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Proverbs 3New Living Translation

Trusting in the Lord

3 My child,^[a] never forget the things I have taught you.
    Store my commands in your heart.
² If you do this, you will live many years,
    and your life will be satisfying.
³ Never let loyalty and kindness leave you!
    Tie them around your neck as a reminder.
    Write them deep within your heart.
⁴ Then you will find favor with both God and people,
    and you will earn a good reputation.

⁵ Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
    do not depend on your own understanding.
⁶ Seek his will in all you do,
    and he will show you which path to take.

⁷ Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom.
    Instead, fear the Lord and turn away from evil.
⁸ Then you will have healing for your body
    and strength for your bones.

⁹ Honor the Lord with your wealth
    and with the best part of everything you produce.
¹⁰ Then he will fill your barns with grain,
    and your vats will overflow with good wine.

¹¹ My child, don’t reject the Lord’s discipline,
    and don’t be upset when he corrects you.
¹² For the Lord corrects those he loves,
    just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.^[b]

¹³ Joyful is the person who finds wisdom,
    the one who gains understanding.
¹⁴ For wisdom is more profitable than silver,
    and her wages are better than gold.
¹⁵ Wisdom is more precious than rubies;
    nothing you desire can compare with her.
¹⁶ She offers you long life in her right hand,
    and riches and honor in her left.
¹⁷ She will guide you down delightful paths;
    all her ways are satisfying.
¹⁸ Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her;
    happy are those who hold her tightly.

¹⁹ By wisdom the Lord founded the earth;
    by understanding he created the heavens.
²⁰ By his knowledge the deep fountains of the earth burst forth,
    and the dew settles beneath the night sky.

²¹ My child, don’t lose sight of common sense and discernment.
    Hang on to them,
²² for they will refresh your soul.
    They are like jewels on a necklace.
²³ They keep you safe on your way,
    and your feet will not stumble.
²⁴ You can go to bed without fear;
    you will lie down and sleep soundly.
²⁵ You need not be afraid of sudden disaster
    or the destruction that comes upon the wicked,
²⁶ for the Lord is your security.
    He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap.

²⁷ Do not withhold good from those who deserve it
    when it’s in your power to help them.
²⁸ If you can help your neighbor now, don’t say,
    “Come back tomorrow, and then I’ll help you.”

²⁹ Don’t plot harm against your neighbor,
    for those who live nearby trust you.
³⁰ Don’t pick a fight without reason,
    when no one has done you harm.

³¹ Don’t envy violent people
    or copy their ways.
³² Such wicked people are detestable to the Lord,
    but he offers his friendship to the godly.

³³ The Lord curses the house of the wicked,
    but he blesses the home of the upright.

³⁴ The Lord mocks the mockers
    but is gracious to the humble.^[c]

³⁵ The wise inherit honor,
    but fools are put to shame!

–

Bill Elliff

Proverbs 3 

THE GOD WHO CAN MAKE US SUCCESSFUL

January 16, 2020

Everybody wants to be successful. Thousands of books have been written and bought by people hungry to prosper in their endeavors. The dictionary describes success as “the favorable or desired outcome.” Who would not want success as a man or woman, husband or wife, parent, ministry leader, business person?

But is there a recognizable, simple path and who is the real author of success?

AN ANCIENT ILLUSTRATION

Abraham, the father of our faith, desired to find a wife for his only son, Isaac. He charged his servant to go back to Abraham’s native land to find this wife. This was a risky, daunting, and seemingly impossible task for this servant. A needle in a haystack. There were a million ways this could go wrong.

The wise leader did what was necessary to be successful. He prayed. And his prayer brought God into the equation.

“O LORD, the God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today, and show lovingkindness to my master Abraham.” (Genesis 24:12)

Through an amazing set of God-designed circumstances, the servant found the exact mate that Isaac needed in a distant land. It was a miracle. He was successful.

A CURRENT PATTERN

You should read the full account in Genesis, Chapter 24. But notice what the servant did.

1. He prayed, crying out to God for His leadership and help. He turned to the One source who could make this hard task successful.
2. He prayed unselfishly. His prayer was not “make me look good” but “Lord, lead me for my master’s sake and to show your nature to all.” His motives had been purified.
3. He listened to and followed the leadership of God. He would later admit “the LORD has guided me” (verse 27). This guidance indicates that the servant followed, trusting in the Lord.
4. When God granted success, He gave God all the glory.

Then the man bowed low and worshiped the LORD. He said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of my master Abraham, who has not forsaken His lovingkindness and His truth toward my master; as for me, the LORD has guided me in the way to the house of my master’s brothers.” (Genesis 22:26-27)

The wise writer of Proverbs would state it this way:

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him (i.e., bring Him into the equation) and He will direct your path. (Proverbs 3:5-6, parenthesis mine)

Do you desire to be successful in your daily living? Raising your family? Your work? Your whole life? The formula is simple. You don’t need another book beside the Bible. God is waiting to grant success to every man or woman who will look to Him unselfishly and give Him all the glory.

Lord, I pray that my life would be successful for Your glory so that You could be seen as the great God You are. Help me to pray without ceasing—to cry out to You today about every single thing. Give me grace to listen and follow Your leadership. And make me careful to bow low and worship when you have blessed the work of my hands, giving You all the glory!

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Fathers Who Teach Their Children to Be Wise

June 20, 2021 Save Article

Proverbs

Why do some children adore their fathers and others hate them? What’s the difference between fathers? Sometimes children are caught up in the mistakes and mindset of fathers who won’t do what they should to guide those children into a safe, secure haven. The fathers’ own pride and arrogance make shipwreck both of their own lives and their children’s. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

I’ve observed one characteristic in almost all fathers whose children love and follow them. I’ll tell you what it is in a moment. 

The book of Proverbs is a veritable owner’s manual on how to raise a wise child. From the first chapter, it says the proverbs were written, in large part, so we would come… 

…to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion—A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel…. Wisdom calls aloud outside; she raises her voice in the open squares. She cries out in the chief concourses, at the openings of the gates in the city she speaks her words: “How long, you simple [naïve, immature] ones, will you love simplicity? For scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge. (Proverbs 1:2-5; 20-22)

Underline three words in this passage: simple, scorners, and fools. A child isn’t born a scorner or a fool. A long road leads to the evolution of a fool. 

Children need your guidance and protection.

They’re easily molded. “Simple” in verse 22 means open and naïve; children’s minds and hearts are plastic—easily shaped, innocent. 

They lack understanding. There comes a time when the child must be guided from innocence into wisdom and maturity.

They can be quickly led into error. A child is an easy target for Hollywood, false religions, and sinful friends. They’re so open, they’ll believe anything. They’re like a sponge. They can be tricked and misled; they’re living in constant danger, sitting ducks for bad influences.

“The simple believes every word…” (Proverbs 24:15). “A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself: but the simple pass on and are punished” (Proverbs 22:3). 

The young tend to think they’re indestructible, not weighing the future, easy to mislead. 

The older child needs godly correction.

Look at the word “scorner.” Little children aren’t scorners yet but heads up, dads: the older children, if not guided by dad and mom, take the next step down—they become the scorners/scoffers. 

They get their jollies from being the smart-alecky kids, the teenage cynics, the mockers at the university. It breaks my heart to say it, but most teenagers in America now are scorners. Scorners can break a parent’s heart.

They defy instruction because “scorners delight in their scorning” (Proverbs 1:22). 
“A wise son heeds his father’s instruction, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke” (Proverbs 13:1). 

Scorners will fire back at you. (See Proverbs 9:8.) They won’t listen. It’s like talking to a brick wall—they’ll tune you out. “A scoffer does not love one who corrects him, nor will he go to the wise” (Proverbs 15:12).

He’ll never come and say, “Dad, I need help. Will you help me out?” When you try to correct the scorner, he’ll look at you and say with his eyes, “I hate your guts.”

They’re on a track for destruction. 
“He who despises the Word will be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:13).

If they laugh at the Word of God, they may laugh their way right into Hell. Scorners are very hard to reach, but there is yet hope; they can still be reclaimed.

Catch them before they self-destruct.

First, there was the simple—naïve, open, carefree. But if he’s not taught, he will become a scorner. We all carry that fallen nature. Then the scorner, if not restrained by parents, becomes a person the Bible designates “a fool.” The scorner is insolent, but the fool is immovable—rebellious, arrogant, and wicked. 

A fool will reject wisdom. 
“And fools hate knowledge” (Proverbs 1:22).

“The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on foolishness” (Proverbs 15:14).

He ridicules righteousness. 
“Fools mock at sin” (Proverbs 14:9). 

This is why we have sitcoms that laugh at drunkenness, glorify adultery, mock marriage, promote homosexuality and relish perversion. Who does that? Fools. 

He rejoices in iniquity. 
“Folly is joy to him who is destitute of discernment…” (Proverbs 15:21).

His moral sense is so perverted, he calls good evil and evil good. His heart is hardened, his conscience is seared, and his mind is defiled.

He rejects reproof. 
God will chasten those who are His own. “For whom the Lord loves, He chastens…” (Hebrews 12:6). But reproof and correction are lost on a fool. “Rebuke is more effective for a wise man than a hundred blows on a fool” (Proverbs 17:10).

Trying to reprove the fool will get you nowhere. Don’t even try. He won’t hear you. He is intransigent. If he were wise, he would repent when God chastised him.

God gives us little children who begin life innocent and open. But if you’re not careful, society will turn them into smart alecks. 

Dad, if they’re not rescued when they become scorners or smart alecks, they’ll become fools. The fool is on the fast track to Hell.

We’re in serious trouble in America. In 1962, prayer in public schools was declared unconstitutional. In 1963, Bible reading in schools was deemed “unconstitutional,” but in 1973 the killing of pre-born children somehow became a Constitutional “right.” Then in 1980, the Ten Commandments had to be removed from where they were posted on school walls because, they said, “The child might be tempted to follow them.” 

Secular humanists have proven to be great strategists. They latched onto the one segment of life almost every child will pass through—public school—and targeted it to become their “Sunday School” for humanist philosophy. To do that, they had to purge any vestige of Christian influence.

In light of this attack on your children, how can you be the father of a wise child and keep from raising a fool?

Dads, with everything in modern culture fighting against you, you must gear up for this battle. 

7 Ways to Be the Father of Wise Children:

1. Expound truth.

Saturate them in the Proverbs. Emblazon the Ten Commandments onto their consciousness. Teach them the Beatitudes, that they might learn these simple, basic truths. It’s your God-given responsibility (See Deuteronomy 6:6-9.) to teach these commandments to your sons, daughters, and grandsons, that your family will survive and your home endure.

The battle is for the mind. As the child thinks, so is he. Get a memorization plan going and make it fun, with rewards when children commit scheduled verses to memory. Get the Word down into their hearts early.

2. Expose sin. 

The young and innocent will learn by example when they see discipline fall upon the scorner. Children need to see what happens when sin is exposed and consequences are suffered. 

