I saw the story about the mother who Tuesday hung her four daughters and herself in a closet in her home. By God’s sheer grace, the youngest and most helpless of the four daughters lived.

In the stories i saw on TV, one could tell that the sherriff was visibly shaken and horrified, as was everyone who learned of what this woman had done. It is absolutely preternatural for a woman to kill the children she has, with so much pain and anguish, brought forth into the world and given life then to kill them so brutally. Yet, this is not the first time that this kind of brutal murder has taken place. In that very town of Hudson Oaks, TX, not five years ago another mother likewise killed three of her children (shooting them in their sleep) before taking her own life. The infamous Andrea Yates killed her five little children by drowning them in the bathtub back in 2003 in Clear Lake, TX. Another woman in Plano, TX, drowned her two daughters in a bathtub, while in East Texas, one woman in 2003 beat her two young sons to death with stones. And the most horrendous of them all (if one can put a superlative on any of these terrible tragedies) is Dena Schlosser, a McKinney, TX, woman, who took a kitchen knife and sliced the arms from her ten-month-old child’s body, and then called 911—with, of all things, a Gospel song playing in the background as she did so.

I find it strangely ironic that all of these incidents have taken place in Texas. Having lived in Texas for three years, i know that it’s not the most exciting place to live; if the circumstances were not so grave, i might actually joke about life in Texas. But thinking on this sad, sad situation, i just can’t do that.

It’s hard to find any kind of meaning in this kind of tragedy. It would be easy for an Atheist to use this as anecdotal evidence of the vapidity of Christianity, not only because the Christian God, who supposedly (from their perspective) controls all things, could let this happen, but also because these women were either professing or nominal Christians.

One thing, though, that i came to embrace in coming to understand the Bible’s Covenant nature is that children are a blessing from Jehovah. However, that very Covenant God who has given his people children, who calls them his own, and who welcomes them into the fellowship of his Church (in all administrations of his Covenant), also warns that they will be part of the curse of the Covenant if his people are not faithful to him in the Covenant he so graciously and lovingly forged with them. Jehovah promises great things: Psalm 103:17-18, “But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts.” It’s not popular today in my ecclesiastical circles to emphasize it, but there is such a thing as Covenant-breaking. There are warnings all over God’s Word (even, as seen here, in the very midst of grand and glorious promises) against those who would fail to love Jehovah wholly and only, and would regard his commandments—for whatever reason—as secondarily important, rather than a way to repent from dead works and show one’s love for the God who brought us out of the miry clay and set our feet upon the solid rock of Christ.

Now, the thing i always hear from those who so disagree with this kind of thinking is a kind of reasoning that takes away the bite of these warnings. The reasoning says, in essence, that the warnings are there, not because God would really damn someone he has saved, but simply to keep them in line, that the warnings are the means by which the elect are kept, and the reprobates are led to (or established in) their damnation. They further explain that no one is really in Covenant with God unless he’s elect, truly regenerate, and trusting in Christ; anyone else who may look like he’s in Covenant simply isn’t and is deceived (and so, apparently, are the rest of us who regarded him as such). But it seems to me that there is nothing of these warnings left when you start applying all these ways to reason out of what God really says.

I am perfectly willing to say that not everyone who is in Covenant with God is a partker of eternal salvation; that much seems clear to me. Yet, the promises are there and they are held forth to those who have been incorporated into God’s Church and Covenant in a way that they are not held forth to those who have not. They are held forth as belonging to them by right and privilegdge of God’s grace, and they are called to respond in faith and love, and as a result, obedience to God’s commandments. Those who fail to do so, from the perspective of the Church and Covenant, are cut off from the life that God had promised them—even if, from God’s perspective, they were reprobates and their apostacy simply revealed what God’s decree was for them. I could go into more of this confusion between the decretal perspective and the preceptive perspective in a bunch of areas of theology, but i’ll leave that for another time. My point is, though, that God is not to be mocked, and his warnings are not to be explained away with any kind of explanations like,”If you’re really elect, this doesn’t apply to you.”

