biden administration will be looking for villains to punish when prices don’t magically come down because the president said they should. And those villains will not be the real culprits.
Remember all of this when Biden repeats his refrain, “Bidenomics is working.”
The 2024 presidential election looks better and better for the GOP, but this is no time for complacency.
Douglas Andrews
The 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.” We know this because the Department of Homeland Security — specifically, the members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council — told us so on November 12, 2020, nine days after the election.
So it must be true, right? After all, nine days is plenty of time to conduct a thorough investigation and forensic examination, right? Right?
And yet. We keep hearing about election fraud. As columnist Betsy McCaughey noted recently, “Never-before-seen emails released by the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 6 reveal that a government-sponsored task force is muzzling public figures, thousands of ordinary Americans, and media outlets like Newsmax and The Babylon Bee when they report election irregularities.”
Why might a government task force do such a thing if not to protect a narrative, a narrative that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats want us all to believe? Indeed, in the days following Tuesday, November 5, 2024, when it becomes clear that Joe Biden — or Gavin Newsom, or Michelle Obama, or whomever they choose at the Democratic National Convention next August — has won a narrow victory over Donald Trump, they’ll want us to believe it again.
But we won’t believe it, and for good reason. Because no sentient being can explain how, in an election that was, in the words of South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds, “as fair as we have seen,” Donald Trump could’ve earned 12 million more votes than any Republican candidate in history and could’ve handily carried an astounding 18 of 19 “bellwether” counties across the nation, and yet still get seven million fewer votes than gaffe-prone, basement-bound, cognitively challenged Joe Biden — a guy whose candidacy was so awful, so utterly uninspiring, that he finished a dismal fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary before getting his clock cleaned by 26 points in Nevada by Bernie Sanders.
Somehow, though, Biden inspired more population-adjusted Americans to vote for him in 2020 than rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008. And we’re expected to believe it was all on the up-and-up.
As for electoral shenanigans, we need only look at Pennsylvania, one of the “blue wall” swing states Trump won in 2016 but lost in 2020. As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors put it in a piece about a mail-in voting time bomb: “The saga of Pennsylvania’s undated ballots since the Covid pandemic is worth unspooling, because it shows how litigation puts indeterminacy into the election system. State law is unambiguous in saying that absentee voters must ‘fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on such envelope.’ This requirement has gone to court repeatedly for three years, with frustratingly inconclusive results.”
What part of “must” don’t these Keystone Coppers understand?
The case of the adjustable ballots is especially frustrating not just because such sloppiness could decide a presidential election but because our system of checks and balances doesn’t seem to be working in this case. We have a 5-3-1 “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court, and yet the justices keep dodging this critical case and others like it. As the Journal’s editors continue: “The nightmare is that control of the White House or the U.S. Senate could be decided after Election Day by a Supreme Court opinion on missing dates, incomplete witness addresses, or other ballot defects. That’s why the Justices should quit dodging these cases. The time to settle voting rules is when the stakes are low, which is to say, well in advance of Election Day.”
Hear, hear. What on earth is the Supreme Court waiting for? The clock is ticking, and Republicans have less than a year to wake up and fix what’s broken — especially in the Democrat-controlled urban centers of the swing states. Remember: Biden didn’t win the 2020 election in a runaway. He won it by 43,000 votes spread across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. If Democrats again are free to administer the election, and flood the zone with their bulk-mail balloting scheme, and count the votes in Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia — we can expect another narrow loss.
Unless it’s not close. Unless the American people are so sick of Joe Biden that the polls clearly show him trailing Donald Trump rather than, as in 2020, narrowly leading him. If that’s the case come next November, no amount of electoral mischief will help the Democrats. As Hugh Hewitt put it in the title of his prescient 2012 book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat.
All this leads us to wonder: What sorts of things might the Democrats have up their sleeve for 2024? If we know one thing about Democrats, it’s that they live to win elections. That’s why they’re starting to freak out about the age and incompetence and awful polling of their 81-year-old standard-bearer.
Perhaps a new lockdown regime is in the offing. China, which was rooting hard for Biden in 2020 and no doubt wants him to win again in 2024, has reintroduced its American electoral roadmap by bringing back masks and social distancing in response to a new and mysterious outbreak of bacterial pneumonia that has echoes of the COVID lockdowns beginning nearly four years ago.
“How are they gonna cheat this time?” is the burning question that columnist Stephen Green ponders. He notes that the COVID lockdowns and the Georgefloydian racial demagoguery and the cynical abuse of state election laws are cards that were all played in 2020. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t try to trot out variations on those themes next year.
“They need something new,” Green writes. “Maybe the shiny new thing will be a convention switcheroo this summer of Biden for Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom. The party mechanics — and that ‘civil war’ between the Newsom and Kamala Harris factions — would be tricky to navigate. But, honestly, Dems excel at that kind of thing. Maybe it will be some massive new public scare. COVID is out … but a war might do.”
The point to all this is that, while those of us on the Right are watching the polls and rubbing our hands with glee, the Democrats are plotting and scheming. And if we don’t learn from recent history, we deserve to repeat it.
The socialist UK healthcare system and government control over medical decisions are killing infants.
Emmy Griffin
The United Kingdom operates under a socialist form of healthcare. The NHS, or National Healthcare System, is “free” for all citizens and is paid for by taxes. Sounds pretty great. It’s not. It has a horrific dark side that too few people are discussing.
Socializing healthcare puts the power of life and death in the hands of the government, and citizens lose the right to seek the best medical outcomes for their families.
Take, for example, young Indi Gregory. Indi was an eight-month-old child with a rare mitochondrial disease. This disease made it difficult for Indi’s small body to turn sugar into the energy her body needed. She had been put on life support and the UK courts and the heartless NHS were given the decision over her life.
Indi’s doctors claimed that her quality of life was going to be limited and that, should they attempt to prolong her life, the child might suffer more pain. Indi was also deemed a financial drag on the healthcare system. A judge ordered her to be taken off life support.
In response, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reached out to Indi’s parents, Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth. Meloni not only gave Indi citizenship in Italy but offered to pay for the infant’s transport and further care at Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital in Rome. Meloni, who was correctly outraged at this sterile and cold treatment of a young human life, said: “They say there isn’t much hope for little Indi, but until the very end, I’ll do what I can to defend her life. And to defend the right of her mamma and papa to do all that they can for her.”
However, the UK denied this aid to the young baby and even denied the child the dignity of dying at home in the bosom of her family for fear the family might try to make a run for Italy. Indi passed away on November 13, she and her family victimized by the dictates of the socialist government healthcare system.
There is no excuse for the judges who had other options and offers of aid for the young child. They killed an innocent for the sake of their own power and because, when it comes to healthcare, parental rights are nil in the UK.
Sadly, this poor family is only the latest to suffer under UK healthcare dictates. Indi is the third baby to be murdered. Six years ago, Charlie Gard (11 months old), who had the same rare disease, was a victim of this eugenicist thinking. And five years ago, Alfie Evans, a 23-month-old suffering from encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, was sentenced to death. Italy also offered to save him, but his family was put through the same horror as Indi and her family.
This is an outrage and a tragedy.
This is also life under socialized healthcare, and it could very well be heading for the U.S. before long. Canada is already there, and we’ve read again and again about the horrors that the failures of that healthcare system have wrought on its population. If you’re poor, they’ll help you commit suicide. If you’re mentally ill, MAID is there as an “easy” response to your unwelcome presence in society.
Socialized healthcare is an excuse for more government tyranny and allows for the evil practice of eugenics to take hold. How many more stories do we need to hear before we realize this is a bad system?
Censorship Industrial Complex, Hunter’s public testimony gambit, National Lampoon’s Christmas, and more.
Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler
Cross-Examination
The birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex? Last we checked, the Constitution’s First Amendment prohibited the government from censoring us, from restricting our ability to speak freely. Even the leftists at the American Library Association know this. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” and all that. So why is it that we continue to find evidence that the government is doing just that? Most insidiously, we find the government partnering with private entities to do their dirty work because, while the First Amendment prevents government censorship, it doesn’t prohibit private individuals or businesses from doing so. And now, as independent journalist Michael Shellenberger reports, “A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.” According to the whistleblower, one of the leaders of a mysterious group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League — a former British intelligence analyst — “was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’” If, as Shellenberger claims, the documents reveal “the birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex,” and if that cryptic reference to “a repeat of 2016” refers to the shocking election of Donald Trump, then it appears they accomplished their mission with the election of Joe Biden in 2020.
The littlest hostage’s family connection to Hunter’s artwork: Author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” So here goes: CBS News reports the unequivocally good news that four-year-old Abigail Mor Edan, whose parents were killed in the barbaric October 7 attacks and who was the youngest American held by Hamas, “was among the group of hostages released back to Israel on Sunday, both President Biden and the Israeli military confirmed.” And yet, as Business Insider reports, a member of little Abigail’s extended family — her great-aunt Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, to be precise — reportedly had purchased a piece of Hunter Biden’s “artwork” and had also received a cushy appointment within the Biden administration. As Benjamin Weingarten of RealClearInvestigations posted to X, “So you’re telling me that the great-aunt of the youngest American hostage — and first American — to be released by Hamas is a buyer of Hunter Biden’s art, who was then appointed by Joe Biden to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad?” What are the odds, huh? And why aren’t we surprised?
Hunter’s public testimony gambit: Republicans on the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Hunter Biden earlier this month to appear before the committee in a closed-door deposition to answer questions and give testimony. Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, on Tuesday offered that his client would comply with the subpoena, but only if the hearing was public. Of course, the demand for a public hearing, which usually only happens after a closed-door hearing, is designed to turn it into a spectacle and make it difficult for lawmakers to ask direct questions and avoid Hunter’s grandstanding. Seeing through the ruse, Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) rejected the offer: “Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else. That won’t stand with House Republicans. Our lawfully issued subpoena to Hunter Biden requires him to appear for a deposition on December 13.” But Hunter can still get his public hearing. Comer added, “We expect full cooperation with our subpoena for a deposition but also agree that Hunter Biden should have the opportunity to testify in a public setting at a future date.” Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy agrees, arguing that this is all theatrics that in the end will amount to little information or change: “There will be no shortage of huffing and puffing over the next two weeks, but Hunter’s eventual testimony is unlikely to amount to much.”
Regulations are taxes: Bidenomics is costing Americans more of their hard-earned money via the weakening of the dollar’s monetary value thanks to sustained high inflation, devaluing the dollar by over 19% since 2019. But Joe Biden has also imposed significant hidden taxes on Americans via his regulatory state. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Biden administration’s added regulations now cost the average American household $14,000 annually. CEI’s Wayne Crews observes, “Instead of finding ways to cut those costs for Americans, President Biden’s whole-of-government policymaking framework prioritizes political causes like climate change and equity in the regulatory process.” And the result is making life needlessly more expensive. Indeed, other than spending on housing, the average American household spends more annually on government regulations than any other expense such as food, transportation, healthcare, and insurance. CEI notes that the $14,514 annual cost in federal regulations equates to 17% of the average American household’s income in 2022 ($87,434) before taxes.
National Archives clings to Biden’s email aliases: It’s strange, isn’t it, how the National Archives was so eager to rat out Donald Trump for his failure to return some of his White House documents and yet has been so tenacious in its defense of Joe Biden for his use of multiple fake email addresses to conceal his affairs and to thereby evade congressional oversight while serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. Why, it’s almost as if the archivist had a political agenda. As The Daily Signal reports, “Getting to the truth of Joe Biden’s use of multiple alias email accounts while he was vice president could take years if Congress waits on the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration to release all of the relevant records it is requesting.” But there’s hope for getting to the bottom of Biden’s surreptitious emails and thereby the secret lives of Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware. As the Signal continues, a narrowly targeted Freedom of Information Act request shows that the National Archives has “731 documents relevant to the creation of these alias email accounts and potentially who authorized their use.” This would greatly streamline the congressional investigation by narrowing the focus to a small tranche of emails rather than painstakingly poring over all 82,000 of them. Now if we can only get the Archives to cough them up, and preferably prior to next year’s election.
National Lampoon’s Christmas: On Tuesday afternoon, strong winds blowing through Washington, DC, toppled the White House’s massive 40-foot National Christmas Tree that had been placed a few days earlier. The tree was knocked over just days before the annual lighting of the tree ceremony scheduled for November 30. The tradition dates back to Christmas Eve of 1923. While this isn’t the only time the National Christmas Tree has been knocked over by high winds, the most recent being in 2011, its falling served as symbolic fodder on social media for skewering Joe Biden. For example, the RNC posted: “National Christmas tree falls DOWN. Perfectly summing up Joe Biden’s presidency.”
Rosalynn Carter’s funeral: Glenn Memorial Church at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, hosted Tuesday’s memorial service for Rosalynn Carter, the late first lady and wife of Jimmy Carter. The 99-year-old former president, who has been in hospice care for the past 10 months, was in attendance to grieve the passing of his wife of 77 years, along with many others who came to pay their respects. Those in attendance included Joe and Jill Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and former first ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, and Laura Bush. Former presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush were invited but did not attend. Several celebrities also paid their respects, including Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who are longtime friends of the Carters. Of his late wife, Jimmy said: “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished. She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.” Rosalynn was 96.
Headlines
Joe Biden plans to skip UN climate talks beginning this week in Dubai (AP)
Released Israeli hostages tell horror stories from time with Hamas (Washington Free Beacon) | Emily Hand, a nine-year-old exchanged by Hamas, is suffering from horrible trauma after weeks in captivity (Not the Bee)
United Nations Women retracts statement condemning Hamas attacks on Israel (National Review)
U.S. Dept. of Education opens investigation of Harvard over anti-Semitism on campus (Fox News)
Internal docs show Biden admin waived taxpayer safeguards to boost offshore wind project (Fox News)
Poorer areas have seen the bulk of clean energy funds in the Inflation Reduction Act’s wake (NBC News)
Gretchen Whitmer signs one of the nation’s most extreme green energy mandates (Daily Wire)
Dem Connecticut governor withdraws electric vehicle mandate in stunning blow to ecofascists (Fox News)
Special Counsel Jack Smith sought info on anyone who “favorited or retweeted” Trump tweets (The Federalist)
Google maps removed DC pregnancy center (Daily Signal)
Record number of Americans died by suicide in 2022 (Fox News)
U.S. life expectancy rose in 2022, but not enough to erase the pandemic’s toll (NBC News)
Satire: To encourage Biden to rescue hostages, posters will now feature photos of WNBA players (Babylon Bee)
The CDC and the FBI ignored a rogue biolab in Reedley, California, connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
Gary Bauer
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) accused the Biden Administration of grossly neglecting our homeland security. Gallagher stated that the CDC and the FBI ignored a rogue biolab in Reedley, California, connected to the Chinese Communist Party, and initially refused to even investigate it.
We first reported on this Chinese biolab in late July. But now there is additional information and none of it makes this story any less disturbing. This should be major news. Yet, the Biden White House and the “mainstream media” don’t want you to know about it.
Local officials begged the CDC and the FBI to investigate what was going on at the Reedley facility. But the bureaucrats literally hung up on them. It was only after a local building inspector took action and a local congressman got involved that the whole thing was exposed.
According to Rep. Gallagher, who chairs a special House committee investigating the Chinese Communist Party’s activities in the United States, the lab was being run by a Chinese citizen, Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, who was in the U.S. illegally.
Zhu, who has an outstanding arrest warrant in Canada related to $330 million in intellectual property theft, received millions of dollars in “unexplained wire transfers” from communist China while he operated this secret biolab.
Somehow, he bought at least 20 lethal pathogens online, including a deadly form of malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and possibly even Ebola. How is that even possible? Several lab workers identified themselves as Chinese citizens and the building inspector noticed many vials labeled in Mandarin Chinese.
The national security threats involved here are obvious. Asked how many more secret biolabs may exist in the U.S., Gallagher replied, “The honest answer is we don’t know,” adding, “This has revealed a huge soft underbelly in our domestic national security. It’s incredibly troubling.”
