A Personal Financial Advisor to Invest with Biblical Values?
What can a Christian do when he wishes to honor the Lord with his investments? Can he use a personal financial advisor who is a Christian? I have written in the past, and highly commended, the Eventide family of mutual funds.
Their fund family includes the Eventide Gilead Fund (ETILX), Eventide Healthcare and Life Sciences Fund (ETIHX), Eventide Exponential Technologies Fund (ETIEX), Eventide Large Cap Focus Fund (ETLIX), Eventide Dividend Opportunities Fund (ETIDX), Eventide Multi-Asset Income Fund (ETIMX), Eventide Limited Term Bond Fund (ETIBX), and Eventide Core Bond Fund (ETIRX). (They also have class N, A, and C shares as well as class I shares, but I utilized the ticker symbols for the class I shares here.) When one invests with Eventide, he avoids companies that support wickedness like abortion, tobacco, cannabis, pornography, violent media, and so on. In addition, their investment philosophy goes one step further to ask important questions about integrity, business practice, and value-creation. I was very excited to find out about Eventide years ago, and still believe they are the best option for practicing Bible-based values in investing, for the reasons explained in my review of the Eventide family of funds and their second-best competitor, the Timothy Plan family of funds.
Are your investments clean, or at least as clean as the Timothy Plan–which is in many ways good, although at a lower standard of Biblical conformity than Eventide–would view it? You can get a complementary moral audit from them of what you own at a link on the page here. Why not find out? Are you afraid of what you will discover? Would you rather find out now, or at the judgment seat of Christ?
One might suppose that he could have a personal financial advisor assist him in investing in a clean, God-honoring way. Is having an actively (or passively) managed account with a personal financial advisor an option? Fidelity, Schwab, Merrill Edge, and many other investment firms provide the option of a personal financial advisor who will seek to follow your investment directions for a fee. On multiple occasions, when I have discussed Biblical, Christian values with such people, they have said that they could follow our virtuous, godly directives and set up something that was acceptable. Does this work? I recently tried it. How did it go?
As is common knowledge, in the San Francisco Bay Area homes and condominiums are very expensive. I would like to be able to buy a residence close to Bethel Baptist Church that fits our ministry goals and family needs. I have prayerfully formulated a plan to get there that also dealt with other financial goals. Because Scripture affirms the value of a “multitude of counsellors” for safety and being established in one’s purposes (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22; 24:6), I wanted to run my plan by more than one financial advisor. I got a complementary meeting with one from Schwab, while with an organization called Personal Capital, part of Empower, I scheduled a meeting because they had promised one would get $100 for meeting with a financial advisor and getting a proposal. I was willing to hear what the Personal Capital person had to say about my investment plan, and that they would give me $100 for meeting with him made it better.
Over the course of three meetings, I explained my Christian, Bible-based values and what I viewed as acceptable for investments. The financial advisor with Personal Capital said something like that he was a devout Christian himself. He said he managed the assets for numbers of Christians and others who, for example, did not want to invest in abortion. Now that sounded good, no? Surely if one can get one’s investments personally under the care of a financial advisor who is himself a Christian, and who manages the assets of numbers of Christians, one can invest cleanly, like one can with Eventide. The financial advisor provided a variety of reasons why he thought what he would offer would outperform an investment strategy that held strictly to a number of Eventide funds. (This post is not about the performance side of the question, but I am actually skeptical of his claim that his mix of investments would outperform what I was doing with Eventide. For example, since inception on 7/8/2008, the Eventide Gilead Fund has grown at an annualized 12.99%, and class I shares since inception on 2/2/2010 have grown at 13.60%. That is a long time for them to outperform by several percentage points what the Personal Capital gentleman said I could expect what he was offering me would probably earn on average.) His company has a section on its website promoting the option of socially responsible investing, which they advertise as a way “to align [one’s] investments with [his] personal values and beliefs.” In any case, for investing in a righteous way, he is certainly a better option. Right?
Unfortunately, no–wrong. First, he said that he did not have the ability to actually determine whether individual companies were actually engaging in evil behaviors, or actively seeking to do good, the way that Eventide would do. Trying to make investments clean would just be, with him, taking a base strategy that did NOT evaluate things from the perspective of the kingdom of God, and simply attempting to improve it a bit. What he could do was take out some notorious companies such as a casino here and there. Would the personalization he offered be clean, according to the complementary moral audit mentioned earlier in this post? Highly unlikely.
