Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

In Genesis 22, we have the story of Abraham’s trial—his test. God tested Abraham. He said to him, Abraham! Here I am, he replied. Then God said, Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.Now, it would be hard to overstate the crisis that this represented to Abraham. He had waited so long for this boy. He had been willing to have Ishmael for his heir, but God had promised him a son through Sarah. Finally, he had that son, and he was now being asked to give him up as a burnt offering.We are told nothing about how Abraham felt at this moment. I heard one preacher say that Abraham didn’t question God—didn’t waver. He just went and did as he was told. I really think, though, that misses the whole point of this story. And is there any way we could miss the parallel of this event with the sacrifice of the only son of God?

When God told Abraham that he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham nearly talked him out of it. He got God to agree that if ten righteous men were found in the cities, he would not destroy the cities for their sakes.Abraham quit reasoning with God after getting to him to agree to ten. I think Abraham felt there where ten righteous men there. But he was wrong. Ten were not found, only one, and Sodom and Gomorrah were left as smoking ruins (if there were any ruins left to smoke).Why did God, you suppose, agree to save this city for ten people? When one righteous man was found, he got him and his family out of the city. If there had been ten righteous men, he could have just gotten them out of the city, as well. So, why did God respond to Abraham the way he did?

Not long ago, a man stood having pleaded guilty to raping an eight-year-old ten times. The judge had the unpleasant duty of sentencing this man. She wanted to say something appropriate when she sentenced him, so she came up with the words of Jesus: But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and they were drowned in the depth of the sea. She proceeded to sentence the man to 51 years in prison saying, I hope God has mercy on you and the hell you have created. Sounds good to me. But a year later the sentence was overturned by the district court of appeals because the judge had allowed her religious beliefs to influence her in giving the man a harsher sentence. Now, I don't know about you, but I would not have needed to open the Bible to give the man 51 years in prison; that doesn't seem like a terribly excessive sentence for someone who would rape an eight-year-old ten times. But I don't think the the appellate court

There is such a thing as believing God and still having your doubts. The fact that a person doubts on a given point, though, doesn’t mean they don’t trust God. People who read the Bible and try to get it right should know this: God is not offended by our doubts.In fact, it is our willingness to put our trust in him in spite of our doubts that constitutes faith. If there were no doubts, there could be no faith. Faith, in that sense, is trusting God instead of trusting our doubts. And it has to do with the choices we make.We know that Abraham believed God, and that his faith was counted for him as righteousness. This doesn’t mean, however, that Abraham never doubted. In fact, some of the promises that God made to Abraham could easily be viewed as outrageous. Consider this encounter between the two in Genesis, chapter 17.

There is nothing new about surrogate motherhood, you know. In fact, there is an example of it in the Bible—and it carried with it then the same pitfalls and potential for discord as it does today.The infertile woman was Sarah, and her husband was Abraham. God had promised them a son. But, after some time, Sarah seemed to now be beyond childbearing age and they had not yet received their promised son. Maybe, they thought, they weren’t doing their part and were going to have to take matters into their own hands.Turn back to Genesis, chapter 16, and let’s read the rest of this story which tells of the birth of two boys—and of a multitude of nations—as well as foretelling conflicts that the world deals with to this day.

Everyone loves a mystery, so I have a good one for you. There is this shadowy Old Testament character who appears only once in the historical accounts of the Bible. His name is Melchizedek, and there are some truly strange things about him.He is mentioned after the patriarch Abraham and his men defeated a coalition of kings and recovered the captives and booty that had been taken from the city of Sodom (including his nephew, Lot). After this battle, we find Abraham giving Melchizedek a tenth of the spoils as an offering to God.When you understand that there seems to be none greater in the Old Testament than Abraham (not even Moses) a question is raised. What is going on when we find Abraham giving a tithe to a man of whom we know next to nothing?

What in the world is God doing? And what does religion have to do with it? I know it may sound a little strange to ask, but asking strange questions is sometimes what teachers do.Man is very prolific in religion-building. But, very often, his religions have very little to do with what God is doing. So, we’ve been looking around in the Book of Genesis for some clues—as I imagine he runs a little deeper than we may first expect.First, a question: who is this we’re dealing with? His name is not God, you know. God is what he is, not who he is. The word God has been used so much, made its way into our language in so many different ways, that we have to take care to be sure what we’re talking about. Here, in the beginning of the Bible, what are the names God is called by—and what do they mean to us today?

