Imagine if you could choose where, when, and under what circumstances you were born. If you’re perfectly fine with how things worked out for you, that’s great, I’m not trying to make you unhappy with your upbringing. But think of the possibilities. Many people would probably choose to be born to rich parents, or maybe to royalty, or if nothing else, in a nicer climate or better location than where you started out.
Of course, we have no way of choosing where or when we’ll be born, our ancestral lineage, or the circumstances of our birth. It’s something we all accept as being beyond our control. That’s what makes it so hard-hitting when we look at Old Testament scriptures to see “before-it-happens” predictions of where and how the Messiah would be born. There are a number of Bible verses describing the coming Christ’s future birth:
Isaiah 7:14 – Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Genesis 49:10 – The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.
Micah 5:2 – But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.
Isaiah 11:1 – There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
Now aside from the virgin birth part of it, I can see how a skeptic might say “well, okay, but if you make enough predictions, you’re bound to get something right.” You know what? I agree with that. Here’s the thing, though. The verses listed so far only pertain to Christ’s birth. When you add in predictions about the Messiah’s demeanor, about His riding on a foal, that He never suffers a broken bone, the nature of His death, etc., you start really narrowing the possibilities down in a way that excludes random chance. While it might be possible to fulfill a few of them by chance, things start to get mind-blowing when someone comes along and fulfills all of them.
I heard somewhere that the odds of anyone fulfilling all the prophecies related to the Christ were fewer than one in 80 billion. I think we get desensitized from movies about how astronomically unlikely it is to overcome such odds. The computer virus gets beaten. Han Solo successfully navigates the asteroid field. Tom Cruise saves the day. Let’s bring this a little closer to real life. The odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery earlier this week were a little better than 1 in 303 million. If those odds remained the same from drawing to drawing, you’d hit the MegaMillions jackpot over 260 times before reaching the same level of likelihood as a single individual fulfilling all those messianic prophecies.
Even if you don’t believe in God, you’ve got to admit there’s something a little unusual about that. The inference is that Jesus Christ is the predicted Messiah. If that’s true, it has massive implications for you and for everyone you hold dear. Why don’t you take a closer look into it?
Let’s build a little off the last post, which went through some reasons to take the Bible seriously. This one gets tricky to visualize though, so I’m going to use movies to tackle a tough biblical subject.
It seems like lately Hollywood ran out of original ideas, so they started rolling out sequels to decades-old movies. Some of them are fun and work well (Top Gun, Creed), others not so much (Indiana Jones), and a whole bunch I haven’t seen so I don’t know (Beverly Hills Cop, Blade Runner, Tron, Mad Max, Bill and Ted, Coming to America, etc.). One such franchise is “The Matrix” series.
The Matrix came out in 1999, followed by two sequels, both in 2003. Then, much later, a final (I hope) Matrix movie came out in 2021. Three different timeframes, all part of the same story. We’re going to use this scenario to help frame our discussion of Daniel’s prophecy of the 70 weeks, which I believe to be one of the most interesting prophecies in the Old Testament.
I have to give a little disclaimer here. There are a few different possibilities as far as the way things can be interpreted, so I’m going to present the way that makes the most sense to me. Things don’t jive perfectly the way I’m going to explain it, but they’re close enough that it makes you say “yeah, there’s something to this.” Just know I could easily be wrong about some of the details, but I encourage you to look into it for yourself and see what people much smarter than me on the subject have to say.
In Daniel 9, verses 20-27, Daniel receives one of the most interesting, but difficult to understand prophecies of the Bible. Daniel, a very godly man, is given the future timeline for some of the world’s most historic events.
Before jumping in, it’s important to have a little context. When you and I think of a “week,” we think of a seven-day period of time. They certainly used this term back in Bible times (God created the universe, earth, and humanity in a week in Genesis, and only a few verses after our text, Daniel mourned for a period of three weeks in Daniel 10:2-3). That’s not the only way the word “week” is used, though. The week you and I think of is a week of days. In this prophecy, a week refers to a period of seven years. Thus, the prophecy of 70 weeks totals a period of 7 x 70, or 490 years.
Here’s the Matrix tie-in. Remember how the movies didn’t all come out in the same year, but were kind of close together in the beginning, then had a big gap between the middle installment and the last one? That’s similar to what happens here. There are 490 years involved, but they’re not all consecutive. Daniel 9:25-27 breaks it down, though not in the most intuitive way. The 70 weeks is going to be broken down into three chunks: seven weeks, 62 weeks, and one week (49 years, 434 years, and seven years, respectively). The first two chunks run back-to-back, and the third one is off floating around by itself. What events are these chunks marking? The answer lies in those same few verses. “From the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty two weeks; the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.” –Dan 9:25
This was written before Christ arrived on the scene. If we look back at history, we can figure out when that command was given and work our way forward. We know from the last post Judah was carried off to Babylon. That city changed hands, falling to the Medo-Persian Empire while Daniel lived there. When Daniel wrote down the prophecy of the 70 weeks (probably sometime between 536 and 530 B.C.), he was serving in the same city while Jerusalem lay in ruins. In the year 457 B.C. the Persian king Artaxerxes gave the Israelite priest Ezra permission to re-inhabit Jerusalem (Ezra 7:6-10). This starts the clock ticking on the first seven weeks from Dan. 9:25. I can’t point to a specific event, but 49 years later, Jerusalem once again had Israelites living in it (including a rebuilt wall and gates courtesy of Nehemiah’s leadership) and Malachi, the final Old Testament prophet, had spoken the last word from the Lord before the Messiah’s arrival. The world then entered a 400+ year period of silence from the Lord (the Intertestamental Period between the Old and New Testaments).
