Mark the date!

The dates for the 2009 Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology are out, and it is coming to Grand Rapids March 27-29. The topic this year is Right With God: The Doctrine of Justification. Since '09 is an off-year for Together for the Gospel, I will be planning on a couple of vacation days to check out some great Reformed Bible teaching right here in the great state of Michigan.

Sound words from a departed brother

From the late D. James Kennedy, heard today on the radio....

Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved society

That almost makes up for suffering through The View for an hour.

Anyone who looks at the United States right now and doesn't see Rome, doesn't know a thing about history or human nature. We tolerate anything except taking a stand. We want everything right now and we want the biggest and the best. Our economy is in shambles, our national morality is at an all time low and we are about to elect an empty suit who is either dangerously naive or just dangerous.

Get your fiddles out, Rome is burning.

Well that worked well

After the much anticipated bailout bill, putting the government $700+ billions into the private market, we were assured that things would be better. Now the Dow is down under 10,000 and the world economy is accelerating it's decline. On the bright side, the taxpayers are about to own hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgage debt. Thank you President Bush, Senator Obama and Senator McCain.

We should declare a moratorium on government for a year. Send Bush home early, disband congress and let this mess sort itself out.

Take on the insurance companies!

I have spent the morning at the hospital while my wife's thyroid was removed, and it has been one Barack Obama commercial after another. The last one has Obama pledging to "take on the insurance companies".

How exactly is that going to happen? By increasing regulation? That will do wonders for bringing down costs. Just nonsense, but people eat this stuff up like sheep eating up hay. Go get Obama! Give me some of their money Obama! Make it fair Obama! Baa! Baa!

Why exactly is it the role of the President to take on insurance companies? Last time I checked, health insurance is a private sector concern. There is not a constitutional right to health insurance (or health care for that matter) and it certainly is not a matter for the President to take on. Just more empty class warfare rhetoric from Obama. I can't wait for the surgery to get over, to get me away from the Obama commercials and now to get me away from The View. The cackling and clucking about nonsensical stuff is making me bleed from the ears. The one chick is talking about how good she feels about Biden, and Hasselback asked her if she felt the same way about McCain. The woman looked at her like she was from Mars. Biden is very experienced, true enough. But what Obama and his lack of experience? Fortunately, the whole conversation was saved by yet another inane comment from that astute political observer, Whoopi Goldberg. No wonder Americans are so stupid when they watch this crap all day.

I wonder when Obama is going to go on TV and promise to "take on" the tort lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits that raise health care costs for all of us and benefit no one but them? I won't hold my breath.

What media bias?

I assume no one is surprised by this headline...

VP Debate Moderator Pens Pro-Obama Book

WASHINGTON: Gwen Ifill, who is moderating Thursday's vice-presidential debate, is releasing a book on Barack Obama and other young black politicians who are "forging a bold new path to political power."

Questions are being raised about the objectivity of Thursday's vice presidential debate moderator after news surfaced that she is releasing a new book promoting Barack Obama and other black politicians who have benefited from the civil rights struggle.

Gwen Ifill, of PBS' "The NewsHour," is expected to remain as moderator, however.

"The book has been a known factor for months, so I'm not sure what the big deal is," said NewsHour spokeswoman Anne Bell.

She told FOXNews.com that there were no concerns about Ifill's neutrality, and that the debate Thursday between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden would go forward as planned. Ifill also moderated the 2004 vice presidential debate.

"We were pleased that the (debate) commission once again turned to Gwen to moderate the debate," Bell said. "They've known and trusted her as a moderator and that's wonderful."

Ifill's book, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama," is due to be released about the same time the next president takes the oath of office.

In her book, Ifill contends that the black political structure of the civil rights movement has cleared the way for post-racial politicians to ascend to new heights.

Now some are wondering whether Ifill can be fair and balanced, and whether she should be the moderator of Thursday's 9 p.m. ET debate.

"Clearly her books aren't going to do as well unless Obama wins, so it looks like she has some investment, literally, in one candidate or the other. And she's supposed to be sitting there as a neutral arbiter during the debate," said NPR's Juan Williams, a FOX News contributor. "I think the world of Gwen Ifill but I know there's a perception problem."

