Echoes in Eternity

This is so, so good.

For every gallon of gas that is sold in the United States, on average, the local, state and federal taxes come out to 48 cents. The average profit taken away from every gallon of gas by Exxon is --brace yourselves for unsavory news about the oil buccaneers -- 2 cents. If you don't like oil profiteering, then you really have to learn how to see our public servants as the equivalent of 24 Exxons, stacked on top of your travel plans like they were so many leeches.

Exxon feels free to take that 2 cents because they explored, researched, drilled, transported, refined, transported, and sold the gas that you were interested in buying. The government is entitled to it . . . why?

God says not to steal, and not even to think about stealing by means of coveting. We have to learn that our bad attitude toward free enterprise is caused by the larceny in our hearts. We think the way we do about oil companies because we want a piece of the action, for nothing. We don't think that way about predatory taxation for the same reason that one thief doesn't see the larceny in the heart of his fellow thieves. We are looking for the kickback.

As a wise man posted somewhere, "It's not theft if you have to fill out a form." So the devotional thought for the morning is that Jesus wants you to feel sorry for Exxon. And when we hear this call to radical discipleship, our faith staggers. Who can do these things? And the reply comes, comforting our hearts, that with God all things are possible.

Doug Wilson makes an astute observation.

We are told that the problem with the residents of Sodom is that they were seething with hatred and were willing to engage in violent sexual acts. And we are told this by people who are seething with hatred...

Doug Wilson wrote an excellent post on the recent flap surrounding Ron Paul's comments in a recent Republican debate in favor of legalizing drug use and prostitution.

While many Christians are unsettled by Paul's idea of legalizing drugs, for example, I am far more concerned about the millions that have gotten themselves addicted to the crack cocaine of other people's money, and who need a daily fix of their power and privilege, paid for by beyond ridiculous economic policies.
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Adultery was a crime in ancient Israel, and a great deal of that activity is committed with prostitutes, and so, there you go. But smoking dope was not a crime under biblical law, and so there you go. And lest you think this would create a vast population of lotus eaters, the Bible does not give us warrant to create a great network of welfare payments that enable people to live like irresponsible potheads, getting dope from friends and their dinner of Cheetos from their food stamps. If we didn't fund it, we probably wouldn't have quite so much of it. Just a thought.
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Many of our modern statist do-gooders and bedwetters think they do not fit the description of the abusive rulers in the Lord's parable because their intentions (viewed under the magnifying glass of their very own wisdom) are so clearly good and full of the waft of sunny uplift. But they are the ones who created the wastelands of the modern American inner city, filled our American penitentiaries with millions of men, who live out their lives in the greatest dog pound ever, and who choked the economy that could feed the world by harassing hard-working men and women all day every day with niggling restrictions, regulations, and rules. Morever, they are impervious to any evidence that would actually demonstrate to them the desolations caused by their pride and officiousness.

Another good post by Pastor Wilson, this time on giving thanks for everything good that God has given us via technology and wealth.

The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone. That temptation will say, fundamentally, that we owe none of this to God, and that we did it all ourselves. That attitude is what we call the Enlightenment. That is modernist hubris, technocratic arrogance, and purblind puffery.
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This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, man takes credit for himself. If someone else later on comes along and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little "social justice" around here -- and what a wretched little phrase social justice is -- he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don't need any extra layers.

The Enlightenment is not to be credited with Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Smith's discovery that no one man is capable of manufacturing a pin, Newton's discovery of what objects in motion tend to do, or Watts' admirable divvying up of energy into units of horsepower. God gave us all those things. We must thank God for them.

Seeing the inevitable abuses of wealth that follow after a humanistic grabbing of credit for it, and reacting away from the whole thing entirely, is simply foolish. If it is a good thing, as my smart phone is a good thing, then God is to be thanked. If it is a sinful thing, like thinking that man does things he can't do, then we should abandon our folly, repent of our sins, and return to the gospel of grace that undergirds all God's statutes and laws. And if you don't know where those passages are, you can look them up on your phone.

Doug Wilson has a good post on how Christianity is necessarily political and thinking it isn't leads to a Kingdom of God that isn't of this world or intended to change our lives in the least.

