Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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The bride-price is a common feature of the Bible’s stories. Jacob famously put in 14 years of hard labor for Rachel. David paid King Saul a bride-price of 100 foreskins of the hated Philistines. For a family to give up a daughter in marriage represented a financial burden, as most of them lived a hand-to-mouth agrarian lifestyle, and all the women helped keep it going. To lose a young woman was to lose an important worker. So, the payment of a bride-price was meant to help compensate for that l...
A documentary filmmaker, Mark, went to Hawaii to capture the stories of pearl divers. These guys make unassisted dives to retrieve oysters. By “unassisted,” we mean they have no oxygen tanks. They’re diving in the skin God gave them, holding their breath. This is a feat that takes years of training and is never without danger. Mark interviewed an older pearl diver, Mr. H, in the elderly man’s small home. Mark heard the tragic story of Mr. H’s son, who died one day after diving too deep or s...
Maybe the most difficult of the Christian duties found in the Bible is forgiveness. We like thinking God has forgiven us, but then we’re told we need to forgive each other as we have been forgiven. As Joan Rivers used to say, “Can we talk?” Can we just admit that forgiving someone who has hurt us deeply can feel impossible? It feels that way a lot. It may not even be a feeling that gets better over time. I don’t have a silver bullet here, to fix this, but I have found that it helps to see what f...
It’s been a rough month for several families in our little congregation. We are grieving deaths, fighting illness, and mourning other heartaches. Others, though, are adjusting to life with new babies, while a few cruise along pretty normally, doing business as usual and enjoying the holidays. We are a single church with members who seem to be walking radically different paths, at least in some ways. The commonality with us all is that, as it says in Psalm 25:10, “All the paths of the Lord are st...
My mother-in-law passed away on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was unexpected. On the other hand, she was a frail, little woman in her 80s, and stuff started breaking down. Ruth Martinez will be greatly missed. Ruth was a woman of faith. Her standard greeting was not, “Hey! How’s it going?” but rather, “Praise the Lord!” To the end, she clung to a promise she knew she had received from her God, that all of her children would enter into his kingdom. She prayed for each of them constantl...
I am not a science denier. You may hear otherwise, but I think that’s unfair. To be anti-science is to be anti God, who created and owns everything in the whole cosmos. Our fathers in the faith used to talk about the value of studying God’s two books. One, of course, was the Bible, and the other was the created world we live in. They believed that God used both books to reveal himself to those who look for him in their pages. The scientific method is one of the tools God has given humanity, so...
If you’ve watched a movie that depicted a funeral in the last 40 years or so, I’d place my bet on two things. One, it was probably raining; and, two, the Scripture quoted by the clergyman was Psalm 23. I’m not sure how we got there, where Psalm 23 is associated with funerals. I’d guess it’s because verse 4 mentions “the valley of the shadow of death.” But, take another run at it, and simply read the words as they’re written. This “Shepherd Psalm” is not gloomy at all. Death is not the topic at...
As a pastor, I have helped people write their requests for religious exemptions to the COVID vaccines. (And I am happy to do so for anyone who needs the assistance.) In my experience, the most prevalent objection to the experimental mRNA shots is that they all made use of fetal cell lines, obtained through abortion, from the research stage, through development, manufacturing, and/or testing. We wouldn’t have the shots if several babies had not been purposely killed decades ago. That is not m...
God commands me to love my neighbor. I am not, however, commanded to put any effort into making my neighbor's life risk-free. Biblical love does not equal safety; much less does it equal the comforting illusion of it. If I'm not breaking any of God's commandments in my relationship with you, then I am acting in love toward you, as defined in Romans 13:8-10. However, none of those commandments are about the elimination of risk. Of the 613 commandments found in the law of God, only three of them...
We’ve begun a new series at our church, preaching through the Psalms. It’s a good time to come and get in on the ground floor. Last Sunday we walked through Psalm 1 and found it speaking to our current situation. The Psalm describes the worshiper of God, who delights in God’s Word. He is compared to a healthy, well-watered tree that bears fruit in its season and never withers. The ungodly, by contrast, walk contrary to the commandments and dry up and blow away. OK, great. That’s all right on the...
In the movie “The Fellowship of the Ring,” a fascinating scenario plays out in multiple scenes. The titular ring is a magic item that gives its owner control over the whole world. It was made by the ultimate bad guy, a dark entity called Sauron. The ring itself embodies his quest for domination. The question arises several times, though, about whether a good, heroic character might be able to use the ring in a better way than Sauron. Maybe this person could become a benevolent dictator, for eve...
As you’re reading your Bible, note the instances in which people try to coerce, bribe, or threaten others into complying with their will. I think you’ll see a pattern emerge rather quickly. First, the ones employing coercive means are the bad guys. Forcing people to comply with your will if you can is the work of a dastardly villain. This is true even if the villain has convinced himself that his own will is the best course for everybody. You might find the odd instance where an otherwise goo...
