biblical law

A cursory examination of the search engines failed to define exactly what these categories of abuse are, and I’m not sure I really want to know, but it is sufficient to note that:

1. This piece of scum person has admitted to being a child sexual predator.

2. Child sex predators are not curable, ever. This man will commit similar acts again.

3. He is out on bail

4. The “church” is powerless to stop such wickedness from happening, and indeed may contribute to its continuation.

Get your children out of the system, and keep them out. That’s the first lesson from this.

This individual should be put to death. it’s that simple. Take him out back to the edge of town, crush his head with a very large stone, and thus “put the evil away from among you.”

Source: BBC NEWS

A vicar is behind bars after he admitted possessing more than 55,000 indecent pictures of children.

The Reverend Richard Hart, 59, from Horsell, Woking, is the vicar of Beguildy, near Knighton in Powys.

He admitted 12 charges of making indecent images of children, four of taking indecent images and five of possessing images on his computer.
…

The court heard he had 44 images showing child sex abuse in the most serious Category 5 – with 52,240 in the least serious category, 2,419 in Category 2, a further 684 in Category 3 and 1,445 in Category 4.

The offences dated between 1991 and 2007.

He has also been suspended from his position as chairman of governors at Beguildy Church in Wales school, where his wife Julie, 40, worked part-time.
…

Defence barrister John Ryan said: “Hart is on bail but wishes to begin his time behind bars today.”
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Hart has been a vicar in Powys for more than 20 years.
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In addition to the court case, the matter is also being referred to a Church in Wales disciplinary panel, who will decide if Hart can remain a priest.

Canon Jones said: “At this moment in time, our thoughts and prayers are with the children who may have been directly or indirectly affected and the wider community in which they live.

“As a church we have co-operated with the authorities throughout this inquiry and we are very grateful to the police for their very thorough investigation.
…

“We regularly review our child protection policy which came into force 10 years ago to try to eliminate the possibility of people behaving in this way.

“No matter how stringent authorities try to make their child protection policies, these things can still happen. We are making every effort to ensure the safety of children in our communities.”

Full Story…

The application of biblical law to this situation would have been implemented back in 1986, and none of this more recent wickedness would even be a story.

“And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; and at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Genesis 9:5-6

Source: CNN.com

New York’s “preppie killer” is heading back to prison: He’s been sentenced to 19 years after pleading guilty to a drug charge.

Robert Chambers was sentenced Tuesday after reaching an agreement last month in a drug deal and an assault on a police officer. He would have faced life in prison if convicted after trial.

The 41-year-old Chambers and girlfriend Shawn Kovell were arrested in October on charges of dealing cocaine. Kovell pleaded guilty in December; she was spared prison and allowed to enter rehab.

Chambers previously was imprisoned for 15 years for strangling a young woman in Central Park during what he called rough sex. The slaying made headlines as a story of a handsome, privileged prep school youth gone bad.

Chambers and Kovell were arrested in October 2007 in an undercover sting at their Manhattan apartment on charges of dealing cocaine.

Full sordid tale…

So here we have two people fighting over God’s word, it seems… Not quite so, though. Men is either a covenant breaker or a covenant keeper down here, and I will show you in the following that Dobson and Obama belong in the same category.

Via: CNN.com

Well, maybe you should read the whole article first, because apart from the first sentences, I will only give you what they say about Scripture.

(CNN) — A top U.S. evangelical leader is accusing Sen. Barack Obama of deliberately distorting the Bible and taking a “fruitcake interpretation” of the U.S. Constitution.
James Dobson says Barack Obama is distorting bibical teachings to fit “his own confused theology.”

(…)

“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?

Generally speaking, the answer to the three (polemic) questions is YES in all cases, the problem is the “or” and the “just” – the whole counsel of God is important (Act 20:27), not just bits and pieces. Scripture is not a smorgasboard where you can pick and choose, so if you do not like Leviticus and Deuteronomy, maybe you do not like the God who gave the Law recounted there. God’s word is a unity – it is called God’s word, not God’s words, for a reason.

As for the content of the statement, Obama shows that he either doesn’t know or wishes to ignore that what we think of when we hear the word slavery – that is, “manstealing” – is forbidden in the bible and he who steals and sells, or buys, a man is to be punished by death (Exo 21:16 “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.).  What the bible calls “slavery”, on the other hand, is a concept much closer to our modern day concept of employment, only that a Hebrew slave came out of his indentured servitude with both the knowledge and the money to start his own family, having been an apprentice, so to speak, of how to be a godly leader of his household for seven years. I have never met an employee who left his employer after seven years with enough money and knowledge to start his own business, so again, as always, God’s plan and ways are far superior to our petty little attempts at organizing life.

Fishes that do not have both fins and scales are among the unclean foods, so that at least is correct. If you wish to ignore God’s laws in this regard, go right ahead and enjoy your pork tenderloin sandwich too, but be ready to account for it.