You see, if the gospel says that repentance and belief actually mean something in this world -- like canceling that sex change operation, or forgoing the nuptials with someone whose genitalia are uncannily similar to yours, or letting your kid stay alive, or even worse, having a repentant king say that such goings-on ought not to be going on -- such particulars might create a stumbling block. No stumbling blocks! We must preach an unfettered message of repentance, by which we mean that we must thunder a message that every man must repent of "stuff." Like what? You know, stuff.

This post by Doug Wilson on Rob Bell is really really good.

[T]here is a particular kind of soft teaching that creates hard hearts, and there is a particular kind of hard teaching that creates tender hearts. The unconverted human heart is a slab of concrete, and what is needed there is the jackhammer of grace, and not the feather duster of indulgence. [Theological] Liberals have a reputation for being soft because feather dusters are soft. But feather dusters leave the hearts hard. Conservatives have a reputation for being hard because jackhammers are hard. But conservatives are tenderhearted. Jackhammers break up the slab, and the big trucks of grace haul the chunks away. Then we can break up the fallow ground beneath the slab, seek the Lord, plant a crop and pray for rain (Hos. 10:12)

Grace for sinners is deliverance from wrath. Indulgence for sinners is the realization that boys will be boys and that we are just one or two doctrinal developments away from Grand Rapids being a great place for theologically informed homosex, not to mention those who are straight but not narrow. Keep your eye on the ball, folks. This is about the lake of fire, but more immediately it is about something that rhymes with fire, as countless rock songs would have it -- desire. Why are we talking about wrath all of a sudden? Because the doctrine of God's wrath gets in the way of certain things that are deeply desired.

Doug Wilson has some very helpful thoughts on the topic of Rob Bell and particularly universalism and a doctrine of hell.

I have taught for many years that if the Lake of Fire is literal, then it is unspeakably bad. If it is symbolic -- because realities are always greater than the symbols that represent them -- it is far, far worse than the symbol.

In short, any theology that neglects telling a wicked and adulterous generation that they need to flee from the wrath to come is a theology that is participating in the general iniquity.

Doug Wilson responds to Rob Bell's Universalism from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

This is a good post by Doug Wilson on a reasonable and Biblical approach to the subject of birth control. As always, he seems to hit just the right note between either extreme ditch.

Doug Wilson has an excellent piece on the dangers of political loyalties.

[T]he issue is not whether you vote Republican or not. The issue is whether you trust Republican. If we do that, then we are a bigger fool than we look.

It is not as though God is making us choose between evils, with us trying to figure out which one is the lesser. Voting Republican is not a venial sin, with a vote for the Democrats being a steaming hot mortal one. The issue on all these things is why and how. Trusting the Democrats is certainly a mortal sin. Trusting the Republicans is a venial one . . . but a sin nonetheless. Christians really ought to knock it off. But trusting perfectionistic third party candidates is obviously the Pathway of Light, upon which, if you walk, no political temptations whatever can behall you. Right? Well, suit yourself, friend. If you never enroll in the class, then nobody ever gets to grade your papers.

At the same time, the coordinates of my convictions do place me a bit out of the mainstream. I do sympathize with the sentiment that says, "If God had wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates." But just as we get the representatives we deserve, so also we get the candidates we deserve. We are not mis-represented. We are not under-represented. We are represented well.

My hope and prayer is that this representation will at some point in the near future signal a turn which can only be described as a political repentance. Repentance means a change of mind, a different direction entirely -- and not just the same old disobedience, only slower. A man in an adulterous relationship, who only sees his mistress once a week now, cannot call his tapering off repentance. A man getting drunk every other weekend cannot think of this as a repentant lifestyle because it is nothing like it used to be back in college. If sin were the city pool, it does not ultimately matter if you are only up to your ankles in the kiddie pool, or doing cannonballs off the high dive.

When it comes to spending, the Republicans are grannies who get into the sherry cabinet way more than they ought to, and Obama is Charlie Sheen. Such comparisons do not redound to anybody's glory, but they do affect what we might decide to do about it. The grannies have an admitted problem, but we do not need to take them off to rehab on a stretcher. Like we do with some people.

Doug Wilson has a great post on why the part of Obamacare that forces pre-existing conditions to be covered is wrong.