“When the scoffer is punished, the simple is made wise” (Proverbs 21:11). 

The worst thing would be for your child to live in a sinful society where he never sees the repercussions of sin. Our children today are insulated; often they don’t see the result of sin. Help them understand. Don’t just expound truth, but expose sin. Take your child down to skid row. Take him to the prisons. Let him see the end result of bad choices. 

“Strike a scoffer, and the simple will become wary; Rebuke one who has  understanding, and he will discern knowledge” (Proverbs 19:25).

The young think they’re indestructible. You need to pull back the veil.

3. Expel scorners. 

Do not let your children hang around with scorners and fools. Just don’t do it. Help them select their friends. That means you may have to be firm and “cast out the scorner.” Show them the door. Impressionable children will succumb to peer pressure. 

Open up your house to your child’s friends. Make your home the headquarters for fun. And while they’re there, you can monitor those friends. Peer pressure is not bad if the peers are good. If there’s a smart aleck or a fool, say, “Son, there’s the sidewalk.” 

“Cast out the scoffer, and contention will leave; Yes, strife and reproach will cease” (Proverbs 22:10). 

Moms and dads, underline this, a good verse for memorization: 

“He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:20).

4. Express love. 

Love your children! Delight in them. 

“For whom the Lord loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he  delights” (Proverbs 3:12). 

Be positive. Avoid negativism. Words can hurt your children more than a slap in the face. Learn to listen. Try to see life from their point of view. They’re facing things you never faced.

5. Be gentle. 

This is that one characteristic I mentioned at the beginning, which I’ve seen in all dads whose children love and follow them: They are gentle. That’s what children want out of their dad. Yes, they want a dad they can look up to, who’s the strongest, wisest, smartest, fastest, best dad in the world…but they want him to be gentle! Touch them, hug them, give them non-verbal affection.

6. Be transparent. 

Let them know your fears, joys, disappointments, failures, and goals. They already know you’re not perfect; they don’t want you to be a phony.

7. Be available. 

Make it a priority that you’re available to your child.

If you feel inadequate—so do I. None of us has what it takes to be this kind of dad. That’s why we need Jesus.

We’ve got to have Christ in our hearts! The Christian life is not difficult, it’s impossible. Only one who can do it, and that’s Jesus. 

But He will do it, in and through us, if we’ll let Him. The best thing you can do for your children is to love God with all your heart. Give your heart to Jesus.

Related Video Programs

• How to Be the Father of a Wise Child – June 20, 2021

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Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Marriage Act and the Post-Boomer Church

 Jake Meador on November 30, 2022

Some time after his death, an editor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pamphlet “Christian Behavior,” which would later be re-published as one section in Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity. Folded inside the book was a letter Tolkien had written but apparently never sent to his long-time friend and fellow Oxford don. In it, Tolkien took issue with Lewis’s treatment of divorce in the pamphlet.

Briefly, Lewis argued for the creation of two separate marriage institutions within the United Kingdom. The former, church marriage, would be handled by the Church of England and defined by Christian conception of marriage while the latter, civil marriage, would be overseen by the state and would be governed by the moral norms in favor with British society. Through this, Lewis thought, British Christians could preserve Christian ideas of marriage, including the prohibition against divorce, while honoring civil laws that were far more permissive regarding divorce.

Tolkien objected strongly to the idea and wrote an aggressive letter to his friend saying so. “No item of Christian morality,” Tolkien said, “is valid only for Christians.”

In other words, Christian morality is human morality because Christianity is a true account of reality, including the human person. You can’t create bifurcations between a kind of privatized religious morality and the real public morality that governs our common life together. Tolkien continued,

The foundation is that (Christian morality) is the correct way of “running the human machine.” Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps?) getting extra mileage out of a few selected machines.

The horror of the Christians with whom you disagree (the great majority of all practicing Christians) at legal divorce is in the ultimate analysis precisely that: horror at seeing good machines ruined by misuse…. Toleration of divorce — if a Christian does tolerate it — is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury) — if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter of expedient policy.

To be sure, sins and crimes are separate things. There are any number of sins that oughtn’t be made illegal and punishable by the government. But Tolkien here is not arguing for sectarianism or theocracy.

He is merely insisting that we flirt with disaster when we presuppose that the moral law and our nation’s civil laws have (basically) nothing to do with one another. If you can change civil laws in ways that make them explicitly contrary to God’s moral law, Tolkien thinks, you’re headed for trouble.

If this debate sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that: It closely mirrors the debate that has happened in recent weeks between David French, Carl Trueman, and Al Mohler regarding the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA).

In short, French sounds strikingly like Andrew Sullivan these days, supporting a conservatism defined far more by its Burkean deference to custom and to a gradualist political method than by specific, positively stated moral content.

Trueman, meanwhile, thinks French is indicative of a shift in conservative Protestantism which he attributes to “evangelical elites,” and Mohler thinks French is a cautionary tale for political conservatives. All of them, I think, are focusing their attention on the wrong problems. Before getting to that, let’s deal directly with the Respect for Marriage Act. Then we can consider the more interesting questions lingering around the edges of this debate.

Essentially, the way we should approach the RFMA is this: There is a good prudential case for supporting it. If the choice put before us is the RFMA or the Equality Act, the RFMA is obviously preferable as it at least pretends to care about religious liberty and has some language included in it that may genuinely provide protection to religious conservatives. In the possible event that the contemporary SOGI regime is here to stay, we should take what protections we can get now. This is my friend Matt Anderson’s prudential argument for supporting it and I think it is a compelling case. (Tim Schultz has written a similar argument.)

There is also a good prudential case against it: The religious liberty language is extremely weak — Mark Joseph Stern makes this point in a recent piece — and the bill gives up an enormous amount from a social conservative perspective in exchange for very little. That, of course, has been the social conservative style for time untold.

As long as we’re reasoning on the grounds of what is prudentially best in this moment for our particular nation, I think a number of possible approaches are admissible and none should be cause for division or for Christian discord.

Where the problem arises, I think, is that most of the argument so far isn’t really about prudential political reasoning amidst challenging circumstance, but is instead a debate hopelessly constrained and conditioned by the culture war, such that the interesting questions get backgrounded while boring disputes largely propelled by personality are foregrounded.

For Mohler, there isn’t really a prudential case here at all. The RFMA must be categorically rejected, full stop, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly just a woke, weak, compromised fraud. There is no attempt to reason, no attempt to consider prudential questions that should obviously arise given the church’s weakened position in American life. There is only Mohler’s characteristically vain declamations.

Also, contra Trueman, the problem isn’t “evangelical elites.” If the past several years have shown us anything, it is that most of these “elites” have quite limited influence with many self-identified evangelicals. One also begins to wonder at what point a chaired Christian college professor and best-selling evangelical press author will, himself, become an “evangelical elite.”

Yet French’s acceptance of gay marriage as an inextricable part of the pluralist order which cannot be transgressed or challenged is no less a solution. The subtext to so much of French’s political writing is an under-developed doctrine of creation, which allows for Christian morality to exist at a remove from questions of public order and common life in precisely the ways Tolkien addressed in his rebuke to Lewis. For civic libertarians like French, and here I suspect you might also include figures like Paul Miller, Christian morality exists atop the world, as it were, and tells individual Christian people how to live in the world. It guides Christians in how to engage with the world when they step down into it. But it doesn’t itself shape the world in any sort of direct, tangible way; the world is governed by other laws. That Christian moral norms would supply the moral content that actually defines our common life in the world is to him anathema and to most in the historic church so obvious as to be banal.

Strikingly, it almost seems as if French and Mohler are vexed by slightly differing versions of the same basic problem, which is an over-estimation of America’s importance in God’s redemptive story and a potentially idolatrous tendency to privilege the concerns of their idea of America over the concerns of Christian faith.

For French, the post war American conception of civil liberties must be preserved, even if the cost is so high as enshrining in law what God’s Word calls wicked. Thus French’s argument for the RFMA goes well beyond the prudential reasoning of Anderson and strays into a more normative mode. Thus he ends up proposing a more extreme example of Lewis’s gambit: Give the culture what it wants via “civil marriage” while preserving “Christian marriage,” unstained from the world.

The fact that Lewis was arguing for more permissive divorce laws while French is arguing for the acceptance of gay marriage is perhaps all the commentary required to understand why this idea will not work. Indeed, it is entirely possible that ten years from now we’ll be redoing this argument yet again, only this time with state-sanctioned plural marriage in view. If we aren’t, I suspect it will have less to do with any principled and widely shared objection to plural marriage within our culture and more to do with the fact that marriage itself has almost altogether withered and died.

Meanwhile, for Mohler, the status of Christoamericanism is sacrosanct and the church must do all it can to preserve that failing regime, even if it means betraying one’s long-stated principles or, more to the point, taking up practices and postures that are antithetical to Christian piety.

Trueman at least gestures toward the idea that should be central to our thought in this moment, which is that the horizons of the kingdom of God stretch beyond the American regime, beyond the neo-liberal open society, beyond American notions of civil liberties (which often collapse down into political atheism), and beyond the American experiment itself. This is the direction in which we all ought to be thinking. The Christoamericanism of Mohler’s dreams is dead; the civic libertarian America favored by French has become incoherent and corrosive to the life of the church and Christian community in the ways T. S. Eliot predicted it would long ago in The Idea of a Christian Society.

The reality facing us is that a new moment in church history is beginning as is a new moment in American history. If we are to be writers of use to the church of today and the church of tomorrow, then we must reckon with these facts rather than trying to preserve a status quo that has already failed.

This is the situation we must confront: The Baby Boomers, who have provided the lion’s share of our financial and volunteer resources for 40 years, are retiring and dying. Their resources are going away. The rising generation won’t replace them, both because they lack the wealth and don’t give what wealth they do have to the same degree as their parents and because the past 25 years have seen 40 million people, predominantly younger people, leave the American church. So in the near future, the American church is going to get numerically smaller and dramatically less resourced in both its financial and volunteer capacities. Churches will close. Colleges and seminaries will collapse. Non-profits will disappear. Any serious political proposal must reckon with this fact.

This, of course, is the best prudential case for the RFMA: The American church is about to get far weaker and whatever civic protections we can build for ourselves now will be hugely important in ten years time. So let’s take what we can get while we can still get it. If we reject this proposal, the next time we come to the bargaining table our position will be even weaker and we may well be staring at the probable passage of the Equality Act, which would be far worse than the RFMA. That’s one account of the American church’s future and America’s future. But it is not the only plausible account.

Alongside this bleak reality facing the church is another reality facing America, which is no less bleak: Our fertility rate has fallen off a cliff. And as Germany, Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, and China are all discovering now, disastrously low fertility leads to other social disasters. But it isn’t just that we aren’t having kids in America; we are enormously dysfunctional when it comes to sex more generally. Whether it is the rise of the incels, the ubiquity of porn, or heartbreaking studies like this one which recently found that a quarter of all women at one university reported being choked during their last sexual encounter, it is clear that we have very little idea what sex is for.