John McCain told FOX News Wednesday he believes Ifill will be "objective" at the debate.

"Does this help if she has written a book that's favorable to Senator Obama? Probably not," McCain said. "But I have confidence Gwen Ifill will do a professional job."

Why the media even pretends to be unbiased shows how delusional and self-important they really are. Maybe we can have Rush Limbaugh moderate a debate for McCain and Obama? What is really sad is that most people are so starstruck by Obama that they don't realize what a creation of the media he is and how dangerous he is for America.

Brief video clip on gender roles in the church, brought on by the discussion of Governor Palin as a possible VP candidate who would not be eligible to be a pastor. They went to Southern Seminary, which makes sense.

ABC News: Gender Roles

The video features an interview with a woman who styles herself "pastor", Linda Barnes. Oddly she describes herself as theologically conservative but doesn't see any reason why she cannot be a pastor. Her argument, according to the interviewer, is that SBC leaders are cherry picking verses to marginalize women. First, it is not cherry picking to point out in context what the Bible says. Second, it doesn't marginalize women unless you buy into the world's definition of success and contribution. Dr. Mohler correctly points out that this lady who styles herself as "Pastor" doesn't have a problem with Dr. Mohler or other Southern Baptists, she has a problem with the New Testament.

The issue boils down to pride. Women look at the Scripture, see what God says but decide that it is unfair. You can't tell me what to do! It is a common failing in the church, but women who insist on being called "pastor" and churches who call them to fill that role are in direct and sinful disobedience to the Scripture.

A victory for common sense

Today the house of Representatives voted by a slim margin to reject the enormous bailout proposed in D.C. The stock market responded kind of poorly, to the tune of a 700+ point drop in the Dow. Bank stocks were especially hammered. My employer had a tough day, but nearly as bad as some others. There is a lot of pain and consolidation to come I am afraid, but long term it beats the alternative. An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today pointed out that any massive bailout of the financial system would have been largely financed by such friends as China and Middle Eastern nations...

The success of the pending rescue of the U.S. financial system probably depends as much on the central banks of China and the Middle East as on Congress and the Federal Reserve.

The U.S. is turning to foreign governments and other overseas investors to buy a good chunk of what could total $700 billion in Treasury debt expected to finance the bailout. Foreign investors also are needed to shore up the depleted capital of the nation's financial institutions, seen in the plan by Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group to buy a large stake in Morgan Stanley, which is weighed down by bad debt and market distrust.

This is a bittersweet moment in U.S. economic history. In one sense, the growing importance of foreign cash represents the triumph of a half-century of U.S. proselytizing for a global financial system in which money flows from those who have it to those who need it. But it is also an unmistakable sign of U.S. economic decline. The global financial system the U.S. designed had anticipated that American banks and financial firms would be the world's financial lifeguards; now those institutions are like exhausted swimmers a stroke or two away from drowning.

The financial crisis makes clear how much the interests of foreign lenders have become a top concern in Washington. A big reason the Fed and Treasury stepped in to rescue mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, say U.S. financial officials, was to reassure foreign leaders including China, which holds roughly $1 trillion in U.S. debt, that U.S. securities were safe. "Superpowers do not normally ask their diplomats to reassure other nations on questions of credit-worthiness," says former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

Just 10 years after the U.S. oversaw the financial rescue of Asian nations, the U.S. now risks becoming the world's largest subprime borrower. This change of fortune has been hard to swallow. In a televised address Thursday, President George W. Bush blamed the current financial crisis on the "massive amount of money [that] flowed into the United States from investors abroad," rather than on greedy decisions by U.S. mortgage lenders and borrowers. In Friday's presidential debate, both candidates railed against U.S. economic dependence on China.

Powerful nations have been humbled before by an overdependence on foreign capital. Council on Foreign Relations economist Brad Setser notes that Britain was forced to end its seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956 because of U.S. opposition. Washington's main weapon: its threat to slash financial support for Britain, whose economy had been battered by World War II.