I have a sense that a lot of us are frightened these days. It isn’t the hair-raising fear that gives us an adrenaline rush. It is the slow dread that creeps up on us in the night and denies sleep. And it really doesn’t help to say, Don’t worry, everything will be all right. I’m not so sure that FDR’s We have nothing to fear except fear itself, would be any help either.It might help a little if the politicians and the news media would stop trying to scare everyone to death. What the politicians have done is impress upon our minds that the situation is truly beyond their control.It isn’t merely that they don’t know what to do. There really is nothing they can do to roll back the laws of human nature. If we can believe the news sources available to us (I’ll admit that is a very big if), we are entering a new era in the world.

It must have been terrifying being on Noah’s ark for all those days—closed up inside, unable to see the sky, hearing a pouring torrent beat the roof, and feeling the whole shop rock to and fro with the waves. But, you know, the most terrifying part of this experience must have been knowing that, outside the ark, everyone and everything, was dying. The people who had been cooped up in that boat emerged totally changed.It’s no wonder that the tradition of the flood is found in nearly every tribe on Earth. After all, every one of us is descended from these eight people. We are all one family. Genesis 11 tells us that the whole earth was of one language and one speech.That certainly is not the case today. How did that change? What can these few chapters in Genesis tell us about how people in the ancient world dealt with issues we still face in the modern age?

Sometimes the Bible can be very disturbing. One reason is because the Bible presents ideas that upset us when they are not what we want to hear. Most of us have a personal theology and our own unique way of looking at God. We then tend to see everything we read in that light.But the problem is that sometimes the Bible is so plain we cannot escape what it is saying. We will run into some things that are very troubling—things that don’t fit in with our personal theology. But when we encounter something in the Bible that conflicts with that personal theology, maybe it is time to re-think it.Let’s take another look, for example, at the Book of Genesis, chapter 6, and the story of the great flood.

People get some really strange ideas about the Bible. There are those who believe, for example, that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was sex or that Cain was the result of some union between Eve and the serpent. They pay no mind to what the Bible says.There is a law called the Law of Parsimony which says roughly that of two arguments presented the shorter and simpler one is more likely to be true. Why make something complicated out of something simple?But we can always learn more—even from relatively straightforward stories—and clear up some misconceptions. So let’s take another look at Genesis, chapters four through six, from the lives of Cain and Abel to the calling of Noah.

If there’s one story in the Bible that is familiar to everyone, it’s the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. For one thing, people who start out to read the Bible naturally start at the beginning. A lot of times they make it about to Leviticus 6 and they just get lost or give up. Some time later, they return and they go back to Genesis. There’s no point in going back to Leviticus 6, is there? And they read the story of Adam and Eve all over again.It would be a rare person who doesn’t know who Adam and Eve were, and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. But this familiarity means that there are hundreds of different theories about Adam and Eve—none of them really compelling. Was the Forbidden Fruit an apple? It is generally taken for that. Or was it sex? Was the Devil a snake?I’ve advanced a few theories on Genesis, myself. Everyone who believes in God is an implicit theologian. And who’s to say your theories are not as good as anyone else’s? It’

Here we are once again in the political silly season. And you know, it’s a hard time for Christians to keep our hats on straight. And there’s no time that’s more important that we do keep our hats on straight because our’s is a government of the people and by the people. And, since we Christians fall in that broad category called the people, we are responsible before God for what this government does.Now, what do I mean when I say it’s hard for us to keep our hats on straight? Well, there are two broad categories of Christians at large in the world. (Listen to this carefully now.) There are Christians who read the Bible regularly and there are Christians who don’t. Now I can throw the numbers at you, but you know I’m right on that. About a third of Christians read something from the Bible at least once a week. About a third reads something from the Bible once a year or less. The other third, well, they’re somewhere in between.Now, I don’t’ have any s

