Author: Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Scripture and Cosmology

What do I think of Kyle Greenwood’s book published by IVP? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I always have an interest in books on science and faith and books I think could be related to inerrancy and books about the worldview of people who lived in Biblical times. With Kyle Greenwood’s work, I have all three. The heavy emphasis is on the third part with a still sizable portion on the first and just a touching on the second, but the reader who goes through this book will be informed on the topic under consideration better.

One of the great problems we have today is people trying to read modern science into the Bible. Christians want to act as if so much of modern science was predicted by the Bible long ago, as if God had a great interest in teaching people scientific principles. That He does not does not mean that He does not care about science, but it does mean that He was wanting to get across a major message and was willing to leave the rest for us. After all, God told us things that we could not know on our own and left what we could discover for ourselves to be discovered by ourselves.

For non-Christians, there is this idea of course that if God spoke, God would speak in agreement with our modern science. One can only wonder what would happen if we were living 1,000 years from now and how much of our science might be different. Would we need a whole new Bible at that point because the science had changed? If the Bible supposedly does not speak about modern science and in scientific language, then it should not be treated seriously.

Greenwood writes to first off show how the ancients viewed the world with the main elements being land, heavens, and sea. Was their worldview primitive by comparison? Yes. What of it? God did indeed speak in that world and used the terminology that the people would be familiar with. Rather than give a whole discourse on the scientific nature of reality, something that would be largely unintelligible to the people back then and would have no way whatsoever to be discovered and backed back then, He instead chose to use the terminology of their time and culture in order to give His revelation.

Of course, in some ways, the Hebrews did not borrow from their pagan neighbors as much as they might have shared similar cosmology. This wasn’t attributed to the gods and there wasn’t sacred space for various deities out there. Everything was attributed to the one God and it was the one God who kept everything in motion by His wisdom and by His power. Naturally, this continues in the New Testament where Jesus Himself is included in this creative force as being the agent of God’s creation.

Greenwood also interacts with how the worldview of cosmology was changing. The first major change was brought by Aristotle and then more change came later on through minds like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Through this, interpretations had to be changed and could it be they had to be changed because we were reading science into the text to begin with and had removed it from its original context? This is why I have been especially pleased with the work of scholars like John Walton as well that point out that works like Genesis 1-3 are not written to answer scientific questions but to answer questions on the nature of God.

To be fair, while I have not been an extensive reader on the medieval period and history, I have done some and there were a few parts that I thought I wanted to check up on. I would certainly want to make clear that the time was not really a dark ages time. There was indeed great scientific advancement going on and I think the work that Greenwood cites illustrates some fine examples of that going on.

Now we come to today. What can we learn? It’s not that science and faith don’t mix. Of course they do. I think Greenwood would mainly agree with Galileo. It is the role of creation to tell us how the heavens go and the role of Scripture to tell us how to go to heaven. Many times when we have married a scientific interpretation to the Bible, it has led to embarrassment mainly because that’s not what the text was trying to teach us in the first place. Does this mean the Bible errored? No more than there’s an error when we talk about sunrise and sunset today. We simply have God speaking in the language of the people at the time. The nature of their cosmological claims does not alter the truth being conveyed. (The glory of God reaching to the ends of the Earth does not change depending on the size and shape of the Earth. God is still the most glorious.)

This will be a fine book in anyone’s library working to understand the worldview of people of the Bible and how better to interpret the text today.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Through A Man’s Eyes

What do I think of Shaunti Feldhahn and Craig Gross’s book published by Multnomah? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Years ago there was a movie released called What Women Want starring Mel Gibson who after an electrical accident found that he could hear what women were thinking. Finally a man was listening. Gibson’s character changed his life drastically seeing the way women think and what effect their inner lives was having on them. Of course, this is not a big surprise since frankly, men have always had a hard time understanding women and have been looking for a good resource that would help them understand them better.

How To Understand Women

Now I think a book has come out that really gets into the lives of men. For many women, men are simple. Give them sex and they’re happy. Okay. There’s a lot of truth to that, but why is that? What’s going on in the life of your man? Why is it that he struggles so much when he walks past the Victoria’s Secret store? If he looks at another women while he’s walking down the street, does that mean he doesn’t care about you? Why should you be more deliberate about thinking about the way that you dress yourself? And of course, why does a man get involved in porn and what can you do about it?

While there is a male co-author, I found the book definitely going inside of my own head which makes me think Feldhahn really does know what we men go through. It starts with the account of a man who gets up early and is thinking about how he was up late the night before but it was worth it. He hears his wife taking a shower and goes in the bathroom just in time to see her wrap a towel around herself to his regret and how even before heading out the door he tries to “cop a feel.” At work, there is the lady who is dressing and has her outfit unbuttoned to an extent that if he looks, his mind will wander. As he drives, he sees constant advertisements on the road with women and he has to deflect his eyes and pay attention for mile upon mile. Throughout the day, he strives to think of his wife and the fun that they had before. No. This man is not a pervert. He’s not a sex addict. He’s just a simple man trying to honor God and his wife and living in a world loaded with traps to lure him away. He’s walking through a sexual minefield as it were.

We men are just drawn to beautiful women. A woman can be beautiful to us without being overt in what she does. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a struggle still, but it makes it easier. Feldhahn and Gross go into great detail as to what happens in the brains of men when they see something sexually stimulating. This will be a shock to some people, but as it turns out men and women are very different. This includes the way they respond to visual stimuli and the way they interpret sexuality. To be fair, while I thought the book was thorough on how a man interprets the signals he receives, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more on why sex is so important to a man and what a role it plays in the worldview.