Furthermore, he also wanted to diversify into foreign companies (a reasonable idea; nothing wrong with that). But for the foreign investments, he would simply have me get ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) that had no moral or Christian component whatsoever. So domestically, I could be part-owner (through ETFs or other investments) of companies that were engaged in evil, although not as notoriously. Outside of the USA, I could own companies that were chopping up little babies in the womb, selling abortion drugs, or marketing cigarettes and booze to twelve-year-olds. No filters whatsoever. Problem.
After the third meeting, when I got his actual proposal, I looked over the companies that he wanted me to invest in. I cannot share on this blog post what they were, because it is proprietary information with them. However, without even doing a complementary moral audit, I knew that many of them would fail, and that a Christian had no business owning them. It would be a tremendous step backward were I to join the Christian clients of this professedly devout Christian financial advisor. My investments would not be clean, much less focused on companies that are positively doing good. It would be a bad choice.
If blog readers assume that their investments are clean because they have a financial advisor who goes to church, reads the Bible, and even possibly is a truly born-again Christian, they should make very, very sure about it. At least with my situation, the fact that this advisor told me that he was committed to Christian doctrine and managed the money of a good number of Christians, and could personalize investments to avoid what is bad turned out not to mean a whole lot. It meant we could take a framework focused solely on gaining filthy lucre and could clean up bits and pieces of it. With Eventide, everything is built around a Biblical framework of investing. What a difference–and what a blessing! Eventide won hands-down over the professedly devout Christian financial advisor who said he could personalize investments to be suitable for Bible-believers.
Naturally, I did not sell my Eventide investments and move over to Personal Capital with Empower. Personal Capital would not have allowed me to invest in a way that glorifies and pleases the Lord.
Other reasons why I did not move over to them–such as that Empower had poor customer service when they were the 401K company for one of my jobs in Wisconsin (I was able to invest in Eventide through them, and that’s all I did), that what the financial advisor said would be their likely performance is lower than how Eventide has performed since their Gilead Fund and other funds started, that Empower / Personal Capital never even gave me the $100 for spending a lot of time with them and having several meetings, that they did not have a phone number for me to call to get help with this, but only an email, and that their customer service here in California seemed to have even more room for improvement than they did in Wisconsin, were less important, although they were not very promising. These all could have been reasons for me not to go with them. That I could not invest cleanly was necessarily a reason not to go with them, but stick with Eventide.
What about you? Do you have confidence that what you invest in pleases the Lord, and will be something you can be happy about when you stand before Christ on judgment day? Don’t assume that you do, just because you have a financial advisor who claims to be a Christian and who says he can personalize your investments.
–TDR
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 2
The gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The gospel is a message. The power of God is in the message of the gospel. The power occurs only when someone delivers the message.
“Power” in Romans 1:16 is the Greek word, dunamis. Dunamis is ability. People will make the point of the English word dynamite, but God gave and gives the gospel, His message, the ability to save. That surpasses dynamite, even though it’s true that the English word came from dunamis. God provides more than dynamite. It’s His ability. He created with His ability all space and matter with His spoken word.
The problem of sin and death goes beyond human ability. The gospel goes beyond human ability because it goes with the ability of God. God saves people with and through the gospel. They are not able to save themselves. No one else can save them, but God is able (Hebrews 7:25).
If the gospel was an antidote for a sure death, undoing a deadly poison, you’d want someone to get it. The poisoned person and the antidote must come together. That means someone must deliver the antidote to the poisoned person. Sin subjects man to sure death. The gospel is the antidote. Someone must deliver that antidote in the one delivery system, communicating the message.
The sinful, dead and dying people need the gospel. However, they don’t know that or receive that reality. That’s different than a deadly poison and an antidote. When people know that, most would want that antidote. They don’t look at the gospel the same. The gospel to them is like the poison rather than the remedy for the poison. A majority won’t want to hear it.
Perhaps the delivery of the gospel fails most, not because of people not wanting to hear it, but because Christians won’t deliver it. They don’t know the gospel themselves well enough to preach it. Professing believers are afraid of the reaction they will get. They are not convinced to deliver it.
