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| Volume 21 Number 8 August 2019 | Page 10 |
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| Volume 21 Number 8 August 2019 | Page 10 |
Mark McWhorter
Jeremiah, the prophet, was from a small town named Anathoth. This town was about two miles northeast of Jerusalem. It was a city of priests. Anathoth means “answer.” The word was used many times in regular speech to indicate the answers to prayer.
When Jeremiah prophesied to the kingdom of Judah, no one wanted to listen. Many simply ignored what he had to say, and some wanted to kill him. They did not want him preaching to them at all. The people of Anathoth were among these people.
In Jeremiah 11:21-23, we read about these terrible people. They told Jeremiah, “Prophesy not in the name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hand.” They continually threatened him with death if he told them what God wanted them to do.
This is so sad. Not only were the men priests, but they lived in the city that gave the picture of answers from God. The priests were the ones who were supposed to remind the people of the laws of God. They were supposed to lead the people in proper worship so that God would answer their prayers with blessings. The High Priest was the one who had the Urim and Thummim, through which God answered specific questions.
There were signs that God was bringing punishment upon Judah. The people were going to their false gods for answers to their problems instead of going to God. God was going to answer them anyway. However, the answer was going to be destruction because of their wickedness.
There are many people that do the same thing today. They have all kinds of problems in their lives. Yet, instead of going to God, they attempt to get answers from anyone who will say something to them. They go to false teachers for guidance. They go to false books. They go to false philosophies.
Do not be like the people of Anathoth. Get your answers from God. Study your Bible. Learn all you can from it. Obey God. If any of this is hard to understand, ask an adult to help you.
Darwin’s Cold Shudder
Donald R. Fox
Note the first sentences in an article entitled, “A Fin Is a Limb Is a Wing” by Carl Zimmer, National Geographic (November 2006). “The father of evolution was a nervous parent. Few things worried Charles Darwin more than the challenge of explaining how nature’s most complex structures, such as the eye, came to be. ‘The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,’ he wrote to a friend in 1860.” We understand that National Geographic is one of the most influential magazines that has publicized the false doctrine and counterfeit science of evolution.
To be sure, I believe Charles Darwin shuddered very often. Of a truth the Psalmist could write by inspiration of God, “I will praise thee: for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalms 193:14).
In Stephen Charnock’s classic, The Existence and Attributes of God (1:64-65), Charnock beautifully outlines the magnificent complex, interrelated, interconnecting workings of our body. He catalogs the “marvelous…works” of the heart, the mouth, the brain, the ear, the eye, etc.—all working in harmony and truly “wonderfully made.” Indeed, the complexity of the human body and the host of living creatures, as well as all sorts of vegetation, are all unexplainable if you leave God out of the equation as our Creator. Only God has the answer, and poor Charles Darwin, the “father of evolution,” must answer to His Creator. “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12).
With the remarkable eye let us also consider the ear. Charnock wrote:
The ear, framed with windings and turnings, to keep any thing from entering to offend the brain; so disposed as to admit sounds with the greatest safety and delight; filled with an air within, by the motion whereof the sound is transmitted to the brain: as sounds are made in the air by diffusing themselves, as you see circles made in the water by the flinging in a stone. This is the gate of knowledge, whereby we hear the oracles of God, and the instruction of men of arts. It is by this they exposed to the mind, and the mind of another man framed in our understanding.
Yes, Mr. Darwin, shudder at the “wonderfully made” creation from our God Almighty.