Top 10 Posts of 2013 - Strategic Silence

The 6^th  most popular post this year was an important reminder from John Turner: the value of strategic silence. Click here to read the original post.

Top 10 Posts of 2013 - Fear of the Dark

The 7^th  most popular post this year had John Turner remind us that we are not alone, even in the dark. Click here to read the entire post, Fear of the Dark.

Top 10 Posts of 2013 - A Six Minute Crash Course on "The Middle East Problem"

The 8^th  most popular post this year takes a look back at the Middle East Problem. Dr. Gary Hedrick presents a short video by Dennis Prager.

Top 10 Posts of 2013 - When Leaves Leave

Top 10 Posts of 2013 - Bon Voyage

The 10th most popular post this year was a Throwback Thursday. John Turner asked the question, “Are you holding onto something you should have released long ago?” Click here to read the original post, Bon Voyage.

Have Iranians Pulled a Fast One?

The one thing about the new deal with Iran that should make everyone extremely uneasy is this: Israel doesn't like it. They say we have made a big mistake. The Israelis, who have one of the most formidable intelligence networks in the world, say the Iranians have pulled a fast one on the West with this agreement. When you stop and remember that the Iranian mullahs are the ones who defend suicide bombers, who strap explosives onto their bodies and walk into public places where they blow themselves up, murdering and maiming innocent men, women, and children with no remorse, it's not hard to understand why civilized people everywhere cringe at the idea of a nuclear-enabled Iran. The respected, conservative Weekly Standard has this take on it ("Abject Surrender by the United States"). Also, check out CNN's "Twenty Questions about the Iran Nuclear Deal".

One further word of caution. When thinking about Iran, we should always distinguish between the policies of the Iranian Islamist government and the Iranian people themselves. Historically, the Iranian people have had close ties to the West and have been friends of the United States. One little-known fact is that when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the USA were announced in Iran, thousand of Iranians poured into the streets to show sympathy. Two days after the tragedy, 60,000 Iranians in a Tehran football (soccer) stadium observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims of 9/11 (see "Candle Power: Iran Mourns America's Dead" from Time Magazine [Sept. 18, 2001] at web.archive.org). Our true enemy is not the Iranian people but rather Islamist extremism and the minority of religious crazies who propagate it.

Keeping It Real: Demythologizing Area 51

In the 1996 blockbuster film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich, the President of the United States (played by actor Bill Pullman) learns that aliens crash landed near Roswell, NM, shortly after the close of World War 2. He is told that their bodies were spirited away to a top-secret military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. It's one of the movie's sub-plots.

In developing his fictional storyline, Emmerich drew on events that are believed by some to have happened in 1947. That's when, on Independence Day of that year, a rancher in New Mexico reportedly found debris from a crashed UFO on his property. Air Force officials later told him that what had crashed on his property was a weather balloon. However, true believers in UFOs found that explanation profoundly unsatisfying. An entire industry subsequently grew up around the Roswell incident. Rumors persisted that the government was trying to cover up the fact that a UFO had crashed on earth. Some reports even said that the bodies of aliens had been recovered. The City of Roswell has embraced the UFO legend for more than half a century and does a brisk tourist business catering to UFO enthusiasts and curiosity seekers. For info from the History Channel about the Roswell incident,click here.

Wikipedia has a good summary of what we have known, up until now, about Area 51: click here

Now the government is declassifying more documents about Area 51 that were restricted as "top secret" during the Cold War era and even up until now. It turns out that the "weather balloon" explanation wasn't entirely on the up and up (surprise, surprise, the government fibbed!)--so the UFO people were onto something after all. A lot of what was happening in that sprawling, remote California-Nevada desert northeast of Edwards AFB was related to research, experimentation, and the testing of military aircraft, including stealth technology. So in that sense, there were, indeed, "unidentified flying objects" (UFOs) in those desert skies!

The National Security Archives are housed at George Washington University in Washington, DC. The latest batch of declassified documents is labeled "The Area 51 File: Secret Aircraft and Soviet MiGs--Declassified Documents Describe Stealth Facility in Nevada (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 443)." It tells us, among other interesting tidbits of information, that the US military secretly obtained Soviet MIG fighters during the Cold War years for testing purposes. Where did they get them? We still don't know.

Check out the latest archive for yourself by clicking here.

Some skeptics charge that the Bible, like Area 51, also needs to be demythologized. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and main author of our Declaration of Independence, edited the New Testament to produce a version of the Gospels that omitted the miracles of Jesus. The so-called "Jefferson Bible" reflected Jefferson's belief that Jesus of Nazareth was a great religious leader and moral teacher but not a miracle worker. Jefferson evidently thought he had rescued the NT from religious mythology and fanciful imagination.

Unlike the mythology that grew up around Roswell and Area 51, however, the NT narrative has a firm historical foundation consisting of numerous consistent and credible eyewitness accounts (1 John 1:1-3). Furthermore, not all of those accounts were written by "friendlies." Ancient Jewish sources, for example, do not dispute that Jesus worked miracles; on the contrary, they assume that He did! The Talmud explains the miracles of Jesus by suggesting that He used magic that He learned in Egypt (Sanhedrin 107b; Sotah 47a). It never says the miracles didn't happen.

Wouldn't you think that if the Lord's miracles were a figment of someone's overly active imagination, His enemies in the first century religious establishment would have been the first ones to alert us to that fact?

That's why demythologizing the Bible is such a sticky business! It's dangerous because the skeptic ends up reading his own unbelief and hardheartedness back into God's Word. It mutilates the Bible by excising one of its central themes--namely, that God has invaded our world in the Person of His Son, Yeshua the Messiah, whose identity was confirmed by the miracles He performed (e.g., Acts 2:22-24).