If we do some math here, 49 years plus 434 years comes out to be 483 years. If you add 483 years to that initial “re-occupy Jerusalem” green light in 457 B.C., you’re very close to the year 30 A.D. That’s the year Christ entered Jerusalem riding on donkey, one week before His crucifixion. (If you want to be more precise on the math, 27 A.D. is closer to the mark, which is when Christ began His earthly ministry.)
Okay, good, so Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is holding up so far, but we’re still short one week/seven year period. Everything we’ve covered so far is retrospective; the prophecy’s math makes sense based on the events that have already taken place. Now we shift gears and look to the future. We’re looking at that final movie sequel, the one that was separated from the earlier installments by a much larger period of time. Daniel 9:26-27 gives some more insight into things. This period refers to the rule of the Antichrist near the end of time, and takes place immediately following the rapture of Christians (when the Lord pulls His followers out of the world to spare them from the horrors about to take place).
That last week, also known in Revelation as the Great Tribulation, can be split in half. Following the confusion and fear accompanying the disappearance of a large fraction of the world’s population in the Rapture, a smooth-talking politician is going to burst onto the world stage, he’s going to calm the panic and broker a peace deal between Israel and its enemies, and everything’s going to feel like it’s fantastic for the first three and a half years. The Bible also refers to these halves of the final week as 42 months or “a time, times, and half a time” (one plus two plus one half). Then, at the mid-point of the seven years, he breaks the treaty, bans Jewish sacrifice, and demands that he be the only one anyone worships (Dan. 9:27, 2 Thess 2:4). It doesn’t give a timeline for when that final week commences, but when the Rapture happens, the Antichrist arrives on the scene, if not before.
There’s a great deal more to what happens during this time in the book of Revelation (chapters 6 to 18), but I recommend using a study Bible with a good deal of notes to help explain it. I believe the point of including this prophecy is to say “look, only God could predict these things with this much specificity, and if the first couple components of the 70 week prophecy have come true, the last part is probably worth taking a look at.”
Finally, let’s suppose you’re not a Christian, but you’re intrigued by what you’re seeing here and in the Bible verses I referenced. Either the Bible is true…or it isn’t. If it’s true, that means the whole thing is true. In light of that, don’t you think it might be a good idea to look around at what else the Bible says? Specifically, I’m referring to humanity’s inadequacy to meet God’s standard and our corresponding reliance on Christ’s perfection and sacrifice on our behalf.
The study of the End Times is fascinating, but for all its razzle dazzle, it’s not nearly as important as the central message of Christ dying for our sins and extending the invitation for us to join Him for eternal communion with God after we pass from this life. As I said toward the beginning of this post, it’s something I encourage you to investigate for yourself.
You might be a skeptic who’s not really into the whole “Christian” thing, or maybe you’ve been a Christian for awhile but haven’t spent much time exploring the Bible for yourself. If you’re in any type of situation where you’re thinking about checking out the Bible, trying to figure out where to start reading it can be a challenge.
I’m not going to tell you where to start, but in this post I’ll help you understand a little more about how the Bible’s laid out and some of the things that make it so compelling. Bear with me for some of the stuff you may already know, and then we’ll get to the interesting stuff.
Let’s start with the basics. The Bible is a huge book, and it wasn’t all written by the same author. We (Christians) believe God separately inspired multiple people to write down what we now know as the books of the Bible, and those various writings collectively form the Word of God without contradicting the doctrinal points of any of the other authors. Those authors’ lives spanned multiple centuries. Moses recorded the first few books of the Bible, but at least one book (Job) was probably written before Moses even came on the scene.
The Bible is broken into the Old Testament (the books written before the birth of Christ) and the New Testament (written after Christ’s birth). The Old Testament is made up of 39 books, and the New Testament has 27. The Old Testament (from Creation and the start of humanity until about 400ish years before Christ’s birth) spans a much larger time than the New Testament (from Christ’s birth to about 95 years after His birth, with a look forward to the end of time).
Many people who aren’t familiar with the Bible don’t realize just how spectacularly the whole thing ties together. Remember…there are many authors of the Bible, spanning over a thousand years. Sometimes it’s hard to get two people in the same room to write similar papers that don’t somehow contradict each other. There are many verses from earlier parts of the Bible that forecast what will happen later in the Bible. Skeptics figure since the Bible is so old and has been around for so long, its ability to accurately predict these things is easy to fake. This is where it gets interesting. It’s not a monolith; it’s 66 different books, all written at different times. While some of their dates of writing are known pretty well, we have to ballpark others. Some of the predicted events pertain to forthcoming “religious” things (like where the Messiah would be born, what tribe He’d be from, how He would die, etc.) and others were focused on more secular events on the world stage (like the rise and fall of different empires).
The Bible spans so much time, parts of the Old Testament actually predict events that come to fruition later in the Old Testament. For example, the Kingdom of Israel split into two separate entities: Israel and Judah. When they both stopped depending on the Lord and started worshiping other gods, the Lord gave them lots of warnings through the prophets He sent. Eventually He had enough. In Hosea 9:3 and 11:5 He warned Israelites Assyria would carry them into captivity if they didn’t repent. They didn’t repent and Assyria conquered them. In Jeremiah 25:8-14 God gave a similar warning to Judah: Babylon will conquer you and take you into captivity if you don’t repent! Guess what? Judah didn’t repent and found itself carried off to Babylon. Recordings of those captivities are elsewhere in the Old Testament, but these geopolitical events are also verifiable outside of scripture, and these two prophets of the Lord accurately predicted them before they occurred.