Nothing said in the book is also meant to justify bad behavior on the part of men. A man is visual so watching porn is a lot more likely for him, but it is certainly not justifiable! A God-honoring man might take a second look at that woman who walked by, but that does not justify it. There are a lot of behaviors men need to work on, but a book like this can help women to better understand just what is going on in the head of the man that they married or are dating, or even in the heads of the man that they are raising, so that they can better support them in whatever battle that they’re in. (Hint: Don’t be like the woman who responded to her husband’s porn addiction by withholding sex and gaining 150 pounds.)

An important insight also is that the way to connect to a man well is through his eyes. Believe it or not wives, your husband does want to see you naked and while you might be hesitant about your own body, he wants to see you period. In fact, if you are concerned about your body, this is also why you can consider that diet and exercise to take care of your body is one of the best ways to say “I love you” to your husband. Your body is a gift that you are giving him. If you were cooking a romantic dinner for him, you wouldn’t be haphazard. You’d make sure you were doing all you could to fix it right. You should do the same with something much more lasting, your body.

Respect is also central to your man in this regard. A husband does not want respect just when you think he deserves it or has earned it. He would be foolish to love you on the same grounds, and yet for most men respect is far more central than love. Men gravitate towards respect. Remember women that you married or you’re dating a man. He is not meant to be a woman and part of his masculinity is his sex drive and his being visually oriented. If you please him with his visual orientation, you can be certain that you will build up his love for you. (Of course, being a Christian, this is to be with sex done in the confines of marriage.) Too many times women try to make their men like one of their girlfriends. It will not happen. Accept that you have a man whose primary stimulation is visual and learn to love him that way, because God wired him to be visual.

The book also does go into detail on the problem of porn and what to do if your husband or son is struggling with pornography or you think he is. It ends with a helpful FAQ that I largely think comes from Craig Gross which covers a bit of everything, including questions like “What if I find out my son has been putting ‘big boobs’ into the search engine on the internet?” Gross in this section really holds nothing back and is just blunt. The writers also stress they have plenty of other resources available at the web site menarevisual.com.

In fact, if anything, men are more visual than Feldhahn and Gross point out. A man can hear a woman speaking on the radio or on the phone and already be speculating about what she looks like. Yeah. That’s not much to go on, but a man will wonder. That’s how much this means to us and when women work with that instead of opposing it, they will find a way to get more joy out of their relationships. That means watching how you take care of yourself and allowing him to delight in you by seeing you and that you might actually have to turn the lights on sometimes when you have sex. Men want their women to be beautiful, but at the same time women don’t need to be as extremely self-conscious as many of them are. Your man just wants to see you and he wants to be wanted by you.

This is an excellent book and it will not take you long to read. I read it in about a day’s time and I found it to be quite spot on. I hope Feldhahn and Gross come out with another book together in the future explaining not just how men are visual, but what exactly sex means to a man and why.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Wow. Gender Neutral Bathrooms Lead To Disaster

Could anyone have possibly seen this coming? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So apparently the University of Toronto has decided to reduce the number of gender-neutral bathrooms. Why? Because shock of all shocks, but there were cases of women showering and cell phones reaching over in an attempt to record them. Of course, this has led to absolute shock. Who on Earth could have possibly seen this coming? Did we have any evidence out there whatsoever that men will be capable of doing absolutely anything just for the chance of getting to see a woman naked? (You know, besides little pieces of evidence like the entirety of human history and the nature of our society as a whole)

Please note that this wasn’t a shock to anyone who did not believe the overarching narrative and actually knew something about human nature. I’d been saying when I first heard about these kinds of policies that there will be many guys in high schools that will “identify” as women just to get a chance to shower with the girls. This isn’t a modern thing. Give guys a chance like that fifty years ago and they would have taken it as well. The difference is that right now our society is giving them just that opportunity in the name of tolerance and who is the biggest loser in this? The women.

After all, many women are very sensitive and protective about their bodies and don’t want them shared everywhere. When a woman is in a shower, she wants some privacy. Now men of course do care about their bodies, but women are often the most prone to being violated. Most of the time when you hear about rape, it will be the case of a man raping a woman. (We should definitely add that the reverse does in fact happen and one reason it might not be reported as much is because a man would not want to admit that he was overpowered by a woman.) Men also tend to be much more visually stimulated than women are. My words to describe the ways sexuality can work in marriage is that if a man wants sex, usually he needs to be attentive to his wife, caring about her needs, bringing home flowers, helping out with chores around the house, etc. If a woman wants sex with her husband, she just needs to even hint that she’s about to take off her clothes.

Now if we were thinking consistently and wisely about this issue, what we’d probably do is realize that the majority of women do not need to be put in a danger because of the concerns of a few individuals. If someone wanted “gender-neutral” bathrooms that could overall hold only one person at a time for instance, this would not be a problem, but when matters become public, we have a problem. My concern is that we could in fact blame the women for not being so sensitive to the people on the other end. Why should I think something like this won’t happen? It has in fact already happened with Planet Fitness.

In fact, some readers are probably thinking I’m pretty intolerant for just writing this.

If you think I am, then feel free to think so even more. As a married man, I have already decided I will not be going anywhere where I have reason to believe a man could legally go into a restroom or public shower where my wife happens to be. I care about her safety and well-being way too much for that. Am I intolerant in that sense? You bet I am. I am intolerant that there could be a man out there that somehow could possibly use a situation like that to take advantage of her and I have zero tolerance for that.

What many of us hope will happen back on planet Earth is that people will wake up and realize that gender is not a fluid concept and just because you say you feel like something does not mean you have all rights to that something. Our behavior is putting our women at risk in the name of tolerance and I suspect that it could be our children are not far behind. Again, a story like this has not been a shock to most of us, but it should be a huge wake-up call to anyone who has been buying into the narrative.

The question is now, what are we going to do about it?

