Conclusion from Peru and Mexico

ESV Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

In recent days I have spent time in Lima and Sullana Peru and Mexico City and I have discovered that people by nature are the same. Man has a heart that is inclined to selfishness and idolatry. Sin abounds in the remotest parts of the land because the heart is desperately wicked. Thousands bow before statues of Mary and pray to her hoping for answers. I have seen these people stare hopelessly at Mary icons, Jesus icons, and a host of dead saints who will do nothing for them. I have talked with people who pray to the pope and say that they love him. I talked with one lady who said that she knew that Jesus was the Savior, but she loved the pope. Thousands bow before Santa Muerte (holy death angel) in hopes that she will do whatever they ask her. I have seen people bring money, burning cigarettes, beer, whiskey, chocolate, plants, and flowers to Santa Muerte in hopes of her answers. I have seen these people bowing on their knees on the concrete in the middle of public places to worship their idol. Millions of people come into the Basilica in Mexico City and pay their money, confess their sins, and stare hopelessly at relics in hope that their sins will be pardoned. In America countless thousands are chained to baseball games, football games, material possessions, and whatever else their heart of idols can produce to worship.

My heart has broken in these last weeks because the God of heaven is not honored as he ought to be honored. People worship the things that are created rather than worshiping the Creator. God has been gracious to all mankind and yet mankind has hardened their hearts against a loving God. God brings the rain on the just and unjust. God brings the beautiful sunrises and sunsets upon the just and unjust. God gives good gifts unto all and above all things he has given his Son that those who would believe in him would be saved. However, man has taken the good things of God and perverted them unto idols and turned their attention away from God. I get a feel for Jesus as he overlooked Jerusalem or Paul as he beseeched for God to save Israel. When you accept the reality of the truth of the glory of God is breaks your heart that people would turn away from the great and awesome God of heaven to serve lesser things. Moses was outraged by the golden calf, the prophets passionately preached against idolatry, Jesus was angered that the temple was changed in an idolatrous business, and Paul preached to the idolaters of Mars Hill by telling them of the unknown God.

I arrived back at home wondering how I should respond to all the idolatry that I have beheld in these last three weeks. I wondered how our church here in the states should respond to all of the idolatry in the world. What are the options? First, I suppose we could sit around and hope that people chose to get their life together and stop being idolaters. However, I do not know how that could ever happen apart from them hearing the truth. Second, I suppose we could spend a lifetime studying cultural issues and customs in hope that we could somehow learn to relate to the people of other countries. However, the bible is quite clear that all men are the same. Men are dead in sin, shaped in iniquity, and by nature are the enemies of God. Thirdly, we could pay other people or other agencies to go and do a work for us while we remain comfortably in the states. However, there is no way to insure that there will be doctrinal accuracy or integrity. If we only pay other people to take the gospel we will miss out on all of the benefits of being obedient to the mission of God. Lastly, we could seek where God would have us to do a lasting work and then invest our lives there for the glory of God. The gospel has the power to raise the dead in any culture and we must be willing to take the gospel wherever God would have us take it. It is for sure that our church cannot go to every country and reach every people group, so we must determine where God would have us work and seek to be obedient wherever that is.

It seems that some doors are opening in the Spanish speaking countries below us and perhaps God is beginning to reveal where we are to work. There are some options for work to be partnered with in Peru and there could be a couple of options in Mexico. The need is greater than I can express upon this paper for a biblical gospel to be proclaimed in Peru and Mexico. Oh, that God would glorify his great name in Peru and Mexico by using a small little church in a town that does not exist to proclaim his great gospel amongst a people who desperately need the truth.

I give thanks to the LORD for allowing me the privilege of going to these countries and broadening my horizons. The things that I have seen will be forever engraved upon my heart. I will long remember the pastors that I spent time with in Peru and I will never forget Adolfo who translated for me in Mexico. I will relish the time that I spent with Paul Washer and the others. When I think of church I will forever remember being on top of that mountain in Sullana at that church which had no electricity and no roof. I am convinced that heaven was looking down on that little church on top of that mountain and very few people on earth even know that it exist. Oh, God I pray that the things of this world will continue to grow dim and that God’s people will be caught up in his glorious presence.

Because of the truth: Pastor: J. Randall Easter II Timothy 2:19 "Our God is in heaven and does whatever He pleases."(Ps. 115:3) "He predestined us according to the good pleasure of His will."(Eph. 1:5) Those who have been saved have been saved for His glory and they are being made holy for this is the will of God. Are you being made holy? Spurgeon says, "If your religion does not make you holy it will damn you to hell."

