|
Truth in Conviction offers insights related to politics, religion and social happenings in the US and worldwide. The columns' philosophical base is conservative. Regarding
religion, it is evangelical. Concerning social matters, it is grounded in biblical ethics.
Swank has BA and MDiv degrees with graduate work at Harvard Divinity School. Married for 49 years with 3 adult children. Author of several books and thousands of articles in various Protestant and Catholic magazines, journals, web sites, and newspapers. Writer of weekly religion column for PORTLAND PRESS HERALD newspaper, Portland ME. |
Tue Jan 12, 2010
HOW CAN A GOOD GOD ALLOW A QUAKE?
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
So many dead. So many grieving. So many distraught.
Where is God? Where is the good God?
Good God created all things sound and pure. Then He placed our first parents in paradise — the Garden of Eden. There, however, was a stipulation. They dared not touch a particular tree. That obviously was to test the mortals-with-free-will obedience quotient.
All other creatures on Earth were programmed by instinct. Only Adam and Eve were gifted with free will — the awesome power of choice. In that, at least, was their image of deity upon their very own natures — the power to think, to make decisions.
Yet, sadly, our first parents disobeyed God to follow the Lie. The Lie told them God really didn’t mean what He said. It was all a ruse. Good God would overlook their eating of the forbidden fruit. After all, He is good God.
However, good God is not only mercy but also justice — eternally so. If He were not, none of us would want to know Him let alone worship and obey Him.
In His mercy and justice, God dealt with Adam and Eve’s disobedience. In His mercy, He did not slay them. He permitted them life and forgiving grace — but a temporary span on Earth, not the eternity He had originally planned. In His justice, He disciplined them by casting them out of Eden. Further, Eve would give birth in pain. Adam would dig out a living by the sweat of his brow.
Earth fell when our first parents disobeyed God. In that, mortal’s body and soul fell, hence there being sickness followed by death as well as meanness, madness and murder, anger, animosity and anxiety.
Further, when Earth fell due to Adam and Eve falling for the Lie, the globe itself came upon its own calamities. They were not originally intended by good God. They were the result of mortals’ disobedience, hence floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and, yes, earthquakes.
Earth’s calamities should then remind us that mortals are indeed frail, fragile creatures in need of the Power above and beyond themselves. Mortals are temporary creatures of a spiritually fallen planet. Mortals are in need of a merciful, comforting God.
Therefore, when earthquakes take lives, spring forth wails of woe, and cover the planet with depression, they remind us of history’s beginnings. They remind us of the awful state the planet is in due to mortal going his and her own way apart from good God. They remind us to call out for mercy, for divine help, and for a hope that is beyond and above the earthquakes, winds and fire.
An earthquake is not God’s fault. It is mortals’ fault — from the start, that is. Adam and Eve’s lineage have had to deal with their disobedience ever since they went for the Lie. That should surely underline for all thinking mortals how truly crucial it is to obey an Almighty God, falling at His feet for mercy and grace, beseeching Him to redeem Earth’s tragedies into a meaning that only eternity can fully explain.
The hope? The hope in a spiritually fallen world is still the good God. There really is no other alternative other than despair and finally spiritual and / or physical suicide. Hope comes from reaching out in faith to good God, calling upon His everlasting arms, and finding Him there — no matter the tragedy, the loss, and the perplexity.
In that, good God has the last word for those in faith. In that, good God then is their Almighty One placing His period at their last sentence.
God Himself acted out before us how to deal with this spiritually fallen planet. He came to earth in Jesus. He taught and loved and healed. Then the jealous enemy spiked Him to the cross. Murder. Injustice. Madness. Meanness. Cruelty.
Yet from that zenith of calamities came His resurrection. And from those lips — now alive and loving — come the words: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me shall not die. Come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will open, I will come in to him and sup with him and he with Me.”
Till the close of Earth’s history, tragedies will continue to spill themselves over the face of the planet — since Adam and Eve first fell for the Lie. But out of every tragedy, faith can lift the arm of hope toward good God. In doing so, victory is assured through the tears. Eternity will prove it to be true.