This, in fact, is precisely as Tolkien predicted decades ago. Elsewhere in his letter to Lewis, he said that the disorders and abuses brought about by more permissive divorce laws would never be limited to more permissive divorce laws:

Wrong behavior (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being “not very good,” “second best” – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.

Of course, an ignorance about the most basic human community in creation —the family — will inevitably manifest as more general confusion about human community writ large. And so here we are.

We live in a deeply unhealthy society marked by loneliness, rootlessness, and the dissolution of the family and most other forms of thick community. This has created a crisis of meaning and belonging for millions. Unsurprisingly, many are now turning to drugs, gambling, and alcohol to slake their thirst for something real. This, then, is the best prudential case against the RFMA: We are living in mad times marked by uniquely unhealthy and destructive beliefs about the body, sexuality, and marriage. It cannot go on forever. So why would we encode that madness even more explicitly and intractably into our nation’s laws?

Mark Sayers argues that in gray zone moments, such as our own, the dying era often becomes a gross, exaggerated caricature of itself before it finally passes away. Certainly one could consider current ideas about sexuality and gender to be an example of precisely those dynamics. In which case, we would do well to heed those suggesting we may be closer than we think to an era of “sex negativity.” Far better, than, to preserve the truth about marriage and the family as much as we can and to fight against the codification of lies into our nation’s law in order to make it all the easier to restore the truth to our political lives in the years to come.

The RFMA debate is significant for us in two ways: First, because it raises the interesting and vital questions that the post-boomer church in America will have to take seriously. Second, because most of our current leaders aren’t reckoning with the problems staring us down but are instead relitigating tired old debates whose relevance has long since passed.

If the church is to have a future in America — and I am quite convinced that we can actually have a very brightfuture in this country — then our leaders will need to stop adjudicating old disputes and reckon with the emerging shape of the post-boomer church.

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• Posted in: Current Politics, Featured, Political Theory

Posted by Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie, their daughter Davy Joy, and sons Wendell, Austin, and Ambrose. Jake’s writing has appeared in Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play and he has written or contributed to several books, including “In Search of the Common Good,” “What Are Christians For?” (both with InterVarsity Press), “A Protestant Christendom?” (with Davenant Press), and “Telling the Stories Right” (with the Front Porch Republic Press).

November 17, 2022

Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming,
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming,

I have written on this before to your fellow Republican Mitt Romney of Utah.

This is an OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, on the NOVEMBER 16, 2022 CONCERNING THE SENATOR’S “YES” VOTE IN SENATE TO  PASS BILL THAT “provides statutory authority for same-sex…marriages,” repealing provisions that define marriage as between a man and a woman!

I am familiar with your church and their traditional view on marriage. Here is a summary of it:

QUESTION: In light of all the recent publicity about same-sex marriage, where does The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod stand on the issue?

ANSWER: God gave marriage as a picture of the relationship between Christ and His bride the Church (Eph. 5:32). Homosexual behavior is prohibited in the Old and New Testaments (Lev. 18:22, 24, 20:13; 1 Cor. 6:9–20; 1 Tim. 1:10) as contrary to the Creator’s design (Rom. 1:26–27).

The LCMS affirms that such behavior is “intrinsically sinful” and that, “on the basis of Scripture, marriage [is] the lifelong union of one man and one woman (Gen. 2:2-24; Matt. 19:5-6)” (2004 Res. 3-05A).

It has also urged its members “to give a public witness from Scripture against the social acceptance and legal recognition of homosexual ‘marriage’ ” (2004 Res. 3-05A).

At the same time, the Synod firmly believes “the redeeming love of Christ, which rescues humanity from sin, death, and the power of Satan, is offered to all through repentance and faith in Christ, regardless of the nature of their sinfulness” (1992 Res. 3-12A).

—-

Your church’s view is the view the Bible takes and I want to say that I am glad you belong to a Bible affirming church that respects the truth about what the Bible says about homosexuality. Maybe you don’t fully understand fully what the Bible says about homosexuality and that is why you voted the way you did on November 16th?

 I heard Greg Koukl talk on this subject and he did a great job. Especially notice the section entitled, “Natural Desire or Natural Function?”

The first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans contains what most readers consider the Bible’s clearest condemnation of same-sex relations.  Recent scholarship reads the same text and finds just the opposite.  Who is right?

Paul, Romans and Homosexuality

 by Greg Koukl

      To most readers, the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans contains the Bible’s clearest condemnation of same-sex relations–both male and female.  Recent scholarship, though, reads the same text and finds just the opposite–that homosexuality is innate and therefore normal, moral, and biblical.

Reconstructing Romans

In Romans, Paul seems to use homosexuality as indicative of man’s deep seated rebellion against God and God’s proper condemnation of man.  New interpretations cast a different light on the passage.

Paul, the religious Jew, is looking across the Mediterranean at life in the capital of Graeco-Roman culture.  Homosexuality in itself is not the focus of condemnation.  Rather, Paul’s opprobrium falls upon paganism’s refusal to acknowledge the true God.

It’s also possible Paul did not understand the physiological basis of genuine homosexuality.  John Boswell, professor of history at Yale, is among those who differ with the classical interpretation.  In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexualityhe writes:

The persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual:  what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons….It is not clear that Paul distinguished in his thoughts or writings between gay persons (in the sense of permanent sexual preference) and heterosexuals who simply engaged in periodic homosexual behavior.  It is in fact unlikely that many Jews of his day recognized such a distinction, but it is quite apparent that–whether or not he was aware of their existence–Paul did not discuss gay persons but only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons.[1]  [emphasis in the original]

Paul is speaking to those who violate their natural sexual orientation, Boswell contends, those who go against their own natural desire:  “‘Nature’ in Romans 1:26, then, should be understood as the personal nature of the pagans in question.”[2]  [emphasis in the original]

Since a homosexual’s natural desire is for the same sex, this verse doesn’t apply to him.  He has not chosen to set aside heterosexuality for homosexuality; the orientation he was born with is homosexual.  Demanding that he forsake his “sin” and become heterosexual is actually the kind of violation of one’s nature Paul condemns here.

Romans 1:18-27

Both views can’t be correct.  Only a close look at the text itself will give us the answer.  The details of this passage show why these new interpretations are impossible:[3]

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.  For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.  Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them.  For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

Let me start by making two observations.  First, this is about God being mad:  “For the wrath of God [orge] is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men….”

Second, there is a specific progression that leads to this “orgy” of anger.  Men “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (v. 18).  They exchanged “the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (v. 25).  Next, “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity…” (v. 24).  They “exchanged the natural [sexual] function for that which is unnatural (v. 26).  Therefore, the wrath of God rightly falls on them (v. 18); they are without excuse (v. 20).

This text is a crystal clear condemnation of homosexuality by the Apostle Paul in the middle of his most brilliant discourse on general revelation.  Paul is not speaking to a localized aberration of pedophilia or temple prostitution that’s part of life in the capital of Graeco-Roman culture.  He is talking about a universal condition of man.

Regarding the same-sex behavior itself, here are the specific words Paul uses:  a lust of the heart, an impurity and dishonoring to the body (v. 24); a degrading passion that’s unnatural (v. 29); an indecent act and an error (v. 27); not proper and the product of a depraved mind (v. 28).

There’s only one way the clear sense of this passage can be missed:  if someone is in total revolt against God.  According to Paul, homosexual behavior is evidence of active, persistent rebellion against one’s Creator.  Verse 32 shows it’s rooted in direct, willful, aggressive sedition against God–true of all so-called Christians who are defending their own homosexuality.  God’s response is explicit:  “They are without excuse” (v. 20).

Born Gay?

What if one’s “natural” desire is for the same sex, though.  What if his homosexuality is part of his physical constitution?  There are four different reasons this is a bad argument.  The first three are compelling; the fourth is unassailable.

First, this rejoinder assumes there is such a thing as innate homosexuality.  The scientific data is far from conclusive, though.  Contrary to the hasty claims of the press, there is no definitive evidence that homosexuality is determined by physiological factors (see “Just Doing What Comes Naturally,” Clear Thinking, Spring, 1997).

There’s a second problem.  If all who have a desire for the same sex do so “naturally,” then to whom does this verse apply?  If everybody is only following their natural sexual desires, then which particular individuals fall under this ban, those who are not aroused by their own gender, but have sex anyway?  Generally, for men at least, if there is no arousal, there is no sex.  And if there is arousal, according to Boswell et al, then the passion must be natural.

Third, this interpretation introduces a whole new concept–constitutional homosexuality–that is entirely foreign to the text.  Boswell himself admits that it was “in fact unlikely that many Jews of [Paul’s] day recognized such a distinction,” and that possibly even Paul himself was in the dark.

If Paul did not understand genuine homosexuality, though, then how can one say he excepted constitutional homosexuals when he wrote that they “exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural”?  This argument self-destructs.

Further, if Paul spoke only to those violating their personal sexual orientation, then wouldn’t he also warn that some men burned unnaturally towards women, and some women towards men?  Wouldn’t Paul warn against both types of violation–heterosexuals committing indecent acts with members of the same sex, and homosexuals committing indecent acts with members of the opposite sex?

What in the text allows us to distinguish between constitutional homosexuals and others?  Only one word:  “natural.”  A close look at this word and what it modifies, though, leads to the most devastating critique of all.

Natural Desire or Natural Function?

Paul was not unclear about what he meant by “natural.”  Homosexuals do not abandon natural desires; they abandon natural functions:  “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another…” (1:26-27)

The Greek word kreesis, translated “function” in this text, is used only these two times in the New Testament, but is found frequently in other literature of the time.  According to the standard Greek language reference A Greek/English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other  Early Christian Literature,[4] the word means “use, relations, function, especially of sexual intercourse.”

Paul is not talking about natural desires here, but natural functions.  He is not talking about what one wants sexually, but how one is built to operatesexually.  The body is built to function in a specific way.  Men were not built to function sexually with men, but with women.

This conclusion becomes unmistakable when one notes what men abandon in verse 27, according to Paul.  The modern argument depends on the text teaching that men abandoned their own natural desire for woman and burned toward one another.  Men whose natural desire was for other men would then be exempted from Paul’s condemnation.  Paul says nothing of the kind, though.

Paul says men forsake not their own natural desire (their constitutional make-up), but rather the “natural function of the woman..”  They abandoned the female, who was built by God to be man’s sexual compliment.

The error has nothing to do with anything in the male’s own constitution that he’s denying.  It is in the rejection of the proper sexual companion God has made for him–a woman:  “The men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts….” (v. 27)

Natural desires go with natural functions.  The passion that exchanges the natural function of sex between a man and a woman for the unnatural function of sex between a   man and a man is what Paul calls a degrading passion.

