For thousands of years, man has applied a huge variety of things to his skin to help injuries heal. By trial and error he has come up with ointments that keep injured skin moist to assist the natural healing process. Antibiotics were eventually added to these ointments. But until recently no one has been able to actually increase the rate at which skin naturally heals.
Continue reading →
In many verses of the Bible, God is described as omnipotent or all-powerful. In Genesis 17:1, God describes Himself to Abraham by saying, “I am Almighty God.” Abraham’s son, Isaac, in blessing his son Jacob, said: “May God Almighty bless you….” The omnipotent nature of God can be seen throughout the Bible. The psalmist wrote: “Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5). From such verses, we get the idea that God can do anything that can be accomplished with power. We also get the idea that God’s power never runs out, and He does not get tired. As Isaiah wrote: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary” (40:28).
At evilbible.com, a website that purports to “spread the vicious truth about the Bible” (2013), the very first alleged “obvious contradiction” listed involves Genesis 1:31 and Genesis 6:6. Since Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good,” and Genesis 6:6 reveals that “the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart,” the Bible is said to be contradictory and untrustworthy. Allegedly, the Lord could not be both satisfied and dissatisfied with His Creation.
Of course, so-called Christians have used the Bible inappropriately to justify much cruelty. But we shouldn’t ask if the Bible has been used to justify cruelty, but instead, does the Bible teach cruelty. This passage doesn’t teach that humans should be cruel to animals or the planet, but that we should be stewards of it. In fact, at the end of human history, God will judge people based on how they treat the Earth. John writes, “The time came for the dead to be judged… to destroy those who destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18). Moreover, Solomon writes, “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal” (Prov. 12:10).
This verse doesn’t imply there is more than one God. Aside from the suggestion that this refers to the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is also possible to give the interpretation that this is a reflection of the conceptual image the Jews had of God. For them he was multi-faceted and did not have only one side to his character as did the other gods around them. This was why he was called Elohim, which is the plural for the singular El (God), and this may be an ancient remnant, or a particular place of expression, where God’s action/nature as non-singular was emphasized.
The environment naturally produces hazardous waste without human help. Ashes from a wood fire can contain enough naturally occurring radioactivity to merit a hazardous waste classification. Uranium and other radioactive elements occur naturally in the environment and can be dissolved in ground water. Chloro fluorocarbons, manufactured for refrigeration, are also spewed from volcanoes. Also called CFCs, these chemicals are thought by some scientists to degrade the earth’s ozone layer. The fact is, nature produces more hazardous waste than does man.
Continue reading →
There is grain for sale in Egypt. (Genesis 42:2)
I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love. (Hosea 11:4)
There is a kind of swagger in modern evangelicalism that I’ve grown to despise. It’s the swagger of people who speak as if God is pacing the floors of heaven wringing His hands, desperately hoping somebody down here with a fog machine, a sermon series logo, and a half-baked marketing strategy can finally help Him “reach this generation.”’
Continue reading →
You are my servant, I have chosen you. (Isaiah 41:9)
Problem: Christ is “the beginning of the creation of God” (KJV, NKJV, NASB).
Christ is “the ruler of God’s creation” (NIV).
Christ is “the Origin, Beginning and Author of God’s creation” (Amplified Bible).
Christ is “the Originator of God’s creation” (Holman Christian Standard Bible).
Anyone who does not love does not know God. (I John 4:8)
The distinguishing mark of a Christian is his confidence in Christ’s love for him and in the offering of his love to Christ. First, faith sets her seal upon the man by enabling the soul to say with the apostle, “Christ loved me and gave himself for me.”1 Then love gives the countersign and stamps upon the heart gratitude and love to Jesus in return. “We love because he first loved us.”2
Problem: This verse tells us that our love isn’t perfect if we’ve had fear. Other verses clearly extoll fear as something near necessary (Rom. 3:18, 11:20; 2 Cor. 5:11, 7:1, 11, 15; Eph. 6:5; Heb. 11:7; Jude 1:12, 23; Rev. 19:5).
Problem: The word “fear” appears in the New King James Version of the Bible 367 times. In some of these occurrences, the text is expounding upon “the fear of the Lord” and its relationship to wisdom (cf. Job 28:28; Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7). In numerous other passages of Scripture, one can read where God commands that His creation fear Him (Leviticus 25:17; Deuteronomy 6:13; Matthew 10:28; et al.). It is widely known that one of the repeated truths in the Bible is that God’s “mercy is on those who fear Him” (Luke 1:50). It also is well known, however, that in the New Testament Paul informed Timothy that “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). The apostle John went even further, saying, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment” (1 John 4:18).
In the Kyle Butt/Dan Barker debate, Dan Barker alleged that He “knows” the God of the Bible cannot exist because “there are mutually incompatible properties/characteristics of the God that’s in this book [the Bible—EL] that rule out the possibility of His existence” (2009). One of the supposed contradictions that Barker mentioned was that God claims invisibility, yet has been seen. (His assertion is found 10 minutes and 55 seconds into his first speech.) Since biblical passages such as Exodus 33:20-23, John 1:18, and 1 John 4:12 teach that God cannot be seen, while other scriptures indicate that man has seen God and spoken to him “face to face” (Exodus 33:11; Genesis 32:30), allegedly “the God of the Bible does not exist.”