Day: August 15, 2018

 

For well over a thousand years marriage has been known as a union between a man and a woman. This view aligns with nature, the combination of male and female is the common and only practice among the higher mammals.

The  union of man and woman is the only natural way to procreate. All through nature you can see the good sense and order in this arrangement. The female is fully and beautifully equipped by nature and instinct to nurse and feed the offspring. She seems, as if by design, the superior and natural carer, a conviction born out by studies on the known differences between the sexes. The male partner during the period of childbearing and nurturing into adulthood tends to provide for and protect both mother and her young. These are necessary roles and each sex seems perfectly adapted to fulfil them. It has taken social engineering on a grand scale to muddy what were once crystal clear waters, reversing roles, masculinising females and emasculating males.

Incredibly, this picture of family life is seen as a shameful exploitation of the female due to this apparent empowering of the male over the female. In order to correct this appalling injustice feminism chose to fight against this and every other perceived ill visited by the brute male on the downtrodden female. Another cause celebre that has undermined our society and thrown it into multiple disorders which continue to reverberate through every level of male/female interactions. The result: huge numbers of disorientated and broken families. This victim mentality has permeated our country, becoming an increasingly vicious battle for rights causing division in every sphere of life.

Here are some verses from the Bible relating to the covenant relationship between a man and a woman.

Genesis 1:27-28: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ ”

Ecclesiastes 4:9: “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labour: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?”

Genesis 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Mark 10:9: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Ephesians 5:25-33: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church…”

That last scripture could not place women in a higher place, because Jesus is the lover of the bride, and his love cannot be surpassed.

In our society the commands and decrees and wisdom of our creator God are being overthrown, but at what price? Marriage was once a well understood institution; the bedrock of society. A safe haven for the nurturing of children, in good marriages one in which the father and mother provide positive role models for their children. The disintegration of this model, which began in the 1960’s, if put into a graph would I believe reflect the incremental levels of confusion and breakdown seen in relationships over the last half century or more. If you can find a good and loving partner and join together in marriage then your chances of happiness are hugely increased. Marriage was created by God for us so that we can discover in the other person more about love, life, self sacrifice, give and take, fulfilment and joy. In the bible there is in the book of Revelation the picture of marriage, a love affair between a bridegroom and his bride. It describes Jesus, the bridegroom coming for his bride.  This picture is in so many ways based on a Jewish marriage and its procedures. The bridegroom goes to prepare a place for his bride. Jesus said to his disciples that he was going to prepare a place for us.

John 14 v 3

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

Below is a Jewish view, not on marriage specifically but on having an encounter, engaging in a relationship with someone who should have been very remote to him. Dr. Dauermann is a lovely, kindly, gentle presence.

 

 

God or gods are many and varied, from local to universal. If there are many then the choosing between them becomes a virtual lottery with not much at stake. Get it wrong and what can happen? The probability is nothing will happen, the god you have chosen is likely to be an invention, a myth. Do all gods fall into this category, or are there a few who could be real, possibly watching or listening or taking an interest in us?  So, could the list be fewer still? Three religions make the claim that there is one supreme God who created everything and everyone, including you and I. These three Gods can be reduced to two, since the God of the Jews and Christians are one and the same. The difficulty between Judaism and Christianity centres around the claimed divinity of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians would claim that the God of the Jews in the Old Testament is the same as the God worshipped and loved in the New Testament. And that the Godhead includes Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

It may come as a surprise to you that Islam, the last of the three monotheistic faiths, claims the same God, but states that His name is Allah, and his prophet Mohammed. According to Muslims he was spoken about in the Bible as the last prophet, greater even than Jesus. On this religion I spend a lot of time because I believe it to be false from beginning to end. For Judaism I have great respect since Christian roots are sunk deeply into the religion of the Jews and we share the Old Testament.

All three of these global religions agree about one thing: God was the Creator of all things. He may have chosen to do it through the evolutionary method, guided the process or left it to its own devices. Or God may have done it as is stated in Genesis chapter one: by a series of spoken commands. That is what I believe, and I am not alone. Scientists and philosophers from both the past and the present hold this to be the Truth about Creation.

Science is the field of study concerned with discovering and describing the world around us by observing and experimenting. Biology, chemistry, and physics are all branches of science. Good science for centuries opened up the wonders of creation and was honoured for its services to mankind and for explaining what had for so long seemed inexplicable. Showed us how nature and the cosmos worked and defined the universal laws which underpinned all things, from the microscopic to a universe so large it beggared our imagination. The foundation upon which this was built can be summarised by the humble saying attributed to Johannes Kepler:

“Thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

 This German astronomer died in 1630. He calculated planetary orbits in great detail through careful observation and painstaking mathematical modelling. He used the scientific method shown above. He also said this:

“The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

 Kepler represents a large number of the greatest names in science: those who laid the groundwork for very close to all scientific endeavour were believers in God and His Son Jesus Christ. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics was a monk. James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian, was the father of almost any modern electronic device you could name.

Over the last 150 years this heritage has been abandoned to be replaced by outright rejection of these roots of Western Science. This has been the work of scientists and philosophers, some of them having attained celebrity status through the media rather than their scientific contributions. Most of them, certainly the more humble among them, would no doubt freely admit they are minnows in comparison to Kepler, Mendel and Clerk Maxwell. And yet the God these three greats of science attributed everything to has been erased from the modern script by the lesser men. It is these who have promoted and broadcast the current version of science which now rules over explanations of nature and the universe.

Please do not misunderstand me, modern science has much to commend it, not least in areas of technology and medicine. But it’s attempts to draw deductions about prehistory and how creation came to exist in all its vast and wondrous variety is altogether another matter. My contention throughout has been that to abandon the Creator of all things as an explanation for life and the cosmos is like following Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole. It is madness and leaves an intellectual void filled by whatever can be found, and that has proved to be a problem. The explanatory well is dry to the point of aridity without the design intuition.

At the beginning of this article I spoke about there not being much at stake in getting the God question and the choices between true or false, or this god or that god wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth since nothing matters in comparison. Missing that truth and getting everything else right is not good enough. When it comes to the end you need to know Jesus and believe he died for your sins and rose from the dead. You have no excuse not to know that Jesus died because very few biblical scholars, whether believers or unbelievers, doubt that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem around 30 AD. No-one escaped death from that form of execution. Jesus was brutally flogged before carrying his cross to the execution site. While nailed to the cross if you not push up with your legs at regular intervals for breath you died of suffocation. When a victim ceased these regular movements it was the end, faking death was not possible.

Don’t doubt, believe, because it really happened. What happened subsequently, the resurrection, is founded on evidence just as compelling.

 

You can find a video giving the evidence widely accepted by most biblical scholars, both Christian and non Christian at the foot of the article titled: What Kind of God Goes This Far For You?