In Deuteronomy, Moses presented a handful of sermons explaining what God expected from the people as his people as they were entering the promised land. In chapter 28, Moses laid out the blessings and curses of the Covenant—blessings if they have faith in Jehovah and repent of their old ways, and curses if they faith to love him and obey him. In light of the story i originally mentioned, i wanted to draw attention to one of the curses that Moses mentions there.

The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities (Deut. 28:49-57, NIV).

Now that is a grisly prospect in itself: devouring one’s children without remorse because of the great tragedy that has befallen the nation. My daughter is 19 months old now, and i have one on the way, and i literally shudder to think of such a dastardly thought as eating one’s own children for food.

Granted, the tragedies that we have seen in recent years (especially numerous in Texas for some reason) isn’t exactly like murdering their children for food, but then again, neither is abortion (though, there are reports to the contrary in some quarters, which others claim to be urban legends spread by Christians to engender outrage at abortion—though, without question, there is a market to eat the afterbirth). The point is, though, that Scripture ties together a depraved lack of regard for the most helpless in society and a willingness to engage in such preternatural acts as slaughtering and eating infant children and afterbirth with God’s judgment that falls for a lack of Covenant faithfulness. This is not something we can ignore or dismiss based on decretal ideas about who is elect and who is not. This is happening in a largely Christian nation, especially in a decidedly Christian state like Texas to people who, most likely, are at least nominal Christians.

Now, lest i sound like a pessimistic Christain (i am an Amillennialist, but an optimistic one), let me say that i don’t expect all things to get worse and worse ’til Jesus comes to rescue us from ourselves. I do believe that the Gospel will have an effect on the world in a positive way (and already has by any accounting of the facts). Yet, i also believe that there is such a thing as the falling away at the end, when, after Satan is released from his “thousand-year” prison in the abyss, he will again go around leading the world astray—but especially he will lure away many who claim the name of Christ, even as he did long ago in Israel. Paul confirms this, and even connects this time with unnatural desires and actions, in the final Scriptural letter he wrote before his death, 2 Timothy.

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

My fear is that these are only the beginnings of things to come, because i believe that the Church in the West, and even in America, for all their posturing on moral issues, has failed fundamentally to be the Church and obedient to God’s Covenant. It will not do the Church any good to come out and condemn the murder of children—whether born or unborn—because we have surrendered all ground upon which we would have any kind of moral foundation. We must stop blaming the culture around us for all the ills that have befallen our nation and start blaming ourselves for letting the culture around us become so corrupt on our watch. We must repent and seek the Lord’s face, and then, perhaps, he will turn and remove the curse he has sent upon our land.

You’ve probably heard about it from other blogs, but here is a very fair-minded and sober letter written to question why the Ad Interim Committee on FV/NPP/AA did what it did. The questions they ask are very good, and really are a more brief rehashing of some of the issues that Jeff Meyers brought out in his 30 Reasons essay (and now, the pared down 12 Reasons essay) expounding the numerous faults of the committee, from its very composition to its very inbalanced findings.

Some anti-FV folks have been asking why it is just now that people have been questioning the composition of the committee if it was apparent from the beginning that so many of the members of the committee had already made their views against the FV public. The simple answer to that question is that, to most fair-minded people (FV and non-FV alike), it was at least possible that people who didn’t personally agree with FV emphases could put forward a balanced and fair report that presents the views in question with dignity and charity. Most people i know on all sides were hoping that would take place, even as we were disappointed at the formation of the committee last summer. It is obvious, though, that the moderator and his hand-picked heresy-hunters were incapable of being balanced or charitable in their assessment of views that diverge from their own. It is right, then, even at this late date, knowing the lack of charity with which the report presents the views of the FV men, to point out the lack of balance on the committee, and even how it violates Robert’s Rules.

I have a feeling that the report will still pass, but i am at least a little encouraged that men who have specifically said that they are not part of the FV conversation are opposed to the report as it now stands and as it is being presented to the PCA General Assembly.

