The Bible in a Minute

King Solomon's Mine Found?

WASHINGTON — Legend has it that King Solomon's mines held a treasure of gold and diamonds, but archeologists say the real mines may have supplied the ancient king with copper.

Researchers led by Thomas Levy of the University of California, San Diego, and Mohammad Najjar of Jordan's Friends of Archaeology, discovered a copper-production center in southern Jordan that dates to the 10th century B.C., the time of Solomon's reign.

The discovery occurred at Khirbat en-Nahas, which means “ruins of copper” in Arabic. Located south of the Dead Sea, the region was known in the Old Testament as Edom.

Research at the site in the 1970s and 1980s indicated that metalworking began there in the 7th century B.C., long after Solomon.

Industrial copper slag mound excavated at Khirbat en-Nahas with a building and layers above it dating to the mid-9th century B.C. and its deposits dating to the 10th century B.C. (Thomas Levy, UC San Diego)

But Dr. Levy and Dr. Najjar dug deeper and were able to date materials such as seeds and sticks to the 10th century B.C.

“We can't believe everything ancient writings tell us,” Dr. Levy said in a statement. “But this research represents a confluence between the archaeological and scientific data and the Bible.”

Their findings are reported in this week's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Christian Martyrdom: Happening Now

"45 million Christians were martyred in the twentieth century."
-- Oxford's World Christian Encyclopedia.

This week I got an email from someone I know in the Muslim world who reported something that the NY Times, almost exclusively, reported, because the mainstream media is busy with other things. There is a kind of genocide that is happening in India right now (a beautiful country that I visited two summers ago). There is presently a kind of religious genocide happening to our Christian brothers and sisters there. Here is the link.

Christians are forced to renounce their faith in exchange for safety, or else face marytrdom. This has been going on for weeks in India. This ought to be stunning to us since India is the world's largest democracy and officially a tolerant secular state. Hindus make up the majority of citizens in India, whilst Christians are only about 2% of the population or so.

The eastern state of Orissa, "in Kandhamal, the district that has seen the greatest violence, more than 30 people have been killed, 3,000 homes burned and over 130 churches destroyed, including the tin-roofed Baptist prayer hall where the Digals worshiped. Today it is a heap of rubble on an empty field, where cows blithely graze."

The private email I got speaks of dozens of Christians tribes being slaughtered.

"In a nearby Catholic orphanage, the mob locked up a Priest and a computer teacher in a house and burned them to death. Many believers have been killed and hacked into pieces and left on the road.... even women and children."

"More than 5000 Christian families have had their homes burned or destroyed. They have fled into the jungles and are living in great fear waiting for the authorities to bring about peace. But so far, no peace is foreseen."

"This will continue for another 10 days.... supposedly the 14 day mourning period for the slain Hindu priest. Many more Christians will die and their houses destroyed."

We really do find it hard to connect with this as Western Christians whose biggest problems revolve around not being able to build 20 million dollar add ons to our massive church structures, and people not making us the center of attention and serving my needs. But we must try to reflect on these things. We must allow our hearts to break, to cry out on behalf of these amazingly beautiful people.

One potent and deep Scripture comes to mind when I think of these people facing persecution today, as I sit in my heated office complaining about my cough-due-to-cold.

Describing men and women in the past who suffered martyrdom for their faith, the writer of Hebrews says:

"They were stoned, sawn in two, put to death with the sword, being destitute, afflicted people of whom the world was not worthy" (Heb. 11.37-38).

That last line is important. People who get killed who remain faithful to Jesus, Scripture is saying, are more valuable then the world could ever understand. The world in all of its confusion, upside down values, and systems of thought and practice. It is no longer worthy to host the kinds of people God decided to take through martyrdom. They are that loved by God and valuable in his sight.

Discipleship of the Mind

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.
(Mark 12.30)

I have always felt a calling to it, but I never had a name for it before. I do now. Discipleship of the Mind. I have always felt that this was my passion; my role within the church. Some people are called to disciple the heart, others the soul, still others the strength. My passion is to disciple the mind. Not as a separate reality from the rest, it is all connected of course.