There are two ways to spread risk over a large population. The first way is Christian -- it is biblical because the risk is shared voluntarily, and without coercion. The second way is from the pit -- because it depends for its success on violence and coercion. These are the two ways -- the way of peace and the way of blood. The way of the cross or the way of the gun.

If enough people pool their resources at a rate of ten dollars a month, they can then together take care of some disastrous occurence that has befallen any one of them. In order for this to work, the disastrous occurence needs to have not already happened. If it is okay for it to "have already happened," then a bunch of people to whom it has already happened will show up tomorrow morning, applications filled out, and all of a sudden the math doesn't work any more. And after the math quits working, and ten bucks a month ain't cuttin' it, then the temptation for the other way of doing business kicks in.

This other way still talks about "contributions," a linguistic vestige of another time and era, but it is the kind of contribution which, if you fail to make, lands you in chokey. This is called strong-arming, extortion, thuggery, intimidation, or, as some brethren on the left would have it, compassion.

The logic of free market insurance is compassionate because it involves free men and women taking care of themselves by means of free transactions. But what about the people with preexisting conditions, who are in a terrible spot? The law of Christ requires compassion here too, of a different nature, but which is still voluntary. This is why Christians should overflow with charitable (and voluntary) giving to take care of such folks. We should take care of them (though they cannot pay) because Christ took care of us when we could not pay. Give. Sacrifice. Bleed. Freely we have received, freely we must give. But this text does not say, please note, that because we have freely received we must haul out the guns, and the jackets with big block letters on the back, to make sure other people are giving, sacrificing, and bleeding enough.

Coercion skews everything.
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Wanting to have your insurance cover your preexisting condition (at no extra cost to you) is exactly like trying to place a bet at the Kentucky Derby after the race is over. You want to bet somebody that Miles Ahead will come in miles ahead when he already did. More than that, you want good odds in your favor. You can't get any takers for some reason, and so you call the men with guns to come and make somebody bet with you. The reason this has happened is that the human heart, which ought to be a house of prayer, has become a den of thieves.

Doug Wilson has an excellent post on the natural and Biblical progression from the freedom brought by the Spirit of God to economic freedom for all mankind.

Everything about God’s purposes and plans converge upon liberty. This is the Spirit of jubilee. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, which cannot be done apart from the gospel. And when the gospel is preached in power, men are set free.
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And when these men are set free from their sins, these freed men in turn set their markets free. Slaves have never built a free economic system, and they never will. They always build tyrannies, with the people enslaved to their lusts and their masters at the bottom, and their masters enslaved to their lusts at the top.

One of the fundamental confusions that drives much of our discussion of American free markets is the confusion between businesses and markets. Being pro-free-market is not at all the same thing as being pro-General-Electric (say). Over the course of our history, American markets have only been comparatively free, but the Spirit of God is nowhere near done with us. We have been free compared to Cuba and Sweden, but we are not yet free compared to the standards of a postmill biblical republic.

The free market consists of the rules of the game. Someone who is pro-free-market thinks that clipping should be clipping for all teams, holding should be holding, and so forth. Someone who is pro-business only sees the rules of the game as one instrument among many that can be used to advance the self-interest of their favored team. Their only rule is winning. Now in the American game of free market football, our refs still make plenty of bad calls, with more than a few of them on the take. But the rules of the game are (still) somewhat recognizable.

Enter the Jim Wallis types, who point out all the cheating, and want to solve the problem by making it legal to bribe the refs and, for good measure, to make it legal for the refs to threaten the wife and children of any of the players. If pressed, he might even cite the Jubilee laws of the Old Testament, apropos of nothing.

So it is hard to determine which is sillier—professed Christians manufacturing chains with Lev. 25:10 stamped on every link, or atheistic Austrian economists pulling theories of true liberty out of the unregenerate heart of man. The former tries, using confused appeals to Augustine, to make the Spirit a slave trader, and the latter tries, using confused appeals to the Scottish Enlightenment, to make the devil the Lord of Manumission.

[O]ne of the great contributions of the first Christendom was the development of free markets. And I would want to maintain that one of the great results of the next Christendom will be the restoration and preservation of them. Free markets are the economic expression of the apostolic teaching that we are to serve one another in love.