Well, i watched the LOST finale tonight after we got home from church. If you haven’t watched it (and you want to before any spoilers), just stop reading now, and go here and watch the episode.

Spoiler Synopsis:  

The episode started with some flashbacks of Jack with a beard. He was actually going to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge, but just as he was going to, a car crashed on the bridge preventing him from doing it. He went to save the people, and ultimately was seen as a hero. All through the various flashbacks, he contined to demonstrate a marked addiction to Oxycodone and alcohol. At one point, while he was trying to smuggle some Oxycodone out of the hospital, he was confronted by the new chief of surgery (who wouldn’t allow Jack to operate on the woman he had rescued from the car crash) on being drunk. Jack rejoined that, if he called his father there, and Jack was drunker than his father, the cheif could fire him right there. He was obviously struggling, all through those various flashbacks, with great depression, especially having read an obituary about the death of a friend (we aren’t told who it was, but when Jack went to the viewing, no one except him had shown up).

Back with the attempt to thwart the “Others” and stop the blocking of radio signals, Charlie, who had gone down to the underwater Looking Glass station from the outrigger he and Desmond were on, had been tied up and was being beaten by the two women who were the station’s attendants. Apparently, Ben had told everyone among his people that the Looking Glass was flooded, and they didn’t know that it’s function was to block all radio transmissions except for those Ben controls. They radioed Ben and told him that he had come down, and Charlie let them know that Juliette had told the lost party that the station was there and what it did. So, now, Ben and all his compatriots were suspicious of Juliette’s loyalty. Tom questioned what else Juliette might have told them, and of course, what everyone was thinking in that regard was the raid on the camp to take all the pregnant women, in which Juliette was supposed to mark the tents and let the raiding party know which had pregnant women in them.

Back at the camp, Jack and everyone excep Sayid, Jin, and Bernard had left to go to the radio tower. Those three who stayed behind to blow up the dynamite were successful in blowing up two of the three marked tents with the explosives (Jin’s aim being off with his handgun), and while they killed seven of the “Others” from the raiding party that came to take the pregnant women, three of them remained alive, and captured Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. They radioed Ben and told him that the mission had been compromised. Ben wanted to know just where all the stranded party (including Danielle, the French woman on the island before the plane crashed, and Carl, the boyfriend of Alex, Ben’s supposed daughter), so he told the survivors to question the three there, but of course they weren’t talking. Ben then told them to shoot Jin to get Sayid or Bernard to talk. Of course, as they were just about to shoot him, Bernard squealed like a pig about everything the group was doing, thinking that he was saving Jin’s life. Ben told his men not to kill the three…yet.

In response, Ben then set out to meet the group on their way to the radio tower, and he also sent Mikhail (the Russian with the eye-patch) to the Looking Glass to take care of Charlie and the women there. Ben, in going to meet the group, was planning on trying to convince Jack not to contact Naomi’s ship with her satellite phone (Naomi was the woman who parachuted onto the island from a damaged helecopter, who claimed there was a ship 80 miles off the island). Surprisingly, when his his sixteen-year-old daughter, Alex, said she wanted to go with him, he allowed it and even encouraged it. On the way there, he let her know that Carl had betrayed the “Others” group and Ben to the crash survivors and that the reason he was allowing Alex to come was to take her to her new home with the group.

