On my mind...

• Sadly, there is still no recent sign of Jeffrey Collins or update on his condition. Last night we prayed for him at our church. I hope that many of you are doing likewise.

• The issue of public school antagonism toward Christianity is a recurrent theme in blogdom, most recently here. This reminded me of a book I have—which I may have written about before. However with no archive search feature (a serious flaw when combined with a failing memory) there is no palatable way to check. Anyway, this book is titled Bible Study Course (Old Testament) Here is a sample question: What was the last thing that happened to the Tabernacle and its furniture? Now, the punch line of this story is the intended audience for this book: it was a text book for the Dallas Public Schools, at least as late as 1954. On the inside cover it is written: Authorized by the Board of Education, September 14, 1954. There is a preface from the Superintendent of Schools describing the history of the plan of offering an accredited course in Bible study. Dallas public schools—remarkable. My how times have changed.

• This next topic is not R rated, but it is about our old enemy, lust. Now I have never blogged about anything related to sex. Partly because my 12 year old son sometimes reads my blog and partly because my wife advised me to “stick to subjects you know something about.” Anyway, I was driving home yesterday, pondering a Ganns Deen post (I couldn't find the permalink, it's his July 30 post-- watch out for the bilnking man) that reminded us of the Biblical instruction to flee from temptation. Then my thought process stopped in midstream because my eyes caught sight of a very attractive jogger as she went past the car. A friend once told me that he feels “Okay” with seeing an attractive woman and admiring her beauty as long as the mental imagery stops there—no further speculation allowed. I guess that is reasonable, and that was the case with jogger, but I still feel uneasy. I am thinking about making a covenant with my eyes as in Job 31:1, but covenants are serious business. Any advice?

• The other thing I was thinking about was time. In this post Mark Byron writes:

God and Heaven are trans-time, existing outside of our space-time universe

Now I am not disagreeing with Mark, but I have a general question. I constantly read about God not being linear with respect to time, and being trans-time, etc. and I agree that it is quite likely true-- yet it is as if I am the only person for whom it is not manifest! Everyone seems to accept it uncritically, but I have not found any clear scriptural references. If you got ‘em, send ‘em. If God is longsuffering, then I think time and its passage is something in God’s universe. Not to mention that if we are to have physical bodies and walk around, well then our motion will still be governed by differential equations with time as the independent variable, won’t it? (That was mostly tongue-in-cheek.) Things will certainly be interesting. Our direction of time (just one way: we age) has a lot to do, so it seems, with the second law of thermodynamics which in turn is related to the irreversibility of processes. For example, if you see a movie of a glass of water on a table and ice cubes start forming in the water, you can be sure the movie is running backwards. (If it lasts six hours, you can also be reasonably sure it was an award winning Ingmar Bergman flick.) Time’s arrow is related to irreversibility-- which is related to decay, and there is no decay in heaven, so something will be wonderfully different about time. With this I agree.

• Finally, I have signed on with the good folks at Blogs4God as the moderator for apologia. As I told them privately, I feel like an interloper who joined up after all the work was done. Like Caesar’s son arriving at the scene of the completed battle at the beginning of Gladiator. I am truly delighted to be on board with this talented group of Christians.

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