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Deeper Waters Podcast 10/10/2015: Rodney Reeves and Randy Richards

What’s coming up on the next episode of the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Recently, we had Rodney Reeves and Randy Richards on to talk about Rediscovering Paul. They’re coming back again and this time they’re talking about Rediscovering Jesus, which I reviewed here. The book is a fun and unique look at Jesus asking what our Christianity would be like if we only had one source or one type of source and then what it would be like if we had some version of Jesus outside of the Bible. So who are the people coming on to talk about this?

Let’s start with Rodney Reeves.

publicity photo

I’ve been married over thirty-six years to Sheri (Richardson) Reeves, who is a Speech and Language Pathologist for Citizens Memorial Hospital, Bolivar, MO.

We have three children: Andrew (28) lives in Kansas City, MO; Emma (24) lives in Chicago, IL; and Grace (19) who is a first-year student at Belhaven University, Jackson, MS. Sheri and I are members of the First Baptist Church, Bolivar, MO.

I’m in my sixteenth year at Southwest Baptist University, Bolivar, MO, as the Redford Professor of Biblical Studies, also serving as Dean of The Courts Redford College of Theology and Ministry. I teach courses in New Testament and Greek.

I’m an SBU alumnus (1979), and I graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Ft. Worth, TX (MDiv, 1982; PhD, 1986). I did part of my doctoral study at Oxford University, UK (1985-86).

Prior to coming to SBU, I served as Senior Pastor, Central Baptist Church, Jonesboro, AR (1995-2000), and associate professor of New Testament at Williams Baptist College, Walnut Ridge, AR (1987-1995).

I have written several articles for scholarly journals, textbooks, dictionaries, handbooks, and magazines. I’ve written four books: A Genuine Faith: How to Follow Jesus Today (Baker Books, 2005); Rediscovering Paul: An Introduction to His World, Letters and Theology, co-authored by David B. Capes and E. Randolph Richards (InterVarsity Press, 2007); Spirituality according to Paul: Imitating the Apostle of Christ (InterVarsity Press, 2011). My newest book, Rediscovering Jesus: An Introduction to Biblical, Religious and Cultural Perspectives on Christ (once again co-authored by Capes and Richards, InterVarsity Press, 2015) was released this summer. And I’m currently working on a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Story of God Bible Commentary, ed. Scot McKnight (Zondervan Publishing, 2016?).

My hobbies are fishing, camping, golfing, and reading.

I made a vow to God many years ago to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to minister to the Body of Christ. I have tried to keep that promise as a member of a Baptist Church, as a minister, and as a college professor. I study Scripture because I want to be a committed disciple of Jesus. I teach biblical studies in an effort to serve the needs of the Church. I’m a part of the academic community here at SBU in hopes of advancing the Kingdom of God, trying to encourage each other to fulfill Jesus’ commandment: to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Therefore, I see my work here as part of the whole kingdom enterprise of teaching students to be servants of Christ for a world that needs him.

And as for Randy Richards.

Richards arms crossed smallest size

Dr. Randy Richards loves training students for ministry, both domestically and internationally. He has been teaching since 1986, originally at a state university and then abroad at an Indonesian seminary. Upon returning to the States, Dr. Richards has served at two Christian universities before joining Palm Beach Atlantic University as the Dean of the School of Ministry in 2006.

His wife Stacia has joyfully accompanied him from jungles of Indonesia to rice fields in Arkansas to beautiful South Florida. They have two fine sons. Josh (Ph.D. 2012, University of St Andrews, Scotland) is a university professor in English. Jacob (Ph.D. 2014, College of Medicine, University of Florida) is a medical researcher.

Dr. Richards has authored or co-authored seven books and dozens of articles. Recently, he has published Rediscovering Jesus (InterVarsity, 2015; Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, with Brandon O’Brien (InterVarsity, 2012), “Reading, Writing, and the Production and Transmission of Manuscripts” in The Background of the New Testament: An Examination of the Context of Early Christianity (Baker, 2013), “Will the Real Author Please Stand Up? The Author in Greco-Roman Letter Writing” in Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics (B&H, 2012), “Pauline Prescripts and Greco-Roman Epistolary Convention” in Christian Origins and Classical Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament (Brill, 2012), and a dozen articles in The Baker Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Baker, 2013).

He has just finished another popular book, Paul Behaving Badly, and is finishing A Little Book for New Bible Scholars, both with InterVarsity Press and due out in 2016. He is also completing chapters in two other books and several dictionary articles.

Dr. Richards is a popular lecturer, speaker and preacher, recently in places as diverse as Wycliffe Hall (Oxford), Kathmandu, and Kenya. He was a Senior Scholar at the IRLBR Summer Summit at Tyndale House (Cambride) in 2013. He regularly conducts missionary training workshops, and currently serves as a Teaching Pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in West Palm Beach.

This book is a highly enjoyable look at the life of Jesus that will lead to you thinking about it in a whole new light. These guys are really passionate about the book as well as I saw last time they came on and I hope you’ll be here to see round two of the discussion. Be watching for the next episode of the Deeper Waters Podcast!

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: How We Love

What do I think of Milan and Kay Yerkovich’s book published by WaterBrook press? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Love. Love. Love. Love is what makes the world go around supposedly. Everyone loves love. We all speak so highly of love and we assume love is a universal good. Wherever there is love, well you have something good for sure. There are many questions that go unanswered about love. One such question is how we love. In this book, the Yerkovich’s speak about various love styles highlighting five that have their own weaknesses and they say are from unhealthy imprints. This means that as a child, you learned a certain way to love before you could really evaluate that and that affects the way you love today.