This is another example of the Biden Administration putting America last. It’s also more evidence of the fact that communist China is not a normal country. It’s not just another “trading partner” we can do business with. It is an enemy that is actively working to undermine us every single day.
Rob Flaherty and the White House misinformation team want you to believe the Biden economy is doing quite well.
Byron York
On Sept. 20, Politico published an article headlined, “Biden campaign set to counterpunch on misinformation.” The story reported that President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign is “overhauling” its strategy to fight “misinformation” on social media. The new effort includes “recruiting hundreds of staffers and volunteers to monitor platforms.” To supervise the work, the campaign hired a former Biden White House staffer named Rob Flaherty, who was described as a “bulldog” and a “controversial figure” whose “combative emails to social media firms have become part of a Republican-led federal court case and a congressional investigation.”
That’s important. The federal court case is Missouri v. Biden, a landmark COVID-era case involving government censorship of social media. Discovery in the case brought revelations that the Biden White House and other Biden administration officials, working with outside activist groups, “held biweekly meetings with tech companies over how to curb the spread of misinformation during the pandemic,” with Flaherty “in constant contact with social media executives,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The White House claimed it was just “flagging problematic posts … that spread disinformation.” But the Journal continued: “Officials weren’t merely flagging false statements. They were bullying companies to censor anything contradicting government guidance.” Flaherty demanded that social media companies ban alleged offenders from big platforms like Facebook. After the companies’ initial hesitance, Flaherty and his administration colleagues got their way. “All 12 people dubbed the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ by the Center for Countering Digital Hate were censored, and pages, groups, and accounts linked to them were removed,” the Journal said.
An important fact to remember is that Flaherty and his colleagues weren’t just targeting misinformation. Many of the postings they sought to ban were “scientifically debatable,” in the Journal’s words. What Flaherty and the Biden team really wanted to do was ban speech that was contrary to or inconvenient for Biden administration policy.
And now Flaherty has a new role at the Biden 2024 campaign. He moves into the job as his former colleagues at the White House have turned to a new topic: alleged misinformation about inflation. They believe it is rampant — the misinformation, that is — and they want to stamp it out.
You might think you are paying crazy high prices at the grocery store, at restaurants and at the gas pump. You might also think you can’t afford to buy a house because of rising prices and high mortgage interest rates. You might think it’s also expensive not to buy a house, with rents going up and up. And you might have spent a lot, if not all, of your savings and have higher credit card balances than you used to.
From your personal experience, you might conclude that the economy is not doing well. What Flaherty at the Biden campaign and the misinformation team at the White House want you to believe is that the economy, the Biden economy, is actually doing quite well. You’ve got it wrong.
One of the first vehicles for this campaign is, of all things, a McDonald’s Smoky BLT Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is what happened: In December of last year, a man ordered the sandwich, which was available only for a limited time, along with large fries and a large Sprite, at a McDonald’s in Post Falls, Idaho. The cost was $15.19, which, along with 91 cents tax, made a final bill of $16.10. The man, Topher Olive, was unhappy and made a TikTok video to complain. “So I get there’s a labor shortage,” Olive said on the brief video. “I get there’s wage increases and a number of other things. But $16? $16 for a burger, a large fry and a drink? It’s just crazy.”
The video went viral. It became the source of stories in some conservative media outlets. “These stories soon reached the White House office of Digital Strategy, which tracked the meme as one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes,” wrote the controversial and oft-corrected Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz. “In reality, inflation has been steadily subsiding.” (Actually, in reality, it is more accurate to say that inflation “steadily subsiding” means that prices are still rising but at a slower rate than earlier.)
The White House and Biden campaign want to push back against complaints like Olive’s. It’s important to note that the White House did not accuse Olive of misrepresenting the price of his meal. Olive included the receipt in the video, and he really did pay $16.10 for his Smoky BLT Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, plus fries and drink. But the Biden team worried about other Americans learning about the high-priced dinner — as if Americans somehow didn’t already know things are terribly expensive. Now, Lorenz reports, the Biden White House is “working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”
Does that sound familiar? It’s precisely how the White House described the work of Flaherty and his colleagues that resulted in Missouri v. Biden. During that time, as Politico reported, evidence showed that Flaherty “harangued employees at Facebook and YouTube when he was at the White House, insisting the companies do more to combat rhetoric against the COVID-19 vaccine. His aggressively worded messages have made him the target of conservative allegations that the White House and other Biden officials wrongly pressured private companies to take down internet speech.”
And remember, behavior like that came after the Biden 2020 campaign’s successful effort, again working with social media companies, to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Pressuring social media companies is something the group around the president has done very effectively. So now, Team Biden is taking on “misinformation” about inflation. But here’s a problem for the White House: Americans have experienced Biden-era inflation in their own lives. They know what it has done to their finances. They don’t feel positively about an economy that has made it difficult for them just to get by. And no Biden effort to suppress discussion or attack “misinformation” will change what those Americans already know to be true.
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/team-bidens-great-double-quarter-pounder-misinformation-campaign.
Brace Yourselves! — A violent, uncontrolled flood of democracy has broken out in Argentina! Fortunately, we Americans have a trustworthy news media on hand to remind us of the threat posed by unapproved candidates.
It’s Not Sexist to Hate ‘The Marvels’ — “The Marvels” marked the lowest opening weekend in the MCU’s franchise history, for obvious reasons. Instead of addressing any mistakes, the director has gone on record calling MCU fans virulent, violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic.
‘I Wouldn’t Live Anywhere but America’ — MMA fighter Jorge Masvidal has competed in fights all over the world. Proud of his Latin roots, Masvidal is even prouder to be an American patriot.
‘I’ll Pass Term Limits as President’ — Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis shares his plan to impose term limits on lawmakers.
The War on Israel, Biblical Prophecy, and Finding Hope — Amir Tsarfati, founder and president of Behold Israel, discusses the Israel-Hamas war in relation to Biblical prophecy, as well as finding hope in God’s prophetic plan amid global chaos.
‘Lady Ballers’: Official Trailer — In a world where women’s sports is being trans-formed, The Daily Wire calls foul with the most triggering comedy of the year.
“Everyone knows that the right-wing extremism in this country has targeted democratically ran cities. And quite frankly, they’ve been very intentional about going after democratically ran cities that are led by people of color. And their whole motivation is to create disruption and chaos. … They’re still mad that a black man is free in this country.” —Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
Re: The Left
“Left wingers in sports are furious that little kids dress up like Indians at football games, but think it’s brave and heroic for grown men to dress up like women and win women’s sports championships. Not satire. This is what they believe.” —Clay Travis
“How, pray tell, is anyone supposed to make progress if race-hustlers … never forgive and keep making new accusations no matter what?” —Nate Jackson
“If JFK were alive today and he were espousing the ideas of his 1,000-day presidency, he would be a Republican. JFK was a staunch Cold War anti-communist/socialist. He espoused lower tax rates, was pro-life, served our country in uniform valiantly, was patriotic, was a hawk on protecting First Amendment civil liberties, and he and his brother, who served as attorney general, took on union and government corruption. Not many Democratic leaders today check any of these boxes.” —Stephen Moore
“There are a few things that define the modern progressive movement. It is overwhelmingly committed to abortion. It believes America is evil, socialism is good and it is increasingly secular.” —Gary Bauer
For the Record
“Since World War II, most American Jews have believed that the more secular American society is, the more secure their status. This has been, as I have argued all of my life, a colossal error. Indeed, it may turn out to be a fatal error. With the outburst of unprecedented levels of antisemitism, American Jews are living the famous warning: ‘Beware what you wish for; you just may get it.’” —Dennis Prager
“Too many have exchanged the power that comes with faith for temporal power that quickly fades away.” —Cal Thomas
Political Futures
“One question critical to the GOP’s chances next year is still open, and the primaries will help answer it: Can Republicans get out the vote? Polls testify to Donald Trump’s popularity with the base. What they don’t show is whether he has the campaign organization to turn his lead on paper into an equally conclusive result when the ballots are counted.” —Daniel McCarthy
“The path to the nomination for anyone other than Trump is exceedingly narrow. Yet if Trump is annoyed that he has to fight for the nomination at all, and others are dismayed that voters won’t give them a chance, Republicans are still better off than the Democrats. The GOP will test Trump before it nominates him again — but no one dares test Joe Biden, because Democrats know he would fail.” —Daniel McCarthy
Jack Smith returning to Washington DC after a hard week of work manufacturing charges against President Trump in Florida. (GP photo)
Political hitman Jack Smith ordered Twitter-X to turn over information on President Trump’s popular Twitter account during his continued fishing expedition into President Trump.
Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ also demanded information on all Twitter-X users who retweeted President Trump, liked President Trump’s tweets, or mentioned President Trump’s account in their tweets.
Merrick Garland is going to target all of the Trump supporters in their continued witch hunt against President Donald Trump.
This is what tyranny looks like.
The lawless DOJ released the highly redacted order to Twitter earlier this week.
BOMBSHELL REPORT: Department of Justice TARGETED THOSE WHO SUPPORTED TRUMP on Twitter – Ordered Review of Trump's Twitter Activity, Including Accounts That Liked, Followed, or Retweeted His Posts.
Justice Department lawyers have disclosed details linked to their search warrant… pic.twitter.com/TeGn6Nwhkw
In the pages that aren’t obscured, there are demands by Smith for information on virtually every conceivable aspect of the 77-year-old former president’s Twitter account, including “all advertising information … and ad topic preferences,” all IP addresses associated with the account, Trump’s privacy and account settings, records of the account’s communications with Twitter support and all direct messages sent and received by the account from October 2020 to January 2021.
The government also sought information on users who interacted with Trump leading up to the riot.
“All information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for the account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. “mentions” or “replies”),” the warrant states.
The warrant was issued to the social media giant along with a nondisclosure order, instructing the company not to notify Trump about the search.
Twitter balked at the nondisclosure order, arguing in a failed court challenge that it was a violation of the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act.
The DOJ’s opposition to the company’s attempt to notify Trump about the warrant was also released Monday.
“For what appears to be the first time in its history, Twitter Inc. (‘Twitter’) has filed a motion to vacate or modify an order that it not disclose the existence of a search warrant,” Smith argued, insisting that “there is reason to believe notification to the former president, a sophisticated actor with an expansive platform, would result in a statutorily cognizable harm.”
Former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker joined ‘FOX & Friends’ to discuss Hunter Biden’s offer and the impact of his scandals as 2024 nears. #FOXNews
More hostages released as ceasefire could be extended as we learn about the terrible treatment some children endured in Hamas captivity; Germany freezes funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, after a report accuses its education programs of teaching antisemitism and glorifying terrorism, and some of its teachers or workers celebrated the October 7th Hamas attacks, and a prayer meeting is held in the Knesset with many Christians joining their Jewish brethren to pray; CBN Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell talks about how Israel could use the pause in the fighting to its own advantage, how Hamas dealt with their hostages, UNRWA workers and Hamas, and the Knesset prayer meeting; Congress having difficulty passing bill combining aid for Israel and Ukraine, as some Democrats want conditions for US help for Israel; a conversation with one Yedidya Harush, one of the heroes who fought back – and is credited with saving an entire community; and amid the often-troubling reports about how Hamas attacked Israelis, one author explains how people can deal with the trauma of the news- and still keep themselves informed.
We are in the section of my Advent thirty day flow where we examine PROPHECY, ARRIVAL, and EARLY LIFE of Jesus.
In this section I chose verses that reflect the prophecies that predict His coming. Prophecy warns of coming judgment but it also comforts in that it foretells the holy and wonderful resolution of all things for the believer. This resolution didn’t begin with Jesus’ incarnation as a babe in the manger, it began before the foundation of the world when the God-head held an intra-council discussion and Jesus voluntarily chose to become the sacrificial Lamb.
Scripture’s clear that salvation isn’t earned by good behavior. Christ alone redeems. Does that mean we’re free to live however we want under God’s grace? Discover the balance between obedience and “walking in love,” on Truth For Life with Alistair Begg.—————————————–
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God’s Word is alive in a truer sense than we are. As Peter quotes Isaiah 40:6–8, “For, ‘all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls off, but the word of the Lord endures forever’” (1 Peter 1:24–25).
Before John gives a narrative of his evidence, the signs and sayings that should produce belief, He gives a dense and powerful statement of the theological conclusion. We know from the beginning what he is driving toward.
“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). John affirms that the living Word of God, that is, the Son of God, was there and the active agent of the events that began in Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning.” Genesis goes on to say, “God created.” John’s assumption of the language of the Genesis narrative indicates that this Word was the God who created. This is reiterated in verse 3 when John writes with economy and force, “All things through him” (as the intermediate but co-equal agent carrying out the full intention of the Father) “came into being, and without him came into being not even one thing” (3). Again, this is stated in verse 10, “The entire created order with all of its symmetry, inter-relations, and reciprocal dependencies and attractions [cosmos] through Him, as the intermediate and effecting agent, came into being.”
The verb “was,” the imperfect of eimi, is used three times in verse 1 and again in verse 2. It implies absolute continual existence. After implying that the Word is eternal and is the God who created, John says the “Word was with God.” This is a strong word of association, “face to face with God” (1:1), with the definite article, “the God.” This identifies another personal being who also is eternally divine, even as the Word is. Immediately John continues with a statement about the Word, “the Word was God.” The Word is not that God identified specifically in the previous phrase, but is himself, in his essence, a person of the same nature as “the God” that he was, is, and will continue to be “with.” A. T. Robertson says that this phrase “presents a plane of equality and intimacy.” When the same phrase appears in 1 John 1:2, he calls it “the accusative of intimate fellowship.” Later this relation is verbalized as “in the bosom of the Father” (18).
Verse 2 reiterates the assertion of verse 1 in short-hand style. “He,” –this one that has just been called God– “was,”—again the imperfect of eimi meaning having continuing eternal existence without a beginning—“in the beginning”—when everything that has a beginning began—‘with God”—face to face in essential union with a distinct divine person whom we learn is the Father. The perfect bond of intimate communion between Son and Father is the Holy Spirit (John 15:26; 16:14, 15).
Verses 4, 5, 9 engage the idea of the Word being the source, not only of physical created light, but of the inextinguishable rationality and inner-witness in men called the “image of God” (Genesis 1:26, 27). As Jesus is the uncreated image of God (Colossians 1:15), even the “brightness of his glory and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), so humanity by created constitution bears God’s image. The Son has created us as reflections of his own being. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (4). As the Father by eternal generation has given to the Son to have “life in himself” (John 5:26), so the Son has given us by creation life and light that is dependent upon him. The light is the rational morality and heart-law of humanity. The Word eternally exists as the true light (9), and every person that is conceived (that comes into being in this world), receives at that point the divine image as communicated by the eternal Word, the eternal radiance of the divine glory.
Sin, however, has darkened our perceptions. Bearers of the Light walk about in darkness and thus, though the light-giver was in the world, “the world did not know him” (10). Even his covenant people who had the fathers and the covenants and the written law did not receive him (11). Revelation of truth diminishes cognitive darkness but does not overcome the spiritual darkness of the soul. The personification of truth, light, faithfulness, glory, and grace came into the world and none of his image-bearers nor even his own covenanted people received him nor knew him.
Another divine operation, therefore, must open that heart and the rationality, banish the darkness and bring sinners of all sorts to belief. John asserts this happens by another birth in which we become “children of God, … not from bloods, nor of a will of the flesh, nor of a will of man, but of God having been begotten” (13). Here John rejects the genealogical pedigree of the Jews, the power of the human will, and all the powers present in humanity as a result of natural birth. This sinful darkness and spiritual deadness over Jew and Gentile can only be overcome by a birth from above.
Revelation of truth diminishes cognitive darkness but does not overcome the spiritual darkness of the soul.
In this tight framework, John has asserted the deity of the Word, the Word’s operation in creation, and his face-to-face connection with “the God.” Now the astounding mystery—this Word became flesh; he dwelt among men as a man. At the same time, he could not be absent of his eternal glory, but did not, nevertheless, exhibit the external form of that glory. The evidence of his deity was abundant, but its form was exhibited rarely.
