Song about lost Eden

I've written some posts on pop songs that unwittingly touch on biblical themes. The Doors song Come On, Come On, Come On Now Touch Me Babe; the Who's Who are You? (the full version of that song with the final verse included, in that link it starts at 4.46), etc. Here is a song that unbeknownst to the song writers is about the lost Eden. The song is Once Upon a Time. It could very well be titled Adam's Song:

http://youtu.be/DMGlL0XkQAY

The Bobby Darin version here is the best. A commenter points out that this was close to his death, and he is out of breath as he's singing.

It's about Adam and Eve and their love. The first verse shows this.

In the second verse you get mention of a 'hill', in the Garden of Eden was the mountain, or hill, of God. You also have mention of a tree. A tree that was lost. The Tree of Life. Lost to fallen man, but not ultimately to those who have faith. There are even echoes of Adam in the 'counting all the stars'...

The final verse speaks for itself.

Real armor of God

[From an email.]

Warning: there seem to be a lot of older anti-Calvinism books in that free Christianity books category in the Amazon Kindle store. They tend to be shallow, or to not understand what they are complaining against. Also, false teachers attack the truth.

I've come to always think: what is real armor of God? That is what we want. We don't want fake armor. We don't want badly manufactured armor. We want real armor. The real thing. Pure, on-the-mark biblical doctrine is armor of God. It effects you internally. So if something is difficult for your fallen nature to accept, just ask, "But, don't I want real armor of God? That's what I need." - C.

Subject-Object again

I was thinking of this subject-object relationship regarding science [see this post], and applying it to the subject of God's sovereignty and man's efforts. God is the first cause, but He operates through secondary causes which can be determined, contingent, or free. Human efforts are part of these secondary causes. This is what gives our actions meaning and what makes them real and effectual.

It's because we don't know which cause if free, determined, or contingent on something else, so a dense matrix is created where our effort is real and meaningful for the outcome of God's decree and providence.

As it is said, God's prescriptive will is known to us. It is what is revealed in the Bible. But his decretal will is not known to us. Deut. 29:29 speaks to this.

So what I was thinking is this subject-object relationship exists in this subject of God's sovereignty and mans's effort as well. God's decree and providence is the object, we are the subject. The object needs the subject for the plan to come in to play.

So when we pray, for instance, instead of just thinking, well, why pray when everything will happen anyway, we instead think that our very prayer is *part* of things coming to happen. Of course some secondary causes are determined, so they will happen no matter what in the way God means them to happen, and some secondary causes are contingent, meaning for something to happen something else has to occur as well, and maybe you will do that something else, maybe someone else will do it, but somebody will do it, and that is why effort is meaningful. And God probably takes note of *who does it* and kind of gives that person a special regard. Then there are free secondary causes which I think opens up a lot of the poetry and potential surprise of life.

So God - the First Cause - and human beings - secondary causes - have a similar relationship as the subject and object of science. And maybe in this is partly where it is meant that God is a personal God which makes Him different from other 'gods'.

Atheists had a summit and decreed that colors don't exist

[Part of an email exchange based on this article, but mostly this article.]

Remember that article about the atheists holding some kind of summit and so on? In one part of that article it talked about how these atheists like to say things like color isn't even real. It's just light waves and doesn't even exist and all that. Look at this quote from Berkhof's Systematic Theology where this subject is directly spoken to (actually it is in Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics where it is really gone deeply into, and I just read that chapter in Bavinck):

"The objective revelation of God would be of no avail, if there were no subjective receptivity for it, a correspondence between subject [human beings] and object [natural world]. Dr. Bavinck correctly says: "Science always consists in a logical relation between subject and object." It is only when the subject is adapted to the object that science can result."

Berkhof, Louis (2011-11-08). Systematic Theology (Kindle Locations 2129-2131). Eerdmans Publishing Co - A. Kindle Edition.

