
FRIDAY CHURCH NEWS NOTES
GRAPHICAL PDF VERSION
JANUARY 25, 2013, VOLUME 14, ISSUE 4
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this does not imply an endorsement. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.
U.S. PRESIDENT SAYS TRUE EQUALITY INCLUSIVE OF “HOMOSEXUAL LOVE” (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – In his second inaugural speech, President Barack Obama quoted the preamble to the U.S. Constitution and applied it to homosexual marriage. Citing the statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” he argued that if this is true then “homosexual love” must be equal as well. He said the journey to human equality “is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” This is pure nonsense.
The Creator God to whom the Founding Fathers referred is the Creator God described in Scripture. At the beginning of the American Revolution, 99.8% of Americans claimed to be Christians (Peter Lillback, George Washington’s Sacred Fire). Though we know that a majority were not born again, the fact remains that there was a huge consensus as to the fact that there is a God and as to who that God is and as to what His laws are. The King James Bible that the U.S. Founding Fathers often quoted does not grant liberty for men to “love” as they please.
The Ten Commandments, which were posted prominently in U.S. schools, legislatures, and courts for 200 years of U.S. history until removed in recently decades by activist judges, restricts man’s freedom by God’s holy laws. One of these is “thou shalt not commit adultery,” and adultery is defined in Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, as the breaking of the bond of holy matrimony, and holy matrimony, as affirmed by Jesus Himself, is one man and one woman in a lifelong covenant of marriage.
Nowhere in Scripture is there even a hint of support for the “marriage” of sameSex couples. President Obama is helping to destroy America morally, socially, and fiscally, but he is not the main problem. He did not elect himself. He is a reflection of the heart and soul of a large portion of the nation. His New Agey type of Christianity–the Oprah Winfrey/The Shack type of Christianity–is the type of Christianity that is very popular in America and that is promoted by the American pop culture throughout the world. America is still a nation of churches, and that is the root problem. Until America’s churches repent and return to walking in the fear of God, the nation will remain under God’s judgment and will continue to be led by unwise men.
BBC NARRATOR SAYS HUMANS ARE A PLAGUE ON EARTH (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – David Attenborough, famous narrator of BBC documentaries, says that humans are a plague on earth. He told the Radio Times: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now” (“David Attenborough,” The Telegraph, Jan. 21, 2013). He says the problem in Ethiopia is that there are “too many people there,” which is patently ridiculous. China and India, which are far more populated, do not have a similar problem with famine.
Ethiopia’s population density is 83 people per square kilometer, whereas China’s is 143 and India’s is 372, which is four times that of Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s famines were caused by war, a corrupt and uncaring government, human greed, statism, forced resettlement, and other things. In fact, BBC’s own documentaries, such as Planet Earth, prove that lack of space is not the problem. The vast majority of the habitable parts of the earth is underpopulated. The problem is not too many people but too much sinful folly.
There is a sense in which man is a plague on earth, but it is not because there are too many of them; it is because man is a sinner against his Creator God and corruption and ruin has followed in his wake. It is telling that “population limiters” such as David Attenborough and Bill Gates never step up to the plate to volunteer their own lives to reduce the population load on earth. They have an elitist mentality. BBC natural history documentaries are a marvelous showcase for the existence of God and the glories of His creation. It’s too bad that they are overladen with evolutionary and man-made global warming mythology.
TEACHER FIRED FOR GIVING STUDENT A BIBLE (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – The following is excerpted from Todd Starnes, Fox News, Jan. 21, 2013: “A longtime substitute teacher in Phillipsburg, NJ, has been fired after he shared a Bible verse with a student–and upon request gave the child a Bible. The Phillipsburg School Board voted Monday night to terminate the employment of Walter Tutka. He was accused of breaking two policies–distributing religious literature on school grounds and another policy that directs teachers to be neutral when discussing religious material. ‘It’s unfortunate the Phillipsburg School District chose the path of religious hostility and intolerance against a retired man serving his community and simply responding to a student’s intellectual curiosity,’ Hiram Sasser, director of litigation at Liberty Institute, told Fox News.
‘What’s next–are they going to ban Shakespeare because his plays have Bible quotations?’ … ‘Just because this guy gave a student a pocket New Testament on his lunch hour–that’s enough to throw you out of school,’ … Imhof and Tutka serve together in Gideons International–a ministry known for providing Bibles to school children across the world. ‘One of the Gideons in our local camp is from the Soviet Union,’ Imhof said. ‘In most countries overseas we are allowed to go into public schools and give Bibles to students.
But since this is America–you can’t do it here. When the Soviet Union fell, Bibles were allowed in the schools, people could pray in the schools,’ Hussey said. ‘It seems we have more persecution in America than they do in Russia.’ … ‘I am sure the school would have celebrated if the issue was a Koran or Hindu text, but this school sent the message that anything associated with the Bible, even good, old-fashioned intellectual curiosity, must be squelched at the source,’ Sasser told Fox News.”
RUSSIA SEEKS TO ENACT ANTI-GAY LAW (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – The following is excerpted from “Russia to Enact Anti-gay Law Nationwide,” AP, Jan. 21, 2013: “Legislation that comes up later this month for first vote, which is being pushed by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church, would make it illegal nationwide to provide minors with information that is defined as ‘propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism.’ It includes a ban on holding public events that promote gay rights. St. Petersburg and a number of other Russian cities already have similar laws on their books.