John, nevertheless, claims, “We saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (14). He saw works of power befitting only God, but the glory he refers to here is the glory resident in the eternal relation between the Father and the Son. If his words do not arise from revelation, how else could John state these propositions with such certainty and in a didactic way? This kind of revealed insight into the historical phenomena experienced by the disciples was promised by Jesus when he said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak.” Jesus then completes the trinitarian unity of knowledge and purpose by saying, “He will glorify me, for he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:12-15). Paul summarized by saying, “What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man, God has revealed to us by his Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9, 10). “In other ages,” Paul claimed, the mystery of Christ was not made known “as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 3:5).
Does this contradict John’s claims in 1 John? John says, “The One that was from the beginning, the One we have heard, the One we have seen with our eyes, the One we have gazed upon and our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life, … we are announcing to you, … and these things we are writing to you so that your joy may be completely full” (1 John 1:1, 3, 4 ). It is true that John saw all these things, heard the words of the Word, felt the flesh of the Word made flesh, and considered all this a sufficient demonstration of the actions, claims, and teachings of Jesus. For such clarity of perception of these transcendent historically certain truths, however, John had to partake of a two-fold work of the Holy Spirit.
First, he was the recipient of the revelation Jesus promised from the Spirit. His assertions about the deity of Jesus are not guesswork nor the mere product of rational deduction from abundance of evidence. Though consistent with the evidence, John’s propositions are revealed truth.
Second, he received the Spiritually-generated true-seeing, true-tasting, true- hearing. He had experienced what Jesus said after the feeding of the 5000, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). He had experienced not only the revelation of cognitive propositions (like Balaam [Numbers 23:1-12]), but the internal apprehension of the truth taught by the Spirit, unlike Balaam (Jude 11, 19). True believers will not believe antichristian lies that deny either the deity or the humanity of Christ for they “have the anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things” (1 John 2:20). In reference to the particular knowledge of the Father and the Son, the Spirit anoints his chosen with that knowledge. Confirming this John wrote, “And the anointing that you received from him abides in you, even so you have no need that anyone teach you. But as his anointing teaches you concerning everything, and is true and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him” (1 John 2:27).
True belief consists of several constituent elements. First, the historical events effecting redemption must have taken place. “The Word became flesh and set himself up as a tabernacle among us” (John 1:14). He “bore our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24) and “died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). He was buried, but “now is Christ risen from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Having made purification for sins, he has sat down at the right hand of the Father (Hebrews 1:3). Second, true belief accepts the meaning of these things as taught infallibly by revelation to chosen messengers (1 Timothy 2:5-7). Truth and error are divided along the lines of apostolic declaration and contrary opinion (1 John 4:5, 6). Third, true belief emerges with a restoration of the true light to the soul by the glory of Christ’s gospel, by a spiritual application of the historical truth that Jesus appeared as God in the flesh and accomplished his assigned work of redemption. Those who don’t believe have been blinded by Satan so that “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God,” does not enlighten them. On the other hand, those who believe are the recipients of an effectual operation of Christ Himself, who “commanded light to shine out of darkness” at creation. He does this through the Spirit [for in this work “the Lord is the Spirit”] and “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:17, 18; 4:4-6).
We “Remember Jesus Christ” when we affirm, on the basis of apostolic revelation, and with a heart full of love and adoration, without a shadow of doubt that the Word who was with the Father, and was himself eternally of the essence of the Father, became flesh.
This article is part 9 in a series by Tom Nettles on Remembering Jesus Christ.
Join us at the 2024 National Founders Conferenceon January 18-20 as we consider what it means to “Remember Jesus Christ” under the teaching of Tom Ascol, Joel Beeke, Costi Hinn, Phil Johnson, Conrad Mbewe and Travis Allen.
41 Then he brought me to the nave and measured the jambs. On each side six cubits1 was the breadth of the jambs.22 And the breadth of the entrance was ten cubits, and the sidewalls of the entrance were five cubits on either side. And he measured the length of the nave,3 forty cubits, and its breadth, twenty cubits. 3 Then he went into the inner room and measured the jambs of the entrance, two cubits; and the entrance, six cubits; and the sidewalls on either side4 of the entrance, seven cubits. 4 And he measured the length of the room, twenty cubits, and its breadth, twenty cubits, across the nave. And he said to me, “This is the Most Holy Place.”
5 Then he measured the wall of the temple, six cubits thick, and the breadth of the side chambers, four cubits, all around the temple. 6 And the side chambers were in three stories, one over another, thirty in each story. There were offsets5 all around the wall of the temple to serve as supports for the side chambers, so that they should not be supported by the wall of the temple. 7 And it became broader as it wound upward to the side chambers, because the temple was enclosed upward all around the temple. Thus the temple had a broad area upward, and so one went up from the lowest story to the top story through the middle story. 8 I saw also that the temple had a raised platform all around; the foundations of the side chambers measured a full reed of six long cubits. 9 The thickness of the outer wall of the side chambers was five cubits. The free space between the side chambers of the temple and the 10 other chambers was a breadth of twenty cubits all around the temple on every side. 11 And the doors of the side chambers opened on the free space, one door toward the north, and another door toward the south. And the breadth of the free space was five cubits all around.
12 The building that was facing the separate yard on the west side was seventy cubits broad, and the wall of the building was five cubits thick all around, and its length ninety cubits.
13 Then he measured the temple, a hundred cubits long; and the yard and the building with its walls, a hundred cubits long; 14 also the breadth of the east front of the temple and the yard, a hundred cubits.
15 Then he measured the length of the building facing the yard that was at the back and its galleries6 on either side, a hundred cubits.
The inside of the nave and the vestibules of the court, 16 the thresholds and the narrow windows and the galleries all around the three of them, opposite the threshold, were paneled with wood all around, from the floor up to the windows (now the windows were covered), 17 to the space above the door, even to the inner room, and on the outside. And on all the walls all around, inside and outside, was a measured pattern.718 It was carved of cherubim and palm trees, a palm tree between cherub and cherub. Every cherub had two faces: 19 a human face toward the palm tree on the one side, and the face of a young lion toward the palm tree on the other side. They were carved on the whole temple all around. 20 From the floor to above the door, cherubim and palm trees were carved; similarly the wall of the nave.
21 The doorposts of the nave were squared, and in front of the Holy Place was something resembling 22 an altar of wood, three cubits high, two cubits long, and two cubits broad.8 Its corners, its base,9 and its walls were of wood. He said to me, “This is the table that is before the LORD.” 23 The nave and the Holy Place had each a double door. 24 The double doors had two leaves apiece, two swinging leaves for each door. 25 And on the doors of the nave were carved cherubim and palm trees, such as were carved on the walls. And there was a canopy10 of wood in front of the vestibule outside. 26 And there were narrow windows and palm trees on either side, on the sidewalls of the vestibule, the side chambers of the temple, and the canopies.
The Temple’s Chambers
42 Then he led me out into the outer court, toward the north, and he brought me to the chambers that were opposite the separate yard and opposite the building on the north. 2 The length of the building whose door faced north was a hundred cubits,11 and the breadth fifty cubits. 3 Facing the twenty cubits that belonged to the inner court, and facing the pavement that belonged to the outer court, was gallery12 against gallery in three stories. 4 And before the chambers was a passage inward, ten cubits wide and a hundred cubits long,13 and their doors were on the north. 5 Now the upper chambers were narrower, for the galleries took more away from them than from the lower and middle chambers of the building. 6 For they were in three stories, and they had no pillars like the pillars of the courts. Thus the upper chambers were set back from the ground more than the lower and the middle ones. 7 And there was a wall outside parallel to the chambers, toward the outer court, opposite the chambers, fifty cubits long. 8 For the chambers on the outer court were fifty cubits long, while those opposite the nave14 were a hundred cubits long. 9 Below these chambers was an entrance on the east side, as one enters them from the outer court.
