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²² Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, the first man. But all who are related to Christ, the other man, will be given new life. ²³ But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised first; then when Christ comes back, all his people will be raised.

²⁴ After that the end will come, when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having put down all enemies of every kind. ²⁵ For Christ must reign until he humbles all his enemies beneath his feet. ²⁶ And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷ For the Scriptures say, “God has given him authority over all things.” (Of course, when it says “authority over all things,” it does not include God himself, who gave Christ his authority.) ²⁸ Then, when he has conquered all things, the Son will present himself to God, so that God, who gave his Son authority over all things, will be utterly supreme over everything everywhere.

Holy Bible : New Living Translation. 1997 (1 Co 15:21). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House.

…

⁵¹ But let me tell you a wonderful secret God has revealed to us. Not all of us will die, but we will all be transformed. ⁵² It will happen in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we will never die. ⁵³ For our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die.

⁵⁴ When this happens—when our perishable earthly bodies have been transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die—then at last the Scriptures will come true:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.

⁵⁵ O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

Holy Bible : New Living Translation. 1997 (1 Co 15:50). Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House.

Boyd made a few comments on Open Theism in a recent blog post.

…if it’s logically impossible for God to create a world in which the future is partly open, then those biblical authors who depict God as speaking and thinking about the future in terms of what might and might not come to pass (e.g. Ex. 13:17) or as changing his mind (e.g. Ex. 32:10-14) or as experiencing surprise and disappointment (Jer 3:7, 19; Isa 5:1-5) must also be asserting a logical contradiction, even if we interpret these depictions as “mere” anthropomorphisms. (Even anthropomorphisms must be logically coherent.) It is certainly difficult to see what it is about these depictions that’s logically contradictory, but not as difficult as it is to explain how passages presumably inspired by God could contain such impossible pictures of him in the first place.

If the above argument is valid, then the assumption that an omniscient God must by definition know the future as eternally and exhaustively settled is demonstrably false. God could create a world with an open future if he wanted to. The unique claim of Open Theism is that, not only is this kind of world possible, but scripture, experience and sound philosophy give us compelling reasons to think that, as a matter of fact, this is precisely the kind of world God created.

I don’t know much about open theism, but the little I have read intrigues me.

My wife was looking for something to help the boys’ speed with math facts, and remembered an old game they used to have on their computer called Funnels and Buckets.  I hunted for it online, and found that there are quite a few sites that stock old abandonware.  Most of these games have to be run inside a Dos emulator such as DOSBox.  I installed DOSBox and read the tutorial, and got the game to work.  Every time you start the game, you have to mount the folder it is in as a virtual drive via the DOS command line.  Then you type in the name of the game, hit alt+enter, and in a flash you go from Windows Vista Ultimate to 1980s-era DOS.  Cool!

The nice thing about games like Funnels is that they are very simple and just give children a little incentive to spout out math facts quickly.  Homeschoolers don’t have competition at flash cards, so things like this are needed to inspire them!

The following review was written for christianaudio.com’s reviewers program.

Believe it or not, this is the first I have ever heard/read anything written by John Piper, so this audiobook was my introduction to the author.

First off, I have to say that this is one of the best narrated audiobooks I have ever heard. Mr. Gardner does a masterful, masculine, and articulate reading. His narration has an authoritative yet reassuring tone.

The beautiful story of Ruth is used in this book to present the compelling message of God’s sovereign rule in our lives.

The subtitle of the book is somewhat misleading in terms of the major themes of the book. The sovereignty of God is the primary theme; sex and race seem to have been sub-points. Not being a Calvinist, and not having read much on the subject of God’s sovereignty from the Calvinist perspective, I was surprised to see how much I resonated with the message of the book.

The message of the book is that God in some way is behind everything – yes, everything – that happens to us.

As I listened to the book I thought of people I wish could hear this message. Please consider giving this audiobook as a gift to someone who has experienced grief or disappointment. It may bring hope and comfort to someone who is afraid that God is not good.

This audiobook can be purchased here.

I received an email from a very kind person with a screenshot of an offensive Google ad that appeared below one of my recent posts. I deactivated the Google Adsense plugin I was using. I apologize, and thanks to the person who pointed this out to me.

This is our 2009 Gingerbread House.  It’s a Victorian House – Michelle got the blueprint here.

Still listening to the Brothers Karamazov.  From chapter V:

“Yes, but you know, in reality it is so now,” said the elder suddenly, and all turned to him at once. “If it were not for the Church of Christ there would be nothing to restrain the criminal from evil-doing, no real chastisement for it afterwards; none, that is, but the mechanical punishment spoken of just now, which in the majority of cases only embitters the heart; and not the real punishment, the only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, which lies in the recognition of sin by conscience.”

In other words, the Church of Christ presents the only real solution to crime.  The prisons and civil courts can’t change people’s hearts.

I was listening to the newest wonderful free audiobook – Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov -from Christian Audio today and came across the following passage.  It made me think that Dostoevsky had some experience and wisdom related to how people get along with each other.

“… I am incapable of loving any one.”

She was in a very paroxysm of self-castigation, and, concluding, she looked with defiant resolution at the elder.

“It’s just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. “He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ ”

“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself…”

We often have big visions of making a difference in the world, of loving people selflessly, of giving our all for those whom Christ loves.  But as the above quotation illustrates, we often fall short in reality.

If you can read this my new Wordpress install is working.  I followed the instructions on this page and used Filezilla to upload the new files.  I was running a pretty old version of WP and read dire warnings about the need to upgrade.

We are enjoying using Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible as our home school Bible text.  I got the idea from a friend.  We read a story in the morning after breakfast and quiz the children with the study questions.
Online text

Study questions (Scans of original available here)

Livrivox audio recording