Weekly Update | August 18

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Casting Lots and Determining God's Will

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What is the deal with casting lots in the OT and why is it used in the NT? Was this a valid way to determine the will of God? Can we cast lots today to determine God’s will for ourselves? When I first became a Christian and began to read through the Bible, This subject led to some very challenging questions that I could not find answers to. Recently, our pastor, David, has been taking the church through the book of Acts on Sunday nights and last Sunday we read about how the disciples used lots to decide who the replacement disciple would be for Judas Iscariot. This reminded me of my own question that I had before and how many others may also be questioning this as well. Why would believers use what would appear to be a system of chance in order to distinguish the will of God? To answer this question, let’s look at 3 things. First, we will need to understand just what “lots” is and what it was used for. Second, we will look at an OT passage in which it was used. Finally, we wil
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Inclusionist, Exclusionist, Pluralist...What do they all mean?

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While I was preparing this week to be on a panel for the discussion of theological issues I came across a very difficult question that pushed me to spend some time solidifying my own doctrine on a certain issue. The question came from a student in our youth group: "How can a person who has never been exposed to the gospel (through no fault of his own) be expected to come to a saving knowledge of Christ?" This simple question has been discussed for centuries and divided denominations since the first denomination was formed. Dr. Ken Keathley, now a professor at a Southern Baptist seminary wrote an interesting work on this very question. His paper delineates the differences between the three schools of thought on the issue presented. The excerpt presented below is from his paper titled, "None Dare Call it Treason: Is an Inclusivist a Paul Revere or a Benedict Arnold?" appearing in the Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry, Vol. 1 No. 2. "Exclusivism holds that
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The Trinity and The Triple Point

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In our monthly theological discussion group, a group of men and I recently discussed the Trinity . We now understand the Trinity to be: The unity of God subsisting in three distinct persons. We reviewed the different views of the Trinity, how the concept is defined in the Bible, and how it has come to be accepted as the orthodox view currently. At the close of our discussion , we began to discuss the different analogies of the Trinity. Here are a few that we discussed through the direction of Millard Erickson's book "Christian Theology." First, we talked about the egg. The egg has the yoke, the surrounding liquid, and the shell. All of these make up the egg. The egg is like the Trinity in that it has three parts unified into one egg. This is obviously an incomplete analogy since each of the parts of the egg are not really completely separated and yet totally unified. Each part of the egg has a different nature. So the egg analogy fails. What about the human/humanity ana
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