One really tricky part to understand, especially for the people living when these books were written, is that the Bible often refers to two future things at once, one in the not-too-distant future and the other waaaaaay down the road. Jeremiah chapters 30, 31, and 33, for example, talk about the restoration of Judah and Israel. Context helps determine whether it’s talking about restoration from its human captors (near-term) or restoration from its sin-tainted past (at the end of this world). Similarly, Isaiah chapter 13 talks about the importance of the city of Babylon both before it became a major player on the world stage and then again when referring to the distant future, “the Day of the Lord” when Babylon represents humanity’s final uprising against God.
Likewise, there are plenty of prophecies (predictions) about the Messiah. Almost all of them were about things outside a normal man’s control. Even if Jesus were an exceptional con man, he’d still have to be the luckiest dude in the world to fulfill all the messianic prophecies he did (have a look at the verses listed in the graphic below). What nobody really expected was that the Messiah would come to Earth twice. Nobody really anticipated Him showing up for awhile as a poor and humble average Joe, then visibly stepping off the world stage for almost 2,000 years (and counting) before coming back in full power and majesty. While the Bible does say the Messiah will be a mighty conqueror, it evidently referred to the second time He’d be coming. Everyone figured it would all happen at once. That’s part of the reason some of the most devout religious figures of the day scoffed at Christ. They expected a mighty warrior king to free them from Roman oppression, and when lowly Jesus didn’t meet their expectations, they wrote Him off, no matter how much sense He made scripturally, regardless of the miracles He performed, and irrespective of all the other prophecies He checked the box for.
In a future post I’ll take a look at a prophecy from the book of Daniel that involves some timelines offering further proof of the Lordship of Jesus. Part of the reason the Bible records these prophecies is to help its readers understand that there’s something supernatural at work here. How could something predict the future with such great accuracy unless someone with knowledge beyond time was involved? If you’re a truth-seeker, chew on that for awhile.
For now, though, where does that leave us? The prophecies that still haven’t been fulfilled give us an idea of what to expect. We’re still looking ahead to when the prophecies of the second coming come true. Internet searches for bible verses connected to “End Times” or “eschatology” should return verses from Revelation, Daniel, 1 Thessalonians, and many more. There’s lots of your own research to do here. The more you research, the more you’ll see how it all ties together.
The answer, of course, is baby giraffes. Let’s talk a little bit about Evolution.
Before we get into that, though, I’d like you to think about a traditional mousetrap. It’s a simple machine that’s been mass produced and has sold millions of units. Yet what would happen if any of the mousetrap’s components was removed? Take away the trigger, the holding bar, the spring, or anything else, and what happens? Removing any single component means the trap isn’t catching any mice.
Instead of a mousetrap, think of a complex biological machine, say, the human eye. Evolution says that simple, one-celled organisms changed over many generations and long periods of time to become highly complex living systems. If this is true, there had to be a series of pretty spectacular leaps forward to move from a single-celled organism to an organ that can sense light, then again to today’s human eye. It just doesn’t make sense. What was the immediate predecessor to the current version? What can you take away from the human eye and have it be almost as capable as the version we know today?
The theory of evolution has a problem. Animals that need to evolve fall into one of two categories: they either fail to evolve quickly enough (and thus fail to pass along genes that will enable future generations to acquire new characteristics), or they undergo massive mutational changes during a single generation (which seems very unlikely). Let’s use the giraffe as an example.
Let’s assume for a moment that Evolution is true. Imagine what giraffes looked like before they had long necks. It was more like a funky moose. For this conversation we’ll call it a stubby giraffe. Evolution claims that as food got scarce for individual stubby giraffes, they were forced to look for sustenance in areas beyond their normal reach. Let’s look at a few possibilities for what happened next.
Possibility number one: starving stubby giraffes did not consume enough calories to carry and give birth to baby stubby giraffes, so they died without birthing any healthy calves. – Unsuccessful evolution.
American, North Korean, and South Korean (left, center, right) soldiers
Possibility number two: the bodies of stubby giraffes, in the span of a single lifetime, while suffering from malnutrition, activated biological mechanisms which altered their own established DNA blueprints and triggered explosive leg and neck growth (while malnourished), enabling its survival. Malnourished bodies, however, experience stunted growth, not accelerated growth. North Korea’s people are starving and its children don’t get enough food to eat during their bodies’ crucial stages of physical development. As a result, many North Korean adults have a much smaller stature than their counterparts in other countries who had sufficient nutritional support during those stages of physical development. – Implausible.
Possibility number three: stubby giraffes did not experience rapid alterations, but they did experience incremental amounts of extraordinary growth (growth beyond what its DNA stipulated) with each passing generation. As these “hybrid giraffes” gained the ability to reach food they hadn’t been able to access before, they consumed all the food stubby giraffes could reach, and the stubby giraffes died out. But the same problem remains: if hybrid giraffes weren’t getting enough to eat and were forced to either evolve or die, how did their starving bodies find it within themselves to boldly step outside the bounds of their DNA and add inches or feet of bones, muscle, and corresponding tissue and blood vessels? On the other hand, if they were getting enough to eat, why did they need to evolve any further, and why haven’t they shrunk since then? After all, in terms of calories and energy, extra muscle mass is expensive. – Implausible.
There’s no logical scenario where this kind of evolution happens. Logically, people would have to buy into possibility number four: the giraffes you see today are similar (both in appearance and genetically) to the first giraffes that walked the planet. Hundreds or thousands of giraffe generations all followed the same DNA blueprint, passed that blueprint along to the next generation, which passed it to the next, and so on. Whoever designed these things established the originals along with a pretty solid process of reproducing themselves.
Did you know that a giraffe’s neck is strong enough to support the weight of a human climbing on it? Also, I got banned from the zoo today.
