Let me answer a Facebook question from Alison, who writes, “Should we ever try to control the number of children we have? More specifically, should a woman ever have her tubes tied, or should a man get a vasectomy?”

I don’t know why people ask me these questions? I have twelve children, nine natural children and three adopted children, so this is probably not a question for me. But with respect to birth control methods that should be avoided at any cost are those methods that destroy or prevent the implantation of an embryo, because an embryo is a living growing human being from the moment of conception.

Openess to children is as well an built in protection against the abuse of...(cont'd.)

I want to answer a Facebook question from David. Here’s his question, he asks, “Can anything involving human beings contain the inerrant Word of God”?

The short answer to that question is “yes.” It’s true that humans are fallible vessels that they’re prone to error, but that in no way precludes the inerrancy of the Bible. All Scripture is God breathed. All Scripture is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The Apostle Paul there puts a very significant premium of the accuracy of all Scripture.

The Apostle Peter does essentially the same...(cont'd.)

Over the last few years in particular there are so many Christians that ask me about the mark of the beast. They are fearful of taking on the mark of the beast inadvertently and particularly so, since the Food and Drug Administration approved the marketing of a microchip that you can implant under the skin of humans for medical identification. Paranoid prophecy pundits of course immediately began touting VeriChip technology is the mark of the beast spoken of in Revelation 13.

Contrary to that newspaper eschatology there is no biblical basis for believing that the mark of the beast is a silicon microchip.

Biblically the mark of the beast is a parody of the Mark of the Lamb. Just as the mark on th...(cont'd.)

If you ever wonder about the significance and relevance of the Christian Research Journal all you have to do is look at what is happening in our culture. The other day in California (8/4/2010), a Federal Court Judge ruled against Proposition 8, the law that banned same sex marriage in California. The judge said that the law fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.

Joe Dallas, program director of Genesis Counseling in Tustin, California, provides in the Christian Research Journal a rational basis for a marriage to be restricted to a man and woman, not a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or any other combination. Again, the words of Joe Dallas in the Christian Research Journal provide the very rational basis that what the judge said does not ...(cont'd.)

I was just reading USA Today this morning that Chelsea Clinton who is Methodist marries Marc Mezvinsky a Conservative Jew. The article points out that President Bill Clinton is a Baptist and Hillary Clinton a Methodist. The article is entitled, “Family and Faith in the Mix.” And as you read through the article the predominant notion is that people just don’t care whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim; rather, the traditions can all be mixed together and blended. [1]

Judaism, however, is a completely different concept than Christianity. I thought I’d take this opportunity to give people a sense of what Judaism teaches. Judaism, of course, is not monolithic. It&r...(cont'd.)

I am just back from Orlando, Florida, which is one of my favorite trips of the year as I participate in Student Leadership University. I did a series on worldview issues as well as answered questions for students, and one of the questions asked was “If you can’t see God, how can you really know that God exists?”

It is not uncommon for skeptics to suppose that we as Christians are irrational for believing in a God that we simply cannot see. In reality, it’s irrational for skeptics to presuppose that what cannot be seen doesn’t exist! The fact that something that cannot be seen does not presuppose that something doesn’t exist. We know black holes, electrons, the laws of logic, and the law of gravity all exist despite the fact we can’t see them! Indeed even a full blown e...(cont'd.)

From a recent front page article in USA Today, we learn that evangelical Christians are leaving evangelical Christianity en masse, particularly children—70% of them leaving the Christian faith, no longer believing that the Bible is the infallible repository of redemptive revelation or that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

Today, tolerance is being redefined to mean that all views are equally valid and all lifestyles equally appropriate. As such, the notion that Jesus is the only way is vilified as the epitome of intolerance.

Rather than capitulating to the culture, however, Christians must be equipped to expose the flaws of today’s tolerance, while simultaneously exemplifying tru...(cont'd.)

One of the things we say at the Christian Research Institute without equivocation is that the Bible is divine as opposed to being merely human in origin; that God has spoken, that these are His Words, and that the Bible is the infallible repository of redemptive revelation. If God has spoken, what has God said? That of course is a question meant to focus your mind on learning to read the Bible for all its worth.

One of the common characteristics of false faith preachers today is their failure to be able to read the Bible for all its worth. This is typically personified by taking the Bible out of context. As such, they consistently use texts as pretexts for their faith fantasies. With respect to immediate context, Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer misuse Romans 4:17 as a pretext for persuading their devotees that thr...(cont'd.)

Most of you listening to my voice right now can remember exactly where you were when you first heard the tale of Christopher Columbus and his raw courage in the face of mutinous sailors who were in mortal terror of sailing over the edge of a flat earth. Who among us is not familiar with the phrase “Dark Ages”?

What we’re largely unfamiliar with is the reality that far from being benighted fanatics clinging to Scriptural claims that the earth was flat for the first fifteen centuries of the Christian epoch, nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the earth spherical. Likewise, only in revisionist history of skeptics like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are the “Dark Ages” dark and the Renaissance enlightened.

If you are following the Legacy Reading Plan, do remember that we are now in the book of Ezra. It is critically important that as you read through the book of Ezra that you are imbued with the ability to read the Bible for all its worth. In Ezra, of course, we see God fulfilling His promise to return His people to the land of promise after seventy years of exile.

As you read through Ezra, however, there things that will grip you. You’ll wonder: how in the world can God make certain demands of His people? For example, what about Ezra’s prayer about intermarriage? Ezra is broken before the Lord as the result of the fact that Israel had intermarried with foreign people. The men had taken foreign wives and vise-a-versa. Does this not in some sense make God a racist? “Shall we again break Your com...(cont'd.)