FEBRUARY 2018

    3) Don’t just read through books, but champion them. That is, allow yourself a cursory read, but then go back and study that same book a bit more; journal from it, ask questions of the text, read commentaries about it. Champion Nahum (tremendous theology about the jealously, vengeance and forgiveness of God), or 2 Thessalonians (great eschatology), or Leviticus (the phrases that are repeated in Leviticus show you not just the core of that book, but also the heart and passions of God Himself). Try to master one book, especially if it is shorter, before leaping to the next one.    4) I would think that this goes without saying, but I feel like I need to say it anyway. One of the most invigorating elements of personal Bible study is being in good church that teaches the Bible, and that doesn’t just echo Christian platitudes. A good preacher will demonstrate every week how to do effective Bible study through specific passages of the Bible and how to create powerful personal applications from those verses. Also, get involved with a smaller Bible study if you are not in one now. The best teachers are the ones who allow you to ask the most questions, not the ones who try to shut you down while they are going through their lesson. Your individual Bible study will thrive if we are also spending time in corporate Bible study, and learning from others about what God is teaching them through His Word.

    If you’ve been discouraged with your Bible study in the past, I would encourage you to pick it up again and give it a try. Some of the most accessible and interesting books include Psalms, Philippians, Proverbs and James.

    Don’t worry about getting through your Bible in a year; that often only encourages thoughtless speed-reading. Try to study through your Bible in a decade, spending at least some time in each of the sixty-six books of the Bible. Take time to read, study, and meditate on these books. 

    Pray for God to give you insight and for Him to help you understand the passage that you are studying. Look for interesting words, or theological points, or for other verses that the passage you are in reminds you about. Strive to understand what you read and then work on applying what you’ve studied in specific and tangible ways. I can almost guarantee that these tips will revolutionize the way you read your Bible.

    What other tips would you pass on about how Bible reading can be more interesting, meaningful and fun? Send your suggestions and thoughts to feedback@eclectickasper.com, and we’ll reproduce good feedback anonymously in an upcoming editions!

THE AGE OF THE EARTH: A Young Earth and the God of a Lesser Deception, Part 1

    The first two articles in this five or six-part series about the age of the earth are presented in this edition, and the rest will follow in subsequent editions. What we will argue is that the issue of the age of the earth is not an obscure theological or scientific question, but rather, it has a wide variety of implications, the most important of which involves Bible interpretation. We hope you enjoy these articles and feel free to send your own thoughts in to feedback@eclectickasper.com. 

    I recently heard a presentation by a scientist who is a Christian. 

    He discussed the Big Bang that allegedly happened 13 billions of years ago and how God occasionally nudged evolutionary processes so that life would appear on this planet at the optimal time, about 4.5 billions of years ago. He ended by lamely noting that the beauty and order of nature could possibly suggest that God may have created something and may possibly have been distantly involved with this process (perhaps). 

    Some of the people in the crowd gently challenged the speaker during the Q&A period. While nobody actually asked, Have you ever heard of the Bible? and Have you ever actually read Genesis 1?, these questions seemed clearly implied under the guise of far more polite queries. The speaker fumbled through responses, but the answer seemed to be “no” on both counts.

    One sheepish young man at the end of the Q&A session had the courage to ask, “What do you say to someone who believes that God made the world about ten thousand years ago but with the appearance of age?”

    With more clarity than I had heard the previous 75 minutes, the speaker intoned that a God who made the world and the universe with the appearance of age was a fraud and a liar. Such an act was uncharacteristic of the God of the Bible, presumably the same Bible that the speaker had already demonstrated scant knowledge of.

    I am a young-earther myself. I frankly don’t care if “young earth” means that creation occurred six thousand years ago, or ten thousand or twenty thousand years ago. I affirm that there may be gaps in some of the genealogies that allow for this range. This issue of the age of the earth is not necessarily a hill that I would die on; however, I have come to appreciate that suggesting that the earth is millions or billions of years old is an egregious disservice to the clear exegesis of the Bible, and especially of Genesis 1.

    But at moments in the past, and at this particular event, I found myself concerned about the implications of this answer. Does a ten-thousand-year-old earth that has the appearance of age make God a liar and a fraud, a cosmic Mastermind behind a great deception?

    However, two realities – I won’t even call them “proofs” but “realities” – undermine the notion that God is a deceptive fraud for creating a young earth with the appearance of age. And of course, we’re using the word ‘deception’ in the title of these articles ironically, as we do not consider God to be in any way the author of deceit. I’ll deal with the first of these realities in the remainder of this article, and the second one in the next. 

    First, we don’t consider the appearance of age to be deceptive in other contexts, so why should we make God a fraud and a liar because He created a young, but functional earth. In fact, I will note here that the organization Creation Ministries International prefers to say that God created the earth with functional maturity, not with the “appearance of age.” This a helpful distinction, one that I may explore at a later time, though I’m not sure that this legitimately solves the deceptively-old-looking-earth dilemma.