10 In the thickness of the wall of the court, on the south15 also, opposite the yard and opposite the building, there were chambers 11 with a passage in front of them. They were similar to the chambers on the north, of the same length and breadth, with the same exits16 and arrangements and doors, 12 as were the entrances of the chambers on the south. There was an entrance at the beginning of the passage, the passage before the corresponding wall on the east as one enters them.17
13 Then he said to me, “The north chambers and the south chambers opposite the yard are the holy chambers, where the priests who approach the LORD shall eat the most holy offerings. There they shall put the most holy offerings—the grain offering, the sin offering, and the guilt offering—for the place is holy. 14 When the priests enter the Holy Place, they shall not go out of it into the outer court without laying there the garments in which they minister, for these are holy. They shall put on other garments before they go near to that which is for the people.”
15 Now when he had finished measuring the interior of the temple area, he led me out by the gate that faced east, and measured the temple area all around. 16 He measured the east side with the measuring reed, 500 cubits by the measuring reed all around. 17 He measured the north side, 500 cubits by the measuring reed all around. 18 He measured the south side, 500 cubits by the measuring reed. 19 Then he turned to the west side and measured, 500 cubits by the measuring reed. 20 He measured it on the four sides. It had a wall around it, 500 cubits long and 500 cubits broad, to make a separation between the holy and the common.
1 Simeon1 Peter, a servant2 and apostle of Jesus Christ,
To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:
2 May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
Confirm Your Calling and Election
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to3 his own glory and excellence,44 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. 5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue,5 and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these qualities6 are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. 10 Therefore, brothers,7 be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. 11 For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
12 Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. 13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body,8 to stir you up by way of reminder, 14 since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me. 15 And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.
Christ’s Glory and the Prophetic Word
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son,9 with whom I am well pleased,” 18 we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. 19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
64:8 Isaiah appealed to God as their Father (see note at 63:16). Only rarely and in extreme cases will a human father disown a delinquent child. The prophet also appealed to God as their Creator, using the image of the potter and his clay (see notes at 29:16; 45:9).
64:9 Like Moses, Isaiah asks that God not destroy Israel because of their sin, but instead remember that they are his people.[1]
64:8–9you are our Father. Isaiah is not blaming God for Israel’s condition; he puts his hope in God as the sovereign Father (cf. Ps. 103:13–14; Isa. 45:9–10). Be not so terribly angry. See Ps. 79:8; Isa. 54:7–8; 57:16–19. remember not iniquity forever. See 43:25; 53:4–6; Jer. 31:34. we are all your people. God chose them, and thus his fame in the world could suffer loss through them (cf. Ex. 32:11–14; Ezek. 36:20–23).[2]
64:8 The prophet Isaiah, as a representative of the whole community, turned to God for aid. He called upon the Lord as Father, invoking the special relationship between Israel and God. The term Father should not be understood according to our modern conceptions of fatherhood. Father is not so much a term of endearment, as it was a word of authority and ownership. Under Israelite law, a parent’s children where his or her property, over which he or she exercised much power. The covenant community was helpless before God as Father like clay in the hands of a potter. The prophet interceded for the people for forgiveness so that God’s faithfulness might be revealed again in a restored Jerusalem.
64:9 Do not be furious claims God’s promise in 54:7, 8. Nor remember claims God’s promise in 43:25. Please look refers to God’s “hiding” of Himself in v. 7.
Radmacher, E. D., Allen, R. B., & House, H. W. (1999). Nelson’s new illustrated Bible commentary (p. 872). T. Nelson Publishers.
64:8, 9 Yet the LORD is still their Father, and there is still hope that the potter can do something with the clay. And so they plead with Him to relax His anger, to forgive and forget their sins, and to acknowledge them as His people still.
MacDonald, W. (1995). Believer’s Bible Commentary: Old and New Testaments (A. Farstad, Ed.; p. 988). Thomas Nelson.
8–9 The concluding verses of chapter 64 (verses 8–12) revert to the theme of God as father. The communal nature of the concept and the united prayer of the people continue—first person plural pronouns occur ten times in the space of five verses. On behalf of the people Isaiah pleads with God for his forgiveness and an end to his wrath. Verse 8 contains another declaration of God’s fatherhood (cf. 63:16) and also the thought that Israel was merely clay in the potter’s hand (cf. 45:9–10). In spite of present circumstances the people appeal to the past and the fact that the relationship between them and God was established as a father/son relationship. Therefore they can pray (verse 9a) for God’s anger against them to cease (cf. the assurance of 54:8 that this anger was not going to continue for ever—only for a moment!). They also plead for God not to remember their sins perpetually. The prayer in verse 9b is a powerful request to God to be gracious to them. The phrasing of the request is pointed, impassioned, and based on the fact that they are indeed his people. The NKJV brings out the force of the Hebrew text admirably with its rendering: ‘Indeed, please look—we all are Your people!’ The use of the Hebrew particle nâ’ after the verb both softens it and also may indicate that the request is the outcome of the existing situation.
Harman, A. (2005). Isaiah: A Covenant to Be Kept for the Sake of the Church (p. 416). Christian Focus Publications.
Ver. 8. But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father.—God our King—Father:—
(“Our Lord, Thou art our Father” with “the Lord is our King,” chap. 33:22). That conviction of a living God, as distinguished from the lifeless one, which is all that many have, made up of a mere bundle of catechetical doctrines, will create a demand for many other convictions besides. For, mark what question presses, so soon as God has been revealed to the soul; it is the deeply self-interested one, In what relation, or relations, does this almighty and glorious One stand to the individual’s self? The answer given by our two texts, and much of the Scripture besides, is, that He is related to each of us both as a Father and a King. Now, not only is there no contrariety betwixt the ideas of these two relations; but, properly, there is no sentiment in the one which the other does not contain in some degree. Nevertheless, the idea of a Father contains more prominently the sentiment of bountiful and tender cherishing; when that of a King contains more prominently that of regulation and control; and it is not till we have combined them that we can form an adequate conception of the relation in which He stands to us. (W. Anderson, LL.D.)
Our King-Father or Father-King the memorial of God:—
Some may say they are identical; nor would I deny, with much warmth, they are. But when the better mode of impressing the heart is the subject of inquiry, not a little depends, I am persuaded, on the order in which the two ideas of the complex relation are presented.
1. Even metaphysically He is first our Father and then our King: the idea of the Divine paternity is the principal one, and that of the royalty the subordinate and qualifying one: He begets us as children before He rules us as subjects.
2. But, whatever may be the state of the question metaphysically, there can be no doubt that, in respect of practical and salutary effect on the heart, the assigning of the place of primary consideration to the relation of Father has a decided advantage. When men ask you, Who is God? let your reply be, He is our Father. And when they say, Is He not your King also? let your reply again be, He is; but first our Father, and more our Father than anything else. Even a heathen could say, as an apostle has approvingly told us, “We are also His offspring.” Although, in respect of our corporeal frames, we are in the predicament of the inferior animals; yet in respect of the nobler part of our constitutions—the immortal soul—in virtue of which, especially, we bear the Divine image, that has been communicated to us directly, by the breath of the Almighty (Eccles. 12:7).
3. The thought is both solemnizing and animating; let us improve it to the ends of having our sense of responsibility deepened for filial reverence and obedience—for upholding the honour of God’s family, by the purity, the elevation, and dignity of our characters—and, also, for our treatment of all mankind as being of a Divine parentage.
4. But it is especially in respect of confidence in His loving-kindness, that I call at present for improvement of the meditation. (Ibid.)
God the Father-King in redemption:—
1. Who is so ignorant as not to know that cold parental displeasure and warm parental affection are frequently found co-existent; and who cannot easily conceive the truth of the following case? I knew a father who, after having long remonstrated in vain with a profligate son—from abhorrence of the sight and hearing of his abominations and profanities, and from respect to his own and family’s peace and honour, turned him out of his house, and would not acknowledge him when he met him on the street. All the time he wept and prayed for him in secret, and gave directions to a friend to take care that his wretched boy should never suffer from want. Is the paternity of the human father more tender and amiable than that of the Divine? Hear how He himself vindicates His parental character: “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?” etc. (Hosea 11:8).
