Making Life Work

By: John Klassek

    We had almost finished dinner at the restaurant when a man in a black suit approached us and asked whether he could perform a few magic tricks for us. I politely declined his offer.

    He then quite happily made his way to the next table. I couldn’t help but to curiously watch him ply his tricks there, and what he did was quite amazing. He threw a red ball into the air and it simply disappeared! The look of surprise and fascination was evident on the faces of everyone seated at that table. “Is seeing believing?” I wondered.

    A friend of mine once lamented that he had never seen any miracles in his life. He implied that our belief in what really matters might be enhanced by being witness to some supernatural...

By: Ronald L. Dart

    Do you suppose God would ever call a man to be a lawyer? Or perhaps, a Governor? No, I am not about to tell a lawyer joke, or talk about Arnold Schwarznegger, who is commonly called the governator.

    There is a funny thing about Christian thinking when it comes to a divine calling. We tend to think of God’s calling solely having to do with church work, or ministry. But is that the right view of the matter? There are two men in the Bible who cause me to think otherwise. They weren’t called to be lawyers, but they were nonetheless called to a surprising vocation. Let me tell you their stories:

    Once upon a time, there was a man named Jacob who had 12 sons. The last was born of the wife that Jacob loved. He was...

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: 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

    When God gave Abraham his great victory over the King of Elam, he was met on his return by an enigmatic figure, a priest, by the name of Melchizedek. What is of special interest about this encounter is that Abraham gave Melchizedek tithes (a tenth) of all the spoil he had taken from the opposing armies–much of it the property of the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 14:20). Why did Abraham do that?

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

And God stepped out on space
And he looked around and said
"I’m lonely, I’ll make me a world." 1

    It is a simple, elegant statement of cosmology. The author, James Weldon Johnson, not only sees God as creator of everything, he imagines a motive for the act of creation. It may seem strange to think of God as lonely. But if we believe that God created all things, then we must believe that there was a time when God was alone and was not content to stay that way. This is true whether you believe God is a Trinity, a Unity, or a family composed of Father and Son. Whatever we call "God" was alone.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    There are no women in heaven," chuckled the preacher. "How do I know this? The Lord revealed it in Revelation 8:1 when He said there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."

    It was all very amusing, and even the ladies enjoyed a little laugh at their own expense. After all, more than one of them had "talked someone’s ear off " sometime in the past 48 hours.

    Still, there was a little hurt in the laughter of some. To them it was just one more "put-down" for women. Only this time it came from an unexpected source, their pastor, from whom they felt they had a right to expect support, not humiliation.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    The story of the Bible begins and ends with a tree. In the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life held a central place. After the expulsion of man from the garden, we don’t hear of the tree again until the last book of the Bible.¹ There, man is in a very different environment called, "The paradise of God."² Once again the Tree of Life is central. But now there is not one tree of life, but twelve. They are on both sides of the river of life and they bear twelve kinds of fruit. Moreover, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of all people.³ It is those who do God’s commandments who have a right to the Tree of Life, and the permission to enter the City of God.⁴

By: Ronald L. Dart

    He is twenty years old, but he looks more like sixteen. In blue jeans and sweater, his hair neatly cut, he looks like he should have books under his arm and be headed for class. The district attorney says he is a cold-blooded killer. It seems he held up a convenience store late one night. The clerk offered no resistance and gave him all the money in the cash register. But as he scooped up the money and stuffed it into his pockets, this “student” calmly raised his pistol and shot the clerk squarely between the eyes just to leave no witnesses. Now the district attorney wants you, the jury, to find him guilty and sentence him to death.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    It had been a hard three days. David and the handful of young men with him had left in a hurry and had taken no food. By the time they got to a place called Nob, they were in a bad way. They needed food and there was only one place David thought they might get something to eat. The Tabernacle at Nob.

By: Ronald L. Dart

“Let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. For I hate divorce,
says the Lord the God of Israel.”

    Divorce is painful. If you have been through a divorce, you need no one to tell you that. Not only do the children get hurt, there are the grandparents, the family, the friends. And who can tell of the pain, of the anger that comes in the middle of the night to the two people who once loved each other above all others?

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

 

"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years" (Genesis 1:14-19).

    Nothing God gave to man has been used so consistently for the purpose He intended. Every civilization of man has used the sun, the moon, or both for the demarcation of time. They had no choice. Even a hunting society had to take notice of the passage of seasons. When would the animals migrate to the north and when would they return? How soon would the antlered animals make their move down from the high country? No people dependent upon the land could fail to notice that there was a time to plant and a time to harvest. Their problem was the prediction of that time, and that required the observation of the sun. It required a calendar, and some form of calendar has always been a mark of civilization.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    The story of the Garden of Eden is a source of endless fascination for me-especially the part about the two trees. Plainly, they are important, but what do they mean? Consider the story.

