Abortion and Artemis: The Damning Desire of Lust for Wealth

FoxNews reports that a Planned Parenthood worker in Texas quit after seeing an ultrasound of a baby being aborted.  Here’s a snippet:

Abby Johnson, 29, used to escort women from their cars to the clinic in the eight years she volunteered and worked for Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas. But she says she knew it was time to leave after she watched a fetus “crumple” as it was vacuumed out of a patient’s uterus in September.

The most intriguing part of this article was when Johnson described the driving force behind the clinic’s abortions:

“Every meeting that we had was, ‘We don’t have enough money, we don’t have enough money — we’ve got to keep these abortions coming’…It’s a very lucrative business and that’s why they want to increase numbers.”

Immediately, Acts 19:21-41 came to my mind.  Paul had been preaching the gospel in Ephesus, and he was preaching against the goddess Artemis, the Greek deity of hunting and fertility, who later became associated with wealth and prosperity.

Some Ephesians were angry at Paul, who “persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not god” (v. 26).  What was the driving force of their anger at Paul and zeal for this goddess?  Verses 24-25 tell us the answer:

For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen.  These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth.”

Just like the Ephesian silversmiths, the Planned Parenthood workers acquired their wealth from a god (i.e. abortion) they made with their own hands.  In a word, they were greedy. Greed and abortion, like Artemis, are idols.  And when the idol of greed is threatened, the result is either repentance  toward Jesus or rage, chaos, hatred, and only more idolatry and greed.

The lust for wealth is a damning desire.  Truly “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Tim. 6:9).

New iPhone App to Allow Driving from Mobile Phone

German researchers have developed an iPhone app that will allow the user to drive a vehicle via their mobile phone.  Here’s a snippet:

The iDriver has individual accelerate and brake buttons and a virtual steering wheel that utilises the phone’s motion-sensor technology. It interfaces with a specially equipped car which receives messages from the iPhone and relays them into the vehicle via wireless technology. The virtual driver allows driving from a distance through the use of live video streaming from a roof-mounted camera

I swear that some people already drive as if they were sitting on their couch in boxers, iPhone in one hand, a bag of Cheetos in the other, singing along to VH1’s pop-up video classics.

Thankfully, the app is not expected to be commercially available any time soon, or at all.

Weekly Weirdness

Let the pop-culture philosopher Dr. Phil McGraw introduce our weird news this week:

You’re an individual. That makes people nervous and it’s going to keep on making them nervous — all your life.

It’s always a good day when I don’t wake up reading about myself in the weird news section.

• 22-inch Nepal man: I’m the world’s shortest
• Man Busted for Being Naked at Home
• Man found asleep in closet…with a corpse

Weekly Weirdness

The best in recent weird news:

• Vampires vow till death do us part at wedding
• Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking
• Woman charged with giving her daughter marijuana
  

Weekly Weirdness

Weird news always brightens-up my day.

• Police: Pilot used plane to stalk ex-girlfriend
• White Philly officer told to get rid of cornrows
• Woman shoots two holes-in-one — in same round

Enjoy the weirdness.

How Should Christians Respond to Obama’s Education Speech?

Obama’s speech on education, which he will give today, has caused quite a stir among Christians, most notably on the Desiring God blog.  There, John Piper expressed his excitment over what the President said.  Basically, Obama challenges students to work hard, be responsible, and have a positive attitude with school.  He said that students need to turn off the TV and get off the Xbox.  I couldn’t agree more.

Some Christians try to find a devil behind everything Obama says.  Some Christians will not give “honor to whom honor is owed” (Rom. 13:7).  I think that’s wrong.  I don’t agree with most of Obama’s policies, but I can commend a man when he speaks truth.

With that in mind, I think if you are one of the Christians who believes you cannot applaud something that Obama says because of his other policies/ideas (which very well may be moral failures), then you are ignoring an important theme in Scripture:

