Thanks to extensions on Chrome, I can easily double click on a word in say, the email newsletters from Classical Archives on Tchaikovsky to learn words I either don't know or don't know how to pronounce.
Voluminous: large volume
Credence: believable
proviso: a stipulated condition
It seems that may Christians fall for the quote: Pride is the root of all evil. It's a famous quote. It's in Hollywood, it's what our American Christians seem to love saying or using. They would conflate every bad thing with pride, to their errs.
This is likely from the Roman Catholics. They (St. Gregory the Great) would source it from their apocryphal Ecclesiasticus 10: The beginning of pride is sin. This is nowhere found in Scripture.
However, 1 Timothy 6:10 did attribute the root of all evil to the love of money. And Stephen Tong clarified this from James 1:15, by emphasizing that pride is not the root, but self:
“己”过大 (over-satisfy)，人就贪心；
“己”过高 (over-estimate)，人就骄傲；
“己”好面子 (narcissistic)，人就虚假；
This is started because of the Beatitudes series done by GCC's pastor on Thursday nights' Bible Study. I think it is very good that we do this in person rather than on Zoom. More people were participating, discussing. Even though the pastor would likely just do this one chapter of the book. So I'll skip first to do Chapter 5.
I see a growing (2-3 families) number of folks coming to our church from the Methodist Churches. Now I already know of that denomination's problem today, either in USA (Modernism i.e. LGBTQ+) and the East (Charismatic leaning), with the Western side being infected worse.
After listening to some of these folks sharing their views in the Bible studies, I find that something's off, something's missing. One love to use the phrase "don't sell your soul to the devil", or "pride is the root of all evil", etc. These are far from reformed and have connotation to modernist and Catholicism.
After googling for "When did the United Methodist Church split" and reading this article, I'm now certain that I was right, that this denomination, incorporated heavily with the holiness movement in the 19th century, wasn't well prepared to deal with the attach of Modernism in the early 20th century. Unlike the Presbyterians and the Baptists, who vigorously challenged the Modernist movement in the 1920-30, Reformed on the Presbyterian side, and Fundamentalist on the Baptist side, the United Methodist church gave in to Modernism. Perhaps due to the holiness movement was seemed very legalistic and though the denomination could be credited for being more active than other denominations in humanitarian works, such as abolition of slavery, their pharisaical movement caused them to surrender to the Modernist movement when their leaders and lay leaders failed to meet the high legalistic demand. Until 1966, Rev. Charles Keysor sparked the Good News movement, a sort of fundamentalist, evangelical movement, attacking the Modernist movement with the 5 famous points (Inerrancy of Scripture, Virgin Birth, Jesus' deity - it seems that Keysor replaced this with the Lord's second coming instead?, sacrifice for sins, resurrection) that the fundamentalists back in the 1930s had already dealt with. I think 1966 is just too late. Just like Rome, with their 2nd Vatican Council in 1962-1965 (Vatican II), against Modernism, Relativism and Neo-Paganism.
I think this would blow their minds, the folks that came to our church. I doubt they were aware of their history. Had they known, they wouldn't be sharing how shocked they were that their old denomination had fallen away doctrinally. For all they know, they think they've inherited the faith of the great Evangelists the likes of John Wesley.
I shall begin to be harsher when threating their denomination as I did last Sunday speaking to a couple, of whom the wife grew up in the Methodist church. I flatly told her that it was leaning towards heresy, to which she seemed surprised, even though she was already aware of the basic bad doctrine detection. I had to bring up LGBTQ+ issue every time just to get them to agree with my stand against their former denomination. Thus, this is my conclusion, that they were not aware of their former denomination's history, which at this point, is a no brainer for me. Maybe not so, the me 30 years ago - besides I was dealing with a different kind of Methodists (the Eastern more Evangelical Pentecostal leaning kind), but not anymore now.
Some brought starbucks coffee, etc. And I came across two posts on FB, first one by MERF's pastor Paul Murphy. Second one from a shared post where I answered in two ways (one for original post and the other from the shared):
I agree. However, if you had to say it, perhaps you need to consider deeper. There are churches where you immediately felt the solemnity from the service, yet some others you feel very relaxed, playful, murky, etc. from the music, lighting, tones in sermons, sitting postures & attires on pulpit, etc. So, maybe not too quick to point fingers.
Although in Murphy's case, there are some honest, convicted response:
Nate Kamphuis: Ouch. This past Sunday morning was the 1st and only time I have had coffee in a service, and just happened to be when you were there preaching. I will admit it felt wrong!
Nevertheless, that does not mean I was wrong. In fact, this would only cause further confusion if my point is ignored and become an unnecessary burden for folks like Nate, plunging him into legalism: Because you make God's house feel relaxed enough to sip a coffee with your sermons, the tone of your pulpit and church atmosphere, yet you expect YOUR Word, to be treated as God's word by your listeners instead of the other way around (God's word flowing out of your work), it ultimately shows that you want people to obey you first because you believe you hold the righteous talking stick, whether they love God or not.
I've been contemplating between using an infinite canvas or Excel Spreadsheet to build the illustration. I intend to illustrate at least all 4 major views of the millennial eschatology. With Bible verses supporting each views as detail as possible in this infographics. There are already great illustrations out there, but none of them comes with supporting verses, at least I have yet to see one online. So I shall start one, in order to make it easier to refer to the differences in scriptural interpretation in the future.
From Wikipedia: 4 major views: Premillennialism (Post-tribulational vs. Pre-tribulational/Dispensational), Postmillennialism, Amillennialism.
