THE “CORPUS CLOCK” REMINDS OF MAN’S MORTALITY (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - A clock recently unveiled at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge teaches about the brevity of life and man’s mortality. Built and funded by inventor John Taylor, the clock features a grasshopper that “eats time” and tolls the hours by a coffin loudly banging shut. Taylor told the Associated Press, “I’m in my early 70s. When you’re a young person you think there is plenty of time. The sound was to remind me of my mortality” (“Cambridge’s Fantastical New Corpus Clock,” USA Today, Sept. 19, 2008). That’s a great lesson. It’s too bad that the gospel of Jesus Christ is no longer preached at Cambridge University to prepare men for death. Why remind men of their mortality if they are the mere product of blind evolution? “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (Hebrews 9:27-28).

EUTHANASIA’S SLIPPERY SLOPE (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Euthanasia’s slippery slope was witnessed by a statement made recently by an “ethicist” in Britain. In an interview with Life and Work, the Church of Scotland’s magazine, Baroness Warnock said, “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives--your family’s lives--and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service. I’m absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there’s a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they’re a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die. ... I think that’s the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you’d be licensing people to put others down” (“Dementia Patients Should Consider Ending Lives,” USA Today, Sept. 19, 2008). The Bible gives us the responsibility to provide for loved ones, but never are we told that we have the right to kill them! “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Tim. 5:8). It is a proud, foolish, and rebellious society that thinks it has the prerogative of God to end life whenever it wishes. Death is not dignified, and it is not a right; it is a punishment by God upon sinful man. We praise Him, though, that He has not left us to die without hope but He has made a way of salvation through the substitutionary death of His Son Jesus Christ. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). (For more on this see http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/rightdie.htm).

TODDLER IGNORED MOTHER’S WARNING (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Ignoring his mother’s warnings, a two-year-old boy removed a gun from his parents’ nightstand and shot himself to death. He had reached for the gun earlier, and his mother had grabbed his hand and told him, “No! Bad, boo, boos.” But as soon as she wasn’t looking, he removed the gun and shot himself in the eye. He was pronounced dead 90 minutes later (“Mother Warned Toddler,” The Hartford Courant, Sept. 19, 2008). There are many lessons in this sad account. One, of course, is the importance of keeping guns out of the reach of children. But another lesson, one that the regular news media will never mention, is the importance of effective child training. The Bible gives clear instructions on this matter, and it says that the training must begin early and must include the rod. Proverbs 13:24 says, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” The old English word “betimes” means early. John Gill defined it as “in the morning of his infancy, before vicious habits are contracted, or he is accustomed to sinning, and hardened in it.” A toddler can be taught to obey, but modern psychological child-training philosophies have been very destructive.

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC’S LOVE FOR THE WORLD (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Bible says, “Love not the world,” and, “Be not conformed to the world,” but Contemporary Christian Music blatantly ignores this. Consider DecemberRadio. Their first album in 2006 won a Dove Award for Rock Album of the Year, and Christianity Today named them Best Band of the Year and Best New Artist. They claim to be Christians and talk about God, but the gospel is nowhere given on their web site, and their biographical sketches only mention in a very hurried way “becoming a Christian” or “surrendering to Christ,” with no details whatsoever. Josh “became a Christian” at age seven; Brian, at age eight; Eric, at age six. Not only do they not give a clear testimony of salvation, but they also do not mention the church, though the Bible says that it is the house of God and the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). They say more about their musical influences than their saving relationship with Christ. They list Led Zeppelin, Herman’s Hermits, Rolling Stones, Black Crowes, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and other raunchy rock groups. On April 21, 2008, Josh Reedy and Erik Miker of DecemberRadio had an interview with John DeBiase of Jesus Freak Hideout. The following statements demonstrate their love for the world. “One thing that gets us excited as a band as far as making music and playing it live is seeing Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan and all of these guitar greats. What they were doing. What he did with Cream. From them to like Aerosmith, Tom Petty with his ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream’ thing. ... I’m really passionate about that era of music. There’s something special about it. ... The stuff that we all grew up on from our dad’s old record collections like Chicago and Led Zeppelin inspire us. ... [Brian, our guitarist] spends time on the computer just learning all of the licks from Eric Clapton and all these people. He learns all these things and just makes it his own.” After I was saved out of a rock & roll/drug background in 1973 at age 23, God spoke to me from the Scriptures (e.g., Romans 12:2; Ephesians 5:11; James 4:4; 1 John 2:15-17) and instructed me to put away the evil music of my past and to sing a new song, meaning new in character. I renounced the filthy, rebellious world of rock & roll then, and I renounce it today. The apostle John defined the world as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” A more perfect description of rock & roll has never been written. What is lacking in “Christian rock” is the fear of God. “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4).

