Please also pray for Kristi’s health, as she is quite sick right now.

Evangelical defeatism is a failure of Biblical perspective. After all, the risen Lord Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and has been made head over all things for the Church; he is the ruler of the kings of the earth and he is currently putting his enemies beneath his feet; he has presumably asked the Father for the nations as his inheritance and the ends of the earth as his possession – and so he will receive them. All nations will bow to Jesus and all kings will serve him and his kingdom will grow to become the largest plant in the garden with the nation-birds finding rest in its branches. His kingdom is the stone which crushed the kingdoms of men in Daniel 2 and which is growing to become a mountain-empire which fills the whole earth. He is the firstborn from among the dead and therefore it is right that in all things he has the first place. He has been highly exalted and not only will every knee bow to him but every knee should bow to him.

Evangelical defeatism is a failure of historical perspective. After all, the statistics are out there. It took 1400 years for 1% of the world’s population to become Christians and then another 360 years for that to double to 2%. Another 170 years saw that grow from 2% to 4% and then, between 1960 and 1990 the proportion of the world’s population made up of Bible-believing Christians rose from 4% to 8%. Now, in 2007, one third of the world’s population confesses that Jesus is Lord and 11% of the world’s population are “evangelical” Christians. The evangelical church is growing twice as fast as Islam and three times as fast as the world’s population. South America is turning Protestant faster than Continental Europe did in the sixteenth century. South Koreans reckon that they can evangelize the whole of North Korea within five years once that country opens up. And then there’s the Chinese church consisting of tens of millions of Christians who have learned to pray, who have confidence in Scripture, who know about spiritual warfare, have been schooled in suffering and are qualified to rule. One day in the next century that Church – tens of millions of Christians trained to die – will be released into global mission and our prayers for the fall of Islam will be answered.

David Field, “Samuel Rutherford and the Confessionally Christian State”

That date has not yet been set, due to complications I would rather not post on a public site. Nonetheless, we are fully committed to the marriage, and continue to prepare, and pray that obstacles would be removed.

I want to add that through the complications, our relationship has only grown stronger, and the opportunity for Kristi to visit me in Grande Prairie last month caused our already-stable love to bloom into something even more wonderful. We look forward eagerly to our future together, and acknowledge that only God in His infinite wisdom and power could have brought us together.

The arrangement has not yet been finalized. Stay tuned.

We do not have a date set yet, as we have only begun to deal with logistical matters, some of which are pretty complex. You can certainly pray that we may find a way to make all of this happen before the year is out. I’m not a big believer in lengthy engagements, and even less so given the distance involved and the factor of children. (If you’re interested in learning how you can pray more specifically, feel free to contact me.)

I cannot express how grateful I am to God for bringing such a wonderful woman into my life. I am humbled by my own weaknesses, and elated by His grace. He truly gives us much better than we deserve.

Now, it so happens that I absolutely agree that there is a close relationship between Adam and Moses, although I think it’s wrongheaded to label this in terms of “covenant of works.” Biblically, these folks simply don’t “get” the nature of either the Adamic covenant or the Mosaic.

Nonetheless, Romans 5 teaches that Torah intensifies the Sin and death state brought on by the fall. The problem for West-Cal and their allies is that the primary Israel-fall depicted in Romans is the stumbling over Christ worked out from the end of Romans 9 and on into the first part of Romans 11. And of course, that won’t do, since the whole point is to posit a contrast to the new covenant, not a parallel (what I call a relational typology between the covenants that shows a fundamental shared structure).

In the midst of all of this, there is a genuine Adam issue that is getting snowed under by the avalanche of rhetoric: many of these “defenders of orthodoxy” have completely abandoned the biblical doctrine of six day creation and a young earth. If you want to ask where to locate the continental divide that threatens to throw not only Reformed niceties, but the whole Christian enterprise into the Pacific (what a coincidence), it is right here.

Why? Because denial of the biblical chronology is an attack on the coherence of a biblical view of Adam. Just ask any evolutionist Christian to talk about Adam and Eve. There are basically three choices: deny their historicity altogether; generalize them out of existence; or arbitrarily claim that humanoids evolved and that at some point God placed His image in a sufficiently evolved pair. But even such a concession as the latter cannot satisfy anyone if we were are going to take the New Testament’s Last Adam Christology seriously – much less if we are going to take Genesis seriously. Moreover, it’s not possible for such a view to stand the test of time – it’s leaning too far down a greased slope, and carries no weight exegetically or “scientifically.” (And yes, I place “scientifically” in quotation marks quite advisedly. When science claims to arbitrate authoritatively about the distant past, it is well beyond its bounds. It is no longer science but conjecture, and ultimately faith – sans revelation.)

The bottom line is that the growing cave-in to macro-evolution is an attack on the very foundations of Christianity. If the R. Scott Clarks of the Church want us to take them seriously as defenders of orthodoxy, they could at least start with hermeneutical principles that support rather than undermine orthodox Christology. You can’t have a covenant with an ahistorical person.

