This is a clever ploy. A Maine lawmaker half-heartedly introduces a bill that would ban the abortion of “homosexual” fetuses. While a bit of a silly, unenforceable bill, it does open the questions of whether homosexuality is genetic and it seeks to force the liberals to chose between gay rights and abortion rights. He could have pressed the issue even further by amending it to say that abortions for sexual preference that discriminates against female fetuses. That’d get the feminists in a knot fighting for both abortion rights and against sexual discrimination. There’d even be a chance of theoretically enforcing that one since a gene actually does exist for determining male and female.

The state representative said that he got the idea from Rush Limbaugh which should immediately warn you that it is most likely extreme and a bad idea.

The great news is that I got to baptize two of my children last Sunday! I’m really proud of them both, we didn’t push them to it, they decided that they needed to do it.

For a brief devotional before the baptism, I chose the verse that most evangelicals flee: 1Pt 3:21 “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The first part of this verse I want to touch on to help us understand baptism is the “appeal to God for a good conscience.” In Hebrews 9:14 we are told that it is the blood of Jesus that cleanses our conscience. Baptism, then, points to the blood of Christ or his death. This is the consistent testimony of the New Testament as Paul says explicitly in Romans 6 and Colossians 2 that we are baptized into Christ’s death. Whereas baptism is an appeal, the reality is in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Baptism is an identification rather than salvation.

The other part is the phrase “corresponding to this”. The immediate question is “corresponding to what?” The context of First Peter 3 is corresponding to Noah. Noah didn’t suddenly wake up in the ark and find himself saved. Nor did he hate and fight God up till he was on the ark and thereby become saved. No, God had been working in Noah’s life for over a hundred years. Jesus preached through Noah. God declared him as the only righteous person on all the earth. Noah obeyed God and built an ark. God had clearly been working with and through Noah for a long time. And this is true of my children also. God has been working in their lives for the past few years and now they are seeking to be identified with his death and resurrection in baptism.

Derek Webb has an iTunes exclusive unplugged EP. No new songs but nice versions on three from his current album I See Things Upside Down. The following link will only work if you have iTunes installed. It works for either PC or Mac.

I am now the PROUD owner of an Apple 15″ Titanium Powerbook G4/867MHz 40GB hard drive, 768 MB, 32MB video memory, combo drive, Airport card computer. I am a happy geek. Virtual PC actually works on this. The screen is big enough to work on, the G4 processor screams, the video memory is what it should be. The only draw back is that there is a ding in the case and the battery is only lasting about 1 1/2 hour or so.

Moving from the iBook couldn’t have been easier. Plug in a Cat 5 cable to each computer and drag and drop. I had to reinstall about three programs, the others I just copied over. This is how computing is supposed to be!

On Christ’s office of prophet, I take a slightly different tact than most standard systematic theologies. I acknowledge that Jesus is the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15 but he is more than simply another, greater Moses. Jesus reveals the Father (John 1:18). Indeed, the Father has spoken to us through the Son in a way he did not to the fathers (Heb 1:2). In this revealing role, Jesus fulfills his office as prophet. This would also necessarily involve his condemning and forgiving sin, giving law, judging etc. Jesus is the better prophet because he is the Word, he is God’s revelation of himself to us. This is an office like “super prophet” as in it cannot get any clearer than this.

Jesus role as prophet (as I’ve described it above) has the Christian life wrapped around it. No one has seen the Father, Jesus has revealed Him (John 1:18). Anyone continues in a sinful life has not seen God (1 John 3:6). It is the Holy Spirit who leads us to Christ (John 15:26). God’s unbounded power has given us all things we need for life and godliness through knowledge (epignosis, true knowledge) of Jesus and partake of the diving nature escaping worldly corruption and sinful desire (2 Pet 1:3-4). All of these things revolve around Jesus’ role as “God revealer” or prophet and all play into our sanctification. Our growth in holiness is dependant on Jesus’ role as prophet.

Two cool ESV (English Standard Version) things:
1) If you have FireFox (and you should, I’m dumping Safari for it) you can download a plugin for the search box. You can type in a scripture reference or a word and it automatically knows which it was. There are many other plugins here.
2) The ESV Reformation Study Bible will be published on March 31. I can’t wait. I’ve wanted that particular study Bible but I don’t care for NKJV so I never got it.

Does Al Gore know about this?

Some friends loaned us a DVD of a Canadian comedy called “Corner Gas”. It is kind of a mix of Seinfeld and Drew Carry. Takes place in Dog River Saskatchewan and is loaded with dry sarcasm. In a Seinfeld fashion, the shows are usually about nothing. The Drew Carry side is that the lead is just a normal guy. He runs a gas station in a small town 40 kilometers from nowhere. Mostly clean humor with a Canadian accent. I just found out that you can’t order the tapes here in the US. They only ship them to Canadian addresses. So, if you know any Canadians, have them record the show for you!

A while ago I began to suspect that the mark of the beast was not an actual physical mark, but rather it represented mental ascent (mark on forehead) and/or physical conformity (mark on hand) to the ways of the beast. I first came across this in some literature from the World Wide Church of God (back before they abandoned their heresy) and it got me thinking. It made sense but I really didn’t have anything to support such an interpretation, I just liked it.

Well this morning when I was reading Exodus I came across this:

And when in time to come your son asks you, “What does this mean?” you shall say to him, “By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. For when Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.”It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt. – Exodus 13:14-16 ESV

What shall be a mark for them? Was it a phylactery? No, it was the redeeming of the firstborn and the telling of it to their children. Doing and remembering or passing it on. It seems reasonable that John would have this kind of thing in mind since he often used Old Testament images in Revelation. This also makes sense since he said that this calls for wisdom to understand. Wisdom is more than just knowing or being smart, it is knowing the right thing to do and doing it. Wisdom involves action.

So it seems that despite the paranoia, bar codes are not the mark of the beast. Neither are chips implanted under the skin or any other physical mark. How can a physical mark condemn you? We’re saved by grace through faith, not by grace through lack of a tattoo.

Dr. Grant Osborne made an interesting observation in class last week. He was lecturing on the temptation of Jesus and how Jesus responded to Satan. He said that the lesson was not “memorize Scripture so that you too can defeat Satan” and I agree. That doesn’t seem to be what we’re supposed to take away from the story. What he said was that you need to go back and read the passages Jesus quoted in their context. All of them were of Israel failing and yet the story is of Jesus succeeding. The point is that the New Israel, that is Christ, succeeds when Old Israel didn’t. Jesus is the Messiah and he redeems failure.

Now, I haven’t gone and looked them up yet and I don’t necessarily follow the “Jesus as the New Israel” line, though I have heard it before. But it is still an interesting observation.