Here’s an example that will make you think. What if I, as a human, suddenly needed to evolve quickly enough to be able to hold my breath for 10 minutes? With practice I can increase my breath-holding capacity to over two minutes, but if I’m thrust into a situation where I need to hold my breath for 10 minutes, I’m not going to make it. That’s a Pass/Fail test, and it’s not looking good for me. What if we take a more incremental approach to this problem, though?
The Bajau people of Southeast Asia have long relied on their skills at free-diving for their livelihood and for food. They spend an extreme amount of time repeatedly holding their breath and diving below the surface to obtain food and pearls on the seafloor. This lifestyle has led to enlarged spleens among the Bajau. (The spleen plays a role in the oxygenation level of blood, among other things.) This adaptation enables divers to stay underwater longer. Here’s the interesting part though. Even non-divers among the Bajau people have enlarged spleens. This finding suggests conditioning the body has an impact on DNA, but it also means this adaptation was not the result of an “evolve or die” scenario, because death was not imminent before it occurred. Is it possible that evolution is taking place here?
I can’t find it online, but when I was in high school I was taught something I think called “Color Theory.” It helped explain the wide disparity in physical characteristics of people across the globe. I’ll run through a few examples. The Massai people of Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Africa have one of the tallest average heights in the world, at around 6 feet, 3 inches. They have tight curly hair and very dark brown (or even black) eyes. Spending many generations primarily as herders of livestock, they’ve traditionally spent long hours in the hot equatorial sun. Their height enabled them to see predators sneaking through the grass to attack members of their herd, and their dark skin, dark eyes, and tightly curled hair provided various forms of protection from the intense sun.
In Asia, the Gobi Desert straddles Mongolia and China, two of the world’s oldest and most storied cultures. The desert played a significant role in the type of genetic characteristics that manifested themselves in people that lived in the area. Being over six feet tall and having curly hair is no picnic during and after a sandstorm. The people in the region were generally much shorter, had straight, coarse hair, and had eye shapes and structures suited to providing protection for their vision. All of these characteristics made it easier to cope with the realities of living in regions with large volumes of sand blowing around.
Finally, the people of Scandinavia in northern Europe have their own unique characteristics. Living at high latitudes means the sun’s rays are not nearly as intense as other areas of the world. Weaker solar rays warrant fewer protections from the sun, so those traditionally living in this region are normally fair-skinned, have thinner (or more fine) hair, and have light-colored eyes. This makes them well suited for geography where, for months out of the year, the sun’s max intensity approximates dawn/twilight.
I share this with you to illustrate the following point. These four examples (Bajau divers, Massai, those around the Gobi Desert, and Scandinavians) all have unique adaptations for their native geography, but none of them are on their way to starting a new species. They are all unquestionably human, and they are all undoubtedly going to stay that way. They in no way represent a departure from the human race.
We are all human because God made us all in His image. We all descended from sinners and are sinners ourselves. Accordingly, we all have need of the same Savior, and that is Jesus Christ. If you’re one of His, there are plenty of other people out there who are waiting for you to share Christ with them, even if they don’t look like you. Take up the challenge to spread the good news with them.
I used to work for a small residential construction company. During my time there we built a variety of houses or did renovations, built decks, or completed smaller jobs. Depending on how many projects we had going and what time of year it was, we had a minimal number of guys or a whole bunch of guys working.
While we built one house in particular, most of the time we only had three workers on the crew. I was the youngest and least experienced, so I ended up being the mule…the guy lugging materials everywhere while the other two assembled them and really made the house come together. I carried lumber to the cutting table, while the other guys cut boards to size and put together headers for windows and doors. I handed plywood up to the guys working on the second floor. When the windows showed up, I took them to the right locations so the other guys could install them. When the boxes of siding arrived, I carried their contents where they needed to go. The joke was that I eventually lifted the whole house by myself.
That’s just the rough assembly. Then come the finer points and finishing touches. Holes for wires and pipes still need to be drilled. After the drywall gets hung, it needs to be taped and spackled, then primed and painted. Upon adding trim around windows and doors, it needs to be caulked and painted, too. After you lay and grout tile, you need to wipe it clean. As the house nears completion, appliances need to be installed.
Think about everything that goes into finishing a new house. There are all kinds of materials that get used in the completion of a home. Deliveries to construction sites normally occur in stages; you don’t deliver the dishwasher before the roof is put on, for example. The foundation gets poured, the lumber arrives, then the roofing materials, then the siding. Windows and doors go in. While that stuff is going on, the plumbing and electrical work takes place. Drywall gets hung and finished. While there’s sometimes some flexibility, the overall process has to be scheduled and coordinated so that one area is not interfering with another. (It’s best to install the wires and pipes before hanging drywall, for example.)
Instead of being delivered in stages, imagine if someone delivered all of the materials that would be used to build the house all at once and just set them down somewhere on the property. Given enough time, would those materials eventually assemble themselves into the finished product? For that to happen, things would have to naturally evolve from a state of chaos to a complex state of order.
A lot of scientists, scholars, and others are convinced that this is how we got our planet. Given enough time, if all the atoms and mass were present, they say, it’s obvious that it would shape itself into this world that can sustain life.
There’s a problem with that.
There’s a scientific principle called “Entropy” which states that the universe naturally progresses toward disorder, rather than order. Conditions will generally evolve from more complex conditions to less complex conditions. That is, orderly conditions in an environment will generally devolve into less orderly arrangements. What happens if you stop mowing your perfectly landscaped lawn for five years? Does it become more neat and tidy or more unkempt? Does your vehicle run better if you perform no maintenance on it, or does it require some upkeep?