2. And yet hitherto I have not, properly, announced one syllable of the tidings of the Gospel. Nature and reason might have sufficed for conducting us all the length we have gone. We need other guidance for proceeding further. I stopped short in my simple story about that young man. What became of him? Well, he repented; returned to his father’s door, with humble confessions, and earnest promises of future well-doing; was taken in; and great was the joy that night throughout that dwelling. Now observe, that though the parallel does not terminate here, when tracing the analogy of the recovery of an outcast from the family of God, yet both lines receive the accession of new elements. On the part of God, there is the accession of the element of His royal character: and on the part of the sinner, the accession of the element of faith in a Mediator. The explanation is most important: it contains the secret of our salvation. Mark, therefore, that God does not re-admit the prodigal to His family, as an earthly father does, merely on account of his repentance; because, beside being a Father, He is a King. Consider, then, how this additional relationship of royalty is produced, and how it affects the Divine procedure. An earthly father’s administration of his family is a matter of privacy. Public interests are not concerned in it; and he may do with his own what pleases his humour. He may open his door and re-admit the prodigal, even without any repentance or confession, if he choose. But God’s family being the Public—the universal Public of created, moral intelligence; though this does not affect the personal love of the administrator, yet does it materially affect the mode of the administration. The family of children has enlarged into a kingdom of subjects; and though it be a Father’s heart, it must be a King’s policy by which the administration is conducted. David’s parental heart said, Spare the young man Absalom; his royal policy commissioned the army to fight him down as a rebel.
3. What, then, is the state of our parallel now? It was sufficient for the re-admission of the prodigal into the earthly father’s house that he should be penitent. But the order of all good government of a kingdom is, that the violation of the laws shall be visited with penal suffering, before there be a restoration to the privileges of citizenship. Behold the mystery of our redemption! And see the advantage of our having assumed the paternity of God as His primary and most characteristic relationship. It is this paternity which, humanly speaking, goes in quest of means for saving us; and returns, exclaiming in triumph, “Save from going down to the pit, for I have found a ransom.” When we commence with the royal relationship, and make that the primary characteristic, there is danger that God may appear as being but coldly passive in the work of our salvation. But when we commence with the paternity of God, we more easily discover Him warmly active in the work of our salvation; with all a Father’s self-interested love devising and executing its scheme. Having found the means of ransom in the substitutionary death of His Son incarnated, He brings it to us, that we may carry it away for presentation at the tribunal of His government.
4. This representation will explain, as clearly as any other, the nature, the necessity, and the efficacy of faith. As being that principle which gives credit to the Divine testimony, it lays hold of the sacrifice which God’s paternal mercy has provided, and pleads with His royal justice that it be accepted as compensation for our transgressions. Mark the necessity of such faith. The gift which God has made of Christ to “sinners of mankind” universally is not the gift of pardon, but of the means of pardon, to be used to that end; and used by the sinner himself: for it would be unholy government to pardon a rebel, whatever might be the amplitude of satisfaction proffered on his behalf by another, if he himself despised or made light of the transaction.
5. Observe, now, a second time, the advantage of giving the paternal relation of God the first place in our meditation on His character. In virtue of this, the proclamation of the Gospel is not so much the proclamation of a King, declaring that no man shall be saved except through faith in that sacrifice; as it is the earnest entreaty of a Father that His children should believe, so as to be saved; when His paternal love shall enjoy them in their recovery to His home; yea, enjoy them. It is much for a child to enjoy his parent; but it is more for a parent to enjoy his child, as an object on which he may lavish his affection; and with all the yearnings of His paternity does God beseech the sinner to afford Him this Divine satisfaction.
6. Having explained the doctrine of God’s paternal love, I now call for its correlative duty, filial confidence on the part of His children.
7. When this first principle of parental honour, confidence in God, is secured, the honouring of Him, which consists in obedience, follows naturally and necessarily. (Ibid.)
We are the clay and Thou our Potter.—Clay and Potter:—
The nearest parallel to this application of the common image of clay and potter is, perhaps, Job 10:9. It is the plea of thecreature against seeming unreasonableness on the part of the Creator. Can the Potter allow the work on which He has lavished His utmost skill and care to be broken in pieces? (Prof. J. Skinner, D.D.)
Lessons from a pottery:—
Many years ago it was my privilege to visit the porcelain works at Worcester, and there I learned most of what I know about the potter and his art. We were first taken into a large showroom, where there were displayed the finished products of the potter’s skill and labour. Here we were glad to spend some time in looking upon the beauty and loveliness which the potter had created. In thinking upon what was exhibited there, what can be learned about the potter and his art with a view to understanding the work and grace of our heavenly Father as our Potter? There were two things that deeply impressed me. The first was the almost unlimited variety secured by the potter in his workmanship. There were not two pieces exactly alike. Everywhere you perceived the mind of the potter on the stretch, seeking to attain all possible variety of form, design and ornamentation. I said to myself: “Well, there is one thing very clear about the earthly potter—he has determined that in his work there shall be an utmost absence of repetition, monotony, similarity. By infinite variety he reveals his skill and the fruitfulness of his mind.” If God is our Potter, are we to think of Him in this respect as like unto the earthly potter? Go to His work in Nature. How much of monotony is there in any department of God’s creation? What does that mean for us? It means a very great deal for Christian life. As a young Christian, I had a way of greatly admiring other people. If I saw any person of decided and beautiful Christian character, my heart was impressed. But the mistake was that I also wanted to be like them! And if I saw any one doing a particular work for God I wanted to do something similar. This longing to be like other people became a great curse and hindrance. Then God had pity upon me, and showed me the mistake of it all, and said to me: “I do not want to make you like anybody else in the universe; I want to make you something different from everybody else;” and He graciously persuaded me to give myself up to Him, to let Him make me the one thing He wished to see me. No greater deliverance ever came into my life than that. Do not try to be like anybody. Do not be one of a set. It would be a thousand pities to go to heaven, and for the angels to say: “We have seen this sort before!” It will not be Christ’s fault if that should happen in your case. There is something that God wants to make each one of us that shall reveal His glory in a way that nobody else does. The second thing to be noted about the work of the potter is this: His whole aim is to make of the clay, not a vessel for its own use, but a vessel for the joy and service of others. Let us realize that Christ is in our lives to turn them outward! When we had spent some time in the showroom, our guide bade us follow him. He at once led us through a door out into the works. What a change! We were now amid the noise and splash and dirt. First of all he directed our attention to a shelf, on which were some half-dozen lumps of what might be described as glass and chalk and clay. As a matter of fact, they were different kinds of clay. “All you have just seen inside there has been made out of such materials.” Who had bridged the gulf between the shapeless clay and the beautiful vessel? The potter—that is what he is for. “We are the clay”—the thing of possibility only. The Lord is the Potter; and He can take the clay, and by His skill and power and grace, make it into a thing of joy and beauty for evermore. But our guide soon led us on, and we saw something of the processes of the potter’s art. One of the first things he did with the clay was to put it into a mill, where it was ground for a week, ground until it was so fine that it would pass through silk with hundreds of meshes to the square inch. If the clay could have thought, how puzzled it would have been! It would have said: “There was something of me once, but I am coming to nothing now. I caught a glimpse through that open door of all those lovely vessels and vases, and I thought the potter was going to make me into one such as they; but here it is only grind! grind! grind! What does it all mean?” Experiences very much like that come to the soul that has surrendered itself to God. The methods and processes of the heavenly Potter are at times very perplexing, and in no discerned relation to the desired end. Be quite sure that God understands His own work! Trust Him. The next thing that struck me was the large use which the potter made of fire. I cannot tell you how many times the porcelain was put into the fire before it was finished. But there was this remarkable thing: it was never put into the fire unshielded. It was always enclosed in a strong outer vessel, closely sealed, so that the fire did its work, and yet no hurt came to the porcelain. Into the fire of trial and suffering God, our Potter, puts us all; but He never puts us in unshielded. When this white porcelain had been taken through a great many processes, it was put into the hands of skilful artists, whose work it was to adorn it with the glory of colour and design with which we are all familiar. When the porcelain left the hands of the artist, the finger of a child could have brushed away all that he had painted upon it. But our guide explained that the porcelain would go into the fire, and that the fire would open its “pores,” and take in the colouring, so that what the painter had put on it would become part of the very vessel itself. That illustrated to me this great truth, that we never become better people by merely knowing more. New truth in the mind is like the colouring upon the porcelain, and some failure of memory may remove it. But God’s way is, when we have got a new truth, to lead us into some trial, some fire, that will make that truth part of our very manhood. Lastly, we were taken into another room, and there the artists were all busy working with a black fluid, which they were putting on the beautiful, pure, white porcelain. I said to our guide, “What are they doing here?” Apparently they were disfiguring the porcelain. His answer was: “They are putting on the gilt! When the porcelain goes into the fire, this black that you see upon it now will be transformed into gilt.” There are times when God seems to be disfiguring the lives of his people. What is He doing? Putting on the gilt. (G. C. Moore.)