It is not patriotic because it both breaks and fails to enforce existing law. However, that is a breakdown of a good system, not a normal application of a bad system. So, unless you are genuinely against a free market economy with as little government intervention as is practical (and I hope you're not :), then your real complaint is against certain individuals who are breaking the applicable rules. I would join in that complaint.

Thanks FK. Capitalism like anything else can be used for the good or for the evil. My complaint was that some unethical businesses, out of greed, try to maximize their profits by hiring illegal aliens (after all, it's much, much cheaper to hire illegal aliens), and breaking the law as well as creating more illgeal mirgant influx.

In addition to this, this greedy and unethical and illegal exercies of free econopmy further puts our national health at security in peril because US Public Helath Service cannot track those who have communicable diseases and our Homeland Security cannot track those who slip into the country as terrorist operatives.

The local and state and federal governments are further aiding unethical and greedy businesses which illegally hire illegal aliens, by not enforcing existing laws on the books that call for stiff penalties for those who hire illegal aliens.

Some here have tried to justify the practice by saying that a bowl of fruitloops, or something like that, would cost $5 instead of $1.25 if the businesses that hire illegals hired Americans! So, for $3.75 we are willing to create a potential terrorist network of thousands of cells inside the US, essenitally selling out freedom for that price, while our men and women are dying in Iraq trying to keep them out?

All that because of greedy capitalists and corrupt government officials who do not apply the law, some bargain-hunters notwithstanding. With about 13 million illegals, how many potential al-Qaida terrorists couls have slipped in? Why, 1% would be an army of 130K! Sobering.

American capitalism has been good for America, but it did not have such a rosey history. It had to be tamed by child labor laws, because greed and profit motives sometimes do not find cruelty, or even unpatriotic practices objectionable. Capitalism does not police itself; the only thing free market economy regulates is the market, and even that si not fail-proof. The ethical conduct and practice of capitalism cannot be above the law and has to be subjected to social norms and principles.

American labor movement was a formidable force in the first half of last century precisely because capitalism wasn't always the nice veriaty we have today. Powerful unions (some of them corrupt just as much as the establishment) competed with capitalism until it became obvious that the only way to rid oursleves of unions and the associated communist element in them was to improve the conditions in workplaces, and provide better security ofr the workers. That's exactly what socialism did! Most Americans don't even realize how myuch we have borrowed from socialist practices—including political correctness.

These social changes did not come from within the capitalist mentality, but were forced on capitalism from without. Today, we have a milder, kinder, nice and better capitalism than 30, 50, 60, 90 years ago. It's like apples and oranges. Yet, we still lag behind Europe when it comes to job security, vacation time, and benefits.

There is nothing inherently moral about capitalism to raise it to biblical reverence. Like any other economic system, it is the system of our age. It may become obsolete just like all others beofre it, when the age changes and the world evolves into something completely new.

But in the discussion and knee-jer reactions that followed, some of them quite childish, my point was lost or forgotten: namely that greed (profit motive) created the demand for illegal aliens, and thereofr eit is greed and corrupt government that is responsible for the 13 million illegals in this country.

Rather than build walls that never kept anyone from entering or escaping, the solution is to cut the demand by discouraging greedy and unethical businesses from hiring illegals with stiff fines as prescribed by the law, and firing the corurpt government officials who do not enforce such laws at the present time.

Christ is simply saying the first apostles would have extraordinary gifts in order to more forcefully preach the Gospel in those very early days of Christianity

Oh, so now he is talking only to the first apostles and when it comes to other preachings where he specifically addresses only the apsotles, then it is all believers? How convenient! He says specifically believers, and that means all believers.

The verse you should be looking at, Kosta, is the verse right before these..."He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved

That's right, shall be saved and not is saved.

I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins...

Of course, because those who don't believe in Him will not follow in His steps and imitate Him, but will give in to their self-rigtheousness and pride.

Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.

Think for a moment how "trinitarian" that is. This is the same God who was with God and was God forever. He had to be "taught?"

If we believe in Jesus Christ alone as Lord and Savior, God incarnate; if we believe He is of God and from God and is God; if we believe He died to pay for our sins and was resurrected into heaven to prove it all true; then we can be assured by Christ's own word that we are not damned, but instead are numbered among His sheep who will be glorified with Him in heaven

That's right, but we have to believe first. It's that leap of faith. You must accept something as holy. But that is not a proof of anything! The Muslims would use the same argument about the Koran. exactly the same.