    In many contexts, we like and want the appearance of age. For instance, when one of our boys was much younger, we bought him a costume of Jango Fett, from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. It wasn’t for Halloween or any other specific event, but we just thought that he would like dressing up as Jango Fett, and our parental instincts weren’t amiss.

    But while taking the costume out of the Party City bag, I noticed that it had some imperfections on the chest piece. I was a bit disappointed that I had paid full price for damaged goods! I pointed this out to my youngster, who, without blinking, noted that the marks were the remnants of blaster fire! That is, the creators of this costume didn’t want to give kids a pristine Jango Fett costume, but one that made the wearer look like it had been battle tested with several blaster marks to prove it! Ironically, these clever and well-placed imperfections didn’t make the costume more fake, but they made it more authentic. We didn’t feel cheated, or that the makers had done us a disservice; quite the reverse.

    Another example: My wife and I know a man who upon retirement pursued his passion for woodworking and furniture making. I remember when he proudly showed us a late nineteenth-century dresser that he had built. Of course, you can’t actually make nineteenth-century furniture; you can only make twenty-first century furniture! However, you can currently make a piece in the style of another century. As long as you don’t lie about its age, you can honestly and authentically enjoy the fact that it was made with the appearance of age, a lesser and quite-excusable deception. We don’t consider such a crafts-person to be a fraud or a liar for this anachronism.

    These kinds of examples abound. Faithful readers know that my family and I enjoy attending Renaissance festivals. The shops, the village sets, and the period costumes are all recently made; none of them are actually five hundred years old. But they are made to look like they are both old and aged, not just of a place that is five hundred years old but of a place that had been around for hundreds of years before that! As such, the painstaking efforts that have been put into these buildings to make them appear old and weathered forge an experience of a late medieval town that is more authentic, not less. 

    Similarly, God didn’t take billions of years to make the earth. He didn’t need to! Rather, He created the universe and the earth with the appearance of age so that humanity could enjoy the benefits of a functionally mature environment. This leads us to the second “reality” regarding this issue, which we will discuss in Part 2 of this article below.

SOCIETY/ CULTURE: Gold(schmidt), Franken-sense, and Moore: Implications of A Scandal-Ridden Culture

    As we were approaching the Christmas season in 2017 we being bombarded with information about the latest sex scandals among prominent politicians and Hollywood personalities. We should have been thinking about tinsel and mistletoe, angels and shepherds, as well as gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Instead, we heard of Hollywood’s hypocrisy, Al Franken’s complete lack-of-sense, and the inexplicable and creepy deeds of Roy Moore. 

    Unlike many other things, the sex scandal machine seemed oblivious to power and prominence, bringing down industry powerhouses like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer. Nothing like sex scandals to almost ruin the holidays!

    These stories about scandals subsided for a while, perhaps being swallowed by the business of the Christmas season, and perhaps the public just developed scandal apathy. Yet, here in the New Year, we have a new series of allegations against actors like actors James Franco and Aziz Ansari, director Paul Haggis, and recent gold medalist Shaun White. It seems that constant news crawlers about sex scandals is the new norm.

    Thought it was the most prominent personalities in politics, sports and media who received the most attention, there are also many lesser-known creeps among the luminaries in the sex-offending firmament. These include John Lasseter, former head of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, Hollywood manager Vincent Cirrincione who was accused of making sexual advances by 21 different women, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, and Bryan Singer, creative genius behind The Usual Suspects and the best films in the X-Men franchise. Other individuals whose careers have been ended by sexual harassment allegations include John Conyers Jr., U.S. representative for Michigan, Chef Mario Batali, and radio host Garrison Keillor. The “Weinstein Effect” has pervaded virtually every industry and aspect of our country.

    These scandals continue to be riddled with hypocrisy and contradiction. Even accusers themselves have fallen prey to allegations against them. California lawmaker and #metoo movement leader Cristina Garcia has been accused of harassment according to several reports presented in early February 2018. Fortunately, Sports Illustrated is doing its part to fight sexual harassment by using their latest edition of their notorious swimsuit issue to feature near naked women with female-empowering words written on them. First of all, how has the SI swimsuit edition ever been about anything other than the exploitation of women? Second, as a Fox News article queries in its title, “Are empowering words on naked bodies really what we need right now?” I don’t think that anyone is solving the problem by feeding the symptoms.

    What do these sex scandals say about us, and what implications do we draw from them about an increasingly sex-scandal plagued culture?