More to Come
Should Christians Learn Greek and Hebrew? Yes! Part 2 of 2
While not all Christians need to learn Greek and Hebrew, knowledge of the Biblical languages has historically been viewed as necessary for students in Biblical seminaries, colleges, and institutes. Why?
Summarizing the first five pages of the study Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages, the answers to this question include:
1.) Jesus Christ learned Greek and Hebrew. if the Savior learned and honored the Greek and Hebrew languages, those who follow Him can do likewise.
2.) Learning Greek and Hebrew shows reverence for God’s inspired and preserved revelation. Belief in verbal, plenary inspiration and verbal, plenary preservation leads to the study of Hebrew and Greek as a necessary consequence.
3.) Greek and Hebrew powerfully aid the study of God’s Word. Many conclusive examples are supplied in the larger study which this blog post is summarizing.
4.) Greek and Hebrew help one observe more accurately and thoroughly, understand more clearly, evaluate more fairly, and interpret more confidently the inspired details of the Biblical text.
5.) Accurate translations are authoritative in their substance, and so it is proper to refer to the English Authorized Version as inspired in a derivative sense. However, there are details of God’s inspired revelation that can only be understood by those who know Greek and Hebrew. One can affirm not only that the KJV is inspired whenever it is accurate, but even that it is perfectly accurate and has no errors in translation, and still see tremendous value in learning Greek and Hebrew.
Indeed, study of the Biblical languages is a good and necessary consequence of the fact that God has revealed Himself and His will in Hebrew and Greek words.
Please read the entirety of the first five pages here, and feel free to comment on them below. May they prove edifying, whether or not one ever learns the Biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew.
–TDR
Dialectics, Triangulation, and Triage as a Pattern for Biblical Belief and Practice, pt. 2
Early in my life, I often heard the term “balance” to describe a superior way to live as a Christian. I think there is a biblical concept of balance, but also an unbiblical one. For instance, we don’t come to an interpretation of scripture or a biblical belief and practice by using balance. Advocates say that the truth, the right interpretation, the actual text of scripture lies in the middle somewhere in between the extremes.
The concept that I’ve described in part one and in this second part finds itself in history at least with the terminology of dialectics, triangulation, and triage. Philosophers and others used these words to communicate the way to determine what’s right or wrong and what to believe and practice or not. Theologians at one time crafted the English word, “syncretism,” which means synthesizing pagan religion with biblical worship.
Let’s see. The world likes worldly country music. Let’s mix that with Christian lyrics. People will like it more. It gives them a feeling. Let’s just say that’s the Holy Spirit. Syncretism occurred. This is dialectics, triangulation, and triage very often found in people who say they’re opposed to what I’m writing here.
John Frame writes that triangulation was the method of liberal Yale theological seminary when he attended in the mid-1960s. The school urged its students to triangulate. He said that fundamentalism and orthodox Protestant theology provided the antithesis, a reference to Hegelian dialectics. They encouraged students to “develop their own distinctive brands of theology. He expressed concern that this method now characterizes evangelical theology.
Another metaphor I’ve heard through my life is that you as a Christian need to decide what hill or hills you’re going to die on. Someone else told me, “Kent, you don’t want to burn all of your bridges.” Leave the bridge open to something you don’t believe and practice. If you burn all those bridges, you’ll be left with a much smaller coalition of allies or friends.
Should you refuse to die on a hill because of a biblical belief or practice? You want to live. Perhaps you’ll live longer if you reduce the number of things for which you might die. Jesus addressed this concept. He said, fear man more than God. Man can destroy your body. God can destroy both body and soul in hell forever.
I understand that Christians grow and churches grow. Not everyone stands at the same position. I’ve changed through the years, but I would call the old position unbiblical, whether it was more or less strict than the former belief or practice.
Many truths of the Bible are embarrassing for professing Christians to the world, especially now. Could believers do better with the world if they shaved off the more unpopular teachings of the Bible or reinterpreted them to move closer to the world? God knows that you’re doing it and He exalts His Word above His own name. He doesn’t accept this dialectic, triangulation, and triage approach to His teachings and practices. If it’s the truth, you don’t move from it, but if it isn’t, then you can and do.