I hope I’m proven wrong, but I think the chances of another lock-down coming in the fall are right around 118%. I sincerely hope we’ve had all the Coronavirus deaths we’re going to have, and that this all just goes away. The warnings we’re hearing, though, make me think that’s unlikely. It’s a good time, if we haven’t done it already, to think through tough issues of individual rights vs. public safety; authority and power; and, the role of governments, churches, and families as they relate t...
On the whole, I’m a science guy. I’m not afraid of science, nor do I perceive any threat from it. As a Christian man, I have no worries that science will damage my faith. In fact, if my faith could be scientifically disproved, then it would deserve to be. I wrote in this space a couple years ago that science needs the Christian worldview to ground its basic assumptions (specifically, things that make experimentation possible, like logic, sense reliability, and the uniformity of nature) whi...
In the second verse of King David’s prayer of repentance, Psalm 51, the sinner cries out, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” We miss the original force of this wording because our English doesn’t do a great job of conveying the feeling that is present in David’s Hebrew. As every decent writer (and editor) will tell you, our exclamation point is pretty weak in this regard. David’s actual words convey the idea of “multiplication,” as in, “again and again, as muc...
The current race debate highlights the issue of generational guilt. Does it really exist? What should be done about it? One side is sure it exists, and wants the government to get involved in redressing past sins. The other side thinks the whole notion is fundamentally unjust from the get-go. Can a generation bear responsibility for the sins of a previous generation of its ancestors? From a biblical standpoint, the answer is, “Yes,” with some stipulations. Clearly, generational guilt is a rea...
Bible believers should take a hard look at libertarianism. I’m not talking about joining the Libertarian Party, which spends a lot of time masquerading as a dumpster fire. I’m talking about libertarianism as a philosophy of government. You believe you are under a New Testament mandate to “take every thought captive” to Christ, but you’ve spent no time doing this when it comes to the ideas that seek to control your life from the outside. At some point you picked a party to join and have generally...
I’ve spent a couple of columns trying to encourage my brethren in Christ to realize that God has given us the victory. We are not destined, as a worldwide body, to lose. We win. And, that means more than simply “hanging on” until Christ rescues us. It means winning the world in an observable fashion. Today, I want to take a different angle. I want to suggest that a young woman named Heather is, in microcosm, how we win. The victory is ours because what just happened to her keeps on happening, to...
Cheer up, believer. You have reason for optimism regarding both the present and the future, yes, even if the return of Christ is delayed. In time and history, the promise is that the gates of hell shall not overcome what he is building. It boils down to a question of which preacher you’re going to listen to. I tell the folks who are willing to hear me that the preaching doesn’t stop once church is over. We are being preached to, or preached at, as the expression goes, in a constant bom...
In my last two columns, I highlighted the Bible’s view of immigrants. That is, they are to be welcomed and loved as brothers. Foreigners in Israel were expected to follow God’s one law, but were not made full citizens until after a process of conversion. This all comports with the original American vision. There is no Constitutional authority given to regulate immigration. In fact, the first restrictive immigration law was not put in place until 1925. Until then, “coming legally” to America...
In my last column, I said the Bible’s attitude toward the “alien” or immigrant is univocal. We are to love him as ourselves, and treat him as a brother. In this piece, I plan to point out the public policy toward foreigners that is set forth in God’s law/word. Next time, I hope to answer common Christian objections to implementing that policy in our day. (Feel free to email me before then with your best arguments.) First, there was no legislative body in ancient Israel under Moses. No one was...
Immigration is a big news item, as we find ourselves still dealing with “kids in cages” on our Southern border. My conservative friends blame Obama for building them. My liberal friends point out that Trump kept on filling them. So here we are, and they’re overflowing. Clearly this is a bi-partisan issue, in the sense that both parties have proven inept in dealing with it. I plan to spend some time in this space investigating a biblical view of immigration and what, if anything, the Scrip...
The Equality Act is making its way through Congress. I think it will become law. This will expand the scope of current anti-discrimination rules, to include sexual and gender categories. It will be illegal to refuse to hire someone based on their stated preferences or identifying labels. Public restrooms will be open to biological members of the other sex. Most importantly, for this article, the Equality Act denies any exemption due to religious conviction. If taken to court over it, no church,...
Should Christians be involved in politics? It’s a trick question, since politics always involves us. However disinterested you are in politics, politics is very interested in you. If you find that concept aggravating, I’m totally on your side. My preference would be to never give one more thought to anything that happens in Washington or Santa Fe. The real question is not whether to be involved, but how? I spent a lot of time doing it wrong. And, by “wrong” I mean ineffectively. When Bible-belie...
I hear there are dozens of presidential executive orders coming soon that tighten the regulation of Second Amendment rights. This is a fundamentally spiritual and moral issue. For years, I have advocated that political candidates should be asked to explain where they think our rights come from. Since government is in the business of securing our rights, how do you know which rights ought to be secured? This is a great question because it’s like a laser-pointer that hovers on issues of m...