    First, the “Weinstein Effect” has overtaken far more men than women. When the affair-encouraging Ashley-Madison website was hacked, of the 11 millions of users, only a few thousand active users were women. A Business Insider article, related that “only 2,409 of the women had ever used the site’s chat function, versus more than 11 million men.” With few exceptions, this is clearly a guy problem.

    Second, the sex-scandals involve more people of the democratic and liberal ilk than those on the conservative side. It seems that more of those who have been swept up by the Weinstein Effect in politics, media and elsewhere veer left, and usually far left, rather than right.

    This may be, in part, a party problem; the Democrats have had many prominent statesmen who have served as role models for bad behavior, including several Kennedys, Neil Edward Goldschmidt, debunked former governor of Oregon, and former President Bill Clinton. I’m not saying there aren’t creeps within the GOP tent, again, Roy Moore, provided a good example of a bad example on the right. And again, this is more of a guy problem, and a sin problem, than an ideological or political problem. Yet the overwhelming amount of high- and mid- profile people who have been hit with sex allegations are liberals. 

    Without delving too deeply into the analysis here, I will just suggest that conservatives probably lean more toward faith systems and ideologies where personal morality is considered more central to their thinking and behavior. Thus, they are less likely to find themselves involved with these kinds of scandals. That said, we could probably write a follow-article on all of the prominent religious leaders who have been haunted by indiscretions from their past and present. Nonetheless, this current wave of sex scandal allegations do involve more people on the left than on the right, and there may be several reasons for that, however, the right is clearly not immune either.

    A few more implications: The past is not as pristine as we thought. Figures like Bill Cosby, Neil Goldschmidt and Ted Kennedy remind us that this problem has been going on for decades, and certainly longer. The most Elizabethan periods of time were probably littered with many scandals that few ever saw. We happen to be both privileged and burdened to live in a time when scandals are harder to hide and when we have to learn about more of them than we really want to.  

    Which leads us to our last point: Your sins will find you out. It is true that either in this life or in the next, in a subtle way or in a very public way, our actions do have consequences and ramifications that we usually cannot predict. This notion should be terrifying to all of us; it should serve as a deterrent for people both in high-profile positions and the rest of us who live, work and play in relative anonymity. In an age where cameras are ubiquitous and where the government and Google probably have records of every website we visit, it is all the more important to exercise self-control and good sense.

    So, what else do these sex scandals say about us? What other implications could we draw about our culture from this sex-epidemic? Send your thoughtful responses to feedback@eclectickasper.com and we’ll reprint good feedback anonymously in a future edition.

ROMANS: Getting Real About People, Romans 3:12-14

    On more than one occasion as a kid I was told, “Watch your mouth.” It was an odd turn of speech in that I couldn’t really see my mouth, my giant nose being in the way. Though usually, when I was being told to watch my mouth, an argument about semantics didn’t seem appropriate, so I kept my mouth shut.

    The Bible has much to say about how our speech patterns reflect our hearts, and the portrait is often not very complimentary. As Paul continues his diatribe about human depravity utilizing Old Testament quotes, Romans 3:12-14 address several issues about how depravity seeps out through our lips and often verifies how truly evil we are.

    Verse 12 continues with the “there is none” statements from verses 10-11, and we described in our last Romans article why these verses are absolute statements declaring that depravity extends to all people without exception. In verse 12, Paul continues to quote from Psalm 14:3 and 53:3. Paul asserts that by turning away from God, people have not become better, but rather, are “useless,” “worthless” or “debased” (the Greek word achreioo). We believe that we can increase our worth and value by jettisoning God, and the opposite occurs instead.

    It seems like so many people do good humanitarian work in this world, and yet, Paul puts all of that into perspective. Relative to achieving our own holiness or earning salvation, nobody does good. Once again, the phrase “not even one,” paralleling the phrase in v. 10, minimizes any possibility of relativity in this passage. These condemnations against humanity are universal, there are not exceptions, there are not a few who are better or somehow more worthy of being saved than others. Nobody has done works that merit salvation or grace from God and none have any positive inclination toward God.

    Having verified this reality through these OT quotes – and there are others to which he could have appealed – Paul now utilizes some additional OT verses to demonstrate the expression of this reality. Verses 13 and 14 specifically demonstrate how our patterns of speech express the fallenness and depravity of humanity.

    This first phrase of v. 13 is from Psalm 5:9. The word taphos, meaning “grave” or “tomb,” is used elsewhere only in Matthew literally of a tomb (23:29) or of Jesus’ tomb (27:61, 64, 66; 28:1) or figuratively of the spirituality of the scribes and Pharisees (23:27). Here in Romans 3:13, the word is modified with the perfect passive participle form of the verb anoigo, meaning “to open” rendering the phrase, “a tomb that has been left open.” It is, of course, important both in ancient as well as modern times to seal a grave, not only to prevent thieves and looters from breaking in, but also from prevent stench, disease and infection from coming out.