For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To listen to the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the icon...Jack

Last time we began to embark on a journey through time, introducing some of those champions of faith, using Eusebius, the third century historian, as well as other viable sources. The power, reliability and accuracy of God's Word is preserved and presented to us by the mosaic comprised of their lives and deaths. Eusebius, as one source, living between 263 and 339 AD, has often been dubbed the Father of Ecclesiastical History. This great historian enthusiastically dedicated his life and energy to documenting the first 300 years of Church history. When reading his summary, History of the Church, it quickly becomes clear that his theme is :  the working of God"s providence through the apostolic succession.

For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To listen to the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the icon...Jack

Sometimes, when I’m feeling like I’m having a rough time, I’ll crack open and read a chapter out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

While reading this historical account of persecutions all the way back to Nero’s in AD 67, one can’t help but be amazed at the grace of God, and the courage of these lovers of God, these martyrs for Christ. And John Foxe knew the scriptures, Old Testament and New, clearly understanding grace, forgiveness, communion, and the Son-ship and the deity of Christ. John Foxe, who lived from 1516 to 1587, recorded the persecutions and martyrdoms of notable Christians, from Coomans, Hues and others in 1568, Ridley and Latimer in 1555, Calvin, Huss, Bunyan, Tyndale, Luther and Wickliffe, to the early 1300’s, and thence back to the Apostles themselves. When you read the writings of ancient, devout followers of Christ, you are peering into their spiritual insights, personal prayer lives, opinions about entertainment, clothing, work, and every other aspect of daily life.

For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To listen to the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the icon...Jack

In the last couple of days we've been looking at similarities among cultures and noting that most entertain myths and beliefs similar in many ways to a primordal paradise, a Garden of Eden.

 Among the most intriguing ancient traditions to me is that reported of the Miautso tribes, who at one time occupied most of inland China south of the Yangtze River. These tribes have been gradually driven into the mountains of the southwest by the better-armed and better-organized Chinese.

 As explained by the translator, Edgar Truax, "The Miao traditions are very precise, as compared with those of many primitive peoples, because they are not only handed down in metrical form, but, also, they are in couplets, in which the same or similar meaning is expressed in different wording, so that the second sentence acts as a definition of the first, where it might otherwise not be clear. This is very much like one form of Hebrew poetry.

For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To listen to the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the icon...Jack

We've been recently exploring the idea that there is, in our past, a cultural memory of a paradise, where there was no death, disease or pain.

Alene Oestreicher, in a 1989 ICR Impact article, compares Genesis 2 with the Greek beliefs from the 8th century B.C. She quotes Hesiod; "At first the immortals who dwell on

Olympus created a golden race of mortal men, and they lived like gods, carefree in their hearts, shielded from pain and misery. Helpless old age did not exist, and with limbs of unsagging vigor they enjoyed the delights of feasts, out of evil's reach.”

There was such tradition already in Greek culture centuries before ancient Homer penned the Iliad. The even more ancient Sumerians’ Eden traditions speak of a time when there was no sin and where animals lived together in harmony; when man was in harmony with deity and never died. The ancient Chinese Kwang-tze in 400 BC presented, among many other Eden-like ideas, that a woman’s desire for knowledge brought forth the end of this paradise. Even the ancient language of the Chinese, with symbols reaching back through the ages of a 4500 year, unbroken civilization, is deeply rooted in a primordial paradise.  

The Maitzu, ancient people in the mountains of Southwest China, have a verbal, amazingly Genesis-like tradition of Creation, of a catastrophic flood, a Tower of Babel, and a geneology that reaches all the way back to Seth, Adam’s son, and the ancestors of the Native American tribe near the Grand Canyon today refer to a world wide flood as the Canyon’s cause. 

The first that comes to mind is the theory that the evolution of humans is demonstrated within the developing human embryo. According to some, if you look at the various stages of development of the human embryo during a women’s pregnancy, you can see the various stages of human evolution. The main arguments for embryonic recapitulation are the supposed "gill slits" (left over from fish), "yolk sac" (left over from the reptile stage), and "tail" (from the monkeys) in the human embryo. But even informed evolutionists have now abandoned this theory. The gill slits, so called, are never slits, nor do they ever function in respiration. They are actually four pairs of pouches: the first pair becomes germ-fighting organs; the second, the middle ear canals; the third and fourth pairs become the parathyroid and thymus glands. The yolk sac does not store food because the mother's body provides this to the embryo. In fact, the "yolk sac’s true function is to produce the first blood cells. The "tail" is no tail, but just the tip of the spine extending beyond the muscles of the embryo. The end of this will eventually become the coccyx, instrumental in the ability to stand and sit as humans do.

In our ongoing enlisting of some good examples of creatures that defy evolutionary theory by their very existence, we last presented a brief overview of the beaver, chicken egg and the Monarch butterfly. Before that we mentioned the Bombardier Beetle, the woodpecker and birds in general, and the octopus. Careful analyses of the sperm whale reveals a specialized, designed creature, with literally tons of features that must all be in place at once for its survival. Large lungs, special oxygen storage ability in their blood, extraordinary heart, extra circulatory control for pressure equalization, discontinuous sinus cavities, specialized lung tissue, reinforced inner ears, continuous backbone to the tail, are just a few examples, and all provide a dramatic, large scale demonstration to the observer that the whale is irreducibly complex...jack

The Beaver is another that is just another example of special design. Many “which came first��? and “how did the animal survive while developing it��? kinds of questions come to mind when one looks at its completed design and instinctual habits...jack

For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To hear the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the icon....Jack

If any of you philosophers are searching for a successful marriage between philosophy and theology, let me recommend a book that, in my opinion, every Christian today should study: Mere Christianity, by CS Lewis. The book’s introduction and development is purely philosophical and demonstrates how argumentation itself, and the common perceptions of what is right and wrong, provide us with a clue to the meaning of the universe.

jack