This is why it’s tough to accept the part of Evolution that mandates rapid change within a single generation of organisms. The theory requires that a given species evolves to overcome some life-threatening obstacle. I’m all for being optimistic and the power of positive thinking and all that, but in must-evolve situations, it’s very simple: if you don’t quickly increase the specialization of a given species, it’s not going to survive. At-risk species that don’t evolve quickly enough to overcome an obstacle don’t survive to pass along modified genes. If they pass along unmodified genes in the same at-risk environment, the new generation has the same problem as the last one.
One of the often-overlooked problems when people are trying to shoot down Creationism is the starting point for life. Sure, things evolve over time, but if evolution is correct and humans and apes came from a common ancestor, which came from a simpler species, which came from single-celled organisms, there’s still a major problem. Somewhere along the line, life sprung from non-life. What did that look like? Where did life originally come from? Such a feat has never been observed to happen in a lab, so what are we missing? I cannot accept the premise that going from “molecules to man” is something that just happened without some kind of intelligent design. (For those that say Earth’s first microbes or bacteria arrived here on asteroids, the same question still applies: how did life start?)
This poses a major problem for those that oppose intelligent design theories. If you hang your entire theory on the notion that life began through some event that is completely unsupported from an empirical perspective, does that not take an amount of faith that is equal to subscribing to some version of the theory of intelligent design? Even if life didn’t originate here on Earth, it came from somewhere. If that life originated after the big bang, how could that possibly have happened? It could only have happened if something gave life to it.
Something to think about. New houses don’t just show up on their own. Beautiful biodiverse habitable planets don’t, either.
I can’t speak much for other parts of the world, but in the United States of America, turning 18 is kind of a big deal.
This is the age when you transition from being a minor to being an adult. Before turning 18, you’re still considered too young to have a firm understanding (or insufficient life experience) to be grounded enough to make good decisions.
I mean, think about it. There are some exceptions, but for the most part you can’t do these things before turning 18:
Get a tattoo or body piercing
Vote
Rent an apartment or buy a house
Join the military
Get married
The intent behind making it mandatory for a minor to turn 18 before being able to make the decision to embark on any of these things is because they all carry a certain weight or have long-lasting consequences. Many of these, after all, are life-altering decisions.
So you’ll understand if I express my disapproval that in many parts of the U.S., it’s easier for an 11-year-old to obtain gender reassignment surgery than it is to get a tattoo. (No, I’m not advocating that we lower the minimum tattoo age.) It is disturbingly easy to empower children to set off on a journey of permanent change without them having a firm grasp of the ramifications they’re agreeing to live with. Even if you’re a pro-trans activist, I think you’d have to agree with me on some level up to this point of the posting.
Let’s call a spade a spade here: we’re talking about mutilating children’s natural body parts and acting like it’s somehow archaic if we do not give them the opportunity to alter the course of their natural lives. I’m sorry, but if you can’t even get tattoos at that age, the government shouldn’t be allowing people under 18 to pursue such permanent reassignment surgeries.
Switching gears slightly, I have to ponder…given the prevalence of this issue in the national spotlight today, one would think there’s a tremendous amount of pent-up demand among minors. I’m not ready to hit the “I Believe” button on that issue, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose it’s true for a moment. As responsible adults, it’s up to people on both sides of the aisle to say “hey look, I recognize there’s a lot of demand for this, but pursuing this course of action is a major decision, so we’re going to make you put it on hold until you’re legally an adult.” Why isn’t that an easy piece of legislation to get passed?
I don’t really believe there IS a lot of demand for this type of thing among kids. That begs another question. If that’s true and there’s no major demand, why such a big push for it? I mean, if politicians are making something out of nothing, what’s the political goal of such a thing?
I guess I’d have to pull in a few other things to round out the picture. “Protecting Women’s rights” does not include fairness for female athletes, and it seems that rather than create a separate category or class of athlete, the party line is that it’s in competition’s best interest to allow biological males (or those born biological males) to compete in Women’s sports. That’s just one additional item. Let’s open the aperture a little more.
It’s pretty scary how much traction the “Defund the Police” movement got within the past few years. I wouldn’t say the tide has completely receded, but I think it’s reached its high-water mark by now. The hypocrisy of the people with the loudest voices calling for such a defunding (hiring personal security details or building walls around their homes) helps illustrate that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Kicking it up a notch though, is the District Attorney from Manhattan who announced recently he would no longer prosecute theft with the intent of establishing racial equity. (Ironically, this viewpoint justifies the use of racism to level the playing field.) What good can the police do if they catch someone robbing a home if that person is released from custody within hours?
Hang with me a little longer. Did you hear about this new mortgage situation? People with high credit scores, the ones that have made good decisions (you know, like “live within your means” or “pay your bills on time”) are now going to be required to pay extra fees to offset the risk associated with granting large loans to people with low credit scores. While I agree that homeownership creates a pathway to wealth, this is not the way to do it. This is essentially Communism by another name. “Everyone else deserves what you’ve worked hard for.”
Finally, the move from equality to equity. It doesn’t sound much different, does it? It’s only a change of two letters. It’s a gargantuan difference, though. I’m all for equality. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had it right. The person best suited for the job should get the job, whatever their background. Equity, however, means that the same outcome is desired across the board, so each person should be given whatever is necessary to empower them to achieve that result. I’m an out-of-shape white dude that’s over 40 years old. If I want to play in the NBA, equity says I should be given whatever it takes to ensure my success in that league. In games, there should be trampolines only I can use. Performance-enhancing drugs, officiating that goes in my favor, special rules…all should be on the table if we want equity.