Why does the discipleship of the mind matter? Well, because ultimately our behavioral patterns follow our thinking patterns -- we do what we think. So, we may mourn the destructive patterns that our family and friends are living in, and we may try to help them stop acting that way, but the reality is, Scripture says, they need a renewal. A renewal of what? A renewal of the mind. That is the only way they will be transformed. Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12.2).

Often people look at this in the context of people who are already Christians. "Yes, teach Christians the basics of the Bible, and theology -- that's important" they may say.
They would agree with A.W. Tozer, as I would that

The gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most important fact about any person is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like…That our concept of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance… A right conception of God is basic not only to theology but to practical Christian living… I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to wrong thinking about God.

But I want to push things further than that. I want to propose that discipleship of the mind is something we need to focus on as a point of our mission, our evangelism -- its is central to how the gospel impacts and changes a people. This is why, when Jesus gave the Great Commission, he said that the disciples were to do two things as they went: baptize and teach (Matthew 28.16-20). According to Jesus, teaching people was part of the mission. You must teach people how to think, and what to think. Think about what? Everything: God, Humanity, Sin, Death, Life, Salvation, Origins, Meaning, Value, Destiny -- this is about constructing a worldview for people.

1980, Charles Malik came to speak at Wheaton College about evangelism, at the opening of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. He said this:

At the heart of all the problems facing Western civilization—the manifold perversions of personal character; problems of the family; problems of economics and politics; problems of the media; problems affecting the school itself and the church itself—at the heart of the crisis in Western civilization lies the state of the mind… The true the task of the evangelical world is not only to win souls, for if you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the world.

Our message to those outside the church is that the gospel is not about one aspect of your lives (some private corner of your heart, in some sentimental way), no, the gospel offers you a new Mind -- a different way to view everything!

As Ravi Zacharias often says: “God not only changes what we do, he changes what we want to do.”

There is so much more to say... but this is enough for now.

Television & Elections: Has the One Destroyed the Other?

It's election time in both Canada and the U.S. and that means attacks ads, political commercials and televised debates. I have heard so much discussion lately around Harper's knit-sweaters, Dion's glasses (not to mention Palin's), and how the TV hurts and helps both candidates in the U.S. Every night when my wife turns on Showbiz Tonight there is a segment, a long segment, called the Palin Factor--which talks about her latest clothes, hair-do and glass. When I hear the discourse of our culture revolving around such things it makes me laugh, and then it makes me kind of sad, and then scared pitless. During these times I always think back to a book I read years ago, which though published in 1984, before the invention of the Internet, still carries with it a great reminder to our culture about the ramifications of having our public discourse--whether it be about politics, religion or news--centered around such trivial things.

The book is Neil Postman's (1931-2003) celebrated and oft-quoted book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business wherein he argues that political philosophy cannot (and thus should not) be done on television. "Its form" he says "works against the content." Here are four points he makes. And I do not make these points in regard to one candidate over another (in either country)--because one could argue that television has helped and hurt all candidates.

First he says "Because we live in an image-centered culture it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high profile office. Probably bald people as well. Indeed we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control... Someone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred pound William Howard Taft, couldn't be put forward as a presidential candidate in today's world. In reality the shape of a mans body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas. But it is quite relevant on television. Television gives us a conversation in images not words."

Secondly he says "Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognizable had they passed by the average citizen in the street... To think about these men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham or Albert Einstein what will likely come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face. Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture."

Thirdly, he says in our move away from a print-based epistemology to an image-based epistemology much has been lost: "Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was generally coherent, serious and rational; but under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.... This shift in epistemology has had grave consequences for public life; we are getting sillier by the minute."

Postman believed that this leads to a kind of cultural death: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when a people become an audience, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility."

Fourthly, he makes a suggestion about political commercials: "I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestions that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials. I would gladly testify before the Federal Communications Commission as to the manifold merits of this excellent idea. To those who would say such a ban is a clear violation of the First Amendment I would offer a compromise: Require all political commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the effect that common sense has determined that watching political commercials is hazardous to the intellectual health of the community...Television serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse--new, politics, science, education, religion--and turns them into entertainments packages. We would all be better off if television got worse not better. "The A-Team" and "Cheers" are no threat to our public health. "60 Minutes," "Eye-Witness News" and "Sesame Street" are."

The reality is that we are an image-driven culture at every level -- the question is: has this helped us or hurt us in regard to the most important parts of our civilization?