The Error or Falsehood of Balancing the Extremes to Come to the Truth
In my lifetime, I’ve lost things. I found them by searching between two places on the extreme of where I’d been. Some call it retracing your steps. It couldn’t have been somewhere beyond the two places, so I looked in between, somewhere in the middle.
In the same way, we do not find or know the truth by searching somewhere between two extremes. Jesus said, “Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17). Scripture tells the truth. That’s how we find or know the truth, by looking at the Bible and understanding what it says.
When I was a boy, my family ate through a sheet cake until one piece was left. My brother and I both wanted the piece, so we must split it in half. We had a deal. Whoever measured, the other got the first choice of his piece. The goal was to cut the cake exactly down the middle. That was fair. It was the closest to what both sides wanted. If you wanted both sides happy, you had to look to the middle.
Men want what they want. The best way to get closest to what most people want is by looking to the middle somewhere, to moderate somewhere between the extremes. Men don’t get along because they want what they want and they clash over their desires. To find peace between men, it makes sense to get as close as possible between two contradicting opinions.
Scripture starts with the wants of God. Usually we call this the will of God, which is also the pleasure of God, what pleases Him. Very often God’s desire is one of the extremes, even more extreme than the most extreme desire of men. Not always though. Sometimes the will of God is one of greater liberty than what man will give. Because of lust, man doesn’t want what God wants. Men would want whatever extreme that they could get if possible, but to live with one another, they negotiate somewhere between each other for the greatest satisfaction between them.
As a method, is this moderation or negotiation the will of God? Is this how God operates? It isn’t. Very often the way of God is foolishness to man. He rejects objective truth, because it clashes with what he wants.
What I’ve described so far, you can see in history, and I give you three explanations that are essentially the same, known by different names.
Dialectics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, born in Stuttgart in 1770 and died in Berlin in 1831. Hegel said that nothing was truth that could not pass a test of experience. He believed self-determination the essence of humanity. In seminary in Tubingen, Hegel disliked the strictness or narrowness and rejected orthodoxy. He viewed mystical experience instead as the reality of Christianity.
Philosophers give Hegel credit for dialectic methodology, which he considered “speculative.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte took Hegel’s method and refined it with three terms — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — which are now called a Hegelian dialectic. The idea behind this is that truth arises from error in the course of historical development. A constant refinement occurs through moderation, which is a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. This replays again and again, forming a new synthesis, which becomes a new thesis and so on.
Many believe American pragmatism, as seen in John Dewey (father of Dewey decimal system), the founder of modernist American education system or philosophy. Subject matter came from intellectual pursuit, tinkering and improving, all according to human reason.
I believe man comes to these compromises with a yearning for absolute truth, while rejecting objective truth. The receipt of objective truth starts with God. Because of his rejection of God, man becomes God and formulates truth according to his reason. Since men cannot unify around one truth without God, they invent a new way to grasp truth, which they need for satisfaction. The quest and the outcome never fulfill. As Paul wrote, he ever learns but never comes to the knowledge of the truth, indicating the longtime existence of a kind of dialectic.
Triangulation
The first I remember hearing of triangulation came when President Bill Clinton reshaped his politics to win the 1996 election. He was very unpopular during the 1994 midterm election, but with the counsel of his political operatives, he employed what they called, triangulation.
I did not know that triangulation already existed as a scientific or philosophical concept. It actually started, as you might assume, as a geometric concept, used in surveying. Triangles have three points, and if you have two points already, you triangulate to get the third. You very often now hear the language, “finding the sweet spot between two points.” I use this in economics, when the economists look for the perfect sweet spot for a tax rate.
In Clintonian politics, triangulation involved incorporating the ideas of a political opponent. If you stand at 43 percent and can’t win a popular election, you try to raise your popularity by attracting more people by using their ideas. You come to the right position by triangulating between two opposing opinions. This surely sounds similar to Hegelian dialectics.
Churches now use triangulation and I have noticed they do this by stating core values. The core saws off the extremes. Someone reading the core values won’t be offended by certain specifics. Those offenses are left out. You see the brochure with the very happy family, leaving out the hard parts. The core attempts to draw together as many people as possible in a Dewey-like pragmatism.