The U.S. isn't in remotely as bad shape as postwar Britain. It still is the world's sole military superpower, and the U.S. currency is still dominant. The latter is important because even if foreign holdings of U.S. debt grow, as is likely, the U.S. alone prints the dollars needed to pay those debts.

Even so, foreign lenders have a great deal of sway. If they were to dump U.S. government debt -- or be unwilling to buy more -- the interest rates needed to attract buyers of Treasurys would soar. The already fragile U.S. economy would absorb yet another hit.

China, Saudi Arabia and other big foreign holders are unlikely to take antidollar measures precisely because they own so much U.S. debt. To the extent the dollar declines, so does the value of those nations' holdings. Mr. Summers calls this situation "the financial balance of terror."

But it is naive to assume that this so-called balance will protect U.S. interests indefinitely. Senior Chinese economists have voiced growing dismay about the outlook for the dollar, and the introduction of an additional $700 billion in debt might drive the currency's value down further, at least in the short term. "I think foreigners are being taken for a ride by the U.S. government," says Andy Xie, an independent economist in Shanghai.

Sounds less and less appealing doesn't it? Propping up the financial systems to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of additional debt for our grandkids, owed to Saudi Arabia and China, is not much of a legacy is it?

This whole situation has proven once and for all that President Bush is naive in many ways when it comes to trusting people around him and his idea of "compassionate conservatism" is little different from big government liberalism. President Bush is generally right on issues of life and on the war on terror, but on economics he either is unable to control the urge to spend or he has surrounded himself with poor advisers. In an attempt to "reach across the aisle", he has allowed liberals to spend and spend and spend. While he has stood strong for what is right in the War of Terror, his legacy will in large part be presiding over a ballooning federal debt and a financial crisis in his final year. What seemed like a promising, historical Presidency is rapidly degenerating into a record of mediocrity and failure. Perhaps his most stinging failure may just be setting up the atmosphere where we elect a unqualified, far left liberal as President.

Conservatism, real conservatism, would dictate that we slash spending at the Federal level as well as cutting taxes. What President Bush has allowed to happen is an unholy union of lower taxes and dramatically higher spending. There is a real danger of becoming a third world economic power with a super power military. That is a recipe for totalitarianism and war for resources (not the fake kind liberals claim the liberation of Iraq amounts to, but real conquest of other nations) Shoring up and stabilizing our financial system, without massive amounts of debt, is in many ways as much an issue of national security as a strong military, and there are far too few voices of courage and reason in the halls of power.

Never have so many who knew so little said so much

Amidst all of the overheated rhetoric about the financial crisis and the bailout plan from people who likely couldn't balance a checkbook without assistance, there are few voices of sanity. All anyone seems able to agree on is the need to DO SOMETHING! There probably has never been a time when doing something just for the sake of doing something has ever turned out well.

I am not looking at this situation as a theologian but as a conservative who remembers what being a conservative is supposed to mean. Dr. Mohler has posted a blog article about what Christians should think facing the financial crisis. Here is a snippet...

The development of vast global economic systems simply builds upon the simple principle that all participants are willing to trade one good for another they want even more and to invest in the hope of future gain.

Is this greed? In and of itself, this is not greed at all. The desire for a profit, for income, and for material gain is not in itself greed. The Bible clearly teaches that the worker is worthy of his hire and that rewards should follow labor, thrift, and investment.

Greed raises its ugly head when individuals and groups (such as corporations or retirement funds) seek an unrealistic gain at the expense of others and then use illegitimate means to gain what they want. Given the nature of this fallen world and the reality of human sinfulness, we should expect that greed will be a constant temptation. Greed will entice the rich to oppress the poor, partners in transactions to lie to one another, and investors to take irrational risks. All of these are evident in this current crisis.

I encourage everyone to read Dr. Mohler's piece, but right now I am more concerned about what the long term ramifications of a knee-jerk government intervention that will have disastrous long-term ramifications for our economy and the financial security of our children.