What this is saying, and I paraphrase Bavinck, is there is an organic relationship, a kinship, between the subject and object, basically because God created the universe for those who have His image. I.e. you can't say color isn't really real because without a human eye to decode it it doesn't exist because color was created by God to be viewed, by the light of God inside humans, by humans. What the atheists are doing is separating the creation from man (as-well-as God).

There are also echoes of Work teaching in the Bavinck chapter when he goes into how we have to have in us what we can see or experience outside us.

Of course, Bavinck goes through all this talking about the history of philosophy and what the foundation of science is and all that.

Because theology is historically a science its first principles are the same as what we think of as science today. Atheist scientists are obviouslly off-track with their materialism and naturalism and so on. It's all a big subject yet also boiled down in the Bavinck chapter, but also by Berkhof.

I havn't even hit on the main points. This is a bit of a ragged email... - C.

Ragged or not it's a good point, interesting in its logic and simplicity. I mean it isn't like revelatory (at least on the one hand) but set up to counter some of that madness those athiests were spouting, it does seem kind of revelatory (afterall) - subject and object have a relationship. Surely they didn't miss that. Err ... looks like it. - Paul of England

It's remarkable and eye-opening to see how Reformed theologians went through the history of western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle forward and were very adept in all that thought and language and were able to put it all into its place ultimately showing how truth boils down to the Logos experienced in a Trinitarian way. It's not shallow. It doesn't give the impression of people operating outside their own field (and I refer to Bavinck's summary of it all in his chapter on the Foundations of Science in his first volume of Reformed Dogmatics). In passing manner he would touch on how someone like Augustine could boil things down to their essence. As I read through it I was wondering what a modern professional philosopher would think of it. Probably wouldn't even go near a volume of systematic theology, let alone by luck get one from the pure school that was as magisterial as Bavinck. - C.

The ho hum dance of death

I was watching some videos of Chechens torturing and killing Russian prisoners. Very brutal. Playfully brutal. Ugly, violent, crude butchering.

It made me think of God and the angels and how they view such things. I think it is nothing to them because that is what fallen human beings do. I.e. that is just what they do. Now, if there is somebody caught up in it who is not supposed to be caught up in it I think they move in and change the scene, the event. But generally the people involved...the torturers and the tortured are there by their level of being. In recurrence. The torturer becomes the tortured, the tortured becomes the torturer. That is why it is nothing to God and the angels. The general activity of fallen man. Man in rebellion. In the case of Chechens and Russians it is generally Muslims vs. atheists. Gross idolators of a false god vs. mocking idolators of self. Idolators killing idolators. (Is there a true martyr in there now and again? Probably.)

In other words, the killing is ho-hum. From a higher perspective. The killer and the victim actually enjoy it. It's a dance. A dance of death. From under the sun, to Hades, to under the sun, to Hades. Or, "the land of graves" as one of the laughing Chechen soldiers put it to a Russian about to get his throat cut.

Short note on visionary seeing

Short overview of the Kingdom of God:

http://jimhamilton.info/2013/04/19/the-kingdom-of-god/

About 11 paragraphs. This subject gives me visionary overview insight into world history. You can see the children of Satan today with the same anger and resentment and lunatic desire to usurp God and God's people on this planet. They focus on the Holy Land, and they focus on Christian nations. Present reality gets broken up into myriad pieces and confuses, but true vision is seeing the more simple picture. This is true with the Bible. I.e. this is what the Bible actually teaches us to do. The Devil and his program and influence is represented by many different names and events and peoples and places and ideas and so on in the Bible, just as what is good and true has different guises in a similar manner; so when you can see both in the simplicity that unites all the disparate reflections you are seeing at a higher level.

On Michael S. Heiser

[An email...]