Triage
Triage is like triangulation, but proceeds from a medical analogy. I had not considered triage before I heard Al Mohler use the metaphor to describe the balance between apparent essential and non-essential truths. What you imagine is a bad war situation where casualties arrive and are prioritized according to how serious the wounds and how close they are to death. The doctors can save this one, not this one, and they shuffle people into their various places, using the triage to save the most possible. It is a form of pragmatism or what some might call a hierarchical ethic, the ethic of doing the most good for the most people.
The triage reminds me of the tomato trucks that drive down Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley of California. As you follow one of these trucks, tomatoes are hopping off onto the road and the side of the road all over the place. The drivers don’t stop to retrieve the lost tomatoes. They are casualties of this method.
Al Mohler’s triage treats certain truths like so many tomatoes falling off the back of a tomato truck. The thought is that we can’t keep or follow everything, so we choose what is most important. This creates a coalition of the largest number of people based upon a fewer number of truths. Man need not live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, just the ones he deems important.
Maybe you with me notice the shrinking number of important truths and the growing number of less important. With this method, churches decide whether to keep their homosexual members. They relegate wokeism with the triage to non-essential. This pulls together a larger coalition, which allows for bigger offerings and a larger work. This must be what God wants to do. He wouldn’t want smaller would He?
The Text of Scripture
Today men determine what the Bible says according to two poles, radical skepticism and absolute certainty. They say those are both wrong. This is read from Dan Wallace in the introduction of a book, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. He wrote:
These two attitudes—radical skepticism and absolute certainty—must be avoided when we examine the New Testament text. We do not have now—in our critical Greek texts or any translations—exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain. But we also do not need to be overly skeptical. Where we should land between these two extremes is what this book addresses.
This isn’t new. I heard it a lot. It reflects the above three concepts I laid out. As you read, you might think God works in absolute certainty. You would be right. This is a Christian worldview. It arises from scripture.
The goal in modern textual criticism is to fall somewhere between radical skepticism and absolute certainty. It sees “absolute certainty” as an extreme. If the text of the Bible is not certain, and men defer to that position, somewhere, however, north of radical skepticism, one would see how that the inspiration, interpretation, and application of scripture are also not certain. How does someone live by faith in something uncertain as such? This occurs when man applies his dialectic, triangulates, or forms a triage based on human reason.
Man-centered philosophies are not faith. They also put man above God. Rather than follow the truth of scripture, man judges God and comes to a better, more pragmatic position. It’s a way to preserve Christianity from itself.
Psalm 77 Podcast Series for Christian Ladies
My wife, Heather Ross, has taught a series of podcasts through Psalm 77, for Christian ladies. Approximately once a week these should go up until Psalm 77 is covered. That is, at the end there should be 21 podcasts (one for each verse, and an introductory lesson). Women who fear God can listen to the podcast series, “Tethered to Truth: A Podcast for Christian Ladies (Series on Psalm 77)” on my YouTube channel here. They can be notified about new podcasts by subscribing to the KJB1611 YouTube channel.
There are also some new weblinks if you wish to share the channel with others:
https://www.youtube.com/c/KJB1611Baptist
https://youtube.com/@KJB1611Baptist
The world would be a better place if people read more and watched videos less, but since things are the way they are, publishing God’s truth in a way that people can watch and listen to it can still help many.
I suspect this is obvious to the vast majority of readers of this blog, but 1 Timothy 2 teaches that women are not to provide authoritative teaching or preaching to men. So if you are a man, I would encourage you to listen to some of the great preaching at Bethel Baptist Church or find other sources of Biblical encouragement and let the righteous women listen to this Psalm 77 series.
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 7
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six
Going door-to-door the first year, I met Geri Singleton, a black woman about 45-50 years old. I preached the gospel to her. She received it. I came back. She still showed interest. She came to church, not faithfully at first. We baptized her and her teenaged son the same night as Art Anabo. Geri grew and grew. She became a faithful member. She is still one, and since that beginning, she taught Sunday School and discipled several women in our church.
After a year and a half, I informed all of the churches that supported us, we were self-supporting. This was in the Spring of 1989. Even though we had buildings, were still a new church plant. We barely had enough in expensive California to support a pastor and only one who lived in a tiny apartment with a wife and no children. Bridget also continued working at the bank.