TORONTO: MUSLIM GANG-RAPES FRIGHTEN PUBLIC
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
“There have been other cases of sexual assaults on women in the Greater Toronto Area” per the Irish Sun.
Muslim males in the Toronto area are logged in with police as gang rape enthusiasts so that non-Muslims in the city are becoming quite anxious.
On New Year’s Day, Rozbah Bahri, 27, Parvez Bahri, 25, Said Serwary, 23, Ahmad Ghafari, 23 and Omed Sarwary, 23, gave up. They told police they were guilty of gang raping two non-Muslim females after the males’ photographs on television and in newspapers pictured them as the rapists.
Gang rape is popular throughout Europe. Muslims consider females not garbed from head to toe as inviting rapists to attack them. Therefore, these women are labeled as “sluts” and consequently regarded as open season victims.
Devout Muslims do not consider these raping males as committing any crime; therefore, they in fact are praised as doing what non-Muslim women bait them to do.
Now in Canada, that same insanity is working for Islamic devotees.
In Toronto, five Muslims attacked the women in their early 20s by breaking into their hotel rooms.
The men had come across the women at a New Year’s social. They followed them to the hotel, then overpowered the non-Muslims, assaulting them. With that, they fled the hotel.
Read more at “5 Canadian Muslims charged in Toronto gang-rape” at http://story.irishsun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/2411cd3571b4f088/id/586035/cs/1/
CANADIAN PLOT: RICH MUSLIM TO BLOW UP STOCK EXCHANGE
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
The undercover policeman “wore a wire at their frequent meetings at coffee shops and a Chinese buffet in Toronto, and was paid a record $4.1 million Canadian to infiltrate the group.” The informant posed as an Islamic co-conspirator.
He was spying on Shareef Abdelhaleem, 34, standing trial for plotting to blow up Canada’s main stock exchange in 2006.
“He aimed to profit from wreaking economic havoc to fund other terror attacks” per AFP.
Abdelhaleem pleaded not guilty while charged with “participating in a terrorist group and intending to cause an explosion.” His scheme, if successful, would have leveled three blocks around the Toronto exchange.
Muslim Abdelhaleem wanted to “provoke Canada’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Not only would his plan have destroyed the exchange but the country’s spy agency buildings and a military base.
Undercover police followed his moves as he attempted to buy three tones of bomb-making materials.
If all went as he had planned, he expected to “reap a windfall” by short-selling stocks prior to the explosions. The moneys would have been put to funding multitudinous terror attacks throughout the world.
Prosecutors state that Abdelhaleem, earning a six-figure salary as a computer programmer, and other Islamic terrorists worked from “religiously-inspired political purposes.” In other words, they were committed to seeing through the Koran’s Islam World Rule.
“The plan was ‘to affect the economy, to make it lose half a trillion dollars,’ said court documents cited by the daily Globe and Mail.”
Four Muslims working with Abdelhaleem have already pleaded guilty. One has been convicted. Five still face trial.
THERE IS NO PRE-TRIBULATION RAPTURE
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Mark it down as biblical truth: There is no pre-tribulation rapture.
However, untold thousands believe in the “secret rapture of the church” prior to the tribulation period. This is because untold thousands don’t want to have to think of suffering through a tribulation time frame. The late Corrie ten Boom called this pre-trib rapture teaching the “American doctrine.” Go figure.
The belief in a secret rapture of believers before the tribulation is also because of a best-seller, “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” by Hal Lindsey which was set loose in the l960s. It has been a paperback aggressively pushed by practically every evangelical / fundamentalist engine going.
Theologians, videos, films and preachers bolster up this myth with their earnest preachings and teachings.
Yet this is nothing but a myth, accented as much by certain theologically conservative Protestant segments similar unto the Roman Catholic underlining of the immaculate conception of Mary. Nevertheless, if there is no biblical support for such a Mariology teaching, it is bogus. Likewise, the pre-tribulation rapture teaching is bogus.
