Some days have special meaning to us.  Our birthday is one of those days.  We may think they come around too fast, but they are very meaningful to our lives.  Other days, such as the day we met our mate, or the day we were married.  There is the day our children and grandchildren were born.

Our spiritual birthday is at the top of the list of important days.  That day changes everything for both time and eternity.  Think about your spiritual birthday.  You may not remember the calendar date, or a lot of other minor details, but if you’ve had a spiritual birthday, you will remember the event of being convicted of your sin, knowing you were lost, and knowing that you needed and wanted to be saved.  You will remember when you got it settled with God.

There is one other day that is of the utmost importance, and that is this day.  Today! The Bible warns us about making future plans without taking the will of God into consideration.  Today is all that we really have, and we may not even have all of it.  The Bible tells about a farmer, in Luke 12, whose crops produced a great yield, and who had been quite successful by the world’s standard of success.  He told himself that he would tear down his old barns, build new and bigger barns to store his goods, and that he would just take it easy from then on, because he had well provided for himself.  It was the equivalent of someone today telling himself to put all his money into annuities, ride off into the sunset in the motorhome, and just wait for the checks to hit the bank account by direct deposit.  Really, the only thing wrong with the plan was that he didn’t bring God into it, and he didn’t give God credit for his well-being.  Today is all we have, but it is really all we need.  Today is sufficient to surrender to God and to have peace with Him.  In the book of Ephesians, the Bible tells us to “redeem the time,” which means to take full advantage of it.  This is a very important day.

Why did Jesus die on the cross, and not by some other method? Why not some more humane method? The ultimate answer is that the cross was the manner in which God chose for Jesus to die. In Deuteronomy 21:22-23, God instructed some guidelines concerning hanging the bodies of executed people on a tree. It was a practice to show that the person was a vile offender, and considered to be cursed of God. In Numbers 21:8-9, after poisonous snakes had bitten the people, as they were wandering in the wilderness, Moses was told to make a brazen serpent, put it on a pole, and all who had been bitten, but would look at the serpent on the pole would not die, but would be healed. Fifteen hundred years later, Jesus told Nicodemus, in John 3, that he must be born again. Nicodemus didn’t understand this, so Jesus gave him an analogy that he could grasp. In John 3:14, Jesus told him that just as Moses had lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. In that conversation, Jesus clarified what that event was all about, back there in the wilderness wanderings. It was pointing to a time when Jesus would be made a curse for us, and would be hung on a cross. So, the cross shows God’s commitment to the fulfillment of His word. Secondly, the cross shows God’s hatred for sin. There could be no easy death, as Jesus, who had no sin in Him, took the sins of the world upon Him. The world can look at the cross, if they wish to know just what God thinks of sin. Thirdly, the cross shows God’s love for sinners. John 3:16, the most familiar verse in the Bible, sums it up. If anyone wishes to know how much God loves sinners, they only have to look at the cross.

I find it interesting how certain many people seem to be that their position is the rock-solid, biblically correct position, and that other people would have to be blind and ignorant to biblical truth not to see it the same way they do. The fact is, there are godly people who take strong stands on both the Calvinistic and Arminian view of God’s dealing with man. Put very simply, the Calvinistic view says that God is in complete control, and that salvation is His doing from start to finish. The Arminian view is that God has made salvation possible for all people, but it is left up to them to accept it or reject it. The most important thing for us to have strong conviction about, is that people are saved only through the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Many people have a Bible verse ready for their position, and sometimes several verses. That’s fine, but we really need to understand that there are Bible verses that seem to support both positions. Does that mean that the Bible is contradictary, and that one cannot draw a conclusion from the Bible? No, but it does mean that both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man are taught in the Bible. The real question is at what point does man really realize his responsibility? Is it as soon as he hears the gospel, or is it when God, in His own timing, sends the Holy Spirit to him to open his heart so that he can believe? In Acts 16:14, what did God do for Lydia? Can the natural man receive the things of the Spirit of God? Not according to 1 Corinthians 2:14.

We are taught that God made man in His own image, but man seems to be forever attempting to recreate God in his own image, according to his liking. God is not shaped by who we would like Him to be, He is exactly who He reveals Himself to be in the Bible. We would do well to make sure, before we start speaking too authoritatively, that our view of God’s dealing with man is indeed biblical. God chose one nation, the nation Israel, to bless them like no other nation on the face of the earth. Was that fair to the other nations? God chose Jacob over Essau to inherit the blessing of Abraham, and He chose him before he or his brother, Essau, was ever born. Was that fair to Essau? We would do well to not impose our standard of fairness on God, because God is completely just, whether it fits with our understanding of justness, or not.

The bottom line, in my understanding, is that God is on the throne of heaven, and He is completely successful in all that He does, He cannot fail, He must prevail. The Lord is the author and finisher of our salvation, but in the Lord’s convicting, convincing, and converting of sinners, we make a decision that is consistent with our will. But when you get right down to it, God is the changer of man’s will. It is our responsibility, as Christians, to spread the gospel to every person, to urge them to turn to Christ, and it is God’s business as to exactly which ones He saves. We have our orders in the Great Commission. We are mail carriers for God, but we, of ourselves, are not able to save anyone. Isn’t it wonderful that God can, and God does?

Second Timothy, chapter two, verse fifteen calls the Bible the “word of truth.” Romans 3:4 says, “…let God be true and every man a liar,” meaning if anyone, regardless of his experience or so-called credentials, says anything contrary to what the Bible says, then consider him to be pitifully ignorant at best, or a malicious liar at worst. The Bible is the ultimate in truth and is the “gold standard” by which we are to judge all things.  For instance, the Bible says that God “created” the world and all that is in it. The Bible is very specific about the time frame in which this creation took place. It was in a six day period, and the days were not millions of years long. Each day was marked by the rotation of the earth, just like it is today. The Bible says “the evening and the morning” constituted each day. We are told in the word of truth that the various life forms were created to have their seed within themselves, so that each would “bring forth after his kind.” we call it the law of bio-genesis. Cats are never going to have puppies, etc. 

But why has the false teaching of evolution become the standard doctrine for government schools? When the Bible first introduces the devil in Genesis 3, we are told that he is very subtle. We see that from the very beginning of his attacks on mankind, he has cast doubt that God’s word really is the word of truth. If people think of themselves as the product of an explosion, and the natural reaction of that explosion resulting in their evolving from a lower life form to a higher form of natural animal, then their expectations for themselves and those around them will be greatly affected. If the Bible is not to be trusted about creation, then it logically follows that it is not to be trusted about salvation, either.  There is also the logic that if God didn’t create us, then He really has no ownership rights over us, therefore, no real right to tell us what to do. 

This very day, there will be teachers who will indoctrinate impressionable boys and girls on these false teachings. What can we do? Pray for Christian teachers, that they will at the very least tell their students that this may be what the book says, but it is certainly not what they believe, that they believe the Bible. We can wake up and realize that God didn’t give children to the government, He gave them to parents. Pray that parents will be diligent to teach their children the word of truth. Finally, we can be a church that will stop making church game time and eating time and make it a learning time for the word of truth. Pray that in the little window of opportunity we have, we will teach the word of truth.