As for the stoning of a disobedient child, the reasons parents are supposed to hand their (adult) child over to the community is not a “straying from the faith”, as Obama suggests, but is to be done if the son is “a glutton and a drunkard” and and unrepentant one to boot. In other words, if your child turns out to be a danger to the community, God commands you to love the brethren and protect them from the evil that threatens them, even if this evil comes from your own son. The parents have the responsibility to educate their children well so that they do not turn out this way. I guess if parents today were still going by God’s commandments, they would let less people interfere with their education, knowing what is at stake.

As for the sermon on the mount, this sermon is completely in line with “the rest” of God’s word. Remember who gave this sermon, and that “I the LORD do not change” (Mal 3:6).

(…)

He also called Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application.”

Quite obviously, God’s Law Word is too radical for Mr Obama, and if he is referring to the “turn the other cheek” idea, implying that it commands a completely pacifistic attitude, he has no understanding of what Jesus was referring to. The Jews of his time, living under Roman occupation, knew better that what Jesus is saying here is elsewhere summed up like this:

“Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mat 22:21)

But on with the article:

In the comments to be aired Tuesday, Dobson said Obama should not be referencing antiquated dietary codes and passages from the Old Testament that are no longer relevant to the teachings of the New Testament.

Ok, so Mr Dobson just outed himself as an antinomian as well.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

So who is Dobson to call any part of God’s word “irrelevant” ?  Who spoke the infallible word, God or man ? Who is Dobson to decide what part of God’s infallible word is suddenly not infallible anymore ? And who is “traditional” Christianity to do the same, for that matter ?  The Pharisees had all kinds of traditions, remember ?   And they were not the least bit pleasing to God simply because they favored their own traditions over God’s Law.

Responding to the comments, Joshua DuBois, Obama’s national director of religious affairs, said the Illinois senator is “committed to reaching out to people of faith and standing up for American families.”

“A full reading of his 2006 Call to Renewal speech shows just that,” DuBois said. “Obama is proud to have the support of millions of Americans of faith and looks forward to working across religious lines to bring our country together.”

Well, so now we know that Obama cannot be a bible believing Christian as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a God who crosses any religious lines, but instead He is a jealous God and idolatry, i.e. crossing religious lines, means breaking the first commandment.

(…)

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values,” Obama said. “It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.”

God is not democratic. His values are very specific, and whoever substitutes God’s judgments and values for his and her own is in apostasy. God is not a humanist, and not subject to argument either, as His commandments are not suggestions open for debate, but commandments.

by R.J. Rushdoony

“If God be God, then His every word is of necessity law, because His every word is the authoritative and ultimate word.  There is no word, law, power or standard beyond by means of which God and His word can be judged.

(Dr. Cornelius) Van Til makes this clear in the course of his discussion of the righteousness of God:

“With the righteousness of God we signify the self-consistency of the divine Being. God is a law unto himself.  He is the absolute self-existent personality and therefore, at the same time, absolute law.  God does not have a law, but is law.  His self-conscious activity regards with absolute complacency the eternal rightness of relationship between the various aspects of multiplicity that are found with the divine Being.  He cannot and does not tolerate any subordination of any one aspect of His Being to any other aspect of His Being.  The attributes and the persons of God are all on a par.” (Cornelius Van Til: “An Introduction to Theology”, II, Philadelphia, PA 1947, p. 214)

It is therefore destructive of the Biblical doctrine of God to oppose or exalt one aspect of God over or against another.  We cannot oppose grace and law; men may do so, but in God’s being they are in unity and not in subordination to one another.  Similarly, in God’s being love and justice are not contraries but equal aspects of Hid being and are an essential unity.  To say “God is love” (1Joh 4:8) is scriptural, but it denies Scripture if we mean therefore that in God love is more basic than law, justice, jealousy, wrath, grace, or any other attribute of God’s being.  Thus, when Scripture contrasts any of these terms, it either has reference to man’s use of them or to man’s relationship to them under God’s economy.

Van Til illustrates this by reference to 2 Corinthians 3:6:

“who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”  The contrast here is not between grace and law, nor a materialistic dispensation versus a spiritual one.  “The ‘letter’ as spoken of by Paul, refers not to Scripture as a whole, but refers to the ‘ministration of condemnation’”, that is, to the Pharisaic externalism.  Thus, “the contention… that the Bible was never meant to be taken as a book that should be interpreted literally” is invalid (Ibid., p. 136)

The misuse of Scripture condemned by Paul was not a faithful obedience to the literal meaning of Scripture but a reinterpretation of that meaning in terms of man’s word, will and thought.  We must, on the contrary,

“make Scripture the standard of our thinking and not our thinking the standard of Scripture” (Ibid., p.210).

It is to the advantage of apostate man to deny or wrongly divide the word of God.  If the Bible is reduced to a non-literal meaning and made anything other than the very word of God, the result is a very different kind of God.  God then has no sure and certain word because God Himself is an uncertain and unrealized being.  Those who pretend to exalt God by declaring Him to be unknowable and hence unnamable are thereby undermining the deity of God.  Greek philosophy, for example, assumed the utter unknowablilty of God. As Van Til observes,

“An apostate man has every reason to teach the unnamability of God.  If God is unnamable then he cannot name anything in the world.  Only if God is unknowable can man think of his own knowledge as autonomous” (Cornelius Van Til: “Christ and the Jews”, Nutely, NY 1968, p. 8).

