Making Life Work

By: C. Roderick Martin



    “Let them bring forth and show us what will happen; Let them show the former things, what they were, so we may consider them, and know the latter end of them” (Isaiah 41:22 NKJV).

    There is little doubt if we are to know what will happen to this country, we must look to the past, specifically, to ancient Israel.

    One may question if we are indeed the direct descendants of the “Lost Ten Tribes,” but there is little debate that we are spiritual Israel. Biblical history gives us detailed accounts, confirmed many times by secular history, of Israel’s fate when the people disobeyed God.

    God is predictable, he does not change; he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In Deuteronomy...

By: Ronald L. Dart

    Searching the Internet a while back, I came across an old item posted by Ravi Zacharias. He said something about the Tower of Babel that I did not quite understand: "In the biblical narrative, when the tower of Babel was being built, we are told that God sent a confusion of languages to stem the tide toward humanity’s self-deification. The implication was that the uniformity of language would inexorably lead to a homogenization of tastes, and a celebration of evil. The human heart, being what it is, moves in a herd instinct, irresistibly drawn to the intrigue and allurements of perversions. The confusion of language was one fence that God put up to limit communication and prevent a moral landslide."

By: Lenny Cacchio

Turn ye again now every one from his evil way, and from the evil of your doings, and dwell in the land that the LORD hath given unto you and to your fathers for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 25:5 KJV)

    If you are inclined to blame political leadership for all the wrong in our country, you need to rethink it. Sometimes political leadership is nothing more than a reflection of the people it represents, and that is especially true in a representative republic such as ours.     In the last chapter of II Samuel, King David makes an appalling mistake. At the time he is a powerful figure in the Middle East. He has conquered lands as far away as present-day Iraq and beyond. He has friendly relations with the Lebanese to the...

By: Ronald L. Dart

   For over a generation, now, schools, parents and social institutions have been fighting a battle with teen pregnancy. They have tried sex education, and that didn’t work. Pregnancies went up. They tried free condom distribution. Pregnancy went up again. They have tried secret abortions, but that only works after pregnancy. Now some are trying abstinence programs.

    But even if they could have abstinence programs in all the schools, they would only be able to affect the problem at the margins. Some kids are taking chastity vows, and even wearing chastity rings, which Jay Leno thought was really funny.

By: Ronald L. Dart

Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. "For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4-5 NKJV)

    It must have been a hard decision for God to make. I don't mean to suggest that anything is really hard for God, but the decision had consequences that even God could not have treated lightly. The decision to put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden had consequences for all of history. By putting that tree there, God effectively created a gate out of the Garden of Eden. He gave man a choice about the kind of a world that he would live in. If Paradise became boring for man, he had an alternative.

By: Ronald L. Dart

King Solomon once wrote, "Wisdom is the principle thing: therefore get wisdom: and with all your getting, get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote you: she shall bring you to honor, when you do embrace her" (Proverbs 4:7, 8).

    I recently saw a bumper sticker that proclaimed, "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it for me!" The person who wrote that bumper sticker may consider me an infidel, but that doesn't settle it for me. I want to know why God said it. Because only then can I even begin to claim to understand God.

By: Ronald L. Dart

The Second Key

    The best ideas are usually simple and this one is no exception. The idea was conceived long ago and is so simply stated that most of us would read right over it and never grasp its implications. It reads as follows: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children” (Proverbs 13:22).

    I can hear you saying, “That sounds like a good idea, but a little tough to execute. I have enough trouble making ends meet as it is without worrying about the next generation.”

By: Ronald L. Dart

    They are people of the desert. To the western eye, they appear backward, undeveloped, fanatical, even bizarre. Yet they are the remnants of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. And they are destined to effect your life more directly than you can ever imagine.

By: Ronald L. Dart

See "The Christian Woman" by Ronald Dart

    Relatively few Christian sects these days prohibit women from wearing makeup. Most of those that do seem to be holdovers from another era when "respectable" women in society did not wear makeup. Some of these groups still try to find biblical support for their position and quite forcefully forbid women to wear makeup in church; some forbid the wearing of it at any time.

    It is of singular importance to note that nowhere does the Bible specifically forbid women to wear makeup. It is not mentioned at all in the law of God or the teachings of Christ. All of the reasons advanced for not wearing makeup are inferences from prophetic writings. There are four principal scriptures that are advanced.

By: Ronald L. Dart

The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter! Even the sea monsters draw out the breast, they nurse their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness (Lamentations 4:1-3).

    The high school graduating class of ‘94 was decimated by a terrible plague and no one paid it much mind. If a bus load of them had been killed on the way to a game, it would have made headlines–at least locally. If a school had blown up and killed a few hundred of them it would have made national, even worldwide, news.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    Just what does it mean to "keep the Sabbath?" What should a person do on that day? Or, as some would prefer to ask, what should a person NOT do? Can you work at your normal job? What about emergencies? Can you buy groceries on the Sabbath? What if you have unexpected guests? The Sabbath is indeed a holy day, and to worship God properly requires a right view of His day.

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” intoned the preacher, “the saved and the lost. There is no middle ground with God.”

    Now there is a sobering thought. If indeed there are only two kinds of people in the world, and if I am “people,” I must be either saved or lost. And if I’m not consciously aware of having been saved, then I must be lost. And if I’m lost...

By: Ronald L. Dart 

    In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing, there was one question raised that no one really stopped to answer. Is it wrong for the United States to seek vengeance for the murder of the 5000 innocent people who died on September 11? Should we, as a country, turn the other cheek? There were those who thought the criminals who did this act should be brought to justice, but that it was wrong to merely seek revenge on Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization.

By: Lenny Cacchio

    America is a strange mix of Jerusalem and Babylon. So states the late Richard John Neuhaus in his book American Babylon: Notes for a Christian Exile. While acknowledging the religiously aware nature of the nation’s founding and of its citizens, he reminds us that “America is Babylon not by comparison with other societies but by comparison with the radically new order sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing to settle for a community of less than truth and justice compromised.”     This, our union, is less perfect than the more perfect one that the Constitution envisions, and hence the people of God are in a foreign land. But if exiles we are, then what is our role as the people of God in a foreign land? ...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    Our God is a patient sort, and that goes for our prayer lives too. As Paul once wrote,

    “The Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” (Rom 8:26-27 NKJV) That’s almost like saying that God sees our hearts even if our tongues don’t say it right.

    But God is patient even if our hearts aren’t quite where they ought to be. Anciently there was a man who was known as Deceitful. This was not just a nickname, and he wasn’t one of the Seven Dwarfs. “Deceitful” is what “Jacob” means in Hebrew. Jeremiah so uses that word in chapter 17 of his book: “The heart is deceitful above...

By: Bill Jacobs  

    In September 2006, passersby found a family murdered along an interstate highway on the Florida gulf coast. The father, mother and two boys, ages two and four were lying on the ground outside their vehicle when they were murdered, indicating an execution.

 

    What causes some people to commit such cruel, remorseless crimes? The New Testament says much about the capacity for sin caused by “carnal nature” and “the flesh.” Scripture states in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart is “desperately wicked.” Some people believe that our nature was passed from Adam and Eve—that we are born evil from birth.

 

    This idea has seeped into how we treat children. We know of an evangelical who has marketed a parenting program for Christians in which he tells us that babies are self-centered to the core. He advises parents to put them on rigid feeding schedules and let them conform to the parents instead of the parents conforming to them. Better to let them cry a while, he advises, so they get used to the idea that they are not the center of the universe right from the beginning.

...