Wealth is the ability to summon the labor of another, and to enjoy the fruit of that labor. Back in the olden time, the opulent could do this by owning a bunch of slaves, or servants with no options, which meant that one man's wealth meant another man's lack of it. In such settings, wealth and poverty really were a zero sum game -- if one person got a larger piece of pie, then somebody else got a smaller piece.

But in a system of free markets, God has given us the gift of being timeshare servants, and the privilege of being timeshare bosses. A young woman can save up her tips waiting tables, and go out with her friends to another restaurant and be waited on. We can do this because of division of labor. One guy makes roast beef sandwiches for 8 hours a day, and I can rent his service for 45 seconds of that time. Again, back in another time, getting a roast beef sandwich would have taken half the day. "In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37" (The Rational Optimist, p. 34).

Many whiners spend a lot of time complaining about this state of affairs for some reason, and unfortunately many Christians have accepted the idea that we should express our ingratitude with a similar attitude, but in the name of Jesus. - Doug Wilson

I've been a bit burned out on blogging (both reading and writing) in recent months... probably started about the time my newest daughter was born. So I'm doing a little catch up, and today is Doug Wilson's Blog and Mablog day. I decided to highlight several of his most helpful posts.

Raising Modest Daughters

It is important for these things to be discussed in the home. In this, a father and mother should take care to instruct their daughters on the dangers of self-deception. We are complicated beings, and our hearts are deceptive. A young woman can be trying to turn heads, and be employing various sexual techniques to do so, and all the while be pretending to herself in her conscious thoughts that she is doing nothing of the kind.

Raising Hard-Working Sons

[P]arents who rob their sons of a work ethic have taken from him one of this life's most precious gifts - sabbath rest. The fourth commandment has two parts, and they depend upon one another. One part, of course, is the day of rest, but the other part is the six days of labor. Without the labor, the rest is nonsensical. Without the rest, the work is slavery. Learned together, a boy comes to comprehend the dignity of labor that is offered up to God in the name of Christ. He learns to rest on the first day of the week in a way that consecrates all his subsequent labors.

So much of this runs contrary to the way the carnal mind thinks, we might come to believe it is impossible. And it is impossible, apart from the gospel of Christ. This is why the discipline of work should be imparted to a boy along with careful teaching on the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is because the foundation of a biblical work ethic is a biblical grace ethic.

Statism vs. Patriotic Idolatry

The statists who support Obama, and the statists who are disillusioned with him because he has not pressed for the complete totalitarian hellhole, are serious idolaters. The household gods of the American right that get a pinch of salt every now and again are a real irritation, a real compromise in the church, and every worthy preacher ought to direct sermonic haymakers at such compromises at every appropriate opportunity. Stop it.

At the same time, that worthy preacher must distinguish serious statism from this lump-in-your-throat nationalism. He must distinguish the superstition of the grandmother who leaves out saucers of milk for the kitchen fairies, and the priest with bloody robes who demands your firstborn for Molech. Just as the true faith has its spice-rack tithing and its weightier matters, so also do those who worship idols.

Doug Wilson has some great comments about Glenn Beck in the video below.

Doug Wilson just posted the text from a talk he gave yesterday on the subject of cigarette smoking and sin. It's quite helpful and speaks to all sorts of issues beyond smoking.

Smoking reveals the method of a self-serving ethic. The way others are to view your liberty is not the same way that you should view your liberty. Other Christians should let you do what you want unless the Bible forbids it. That’s how we guard against legalism. But you should use your liberty differently—you should be asking what the reasons are for doing it, and not what the reasons are for prohibiting it. Liberty is intended by God for you to use as an instrument for loving others (Gal. 5:13), and not as an instrument for suiting yourself.

Whew, July was a slow blogging month, but I have an excuse. :)

Doug Wilson wrote an excellent post on the problems facing parents who either unwittingly want their kids to be in the world and of it and those who desire that their kids be out of the world and not even thinking of it. As Wilson says, in both ditches lies spiritual death.

One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation.

