The Casual Christian

On the day of the 9/11 attack, a shock wave emanated from the Twin Towers to the Federal Hall, cracking the very foundation of the building that had served as the original seat of government of the new nation. Jonathan Cahn, author of The Harbinger, maintains that this event was the sign of coming judgment upon America. See his fascinating interview with Pat Robertson of the 700 Club.

If you want to be among those who are rescued from the terrible ordeals that are about to come, you must give up your pre-occupation with acquiring possessions and enriching yourself and make Jesus Christ the love of your life. He will take care of the details.

It is time to take sides in this great battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. Make sure that your loyalties lie with the one who will be on the winning side. That one is Jesus Christ, King of the Jews and rightful heir to the throne of Jerusalem. Have you pledged your allegiance to him?

To properly understand Bible prophecy, it is important to know the context of the times in which it was written. To do that requires setting aside our modern western understanding of nations as geographical and political nation states and recognizing that in the ancient world, nations were people descended from a common ancestor whose language and culture originated at the Towe of Babel.

Does knowing that Jesus is coming back to earth to set up His kingdom, free us from sin and death, and restore creation to its pristine state excite you so much that you want to tell others? That is the hope that should purify us, draw us together in close community, and spur us on to good works. 

The only reasons we don’t warn people about hell are that we really don’t comprehend how horrible it is or how heinous our own sins are.

If we cannot even grasp the utility of the Lord's prayer, how can we ever hope to learn the more difficult aspects of the faith like forbearance, forgiveness, patience under pressure, and genuine brotherly love that bears another's burdens and shares his joys?

The Bible is not just a guideline. It is the authoritative Word of God. Disobeying it has consequences. Obeying it has rewards. Yet we fudge. We compromise. We rationalize. We trade away our spiritual integrity for man’s approval and as we do, we gradually erode our ability to distinguish right from wrong, to see our own failings, and to turn back in repentance to God.

We are willing to believe that an inanimate, impersonal universe is more capable of producing human life than Almighty God, yet we freely offer prayers to God asking Him to shape events on our behalf and we hold firmly to a belief in the human soul and an afterlife. We embrace the notion of survival of the fittest, yet we ask for mercy for our weakness. We believe that a process called natural selection spawned life out of chaos, yet we depend on the world to be predictable and orderly every morning when we get out of bed.

We must start by acknowledging that no present day phenomenon can account for the massive forces of nature that accompanied the flood.  The world that exists today is drastically different from the one God created.

Historical evidence for the accuracy of the Bible abounds. No other document has proven to be so reliable when it comes to matters of history or science or faith. So why are people so cavalier about their relationships to God and one another? God says the penalties for ignoring His Word can be very severe. And if those pronouncements are as reliable as the rest of scripture, then we disregard them at our own peril.

This is the value neutral, non-judgmental environment of postmodernism which our culture has been fostering for a generation and which has now engulfed the Christian community. It manifests itself in Christian circles through the lack of emphasis on repentance and sorrow for sin, which used to be a prerequisite for forgiveness.

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”  Charles Darwin

Where did the order come from? If the universe came about by chance, there would be no predictability - no laws of science. It is this predictability that allows scientists to put satellites in orbit around mars, a feat equivalent to throwing a basketball from New York City to San Francisco and getting nothing but net! Clearly there is a mind behind the order in the universe. And not just a mind, but a power to create and sustain it.