What is a Father?

This guy knows...



HT: Justin Taylor

Ancient Meets Modern

A cool development hits the web today for anyone interested in biblical scholarship. The Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, is being released on the web for the world to see. Searchable photographs of each page of the document are being released, beginning today with the Gospel of Mark and the Psalms. The entire document is scheduled to be on the web by next summer. Head over and check it out.

Journalistic Integrity?

I never took a journalism class in college, but I did take a few ethics classes - and that's all I need to know that the company behind Louisville's largest newspaper isn't the most trustworthy. Our integrity is perhaps best measured by how we treat those with the least influence and power. Sadly, as a friend of mine has discovered, the Courier-Journal doesn't measure up.

HT: About.com: Louisville

To Every Tribe and Nation

This morning, our church sent out a team of seven individuals to spend a week ministering in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had the privledge of praying with them at the airport prior to their departure. The team is very excited about the opportunities for sharing the gospel that lie before them, both the ones they have planned and the ones that only God knows of. Please remember the team in prayer, asking that God would use them in a great way to his glory this week. Pray for me as well, as I will be preaching both services this Sunday while Eric is away on the trip.

Friday's Featured Film - 7/18/08

New movies are usually released to theaters every Friday, but who’s got 10 bucks these days to drop on a movie that may well be a load of crap? Given those odds, each Friday I offer an alternative on DVD that you can rent at your local video store (or in some cases, avoid at all costs). Some will be new releases, others you may have to hunt for, but all of them are available to light up your small screen should it be a lazy Friday night.

Batman Begins

Unless you live under a rock (and even then it’s debatable), you’re probably aware that a new Batman movie opens today. The film is getting a lot of hype for its quality and for the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. The Dark Knight will continue the reinvention of the Batman franchise that began with 2005’s Batman Begins – and if the film recreates the excellence of the first, the hype is not unfounded. After watching the franchise descend into pulp-goth silliness in the late 90s, director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige) was brought on board to bring it back down to earth. Throwing out the previous films and starting from scratch, he created in Batman Begins easily the best comic-book adaptation of all time and a tremendous film by any criteria.

The film follows the life of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), the son of Gotham City’s most noted businessman and philanthropist. After seeing his parents murdered at a young age, Wayne sets out on a desperate quest for meaning and vengeance, eventually finding himself on the far side of the world, where a man named Ducard (Liam Neeson) finds him and gives him direction, training him to strike back against the criminal world and become an agent of justice. Returning home to find Gotham in disarray, Wayne takes on the persona of Batman, seeking to use fear against those who prey on the fearful. Aided by his loyal butler and father-figure Alfred (Michael Caine), friend and tech guru Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman), and rare-good cop Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), he sets out to shut down the organized crime that has a deathgrip on Gotham and the mysterious young psychologist (Cillian Murphy) who seems to be pulling the strings – while maintaining his humanity, most clearly seen in his relationship with childhood friend and current assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes).

As setup goes, it seems like standard comic-book fare. What elevates Batman Begins above the fray, however, is the way in which the material is handled by all involved. Nolan, who has a knack for exploring the darker side of the human psyche, gives each character deep and real motivations and presents the world of Gotham in an incredibly realistic fashion. As reviewers of the sequel have pointed out, the films feel much more like a deep crime drama than like something ripped from the pages of a comic book. That’s not to say that the film is at all dry and boring – the action sequences are intense and visually breathtaking and the film has a sharp wit about it. Yet the world of Batman Begins feels like the world in which we live, not a glossy, disconnected fantasy. The production design and art direction add to the realistic flavor while still giving the movie a great (and much subtler than its predecessors’) visual style. The film is perfectly cast – Bale gives a breakout performance that’s largely responsible for his recent mainstream success, seasoned vets such as Neeson, Caine, and Freeman provide supporting characters that are never thin or throwaway, Oldman shines in a rare good-guy role, and even Holmes turns in a solid performance that went largely unappreciated, especially in light of her decision not to reprise her role in the sequel. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score fits what’s on screen perfectly, adding an audible dimension to the film’s palpable mood. As pictures of this genre go, Batman Begins is perfect, to the point that it actually transcends genre and deserves to be held up as a classic. This is one of mine and Heather’s all time favorite movies, and we’ll be heading out to see the sequel as soon as we can line up a babysitter. If you haven’t seen the original, go rent it ASAP, comic-book fan or not. If you have seen it, go see the sequel – and if you can’t make it to the theater this weekend, pop Batman Begins in your DVD player to get caught up like we will be doing tonight. - **** (out of 4)

Batman Begins is rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements.