The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids -- kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that's a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors -- equally bad. One is to accommodate yourself to the presence of this kind of room temperature sin, in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself. That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff. But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you have daubed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve. This is another way of spiritual death.
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Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the Lord. But you know for a fact that two/thirds of the kids in your son's class are all hot about the latest skanky movie. Just last night, after the youth group get together, they all went to see Skanky Movie III, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross. What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well-intentioned the folks running the school might be, the "tone" of the school is not nearly "high enough," and that all these families clearly have poor standards. You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of Mom School.

You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents -- including you -- are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like. About a third of the kids who went to that movie didn't really want to, and wouldn't have gone if someone in the class -- I am thinking of your son in particular -- had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up. You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader. The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one.

Doug Wilson has a good discussion here on the options open to Christians as it pertains to political engagement.

So here are the options: 1. Jesus doesn't care whether or not nations are explicitly Christian. 2. Jesus is opposed to nations being explicitly Christian. 3. Jesus wants nations to be explicitly Christian.

And here should be our responses to these possibilities: 1. Well, if Jesus doesn't care, that means we have the right to care. So let's make this a Christian nation, shall we? 2. Okay. Let's have a Bible study and find out why "disciple the nations" really means "don't disciple the nations, whatever you do." 3. Yes, Lord.

I loved Doug Wilson's response to Jim Wallis' vitriolic vacuity. Seriously, I'm not sure if Wallis could get any more intellectually dishonest or imbecilic. Read Wilson's piece in its entirety here.

Jim Wallis recently offered the opening salvo of an invitation to discuss exactly how "Christian" the Tea Party movement is.
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His five points are these:

1. The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not a Christian virtue;
2. An anti-government ideology is not biblical;
3. Supreme confidence in the power of markets is not biblical;
4. Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is not biblical;
5. The Tea Party is just too white.
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Later in his discussion, Wallis cites Jeremiah 22:16 and Amos 5:15 authoritatively, which is fine by me, but the Old Testament has a lot of other verses too (Ex. 22:18). If you are going to reason this way, you are going to have to give an accounting of the political ramifications of all Scripture. You can't just treat troublesome verses like a cluster of distant trees on the bank which you float by on the river of benevolent niceness, in the rowboat of exegetical detachment.

That said, let us consider his points in turn.

"The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition."

But he misstates the question. The question is not "shall we have individual rights or shall we have the common good? Which shall it be?" The debate is over which form of social organization is most conducive to the common good.

"Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle."

For Christian libertarians, individual rights are not the supreme value, and to assert that they are is idolatry, pure and simple. The glory of God, and the gospel of His Christ, are the supreme political values. But once we have faithfully answered the first question in the Shorter Catechism, we still have to figure out our social and political arrangements. In the process of doing that, it is simply a misrepresentation to say that those who want to protect individual rights in the first instance are disinterested in the fate of the common good. Overweening government is not just the major obstacle to an enjoyment of individual rights, it is the major obstacle to the common good.

Because Wallis does not understand economics, or logic, he cites Bible verses into the air.

"Jeremiah, speaking of King Josiah, said, 'He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well' (Jeremiah 22:16). Amos instructs the courts (the government) to 'Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts' (Amos 5:15). The prophets hold kings, rulers, judges, and employers accountable to the demands of justice and mercy.

They most certainly do, and I am an unabashed theocrat on these issues. Kings are responsible to God to protect and defend justice, and He will judge them at the last day for any failure to do so. Kings are responsible to defend and protect the poor from the predatory rich. But it will not do for Wallis to cite a Bible verse with the word justice in it, and then import an alien definition of justice, and reason from there. When employers rip off their employees, the righteous prince will be right there, and will enforce the demands of justice (Jas. 5:4). But when an economic illiterate demands that we destroy an inner city with minimum wage laws and rent control, what charge shall we bring against him? For my part, I would charge him with not hating evil, with not loving good, and with not maintaining justice in the courts.

Christian liberals need to get it into their heads that the prophet Amos never said, "And thou shalt be sure to maintain your charitable niceness pure and undefiled with the pixie dust of good intentions."

"An anti-government ideology just isn’t biblical."

Sure. Great. Amen. Governments are established by God, and we should all acknowledge it. Anarchism is out. But . . . it is interesting to me that folks like Wallis haul out the Romans 13 lecture to hector attendees of Tea Party rallies, where American flags and Uncle Sam hats abound, and they go deathly quiet when actual anarchists riot in Toronto.