I've been reading Michael Heiser (not just on the Divine Council subject), and he's basically a theological liberal. The usual type found in academia. He defends the thoroughly indefensible Peter Enns. He's got a deficient view of the Bible as the very word of God.

http://michaelsheiser.com/TheNakedBible/2008/06/beginning-a-serious-discussion-about-inerrancy/

He also is an ANE (Ancient Near East) scholar (like Enns), and their overriding idiocy is to *have* to see ANE literature as *influencing the Bible* rather than the biblical narrative as it has echoed down through the ages influencing ANE literature.

Ultimately he's a shallow scholar and not a Bible-believing Christian, though he does give some lip service to being conservative on biblical issues.

It's not surprising that Mormons use his books to bolster their science fiction novel theology.

One thing he does that is lunatic (and that people like Peter Enns does) is he talks about the 'need' to rethink the entire biblical 'story' based on what scholars 'now know' regarding ANE this and that (and Enns would also include what is now known regarding evolution, which he swallows hook, line, and sinker). I.e. there is a *scale* thing going on here in their minds (i.e. they can't discern scale). They think the wide and strong river of history and theology can be redefined by their little books and theories and 'PhDs' and that everybody will just have to come along with them. This is Happy Hills Mental Disorder Hospital realm stuff. - C.

* * * * * * *

[An earlier email...]
I haven't looked at this person's [Michael S. Heiser] website or the links yet, but a good question to ask when approaching such a type is does he present good armor? Does he have effective armor? Does he present real biblical armor? - C.

No, he doesn't. He doesn't know the power of biblical doctrine. He doesn't have a parts-in-relation-to-the-whole understanding of the Bible. He's a scholar. An academic. A fool. Before he's a Christian. Ironically he's a rare case of someone being off-the-mark due in part to a *deficient* doctrine on angels. That's just an aside. He's got bigger problems than that. He, to mention maybe the biggest, doesn't seem to connect the orthodox understanding of the Trinity with salvation and the plan of God itself. I.e. he doesn't fear treading blithely on that ground. Again, a fool. We want armor of God. Real armor. That armor cast in the Reformation is real and celestial armor.

How false teachers admit to truth

The thoroughly odious false teacher Peter Enns was allowing my comments on his blog for a couple of weeks, but I had never made a direct hit on him. Today I did, and even though he seems to have changed his policy to allow comments from more than just useful idiot yes-men he deleted my comment. This is how false teachers admit to truth. By what they actually ban from their presence and the presence of their following of useful idiots. Here is my comment:

"Mr. Enns, you continue to pose this so-called problem in the most cartoonishly (and ignorant) way possible. 97% of scientists believe in *micro* evolution (otherwise know as dog breeding, now being done at ever smaller scale). Actually I hope 100% of scientists do. That is the *lab science* associated with the term evolution. You are conflating *that* with Darwinian *macro* evolution, which is not operative science but is speculative or historical science solely. It is the theory that fish turn into race horses. It's never been observed, never been proven from the fossil record or any other means, and is the main arena atheist scientists play in to use 'the theory of evolution' as a club to hit Christians over the head with. The fossil record and micro biology in general have caused most scientists to abandon Darwinian macro evolution (other than as a useful tool to attack Christianity still, which they still use it for, to the degree of still teaching decades old known hoaxes in school text books). At this point honest atheist scientists who have abandoned Darwinian macro evolution but who can never bring themselves to accept the word of God pretty much state their position this way: "We'll stay in suspended animation for however long it takes to come up with something better, but until then we will never accept supernatural creation." So be it. It's now time to present this subject in a more intelligent and accurate way (even if it makes your books look a bit silly and unnecessary)."

Many observers, few observed

In life there are observers and there are the observed. You want to be the observed. The observed are rare. You want to be a spectacle to the world. You want the world to see you as a spectacle. "Who is that out-of-place person?" It's a child of God. "Who is that outsider?" It's a child of God. "Who is that person who can't seem to be anonymous and inconspicuous to us?" It's a child of God. A temple of the Holy Spirit. In this world, not of this world.