To bring this to a close, it seems to me that all these viewpoints, with as little logical sense as they make, actually make quite a bit of political sense in one respect. If your goal is to tear down the existing system, these things will help you get there.
Now everybody knows that a nation of more than 330 million people can’t just burn down its government and let chaos reign. If you’re trying to topple the government that’s already there, you surely intend to replace it with something. And that, my friends, is the problem. In societies overrun with discontent and anger at those perceived to be hoarding resources, Communism has a very real chance at taking hold. Communism is second-to-none when it comes to political systems that cause large amounts of human suffering.
Whatever its faults, Capitalism rewards those that work hard. If there’s an inequality in the system (which, I will concede, there often is), the solution is to create more opportunities (as opposed to handouts) for those getting the short end of the stick, not punishing those flourishing.
If you’re roughly 45 years old or more, you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of Soviet Communism. You remember the harsh realities behind the Iron Curtain. Very little freedom. Very little food. God is abolished and replaced with the State and state-run religion. This is where we’re headed if the present culture of participation trophies and “I’m too stressed to work five days a week” prevails. Do not accept the notion of making the illogical acceptable. Get involved in local politics. Attend school board meetings. There are more of you than you might think, but most of them are thinking someone else will show up at the meetings.
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” – Edmund Burke
Let’s enter the imaginarium for a few moments here. Suppose that you were around to witness God’s drawing board when He was designing the universe.
To put some scale to the level of God’s creativity here, imagine just for a moment that you were going to write a short story about landing on an inhabited alien planet where no human has ever set foot. What would that planet look like? What kind of life would be there, and what governs the way they live their lives? Don’t be shy or hold back, be as creative as you possibly can.
You’d probably imagine things you’ve already seen or heard from movies, TV shows, or books. Taking something you’re already sort of familiar with, then tweaking it…we can call that one degree of separation. Now think about God creating this planet. He made it out of absolutely nothing, and He did it without anything to borrow inspiration from or to model after. That’s at least two degrees of separation, and it’s something we as humans have a hard time wrapping our minds around.
Back to God’s workshop. Some people might envision sketches of antelopes, clay models of whales, and a scale model of a sparrow in a wind tunnel. While that would all be pretty cool to watch unfold, I’m more fascinated with the way He, once again, from nothing, laid out the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology.
We’re so set on the constancy of what we know as physical laws that the idea sounds absurd, but God could just as easily established different rules and had them work out fine and still be in harmony with all the other naturally occurring laws He set in place. Imagine if instead of what we’re used to, the following things hold true:
Materials with greater densities float above those with lesser densities. Water boils at 50 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level. The speed of light is the same speed as the speed of sound. There are bugs that combine grains of sand to form volcanic rock. Zebras give birth to aardvarks. Visible light is not the only visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Space is hot, not cold. The sky is yellow, not blue. The earth spins not west to east, but south to north, and it takes 33 hours instead of 24 to make a complete rotation.
According to what we know and understand, any single one of these things simply cannot happen. If He wanted to, God could have made all of these “absurd rules” work together simultaneously, and have it make sense. He could have made them the physical and scientific laws we abide by, but He didn’t. The laws we observe and rely on are the ones He gave us, and they provide context for our understanding of the universe.
I’ve studied physics, chemistry, and biology to some degree, and it can be especially frustrating to get the math wrong and not be able to figure out where you went wrong. It’s very helpful, however, in getting some insight into just how creative God is; imagine being so creative that you come up with physical laws that work in harmony with all other physical laws and living things on the planet, and you nail it on the first shot. You even get the nuances and exceptions right! Just one example: there are three basic forms of matter…gas, liquid, and solid. Ordinarily as a molecule moves from solid to liquid to gas, it takes up increasing amounts of volume. On the flip side of that coin, a cloud of gas takes up less room as a liquid, and even less room as a solid. You’re fitting the same amount of mass into smaller amounts of volume, so it becomes more and more dense. Here’s the kicker – water doesn’t behave that way, and continued life on Earth depends on that fact. Water actually expands as it moves from liquid to solid form. (Ever freeze a full container of water? I hope you weren’t too attached to it.) This single concept changes everything, and getting it wrong meant we’d have a really hard time surviving. If water behaved like most other forms of matter, ice would form at the surface and then settle to the bottom, making room for more ice to form at the surface and subsequently settle. Eventually the whole body of water would freeze solid, (probably) killing anything living in it.
Or what about the fact that Earth’s core is a big glob of slowly spinning molten iron? This gigantic dynamo produces a magnetic field that extends beyond our planet and protects us by diverting the crippling charged particles that the sun is constantly emitting. If this magnetic field didn’t exist, the sun’s particles would relentlessly strip Earth of its atmosphere, creating two major problems for us. First, there would be nothing left to breathe. Second, the reduction in atmospheric pressure would cause all liquid water to boil off and escape into space, even at low temperatures. Our planet would become a lifeless dry rock with no significant atmosphere (like Mars), but because God set things up so that the science would work together to maintain a habitable environment, we’re still able to walk around without wearing pressure suits.
It’s mind-blowing! The logic and creativity is without parallel. Yes, God is a God of love, of compassion, of power, of emotion, of so many “touchy-feely” things, but He’s also the God of logic, of order, of completeness, of “yeah, I considered all of those things when I set the universe in motion.” In the military I heard about the importance of weighing the “second- and third-order effects” of an event. God considers the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh order effects of an event, and then some.
That’s the God we serve. He’s not some aloof buffoon sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating grapes and throwing lightning bolts. He’s alive and well, and He’s actively involved in what happens every day in the life of His creation’s masterpiece: you. The next time that you feel your life is nothing more than an accident or that nobody even knows you’re there, remember that the God of all things had you in mind when He created this world, and when He went to the cross. The creator of the world decided He would rather die than live without you. He sees you, you matter to Him, and He has a plan for your life.