Anti-government ideology is unbiblical, but being anti-tyranny isn't. The problem is that advocates of hubristic governments think that any opposition to that hubris is opposition to the original point of constitutional government. Which it isn't. Wallis acknowledges this in the abstract -- "a power-hungry government is clearly an aberration and violation of the proper role of government in protecting its citizens and upholding the demands of fairness and justice." So what do we do when that happens? And will we be able to do it in a peaceful and orderly way without men like Wallis lecturing us, as though we didn't know already, that responsible government is a good thing?
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"The Libertarians’ supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin."

Just one quick point here. Markets are formed when men agree to not behave coercively toward one another in their economic transactions. Governments are formed when men agree together on what the structure of their collective coercions shall be. Markets are not coercive, by definition. Governments are coercive, by definition. The person who needs to have his unbiblical views of the nature of sin adjusted is the person who thinks that government presents less of a temptation to sinners than markets do.

My political philosophy can be summed up this way -- keep coercion to a minimum. This exhibits naivete about the reality of sin? Hardly.

"The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian . . . To anticipate the Libertarian response, let me just say that private charity is simply not enough to satisfy the demands of either fairness or justice, let alone compassion."

First, this objection is wrong simply as a matter of fact. The underlying premise, driven by envy and ressentiment, is simply wrong. Is it true that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer? Is it true on a basic factual level?
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But secondly, let us translate what Wallis is actually saying on the theological level. He is arguing that compassion cannot survive apart from coercion. Compassion comes out of the barrel of a gun. The demands of compassion require that we threaten a lot of people with hard time in chokey if they don't fork it over now. Wallis is a theocrat, as am I. But his vision of theocracy has a lot more guns, jails, and fines in it than mine does. How many guns and jails do we need? I don't know -- how far did we fall short on the compassion index this year? Anybody who thinks that someone with Wallis' political philosophy is ever going to say at some point, "that's enough, we have finally fed the poor" . . . probably doesn't have a biblical understanding of sin. But I am repeating myself.

"Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not."

Ah, the race card. This objection, which is doubling as a violation of the ninth commandment to boot, is amazing. I confess myself poleaxed and flummoxed. Look at what he is actually saying here. It is not "likely," but obviously still possible, that "every member" of the Tea Party is racist. He says this on the basis of who shows up at open-invitation events? Compare this to the line-up of an invitation only operation . . . here. Heh.

Here's a really good piece on grace by Doug Wilson.

One of the hardest lessons for us to learn is that our salvation is all of grace. We know that it is by grace; we struggle with the idea that it is all of grace. We want to shoehorn something in there that distinguishes one from another. But, though there are distinctions, and sharp ones, between the wise and foolish, the elect and the reprobate, the saved and lost, every last one of those distinctions, as far as the recipients of grace are concerned, is an unadulterated gift from the hand of the Lord. All gift, and nothing but gift.

This teaching is one of the glories of our Protestant heritage. But glory is a tricky thing—beware of taking glory in that kind of glory, because to boast in the grace of God, as though you earned it by understanding it, is the most perverse of all errors. Salvation is all of grace, and this is hard for the fallen heart to grasp. So then, have you grasped it? Well done! What have you earned? You cannot boast in the fact that you understand that boasting is excluded. To fall into this mistake is not to glory in salvation by grace; it is to confuse grace with tiny works, in this case, a tiny doctrinal work.

What does this have to do with the Lord’s Supper? One of the blessings we can glean from our practice of admitting little ones to the Table is that we can begin to see how gracious God is to us. We see the nature of grace, and we rejoice to give bread and wine to our children—even though they are just now on the threshold of understanding it. When children are brought to a table, nobody thinks they are earning their keep. Mom and Dad provide what’s on the table—kids just show up and receive. That is what we are doing here—showing up in order to receive.

This is an interesting piece by Doug Wilson.

Husbands, what is your wife to you? If you have a decent marriage, you could probably answer in greeting card terms. “She is my best friend.” “She is a wonderful mother to my children.” But if you have a biblical marriage, the answer should be quite different. “She is my glory.”