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Today a new issue of my trade magazine came in, and I came across a curious item regarding this year’s tax rebate "stimulus" package: 

    "In fact the legacy of the fiscal stimulus was how consumers responded – by lifting their savings rates to a six-year high of 2.6% from 0.3% rather than embarking on a new buying spree … That was the third-sharpest increase in the savings rate in the past 55 years and a vivid sign that frugality is now replacing frivolity."

    Some reports indicate that only 10% - 20% of those government stimulus checks were actually spent.  The bulk of the money went into savings or debt reduction.

    To you and me that might sound like a great thing, but not according to Michael...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    "Don’t sell your birthright for a bowl of red soup."  That little allegory might be hard to understand, but it should be a part of our cultural literacy.  It’s based on a story in the book of Genesis, where twin brothers became rivals and vied for supremacy.  In ancient times, the older brother was entitled to the family birthright, but in this story the younger brother through savvy and deceit talked the older one in a moment of hunger to give up his birthright for one bowl of red soup.

    Jacob and Esau were the two brothers’ names, and the account is in Genesis 25:29-34, and it reads like this:

    Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished.  He said to Jacob, "Quick,...

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: Ron Saladin

    I was on my way home from work when I got the page—911. I hurriedly dialed home to hear that five year-old Christopher had a bad puncture wound under his left jaw. He had catapulted off his bicycle into the edge of a log. Lots of blood. I hurriedly asked if he was breathing okay; the answer was yes. I was 30 minutes away.

    When I arrived, I looked at the wound. It was bleeding more from the inside than the outside. My wife, Cynthia, had rolled up a cloth and put it into Christopher’s mouth to absorb some of the seeping blood. The wound looked odd—smooth tissue, almost like the inside tissue of a cheek. We were off to the emergency room at St. John’s in Washington, MO.

    The doctor suspected a broken jaw, and...

By: Gerald Saul

    An article recently came across my desk with an eye-catching title—Look Who’s Happily Unmarried by Rory Evans[1]. The opening sentence reads, “Get your grandma her fan and smelling salts: More and more couples are living in sin.”

    The article goes on to state that just over half of the households in America are now led by unmarried people—50.3% to be exact. Also presented is a quote from the executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project who says that “these numbers suggest that couples living together can’t be scandalous…It’s hard to scandalize when you’re the majority.”

    Does this mean what I think it means? Are half of America’s couples really in long-term “unmarriage”?...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    When Eve offered Adam that infamous piece of fruit, what should he have done?  The obvious answer, of course, would be to refuse it.  But what else?     What Adam should have done is found in part in an unusual High Day mentioned in Leviticus 23. "The tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. Hold a sacred assembly and deny yourselves, and present an offering made to the LORD by fire.   Do no work on that day, because it is the Day of Atonement, when atonement is made for you before the LORD your God. "  (Leviticus 23:27-28 NIV)     The Day of Atonement is more commonly known by its Hebrew name Yom Kippur.  In our English Bibles, the word kippur is translated "atonement", but a more precise translation would...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    Another harrowing week on the job leaves me drained, and I know that I am not unique.  The strain of our on-the-run culture is robbing us of our freedom and the quality in our lives.  A recent article in the Kansas City Star poignantly pointed out that our information age has linked us to our offices 24/7 not only from home but from virtually anywhere in the world.  Our cell phones and laptops make it next to impossible to escape the yoke of our employment’s reach.     The age of just-in-time inventory, instant messages, and overnight delivery are symptoms of a culture that demands what it wants and demands it now.  The luxury of taking one’s time is no longer afforded us, let alone a full escape from the pressures of...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    It is hard to write an essay on the goodness of God when there is so much evil in the air. Why did God allow Katrina to disrupt so many lives? That is a natural question for a ten-year old, and even great theologians wrestle with it. How can all-powerful and all-loving God allow bad things to happen to good people?     I don’t have all the answers, and I won’t tell you that I do. Rabbi Harold Kushner struggled with it, and through simple deductive logic came to a startling conclusion. He reasoned that if God is just, if God is loving, and if God is all-powerful, then such a God couldn’t allow bad things to happen to good people. Therefore, either God is not just, or God does not love, or God is not all-powerful.    ...