Imagine your plane is coming in for a landing and the pilot comes on to announce, ‘ladies and gentlemen, please be assured that everything is going smoothly. I am letting God guide our plane. It’s in His hands now.” Most of us would rather know that the pilot was using his instruments to guide the plane to a safe landing. Even the devout among us would hope so.
We live increasingly in a more secular environment where we trust the things of the world to alleviate our problems and create our progress.
As we understand more and more about how the universe operates we have a tendency to place less of our confidence in the sovereign God who governs this universe and some folk come to doubt more and more that there is even a pilot at the wheel of this ship we call the universe.
But I believe that God is thrilled that we study his creation. That’s really what science is, you know, the study of God’s handiwork. We don’t need less of God. What we need is more gratitude to God and reliance upon God to show us the way into the future. We need not be afraid of science closing some gaps in belief. We need to be grateful that God has shown us how to progress and find answers that were once unknown.
But know this- God is the God of the downtrodden, the outcasts, the ‘sinners’, and the lost. So if our science helps us to help them then progress is of use to our Lord’s purpose but if science becomes our god to satisfy our own needs and neglect the most needful then God will surely judge us.
Science and faith go together. We can trust the latest technologies and guide our plane smoothly to the ground, and at the same time love the God who makes it all possible, the God whose intimacy in our lives can never be mechanized or secularized.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
John 1:9 English Standard Version

I believe that Christ indwells all people.  He is the only one who can give enough light for anyone to even think of God. Anyone who is born into this world has been blessed with the presence of God, whose face we see in Christ.
In Revelation 3:20 Jesus says that he knocks on the door of everyone. I realize that the context concerns the church of Revelation but the words of Jesus may be applicable to anyone who is willing to listen to Christ’s voice.
I address now those who are aware of this light. Do not be fearful that this light has dimmed or even extinguished for Christ will not forsake any of us. There are times when as the song goes, ‘darkness veils his lovely face but still i rest on his unchanging grace.’ God’s grace is not extinguished in this world.  God is sovereign over his creation and nothing will stop that within your soul.  The light sometimes flickers by our own volition or sometimes God wants us to stretch further and look deeper within our souls for his light but it’s always there. Sometimes we just need to look or listen within our own souls for that light, that voice, that presence.  We live too much on the surface of life reacting to the stimuli outside us but not within us.

Dallas Willard writes in ‘The Divine Conspiracy’, “There is now not a single moral conclusion about behavior or character traits that a teacher could base a student’s grade upon.” (p.3)  Willard is making the case that moral knowledge has disappeared from the educational system.  Is he right?  Can we not teach our children that hatred is morally wrong?  What about discrimination?  If a student in answering an essay said that discrimination against others on the basis of their nationality was acceptable, would a teacher be able to mark that comment as wrong?  Surely math, science and for the most part history have facts that are acceptable.  Is that not the case for moral knowledge?  Could a teacher ask the question , ‘Is racism wrong?’ and have a student answer, ‘No.’ And would that have to be an acceptable answer in the education of our children.  I’m not sure.  Maybe there are those of you out there who could answer that for me with some evidences.
I am suspecting that without God and a moral universe we ‘organisms’ are at a loss in regard to moral knowledge and virtue.  I know Congress makes laws, states make laws but where are the citizens getting their information for some moral foundation upon which to make those laws?
Can students today learn the meaning of love, respect for life, forgiveness?  How about reconciliation?  There’s one that the politicians sure could use. Is setting a cat on fire ‘morally wrong’?
Can we not tell our students that killing someone is wrong? Sure maybe we would have to address the issues of abortion, war, capital punishment and euthanasia and somewhere along there we need a master teacher to point the way. Otherwise we just all do what we feel like doing and vote the same way.
Let’s put it this way, fact: 2+2= 4. But are there ‘moral facts’?
Well, there you have it. For the moment. I look forward to your thinking on these matters.

I want to recommend a book by N.T. Wright, New Testament Professor at St. Andrews in Scotland.  The book title is ‘Simply Jesus.’

I have just finished it and found myself absorbed in a book that puts the life of Jesus right in front of us.  Jesus is in the context of his world and using a wonderful analogy of the event that took place in the Northeast in 1991, The Perfect Storm, Wright helps us to understand the events then and now that have confused our understanding of Jesus.

The author writes about the three storms that converged in the Middle East at the time of Jesus and how Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God.  This book is a wonderful way to step away from our various denominations and discover perhaps for the first time Jesus and God’s purpose for his Son and for us.  Reading this book makes me really believe that we live right now in the Kingdom of God.  Jesus established it at his entrance into the world and particularly as he entered Jerusalem.

Next I am going to read Wright’s newest book called How God Became King.

What does the death of Christ actually accomplish?

How is it that Jesus the Lamb of God really does take away the sin of the world? Jesus as the Passover lamb creates for humanity a new Exodus. The Pharaoh of death and evil has been destroyed. Satan in all his attempts to chain humanity and separate us from God has been destroyed. Paul writes in Colossians 2:15: “He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.”(Message)

I dare say that all humanity has crossed over into new life. I suspect that like the Israelites some will stay disobedient to Christ and even deny him. But Jesus has by his death removed any enmity with God. The wall of separation has been taken down so that now we can enjoy intimate friendship with our God.

See, when you forgive someone a part of you has to die and so Christ’ in forgiving the sins of the world has died fully for all of us in order as Paul writes in 2Cor. 5:19 “ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them”. Jesus through his final encounter with death exhausts the power of evil from stopping the movement of the Kingdom of God. Not even the gates of hell can prevent its progress. That’s Good News.