And the Muslims will tell you the same thing about their faith. It proves nothing to say you have faith. It is your belief. It's not a proof of its credibility or correctness. IF you believe then the scripture "makes sense." But to us the Koran is nothing and to the Muslims, the NT is nothing. To us Christ IS God, and to the Muslims and Jews he is just a man. They believe it as much as you and I believe He is God.

Scriputre cannot prove itself. It requires an a priori leap of faith; blind acceptance of its holiness.

That is an excellent post kosta and one that I find a lot of truth in. Capitalism was most successful when we had honest men like Henry Ford who was willing to pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work. Mr. Ford wisely understood that for him to be successful, he needed to raise the standard of living for the working class so they could buy his cars. This was a concept lost upon other.

Unions, while born of socialism, had their place as a check and balance against corporations who were more interested in taking advantage of the working class. While not the best of form, they had their place in raising social standards. Their failure was simply they lost sight of truly fair and honest treatment of the workers in general.

Today the unions are gone and we have corporations who really don’t give two hoots about the share holders. As long as a few of them hold 51% of the stock, they can vote themselves multi-million dollar bonuses on companies that are going bankrupted. While people complain about this, these corporate raiders are not interested in helping the workers raise their standards as Henry Ford did.

I wouldn’t be so keen on “lagging behind Europe when it comes to job security, vacation time, and benefits.” I talked to a number of Europeans about their benefits. They told me that while its nice that they have the security of knowing they have health care and income security, the price they pay for that is a significantly lower life style. Many I talked to lamented they couldn’t afford to travel or do anything simply because the government took most of their money.

This country has a lot of problems that it doesn’t seem to want to face. We keep sending billions of dollars overseas for poverty while homeless vets beg for spare change in subway stations. We have a war going on 6,000 miles away to keep us safe from terrorists all the while we have illegal immigrants sneaking across our borders. We have companies posting $250 million dollar deficits and they award their board $70 million for doing a great job.

I don’t wish to sound gloomy (not doing a very good job, am I). I’m convince much of this, with the rise in hurricanes, droughts, etc. is simpling heralding in the end times. Of course people said this before-but then I wasn't around to correct them. ;O)

Unfortantely for our friend Kosta he has backed himself into a corner. When he demands from us hard empirical evidence for Scripture as the revelation of the God of Christianity he is unequally able to provide hard empirical evidence, outside of Scripture, for the God of Christianity, since they go hand-in-hand. I think it instructive to look at the thinking here.

First, let’s admit that if one is looking for absolute certainty as one might get in geometry for the truth claims about Scripture, or as a course of fact Christianity itself, then Christianity does not offer this. Some will offer historical facts as proof but these by their nature are unable to show geometric certainty due to the complexity of the time-space universe. “Hold on”, might exclaim the evidentialist Christian, “the scientist relies upon rational probability for his empirical evidence, why should Christians make a greater claim”? But this only makes Christianity just another opinion in the interpretation of history.

Now the skeptic believes history is something that floats on an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of Chance. Therefore he can say that anything might happen. The Christian God revealing himself through prophets and apostles has as good of chance as Unicorns on Jupiter. The free-will Christian is in essential agreement with the skeptic in relation to history since the “possibilities” of history are above God. So these “possibilities” that are above God is the same thing as Chance. A God surrounded by Chance cannot speak with authority. He would be speaking into a vacuum. His voice could not be heard. And if God were surrounded by Chance, then human beings would be too. They would live in a vacuum, unable to hear either their own voices or those of others. Thus the whole of history, including all of its facts, would be without meaning.

If history were what the skeptic assumes that it is, then anything might happen and then nobody would know what may happen. No one thing would then be more likely to happen than any other thing. David Hume, the great skeptic, has effectively argued that if you allow any room for Chance in your thought, then you no longer have the right to speak of probabilities. Whirl would be king. No one hypothesis would have any more relevance to facts than any other hypothesis. Did God raise Christ from the dead? Perchance he did. Did Jupiter do it? Perchance he did. What is Truth? Nobody knows. Such would be the picture of the universe if the skeptic were right.

No comfort can be taken from the assurance of the free-will Christian that, since Christianity makes no higher claim than that of rational probability, “the system of Christianity can be refuted only by probability. Perhaps our loss is gain.” How could one ever argue that there is a greater probability for the truth of Christianity than for the truth of its opposite if the very meaning of the word probability rests upon the idea of Chance? On this basis nature and history would be no more than a series of pointer readings pointing into the blank.