Jesus clarified the natural, normal relationship:  “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said ‘For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh [sexual intercourse].’?”  (Matthew 19:4-5)

Homosexual desire is unnatural because it causes a man to abandon the natural sexual compliment God has ordained for him:  a woman.  That was Paul’s view.  If it was Paul’s view recorded in the inspired text, then it is God’s view.  And if it is God’s view, it should be ours if we call ourselves Christian.

---

[1]John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality(Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 109.

[2]Ibid., p. 111.

[3]Citations are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1977, The Lockman Foundation.

[4]Bauer, Arndt and Gingrich (University of Chicago Press).

I want to object to your recent vote on November to do away with traditional marriage special position in our laws!!! Take a look at this letter I wrote to President Obama that applies to you!!!

Francis Schaeffer

December 28, 2020

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

On page 286 you talk about speaking at the 2009 National Prayer Breakfast and in fact you spoke at 2 of those in 2009 and one each February you were President!! Let me quote from one of those speeches of yours below!

                                 June 19, 2009
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT THE ESPERANZA NATIONAL HISPANIC PRAYER BREAKFASTJ.W. Marriott
Washington, D.C: “At a time when there’s no shortage of challenges to occupy our time, it’s even more important to step back, and to give thanks, and to seek guidance from each other — but most importantly, from God. That’s what we’ve come here to do.”

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR GUIDANCE FROM GOD’S WORD OR FROM OTHER SOURCES LIKE LIBERAL THEOLOGIANS DO?

As a Christian I accept that the Bible is the word of God and inerrant. I understand that you take a much more liberal view of the Bible. Your church denomination includes very liberal theologians and Paul Tillich is probably the most prominent in the past. 

Schaeffer went on to analyze how neo-orthodoxy ultimately gives way to radical mysticism:

Karl Barth opened the door to the existentialistic leap in theology… He has been followed by many more, men like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Bishop John Robinson, Alan Richardson and all the new theologians. They may differ in details, but their struggle is still the same—it is the struggle of modern man who has given up [rationality]. As far as the theologians are concerned … their new system is not open to verification, it must simply be believed.¹⁰

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

You want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology., 

A fine message below in which John MacArthur reminds us:

As Francis Schaeffer warned nearly thirty years ago in The God Who Is There, the church is following the irrationality of secular philosophy. Consequently, reckless faith has overrun the evangelical community. Many are discarding doctrine in favor of personal experience.