I can’t say I’m sold on the hypothesis yet, but it is an understandable one. There are many people for instance who cannot relate to God as Father and they have a hard time doing such because they had bad fathers when they were growing up. The Yerkoviches then move us into the various love styles, such as the avoider who tends to shy away from contact and does not open up about themselves. There’s also the pleaser who has a hard time saying no to anyone and wants to please everyone, which is often done to cover their own negativity. The vacillator style is one that sees relationships as valuable for certain needs that they meet and when these needs aren’t being met, they tend to want to move on. Then we get into two styles that go hand in hand due to abuse which are the controller and the victim.

The authors look at each of these and discusses how each of these styles love. They tell each person in the style what they can do to change and they also say what can be done to help your spouse if they are in that style, although they do emphasize that you cannot directly change your partner. You alone are the one that can change and even if your spouse does not go along, you can still play your part. The version of the book I read also came with a workbook.

If there were areas I’d like more on, I would like to see more clarification at times on the styles. When I took the online test, I was pretty similar for three of them, which I considered problematic. I was unsure where I ranked too often and unsure where my own spouse ranked. This made it difficult for me to get the full benefit of the book since I could see myself and I could see my wife in many of the styles. (Aside from the last two.)

I also would have liked more said about sex. There was one section where it was mentioned for a bit, but in books that talk about marriage, we really do need to talk about sex more. I would have liked to have seen something on how each of the love styles approached sexual intimacy and how partners on both sides could better relate to improve this area in their marriages.

Still, this is a book worth reading and worth considering. I did end it with much to think about.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Neil deGrasse Tyson Embarrasses Himself Again

Is Tyson speaking out of his area again? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Neil deGrasse Tyson of Cosmos has had a history of not getting his facts right when speaking to public audiences. I found out yesterday while browsing on Facebook that he had spoken to Bill Moyers on Moyers and Company. The Friendly Atheist gave a report on the interview here. Unfortunately, when Tyson spoke, he again revealed that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about and this time it was done when talking about the second coming of Christ.

At the start, Tyson doesn’t realize apparently that there’s much debate about what is called the second coming. There are some Christians that see the discourse in Matthew 24 and the book of Revelation as referring to a future scenario. Then there are some who like myself see it more referring to a past event. We look forward to the future bodily return of Christ, but Matthew 24 is really talking about the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. Probably the best work you can read on Matthew 24 from that perspective now is Dee Dee Warren’s It’s Not The End Of The World. You can also listen to my interview with her on that book here.

Of course, Tyson doesn’t know about any of this. What I first was confronted with was a meme that someone made meant to show that the Bible cannot be trusted on anything, which is already itself a strange statement to make. Because the Bible was supposedly unscientific at one point, we cannot trust it on anything whatsoever? You can always count on fundamentalists to have all-or-nothing thinking, but let’s take a look at the meme itself.

starstoEarth

Once again, I would have liked to have thought that this was a misquote. I would like to have thought that he did not say this. Unfortunately, the link from The Friendly Atheist shows otherwise. Of course, Tyson in all of this is showing that faith and science are supposedly incompatible. Towards the end of the article, he makes statements that could help indicate the cause of his misconception.

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

Unfortunately, Tyson doesn’t realize that his hang-up on literalism is not one that was shared by the early church. The fathers, for instance, had a great love of allegory. This was also long before the rise of modern science. Saint Augustine wrote a book where he argued that all of creation happened instantly and did so in a book about the literal meaning of Genesis. In fact, you can find here a great statement from Augustine:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field in which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Keep in mind this is long before modern science.

The irony is that Tyson is doing to religion exactly what he accuses of religion doing to science. Tyson is knocking on the doors of religion trying to get to insist on a literalist interpretation of Scripture and saying that this is how it should be done. You can be a strong conservative holding to positions like inerrancy and reject the idea of the Bible as a science textbook and insist that not everything has to be interpreted “literally.” Tyson thus wants to treat the idea that taking the Bible “literally” is ridiculous when not only does he do it himself, but he shows no indication that there are other understandings of the passages under question held by even conservatives.

It could be understandable why Tyson interprets the data of Scripture the way that he does given the modern context that we live in. On the other hand, Tyson could also recognize that when it comes to claims like evolution, for a number of people, it could be said that they just look at the data of the complexity of nature and the beauty of the universe and find that’s an inadequate answer. Tyson would probably say they need to study the evidence of evolution before dismissing it so quickly, and he would be right. I say the same thing back. Before Tyson speaks on interpretation, he needs to actually study it and how the text has been interpreted throughout the centuries and what some interpretations are of such passages.

Of course, he also ends with saying that many of us can go and still get our emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Tyson is unaware that many of us go that route for intellectual fulfillment. We believe in Christianity because it actually answers the questions of the mind. Whether or not it gives spiritual or emotional fulfillment is irrelevant, and frankly, many of us will often say that it does not. The Christian life is not always rainbows and roses. I like how C.S. Lewis said years ago that he didn’t go to Christianity to be happy because he knew a bottle of port would do that just fine. If we were searching for emotional and spiritual fulfillment, many of us would go elsewhere.

Now of course, I recognize Tyson is a scientist, but the problem is scientists like him are speaking about how much religious people who do not understand science are trying to speak on the topic without knowledge. I agree. I have a problem with that going on. I would join Tyson in that. The problem I have is that has to be a two-way street. Tyson does not get to speak on religion just because he is a scientist. If Tyson wants to make his audience more friendly to what he has to say, then he needs to learn to not speak on areas where people who do know what they’re talking about will only roll their eyes.

Will he and others like him ever learn?

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Can I Be Forgiven?

Is forgiveness out of your reach? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’ve been meaning to write a post recently on the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, but I think that should extend to most every other sin. When it comes to the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, too many Christians I meet struggle with the fear that they have committed this sin. Personally, I am under the impression now that it looks like every Christian and their mother wrestles with this at times, and that includes myself in the past. There was a time in my life when I also struggled with forgiveness and interestingly, I was in Bible College at the time. I struggled with knowing if I was acceptable in the eyes of God and spent much time in the chapel at my college praying about it and trying to find peace.