RECREATING THE BIG BANG? (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Peter Galling, “A Miniature Big Bang or More Hot Air,” Answers in Genesis, Sept. 11, 2008: “Flowing champagne marked the startup this week of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a nearly 17-mile-long (27 km) tube located 300 feet (91 m) beneath the Swiss–French border. The new LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, designed to (essentially) hurl two beams of magnet-accelerated particles at each other inside a vacuum, with the inevitable, hoped-for result being some incredible collisions. ... A primary quest for the LHC is to create the as-yet unobserved Higgs boson, a theorized particle that would ‘help explain why matter has mass,’ according to CNN. The Higgs boson has even been referred to as the ‘God particle’ because physicists believe it may answer many other lingering ‘big questions’ in physics. ...  Also, a common theme in most, if not all, of the news stories describing the LHC is that the experiments there will, e.g., ‘recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the [b]ig [b]ang, when there was a hot soup of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved’ (in CNN’s words). The hype surrounding the LHC seems to falsely indicate that whatever happens in the LHC experiments, they will in various ways verify the big bang. However, our guess is that no matter what happens when the beams collide, researchers will use it to justify and/or explain what they believe happened in the moments after the big bang. After all, these scientists have faith that they are recreating big bang conditions; they will likewise have faith that the results mimic the ‘original’ big bang. The problem is that because the big bang was (allegedly) a one-time event--just like creation in Genesis--no amount of ‘repeating it’ nor any scientific experiments could provide evidence for it. Rather, it must be accepted on faith, and then the results interpreted within that framework. In other words, the LHC experiments will no more confirm the big bang than creationists could confirm Genesis 1 by shining a flashlight on a swimming pool on a dark night, saying, ‘Let there be light’ and leaning over the surface of the deep. If the Higgs boson is discovered, there is little doubt it will be held up as partial proof for the big bang model of origins. Yet subatomic particles, and the related physics, can also be explained within a biblical model of origins. Having faith in God’s account of origins (presented in Genesis) means that we, too, will be able to interpret and explain whatever good observational science the physicists conduct at the LHC.”

1925 MOSLEM GUIDE STATED THAT THE TEMPLE MOUNT IS JEWISH (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Since the 1990s there has been an Islamic campaign to deny that Israel ever had a temple in Jerusalem. This Temple Denial is intended to delegitimize Israel’s claim to the city. In The Fight for Jerusalem, Dore Gold describes the rapid spread of this propaganda: “Temple Denial spread across the Middle East like wildfire from the editorial pages of al-Jazirah in Saudi Arabia to well-funded international seminars in the United Arab Emirates. ... Temple Denial found fertile ground in the Arab world’s universities, particularly those with a more radical Islamist perspective, where it would affect an entirely new generation.” Gold gives many evidences for the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, including Josephus’ testimony, the Arch of Titus in Rome, and items that have been recovered such as temple plaques and coins. (See http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/temple-denial-vs-archaeology.html). Now there is new evidence. The Jewish Temple Institute recently acquired a copy of a 1925 guidebook published by the Supreme Moslem Council, which states the following: “Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which ‘David built there an altar unto the Lord’” (Arutz Sheva, Sept. 2, 2008). In March 2008, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced that for the first time in the history of archaeological research, remains from Solomon’s Temple have been found close to the Temple Mount (“First Temple Building Remains Found,” Arutz Sheva, March 17, 2008). Excavations done over the past two years have uncovered a “magnificent colonnaded street from the 2nd century” that sits directly on top of the layer from the First Temple period, thus having protected it from plunder in later periods.

IRAN PARLIAMENT PASSES APOSTASY DEATH BILL (Friday Church News Notes, September 26, 2008, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from the WEA Religious Liberty News, Sept. 22, 2008: “That apostasy (leaving Islam) is an enormously risky even deadly business in any Muslim country is not news to any apostate or to any serious religious liberty observer. That the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) does not always share this view, however, is news to many. Traditional Sharia Law mandates death for apostates based on the Hadith (saying of Muhammad) ‘Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him’ (Sahih Al-Bukhari, Vol. 9:57). ... An international revival of Sunni Wahhabism has been riding on the back of Saudi Arabian oil profits since the late 1970s. ... Now Iran is in the process of legislating to make apostasy and promoting apostasy (including through the Internet) mandatory capital offences in the name of protecting the State’s ‘mental security.’ ... Yet over recent years several Western countries have been returning Iranian Christian asylum seekers, including apostates, to Iran on the basis that the UNHCR claims they will not be persecuted. UNHCR take note: As Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports, ‘The Iranian Parliament voted on Tuesday [9 Sep] in favour of a bill stipulating the death penalty for apostasy. The bill was approved by 196 votes for, seven against, and two abstentions.’ ... The Khaleej Times (Dubai) in July reported the bill states that those convicted of these crimes ‘should be punished as mohareb (enemy of God) and ‘corrupt on the earth.’ The bill also stipulates that the punishment handed out in these cases ‘cannot be commuted, suspended or changed.’ ... On 10 September Compass Direct (CD) reported that two Iranian Christians have now officially been charged with ‘apostasy.’”