Ver. 9. Be not wroth very sore, O Lord.—God’s wrath deprecated:—
I. THE EVIL DEPRECATED. God’s anger.
1. Merited.
2. Acknowledged.
II. THE TERMS IN WHICH IT IS DEPRECATED.
1. Imply the justice of God’s procedure.
2. Beseech a limitation of its severity.
III. THE PLEA BY WHICH IT IS DEPRECATED.
1. Humble.
2. Confident.
3. Founded on God’s covenant relation to His people. (Homiletic Commentary.)
Exell, J. S. (n.d.). Isaiah (Vol. 3, pp. 446–449). Fleming H. Revell Company.
The unchanged God (64:8–9). In his holy hostility to sin and sinners, the Lord is unchanged, but he is also unchanged in grace and mercy—and therein lies the ground for continuing pleading. The relationship of Father (8) to his children is permanent: through all the vicissitudes of family life the relationship itself cannot be erased. The potter cannot disown the pot—it is there only because he made it—nor can the artisan (your hand) disown the artefact (work). Again, this is not to shift blame on to God for our failure, but to assert a permanent relationship—the love of the father, the sovereign decision of the potter, the skill of the craftsman. The children may always ask to come home; the pot may seek refashioning in the hand of the potter. In verse 6, all of us … we all uses the same Hebrew word twice as confession; here, in we … all, it comes twice as plea. Beyond measure: (lit.) ‘unto muchness’, meaning ‘in all its inherent energy’, i.e. ‘do not let your anger have full play’. The end of the old—a changed moral reaction (angry) and an erased memory (remember)—is matched by the onset of the new divine attitude (look upon us) and a revivified divine memory (we are all your people).
Motyer, J. A. (1999). Isaiah: an introduction and commentary (Vol. 20, p. 443). InterVarsity Press.
8. And now, O Jehovah. After having complained of their miseries, by which they were almost overwhelmed, they now more openly ask pardon from God and a mitigation of their distresses, and with greater boldness plead with God that still they are his children. Adoption alone could encourage them to cherish favourable hopes, that they might not cease to rely on their Father, though overwhelmed by the load of afflictions. And this order should be carefully observed; for, in order that we may be truly humbled in our hearts, we need to be cast down, and laid low, and almost crushed. But when despair seizes us, we must lay hold on this altar of consolation, that, “since God has been pleased to elect us to be his children, we ought to expect salvation from him, even when matters are at the worst.” Thus, with a view to the gracious covenant, the Israelites affirm that they are the children of God, in order that they may experience his fatherly kindness, and that his promise may not be made void.
We are the clay, and thou our potter. By means of a comparison they magnify the grace of God, and acknowledge that they were formed of despicable clay; for they do not seek the ground of superiority in themselves, but in their origin celebrate the mercy of God, who out of mean and filthy clay determined to create children to himself.
We all are the work of thy hands. Of the same import as the former is this second clause, in which God is called the Creator, and his people are called the work of his hands; because to God alone they ascribe all that they are and all that they have. This is true gratitude; for, so long as men advance the smallest claim to anything as their own, God is defrauded of his right. Now, Isaiah speaks not of the ordinary creation of men, but of regeneration, on account of which believers are especially called “the work of God;” as we have frequently stated in the exposition of other passages. Here they acknowledge a remarkable act of God’s kindness, in having elected them to be his people, and adorned them with benefits so numerous and so great.
9. Be not angry, O Jehovah, beyond measure. The people pray that the severity of punishment and the fierceness of the wrath of God may be abated; not that God goes beyond measure, but because they would be altogether overwhelmed, if he should choose to act toward them with the utmost strictness of justice. They therefore ask a mitigation of punishment; as Jeremiah also says, “Chasten me, O Lord, but in judgment,” (Jer. 10:24,) that is, moderately; for he draws a contrast between “judgment” and “wrath;” as it is elsewhere said that God chastises us “by the hand of man,” (2 Sam. 7:14,) because he does not put forth the power of his hand to punish us, lest we should be utterly destroyed.
Neither remember iniquity for ever. It deserves notice that they do not absolutely shrink from the judgment of God, or pray that they may wholly escape from it, but present themselves to be corrected, so as not to faint under the strokes. And this is the reason why they desire to have the remembrance of their iniquities blotted out; for, if God do not mercifully pardon them, there will be no end of the chastisements.
We all are thy people. The Prophet repeats what he said a little before, that God elected the family of Abraham; because the best ground for the confident expectation of obtaining pardon was, that God, who is true to his promises, cannot cast away those whom he had once elected. By employing the word all, he does not speak of each individual, as I formerly remarked, but includes the whole body of the Church. Although the greater part had withdrawn through wicked revolt, yet still it was true that the Jews were God’s peculiar people; and this prayer was offered, not for every one of them without distinction, but only for the children of God who were still left. The people do not plead their own merits before God, but betake themselves to the covenant of free grace, by which they had been adopted. This is the sure and only refuge of believers, this is the remedy for all evils; and that is the reason why Moses and the other prophets repeat it so frequently. (Exod. 32:13.)
Calvin, J., & Pringle, W. (2010). Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah (Vol. 4, pp. 370–372). Logos Bible Software.
[1] Longman, T., III. (2017). Isaiah. In E. A. Blum & T. Wax (Eds.), CSB Study Bible: Notes (p. 1132). Holman Bible Publishers.
Daniel 6:2 — When the president of a new political party takes over in Washington, he usually replaces all of the previous president’s cabinet appointees. Daniel survived not just a new party but a new empire as well!
Daniel 6:3 — Pray for the “Daniels” in office today!
Daniel 6:11 — If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?
Daniel 6:21 — Even having been thrown into the lions’ den, Daniel was still respectful to the king.
2 Peter 3:2 — Peter is again emphasizing the importance of Scripture, the Old Testament prophets, and the New Testament apostles. In 2 Peter 3:15-16, Peter affirms that Paul’s writings are not just inspired Scriptures, but they also contain “some things hard to be understood.”
Uniformitarianism is the modern name for the doctrine, prophesied long ago by Peter for those living in the last days, that “the present is the key to the past.” That is, the study of present-day natural processes (biological recombination, geological sedimentation, etc.) operating in the past as they do at present, are sufficient to determine the origin and development of all things. To them, no supernatural cause (such as God!) is needed. Even “creation” is still going on by these natural processes, since “all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
Peter, however, not only predicts this philosophy but also condemns it! “For this they willingly are ignorant of!” (v. 5). That is, people who believe in the unbroken continuity of all things are willful in their refusal to consider the overwhelming evidences of dis-continuity, particularly at the times of the special creation of all things in the beginning and the cataclysmic destruction of all things at the great flood, when “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (v. 6).
2 Peter 3:11-12 — If this world is going to burn, where should you lay up your treasure? In the New Heavens and the New Earth! We read about it in Ezekiel and will read about it again in Revelation!
The Lord brings redemption through the message of Christ, for the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). Today, W. Robert Godfrey examines Paul’s great summary of the gospel in Romans 1.
Scripture’s clear that salvation isn’t earned by good behavior. Christ alone redeems. Does that mean we’re free to live however we want under God’s grace? Discover the balance between obedience and “walking in love,” on Truth For Life with Alistair Begg.—————————————–
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