Mikhail had made it to the beach to go down to the Looking Glass station, and Desmond was just waking up from being knocked out by Charlie before he dove down to the station. Mikhail started firing his rifle at Desmond in the outrigger, and there was nothing to do but to go down. He happened to come up through the floor just when the women were in the control room arguing among themselves about what to do with Charlie. Charlie told Des to hide, and so he went into a locker closet just off of the deck surrounding the pool. The women heard Charlie talking, and came out asking him who he was talking to, but he started singing one of the songs from his band to cover. Charlie was confident that he would shut off the jamming signal, but the women informed him that he would need the code–something he had known nothing about until they told him–and only they and Ben knew it. Charlie, though, knowing his fate from Desmond’s vision, knew he would somehow shut off the jammer, and so he just went on singing. One of the women, angry at his singing, said she was going to get a spear gun to shoot him, but the spear gun just happened to be in the locker closet where Desmond was hiding, and so Charlie did his best to keep her from opening it. But just before she was opening the locker, Mikhail came up from the pool. He was surprised to find the station not flooded and functional, and with two women he thought were on another mission somewhere manning the station. He told them about Desmond coming down, but they had no idea he had come down. Mikhail questioned Charlie about where Desmond went, but Charlie retorted with asking a more important question about why Ben was jamming all signals from the island (this would be important to Mikhail who lives in another satellite station that he believed was inoperable) and why the station was not flooded like Ben had said. Mikhail radioed Ben for an explanation, and Ben was falling all over himself trying to explain and apologize for lying to Mikhail, but he assured him that everything he did, he did for the island. Ben told Mikhail to kill Charlie, and also to take care of the women there. When he came out of the room where he was talking with Ben on the radio, he questioned the women about the station and its functionality, and then he shot the women, killing one, and mortally wounding the other. Just then, Desmond burst from the closet and shot Mikhail with a spear gun in the middle of the chest. Desmond got the gun Mikhail had and was going to finish off the other woman, but Charlie stopped him and told him that she has the code they need to shut off the jammer. Delirious, she started rattling off a long list of numbers, but Charlie couldn’t get them down. She finally said that the code are notes from a specific song, “Good Vibrations,” by the Beach Boys. She finally fades, and Charlie goes into the control room where he sees the touchpad. Being musician, he had no trouble tapping out the notes from the opening lines of “Good Vibrations” on the keypad, and as soon as the jammer was off, there was an incoming message. He turned it on, and saw that it was Penelope, Desmond’s former fiance, who had been looking for him, and from whose ship Naomi said she had come to look for Desmond. When Charlie asked, though, Penelope knew nothing of the ship or Naomi’s helecopter ride to the island. Just as Charlie was calling Desmond to come and speak to Penny, though, Desmond discovered that Mikhail’s body was no longer lying where it was, and Charlie heard a knocking outside the porthole of the control room, and he saw Mikhail in his scuba suit holding a grenade. He shut the hatch door in Desmond’s face, just as the grenade exploded and shattered the porthole glass. Charlie seemed to contemplate his fate of drowning after turning off the jammer, and then wrote a message on his hand to give to Desmond: “NOT PENNY’S SHIP!” The room filled with water, and Charlie seemed to fade away.

Back on the island, Ben had gone to intercept the group heading when Ben caught up with them, he took Jack aside to talk to him, and Jack took his walkie-talkie. Ben told Jack that Naomi is not who she says she is, and that if he allows her to contact her ship, every single living person on the island will die. Ben likened the decision Jack had to make to a decision Ben himself had to make a while back, when over 40 people died in a single day. Of course Jack didn’t believe Ben’s claims, thinking them to be what he’s always known them to be: lies. Ben asked for his radio back, telling Jack that there’s something he needs to see. Ben radios Tom and the other two men holding Jin, Sayid, and Bernard, and informs Jack that he has them, and that they would be killed if Jack didn’t go and get the satellite phone from Naomi and give it to him. Jack asked him what would stop him from just snapping Ben’s neck. Ben then told the surviving men from the raiding party that if they don’t hear his voice in one minute, shoot all three of the men they were holding. Jack struggled with it, but he knew that Sayid had told him that he was willing to die if it meant everyone getting rescued. He refused to go get the phone, and all one could hear over the radio is three shots. Jack’s emotions then were out of control on hearing the shots that killed his friends, and he beat Ben brutally, and then took him back to the group. As Alex was hovering over her bloodied and beaten father, Danielle came over and was standing over them both; Ben informed Alex that Danielle is her mother.

