High school Biology teachers often guide their students through the dissection of frogs or fish. The stench of formaldehyde wafts around trembling fingers as scalpels slice through rubbery material. Students squint at the internal organs of the amphibian or the vertebrate and then roughly sketch the physical details. There is no time for lasting emotional connection with the dissected creature, whose remains are soon disposed of in the nearest rubbish …Read More
Cold love and shaking kingdoms
Senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (54-117 AD) once commented on political transitions in the Roman Empire: “Dum hac totius orbis mutatione fortuna imperii transit” (“With worldwide convulsion the Imperial power was changing hands”). The recent changeover of political power in the USA might not be global in scope, but the world’s scoop-hungry media has whipped up this national news into tsunami-like dimensions. Bitter acrimony has infected American social media more quickly than the Stuxnet virus. Public …Read More
Sweeping away the refuge of lies (Isaiah 28:16-17)
Yesterday (Sunday January 15, 2017) in the early evening a rooster crowed in Paris. A small droplet of victory fell from Heaven. The “Conférence pour la Paix au Proche-Orient” (Conference for Peace in the Near East) decided not to approve its original detailed pre-conference communiqué which would have been an evil decree ratcheting up ‘lawfare’ against the Jewish state. Over the past week believers worldwide have called out to Jacob’s …Read More
The crumbling of Europa
Is Paris burning? The flames are not visible to the naked eye, but they roar nevertheless in the realm of the spirit. On Sunday January 15, 2017 more than seventy nations and organizations will gather in the ‘City of Lights’ (named because it was one of the first European cities to have gas-burning street lamps). There the nations will bang nails into a coffin that actually contains the disintegrating remains …Read More
Replacement Blowback
Newton’s third law of motion states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This principle also manifests itself in politics, in war and in religion. The intelligence community uses the term ‘blowback’ to describe an analogous dynamic – the unintended consequences, unwanted side-effects or repercussions of a black operation that backfires. Replacement Theology (an anti-Semitic expression of Christian theology that raised its head in the 2nd Century …Read More
“The kings of the earth are taking their positions”
Psalm 2 describes a dynamic in history that is coming to a high point in our day. The nations are in an uproar over the Jewish people and over their capital city Zion (2:1). They ‘rage against the machine’ – they gnash their teeth at God’s strategy in choosing Jerusalem (synonymous with Zion – Psalm 51:18; 102:21; 128:5; 135:21; 147:12; Isaiah 4:4; 10:12; 24:23; 31:9; 37:32; 40:9; 41:27; 52:1-2; 62:2; …Read More