There is plenty of complicity to go around. Banks made bad loan that they shouldn't have because compensation is based on a "here and now" production system that is rapidly moving to sacrifice quality of business for quantity of sales. Appraisers would value a property at whatever it needed to come in at to make sure they stayed on the approved lists (when we bought our house in Northern Michigan the appraisal came in at the exact agreed purchase price of the house, to the penny. Coincidence? I think not) The government, through meddling in the free market, has forced banks to make loans on properties that they wouldn’t normally have, to people who are not credit worthy so that they can tick off their lists for the community reinvestment act.

And *GASP* here is another huge group of people to blame: consumers who bought houses they couldn't afford. Get real, most of these people were not saying "no, no I will get the smaller house" they were buying the biggest house they could get (not that they could afford, that they could get approved for). They then took full advantage of artificially inflated housing values to pay off revolving debt and then turned around an racked up even MORE revolving debt to go along with a huge mortgage and a maxed out home equity line. With the encouragement of banks and retailers, people turned their houses upside down and shook them like piggy banks. We are now, all of us, starting to reap what we have sown. Even those who were responsible borrowers, savers, investors are feeling the bite of a financial system gone sour. Those are the facts, the question is what to do about it?

Those who claim that this crisis is a sign that deregulation and the free market don't work are fools, because we haven't truly operated in a free market when it comes to housing for a very long time. It is patently false that the free market doesn't work or that regulation helps the economy. What is true is that when government interferes and tinkers in the free market, it invariably leads to disaster. That is never truer than right now with the impending bailout deal to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, drawn from the already empty coffers of the Federal government. Since when is it the responsibility of the government to prop up banks and reward consumers who have entered into bad loan agreements? It never stops. The Big Three auto makers in Detroit want government backed loans because they have become uncompetitive through sloppy management and allowing unions to wring unreasonable pay and benefit concessions from them. What are we going to do when all of the revolving debt comes to a critical mas and blows up? Is the government going to bail out Capital One and MBNA? Bail out customers who have spent billions in money they don't have? Take over the stores that have been built to meet the phony demand generated by credit card purchases? That is a huge problem, because all of these strips malls were built in large part to meet demand for products that is driven by phantom money. The real question is this: who will get left holding the bag?

There are two ways to address this "crisis". One is to increase the inefficient and politically charged interference with the lending markets and in doing so put the taxpayers on the line for hundreds of billions of dollars of debt to rescue irresponsible lending, regulation and consumers spending. The other is less politically palatable but I think makes the most sense, that is to let the chips fall where they may and let the market correct itself. Banks will collapse but be snatched up by others (like Washington Mutual and its 2200 branches being gobbled up by Chase) There are really too many banks right now anyway. Houses will be foreclosed on, but that is the unfortunate reality. If you voluntarily enter into an agreement to borrow $200,000 and pay that money back over time, and offer a bank the house you are buying as collateral, the bank can and should be able to recoup their money if you don't pay them back. Otherwise, banks will stop lending because in banking it is all about risk. Change the risk and you need more reward. Banks do not have to loan money, you do not have a Constitutional right to own a home or be approved for a mortgage. If you decrease the reward and increase the risk, people will invest their money in better investments and no one will be able to buy a house. It is a harsh reality, but homes will be lost and people will be forced to move out and it is not the governments job to prop up failed loans. This is the only way.

Otherwise we are looking at a perpetual cycle of more and more government interference. The proposals on the table include things from the government becoming a shareholder in the companies receiving aid and setting executive compensation for private companies all the way to bankruptcy judges being given authority to arbitrarily modify loan terms. This would be an enormous intrusion into the free market and would be catastrophic for our long term economy. Look to Europe and see the results of quasi-socialist businesses: enormous increases to the rolls of the permanently unemployed, months of mandatory vacation time, dying industry. We are already in a precarious position economically because of a total lack of planning in our economy. We haven't built a new refinery in decades and have closed a bunch of nuclear plants, which coupled with the failure to explore and drill for domestic oil has left us at the mercy of nations like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela who are not very friendly. High oil prices have led to much of the economic slowdown which has exacerbated the lending mess as people lose jobs or have to move and leave their mortgages behind. Our farm system is riddled with subsidies. Our manufacturing base is fleeing as fast as it can.