Meanwhile, Sawyer, Juliette, and Hurley had gone back to the original camp where the ambush of the raiding party was to take place. Sawyer insulted Hurley about his weight to get him to go back, and so only Juliette and Sawyer proceeded on to the camp. Hurley, though, just wanted to find a way to be useful to help everyone. When Juliette and Sawyer got there to the camp, they saw that they were outnumbered and outgunned, but apparently their friends were still alive, the raiding party having fired three shots in the ground instead of shooting the men, because they saw how Ben was going off the deep end. Just as Juliette and Sawyer were coming to the realization that they were outnumbered and wondering how they could rescue their friends, they heard some kind of noise coming from the jungle behind them. Just then, the minibus that Hurley had started (the one we later found out that had Ben’s dead father, Roger, in it when Ben killed him) was barrelling through the woods and into the camp, running over one of the captors and knocking over Tom. Sawyer rushed behind the minibus, kept Hurley inside, and grabbed the gun the man who had been run over dropped. Sayid, though tied up and gagged, managed to sweep the legs out from under the other man, and held him in a headlock with his legs. Sawyer kicked away the gun that Tom had before he could get it back, and though he said he surrendered, Sawyer shot him in the chest. Hurley radioed Jack and the group to tell them that everyone was OK, including the three men that Jack and Ben thought were dead.

Jack and his group finally reached the radio tower, and they turned off the message Danielle had recorded sixteen years earlier when she crashed on the island. Naomi saw that the signal was no longer being jammed, and she was trying to get a signal, and as she walked out of the station below the radio tower and acquired a signal, Locke (who had been shot by Ben, and apparently had been paralyzed again; it was actually Walt who, somehow, came to the pit where he lie and encouraged him not to shoot himself, which he was about to do) threw a knife and killed Naomi just as the phone was connecting. Locke told Jack not to touch the phone, threatening to shoot him if he did, but Jack reached for it anyway and picked it up. Locke told Jack that he wasn’t supposed to do this, but Jack told him that he was through keeping him on the island. The phone had been ringing, and a man picked up on the other end of the phone. Jack told him who they were and that they had found Naomi (but not that she was dead), and asked if he could get a fix on their location. The man said that he could and that they’d be there shortly. Everyone was elated, as expected.

The final scene shows Jack back in one of the flashbacks where he was addicted to drugs, drinking alot, and very depressed. He was apparently in his home, which was an absolute mess. He reaches to his cellphone to call someone, and tells the person on the other end of the line that, in spite of the fact the person told him not to, he was calling anyway, because he needed to see the person, and that they should meet at the airport. He went to the airport, just off of the runway, and a car pulled up, and up walked, of all people, Kate. He told her about the person who had died, and he told her that he wanted to die, which is why he’d been flying so much. He said he wanted to back, and that they had made a mistake to try and leave the island. As she pulled off, he yelled at her, “We have to go back!”

My thoughts:

Well, it’s obvious that the “flashbacks” in this episode were actually “flashforwards,” or better yet, what took place on the island were the flashbacks. This was after everyone had been rescued, and Jack’s life was falling apart. He regretting trying to leave the island and defying Ben and Locke.

It seems that Ben may actually have been telling the truth when he said that Naomi wasn’t who she said she was, especially since Naomi said that Penelope was the one who had sent her to look for Desmond, and according to Penelope’s account to Charlie, that wasn’t so.

One funny little thing i noticed, though, was that Jack, in those “flashforwards” referred to his father as still being alive, while in the first season, we saw that his father died in Sydney. In an episode in the first season, Jack saw his father walking around, but we were expected to chalk it up to Jack’s overactive imagination. But there may be something to it.

Also, this will be about the third time that Mikhail has been killed in some way unsuccessfully. Taken with the guy who recruited Juliette (Richard), one of the original inhabitants of the island before the Dharma Initiative came to the island, who doesn’t seem to have aged from the time Ben was a young kid, it seems that Mikhail may have been one of those “hostiles” that the Dharma Initiative fought against and by whom they were defeated. Some kind of immortality seems to be at work.