Oh God, the more we learn about science, the more it points to you. Some students of science will go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the evidence of a designer, but thank you so much for revealing yourself through it! May You be glorified through it!
Last week I talked about the shifting ground underneath our feet and the importance of having solid footing. “That’s all well and good,” you may say, “but what’s that look like in the course of living daily life?” Today I’d like to talk about an application. Today let’s examine the erosion of truth.
We’ve got an “Emperor’s new clothes” situation here. Our culture as a whole is afraid to define what a man is and what a woman is. Today’s topic has gained so much traction that even our most recent Supreme Court Justice during her confirmation hearing wriggled out of answering the question of defining what a woman is. While I certainly understand wanting to avoid being caught in an obvious trap during a confirmation hearing, the fact that anyone at this level of government was able to avoid answering such a simple question by saying “I’m not a biologist” testifies to the sad state of truth in our world today.
This post contains nothing hateful, but I imagine some will imply otherwise because of its “close minded, binary thinking.” America’s experience with COVID gave rise to the phrase “follow the science,” so I don’t see it as unreasonable for that phrase to apply in other areas of life.
Back before science got politicized to the degree it is today, this was an easy topic to address. Politics shouldn’t affect science. Biologically speaking, a human female has two X chromosomes, and a human male has an X and a Y chromosome. There is no fluidity in moving back and forth from one to the other, it’s established and set before birth. If you were born with an X and a Y chromosome, you are, and always will be, a dude. If you don’t like living as a dude, you might try to hide it, but you won’t ever change the fact that you’re a male. Dudes are able to undergo medical procedures and take hormones to make changes to their body, but they can’t change their chromosome makeup. If you’ve decided to undergo such things, medically speaking, you’ll always be a dude with an X and a Y chromosome that’s modified your body. (To be clear, this is a post about truth. It’s a completely separate discussion from your right to live according to your desired lifestyle.) Your appearance may fool me in some cases, but you can’t convince me that you were born a male and are now a female.
“That’s hateful!” Bullfeathers. Facts aren’t hateful, but they’re inconvenient if you embrace a worldview that’s based on things that aren’t true. Follow the science.
One of the clearest examples of this right now is the collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas. Lia Thomas was born with an X and a Y chromosome and got into competitive swimming. He then decided he wanted to compete in women’s swimming. Is it a sexist thing to say that Lia Thomas, born a male and possessing the musculature of a man, has an unfair competitive advantage over swimmers that were born females? I don’t know if “sexist” is the right word for it, but people definitely don’t want this thought expressed. Cranking up the fear to generate hesitation in speaking out against things like this is not an accident. If anyone is controlling your thoughts, they’re effectively controlling you, now aren’t they?
(As a brief aside here, if everyone’s concerned about fairness, the obvious solution is to move from a two-division class of sports (male and female) to an eight-division paradigm. One for males, one for females, one for those born male but now living as something they describe as other than male, one for those born female but now living as something they describe as other than female, and my favorites: the same four classes, but with all manner of performance-enhancing drugs being fair game. [I say that jokingly, but c’mon, out of those eight classes, which would YOU rather watch? Just don’t grow too attached to any of the competitors; I can’t imagine any of them will have a terribly long lifespan…])
“A person’s gender isn’t based only on science. It’s based partly on them knowing, and having a connection with who they really are.” Hmmm. Okay. How do you validate that knowledge? If you suspect you are something other than what your chromosomal makeup dictates, how do you confirm your suspicions? What test can you perform on a newborn that provides empirical results for this type of thing? If you want to use that line of thinking, what do you think about anorexics or bulimics that “know” they need to lose more weight? If they don’t even have the strength to get out of bed because they’re so underweight and undernourished, yet feel very strongly that they weigh too much, you must also believe they’re correct based on their strong feelings, is that true?
Regardless of gender or sex, every single person alive right now needs the love and forgiveness that comes from a relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m not saying the people discussed in this post can’t be geniuses, amazing friends, or really good people…I’m highlighting the degree to which the truth of something so basic has eroded in our society.
This is a single example of blurring the line between truth and lies. What is the ultimate goal of creating this uncertainty? As a religious fellow, I believe it’s ultimately Satan’s goal to taint every aspect of what God stands for and of how a person gets to Heaven. Lots of people believe in God or in Heaven and Hell, but they think that the way you get to Heaven is by being a good person or by living a good life. They have no idea that being a good person has nothing to do with it. According to the Bible, the single most important truth anyone can hear is that acceptance of Jesus Christ, who was both fully God and fully man, as their personal savior is the only way to enter Heaven and spend eternity in fellowship with God. You can never be good enough on your own.
If you’re Satan and you viciously hate everything about God, yet are powerless to harm Him, you will do everything within your power, working over the course of thousands of years, to distract from, water down, or erode that central truth. If the process of doing that requires you to employ a scorched-earth policy that causes confusion by eroding all basic truths, then so much the better.
I’ll say it again. According to the Bible, the single most important truth anyone can hear is that acceptance of Jesus Christ, who was both fully God and fully man, as their personal savior is the only way to enter Heaven and spend eternity in fellowship with God. You can never be good enough on your own. Let that truth ring out loud and clear, be repeated constantly, and define how you live your life.
A lot of Christians struggle to reconcile what the Bible says with the available scientific evidence. Case in point: according to your beliefs, how old is the earth?