You aren’t under any stress, are you? The funny thing about that question is that most people will answer that question with something like, No. Not really. But, in reality, far too many people are suffering from things like anxiety, high blood pressure, insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, and an array of stress-related conditions.How did we get here? Why are we being eating up with these illnesses? The answer could be that we work hard. In fact, the problem is that we think we have to work harder than God.But God actually gave us a tool to deal with stress. But it is all too often ignored. What is it? Turn to chapter 2 of Genesis and we’ll take a look.Referenced Works:From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity by Samuele Bacchiocchi

Most people believe that there is a God. Strangely, many people have not considered the consequences of that belief. If God exists, and if he created the world and everything in it, then that raises a really fascinating question: Why did he do it?Somewhere in time, God arrived at a decision or series of decisions that lead to all this we see. Why did he do it? Why did he create the heavens, Earth, and man? What is he up to?The apostle Paul informs us that the invisible things of God can be understood through the creation—the things which are visible. So maybe we should take a deeper look at that book of beginnings—the Book of Genesis, starting in chapter one.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:1–2 KJVThere’s a theory that in the original creation the world was not without form and void (the Hebrew suggests chaotic and in confusion) and, according to this theory, since God is not the author of confusion, something must have gone wrong. This theory allows any number of years between the original, pristine creation of the heavens and the Earth and the chaos and confusion that followed.What may have happened during this period is hinted at in several passages of both the Old and New Testaments. Let’s take a closer at this theory and the idea of a great rebellion and war between Good and Evil.

What in the world is God doing? I don’t think any religious system on Earth has even scratched the surface. Now, we owe a staggering debt to those who have gone before and received and passed onto us the testimony of God. The Bible is a book of enormous value and a revelation of God. But we should never assume that those who came before have comprehended God.Why God conceals things from us is not entirely clear, but it is clear that he does. The Bible does not answer directly what God has been doing for the last 15 billion years, but it does give us hints. More importantly, it authorizes us to search, to think, to reason, and to come to conclusions. As Solomon put it:It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.Proverbs 25:2 KJ2000So if the Bible does not answer directly, what makes me think I can answer it? Well, maybe I can’t—you be the judge. We have to start with what we know about God from the Bible and another, often-overlooked source.

I honestly don’t know what people expect in terms of a prophet. I don’t think many people even know where to look for one. You certainly would be making a mistake if you looked for one in a pulpit of a church or speaking in a stadium in front of 60,000 people. You aren’t likely to find a real prophet in those environments.One ancient prophet, for example was a sheep-herder and a fruit-picker before God spoke to him. And he seems to have been a reluctant prophet, at that. He wasn’t schooled, trained or taught. On one occasion, when he had delivered an unpleasant prophecy concerning Israel, he was told to knock it off, go home, and shut up.We’ll find his reply, as well as a most interesting principle regarding how God chooses to reveal his secrets to man, in the Book of Amos.

Would you agree that Jesus was a good man? I doubt that we could find anyone who would argue to the contrary. Would you then agree that Jesus was a righteous man? I am reasonably sure you would. But what exactly does that mean?I have asked the question: If you only had a short time to tell someone about God, what would you want to be sure and tell them. Each of us might have our own list, but God gave us his in Jeremiah 9. [T]hat they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight[.]The last thing on God’s list of things he wants us to know and understand about him is that he exercises righteousness in the earth. And since Jesus is God in the flesh, we would surely expect him to be an example of righteousness. But again, I have to ask, what does that mean?

If you sit down to read the Old Testament, you’re very likely to come across some events that are profoundly disturbing. There are instances where God commands Israel to wipe out whole cities—men, women, children, and animals. And it is not easy to reconcile these events with what we otherwise know about the nature of God.People make two big mistakes when they tackle this issue. They try to justify God or they condemn God for allowing bad things to happen. As to the first error, God is sovereign and can do as he wishes. My task is not to justify God, but to understand and know him. As to the second error, this arises from the human desire to have our cake and eat it too. We want to be free to live our lives as we choose without anything bad happening to us.But the freedom to live our lives as we choose means that we each have the freedom to harm one another—which we often do. The presence of evil in the world is relatively easy to understand. Man is free. Man commits sin. When we commit sin,