What really changed all of that? I’d say it was apologetics, but it was only apologetics in part. Apologetics led to really thinking about my positions on faith issues. Until you do that, you are simply feeling your positions and if you feel miserable, well that means that God is against you. If you feel great, well that means God is for you. Truth is that you can feel wonderful and God has His wrath on you and you can feel miserable and the favor of God rests on you. Your feelings can’t tell you anything about the way of God in your life. (And this is one reason I get so concerned when I hear calls for donations at a church where we’re told to give as we feel led. We dare not give divine authority to our feelings.)

As hard as it can be, at the times in our life when we struggle with our suffering, we must go to the Scriptures. We look and ask “What do the Scriptures say?” If the Bible says X and I feel non-X, well my feeling is wrong. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel it. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a strong feeling. It doesn’t mean that the issue is immediately settled in my mind as the feeling is still screaming out loud, but it does mean I at least know the true answer and I am willing to fight to accept that true answer. If I say my feelings trump the Scripture, then at that point why even need a Bible? I can just say whatever I feel comes from God Himself. (This would be odd for many Protestants who don’t like the Pope speaking ex cathedra but want to give divine authority to their feelings.)

For me then, when apologetics came along, that led to sound theology. Sound theology is really thinking about the God you worship. Many of us claim God is #1 in our lives, but we only really know Him based on how we feel and the Bible more than anything else just tells us how we are supposed to live. Now the Bible does give tips on how to live, but it also reveals to us the nature of God, especially in the person of Jesus. We need to strive to know Him as He is. We have had too many misconceptions on the nature of God and these are not perceptions that come from Scripture and do not match the God revealed in Jesus Christ. When you have good theology, your world makes a lot more sense.

soundtheology

So how does this sound theology relate to the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?

It’s noteworthy that Jesus never says anyone has blasphemed the Holy Spirit. There’s no indication that anyone in the crowd was permanently unforgiven. What was the danger? The danger was that they had the clear evidence right there of the work of the Holy Spirit in identifying who Jesus is and they were denying it. It’s as if Jesus is saying “If you cannot believe what is right before you, then you cannot receive forgiveness.” Now why would this be the case?

Because to receive forgiveness from someone, you must believe that they have the authority to forgive you and that they can and will forgive you. If you do not believe, you cannot be forgiven. If you believe in Christ and confess, you will be forgiven. If you don’t think that, then you are saying that you think God would rather delight in punishing you rather than forgive you. Now that doesn’t mean there might not be some consequences to your sin, but it does mean that you will be restored in the relationship to where you were before.

So let’s look at some relevant passages on forgiveness. Let’s start with Romans 4:4-8.

4 Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. 5 However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. 6 David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

7 “Blessed are those
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
8 Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord will never count against them.”

This is talking about how Abraham was declared righteous. Please note this. Abraham’s sins are never declared righteous. That cannot be. When we speak about justification, we do not mean that sin is justified. There can be no excusing the wrong that was done. Now there are of course circumstances that can explain why you did what you did that was wrong. It’s no good to mention those to God. He knows all of them and He knows the ones you haven’t thought of. Somewhere in all of this there is still something wrong that was done. That is what must be forgiven. When God justifies you, He declares you are in the right. He does not declare that your sins are right.

So what do we see in this passage? Righteousness is not given to someone because of an obligation. That’s a wage. It is simply given because of trust. Please emphasize as well the part in verse 5. God who justifies the ungodly. This is something quite amazing because there were always people that were seen as outcasts in the time of Jesus because of their sinful lifestyles. These were the very people Jesus gravitated towards. Jesus wanted to spend most of His time with prostitutes and tax collectors and said they are making it into the Kingdom of God ahead of the Pharisees. After all, when the message of repentance came, they believed it.

If you could earn forgiveness, it wouldn’t be a gift. Forgiveness must be a gift. It must be free and it must not be forced. That doesn’t mean you don’t ask for it, but it does mean you don’t bend someone’s arm to get it. You don’t jump through hoops to get forgiven. All the hoops that were done were taken care of by the Holy Trinity.

Romans 8:28-39:

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It’s almost as if at this point, Paul is wanting to cement your position in Christ as strongly as He can.

Start out with the beginning. All things work together for good to them that love the Lord. It is not that all things are good. They are not. Sin is not good for instance. It is that all things will work for good. That does not mean that you do evil so good may result such as Paul is accused of saying in Romans 3. It does mean that even if you do sin, and you will, that it will not be used by God somehow so you don’t need to despair. Paul then goes on to say that you will be conformed to the likeness of Christ. Which means that you will be looking like Jesus one day.

That means God is on your side. Who can be against you? Imagine going into a court trial and knowing the judge was in your corner. Why would you be afraid? What charge could be brought against you if you have such a great advocate? Not only do you know the judge, you know the judge’s son. He’s the one arguing on your behalf. What better situation could you get in a court room than to have this? What separates us then from the love of Christ? Nothing. NOTHING.

If we could get the reality of this passage sunk into our heads, we would never be the same.

Let’s also think about the Prodigal Son story here. The sad part is that we call it the Prodigal Son when really the main character of the story is not the son but the father. The father is the one that is astounding and this is not a father the elite of the day would care about. His son pretty much says to him “I wish you were dead” and the dad gives in. Then when the son returns, all the father cares about is his son is returning and then he runs after him. Yes. Grown men did not run unless they were in a race. That was shameful. He decorates him with a robe and a ring, meaning that the son was restored to his old position, one of authority, and then he has a feast for him.