I didn’t recount it in my synopsis, but a running undercurrent in this episode was that the “Others” had to trust Ben and his leadership in Jacob’s name, or else everything that they had would unravel. I’m starting to think that my original idea that this show is about the conflict between faith and reason, free will and predestination, religion and secularism, &c., but it may appear that the “Others” represent religion in general (in a kind of cultic way, which is the way that many secularists look at religion in general). Given that there is some kind of unseen being (named “Jacob”) communicating to Ben, and given that the people following him must do so blindly, and given that there is a promise (or in some cases, an experience) of immortality and curing of all disease and sickness through the mysterious power of the island, which island also affords a dark and sinister “smoke monster” that is the seeming embodiment of evil, and they are trying to keep all the people there fon the island from leaving and also trying to recruit others to come: it just seems to me that this is presented as some kind of religious analogy or corollary. These hateful and murderous people are the “religious” ones, and that’s all that religion leads to. Religious philosophy is obviously the undercurrent, given the names of many of the characters are the exact names of famous religious philosophers (e.g., Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist; John Locke, the secular, even anti-Christian, philosopher; David Hume, whose name is shared by Desmond, was a secular, naturalist, and skeptical philosopher, &c.).

What will be interesting, though, is to see what leads to Jack’s depression and disappointment, if possibly, there is something we don’t know about that will affirm Ben’s contention that, really, they are the “good guys,” and there are others who are trying to fight against them and destroy what they have who are really the “bad guys.”

Who else watches? Any thoughts?

…Pat Robertson is singing his praises! Who ever thought that CBN or the 700 Club would do a story on the Logos School and New St. Andrew’s College, both in Moscow, Idaho, with connections to the church that Doug Wilson pastors.

I must say, though, that classical education is a definite benefit. Whether in schools like Logos or in-home education, i believe that the “Trivium” should be part of Christian education.

Take a look at the story (just over 8 minutes). Very interesting, in more ways than one.

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As you could see in the last post, there is a tree in the front yard. In the original pictures in 2005, it was a nice, thriving tree, with much promise. Now, i think, due to the low spot that floods in the front yard, the tree is dead. I think there is an illustration of the Christian life here: in the case of Covenant breakers, while all the promise and indications of life were there at one time, life gets choked out, and only death follows, save for God’s granting repentance and mercy.

In the mean time, though, i have to get that tree and stump up somehow. I’m going to have to dig up around the stump, and then i’m going to have a guy in our town to come pull it up with his dump truck. Also, there were some rhododendrons across the front, and these pictures were taken a few months after they had been cut back. Before this, though, they were up to the roofline, and since then, having never been cut, they were almost that big again. I dug all five of them up, but i had to mutilate them so to get them up and the roots were so big that i didn’t have any hope of saving them and transplanting them. But even before i could remove those bushes and those on the side of the house, i had to remove all the rock mulch that had been in those beds for nearly 20 years. I hate rock mulch as much as i hate anything.

You can also see in these new set of pictures that i got a big load of dirt. That’s to fill in the low spot, where i am going to put a new bed, and also to build up the other beds in front of the house and at the end of the sidewalk. You can see where i’ve marked the yard for the new beds and started on preparing them. I’ve still got alot of work to do.

I’ve been working in the yard all day today. Having purchased a bagger for my lawnmower last week, i put it together today and cut the grass. The problem i’m facing, though, is that it keeps clogging up. I think it has to do with how much grass i was trying to cut. Looks like i won’t be able to cut the grass as short when i’m picking up the clippings as when i normally cut it without all that. It took me *FOREVER* (or so it felt) to cut the grass this afternoon and evening. What a job!

I’m still in the process of trying to landscape the manse here. I’m hoping to post some pictures of “before” (some pictures we took of the manse before we even moved in), some picutres of “in progress,” and the “completed” pictures when it’s done (or when the various stages are done). I doubt many people will care all that much, but it’s what is consuming most of my time these days, and i thought i could share it all with the few of you who read this blog.