Randy Alcorn

إن كنتِ سيدة، وقد خضعتِ لعملية إجهاض، أو نصحتِ سيدة أخرى بالخضوع لها، فإن هذا المقال موجَّه إليك. وإن كنتَ رجلًا، وقد اشتركتَ في قرار إجهاض — سواء كان القرار يخص حبيبتك، أو زوجتك، أو ابنتك، أو أي شخص آخر، فهذا المقال أيضًا موجَّه إليكَ.

I think Charles Spurgeon comes as close as anyone I’ve read to articulating what Scripture as a whole reveals. Sadly, though I attended both a good Bible college and a good seminary, I never read Spurgeon or learned anything about him. I’d been a pastor for ten years before I discovered him, and then I couldn’t get enough of him.

Relativism dominates the thinking of most educated people (which means sometimes that uneducated people are morally smarter). The “it all depends” morality, controversial fifty years ago when called situational ethics, denies the existence of any objective standards of right and wrong. What’s wrong for one person, so it insists, may be right for another. One uses internal, not external, standards to judge morality.

Because work began before sin and the Curse, and because God, who is without sin, is a worker, we should assume human beings will work on the New Earth. We’ll have satisfying and enriching work that we can’t wait to get back to, work that’ll never be drudgery.

Question from reader: In Heaven, you make a case that we will have some type of body in the intermediate Heaven. So what body do we receive in 1 Thessalonians 4:17? It says, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”

If we don’t clean our dirty laundry, the world will hang it out on the line for everyone to see, every time. Our goal shouldn’t be to convince the world there’s no sin in the church. The world already knows there is, and so should we. And only if we do know will we do something to deal with and prevent it in Christ-honoring way.

When we’re asked to do worthless or unprofitable things, it doesn’t take much wisdom to say no, does it? Especially not when you do one of those things and think, “Okay, that was a waste…I’m never doing that again.” The real problem is all the good things we’re asked to do.

The problem of how we could possibly be reconciled with a God who hates evil is the greatest problem of history. Before we can see God in Heaven, something must radically change. This calls for no less than the greatest solution ever devised. 

Does it really matter whether we believe that God is happy? Yes—it matters more than anything has ever mattered, or ever will. Upon it hinges, for instance, whether or not we can believe God’s promises, like those found in Romans 8.