Or the unmerciful servant. The servant in this case was forgiven by the king of a debt that he could never ever hope to repay. It was totally canceled and what is the response by the servant? He shows unforgiveness to another servant. Why would he do this? Chances are he didn’t really believe the king had forgiven him so he did not really receive the forgiveness. This can remind us of what was said in the sermon on the mount after the Lord’s prayer. If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father in Heaven will not forgive you your sins. As C.S. Lewis says, there is no indication he does not mean what he says. This is because this is the ministry of reconciliation that’s taking place.

We could go on and on with more and more in the Bible, but forgiveness is always given when asked for. It’s really tragic that something that God stresses so much in the Bible we do not believe, and yet we want to claim that God is love. Now of course, this forgiveness does seem unbelievable. It does seem like there has to be a catch. There isn’t. There is something asked of you. God does ask that you walk in holiness and honor Him, but you do this not so you will be forgiven, but you do this because you have been forgiven.

Imagine you lived in the world of Jesus and wanted to run a bakery. Problem. You’re a peasant. You don’t have the money for a bakery. You go to someone with the money and ask for their blessing. If the person gives it, then you have a bakery, but they have a catch. You must be telling your customers about who built the bakery for you and who supplies it and what a great benefactor that that person is. Now in the ancient world, the rich person is called a patron. You are called a client. If someone was a go-between for you, that person would be the broker. When the patron gives you a gift, it’s called charis. That’s where we get our word translated as grace. Your response on praising your patron and being loyal to him is called pistis. This is the word translated as faith.

It hasn’t changed today. God is your patron and He gives you a great gift called forgiveness. What is your great response to this? You are to go around the world telling everyone what a great patron you have. The only added part is that Jesus is your broker in this case. God forgives you in fact not because you are so special. He forgives you because He is so gracious and He receives honor by forgiving you. His glory is magnified in forgiving you. Anyone can punish an offense, but to cancel out the offense shows the real power God has in that He is the one who has authority over you in your life and can declare you righteous if He wants. Judging you is really foreign to His nature of love and is only done because of unrepentant sin. A god who does not respond to repentance is a god who delights in suffering. Ours is not like that.

Christian. You are forgiven. Accept it and celebrate it and tell the world what a great God you serve.

in Christ,
Nick Peters

Whatever Happened To Sin?

Are we missing a more theological side to strife in our country? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Another shooting has happened, this time in Oregon, and it looks like the shooter was especially wanting to target Christians. Now there are a lot of debates going on about gun control and such. I have my own opinion, but I don’t really want to talk about that. My blog is not meant to be about politics, but I would like to consider another angle to this whole situation going on. On a friend’s Facebook today I think one of my friends said what summed it up for me. “That was one evil dude.” Yes. Yes he was, and the sad reality is that it looks like in our society we’ve lost the real idea of what evil is.

You see, we live in a society that proclaims being tolerant and non-judgmental and accepting of other positions. When we talk about evil, too often we just refer to disagreement with someone or not making a wedding cake or something of that sort. Whatever your opinion of those, it’s hard to think that that really compares to murdering several people in cold blood. When 9/11 struck, evil did very quickly become a word we used more often. Yet unfortunately, we seem to have a collective short-term memory and we forget about the tragedies that strike us and try to explain what went wrong in someone’s heart to make them commit murders.

For instance, some people are talking about mental health. To an extent, I agree with them. We need to be taking mental health seriously. If you have cancer or Lou Gehrig’s Disease or Cerebral Palsy or some other physical condition, you can often find an organization pretty easily that is working to raise awareness. Think fast! What organization do you know of that is nationally recognized and known by many people that works for depression?

Do you have a hard time thinking of one?

Now there are of course some mental conditions with awareness out there. My wife and I both have Aspergers which puts us on the autism spectrum and there is indeed Autism Awareness Month. Somehow depression has slipped under the radar and it is a quite common occurrence here. Dare I say it, but the church is even worse. You see, we have this idea that in the church, you shouldn’t be depressed. You should be living a life of joy constantly. Have we forgot that our savior is described as a man of sorrows familiar with suffering? He went to the cross for the joy set before Him. He learned through suffering. Suffering and rejection were not strangers to the life of Christ and if your idea of how your life is to be is constant happiness, then Jesus is a sorry example of how you should live because His life was filled with stress and sorrow. The people that should have accepted Him the most rejected Him the most. This includes His own family!

By the way, that family would have also known about His miraculous origins and they still were ashamed of Him.

If someone has a chemical imbalance in their head, well they have a chemical imbalance. I’m not at all saying don’t pray for them in that. God can heal such an imbalance of course. I am saying don’t treat it like a stigma. For some people, this could be the cross that they have to learn to carry. We should also note that there is a difference between having depression and being depressed. I often tell my wife as well as others that you cannot choose how you feel. You can choose what you do with it even when that is admittedly hard. How many nights have I put my head down on my pillow wanting to sleep with a problem looming over my head and I have to try to focus on what I know of God and Christ through Scripture and reason? It’s not always easy. It takes active effort. Sorry, but I’m really skeptical of people who describe their lives as a life of joy. Is there joy in knowing Jesus? Of course. There’s also suffering in walking in a post-fall world.

Sadly, how many people do you know who have depression would want to share that fact in church? Hardly any. Church should be a major safe haven for people who are depressed. Many of us would be more open going to the neighborhood bar and pouring out our griefs to a bartender. You could be more prone to talk to an absolute stranger on a plane or subway about your troubles before you’d go to a church. When the world says the church is full of judgmental people, let’s be honest and admit that sometimes they have been right in what they’ve said. Could it also be many of us want to sweep under the rug the idea of other people being depressed because that means we can avoid dealing with our own internal problems?

And if this is something from a chemical imbalance, what about people who feel like pariahs for other reasons? How many people have confessed to abuse, especially sexual abuse, and then received the message that they were responsible for their abuse somehow? Or even worse, have the claim just dismissed? Of course some claims are false, but they should all be considered because these are real people we’re dealing with. Fortunately, there are many churches that are providing safe havens, such as giving programs like Celebrate Recovery to help with this bizarre realization that Christians actually struggle with sin. (Yeah. Really. No joke. Who would have imagined?)

