Pastor's Blog (Page 32)
Toil and Sweat
Imagine: * summer gardening in South Carolina without shirt-drenching sweat. * cultivating, planting, and reaping a crop without exhaustion or a sense of toil. Of course, I’m thinking of those two words in Genesis 3:17-19: toil and sweat. Sin’s consequence is not work, but the toilsomeness of it—that immense degree of effort required to extract a crop. And toil’s…
Taking the Blame
It was the woman You gave me who gave me the fruit…(Genesis 3:8) First he hid in the trees. Now he hides behind someone else’s actions. And Eve was quick to follow suit: “It was the serpent. He deceived me…” Thanks to lots of practice down through the centuries, we’ve turned hiding behind someone else’s actions into an art…
Pursued By God
…and the man & his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.* I remember hiding from my dad once. I was a young child and had been invited over to a friend’s house for the afternoon. While I was there my friend and I did some things we clearly knew were forbidden. What’s more, my friend’s parents discovered our disobedience! Later that afternoon,…
You Shall Not Surely Die!
It only took about 45 words for Satan to seduce the first couple. A question, a statement, and a brief explanation. You would think it would take much more than that to ruin human history. First, the question: Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? Eve missed what Satan was insinuating with, Did God really say…? And she…
Knowing Good & Evil
“…you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” (Genesis 2:17) Some things we were not designed for. For example: * We were not made to function with detailed knowledge of the future. * We were not designed for death–that hideous aberration of God’s magnificent creation. And, apparently, we were not designed to function…
In the beginning God…
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” Well, actually, when it came to the creation of the Universe, God just wasn’t necessary. So says Stephen Hawking, famed theoretical physicist, in his new book, Grand Design. “There is no heaven or afterlife…; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he…