Joan and I had all three of our daughters back for Thanksgiving. Now that they are older and starting to make lives of their own this will be more difficult to make happen. It was a great short visit. Laura Michelle flew in Thursday afternoon and I took her to the airport Sunday morning before I started a revival for James Martinez in Phoenix. Brooke drove to Las Vegas Wed. night, stayed the night and arrived mid morning on Thanksgiving day with Audra. Good salami and cheese. A great turkey with a different stuffing. Egg nog and Martinelli’s. A great meal.

 

On Friday we continued our exploration of the back route to Jerome. We returned to Perkinsville, went down to the Verde river and then climbed the north side of Mingus the back way into Jerome. The girl’s looked at Jeff Brown’s jewelry, had some coffee and came home. It was a good visit. Photos along the way to Jerome.

I enjoyed this:

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Mark Steyn is one of my favorite political writers. I started reading his articles in the English publication “The Spectator” while I was in Zambia. Here is the latest from Mark Steyn.  

Here are some thoughts from “World Chaos” by G. H. Lang. A German in 1938 was asked what the religion of Hitler was. “If anything he is a pantheist.” This means that everything is God and God is everything. It leaves no room for a personal God that created anything. Hindus, some Greeks, Spinoza and for the Nazis Johannes Eckhart who said that “man is God” all believed in some form of pantheism. Ps 115:8 Those who make them are like them; So is everyone who trusts in them. NKJV “The principal underlying this statement is that the worshipper becomes like the being he worships. A quote about Himmler from “The Last Days of Hitler” by Trevor Roper: Thanks to that principle of loyalty his life had been as simple and uncomplicated as his naïve faith in the metaphysical Nordic balderdash of the Nazi religion. Protected by that magic armour, he had known neither thought nor doubt; he had believed and acted:  he had worshipped the Aryan deities, contemplated the Aryan truth, and partaken of the Aryan sacraments. He had extirpated heresy, and in the name of orthodoxy had sent millions, unthinkingly, even benignly, to the torture chamber and the gas van. Imagination cannot comprehend the sum-total of the human suffering, or even of the mere deaths, which had proceeded from the authority of that single true believer…who himself never seems to have considered, far less examined or relished or regretted, the consequences of his authority….a terrible, impersonal priest of Moloch…He goes on about Himmler’s suicide: It was an appropriate death, as appropriate as the barbaric funeral of Hitler and the silent, secondary death of Goebbels (Directly after Hitler’s suicide Goebbels had his six children killed, and then killed his wife and himself. Such can be the violent reaction from a misplaced faith in man.)appropriate to his character—for it was squalid and delayed (At the very last minute, while he was being searched at a British post, he bit a capsule of poison that was in his mouth, and was dead in a few seconds.) and appropriate to the functions he could no longer exercise. The terrible high priest of Hitler, who had once served the altar, expounded the mysteries, and presided over the human sacrifices with such undeviating devotion, having once yielded to doubt, had become a mere wandering shadow, a ghostly sacristan, fitfully haunting the shrine he could no longer attend. Now the god himself had perished; the temple had been utterly destroyed; the faithful had been scattered or converted; and the suicide of the exiled priest is the natural end of a chapter in history; the history, it seems, of a savage tribe and a primitive superstition.

 

Why Hitler? Rom 1:28 “they refused to have God in their knowledge”.

 

October 27^th, 1945 from the Daily Telegraph:

Nuremberg. Dr. Robert Ley, former leader of the Nazi Labour Front, left a message for the Germany of the future among papers he prepared in his room in his prison cell before his suicide last night. His message….declared: “We have forsaken God, and therefore we were forsaken by God. We put our human volition in the place of HIS Godly Grace…I have tortured myself to find a reason for this downfall, and this is the result of my contemplations.”

 

“In like manner it was the false and irreligious views held by the Nazis that caused them to become some of the most awful, colossal defilers, destroyers, desolators that the world has yet seen.”

 

The Nazis were at war with Christianity. Quoting Rosenburg from “The Religion of the 20^th Century”: The fight concerning the relationship of man and God in Jesus, the strife concerning love and grace, concerning immortality or mortality of the soul, drop out of the area of vision of a renewed Teutonic German religion.”  “The spirit of Christianity….was and is the bitterest enemy of the German Nature sense.”

 

Nazism from Rosenburg: “A faith, a religion is genuine only when it has laid hold of the whole man…The conception of honour of Fritz,, the method of discipline of Moltke, the holy will of Bismarck, are the three forces which, embodied in different persons in different combinations, all serve the one end; the honour of the German nation.”

 

Hitler from “Mein Kampf”: A more powerful race will drive off the weak, because the pressing impulse to live, in its ultimate form, will burst asunder all the ridiculous fetters of a so-called humanitarian feeling for the individual, and will replace it with the humanitarianism of Nature, which destroys what is weak to give place to strength.

 

Lang: “It was the logical and practical pursuance of this policy that led to war, to rendering the weak or diseased incapable of marriage, to wholesale murder of imbeciles and persons otherwise useless for national honor, to concentration camps, and to general massacres of the unwanted or the hated, as of the Jews.”

