A buddy of mine sent me an article in the Washington Post about recent thinking in how old the Grand Canyon (the one in Arizona not the one in Pennsylvania in case you were confused) is. The article states that there is debate as to whether the pothole-relative-from-space is 5 million years old or 17 million years old. No doubt this makes a difference because when you find objects at different sediment levels, you date them relative to the age of the sediment you found them in and each sediment is dated based on its surroundings. So, the actual age of the Grand Canyon will have some effect on these ages. Nowhere in the article do you find any discussion of “creationism” or any such derivatives, this article is purely informative from a scientific viewpoint and does not attempt to crush any debates, which is a great compliment to the reporter.

Then I read the readers’ comments.

The very first comment on the article was this:

Hey, I thought the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old because it was formed during the Great Flood!

At least that’s what a minister once told me. Perhaps he was wrong?

The first one! I kept reading, they’re all the same. Everyone wanted to mock young-earth creationism. This is instantly on the minds of a lot of people, myself included from the other perspective, when they read through any article related to dinosaurs, evolution, geological ages, etc. Why is this? Why do people skip over the content of the article and head directly to the hot topics, the ones that are controversial?

Maybe we can say that deep down, people feel like if they can debunk the truthfulness of the Bible, they don’t have to believe it or the author of it. The Bible says that creation speaks of God’s workmanship and that man has looked upon God’s creation and suppressed the truth that God was the one behind it. So, the burden of proof is not on Christians to defend the creation aspects of the Bible. God has taken this upon Himself.

But, this certainly does not mean that we should give up on pursuing these aspects of study. Christians have been at the forefront of the study of God’s creation (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, etc.) for a long time. Without their studies, the world would be lacking in the most basic things we take for granted today (the earth revolving around the sun for example). The study of the sciences and God’s creation should point us to God, never away.

Now it’s your turn to comment. Are Christians the cause of some of this? Have we made too big an issue of creation/evolution and caused that to be a great dividing line? Do you think this is a worthy dividing line?

I’m sorry to be posting this so late, but the guys at T4G have been giving away admissions to the T4G ‘08 conference if they appreciate your answer to a series of questions they have been posting. Have a look here.

The Associated Press is running a story today with the details of a handwritten letter found in the car of the Colorado gunman who killed 4 people in Dec. 2007. I can’t seem to find a copy of the whole letter but the bits and pieces found in the article are difficult to read: “Jesus, where are you? Do you even care these days?”, “What have I done so wrong? What is wrong with me anyways? Am I really such a bad person?”, and the most telling “Am I too lost to be saved? My soul cries for deliverance. I’m dieing (sic), praying, bleeding and screaming. Will I be denied???”.

How many millions have these same thoughts?

I wonder though, if someone were to share similar thoughts with you as a reason they didn’t believe, what would you say to them?  It would be great to get some discussion going on this topic so maybe I can start off with a few things.

• Am I too lost to be saved? Two Scripture passages come to mind, Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” and Luke 23:39-43 where the thief condemned on the cross cries out to Jesus and Jesus assures him he would join him in heaven. One passage gives clear teaching that Christ died for unworthy sinners, not somewhat worthy sinners or sinners with a little bit of good in them. There is no distinction here, it says that Christ died for those who needed salvation the most. The other passage gives an example of a man who was so lost in his sins that he was sent to his death but yet Jesus still assures him that his sins will be forgiven. The condemned sinner has no chance to prove his salvation by living a good life afterwards, he died in a few hours.
• Will I be denied? Romans 10:13 (quoting Joel 2:32) “for ‘whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved’”. This is pretty clear teaching that God will deny no one who calls on him for salvation. I think we need to be careful here though, Jesus talks about people who try and get in through a back door by believing in Jesus but still attempting to work their way into heaven by their good works in Matthew 7:21-23. Salvation is of the Lord (Jonah 2:9), it is not of man’s good works.
• What have I done so wrong? Again, Romans 1:23 says we all have exchanged the glory of God for an idol. We have all traded what is infinitely valuable for what is worthless. Everyone has done this, everyone has sinned against God. It is important to talk about our sinful nature and not our individual sins though. People easily get hung up on a one-time sin they did a long time ago, or they are caught up in a repetitive habit of the same sin over and over and can’t get past this. But, it’s not like God overlooks all the other smaller dirt and just focuses on the mud pile so that if you could just find forgiveness for the one big sin everything would be ok. All of these sins we commit are the evidence of our sinful nature, our bent towards doing the opposite of what we know to be the right thing to do. We need salvation from our sinful selves and Christ promises to forgive all sins.

Now it’s your turn, would you say things differently? What else would you say? The gunman also asked, Why couldn’t you write your (expletive) book more clearly?” What would you say to that?

Sorry for the sneaky title. Ligonier is offering a free PDF of some of their books if you agree to review it on your blog. After they review your…review…they will send you a free hard-copy of the same book you wrote about. I picked up The Truth of the Cross in PDF format and easily put it on my Kindle (look for a review soon). Then I realized that Reformation Trust doesn’t offer their books on the Kindle but they obviously have PDF versions readily available. This then lead to the obvious question; Why don’t more publishers offer electronic versions of their books if they have them? I realize there is a lot to the publishing world I don’t know about so please excuse my ignorance in this matter. I’m not just looking to get every book on my Kindle, I just think a lot of folks would love to have a PDF copy of the hard-copy books they purchase. This way you could read the hard-copy books on paper but also have the ability to use the PDF as a search-able reference document for later studies (not all of us have Al Mohler’s uncanny ability to memorize every book he reads).

Does anyone have some insight into this?

News titles don’t come any better than this

Tiny post-it notes left on a Chuck Norris “shrine” in Iraq by US troops left me in stitches: The fastest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist, and Chuck Norris divides by zero. Classic.

Get out your checklists!

Have a look.

The March/April edition of the 9Marks journal is available here. The focus is on gospel unity/division, from Jonathan Leeman:

all the writers in this issue of the 9Marks eJournal make their attempt at striking the balance between the gospel’s call to unity and its call to separation

First Things has an interview with Tim Keller. You can find the Bob Newhart skit he’s talking about here.

Here is a video of Randy Pausch, Professor at CMU, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, doctors say, doesn’t have more than a few months to live. After giving a group of his students at CMU a “last lecture” which was downloaded over six million times, Oprah caught wind of it and invited him on her show to deliver that same lecture to her audience.

This man is trying to leave something for his kids to listen to when they grow up. His desire is that they don’t waste their lives and so he tells them things like, “Always tell the truth, apologize when you make mistakes, be patient with others, and live life to the fullest.” He also mentioned that “things” are just things and people are more important so we should not get attached to our stuff. These seem like good things to remind your children. He also included this advice:

“If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself”

and

“If you live properly the dreams will come to you”

But the one that really stuck out to me was this:

“In life, you can choose to complain or you can choose to play the game harder, which is probably going to be more helpful to you in the long-run”

And the reason this caught my hear was because he used the term “long-run”, which is a relative term but given Dr. Pausch’s circumstances this term has particular meaning to it. I’m not looking for comments here, and I would actually prefer if folks did not comment, but I would like to ask you to think about two questions; What does the long-run mean to Dr. Pausch? and, after listening to this lecture, what do you think Dr. Pausch’s hope is in right now? After thinking about these, please apply them to yourself; what does the long-run mean to you and what have you placed your hope in?