While evangelizing in Hercules that first year, I talked to a man, who said he bought his house after selling his mobile home. I came home that day and told my wife the story. That very night we drove to a mobile home park and found a single wide, just for sale that very day. The owner died and left the home to her brother, who was eager to sell fast, and offered it for 10,000 dollars. We bought it and moved in.
The San Francisco Bay Area had Fleet Week every year because of the Alameda Naval Air Station, which closed in the early nineties during the Clinton Presidency. In the early days we had up to five families attend our church from the Naval base, and one faithful family in particular, the Ruckels, bought us carpet for our new tiny mobile home. The same year we bought it, the park voted to become 55 or older and we were now the only twenty somethings there. The timing was perfect. A few years later we sold the mobile home for 19,000 as a down payment for a two bedroom condominium.
Evangelizing door-to-door in Pinole, I met Brenda Rose. She came to a service. She was saved. Shortly thereafter she met a Navy man, who grew up in Arkansas in the Church of Christ. I met with both and Doug Stracener was saved. The two went to Bible college, trained, and then went back to Arkansas. There Doug discipled dozens of people using a thirty week discipleship I wrote and our church used.
I was never a carpenter, but suddenly with new buildings and no construction types in our church, repairing and maintaining the buildings was difficult. We had a tiny nursery spot right next to the meeting room and the babies were loud. We decided to split our only other large room into a nursery and a classroom, which required building a wall. About that time, a homeless man knocked on the door and asked if he could do any work. He said he didn’t want money, just a place to sleep and milk and cookies.
Scott had been a successful general contractor, who became disabled in a work accident and he wasn’t covered by insurance. He couldn’t do most of the work to build a new nursery, but he could tell me what to do. I would preach to him while I worked and every day bring him milk and cookies. He slept in the nursery.
In October 17, 1989, one day before our second anniversary of the church, I sat in front of the mobile home after supper with my wife in our running Subaru, talking before I went to work at the church building. That year the Oakland A’s played the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. Most people were already at home to watch the Bay Bridge Series.
Someone, I thought, as a practical joke began to jump up and down on the bumper of our car. As our car rocked violently, I saw the road in the mobile home park like a ribbon rolling in front of me. It threw our neighbors cat way up in the air and it shrieked as it flew in the sky. What was happening? It was the biggest earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early twentieth century San Francisco Quake. They called it the Loma Prieta quake.
I had never experienced an earthquake before, except for the typical minor tremors anyone will feel in the Bay Area from time to time. This was a Big One, albeit not The big one. I left my wife at the mobile home, not really knowing how serious this was. My first stop at a hardware store to pick up some things revealed the extent. Almost everything on the shelves was now on the floor. The rolling quake scattered nuts, screws, paint, glass, and bolts all over the store. After seeing that, I drove to the church building to see.
Everything at church was fine. I could only imagine how much the building moved. Our mobile home rode the wave, but up on stilts it was in a better position than some houses. It was the only moment I remember wishing I was in the air rather than on the ground. It was not terra firma that October evening.
What I found was that a church member was stuck on the Bay Bridge because part of it collapsed. He couldn’t get home that night. Over a hundred died on Highway 880 near Oakland, only ten minutes from us, when the top deck collapsed on to the bottom. Many across the country saw Candlestick Park swaying on national television right before the Series game began. The timing saved hundreds from death, as the highways were half as crowded as normal, fans from both side of the Bay already sitting on their couch to watch.
Anyone could wish that an earthquake would grab the attention of the lost. I can report that it did little to nothing for constructive introspection. More than anything, people in the Bay were, one, angry, and, two, determined to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
To Be Continued
Should Christians Learn Hebrew and Greek? Part 1 of 7
I have composed a work explaining why Christians, and, specifically, Bible-believing, separatist King James Only Baptists should and can learn Hebrew and Greek, the Biblical languages. View the complete work here. While my first purpose in writing was to encourage my current crop of students, I believe that this work will be edifying to a broader readership, including those who never learn the Biblical languages. First, it exposits Biblical principles that relate to this topic, and, as an exposition and application of Scripture, has value. Second, it exposits a number of specific passages where controversy currently exists, enabling Christians to have Biblical answers in these inspired texts. Third, it explains the relationship between the original language text dictated by the Holy Spirit through holy men of old and translations. Can one call translations “inspired,” and if so, in what sense? Fourth, it answers the unbiblical extremism of Ruckman and Riplinger that is a stain to the advocates of the Textus Receptus and King James Bible. When peole want to find out what a Biblical word means, it is fine if they want to look at Webster’s English dictionary, but they should definitely be looking at a Hebrew or Greek lexicon, contrary to the advice of false teachers like Mrs. Gail Riplinger. Fifth, it can encourage Christians to see that learning the Biblical languages is not only desirable, but is an eminently attainable goal.