 

Lang’s conclusion in Chapter 1: Let us take stock of the situation this reached. There is no personal God. There is no Creator, or creation. There is no supreme Ruler. Love, with its children pity, mercy, gentleness, is to be abhorred. Grace to the guilty if foolish weakness. There is no Son of God sent by the Father to effect the reconciliation of His enemies, by Himself bearing their punishment. There is no divine purpose or plan in history conducting heaven and earth to a worthy goal. In place of all this we are to be ruled by selfish ambition, by lust of power; brute force is honourable and essential; the weak must be eliminated wholesale and ruthlessly. National “honour” is to oust God. Indeed, there is no God to fear nor wrath of God to Dread.

And the outcome?—reversion to the most fearful barbarities of the degraded gods exalted before misled men to be their heroes and models. Every effect must have a cause adequate to produce it. Here certainly cause and effect tally exactly, and endorse the ancient statement in that ancient oriental Book: “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God! They are corrupt, they have done abominable works: (psalm 14:1). Yet this at least the Nazis have done that is noteworthy: they have demonstrated absolutely the immoral nature of the pantheistic philosophy of the universe. He that hath eyes to see, let him see.

I did my first substituting in grade school this week. I started out with a first grade class in Humboldt. I have gotten use to the High School so I was a little nervous about entering into the primary grades. I knew there would be no personal reading but instead I would be required to give my constant attention to the class. The teacher had a nice print out of the day’s activities.

 

It started with the morning rituals. I greeted each child with a handshake. We put the packs away. We did the pledge of allegiance. (In High School they are not required to stand. I only found out after sending kids to the office two days in a row.) (By the way, after sending the dissenters to the office, I was heartily commended by some of the students.) We were onto the morning song. I asked who knew the song and called on two girls to come and lead the class in the song.

 

They started singing away. There was some slight confusion on their part and the part of the class. One boy in particular was quite agitated by the sound of their voices. Because the girls did not seem too confident, I asked if this was the right song. The boy shouted out that they were not singing it right. I tried to assure him that it would be Ok as I asked the girls to continue. The boy is now weeping in his seat with his head in his arms. I try to encourage the lad. He lets me know that they sang the song all wrong. He now spoke in a voice of total anguish: “I think I am going to have a bad day”. It was right out of a psychiatrist’s office. Without laughing I told him that it was going to be a great day (Mr. Rogers anyone). I started to sing that it was going to be a great day and got the class to sing along.

 

The boy not only recovered, but shined and when I returned his lunch bag from the cafeteria he let me know there was an extra drink in there for me.

 

It was a great time. Read Mr. Hatch. Had them write in their journals about Mr. Hatch. Did Math on the board. It was just a lot of fun. I was surprised how easier it was than I imagined.

 

I also covered PE at Liberty traditional. I was in heaven. They come in, they run until getting tired. I start the music they run, jump or dance to the music and then freeze when the music stops. We stretch. The music starts again until we get tired. We then count off 1,2,3,4 to make teams to play field hockey on the gym floor. Lots of fun. The younger classes I kept in a smaller room as the gym doubles as a cafeteria. Same pattern. Except I added Simon says. I felt a little devious as the kids got close to the finish and I said Simon Says take one step. Touch the wall – and they had to go all the way back.

 

They also played field hockey with small sticks. Once they realized I was dolling out band aids for injuries the line for band aids increased as the tiniest of scratches seemed to cry out for first aid fixins.

I just finished preaching for Artie Marin in San Diego. He is just getting started. One element of the revival was the support he received from the surrounding churches. It reminded me of my pioneer experience in Seattle, which is where I am now preaching for Tony Uriarte. This is definitely a bit of old home week. I am even enjoying the overcast weather.

 

Tony and I had an interesting encounter at Half-Price Books. I was buying some used books. One of the titles was “Tricks Our Minds Play on Us”. The clerk was ringing it up and began to talk about the title. He mentioned how are minds can get messed up especially by fear. I then said “Fear has torment” to him. He paused and then strongly agreed how true that statement was. I asked him if he knew from what book that statement came. No. I answered “the bible”.

 

It was like a flash of light catching the deer in the middle of the road. He mumbled, hesitated and lost track of the transaction. His mind seemed to stop functioning. Finally, he was able to get back on track and was able to put the books in a bag and hand them to me, with a comment about how some fear is good for you.

 

Tony and I talked about this spiritual transaction over lunch. I am sure if I had told the man that the quote came from a classic or the Koran nothing would have came from it. There is something about the bible and Jesus that is very different in making conversation. Americans are experts at recognizing and avoiding biblical conversations. That was what I enjoyed most about Zambia. Everyone, black and white were willing and even desiring to hear my thoughts about Christian, pastoral thoughts, insights and experiences. It was the difference in the soil.

 

I believe that if people were given a fair chance to consider the weight of the evidence presented in the bible about life, judgment and salvation they would respond appropriately. Demonic forces will never give people a fair chance. The one hook the devil has is personal sin. John 3:19 “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”  We need to be knocking on the doors of hearts at the same time that Jesus is knocking. As the bible says: “Keep knocking”.

Here is an article that deals with the statement: “His statement that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” has been repeated in thousands of articles in order to argue that Darwinism must have a central place in all areas of science education, including medicine, agriculture and biotechnology”  http://www.trueorigin.org/biologymyth.asp This article describes a non-teaching of the subject in most schools except for introductory classes. I just finished an out of date George Gilder book: “Telecosm” published in 2000. It is already out of date but he correctly takes us into the future at that time. George is a Wired magazine favorite. I still hold on to one of his thoughts about how the knowledge of the truth about evolution would be a major culture changer in this century. We will see, not yet as was pointed out to me by Herb Rubi.