I recently was posed with this question for one of my Bible classes, and although I didn't take it the way the professor was probably expecting, I felt it was particularly applicable to my blog. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
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1. What can we do as Christians to promote more justice in this world of hatred? For example, we have churches from various ethnic backgrounds that don’t seem to have fellowship/partnership with one another. We have drawn a clear distinction along the social and ethnical lines.

Unfortunately, this is a very difficult question to answer. Our society is still heavily segregated along various social an ethnic lines most often due to the overarching societal stigmas that are constantly battled and placed on us by the media and our government. I think of affirmative action as an example of being one of the most blatantly government forced segregation made.

The very fact that it is such a big deal that our President in the United States of America is black is an indicator of our segregated attitudes. Unfortunately, we tend to want to force people to not segregate by any manner of coercion: political, guilt, or violent. This however tends to cause the opposite of the intention to result. For instance, one of the absolute worst ways to help those who are poor is to increase or have welfare at all. In addition, things like, Medicaid, social security, welfare, unemployment, are all increasingly detrimental to the poor of society rather than beneficial. This fact is incredibly ironic when it is considered that such programs coerce people into recognizing who the poor are (discrimination) and “help” them, when in fact it hurts them both socially and fiscally.

I am distinctly of the opinion that if we ever want to change the views of American society on social and ethnic segregation, it will come by the lack of acknowledgement of their existence and by simply once again viewing people as people regardless of any denotation into a certain group that person may have. This is a very Christian idea as Christ always viewed people as people and not as a person of a group. I think about the women who was about to be stoned who Jesus saved from that peril. It is interesting that all the men who were to stone her simply saw her as being a part of an “adulterous” group, while Jesus saw her as an individual who had specific needs, and concerns that needed to be met in order to change and follow God.

This video is extremely important in understand the immorality of our large-government interventionist policies that cause chaos and destruction throughout the world. It is also deeply moving if you do indeed understand why we are where we're at.

My latest posts have been mostly about the state of affairs in our country and the moral ramifications thereof. So I feel that it's time for a change of pace. I hope you enjoy and find this next post both interesting and perhaps challenging.
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The title for this entry is a simple question which could be easily answered in a simple fashion as well. However, due to many of our modern ideas about God, such a question is no longer so simple.

Unfortunately, there are ideas that have begun circulating around that God is an 'Omni' God. I'm sure many of you have heard the sermon about the "attributes" of God, I never really took much time to memorize them since they were never particularly useful to me, but I believe that they are, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotence. Firstly, if God has a chance at being any of them He might be omnipresent and omnipotent, but this may just be because I have yet to find conflict within these ideas. However, there are several things that are important to note when having this discussion.

First, none of these 'omni' words are used in the Bible. These words were created and while their definitions are found within the Bible, to simply claim them to be correct can inappropriately ignore the context with which the words were written.

Second, omniscience (all-knowing) is not required for God to know what he will choose to do in the future. This is a big one, because I would argue that every account within the Bible where it claims that God knew that something would come to be can be a true statement simply because God knows what he will do.

Third, the omniscience of God, when applied to knowing what we will choose, goes against the entirety of free will and removes all will for any action.

Having said these three things, I would then put forth that it is possible for God to have hope for us and it is from that that God is filled with joy and consequentally we can be filled with joy. To provide a concrete example of God having hope for the future (why would God have hope if he knows what's going to happen?) take a look at Amos 9:11-15. Here we can see that God is wishing for something different in the future, but he has already laid out that it is contingent upon the people of Israel.

So what does that mean for us? If God has hopes and desires for our lives, in what way should that affect us? I submit that it should give us the footing to make decisions in our lives that in faithful submission to the love that God has shown to us. It should cause us to review every aspect of our lives in a way that there is no such thing as 'secular' and 'religious' because your entire life will be God centered.