God can be named, but not by man.  For man to name God means that man’s autonomous mind establishes the categories of definition.  The definitive and ultimate word is then the word of man.  For man to define God would mean that man could then classify God in relationship to himself, and would understand and judge God, as well as to name Him, in terms of man’s infallible word.  This is at the heart of the evil of idolatry.  Some forms of idolatry seem, superficially examined, to be very noble; some, in fact, show the influence of Biblical thought.  At heart, however, idolatry defines God, whether by word, graven image, picture, or philosophical thought, in terms of man’s autonomous mind and man’s defining and creative word.

The people of Israel wanted, in the person of Moses, a definition of God.  What was His name ?  By this they meant a definition of God in terms of man’s requirements and being.  God refused to so name Himself.  In terms of man, He is beyond definition, because He is not to be defined by anything external to Himself as a criterion over Himself, but in terms of His own Being.  Scripture defines man in terms of the image of God; hence apostate man is fallen man:  he has fallen from God’s norm.  Of a contemptible sinner, we say “He’s not much of a man”, because man is not defined by his own existence. We cannot name, define or know God in terms of anything external to Himself, and hence we cannot judge God, because God and His word are the criterion of all judgment.  We can truly say of a man “He’s not much of a man”, but we can never so speak of God, that He is not much of a God.

As a result, God answered Moses, not as Israel would have wished, but by declaring Himself to be God:  that was His name, He Who Is, the self-existent one.

“God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”  God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exo 3:14-15)

This means, FIRST, than man cannot name or define God:  God names Himself, I AM WHO I AM.  Where man does any naming, as Adam was required to do in Eden (Gen 2:19-20), it is either as a covenant-keeper, working to understand the world under God and in terms of God’s purpose as a creator, or as a covenant-breaker, seeking to establish the meaning of creation in terms of man’s autonomous and ultimate word (Gen 3:5:  “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”).

SECOND, God defines Himself by His self-revelation.  The naming, defining, knowing word is thus the word of God.  Man’s word, when autonomous in intent, is unable to create reality or impose its own determinative meaning on reality.  All things having been made by God, serve and obey His word and purpose.

THIRD, this means that Scripture is the necessary word.  God makes Himself knowable by means of His sovereign and infallible word.  God’s word is the word of salvation, but it is also the word of knowledge, basic to epistemology [the science that studies the possibility, origin, nature and extent of human knowledge].  It is the word of law, love, wrath, grace, justice, judgment, and more.  It is the word which establishes the meaning of life, time, and history.

FORTH, God’s word is the unchanging word.  He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).  He declares “For I the LORD do not change” (Mal 3:8).  He is “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”.  As He was then, He is now and forever.  “This is my name forever”.  His word is thus the infallible word, because He is the absolute and omnipotent God, whose every word is truth.

FIFTH, God then made clear to Moses that He did not answer to Moses or to Israel:  they answered to Him.  Hence, Moses had to “go” at God’s command, and Israel had to stand up to Pharaoh in terms of God’s requirement that Israel must serve God, not Pharaoh (Exo 3:16-20).  Israel could serve neither Pharaoh nor itself: it must serve the Lord, and if Pharaoh (or Israel) stood in God’s way, He would stretch out His hand and smite him.  This is no less true today.  The Scripture is not a problem to be resolved by man, nor a mere subject for research and speculation.  It is God’s infallible command word: we either obey it or are condemned by it.”

From: Rousas John Rushdoony: “Systematic Theology” Volume I.  Vallecito, CA 1994, p. 49-52
Bible quotes, unlike in the original, from the ESV (not the KJV)

Yahweh desires for us to dwell in his presence and to take dominion over His creation, just as is outlined in the book of Genesis: Genesis 1:28

Yahweh’s Law is of such as design that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we are enabled and have been given the tools to accomplish this task of dominion…”on earth as it is in Heaven.” When man attempts to take dominion apart from the law, decrees and instruction of the Most High King, it becomes ugly and abusive and eventually self destructive, but with Yahweh’s Law as a guide, all will be truly well with us and our families, as He promised.

The goal cannot be any more clear, and the “deep” questions that many people have about life, such as who we are and why we are here are really attempts to disregard the desire that Yahweh has for us, and instead become Masters of our own fate, and captains of our own souls. In the end our own ideas will never work out very well. This is easy to see if you look at the various neurosis and problems that plague society today: depression, drug abuse, fornication, fantasy and escapism, and the like. Even if someone achieves a degree of “happiness” in this life, they will usually do so at the expense of the next. Remember, seek ye first the Kingdom of God.

You will never come into true communion with Yahweh on your own terms… it has to be on Yahweh’s terms, it’s as simple as that. Yahweh is King, and His law stands forever. Praise Yahweh!

This world is passing away, and we eagerly await a New Heaven, and a New Earth, and pray to be counted worth to be a part of Yahweh’s glorious plan.

We are prepared… are you?

Mosaic Law, Biblical Law, Genesis 1:28, dominion