We started listening to the first book in Harry Turtledove’s Atlantis books.  So far they are fantastic!

7 Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;

fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,

over the man who carries out evil devices!

8 Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!

Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.

9 For the evildoers shall be cut off,

but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

10 In just a little while, the wicked will be no more;

though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.

11 But the meek shall inherit the land

and delight themselves in abundant peace.

via Passage: Psalm 37 (ESV Bible Online).

Envy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article is good though it fails to point out the difference between enviousness and covetousness.  You covet something you actually would like to take.

Envy, as the frustration that someone else possesses something that you lack, leads to even more destructive behavior.

People who think the iPod version of a book will ever sell like an iPod are forgetting economic basics.

Paper is cheap and portable.

iPods work because playing music has always required machines.  Reading has not.  There is no comparison.

We could be done with the recession and on the track to recovery. It would have been a horrible 2009 but we would be pulling out now. Instead, we are still lurching downward. How many decades will we be stuck here?

If you can’t be the party of NO, then you are useless.

(What follows is basically a repeat of this post–which is true of many of my posts on Romans)

Peter asks, “Why didn’t the Son come in the flesh just outside Eden?”

I’m not happy with Peter’s answer. I suspect that it would have been true had Adam not sinned. Then, I think, the incarnation would have been the climax of the first creation, the wedding feast after the long courtship.

But sin puts us more in a Samson situation, where the husband marries the bride before he can welcome her into a new home. He has to live elsewhere and only visit from time to time until the inheritance is ready.

In other words, to redeem us from sin, what was supposed to happen at the beginning of history was brought back to near the beginning of history (yes we are still near the beginning of history). The paltry few millennia were only inserted because they were necessary.

Why were they necessary. God needed to increase sin in order to condemn it.

Paul writes, “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” The prevailing interpretation is that God needed to teach us what sin is, so he gave us the law to define it.

But even though knowledge as in awareness is part of how the law-sin dynamic works (Romans 7) that is now how we should interpret what Paul means. His point is not that we simply learned about sin, but that sin itself grew and spread through the Law. Knowledge here means direct experience like the way Adam knew Eve.

Why did God need sin to grow?

God does not arbitrarily choose the Day of Judgment (though we can never really know when the time is right). There has to be an objective reason for him to say “This is the right time” (c.f. Romans 5.6). He sent the Flood when time ran out. He refused to judge the Canaanites in Abraham’s day because they had not reached that point yet, but did judge Sodom and Gomorrah because they had.

Israel was dealt with patiently, judged, and then restored by grace (Judges to Kingdom, Kingdom to Empire). Each time they were restored they fell harder. “Now the law came in to increase the trespass.” Why? Just to be God’s flannelgraph about sin and judgment? I don’t think so.

The point was that God needed the “right time” or else he could not set forth Christ as a propitiation of his wrath. But because he sent Jesus at the right time, at the time of wrath, he was able to condemn sin in the flesh of Jesus (Romans 8.3).

Jesus couldn’t have been sent at any time and to any place or incarnated in any other culture.  If the Son of God had become Malaysian and drowned in a storm that would not have made any sense or had any significance in propitiating the wrath of God.  The history of Israel with the Law was all a necessary condition.

The history of the world from Eden to Bethlehem wasn’t flannelgraph or foreplay–it was the preparation for a Judgment Day in which the Son would be there to take the verdict on Himself.

John Courson, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.” Courson was implying that homeowners — record numbers of whom continue to default — have a responsibility to make good. He wasn’t referring to the people who have no choice, who can’t afford their payments. He was speaking about the rising number of folks who are voluntarily choosing not to pay.

Read the rest: The Way We Live Now – Walk Away From Your Mortgage! – NYTimes.com.

The weekend of April 9-10, in the year of our Lord 2010, I will be (speed) lecturing on Romans for The Martin Bucer Institute.

We now returne you to your regularly unscheduled browsing