I am not planning to introduce the entire text of my study on these topics into the blog. I intend to summarize its arguments in several posts. Please read the actual work itself for more information. Learning Hebrew and Greek are desirable and attainable goals for Christians.
Please feel free to comment on this post or the rest of the posts in this series, but kindly read the work I am referencing first. Thank you.
–TDR
My Take on the Disappointing Results of Tuesday’s Mid-Term Elections
Many of you have heard the terminology, “gag reflex.” Certain behavior once merited a gag reflex. You saw it and something rose in your throat that caused you to gag. It was a good response.
Then after awhile you saw the same behavior become so common that it was normal. You didn’t gag anymore. No reflexive reaction occurred at all. When you see something all the time and all over, you might become desensitized to it.
As the gag reflex became insensitive to one bad behavior, it required even worse behavior to bring it. Gagging necessitated a more extreme action. Don’t get me wrong, I care about John Fetterman as a candidate for the gospel. I would love him as a person. God can and will save him if he turns to the Lord. However, I gag at his Senatorial election win. I’m glad that some things can still boggle my mind. If he showed up to flip burgers, I wouldn’t hire him. I’d help him to the door and then watch to make sure he walked away.
Something happened on Tuesday night that was new. I always expect the polls are wrong. They were wrong again, except for ones usually wrong. Now they were right on this one. The left was wrong in 2016. The right was wrong in 2022. You can’t reliably predict these things any more. I thought John Fetterman could never win as a candidate. He did.
I thought a red wave would occur. Almost nothing went well in the last two years. Everyone suffered from Democrat control. I won’t list all the ways things have gone wrong. Republicans may still control the House and Senate, but it felt like a loss. It looks like one. What happened?
I just read Mike Pence’s personal account of January 6 from the Wall Street Journal. It’s an excerpt from his upcoming book. I haven’t read an analysis of it, but it seems like his attempt to sink Donald Trump. I wouldn’t call it retaliation. I don’t think Pence works that way. However, I do see it as purposeful to help someone else clear away Trump for 2024. Could someone? Maybe, maybe not.
A large group of people in the United States — I’m going to estimate thirty percent at least — are loyal to President Trump. He stood up for them and us and took unprecedented opposition for four years. 2020 was rigged. Whoever beats Trump in a 2024 primary will need those people.
In many ways, Trump created Ron DeSantis. No one operated like DeSantis until Trump. And as a result, something happened in Florida as never before. You remember the hanging chads in the Bush-Gore election of 2000? DeSantis wins by 20 points a little over 20 years later.
Two major points appeared Tuesday. Someone like Trump can still win an election, but he would do it like Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has everything good about Trump without most of what’s bad about Trump. Donald Trump will not back down. Someone will need to peel off some of that thirty percent. It’s not going to be easy. That’s one point.
What else? The country is even in worse shape than what it was. Way worse. I’m not talking about damage caused by President Joe Biden. He’s just a symptom. They voted for John Fetterman. Katie Hobbs is ahead in Arizona and she ran a near basement campaign. Even if Lake comes back to win big after they finish the count, why did the counting stop for over 24 hours at 66 percent? This wouldn’t happen to a Democrat. The final result won’t occur until Monday. This itself is a level of either corruption or incompetence that has become the new normal. And those in charge can still get away with this, just like those who spawned the Russia collusion hoax.
A majority of people may not like wokeness, but they will still do little to none to defeat it. It’s not going to change through elections. People must change in their natures to affect the downward trajectory. That will come only through the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that won’t happen unless churches, the individual professing believers of churches, commit themselves wholesale to the only true gospel.
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Interesting Report from John Solomon on the Republicans Winning the Popular Vote on Tuesday, 53-47.
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