Science says that the earth is more than four and a half billion years old. That doesn’t square with a strict reading of the Bible, though. The Bible says that not only the earth, but the entire universe…everything that is…was created in seven literal 24-hour days, probably between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
This presents a problem for many Christ-followers. I’ve heard some water down what the Bible says in order to make it fit the science. “I don’t think it was one literal week, I think it was figuratively referring to the process that actually took billions of years.” Or maybe “I believe God intentionally inspired the author of Genesis to use vague language, so that it’s not clear.”
Consider another alternative. The scientific evidence we observe is accurate and makes sense, and God created the whole universe in seven literal days less than 10,000 years ago.
How could this be? I offer this theory: instead of creating the earth as if it were brand new, God created it as though it were already in-progress.
What does that mean? It means when the earth was only a month old, it already had the appearance of being much older. Instead of creating a molten Earth with flat terrain, taking millions of years for plate tectonics to build mountains and for glaciers to carve valleys, there were already crumbling mountains and an amazing Grand Canyon by the time Adam and Eve showed up.
Half-lives of Carbon and other elements used for dating old materials would present a compelling case for an earth that’s much older than 10,000 years. The part that’s not going to jump out at us is the part where those elements were created in a partially decayed state. Science can present us with verifiable facts, but in order for us to get the full story there are still considerations apart from science.
“Mmmmm, yeah, I’m still not buying it,” says the science-leaning Christian. Okay. How about this spin on the “chicken or egg” problem? Adam took his first breath as a full-grown man. He was never “born” in the traditional sense. Since he never had a need for an umbilical cord, do you think Adam had a belly button?
If Adam did lots of crunches and took selfies
It’s an odd question, perhaps. Of course, we have no way of knowing from our reading of Genesis, but since Adam was made in God’s image, would he be functionally different from what we are today? I can’t say it with certainty, but I say no. The main recorded physiological difference between Adam and modern man is that he may have been born with more ribs than we were. (Genesis 2:21-23 gives a little more information on this subject.)
From what we know about the way Adam was brought to life, if he had a belly button, it was more for decorative use than functional. Obviously he didn’t need it, but if it was there, it was likely because everyone else after that point would have one, and since he was the first man he should look like everyone else. Is this an odd discussion? Absolutely! It meshes with the theory listed above though: God created everything as though we picked up in the middle of a movie. If that’s true, is it such a stretch to claim that yes, science would suggest the earth is over four and a half billion years old, but that there’s also a perfectly good reason to think it’s much younger?
Not only is God good, He’s the God of logic. Why would the Creator of science leave a trail of evidence that leads His followers away from what He claims in the Bible?
So you’re a Christian, huh? You seem like a pretty rational person other than the fact that you believe the universe and mankind were created in seven 24-hour days less than 10,000 years ago, that a 500-year-old man built a huge boat and then went out and gathered two of every kind of animal in the world onto it, that a big fish swallowed a dude and swam around with him alive in its belly for three days before vomiting him up unharmed, and that a virgin gave birth to the Messiah, who was able to turn water into wine, walk on water, and raise himself from the dead. But yeah, other than that you seem pretty rational.
Why on earth would any reasonable person become a Christian?
It’s okay to have and explore questions like this, because if you can’t provide a response, how will skeptics in your life ever learn the truth? This is the “mind” part of when Christ stated the importance of loving the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. I’ll share a little bit about one thing that helps assure me that God is out there and that He’s in charge of history.
People that aren’t familiar with the Bible usually don’t understand that it’s not a monolith. It’s not a huge book that was written by a single author. It consists of 66 books written by nearly 40 authors, spread out over the course of hundreds of years (with a big gap between the Old and New Testaments).
Aside from the events that took place in the Bible, there are a lot of “nonreligious” things that happened in history. Think about major international news events of the modern era. World War II took place; men landed on the moon; the Berlin Wall came down; 9/11 happened; Russia annexed Crimea; and the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series. In the same way that those events can all be verified outside of religion, there are plenty of other writers outside the Bible that captured some of the world’s major events that the Bible wrote about.
Can you imagine if someone predicted all those major events I just mentioned decades, or even hundreds of years before they happened, with a decent amount of specificity? It would surely raise a few eyebrows, and odds are you’d be curious to take a look at the other things the author wrote.
That’s exactly what happens in the book of Daniel. It predicted the rise and fall of several empires, and even described each of them to some degree. Daniel predicted the then-future (which is our history), and now in hindsight we are able to corroborate from non-biblical sources the accuracy of those predictions. That’s like Abraham Lincoln stating that Tom Brady would one day join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers…before the sport of football had even been invented. We can look in history books to verify that the Babylonian Empire was captured by the Persian Empire, who then fell to Alexander the Great, and upon his death the territory he’d conquered got split up into four different regions and was given to four of his generals. We hear of an unbelievably arrogant king that we learn from extra-biblical sources to be Antiochus IV Epiphenes. Daniel chapter 11 discusses some of the efforts at diplomacy and trickery between some of these four. Then the book describes events that are still in our future.
When you consider the magnitude of what this represents, you begin to understand that the book of Daniel is about much more than a story about a lion’s den. If you study the book of Daniel closely, you see that it laid out the future with a startling amount of detail. To anyone alive during the time Daniel’s prophecies came true, imagine the credibility his writings gained. Wouldn’t you want to learn more about what Daniel said and how he knew the future? Daniel pointed straight to God and gave Him the glory for being able to control and know the future.
This is only one case of how common sense and logical thought build a case for the idea that there’s more than what we can see. Put them together and the case starts to get pretty strong. How can a rational person be a Christian? How can you not at least consider it?
Mr. Spock: one of the most rational (half) people I know. Courtesy of Pinterest.