We are in trouble. But the government should not and cannot bail us out without causing us even greater trouble down the road. Unless we want to end up a country with a third world economy and a super power military, we need to let the market correct itself and have less government interference, not more.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a banker so I am intimately involved in what is going on even though my bank is very stable)

Pure Church: Henry Scougal on Preaching

Pure Church: Henry Scougal on Preaching

Sobering quote on Thabiti Anyabwile's blog Pure Church from Henry Scougal's The Life of God in the Soul of Man...here is a snippet...

"If a man could speak fire, and blood, and smoke, if flames should come out of his mouth instead of words, if he had a voice like thunder, and an eye like lightning, he could not sufficiently represent the dreadful account which an unfaithful pastor shall make....

"Again, preaching is an exercise of which many are ambitious, and none more so than those that are the least qualified for it; but it is not so easy a matter to perform this task aright. To stand in the presence of God, and speak to his people in his name, with that seriousness, gravity and simplicity, that zeal and concern which the business requires; to accommodate ourselves to the capacity of the common people, without disgusting the more knowing ones; to awaken drowsy souls, without terrifying tender consciences; to carry home the charge of sin, without the appearance of personal reflection; in a word, to approve ourselves unto God as workmen that need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

As someone who stands under no small measure of condemnation for my unfaithfulness in preaching, these words are both sobering and crushing to my soul. It is a terrible and humbling charge to preach the Word of God, both in the pulpit and out.

Under arrest for excessive fertility?

Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (Psalms 127:3-5 ESV)

Do we still believe that? By "we" I mean the church. Dr. Mohler brought up this issue on a recent radio program in response to some statements by secular writers, and he was pretty vocal in what he though about the issue. These writers and speakers are quite strident in their belief that having large families (large being defined by them arbitrarily and with an eye towards a shrinking populations) is inherently immoral and perhaps ought to be make illegal or at least taxed some heavily so as to become impossible for any but the elite (which is no doubt part of his plan).

When I heard and read from Dr. Mohler about this, I wanted to read it myself. I am comfortable with Dr. Mohler’s objectivity, but I still needed to read for myself and see if perhaps he wasn’t blowing things out of proportion. He wasn’t. The worldview that Paul Ehrlich and others like him subscribe to and are evangelists for is chilling in its callous disregard for the sanctity of human life. For Paul Ehrlich and his ilk, human beings are two things: 1) a source of pollution and 2) a means of production. The comments from Prince Phillip are pretty irrelevant because no one really cares what he thinks and he is generally considered to be a moron, so when a person with four kids says this:

The duke hints that curbing family sizes may be the best means of keeping the soaring cost of staple food products, such as bread and rice, in check.

“Food prices are going up,” he tells his interviewer, Sir Trevor McDonald. “Everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great – too many people. Basically, it’s a little embarrassing for everybody. No one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the government.”

you are free to write him off as a crackpot. But Paul Ehrlich, despite the myriad of horrible false predictions he has made in the past, has an audience and for some reason credibility. He has written dozens of books and articles, all spectacularly wrong but he still gets press coverage. I can only assume his coverage is linked to the media wanting to believe what he says, no matter how wrong he is. Women in the work force in increasing numbers, abortion on demand, sex-ed at all ages, railing against SUVs as the mark of the beast all fit into the agenda of the media. So when Ehrlich says things like this, they deserve attention:

What do you mean by that? What is the U.S.'s role in contributing to world population?

Ehrlich: We have over 300 million people, which makes us the third largest population. But when you factor in our consumption and the technologies we use, like SUVs, our impact on life-support systems is much higher than even China's, and certainly higher than India's, which are countries with 1.3 billion and 1.1 billion people each.

I believe it is immoral and should be illegal for people to have very large numbers of children because they are then co-opting for themselves and their children resources that should be spread elsewhere in the world. You only get a chance to get your fair share.