The bill is part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values as opposed to Western liberalism, which the Kremlin and church see as corrupting Russian youth and by extension contributing to a wave of protest against President Vladimir Putin’s rule. … Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center, an independent pollster, says the anti-gay bill fits the ‘general logic’ of a government intent on limiting various rights. But in this case, the move has been met mostly with either indifference or open enthusiasm by average Russians. Levada polls conducted last year show that almost two thirds of Russians find homosexuality ‘morally unacceptable and worth condemning.’ About half are against gay rallies and sameSex marriage; almost a third think homosexuality is the result of ‘a sickness or a psychological trauma,’ the Levada surveys show.”
MATHEMATICIAN MARVELS AT THE HUMAN BODY (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – Alexander Tsiaras (b. 1952) is the author of From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds and The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body. As chief of scientific visualization in the department of medicine at Yale University, he wrote many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep space. The following is excerpted from a lecture on December 10, 2010, at INK Talk (in association with TED Talk) in which Tsiaras described some of the discoveries that are being made using new kinds of scanning technologies that can track previously unforeseen details of the growth of the infant in the womb and of the human body in general.
“I remember one of the first things we were looking at was collagen. Everything in your body–hair, skin, bone, nails–is made of collagen. Its a kind of rope-like structure that swirls and twirls, and the only place that collagen changes its structure is the cornea of your eye, and in your eye it forms a grid formation and it becomes transparent instead of opaque. The structure is so perfectly organized it is hard not to attribute divinity to it, because we kept on seeing this over and over and over again in different parts of the body. …
[Consider] a trophoblast coming off the blastocyst, all of the sudden burying itself into the side of the uterus and having a conversation, saying, ‘I’m here to stay; plant me’–building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes within 44 days something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks it is like a little human being. … And then there is the instruction set of every other part of the body. … And it is not only just our own existence, but how does the woman’s body have a genetic structure that not only builds her own but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that is a mobile system that can actually nurture this child is such a marvel that is, again, beyond our comprehension. …
The complexity of the mathematical model and how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician I look at this with a marvel of how these instruction sets do not make mistakes as they build what is us. It is a mystery. It is magic. It is divinity. … By the time you are nine months old you have almost 60,000 miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries inside your body that are bringing nutrients and taking waste away. And only one mile is visible. … [This is] the magic that is the existence that is us.” CONCLUSION: No evidence for God, you say? Not only is the evidence for God overwhelming, but so is the evidence that this God has revealed Himself to man through the Bible.
CHURCH USES WAY OF LIFE MATERIALS IN DISCIPLESHIP CLASS (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – We received the following testimony this week, and it is a great encouragement to see churches taking discipleship seriously and fortifying the Lord’s people against the tide of apostasy of compromise that we are facing: “Our church is preparing, when we finish the one year discipleship course, to do your study on evolution to help prepare our kids to face it. After that, we’ll move on to the Bible version issue and use your materials for that. All of these are done during what we call our discipleship class, which we have at 5pm on Sundays before the evening service.
It’s an additional hour of teaching beyond Sunday School, morning service, evening service and prayer meeting. We’ve been doing it about two years. Our church is really enjoying, and being blessed by, the materials you have produced. They are critical to our work of preparing our members, especially children, to deal with the lies of the present world-view. Thank you for your faithfulness and praise the Lord for His!”
THE AMERICAN DREAM (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – In the 17th to the mid 20th centuries, the American Dream was freedom of religion and speech and press, peaceable assembly, freedom from government tyranny, the freedoms that were encapsulated in the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791, which granted the opportunity for individuals to pursue their dreams. It was encapsulated by the slogan that America was “the land of opportunity.” From mid-20th century, the American Dream was no longer merely opportunity but prosperity and pleasure itself, and particularly pleasure without moral restraint. In the 21st century, the American dream is dependence on a Nanny State, the pursuit of pop culture vanities such as having one’s YouTube video go viral and the dream of winning a state lottery.
YOUR ONE MILLION TRILLION KINESINS (Friday Church News Notes, January 25, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – David Bolinsky and his team (a company called XVIVO) illustrate complex scientific and medical concepts with computer animation. He has worked with the BioVision initiative of Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. At a talk at TED2007, he showed a video clip from his animation entitled “The Inner Life of a Cell.” The following is excerpted from this talk: “These little walking machines, they’re called kinesins, that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size.
These various machines that power the inside of the cell are really quite amazing. They are the basis of all life, because these machines interact with each other; they pass information to each other; they cause different things to happen inside the cell; and the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly from information that is brought from the nucleus by the molecules that read the genes. No life would be possible without these micro machines. The kinesin is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell, and he pulls a sack that is full of brand-new manufactured proteins to wherever it is needed in the cell, whether it is to a membrane or to an organelle, whether it is to build something or repair something.
And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around right now inside each of our hundred trillion cells. It’s quite amazing that these micro-machines are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding, they work together, they make the cell do what it needs to do, and their working together helps our bodies–huge entities that they will never see–function properly.”
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14). This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list.
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