The pre-trib rapture concept was manufactured in the 1800s in an 18 year old Plymouth Brethren girl’s dream, told to her Pastor, John Darby, and then relayed to C. I. Scofield who bought into the dream as revealed truth. Scofield placed this pre-tribulation rapture notion as a footnote in his popular Bible, hence the spread of the myth.
However, just the opposite is biblical truth. In Matthew 24:29-3l, for instance, the rapture ("gathering together") is placed in the same time frame as the open second coming of Jesus Christ. And all of this is “after the tribulation” (verse 29). That is it in a nutshell!
Yet pre-tribulation rapturists sidestep this clear passage for more oblique passages. The latter are twisted and turned in order to fit into the “American doctrine.” Yet such twisting is not sound exegesis. And for biblically-riveted evangelicals and fundamentalists to commit this drastic error is bordering on the horrific.
All other passages in Scripture relating to the “gathering together unto Him” must refer back to the literal time line provided by Jesus in Matthew 24.
One must not use a symbolic passage in the Book of Revelation or any other symbolically-based section of the Bible by which to draw a pre-tribulation rapture doctrine.
Further, one must not take words of the apostle Paul so as to insert them opportunistically into a conjured pre-tribulation string of Scripture references. Yet this has been done ad infinitum.
Instead, Jesus’ literalism of Matthew 24 must be used as the benchmark for all other “gathering together” themes of Scripture.
One starts with literalism and moves into symbolism when seeking to understand Scripture; it is not the other way around.
During the 1970s and 1980s there was much written and preached about a pre-tribulation rapture. This has wound down some in the last decade or so. Why?
Today, with the world situation being what it is, there is not that much risk-taking in preaching dogmatically the pre-tribulation rapture. Why?
Is it because there are many who are beginning to question its validity? Is it because the world state is so uncertain that to go out on a limb with a false hope may ricochet?
One wonders, with world events progressively becoming more and more anti-Christian, why the pre-tribulation rapture persons are not celebrating each dawn as the day when Jesus may return to earth.
Such is not the phenomenon on a large scale. Furthermore, it may be because the next generation has not bought into this notion.
In any case, it is a myth, a legend of conservative Protestantism’s own conjuring and has no base in the Holy Scriptures.
Yet these very Protestants are the ones who ardently point out the myths of Catholicism while holding to some of their own myths. Both segments of Christendom need to do some serious housecleaning of manufactured legends in order to return to the simple Bible truths; otherwise, the church suffers from severe lack of knowledge.
What is so frightening about holding to a pre-tribulation rapture? It is more than mere academic quibbling. Holding to such a notion is drastically weakening the church worldwide.
The church should be preparing for spiritual battle against the most evil forces arrayed by hell.
Instead, the church is languishing with a false hope. This is all orchestrated by the demonic powers in order to eventuate in a limp army of believers. And to see that through in this age of laxity in religion does not take much on the part of the dark powers. In addition, the apostate segment of religion is doing its fair share of blackening truth.
Does it take much intelligence to realize that there are awesomely wretched days yet ahead for the righteous remnant?
Those who are not strong will drop--fall away, as biblically predicted. They will be too numerous to contemplate. But for those who are truly into carrying the daily cross there will be nothing able to thwart their zeal for Christ.
Already the remnant is being strengthened by the Spirit of light. He is gathering His own together in the power of the resurrection and the might of the revealed Word. Their numbers are few; but their ardor before the Father is lovingly honored.
Set your vision upon the difficulties yet to be. They are but the trials permitted by the coming Christ.
At the close of the tribulation period, then there will be the gathering together of the believers from the four corners of the earth. They will greet Jesus in the clouds as He descends through space, having left the right hand of the Father in heaven.
The gathering together ("rapture") and the second advent then will be realized as one and the same event occurring at the end of the tribulation time frame. Jesus’ declaration in Matthew 24:29-3l states it clearly.
__________________________________________________________________
| PREV page | NEXT page |
Copyright ©2005-2010 by J. Grant Swank, Jr. All Rights reserved