For easier note-taking, I will build the spreadsheet instead of the infinite canvas. I think I can insert new lines easier in Excel than in some canvas. The excel sheet is shared online and will be built based on the above illustration.
Some key terms:
The already = the present blessings of the kingdom of God
The not yet = the eternal blessings of the consummation
example in debates between optimistic postmillenarians vs. pessimistic amillenarians
Amil.: the postmil. are confused about the already and the not yet.
Here's some challenge from folks who think they are both reformed and dispensationalists.
2/5/2024 Apparently someone thinks they can make their own 12-month MBA program that's better than any other institutes. I am interested.
2/3/2024 The Tim Keller quote: It's a shocking message: careful obedience to God's law may actually serve as a strategy for rebelling against God. The was reposted again recently on FB. I remember when it first came out while Keller was still alive, lots of fundamentalists had problem with it, they even made a caricature of it in the picture of the serpent asking Eve "Did God really say that?" implying Keller as the serpent.
2/2/2024 While cleaning my desk, I came across the 8/27/23 Church Bulletin that I did not logged my notes here. So here it is: GCC sermon by Pastor Chris on Haggai 1:7-11 "Consider The Lord". At some point he remarked that Elon Musk plan to Mars is more curse than blessings. I would comment that it depends on motive, otherwise we would not have airplanes.
During Sunday School, this day seemed to be the one that we discussed the word Temptation and Matt and I found that unlike Chinese or maybe Greek? that English is lacking in sufficient coverage of the word "temptation". In chinese we distinguished 试探 (tempt, bad) vs. 试炼 (test, trial, challenge, good). The Discussion then went on to Christ's Temptation, where the pastor linked Christ's impeccability to God. I would stress here that impeccability only applies to a creature, because it is a creaturely word. So it makes sense to apply it to a God-man, but not God, who is creator and thus impeccability does not nor should be permitted to apply to God. However, because the God-man is impeccable, thus we can say that this is due to the hypostatic union of Christ to His divine nature or person, in one person. I scribbled further but I think it may deserve further research before I fully commit to my scribbling in the bulletin: How temptation and Impeccability/Peccability are connected.
2/1/2024 Came across this news for Mr. You regarding a man suing Bayer for using glyphosate in their product and supposedly the cause of his cancer. He won the case for $2.25 billions, which I think is ridiculous. Only in a liberal's all about individual human right twisted ethic. This drew my interest because glyphosate was mentioned. And it's still a debatable topic whether it's harmful or not to human in this context. Bad interpretation of natural revelation = bad science. Glyphosate is the main keyword I use to look for herbicide. All other active ingredients are a joke. The environmental activists can go suck it. Salt and vinegar have proven effective as well.
An intro to three.js web animations.
Learned that my favored fi-6130dj Fujitsu Scanner doesn't do scanning more than A4 portrait (210 x 297mm), legal (8.5 x 14in.), in terms of paper size: width & length. I suppose most scanners come with such limitations.
Not bad quick 24 pointers from someone 10 years in the Tech world. Some cool quotes:
Forget 5 or 10-year plans. Follow your curiosity and ride the wave. This challenges the principle of sticking to learning something until it is completed, instead of being spontaneous.
You don’t get promoted to take on more responsibility. You take on more responsibility to get promoted.
The best time to apply for a new job is while you still have a good one. This is to ponder upon. I'm guessing this works only in contrast to a disgraced ex-employee when reputation ruined your next job application. So the question is when I'm doing well in a job, are there or how to get better options?
Clear is better than clever. Clever will make you feel smart in the moment and dumb later. Clear will make you feel dumb in the moment and smart later.
A “creative” corporate job won’t scratch your artistic itch. This is good for folks in creative such as Gene. And it's not restricted to the creative field.
Happening for the past few months lately. I had to look for a solution other than rebooting the PC or restarting Windows Explorer. It appears to be some bug in indexing.
Solution: Windows Key + R, type command: msdt.exe -ep WindowsHelp id SearchDiagnostic
This opens up the Search and Indexing Troubleshooter. I then clicked on "Advanced" to reload this troubleshooter in Admin elevated mode. Then when prompted with a list of reasons to troubleshoot, I selected the first one: "Can't Start a search or see results", after finishing this process, it is fixed.
Solution Source: Microsoft (Solution #2)
Here I shall collected all Chinese great hymns:
耶和华是爱
词:冯永梁 曲: 金培达
轻轻听
词：张千玉；曲：陈天赐
Stephen Tong would give a resounding YES!!!
I remember the pastor of my church GCC claimed that this is not possible. Not sure if he would change his mind or simply agree to otherwise once you state "with God, all things are possible". But he would still stick to his original principle that sounded something like: "humans were not designed to be kings or rule other humans", if I paraphrase correctly. His point is probably such that he reserves Jesus as the only one qualified to be the King, while all human not only would fail in imperfection as a king, but I'm sure I didn't misheard that Pastor Chris would go as far as saying no human, not even Adam pre-fall, is meant to be king. But I'm not certain if this is truly the pastor's view, because this comes close to denying the 3 functions (priestly, kingship, prophetic) of human nature, which would be against what is unique in reformed doctrine.
However, Stephen Tong has this down in disagreement:
With one important principle: Yes, one can be a good king, ruling over the nations and his people properly in favor with God, as mere human, following Christ the King, if when the time calls for it, he is willing to sacrifice himself for the Lord. Daniel and his friends were excellent examples! Though Elijah was not a king or ruler, his character is still a worthy study: to stand against the king. To see through the conflict of two kingdoms: "God's authority manifesting in human kingdoms" ~ by Daniel.
This is spot on.