Get Genesis right, and then maybe we can talk.

Meanwhile, please excuse us if we laugh at your ranting while you try to strain out gnats and force us to swallow camels.

EASTERN

Washington vs Montreal: Caps in six.

New Jersey vs Philadelphia: Flyers upset in six.

Buffalo vs Boston: Sabres in seven.

Pittsburgh vs Ottawa: Pens in six.

WESTERN

San Jose vs Colorado: Sharks in five.

Chicago vs Nashville: Hawks in six.

Vancouver vs Los Angeles: Canucks in five.

Phoenix vs Detroit: Wings in six.

Don’t bank on any of this.

While at a few points in his life, Dad had his own handyman business, his one recurring employer was Argyle Machine Shop in Port Alberni, BC. (I think that is where he was working when he met my mother.)

There were a lot of interesting things about his history with Argyle, but one basic one was that he never joined the union in what was ostensibly a closed shop. How he accomplished that, I’m not sure, but he was opposed to it philosophically. The union shop steward perhaps countenanced it because Dad would do tasks that his union members probably would not.

Dad was basically a go-boy. He did whatever was thrown at him – cleaning up garbage, sand blasting, spray painting, whatever. He worked hard and didn’t complain about his wages.

During a big negotiation process during which the union was threatening to strike in the mid-1960s, one day the foreman came up to my father and said simply: “We’re giving you a dollar an hour raise.” Perhaps that doesn’t compute for the younger generation, but a dollar an hour raise in the mid-1960s was almost unheard of. It was probably a 30% increase.

It should be kept in mind, though, that often when my Dad left, the machine shop hired two men to take his place. That was how he worked.

But his influence was not simply limited to his work ethic. He brought something else to the workplace. During coffee breaks, he would pull out his Bible and read.

He wasn’t preachy with the other men and didn’t even comment on their language. Yet interestingly enough, some of them began to apologize to him when they happened to utter obscenities in his presence. (He told them it wasn’t him to whom they needed to apologize.)

One of the most memorable incidents occurred on one of those days in which Dad had dropped a pile of garbage off at the dump. A while later, the foreman came up to him and told him that something had accidentally got thrown out. I’m not sure what it was, but it was very small – as in smaller than your finger. He asked Dad if he could go back to the dump to look for it.

What a hopeless task! What are the odds of actually finding something like that, even if you knew exactly where to look?

Dad drove out to the dump, sat in the truck and prayed that the Lord would help him find it, got out of the truck, walked to the pile, picked the item off the surface of the pile without so much as needing to search, and drove back to the shop.

Upon his return, he handed the item to the foreman and said, “I prayed.”

To which the simple response from the foreman was: “I knew you would.”

Whatever else one may say about those years, my father had a simple faith that forced people to take notice – take notice not merely of his faith, but of the God who really acted through it.

You don’t need to do “big things” in order for God to glorify His name in your life.

The last stint my Dad worked at Argyle Machine Shop, he gave his notice that he was leaving about a month beforehand. He was not merely quitting to go preaching and then come back; we were going to move from Port Alberni.

With a couple weeks to go, Dad was doing the lawn and experienced some pains. He also had someone working on his car getting it ready for the trip. In this particular house, the garage was in the basement. That day, Dad went up and down the stairs many times to check on the progress of the repairs. He worked like this all day, and the pains were not going away. He thought he may be fighting fumes. Finally, he got frustrated and started doing pushups.

Late that night, lying in bed, he started to describe to Mom the symptoms he was having, and she got scared: they sounded much like the symptoms her father experienced when he had a massive heart attack.

She called an ambulance at about 1:30 in the morning.

At the hospital, it took a couple of hours before Dad actually got anything done to him other than needing to answer questions.

But yes, it was a massive heart attack. The doctor told Mom that if he could make it through the first 24 hours, he was hopeful Dad could make it.

Make it he did, but he was in critical condition for 100 hours.

Yet as crazy as all this seems, we moved from Port Alberni on the day appointed. God had restored Dad in an amazing way.

I brought this story up at this particular juncture for two reasons.

First, this was the end of the “work for a while and then go preach” period. From here on out, Dad finally started taking up collections. He knew he was putting too much strain on himself.

The other thing is that here again was evidence of how God cared for us financially. Even though Dad had already given his notice, and surely would never be back, Argyle Machine Shop provided him with three months’ severance pay.

It would not be the last time over the next few years that we marvelled at how God provided.

I was sort of commissioned to write this piece back in 2004, but the book in which it was to appear fell on hard times and was not published. I later had a contract with another publisher to have it released on its own, but it fell victim to cutbacks. Knowing that I do not have present resources to publish in paperback as I did with Feed My Lambs, I decided on my first ebook-only (PDF) release.

You can get more information and learn how to purchase by going to my Pactum Reformanda Publishing web site.