Immoral and illegal. Having a family bigger than what Ehrlich thinks is acceptable is immoral and if he had his way would be illegal. The implications of this worldview are stunning. Ehrlich is so concerned with illegal abortions but what about illegal pregnancies? Will we come to a day when population stormtroopers kick down doors of secret OB offices, and dragging women off to have forced abortions? Think that sort of thing isn't happening in China? Or less extreme, what about families who are deemed unworthy being taxed into starvation? This is the inevitable end result of this sort of elitist totalitarian worldview.

What is perhaps more disturbing is this next statement:

How many is "very large"?

Ehrlich:

The issue is: What is the political position to take? In a country like the United States, we should stop at two. But if you had an ideal situation, you might have a lot of people who have no children at all, and some people who have as many as three or four because they happen to be particularly good parents, and are going to raise their children very well.

So someone, ideally, should have more kids if they are determined by some outside entity to be "particularly good parents" they should be "allowed" to have more kids, but others should have no children. Care to wonder who those who don't have the right to have any kids are? IQ too low? Too fat? Too religious? There is a word for this philosophy, although Ehrlich doesn't come out and say it:

Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier, stronger and/or more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering.

That may sound harsh, but Ehrlich and his disciples praise the murderous policy of China that has led to countless abortions of girls because they are less desirable. That would be perfectly fine with Ehrlich.

More from Ehrlich...

“That's a problem we have in this country. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are not the result of a woman intending to become a mother. That's a shocking statistic and it betrays the fact that we ourselves have very ambivalent feelings about sexuality and reproduction, and are not very good about allowing women to achieve all that they would like to in life by planning when they want to be a mother and when they don't.”

Well here is a more relevant statistics. Nearly 100% of women who become pregnant get that way through sexual intercourse. Even with widespread availability in this country of contraceptives and education, women and teens still get pregnant in staggering numbers out of wedlock. Some is carelessness, some is frankly intentional, a tiny fraction is coercive but the issue is that when we are teaching sex ed we ought to make very clear that if you decide to become sexually active, the odds are pretty good that you are going to end up pregnant.

What is more relevant is the very idea that a particular family size is immoral and that there are people like Paul Ehrlich and many others who would make it illegal to have more children than Paul Ehrlich or bureaucrats or other self-appointed “population experts” decree. What is immoral is looking at people as some sort of disease on the planet. We were placed on this earth by our Creator to rule over and have dominion over the planet. Ehrlich looks around and sees the poor, the religious, the ugly, the stupid as breeding more people like them and wants them to stop. If they won't stop based on his brilliant arguments, he is fully willing to use coercion and force to make his nightmare a reality.

Unfortunately this attitude has bled into the church. Many Christian couples look at large families as unthinkable. When did having lots of kids, being fruitful, stop being a sign of blessings from God and start becoming a hassle and a line item in your budget? Where are the sermons on the blessings of a full quiver? Where in pre-marital counseling are couples told of the blessings of large families?

We have a big family, and then brings big responsibilities but also big blessings. I will encourage my children to have large families as well. The biggest predictor of a persons worldview is their parents, so it is my hope that as Christians rediscover large families, the doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich will gradually become extinct.

Thou shalt not covet...

Unless what you are coveting is a cool new study Bible! The new ESV Study Bible is coming out soon (October 15th)and looks to be a great resource. It is not like I need another study Bible, but if you watch the video here, it looks really exciting. At least really exciting as far as study Bibles go...

Children of Caesar

More from Voddie Baucham

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Dr. Baucham. His voice is exactly the one we need, bold and humble, unapologetic about the Gospel, unafraid of what the world thinks. The video below is on secular education for kids from Christian families.

If we send our children to Caesar, we shouldn't be surprised when they come back Romans. We send out kids of to be educated in a godless secular school and then bemoan how we are losing our youth. Well duh! We send them to a place where they are taught that God doesn't exist, and then wonder why they come home unbelieving. With all the challenges facing the church and especially our youth, why would we intentionally handicap them?

A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher. (Luke 6:40)