The church is to be the body of Christ and represent Jesus on Earth. If sinners are afraid to come to you, there’s a problem, because they weren’t afraid to come to Jesus.

That having been said, while we should not ignore mental conditions, we should not act like everything is a mental condition. A mental condition could make something more likely to happen in some cases, but it does not necessitate it. After a school shooting that took place once, and I think it was the Sandy Hook one, my father-in-law went on Facebook in response to someone on his page talking about the shooter being said to have Aspergers and treating Aspies like a threat. My father-in-law spoke about how my wife and I have Aspergers and we’re not like that at all and the thought that she or I would go into a school with a gun and start shooting is just ludicrous.

Some people don’t need a mental condition to do evil. They have another problem. It’s one we all have called sin, and this is a problem we don’t really do much about.

In speaking that way, we could be making a drastic mistake.

We need to be clear that when we look at the evil, we don’t think it will go away just with medication or therapy. There is no pill you can give someone to turn them into a sinless person. Believe me, I wish there was. I wish there was something that would be “If you take this, you will no longer worry about the future.” “If you take this, you will be totally unselfish with your spouse.” “If you take this, you won’t be tempted to look at other women.” “If you take this, you will not have greed when it comes to money.” It would be nice, but it’s not there. The problem is not a problem of the wrong chemicals flowing. The problem is you and I are fallen sinful human beings and we do the behavior of fallen and sinful human beings.

Can therapy help with some of that? Absolutely. I’m not opposed to Christian therapy and I myself have partaken of it before in the past and today, while I do not see a professional therapist, I have a band of mentors and a band of listening ears because I have my own problems in this life and I need help dealing with them and I’ve had to learn the wisdom of reaching out and seeking help. Therapy will not help all of it because our therapists also have the same problem. Our therapists are fallen and sinful human beings.

What do we need to do then? Diagnose the root issue every time. Somewhere, there is still sin. Even if you have a mental illness, there is still sin. When it comes to the behavior my wife and I can exhibit as people on the spectrum, I tell them that we have an explanation, but not a justification. Do we need to change our behavior a number of times? Yeah. We do. Is there something in us that can explain why we behave the way we do at times? Yeah. Is there still something wrong in what we do at those times? Yes. Yes there is. That something is called the sin itself. There is some place in us where we still actively chose the wrong thing.

Could it be that if we got to the sin issue, we could change much of the woes of our country? Note this is more than getting people to know Jesus as their savior. (And no, this is not getting into Lordship salvation. This is not about whether people are saved but as to how seriously they are taking their following of Jesus.) There are a lot of people that get converted to Jesus and are thus babies in the faith and sadly, spend their lives as children. They do not grow and mature in their Christian walk at all. They are still fed baby food from their pulpits and never get to eat meat. There is not enough awareness about what God has to say in our lives. People want to come to a knowledge of God, but where are they getting it from? Too many are getting it from their feelings and personal experience instead of being people of Scripture. (It’s so amazing that so many of us who are Protestants and don’t like the idea of the Pope claiming to speak for God somehow think that our emotions are absolute pathways to the divine.)

This might sound outlandish, but could it be that what we really need in our churches is discipleship? We need to know what it means to be a follower of Jesus. How many of us if we’re struggling in our marriage will have no objections to going to a marriage seminar to learn how to be a good spouse? How many of us would have no hesitancy in going to a seminar our workplace wants us to go to in order to learn how to be a good employee and do sales well? How many of us realize if we want to have a job in a credentialed field, we need to go to college and get a degree that will take years?

And yet when it comes to following Jesus, we think that all just comes naturally. (In fact, following Jesus should tell you to be careful about what comes naturally.)

Could it be we need to examine ourselves and look for what is described as the sin that so easily entangles? Note also that word. Easily. It’s easy to fall into sin. It’s easy to feel imprisoned by it and feel there is no escape, and if we think deliverance will come through a feeling, we are sadly mistaken. We need to let the sacred truths of Scripture penetrate our hearts and shine within us to expose what’s not good in us. Is that painful? Yep. Is it something we hate? Yep. I have had enough of my own prayer times where I’ve had to look at what’s in my own heart and frankly, not really liked it, but oh well. That’s the only way you grow in Christ. It’s not going to be sunshine and roses.

And you know what, most of us aren’t in danger of shooting up a school. Yeah. That’s true, but we can hate our neighbor in our hearts. What does that mean? It means that if we could get away with it, we would. Many of us won’t have affairs in our marriages. That’s true, but we do lust after others. What does that mean? It means that if we could get away with it, we would. We have our own sins that we do fall into. We have various objects and activities we get addicted to, and not even bad things. Food and sex for instance are good things, but they are not meant to be idols and they can never satisfy entirely. Some of us can struggle with greed in the church. Many, especially those who are leaders, and I easily include myself, can struggle with pride. These are still sin as well and these need to be dealt with.

By all means, have the discussions when these events happen about what needs to be done in the political field. Have the real discussions that need to be had on mental health, but Christians need to in the midst of these discussions not miss the most important one. We need to have a discussion on sin and what it means then to be a follower of Jesus in a world of evil where we are supposed to be spreading the good news that Jesus is King.