In assuming his philosophy of Chance and thus virtually saying that nobody knows what is back of the common objects of daily observation, the skeptic also virtually says that the Christian view of things is wrong. If I assert that there is a black cat in the closet, and you assert that nobody knows what is in the closet, you have virtually told me that I am wrong in my hypothesis. So when I tell the skeptic that God exists, and he responds very graciously by saying that perhaps I am right since nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” he is virtually saying that I am wrong in my “hypothesis.” He is obviously thinking of such a God as could comfortably live in the realm of Chance. But the God of Scripture cannot live in the realm of Chance.

The skeptics response when confronted with the claims of God and his Christ, is essentially this: Nobody knows, but nevertheless your hypothesis is certainly wrong and mine is certainly right. Nobody knows whether God exists, but God certainly does not exist and Chance certainly does exist.

When the skeptic thus virtually makes his universal negative assertion, saying in effect that God cannot possibly exist and that Christianity cannot possibly be true, he must surely be standing on something very solid. Is it on solid rock that he stands? No, he stands on water! He stands on his own “experience.” But this experience, by his own assumption, rests again on Chance. Thus, standing on Chance, he swings the “logician’s postulate” and modestly asserts what cannot be in the “Beyond,” of which he said before that nothing can be said.

Of course, what the skeptic is doing appears very reasonable to himself. “Surely,” he says, if questioned at all on the subject, “a rational man must have systematic coherence in his experience. Therefore he cannot accept as true anything that is not in accord with the law of noncontradiction. So long as you leave your God in the realm of the ‘Beyond,’ in the realm of the indeterminate, you may worship him by yourself alone. But so soon as you claim that your God has revealed himself in creation, in providence, or in your Scripture, so soon I shall put that revelation to a test by the principle of rational coherence.”

“And by that test none of your doctrines are acceptable. All of them are contradictory. No rational man can accept any of them. If your God is eternal, then he falls outside of my experience and lives in the realm of the ‘Beyond,’ of the unknowable. But if he is to have anything to do with the world, then he must himself be wholly within the world. I must understand your God throughout if I am to speak intelligently of any relationship that he sustains to my world and to myself. Your idea that God is both eternal and unchangeable and yet sustains such relationships to the world as are involved in your doctrine of creation and providence, is flatly contradictory.”

All this amounts to saying that the skeptic, the lover of a Chance philosophy, the indeterminist, is at the same time an out-and-out determinist or fatalist. It is to say that the skeptic, the irrationalist, who said that nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” is at the same time a flaming rationalist. For him only that can be which—so he thinks—he can exhaustively determine by logic must be. He may at first grant that anything may exist, but when he says this he at the same time says in effect that nothing can exist and have meaning for man but that which man himself can exhaustively know. Therefore, for the skeptic, the God of Christianity cannot exist. For him the doctrine of creation cannot be true. There could be no revelation of God to man through nature and history. There can be no such thing as the resurrection of Christ.

Strangely enough, when the skeptic thus says that God cannot exist and that the resurrection of Christ cannot be a fact, and when he also says that God may very well exist and that the resurrection of Christ may very well be a fact, he is not inconsistent with himself. For he must, to be true to his method, contradict himself in every statement that he makes about any fact whatsoever. If he does not, then he would deny either his philosophy of Chance or his philosophy of Fate. According to him, every fact that he meets has in it the two ingredients: that of Chance and that of Fate, that of the wholly unknown and that of the wholly known. Thus man makes the tools of thought, which the Creator has given him in order therewith to think God’s thoughts after him on a created level, into the means by which he makes sure that God cannot exist, and therefore certainly cannot reveal himself.

“I do not like the regular Calvinist”, say the skeptic. She tells me that based on my philosophy that no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. For all facts would be changing into their opposites all the time. All would be gobble-de-gook. At the same time, nothing could change at all; all would be one block of ice. Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? He clearly has. I know you cannot see this even though it is perfectly clear. I know you have taken out your own eyes. Hence your inability to see is at the same time unwillingness to see. Pray God for forgiveness and repent.

She claims that I am a creature of God. She says that all facts are made by God and controlled by the providence of God. She says that all men have sinned against God in Adam their representative. She adds that therefore I am spiritually blind and morally perverse. She says all this and more on the basis of the absolute authority of Scripture. She would interpret me, my facts, and my logic in terms of the authority of that Scripture. She says I need this authority. She says I need nothing but this authority. Her Scripture, She claims, is sufficient and final. And the whole thing, she claims, is clear.

_{(I essentially stole this from Cornelius Van Til, “The Authority of Scripture”. I redacted and rephrased for the present situation.)}

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