Benefits of the Deliberate Approach

While I was away last week, I was able to finish Mark Dever and Paul Alexander's The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel, a book I had been intending to finish up for some time. The time was very well spent. To those who are in church ministry of any kind, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Dever and Alexander lay out not only what a church based on the Scriptures should look like, but also some very practical steps on how to get there.

As the title suggests, the book is designed to suggest how a church can be deliberate in following the Bible's commands for how the church ought to function. We live in a day when, as Derek Webb put it, we don't really see a difference between what works and what's right when it comes to the church. Does it put people in the pews? Then it's great! Success is measured in terms of numbers - both membership and budget. Even those who may eschew these trends often do so not because of a biblical focus, but because of entrenched human tradition. The Deliberate Church does an excellent job of pointing us to examine what the Bible has to say about the church, nothing more, and then explores how to implement these truths.

The book covers the whole spectrum of church life, including membership, polity, prayer, music, structure, and the ordinances. The book's strength is its ability to cover a great many topics while providing great advice on how to get from where you're at to where you're going. Often times, studying a healthy church from a Biblical perspective can be an overwhelming endeavor, with my enthusiasm for moving forward severely dampened by the despair of a seemingly insurmountable task. I never got that feeling with this book. What I did get is a clearly presented view of what the Scriptures call us to as a local church, and the motivating desire that pursuing those goals is not only admirable but possible by God's grace. Well paced, biblically founded and accessibly presented, whether you're a pastor or layman you owe it to yourself and your church to pick this book up.

Further Proof That...

...John Piper is bad.

HT: Joshua Harris

The Future Begins - And it Might Not Be Awful

I'll admit, I've been somewhat skeptical of next summer's fourth installment in the Terminator series, Terminator: Salvation, which will resume the franchise by taking it to the future war between man and machine only glimpsed in the other movies. Part of it is that I have trouble imagining a Terminator movie without Ahhnuld (a fear mostly allayed by the suprisingly engaging Terminator TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles), and part of it is that the movie's being directed by a guy who calls himself McG and directed one of the worst movies ever made. However, the first teaser trailer has just been released, it's got Christian Bale and killer robots, and it actually has got me interested to see the finished product. See for yourself...

Sola5 Wednesday Recap - 7/16/08

This weekly topic is an effort to recap the Wednesday night Bible study I teach at Sola5, my youth group. I hope it serves to help us all in contemplating the ceaseless riches of God’s grace as revealed through the Scriptures.

Last night, we continued our “You Asked for It” summer series by examining a couple of very complex questions about the nature of sin. One of my students submitted two questions that we rolled into one study – Was sin already in the world before Adam and Eve’s actions at the fall (since they were already tempted and had thought about sinning), and did God create sin? To answer the questions, we spent the bulk of our time in James 1:12-15, but also moved around a bit to see the surprisingly complex answers to these questions.

In James’s passage, he makes some very plain statements (as he does so well!) about the nature of sin and temptation. In verse 12, we’re told that temptation is not purposeless. James says that there is blessing in remaining true under trial, and his follow up comments in verse 13 indicate that when he says “trial,” he at least partially has temptation in view (and of course, what are trials but opportunities for temptation? – temptation to doubt, to reject God, etc.). Yet James says that temptations are part of the process that builds us into the image of Christ, preparing to receive the crown of life. Many times when I’m facing temptations of various kinds, I wonder to God why he can’t just remove the desires altogether and make life easier. However, his words to Paul keep ringing in my ears – “my grace is sufficient for you.” God does things in and through us during times of trial and temptation that simply wouldn’t be the same in ease and comfort.

After establishing that God uses temptation to build and strengthen us, he makes certain to clarify explicitly that temptation doesn’t come from God, but from us. Did God create sin? The short answer is an emphatic and conclusive no. When we feel tempted to turn away into sin, we’ve got no one to throw the blame at but ourselves. James says we are tempted when we are dragged away by our own desires. We already have everything we need to be the worst sinner imaginable inside of us. As one of my favorite college professors, Dr. Charles Draper, said, “There is nothing that you are not capable of given the right circumstances.” My students agreed with me that James really couldn’t have been clearer in verses 13 and 14. God is in no way tainted by or responsible for sin and temptation. Thus the short answer to “did God create sin?” The long answer was more complex, and we’ll return to it shortly.