Sin is real. We can put any other label on it, but it will not change sin, and there are people dead today who shouldn’t have been because of sin, and there is evil we are committing today that we shouldn’t be because of sin. Deal with what’s out there, but each of us will give an account before God of what we’re doing as well. We can’t be willing to deal with the world if we’re not cleaning up our own house first.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Update on the Podcast

Is something wrong with the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Consider this post more of an FYI on the status of the Deeper Waters Podcast. First off, I’ll provide some relief to you if you’re worried and say “No, we’re not going anywhere.” If you were expecting the interview last Saturday, I had been invited to speak at a ministry convention and I thought it might be easier if my guest could postpone. He had no problem whatsoever doing this and looking back, it’s a good thing he did. The hotel Allie and I stayed at had terrible wi-fi so much so that on Saturday night while both of us were trying to connect with our devices, we just eventually gave up. It would not have been possible to have completed an interview while I was there. The interview that was scheduled then has been rescheduled for October 24th.

Meanwhile, this Saturday’s interview with David Capes will unfortunately also have to be postponed. There were some mistakes in communication that I’m sure unsure of between the media side of what David did and myself that left some confusion, but again, David Capes will be back sometime on the show and we will be talking about his book. That means there won’t be a show again this Saturday. If you are ever concerned about the status of a show, please feel free to let me know about it. I do appreciate the feedback that comes from fans of the show and I also appreciate seeing ITunes reviews.

So while we’re here and we’re talking about the show, let’s talk about some episodes coming up.

We do have Rodney Reeves and Randy Richards coming on again to talk about their book Rediscovering Jesus. This book is a fascinating look with a new perspective asking what we would know about Jesus if all we had was one source.

The next Saturday we have Ken Samples of RTB coming on. We will be talking about the data for alien abductions and asking “Why should we believe eyewitness testimony for the resurrection when we have that for alien abductions?”

On the 24th, we have David Wilkie who does the comic strip Coffee With Jesus (I still have a plea that it be turned into Tea With Jesus since tea is the nectar of the gods and coffee was created by the devil to lead us away from it.) We’ll be talking about art and apologetics and using media.

On Halloween, my friend Mark Hunnemann comes on to talk about his book Seeing Ghosts Through God’s Eyes. We’ll be discussing what the Bible has to say about our idea of things that go bump in the night.

The next sure date we have is November 21st where J. Warner Wallace will return and talk about his book God’s Crime Scene. Here are some other things we have in the works coming up as well.

My pastor has agreed to come on some time. He is a church planter and our church has a unique idea of taking questions during the service to answer at the end and while apologetics is not mentioned explicitly, it is taken seriously. We’ll be talking about the need for planting churches and the unique evangelism approach we use at our church such as going to bars and tattoo conventions.

David Capes as I said will be back as well sometime to talk about his book Slow To Judge.

I have also been contacted by a YEC who wants to come on and since I don’t agree with the view, I said I’d welcome it if it could be in the style of a debate. Right now, an OEC who has volunteered is in communication with him to see if this can be done.

Most recently Craig Keener has also said he is willing to come back to the show to talk about his commentary series on Acts.

I’d like to thank everyone who has been interested in the show and been following us. Sometimes I get suggestions as well for guests. I don’t always go with the idea of the guest, but I appreciate the suggestions. After all, this is the only way I can know who you really like and want to have on. As I said earlier, I especially like seeing your reviews. They let me know how much the show is appreciated and I really encourage you to tell your friends about the show. Chances are they’ll find something they like in the archives.

Thanks again for being fans of the Deeper Waters Podcast!

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Once Again, Please Christians Check Your Sources

How can we expect people to believe us on major claims if they can’t believe us on minor claims? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So yesterday, a news story is going around all over Facebook. Now this is in light of my writing about the scandals caused by the blood moon hysteria so this is just more of the same. This time, it’s a claim that Facebook is about to charge for something and this was on the news so now it’s official. This was being shared by so many people and it was a cut and paste job regularly. Sadly, a lot of people I knew who were sharing it were Christians. I have written about such things before, but I always get concerned when this happens because it has a direct impact on how the body of Christ is seen in the world.

If you’re not in the field of apologetics like I am, you might not be aware that to the world of unbelievers, we’re a bunch of gullible and superstitious morons who believe something bizarre just because we read it in a book. Now unfortunately, there are too many Christians who will believe something just because they read it in a book or they heard it from their pastor. Of course, on the other hand, there are a lot of atheists who will believe something because they read it on the internet as well. People going with something because it fits with what they already believe is nothing new and it happens on both ends.

And to be fair, if you’re not a Christian, what we believe can easily strike the world as odd. In fact, it is. We believe something simply incredible and we hold this up as the greatest fact of all. Do you want a claim like that to have credibility? People you are telling this to, and that includes people on Facebook, can’t jump in a time machine and go back to the tomb and watch Jesus come out and say “Yep. He really rose again.” Here’s what they can do. They can look at that post that you just put up on Facebook and see that you didn’t bother doing any checking on it whatsoever and then decide that if you are that gullible, they don’t really need to pay attention to your major claims such as that Jesus rose from the dead.

Can you blame them? If you can’t be trusted on something that can be checked on in a couple of minutes, why should you be trusted on something that requires months and years of research?

This also includes when we spread information about those who we see as our opposition even on the religious front or the political front or both. Many of you know I am a conservative in politics. I have seen people spread claims about Obama, who I do not care for, that are simply false and I always have to point them out and say “Don’t spread these claims.” Why? Because even if someone is my opponent, I want to take them down honestly. If I think someone is a threat to the greater good, then I should be able to demonstrate that by using honest material and not fake material. Again, this isn’t just a Christian thing as all sides do this, but Christians are supposed to be people who claim to care about truth and walk in the truth and serve Christ who said He is the truth. If truth is not a priority to us, why should we be taken seriously?

Now of course, if you want to share something and you haven’t found any verification and you just want to ask if it’s true or get thoughts, then go right on ahead, but if something could possibly be shown to be demonstrably false, then please do not just blindly share it. Take the time to check the claims. If the world cannot believe you on earthly things, why should they believe you when you speak on heavenly things?

In Christ,
Nick Peters