The War Against Reason by John MacArthur

True discernment has suffered a horrible setback in the past few decades because reason itself has been under attack within the church. As Francis Schaeffer warned nearly thirty years ago in The God Who Is There, the church is following the irrationality of secular philosophy. Consequently, reckless faith has overrun the evangelical community. Many are discarding doctrine in favor of personal experience. Others say they are willing to disregard crucial biblical distinctives in order to achieve external unity among all professing Christians. True Christianity marked by intelligent, biblical faith seems to be declining even among the most conservative evangelicals.THE ABANDONMENT OF OBJECTIVE TRUTHThe visible church in our generation has become astonishingly tolerant of aberrant teaching and outlandish ideas—and frighteningly intolerant of sound teaching. The popular evangelical conception of “truth” has become almost completely subjective. Truth is viewed as fluid, always relative, never absolute. To suggest that any objective criterion might be used to distinguish truth from error is to be egregiously out of step with the spirit of the age. In some circles, Scripture itself has been ruled out as a reliable test of truth. After all, the Bible can be interpreted in so many different ways—who can say which interpretation is right? And many believe there is truth beyond the Bible.All this relativity has had disastrous effects on the typical Christian’s ability to discern truth from error, right from wrong, good from evil. The plainest teachings of the Bible are being questioned among people who declare themselves believers in the Bible. For example, some Christians are no longer certain whether homosexuality should be classed as a sin. Others argue that the feminist agenda is compatible with biblical Christianity. “Christian” television, radio, books, and magazines serve up a preposterous smorgasbord of ideas from the merely capricious to the downright dangerous—and the average Christian is woefully ill-equipped to sort out the lies from the truth.Even to suggest that a sorting between lies and truth is necessary is viewed by many as perilously intolerant. There is a notion abroad that any dispute over doctrine is inherently evil. Concern for orthodoxy is regarded as incompatible with Christian unity. Doctrine itself is labeled divisive and those who make doctrine an issue are branded uncharitable. No one is permitted to criticize anyone else’s beliefs, no matter how unbiblical those beliefs seem to be. A recent article in Christianity Today exemplifies the trend. The article, titled “Hunting for Heresy,” profiled two well-known Christian leaders who had “come under withering attack for controversial writings.”1One is a popular speaker on the college lecture circuit and a bestselling author. He wrote a book in which he encouraged homosexuals to establish permanent live-together relationships (albeit celibate ones). He suggests the evangelical community suffers from “homophobia.” He is convinced that permanent living arrangements between homosexuals are the only alternative to loneliness for people he believes are “born with a homosexual orientation.” This man’s wife has published an article in a homosexual magazine in which she enthusiastically affirms” monogamous sexual relationships between homosexuals. The speaker-author says he has a “very, very strong” disagreement with his wife’s approval of homosexual sex, but his own view seems to allow homosexuals to engage in other kinds of physical intimacy short of actual intercourse.The other Christian leader profiled in the Christianity Today article is a woman who, with her husband, is a featured speaker for a popular, nationally-syndicated radio and television ministry. Their ministry is not a weird offshoot from some fringe cult, but an established, well-respected mainstay from the evangelical heartland. She also serves as chairperson of one of the largest evangelical student organizations in the world. This woman has written a book in which she chronicles some rather peculiar spiritual experiences. She dedicates the book to her male alter ego, an imaginary person named “Eddie Bishop” who romances her in her dreams. This woman says she also has visions of “the Christ child that is within” her. He appears to her as a drooling, emaciated, barefoot “idiot child” in a torn undershirt—”its head totally bald and lolled to one side.” The woman has engaged the services of a Catholic nun who serves as her “spiritual director,” helping to interpret her dreams and fantasies. The book mingles mysticism, Jungian psychology, out-of-body experiences, feminist ideas, subjective religious experience, and this woman’s romantic fantasies into an extraordinary amalgam. The book is frankly so bizarre that it is disturbing to read.The remarkable thing about the Christianity Today article is that the story was not written to expose the aberrant ideas being taught by these two leading evangelicals. Instead, what the magazine’s editors deemed newsworthy was the fact that these people were under attack for their views.In the world of modern evangelicalism, it is allowable to advocate the most unconventional, unbiblical doctrines—as long as you afford everyone else the same privilege. About the only thing that is taboo nowadays is the intolerance of those who dare to point out others’ errors. Anyone today who is bold enough to suggest that someone else’s ideas or doctrines are unsound or unbiblical is dismissed at once as contentious, divisive, unloving, or unchristian. It is all right toespouse any view you wish, but it is not all right to criticize another person’s views—no matter how patently unbiblical those views may be.When tolerance is valued over truth, the cause of truth always suffers. Church history shows this to be so. Only when the people of God have mounted a hardy defense of truth and sound doctrine has the church flourished and grown strong. The Reformation, the Puritan era, and the Great Awakenings are all examples of this. The times of decline in the history of the church have always been marked by an undue emphasis on tolerance—which leads inevitably to carelessness, worldliness, doctrinal compromise, and great confusion in the church.ADRIFT ON A SEA OF SUBJECTIVITYThat the church would lose her moorings in this particular age, however, poses greater dangers than ever. For in the past hundred years or so, the world has changed in a dramatic and very frightening way. People no longer look at truth the way they used to. In fact, we live under a prevailing philosophy that has become hostile to the very idea of absolute truth.From the beginning of recorded history until late last century, virtually all human philosophy assumed the necessity of absolute truth. Truth was universally understood as that which is true, not false; factual, not erroneous; correct, not incorrect; moral, not immoral; just, not unjust; right, not wrong. Practically all philosophers since the time of Plato assumed the objectivity of truth. Philosophy itself was a quest for the highest understanding of truth. Such a pursuit was presumed to be possible, even necessary, because truth was understood to be the same for every person. This did not mean that everyone agreed what truth was, of course. But virtually all agreed that whatever was true was true for everyone.That all changed in the nineteenth century with the birth of existentialism. Existentialism defies precise definition, but it includes the concept that the highest truth is subjective (having its source in the individual’s mind) rather than objective (something that actually exists outside the individual). Existentialism elevates individual experience and personal choice, minimizing or ruling out absolute standards of truth, goodness, morality, and such things. We might accurately characterize existentialism as the abandonment of objectivity. Existentialism is inherently anti-intellectual, against reason, irrational.Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard first used the term “existential.” Kierkegaard’s life and philosophy revolved around his experiences with Christianity. Christian ideas and biblical terminology reverberate in many of his writings. He wrote much about faith and certainly regarded himself as a Christian. Many of his ideas began as a legitimate reaction against the stale formalism of the Danish Lutheran state church. He was rightly offended at the barren ritualism of the church, properly outraged that people who had no love for God called themselves Christians just because they happened to be born in a “Christian” nation.But in his reaction against the lifeless state church, Kierkegaard set up a false antithesis. He decided that objectivity and truth were incompatible. To counter the passionless ritualism and lifeless doctrinal formulas he saw in Danish Lutheranism, Kierkegaard devised an approach to religion that was pure passion, altogether subjective. Faith, he suggested, means the rejection of reason and the exaltation of feeling and personal experience. It was Kierkegaard who coined the expression “leap of faith.” Faith to him was an irrational experience, above all a personal choice. He recorded these words in his journal on August 1, 1835: “The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”2Clearly, Kierkegaard had already rejected as inherently worthless the belief that truth is objective. His journal continues with these words:What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth …. What good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion? … I am left standing like a man who has rented a house and gathered all the furniture and household things together, but has not yet found the beloved with whom to share the joys and sorrows of his life…. It is this divine side of man, his inward action, which means everything—not a mass of [objective] information.3Having repudiated the objectivity of truth, Kierkegaard was left longing for an existential experience, which he believed would bring him a sense of personal fulfillment. He stood on the precipice, preparing to make his leap of faith. Ultimately, the idea he chose to live and die for was Christianity, but it was a characteristically subjective brand of Christianity that he embraced.Though Kierkegaard was virtually unknown during his lifetime, his writings have endured and have deeply influenced all subsequent philosophy. His idea of “truth that is true for me” infiltrated popular thought and set the tone for our generations radical rejection of all objective standards.Kierkegaard knew how to make irrationalism sound profound. “God does not exist; He is eternal,” he wrote. He believed Christianity was full of “existential paradoxes,” which he regarded as actual contradictions, proof that truth is irrational.Using the example of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22:1-19), Kierkegaard suggested that God called Abraham to violate moral law in slaying his son. For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s willingness to “suspend” his ethical convictions epitomized the leap of faith that is demanded of everyone. Kierkegaard believed the incident proved that “the single individual [Abraham] is higher than the universal [moral law].”4 Building on that conclusion, the Danish philosopher offered this observation: “Abraham represents faith…. He acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely [by virtue of] the absurd that he as the single individual is higher than the universal.”5 “[I] cannot understand Abraham,” Kierkegaard declared, “even though in a certain demented sense I admire him more than all others.”6It is not difficult to see how such thinking thrusts all truth into the realm of pure subjectivity—even to the point of absurdity or dementia. Everything becomes relative. Absolutes dematerialize. The difference between truth and nonsense becomes meaningless. All that matters is personal experience.And one person’s experience is as valid as another’s—even if everyone’s experiences lead to contradictory conceptions of truth. “Truth that is true for me” might be different from someone else’s truth. In fact, our beliefs might be obviously contradictory, yet another person’s “truth” in no way invalidates mine. Because “truth”is authenticated by personal experience, its only relevance is for the individual who makes the leap of faith. That is existentialism.Existentialism caught on in a big way in secular philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, also rejected reason and emphasized the will of the individual. Nietzsche probably knew nothing of Kierkegaard’s works, but their ideas paralleled at the key points. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, Nietzsche never made the leap of faith to Christianity. Instead, he leapt to the conclusion that God is dead. The truth that was “true for him,” it seems, turned out to be the opposite of the truth Kierkegaard chose. But their epistemology (the way they arrived at their ideas) was exactly the same.Later existentialists, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, refined Kierkegaard’s ideas while following the atheism of Nietzsche. Heidegger and Sartre both believed that reason is futile and life basically meaningless. Those ideas have been a powerful force in twentieth-century thought. As the world continues to grow more atheistic, more secular, and more irrational, it helps to understand that it is being propelled in that direction by strong existentialist influences.EXISTENTIALISM INVADES THE CHURCH But don’t get the idea that existentialism’s influence is limited to the secular world. From the moment Kierkegaard wedded existentialist ideas with Christianity, neo-orthodox theology was the inevitable outcome.Neo-orthodoxy is the term used to identify an existentialist variety of Christianity. Because it denies the essential objective basis of truth—the absolute truth and authority of Scripture—neo-orthodoxy must be understood as pseudo-Christianity. Its heyday came in the middle of the twentieth century with the writings of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Those men echoed the language and the thinking of Kierkegaard, speaking of the primacy of “personal authenticity,” while downplaying or denying the significance of objective truth. Barth, the father of neo-orthodoxy, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Kierkegaard.7Neo-orthodoxy’s attitude toward Scripture is a microcosm of the entire existentialist philosophy: the Bible itself is not objectively the Word of God, but it becomes the Word of God when it speaks to me individually. In neo-orthodoxy, that same subjectivism is imposed on all the doctrines of historic Christianity. Familiar terms are used, but are redefined or employed in a way that is purposely vague—not to convey objective meaning, but to communicate a subjective symbolism. After all, any “truth” theological terms convey is unique to the person who exercises faith. What the Bible means becomes unimportant. What it means to me is the relevant issue. All of this resoundingly echoes Kierkegaard’s concept of “truth that is true for me.”Thus while neo-orthodox theologians often sound as if they are affirming traditional beliefs, their actual system differs radically from the historic understanding of the Christian faith. By denying the objectivity of truth, they relegate all theology to the realm of subjective relativism. It is a theology perfectly suited for the age in which we live.And that is precisely why it is so deadly.Francis Schaeffer’s 1968 work The God Who Is There included a perceptive analysis of Kierkegaard’s influence on modern thought and modern theology.8 Schaeffer named the boundary between rationality and irrationality “the line of despair.” He noted that existentialism pushed secular thought below the line of despair sometime in the nineteenth century. Religious neo-orthodoxy was simply a johnny-come-lately response of theologians who were jumping on the existentialist bandwagon, following secular art, music, and general culture: “Neo-orthodoxy gave no new answer. What existential philosophy had already said in secular language, it now said in theological language…. [With the advent of neo-orthodoxy,] theology too has gone below the line of despair.”9Schaeffer went on to analyze how neo-orthodoxy ultimately gives way to radical mysticism:Karl Barth opened the door to the existentialistic leap in theology… He has been followed by many more, men like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Bishop John Robinson, Alan Richardson and all the new theologians. They may differ in details, but their struggle is still the same—it is the struggle of modern man who has given up [rationality]. As far as the theologians are concerned … their new system is not open to verification, it must simply be believed.10Such a system, Schaeffer points out, has no integrity. Those who espouse it cannot live with the repercussions of their own illogic. “In practice a man cannot totally reject [rationality], however much his system leads him to it, unless he experiences … some form of mental breakdown.” Thus people have been forced to an even deeper level of despair: “a level of mysticism with nothing there.”11MYSTICISM: IRRATIONALITY GONE TO SEEDMysticism is the idea that spiritual reality is found by looking inward. Mysticism is perfectly suited for religious existentialism; indeed, it is its inevitable consequence. The mystic disdains rational understanding and seeks truth instead through the feelings, the imagination, personal visions, inner voices, private illumination, or other purely subjective means. Objective truth becomes practically superfluous. Mystical experiences are therefore self-authenticating; that is, they are not subject to any form of objective verification. They are unique to the person who experiences them. Since they do not arise from or depend upon any rational process, they are invulnerable to any refutation by rational means.Arthur L. Johnson writes,The experience convinces the mystic in such a way, and to such a degree, that lie simply cannot doubt its value and the correctness of what he believes it “says.”…In its crudest form this position says that believing something to be so makes it so. The idea is that ultimate reality is purely mental; therefore one is able to create whatever reality one wishes. Thus the mystic “creates” truth through his experience. In a less extreme form, the view seems to be that there are “alternate realities,” one as real as another, and that these “break in upon” the mystic in his experiences. Whatever form is taken, the criterion of truth is again a purely private and subjective experience that provides no means of verification and no safeguard against error. Nevertheless, it is seen by the mystic as being above question by others.The practical result of all this is that it is nearly impossible to reason with any convinced mystic. Such people are generally beyond the reach of reason.12Mysticism is therefore antithetical to discernment. It is an extreme form of reckless faith.Mysticism is the great melting pot into which neo-orthodoxy, the charismatic movement, anti-intellectual evangelicals, and even some segments of Roman Catholicism have been synthesized. It has produced movements like the Third Wave (a neo-charismatic movement with excessive emphasis on signs, wonders, and personal prophecies); Renovaré (an organization that blends teachings from monasticism, ancient Catholic mysticism, Eastern religion, and other mystical traditions); the spiritual warfare movement (which seeks to engage demonic powers in direct confrontation); and the modern prophecy movement (which encourages believers to seek private, extrabiblical revelation directly ftom God). The influx of mysticism has also opened evangelicalism to New-Age concepts like subliminal thought- control, inner healing, communication with angels, channeling, dream analysis, positive confession, and a host of other therapies andpractices coming directly from occult and Eastern religions. The face of evangelicalism has changed so dramatically in the past twenty years that what is called evangelicalism today is beginning to resemble what used to be called neo-orthodoxy. If anything, some segments of contemporary evangelicalism are even more subjective in their approach to truth than neo-orthodoxy ever was.It could be argued that evangelicalism never successfully resisted neo-orthodoxy. Twenty years ago evangelicals took a heroic stand against neo-orthodox influences on the issue of biblical inerrancy. But whatever victory was gained in that battle is now being sacrificed on the altar of mysticism. Mysticism renders biblical inerrancy irrelevant. After all, if the highest truth is subjective and comes from within us, then it doesn’t ultimately matter if the specifics of Scripture are true or not. If the content of faith is not the real issue, what does it really matter if the Bible has errors or not?In other words, neo-orthodoxy attacked the objective inspiration of Scripture. Evangelical mysticism attacks the objective interpretation of Scripture. The practical effect is the same. By embracing existential relativism, evangelicals are forfeiting the very riches they fought so hard to protect. If we can gain meaningful guidance from characters who appear in our fantasies, why should we bother ourselves with what the Bible says? If we are going to disregard or even reject the biblical verdict against homosexuality, what difference does it make if the historical and factual matter revealed in Scripture is accurate or inaccurate? If personal prophecies, visions, dreams, and angelic beings are available to give us up-to-the-minute spiritual direction—”fresh revelation” as it is often called—who cares if Scripture is without error in the whole or in the parts?Mysticism further nullifies Scripture by pointing people away from the sure Word of God as the only reliable object of faith. Warning of the dangers of mysticism, Schaeffer wrote,Probably the best way to describe this concept of modern theology is to say that it is faith in faith, rather than faith directed to an object which is actually there…. A modern man cannot talk about the object of his faith, only about the faith itself. So he can discuss the existence of his faith and its “size” as it exists against all reason, but that is all. Modern man’s faith turns inward…. Faith is introverted, because it has no certain object … it is rationally not open to discussion. This position, I would suggest, is actually a greater despair and darkness than the position of those modern men who commit suicide.“13The faith of mysticism is an illusion. “Truth that is true for me” is irrelevant to anyone else, because it lacks any objective basis. Ultimately, therefore, existential faith is impotent to lift anyone above the level of despair. All it can do is seek more experiences and more feelings. Multitudes are trapped in the desperate cycle of feeding off one experience while zealously seeking the next. Such people have no real concept of truth; they just believe. Theirs is a reckless faith.MEANWHILE, AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM…Mysticism, however, is not the only form of reckless faith that threatens the contemporary church. A new movement has been gaining strength lately. Evangelicals are leaving the fold and moving into Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and liturgical high-church Protestantism. Rejecting the ever-changing subjectivism of a free- wheeling existential Protestantism, they seek a religion with historical roots. Turned off by the shallow silliness that has overrun the evangelical movement, they desire a more magisterial approach. Perhaps sensing the dangers of a religion that points people inward, they choose instead a religion that emphasizes external ceremonies and dogmatic hierarchical authority.I listened to the taped testimony of one of these converts to Roman Catholicism, a former Protestant minister. He said he had graduated with highest honors from a leading Protestant seminary. He told his audience that as a student he was rabidly anti-Catholic and fully committed to Protestant Reformed doctrine (although he refuted this himself by admitting he had already rejected the crucial doctrine of justification by faith). After college he began to read Roman Catholic writings and found himself drawn to Catholic theology and liturgy. He described his initial resistance to the doctrines of purgatory, the perpetual virginity of Mary, transubstantiation, and prayers to Mary and the saints. All of those doctrines are easily disproved by the Bible.14 But this man—acknowledging that he could find no warrant anywhere in Scripture for praying to Mary—nevertheless completely changed his outlook on such matters after he tried praying the rosary and received an answer to a very specific prayer. He concluded that it must have been Mary who answered his prayer and immediately began praying regularly to her. Ultimately, he decided the Bible alone was not a sufficient rule of faith for believers, and he put his faith in papal authority and church tradition.That man’s leap of faith may not have been of the existential variety, but it was a blind leap nonetheless. He chose the other extreme of reckless faith, the kind that makes extrabiblical religious tradition the object of one’s faith.This kind of faith is reckless because it subjugates the written Word of God to oral tradition, church authority, or some other human criterion. It is an uncritical trust in an earthly religious authority—the pope, tradition, a self-styled prophet like David Koresh, or whatever. Such faith rarely jettisons Scripture altogether—but by forcing God’s Word into the mold of religious tradition, it invalidates the Word of God and renders it of no effect (cf. Matt. 15:6).The man whose taped testimony I heard is now an apologist for the Roman Catholic Church. He speaks to Catholic congregations and tells them how to counter biblical arguments against Catholicism. At the end of his testimony tape, he deals briefly with the official Catholic attitude toward Scripture. He is eager to assure his listeners that the modern Roman Catholic Church has no objection if Catholic people want to read Scripture for themselves. Even personal Bible study is all right, he says—but then hastens to add that it is not necessary to go overboard. “A verse or two a day is enough.” This man, a seminary graduate, surely should be aware that a comment like that seriously understates the importance of the written Word of God. We are commanded to meditate on Scripture day and night (Josh. 1:8; Ps. 1:2). We are to let it fill our hearts at all times (Deut. 6:6-9). We must study it diligently and handle it rightly (2 Tim. 2:15). The Bible alone is able to give us the wisdom that leads to salvation, then adequately equip us for every good work (2 Tim. 3:15-17).Discernment depends on a knowledge of Scripture. Those who are content to listen gullibly to some voice of human authority rather than hearing God’s Word and letting it speak for itself cannot be discerning. Theirs is a reckless, irrational faith.We identified the inward-looking extreme of reckless faith as mysticism. We could call this other variety rote tradition. In Isaiah 29:13, that is precisely how God Himself characterized it: “This people their lip service, but draw near with their words and honor Me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from Me, and their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote” (emphasis added).Scripture has nothing but condemnation for rote tradition. Barren religious ritual, sacerdotal formalism, or liturgy out of a book are not the same as worship. Real worship, like faith, must engage the mind. Jesus said, “The true worshipers … worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers” (John 4:23).Did you realize that rote tradition was the very error for which Jesus condemned the Pharisees? He told them,“Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me. teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’ Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.”He was also saying to them, “You nicely set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (Mark 7:6-9).Rote tradition is not unlike mysticism in that it also bypasses the mind. Paul said this of the Jews who were so absorbed in their empty religious traditions:I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Rom. 10:2-4).Their problem was not a lack of zeal. It was not that they were short on enthusiasm, emotionally flat, or slothful about religious observances. The issue was that the zeal they displayed was rote tradition, “not in accordance with knowledge.” They were not sufficiently discerning, and therefore their faith itself was deficient.Paul is specific in stating that their ignorance lay in trying to establish their own righteousness rather than submitting to the righteousness of God. This passage comes at the culmination of Paul’s doctrinal discussion in Romans. In context it is very clear that he was talking about the doctrine ofjustification by faith. He had thoroughly expounded this subject beginning in chapter 3. He said we are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (3:24). Justification is “by faith apart from works of the Law” (v.28). “God reckons righteousness apart from works” (Rom. 4:6).But instead of seeking the perfect righteousness of Christ, which God reckons to those who believe, the unbelieving Jews had set out to try to establish a righteousness of their own through works. That is where rote tradition always leads. It is a religion of works. Thus the ritualistic, unbelieving Pharisees are an exact parallel to Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and most forms of ritual-laden Protestantism. All of them deny justification by faith.If the Pharisees or their followers had used the Scriptures as their standard of truth rather than rabbinical tradition, they would have known that God justifies sinners by faith. Repeatedly, Jesus said things to them like “Did you never read in the Scriptures . . . ?” (Matt. 21:42); “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures, or the power of God” (22:29); and, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and do not understand these things?” (John 3:10). What He continually chided them for was their ignorance of the Scriptures. They had set rote tradition in place of the written Word of God (Matt. 15:6), and they were condemned for it.Contrast the way Luke commended the Bereans for their noblemindedness: “For they received the word [the New Testament gospel from the apostles] with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures [the Old Testament books] daily, to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:1 1). What made the Bereans worthy of commendation? Their eagerness to be discerning. They rightly refused to blindly accept anyone’s teaching (even that of the apostles) without clear warrant from God’s Word.Spiritual discernment is, I believe, the only antidote to the existentialism of our age. Until’Christians regain the will to test everything by the rule of Scripture, reject what is false, and hold fast to what is true, the church will struggle and falter, and our testimony to a world in sin will be impaired.But if the church will rise up and stand for the truth of God’s Word against all the lies of this evil world, then we will begin to see the power of truth that sets people free (John 8:32).Endnotes1. John W. Kennedy, “Hunting for Heresy,” Christianity Today (16 May 1994).2. Robert Bretall, cd., A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), 5 (emphasis in original).3. Ibid.4. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, trans. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55.5. Ibid.6. Ibid., 57.7. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Edwyn C. Hoskyns, trans. (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). Barth cites Kierkegaard repeatedly in this, one of his earliest works.8. Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, Volume I (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1982).9. Ibid., 53.10. Ibid., 55.11. Ibid., 58.12. Arthur L. Johnson, Faith Misguided: Exposing the Dangers of Mysticism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1988), 31-32.13. Schaeffer, 64-65, emphasis added.14. Purgatory: Luke 23:42-43 and 2 Cor. 5:8 indicate that believers go immediately to be with Christ at death. Perpetual Virginity of Mary: Matt. 1:25 states that Joseph kept Mary a virgin only until Jesus’ birth, and John 2:12 and Acts 1:14 reveal that Jesus had brothers. Transubstantiation: Heb. 7:27 and 10:12 teach that Christ made one sacrifice for sins forever; there is no need for the daily sacrifice of the Mass. Prayers to Mary and the saints: prayers, adoration, and spiritual veneration offered to anyone but God is expressly forbidden by the first commandment and elsewhere throughout Scripture (Ex. 20:3; Matt. 4:10; Acts 10:25-26; Rev. 19:10; Rev. 22:8-9).Excerpt from Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses Its Will to Discern, © 1994 by John MacArthur.We do pray this article has blessed you in some way.  Our prayer is that you will use this message to better understand what is happening in our churches today.Blessings, Robert Wise