In verse 15, James gives us a look at the process of sin’s generation, allowing us to see that temptation itself is not sin. Basically, temptation is when we come to the fork in the road and see multiple paths before us, one of which we know to be wrong. Seeing that path isn’t sin. Seeing its temporal appeal isn’t even necessarily sin. Sin happens when we make the decision to walk down that path and reject God’s truth. I say “make the decision” because Scripture is very clear that it’s entirely possible to sin with no outward actions whatsoever (see Matthew 5:21-30). I don’t have to actually act on sinful desires to sin, I just have to dwell on them. This helps us to understand the first question asked, “Where does sin begin?” Sin begins in between temptation and action when we seek that which is wrong.

Finishing here, we’ve gotten at least basic answers to both of the questions. However, to say emphatically that God didn’t create sin requires some more careful thought. After all, if we say (as we often do at Sola5) that God is in total sovereign control of all things (even human actions), and sin is a part of the world, isn’t he somehow responsible? To understand why we can say no, we looked at three different relevant Biblical examples – Genesis 50:15-21, Isaiah 10:5-19, and Acts 2:22-23. In each of these examples, we’re told that God has ordained the ultimately evil actions of people (selling of Joseph into slavery, Assyria’s destruction of Israel, the crucifixion of Christ), but that the responsibility for these evil actions is fully and totally upon the ones who willingly committed them (Joseph’s brothers, the Assyrian king, the “lawless men”). It was God’s plan from before the world began that Christ would be killed to save his people from their sins. This is not plan B, and God’s not thinking on the fly. However, the people who mocked, beat, and executed Christ were acting wickedly, and they alone are responsible for their actions.

Now, do I understand how these two realities (God’s sovereign plan and true human responsibility) can both be true simultaneously? Nope. I don’t understand the fullness of who God is or how he operates, and I never fully will. Think of it this way. Do you have a dog? Guess what – your dog will never fully understand what it’s like to be you. Doesn’t matter how carefully you explain it to him, he’ll never fully understand. Why? Because you’re an exponentially more complex being than he is. Now, of course he can understand some things about you – that you care for him, enjoy his company, and will provide for his needs. How does he know these things? Because you’ve revealed them to him in a way he can understand (you feed him, play with him, etc.) Now, if you’re an exponentially more complex being than your dog, God is an infinitely more complex being than you. There are some things about him that you will never fully understand – but what he does reveal to us we should believe and celebrate. Thus, my willingness to accept as true realities I can’t necessarily reconcile in my mind.

Perhaps after such a deep doctrinal exploration, you’re wondering why this stuff even matters at all. You’ll never fully figure out God, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If we love him like we say, we should want to know all that we can about him and celebrate that deepening relationship. Why dwell on sin? Because the cross of Christ is about sin, and if we have a cheap and shallow view of our own sin than we’ll have a cheap and shallow view of the cross. If your sin is small, your savior will be small. Don’t be afraid this week to look your own sin in the face and rejoice in the grace that God has given to finite, fallen creatures such as us by his great love.

A Great Time to Be a Gamer

If you're into videogames, you'll probably agree that this generation of games has seen some truly great innovations. Not only have graphics entered the HD era, but more importantly game developers have made countless strides in making gameplay feel rich, immersive, and truly realistic. This week is the game industry's biggest trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo - more commonly known as E3. A ton of title's I'm really looking forward to have been shown, including Fable 2, Fallout 3, and Halo Wars. However, one I didn't expect caught my eye this morning in the form of a trailer. The game is called Mirror's Edge and is developed by DICE, the same company that birthed the great Battlefield 1942 and it's subsequent iterations. Mirror's Edge is a first-person game, but don't dare call it a shooter. In fact, the focus of the game is running. That's right, running. Sounds boring, right? Well, imagine the opening chase scene of the movie Casino Royale, then imagine yourself in that scene. That's the vibe this game gives. If the developers can pull it off, it promises to be one of the more unique experiences you'll have on your Xbox 360 or PS3 this winter. Check this out...