As Yeshua-believers, we should be all about truth and evidence. We agree that there's a place for demythologizing things that aren't true. But when it comes to Yeshua the Messiah and God's holy Word, we'd better keep it real!

Tens of Billions of Planets Are Like Earth, Study Finds

This is the Achilles heel of the Darwinian view of the universe.

If the building blocks of biological life are present on other planets where conditions are similar to earth, and if life arises spontaneously under such conditions and evolves into ever-higher and more advanced forms of life, then it is inconceivable that intelligent life similar to humankind hasn't evolved on other worlds. In fact, in some regions of the galaxy that are "older" than ours, evolutionary scientists are persuaded that civilizations much more advanced than ours may have arisen. This has given rise to efforts like SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and its never-ending quest to establish contact with alien civilizations.

We discussed this in my Star Trek article in the July-August issue of Messianic Perspectives: click here

The late Carl Sagan, the affable yet brilliant astronomer from Cornell University, was one of the early driving forces behind SETI. His book Contact was made into a motion picture starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. The main character is a scientist who has dedicated her life to establishing contact with extraterrestrials. Spoiler warning: with a little help from Sagan's fertile imagination, she is finally able to do so.

Here's an excerpt from the article in Messianic Perspectives:

But there’s another fly in the ointment for our SETI friends. Even if we were to accept the possibility that there may be civilizations in other parts of the galaxy, how could we possibly know that they are friendly? After all, doesn’t Darwinian dogma dictate that the fittest species are the ones that survive—and the strong advance at the expense of the weak? So what if an alien civilization—like the Borg in Star Trek, for instance—simply saw us as raw materials and resources to be harvested—or perhaps as laborers to be enslaved? We may wish we hadn’t knocked on their door!

So have the Darwinists at SETI really thought this through? I wonder!

Nonetheless, evidence continues to mount that there are many other worlds similar to our own--possibly millions of them--scattered across the galaxy. The fact that all SETI is hearing from beyond our world is stark and uninterrupted silence tends to confirm a biblical worldview that says Planet Earth is the universe's cradle of intelligent life. It all started here! The rest of the universe was created for our exploration, growth, and enjoyment. Unfortunately, our quest to exercise dominion over the creation (as mandated in Genesis 1:26-28) was interrupted by the Fall (sin). Sagan would probably say that this is a rather self-absorbed and human-centric view of our place in the cosmos; however, I believe it's biblical. The Bible puts humankind (and Planet Earth) in the epicenter of a grand epic drama that's being played out on the stage of history. Its ultimate goal: to eradicate evil and its effects once and for all.

Here's the article from CNN: click here

The Dating of the Book of Revelation: Who Cares?

It's true that some believers get bogged down in theological minutiae (hair-splitting) that is, for the most part, pointless.

One of my children reminded me recently that I'm a pretty opinionated guy--and maybe a little bit too much so. There's a part of me that wants everyone to agree with me on everything because, of course, my view is the "correct" one!

So I have to guard against that tendency in my own life. Fortunately, the passage of time has a way of smoothing off some of those rough edges. I'm not nearly as dogmatic and self-assured as I was when I was a young preacher in my 20s and 30s. Back in those days, I was ready at the drop of a hat to debate anyone who dared to question anything I preached or wrote. Today, 40 or so years later, my approach has morphed somewhat. I suppose I'm still opinionated, but I try, nonetheless, to listen more than I talk. I find that I learn more that way. And boy, do I have a lot to learn!

These days, I'm more concerned with making sure that I'm right about my beliefs than I am about making sure everyone else agrees with me.

Eschatology is one of those fields of study where people tend to get bogged down with details. The main point of eschatology is that the Lord is coming back someday and in the meantime, we're here to live holy lives and serve Him faithfully in anticipation of that Day. It's really that simple. Peter says it like this:

10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. 11 Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner [of persons] ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, 12 looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? (2 Peter 3:10-12).

However, one eschatological issue that is not minutiae and does make a difference, believe it or not, is the dating of the Book of Revelation. There are two main theories--the early date (somewhere around AD 65) and the late date (c. AD 95). Almost without exception, premillennial evangelicals (like us) hold to the late date. Preterists (who say the Book of Revelation is past history rather than future prophecy) rely heavily on the early date. In fact, their whole system falls apart if the early date cannot be upheld.

Mark Hitchcock, who stays busy pastoring a church while also teaching at Dallas Seminary, did his doctoral dissertation on this topic (the dating of the Book of Revelation). Dr. Hitchcock debated Hank Hanegraaf ("the Bible Answer Man") a few years ago and a three-part video of that debate on the AD 65 vs AD 95 issue is available on Vimeo: 

http://vimeo.com/25830703 (part one)

http://vimeo.com/25836659 (part two)

http://vimeo.com/25841874 (part three)

In my opinion, Hank is the smoother debater, but he plays fast and loose with selected facts and makes a huge gaffe in Part One when he boldly declares that Norm Geisler is a preterist (in reality, Geisler is a died-in-the-wool, pre-Trib premillennialist, about as far from a preterist as you can get!).

This highlights one of the shortcomings of debates as a tool for settling a disputed issue: that is, very often they're more about deciding who's the better debater than they are about figuring out who is right. In this case, some of us might be willing to concede that Hank was the better debater (style); but we would also say that Mark was right (substance).

But I could be wrong (not likely, but possible--ha). Check it out and let us know what you think!

2013 Shalom Yerushalayim in NYC

Check out this video on Vimeo (link below).

It's from a Korean Christian group that rejects replacement theology and affirms Israel's ongoing role in God's plan. Very moving!

2013 Shalom Yerushalayim in NYC from K. Jonathan Park on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/72049857