• Remember that King Cyrus was a pagan ruler of a pagan nation, yet he was the Lord’s “anointed,” who was used to redeem his people. God said, “I call you by your name, I name you, though you do not know me…I equip you, though you do not know me” (Isa. 45:1-13). It is clear that God can do good through people who don’t know him personally.
• Remember that God has common grace on all of creation: “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). This includes Obama and all the unsaved teachers who teach our children.
• Remember that God loves justice wherever he finds it because God is just: “A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight” (Pr. 11:1). And “A just balance and scales are the LORD’s; all the weights in the bag are his work” (Pr. 16:11). This applies even to Obama and education in the United States.
• Remember that Obama is a “servant for your good” if you are a believer (Rom. 13:4), whether you agree with him or not. Are some of his policies bad? Yes. Was there anything wrong with what he said in this speech? If there was, it was minimal.  Would you fault your non-Christian employer who demands his employees to work harder instead of showing up late, leaving early, and taking an extra long lunch because he didn’t mention Jesus? I doubt it.
• Remember, finally, that Paul quoted pagan religions in evangelism and teaching (Acts 17:22-34; Titus 1:12). There are commonalities that we can share with non-believers in order to point them to Jesus. Obama can’t point people to Jesus if he’s not a believer, so we can’t expect him to do that. The job falls on us Christians to find common ground in order to tell him (and others), “Look there! That’s Jesus. He made hard work. He created math and science and English and history. And he gives us strength to learn and write papers and do science projects!  To know this Jesus, that is what our children need the most.”

So we pray for Obama and beg God to let light shine in his heart. But we also give honor to whom honor is due. We don’t encourage our children to be like Obama or a teacher or anyone else (not even John Piper!!!). We point them to the cross, teaching them to be conformed to and led by Jesus. As we do that, we tell them to rejoice in truth wherever it is found because all objective truth is God’s truth. Education is good. Hard work is good. Addiction to TV and Xbox or anything else is bad. We praise God for these truths. He is the author of them.

*     *     *

Related Posts:

• Some Lessons for Conservative Christians
• How Should Christians (who didn’t vote for Obama) Respond to His Election?

Jesus and John and Kate Plus Eight

This is a good article from Christianity Today  on the popular TV show John and Kate Plus Eight.

Here’s an excerpt:

When the first few episodes revealed the earning potential of this “everyday family,” Jon & Kate Plus Eight became a brand name that was packaged and sold. And many Christians were happy to comply by opening up their wallets and their fellowship halls. When the network and the couple were not satisfied with the money generated through high ratings and book sales, the Gosselin home was filled with product placements and the children were filmed for long hours each week. All the while many (though not all) evangelicals watched with undiscerning eyes. Somewhere along the line we, like Jon and Kate, seemed to forget the warnings of 1 Timothy 6:9-10:

But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (NRSV)

How the Swine Flu and Abortion are Related

Mike Huckabee writes why he’s not afraid of the swine flu.  Here’s a good chunk of his article:

I’ve watched the Obama administration tell us how much they care about protecting lives from the flu. If they really want to help make children safer, let me make a suggestion: Start doing all you can to move this country to being pro-life.

Almost a million unborn children will die in their mother’s womb because of elective abortion this year. These are not sick or unhealthy babies, they’re just inconvenient.

And by ending their lives because they represent an economic disruption or a social interference to the mother, we’ve created a culture in which a human life is expendable because it represents an inconvenience.

It happens a million times a year in the United States. Where’s the press conference by the president, or the warnings of the vice president, or the outline of steps to be taken issued by Homeland Security or the secretary of Health and Human Services?

There isn’t one, because they all support the notion that it’s OK to end the lives of perfectly healthy unborn babies because they are in someone’s way.

That’s One Way to Prevent the Swine Flu

To prevent the swine flu (or any other flu) from spreading, most people wash their hands, quarantine themselves, or wear a doctor’s mask.  In Egypt however, their strategy is a bit different, as the Associated Press reports:

China quarantined more than 70 Mexican travelers and Hong Kong isolated 350 people in a hotel as a precaution even though no new swine flu infections appeared in Asia. In Egypt, authorities’ attempt to kill all pigs as a precaution against the disease prompted pig owners to clash with police who were helping to seize their animals for slaughter.

If I’m not mistaken, Egypt’s national motto is, “We hate pigs…but we like ‘em with eggs.”

South Africa Presidential Election

On Wednesday, South Africa will hold its presidential elections.  The favored party to win is the African National Congress (ANC).  Jacob Zuma, most likely, will be president.  Last year, Zuma was tried for the rape of a HIV-infected woman.  He was found not guilty.  Perhaps the ANC will win because it is the party of former-president Nelson Mandela.  This week, he publicly gave his support for Zuma.

We know that God’s will must be done.  You can pray for that, of course.  But more than that, pray for the hearts of the South Africans, that they might understand and embrace the fact that no human kingdom will satisfy.  Pray that they would receive the kingdom that cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28), instead of hoping in a kingdom that can be ruined.

Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.”  God is sovereign.  Nothing will surprise him.  Whatever God ordains will happen and is right.  This election, and every other election, is a mere footnote in his grand story.  In God’s story, King Jesus will reign, and every knee will bow and tongue confess that he is Lord.