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@haltingarkansasliberalswithtruth

END OF LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA!!!

The United States Senate voted November 16, 2022 to advance the so-called Respect for Marriage Act.

HR 8404, which passed the House of Representatives in July, “provides statutory authority for same-sex…marriages,” repealing provisions that define marriage as between a man and a woman. YOU VOTED YES!!!!

Senator I bet don’t like to be compared to President Obama but why did you vote like he would have done on this vote!!!!

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, everettehatcher@gmail.com,

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President Obama and the Founding Fathers

May 8, 2013 – 9:20 am

President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)

Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the founding fathers and their belief in inalienable rights

December 5, 2012 – 12:38 am

Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)

David Barton: In their words, did the Founding Fathers put their faith in Christ? (Part 4)

May 30, 2012 – 1:35 am

America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)

Were the founding fathers christian?

May 23, 2012 – 7:04 am

3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

John Quincy Adams a founding father?

June 29, 2011 – 3:58 pm

I do  not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his  father was. However, I do think he was involved in the  early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good  Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)

“Sanctity of Life Saturday” Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on various issues Part E “Moral absolutes and abortion” Francis Schaeffer Quotes part 5(includes the film SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS) (editorial cartoon)

July 6, 2013 – 1:26 am

I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control  and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)

Article from Adrian Rogers, “Bring back the glory”

June 11, 2013 – 12:34 am

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

“Schaeffer Sundays” Francis Schaeffer’s own words concerning the possibility that minorities may be mistreated under 51% rule

June 9, 2013 – 1:21 am

Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book  really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

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You Are Highly Exalted

July 29, 2020 Save Article

PRAY OVER THIS:

“Two things I request of You (Deprive me not before I die): Remove falsehood and lies far from me. Give me neither poverty nor riches—feed me with the food allotted to me, lest I be full and deny You, and say, “Who is the Lord?” Or lest I be poor and steal, and profane the name of my God” (Proverbs 30:7-9)

PONDER THIS:

You may encounter in this life both the tests of poverty and of riches. If so, the Lord has some advice for you.

See poverty in the proper perspective. In the Lord Jesus Christ, you are highly exalted, no matter how poor you are. Having Christ, you are richer than the richest man on earth without the Lord Jesus. As a Christian, you have gone from rags to riches in Him.

It’s hard to be poor and even harder to be rich. The rich man may have an easier time in life, but he has a harder time passing the test.

The Lord doesn’t tell the rich to renounce their riches but to properly assess them. It’s not wrong to have money. Some of God’s choicest saints—Abraham for example—were wealthy. But the rich are to see their wealth from a proper perspective.

Many people would do better being poor than rich. Some people can stand almost anything but prosperity.

PRACTICE THIS:

It’s better to have balance, neither wealth nor poverty, but enough food for our daily bread. If we have too much, we may think we don’t need God. If too little, we might be tempted to steal and dishonor the Lord. Remember to thank the Lord today for His daily provision.

Proverbs 30 New Living Translation

Proverbs 30New Living Translation

The Sayings of Agur

30 The sayings of Agur son of Jakeh contain this message.^[a]

I am weary, O God;
    I am weary and worn out, O God.^[b]
2 I am too stupid to be human,
    and I lack common sense.
³ I have not mastered human wisdom,
    nor do I know the Holy One.

⁴ Who but God goes up to heaven and comes back down?
    Who holds the wind in his fists?
Who wraps up the oceans in his cloak?
    Who has created the whole wide world?
What is his name—and his son’s name?
    Tell me if you know!

⁵ Every word of God proves true.
    He is a shield to all who come to him for protection.
⁶ Do not add to his words,
    or he may rebuke you and expose you as a liar.

⁷ O God, I beg two favors from you;
    let me have them before I die.
⁸ First, help me never to tell a lie.
    Second, give me neither poverty nor riches!
    Give me just enough to satisfy my needs.
⁹ For if I grow rich, I may deny you and say, “Who is the Lord?”
    And if I am too poor, I may steal and thus insult God’s holy name.

¹⁰ Never slander a worker to the employer,
    or the person will curse you, and you will pay for it.

¹¹ Some people curse their father
    and do not thank their mother.
¹² They are pure in their own eyes,
    but they are filthy and unwashed.
¹³ They look proudly around,
    casting disdainful glances.
¹⁴ They have teeth like swords
    and fangs like knives.
They devour the poor from the earth
    and the needy from among humanity.

¹⁵ The leech has two suckers
    that cry out, “More, more!”^[c]

There are three things that are never satisfied—
    no, four that never say, “Enough!”:
¹⁶ the grave,^[d]
    the barren womb,
    the thirsty desert,
    the blazing fire.

¹⁷ The eye that mocks a father
    and despises a mother’s instructions
will be plucked out by ravens of the valley
    and eaten by vultures.

¹⁸ There are three things that amaze me—
    no, four things that I don’t understand:
¹⁹ how an eagle glides through the sky,
    how a snake slithers on a rock,
    how a ship navigates the ocean,
    how a man loves a woman.

²⁰ An adulterous woman consumes a man,
    then wipes her mouth and says, “What’s wrong with that?”

²¹ There are three things that make the earth tremble—
    no, four it cannot endure:
²² a slave who becomes a king,
    an overbearing fool who prospers,
²³     a bitter woman who finally gets a husband,
    a servant girl who supplants her mistress.

²⁴ There are four things on earth that are small but unusually wise:
²⁵ Ants—they aren’t strong,
    but they store up food all summer.
²⁶ Hyraxes^[e]—they aren’t powerful,
    but they make their homes among the rocks.
²⁷ Locusts—they have no king,
    but they march in formation.
²⁸ Lizards—they are easy to catch,
    but they are found even in kings’ palaces.

²⁹ There are three things that walk with stately stride—
    no, four that strut about:
³⁰ the lion, king of animals, who won’t turn aside for anything,
³¹     the strutting rooster,
    the male goat,
    a king as he leads his army.

³² If you have been a fool by being proud or plotting evil,
    cover your mouth in shame.

³³ As the beating of cream yields butter
    and striking the nose causes bleeding,
    so stirring up anger causes quarrels.

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Seeing Jesus in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job

July 16, 2013 – 1:28 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 10) Summing up Proverbs study

May 30, 2013 – 1:06 am

Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 9) “Love your neighbor”

May 28, 2013 – 1:23 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 8) “Manage your money”

May 23, 2013 – 1:35 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 7) “Pursue your work”

May 21, 2013 – 1:05 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 6) “Enjoy your wife and watch your words”

May 16, 2013 – 1:23 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 5) “Control your body”

May 14, 2013 – 1:44 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 4) “Bad company corrupts…”

May 9, 2013 – 1:10 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 3) “Guard your mind and obey your parents!!”

May 7, 2013 – 1:43 am

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John MacArthur on Proverbs (Part 2) What does it mean to fear the Lord?

May 2, 2013 – 1:13 am

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The Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

July 8, 2013 – 12:01 am

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Why is Solomon so depressed in Ecclesiastes? by Brent Cunningham

July 3, 2013 – 7:00 am

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Robert Leroe on Ecclesiastes (Mentions Thomas Aquinas, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, King Solomon, King Rehoboam, Eugene Peterson, Chuck Swindoll, and John Newton.)

June 19, 2013 – 1:30 am

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Solomon was the author of Ecclesiastes

June 11, 2013 – 1:55 am

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Ecclesiastes: Solomon with Life in the Fast Lane

June 3, 2013 – 1:19 am

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Ecclesiastes a scathing and self-deprecating attack on hedonism and secular humanism by Solomon

May 31, 2013 – 1:17 am

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Solomon was right in his cynicism–unless……unless there is a God who created us and cares about us

May 22, 2013 – 1:34 am

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The Humanist takes on Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes

May 20, 2013 – 1:13 pm

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Tom Brady , Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 3)

December 23, 2011 – 11:12 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. _______________________ Tom Brady ESPN Interview Tom Brady has famous wife earned over 76 million dollars last year. However, has Brady found lasting satifaction in his life? It does not […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Adrian Rogers on gambling

July 18, 2013 – 12:44 am

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Book of Ecclesiastes

July 17, 2013 – 1:40 am

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Adrian Rogers: Are fathers necessary?

July 16, 2013 – 12:43 am

Adrian Rogers – How to Cultivate a Marriage Another great article from Adrian Rogers. Are fathers necessary? “Artificial insemination is the ideal method of producing a pregnancy, and a lesbian partner should have the same parenting rights accorded historically to biological fathers.” Quoted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, summer of 1995. […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)

Tom Brady, Coldplay, Kansas, Solomon and the search for satisfaction (part 2)

December 22, 2011 – 11:56 am

Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. To Download this video copy the URL to http://www.vixy.net ________________ Obviously from the video clip above, Tom Brady has realized that even though he has won many Super Bowls […]

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Canary Islands 2014: Harold Kroto and Richard Dawkins

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September 14, 2019

Richard Dawkins c/o Richard Dawkins Foundation, 
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

Page 217 of THE GOD DELUSION: Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers:

Here is some very impressive evidence that indicates the Bible is accurate and even reasonable skeptics should take notice!!!

Francis Schaeffer in another place worded it like this:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?)

So the story goes on. We have stopped at only a few incidents in the sweep back to the year 1000 B.C. What we hope has emerged from this is a sense of the historical reliability of the Bible’s text. When the Bible refers to historical incidents, it is speaking about the same sort of “history” that historians examine elsewhere in other cultures and periods. This borne out by the fact that some of the incidents, some of the individuals, and some of the places have been confirmed by archaeological discoveries in the past hundred years has swept away the possibility of a naive skepticism about the Bible’s history. And what is particularly striking is that the tide has built up concerning the time before the year 1000 B.C. Our knowledge about the years 2500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. has vastly increased through discoveries sometimes of whole libraries and even of hitherto unknown people and languages.

There was a time, for example, when the Hittite people, referred to in the early parts of the Bible, were treated as fictitious by critical scholars. Then came the discoveries after 1906 at Boghaz Koi (Boghaz-koy) which not only gave us the certainty of their existence but stacks of details from their own archives!

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3 That Changed The World – Boghazkoi Clay Tablets

Posted in Current Affairs, History, India, Media, politics, Religion by Anuraag Sanghi on December 25, 2007

9 Votes

Egyptian temple complex of Abu Simbel, Southern Egypt. (Photograph by David S. Boyer, Courtesy – National Geographic). Click for larger photograph.

Ramesses-II goes to war

1301 BC. An Egyptian land army, numbering more than 20,000, (divided in 4 divisions), set out on a campaign, lead by Pharoah Ramesses-II of the XIX Dynasty.

Ramesses-II, lived for more than 90 years, was probably the Pharaoh at the time of Exodus of Hebrews under Moses.

Ramesses-II is known in history for the construction during his reign. Most notably, the Temple Of Abu Simbel, Temple Of Nefertari. How would Abu Simbel read in Sanskrit – ‘abu’ is elephant, ‘simba’ is sinh i.e. lion and ‘bal’ is strength.

Cause of War Of Kadesh

Of the two warring sides, one was the Egyptian Pharoah RamessesII (1279-1212 BCE). With a land army of 20,000, and a naval Egyptian force set sail, in ships, to reach Byblos and squeeze the Hittites in the world’s first pincer movement. Ramesses-II set out to punish a small kingdom. Of Hittites, for trying to lure the Amurrus, Egyptian vassals, to the Hittite side.

Bedouin Slaves Being Beaten – Battle Of Kadesh

A lesser known (to modern history) element, were the Hittites led by Muwutalli-II, who had cobbled an alliance of small kingdoms.

Both these kingdoms were interested in the Syria and Palestine areas through which trade was carried out with India. Syriac and Palestinian lands were controlled by the Amurru – who were Egyptian vassals. The Hittites were a liberalising element in the Middle East /West Asia and possibly the Amurrus had defected to protect their political identity.

The campaign

During the march, leading to the Kadesh battle, the Egyptian army captured two Bedouin “spies”. These “spies”, after being sufficiently beaten, “revealed” to the Pharoah important information – giving confidence to the Pharoah that the Hittites feared the approaching Egyptian army. The truth was the opposite.

Battle Of Kadesh

The Greatest Chariot Battle In History

What followed was a historic chariot battle.

The awaiting Hittites ambushed the Egyptian army. These spies, in fact, were Hittites – sent to misinform the Egyptians!! An estimated 2500 Hittite (Ramesses’ estimate) chariots saw action. For two days the battle of Kadesh raged. Fought on the banks of the Orontes River in Syria.

The Egyptian king was saved at the last minute by the appearance of his reserve troops.

The Historic Treaty

After this battle, the Egyptians and the Hittites sat down and wrote their versions of this battle – which makes it rather unique. One of the few times in ancient history, where we get both versions of the battle. Two copies of the treaty were made. One, in Egyptian hieroglyphics and the other, in Hittite-Akaddian, and both survived. Only one difference in both the copies – the Egyptian version (recorded on a silver plaque) states that the Hittite king who wanted peace. In the Hittite copy, it was Ramesses-II who sent emissaries.

Queen Nefertari (Photograph by Kenneth Garrett 1997, NGM, From Treasures of Egypt, 2003.).

The two queens – critical factor

Peace broke when the queens of Hatti and Egypt, Puduhepa and Nefertari, sent one another congratulatory gifts and letters. Over the next 15 years, they arrived at modus vivendi and drafted a peace treaty. Puduhepa continued to be an active diplomat, co-signatory to the treaty of  Ulmi-Teshub treaty.

This peace treaty is the first in recorded history. A replica of this peace pact, in cuneiform tablet, found at Hattusas, Boghazkoi, hangs above the Security Council Chamber, United Nations, in New York, – a demonstration to modern nations the power of peace through international treaties. At Boghazkoi other Hiitite treaties have been found.

Another Treaty

The second discovery in the West Asian history, is the Treaty between the Mitannis and Hittites. In 1450 BC, Suppiluliuma I of the Hittitesentered into a treaty with the Mitannis. The Mittanis of the Amarna Tablets fame were linked to the significant power in the region – Egypt. As already outlined, the Mittanis were the closely associated with the Egyptian Pharaohs by marriage. And the Mittanis were also Indo-Aryans.

What Is Special About This Treaty

In this treaty, Vedic Gods like Indra, Varuna, The Ashwini twins were invoked to bless and witness the treaty. The Hittites who had become past masters at treaties did not invoke these Gods with any other kingdom – except the Mitannis. Hittites and Mitannis were Indo- Aryan kingdoms – in full presence, with their Vedic Gods and culture.

The Zannanzas Puzzle

The 3rd interesting link between the Mitannis and the Hittites was the Zannanzas affair. After the death of Tutankhamen, (The Boy King) the XVIIIth Dynasty of Egypt was without a ruler. Tutankhamen’s queen, Ankhesenamun, a princess of Mitanni descent, needed a husband to continue the dynasty and protect the throne. She sent some urgent missives to the Hittite King, Suppiluliuma – asking him to send his son, to her as a husband, and become the King Of Egypt. The suspicious Hittite king ignored the missive. A second missive followed – and then a young prince was sent to Thebes (the capital was moved from Amarna back to Thebes).

The young prince never reached Egypt. He was possibly killed en route. And Tutankhamen’s Queen? Never been heard of since then.

How Do We Know All This

In 1906-07, an Turkish archeologist , Theodore Makridi-Bey, started excavations at Boghazkoi, (now identified as the ancient city of Hattusas) in Cappadocia, 150-200 kms from Ankara, Turkey. The name of the Hittite city, Hattusas, is possibly derived from the Sanskrit word, hutashan, हुताशन meaning ‘”sacred sacrificial fire.”

He was joined by Hugo Winckler, a German archaeologist, specialising in Assyria. They unearthed more than 10,000 clay tablets which proved to be of tremendous interest. A Czech cryptographer, born in Poland, working in Germany, Friedrich (or Bedrich) Hrozny, working in Germany cracked this code over the next 15 years – and that set off a furore amongst archaeologists.

What do the Boghaz koi tablets show

Deciphered cuneiform tablets show Hittite worship of Varuna, Mitra and Indra – Gods worshipped by Indo-Aryans. Rulers and Kings had names likes Shutruk (Shatrughna), Tushrutta meaning “of splendid chariots” (similar to Dashratha; Master of Ten Chariots) Rama-Sin (Assyrian Moon Good was Sin; in Hindi Ramachandra), Warad (Bharat). One of the Hittite allies against Ramesses II was Rimisharrinaa, रामशरण the King of Aleppo. (One of my grand uncles is also named as रामशरण – a common Indian name 4000 years later, 4000 kilometers apart).

These Hittites ruled immediately before and after Hammurabi – the much proclaimed western world’s first law giver. Hammurabi’s legal concepts of vengeful laws and retributive justice are the basis of laws in the 3 ‘desert religions.’

The Elam culture had a language which is similar to Dravidian languages. The Mitannite, Kikkuli, wrote on how to manage chariot horses. Egyptian king, Amenhotep I, married a Mittanite princesses. Elamites were founders of the first kingdom in the Iranian geography.

Some archaeologists await the discovery of tombs to establish the identity of kings. They may never find them. In Vedic cultures, there are no tombs – like the Pyramids, or the Catacombs, or Mausoluems. Vedic Indo Aryans cremate their dead. They do not build memorials or mausoluems.

Religious freedom

The Hittite kingdom came to be known as the “kingdom of thousands of gods.” Like the Mittani, the Hittites too, added the gods of the conquered people to their own list of gods – instead of imposing the Hittite religion on the conquered peoples.

Why does this sound familiar?

This is significant as the Western concept of slavery was to deprive the captured of their religions (for instance, The Wends and their religion). This is another display of slave reform by Indics 3000 years ago.

Valued 3000 years later

These inscriptions were held sacred by the locals, 3000 years later and William Wright, an European investigator, had difficulty in noting these inscriptions. In 1870 The Hittites were named, by William Wright and Oxford University linguist A. H. Saycebased on Biblical short references, as one of the tribes of Palestine in the first millennium BC. It was a “son of Heth—a Hittite—who sold the Prophet Abraham the land to bury his much-loved wife, Sarah”. Modern view is Hattusas-Hittites (Yazilikaya/Boghazkoi/Carchemish) have nothing to do with the Biblical Hittites.

The Boghazkoi tablets changed modern history. From a completely Greco-Roman (read Euro-centric) history, the pendulum had swung to the other end. Boghazkoi showed Indian presence in the thick of West Asia in the year 2000BC with their culture and technology. This has pushed Indian history back by at least by 2000 years – to 4000 BC.

The Amarna letters and the Boghazkoi tablets have given archaeological proof of the Indo Aryan spread. Earlier, theories were retro-fitted, based on Biblical dates (Max Mueller’s, (specialist in “Compartive Theology”); main aim – “save” Indian pagans; make them see “the light” of Christian belief), colonial propaganda (Max Mueller, though a German, was a British employee) and racism. Hazy systems like philology, linguistics, comparative linguistics were used to define history. Now hard archaeological proof shows something else. Written texts, deciphered and decrpyted give us a new theory.

These discoveries and their implications have been buried under a mound of silence. Although well known in academic circles, these discoveries have not been used to update popular history. In the next (and last instalment of this series) I will trace how DNA testing is the third major tool used to reveal history!

PS – One of the big hits in Japan is the manga comic series “Red River” by Chie Shinohara. The entire series is based on this interaction between the Hittites and The Egyptians. The Red River is a work of fiction – so it cannot be taken as history – but the intrigue, silence, drama obviously inspired the author.

The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.

Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221, United States

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse, Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

In  the second video below in the 67th clip in this series are Richard Dawkins’ words that Harry Kroto wanted me to see. Since then I have read several of Richard Dawkins books and have attempted to respond to the contents of these books directly to Richard Dawkins by mail. In fact, I have been writing Richard Dawkins letters since May 15, 1994 which was the 10th anniversary of the passing of one of my heroes, Francis Schaeffer. Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time responding to many of Richard Dawkins’ heroes such as Carl Sagan, Jacques Monod, H.J. Blackham, Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Planck, Johann Sebastian Bach, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, Gerald Horton, Edmund Leach, Louis Pasteur, George Wald, Jacob Bronowski, Steven Weinberg, Charles Darwin, Paul Kurtz, Peter Singer, Jonathan Miller, William B. Provine, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, James D. Watson, Francis Crick, Michael Polanyi, The Huxley family, Antony Flew, and Edward O. Wilson (Dawkins has since revised his opinion of Flew and Wilson, but he earlier regarded them very highly). 

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Both Francis Schaeffer and Richard Dawkins have talked extensively about the life of Charles Darwin.

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Sir Harry Kroto with his high school friend Sir Ian McKellan at the FSU National High Field Magnetic Lab on Tuesday, October 27, 2009.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

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Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

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Edit Post ‹ The Daily Hatch — WordPress

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

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Richard Dawkins Photos Photos – Professor Stephen Hawking Unveils Medal For Science Communication – Zimbio

Professor Stephen Hawking Unveils Medal For Science Communication In This Photo: Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian May, Harold Kroto, Alexi Leonov, Garik Israelian

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Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Credit: Don Arnold Getty Images

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Garik Israelian, Stephen Hawking, Alexey Leonov, Brian May, Richard Dawkins and Harry Kroto

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Yes, Princess Diana really danced to Uptown Girl as seen in The Crown. She also played piano.

23 November 2020, 9:23 | Updated: 23 November 2020, 9:26

An extraordinary scene in season four of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix reminds us of Lady Diana’s real-life love for ballet, pianistic talents, and unlikely friendship with Pavarotti.

A scene in the penultimate episode of season four of The Crown shows Princess Diana (Emma Corrin) surprising her husband, Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor), with a duet to ‘Uptown Girl’ alongside dancer Wayne Sleep at the Royal Opera House.https://d-17359588421272168243.ampproject.net/2012301722001/frame.html

While the royal Netflix drama has moments of self-confessed embellishment, it turns out this moment actually happened. And what’s more, Diana’s musical interests went a lot further than just a one-off gimmick at the opera.

Did Princess Diana really dance to ‘Uptown Girl’ at the Royal Opera House?

She did! It happened in December 1985 at a real-life VIP event, at London’s Royal Opera House. The annual show, for Friends of Covent Garden only, usually featured a surprise appearance from a celebrity guest – in this case, little did Charles know, it was Diana.

As a surprise for her husband, she appeared on stage with Wayne Sleep, a well-known British dancer who performed for some years with the Royal Ballet, played in The Crown by dancer Jay Webb.https://d-17359588421272168243.ampproject.net/2012301722001/frame.html

Sleep jokingly recalled the moment the Royal approached him about the idea in a piece for The Telegraph. “I said to Princess Diana – this will never work, Ma’am. You’re so much taller than me.” Sleep is 5’2”, while Diana was 5’10”.

Read more: All the music and songs in The Crown season 4 >

The pair danced a short contemporary sequence to Billy Joel’s 80s hit ‘Uptown Girl’, to uproarious applause and countless curtain calls from the audience.

Years after the dance, Sleep wrote in The Guardian: “She loved the freedom dancing gave her. A few days later, I got a letter. She wrote: ‘Now I understand the buzz you get from performing.’”

No video footage exists of the now stuff-of-legend moment, so we have mostly Webb and Corrin’s elegant re-creation to rely on. But there is a series of photos which you can see in the video below, narrated by Sleep.

Charles’ reaction – was it real?

The episode in question starts with the suggestion that Charles feels embarrassed, and perhaps a little envious, of the press attention given to Diana.

During the scene, he appears sullen and deeply focused on the music. As soon as Diana makes her surprises appearance on stage, Charles is tense. Afterwards, he becomes cold, asking his wife “What were you thinking?” and calling the surprise a “grotesque, mortifying display”.

According to royal biographer Tina Brown, despite eight curtain calls from the audience, Charles did not stand. His reaction was interpreted, Brown says, as “frigid disapproval of Diana’s lapse in royal etiquette”. But Sleep told her that he believed Charles was offended at having been left out. The previous year, they had actually performed a ‘bit’ together.

It is also unclear whether the performance was actually for Charles’s birthday, being a month earlier in real life.

Friends of HRH The Prince of Wales have reportedly criticised the new season for “dragging his name through the mud”. His Royal Highness has said he will not be watching the show.

Diana’s real-life love for ballet

As Sleep attested to, ballet was one of Diana’s great loves. As a child, she took ballet and tap lessons.

“She was very good and very musical,” Sleep says, recalling how Diana prepared for her on-stage appearance in 1985. “She had been taking dance classes somewhere off the Talgarth Road [in west London].”

After marrying Charles, Diana became a patron of the English National Ballet, supporting the company both as a private dancer and through fundraising, and attending a number of performances.

Read more: Moving moment ballerina with Alzheimer’s remembers Swan Lake >

She also played piano

Diana was an accomplished pianist, as demonstrated by the time (watch below) she shocked a room of young musicians by rattling off a passage of Rachmaninov.

It happened during a royal tour to Australia, when Charles and Diana were visiting a school. Charles bumped into an old friend who knew he once played the cello, and he agreed to play a few notes.

Moments later, Diana was asked if she might tickle the ivories. After some persuasion, the princess walked over to the keys and a segment from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 flowed from her fingertips, much to the surprise of the room.

After the performance, the broadcaster at the time recalled, “She almost ran for cover, clearly embarrassed at her musical debut.”

and developed an unlikely friendship with Pavarotti

Diana shared an unlikely, wonderful bond with the late great tenor, Luciano Pavarotti.

The pair reportedly shared a wicked sense of humour and it was Diana’s charitable efforts that persuaded the tenor to give more benefit concerts. 

At a rain-soaked 1991 charity concert in Hyde Park, Pavarotti dedicated the aria ‘Donna non vidi mai’ (‘I Have Never Seen a Woman Like That’) to Lady Diana.

Footage of the dedication – an extraordinary moment, at which everyone in the audience led by the Princess lowered their umbrellas, so others could enjoy the concert – was unearthed for the recent Pavarotti biopic directed by Ron Howard.

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