Joseph’s Alabaster Box

To say I hate artiest may not br entirely accurate because I am not sure I have the ability to hate. I’m not even sure I would recognize hate if I met it on the street. Hate, it seems to me would be a very difficult emotion to handle. The hater would have to be conscious of his hatred at all times. The person a hater hates would have to be constantly in the mind of the hater. Hate, I believe, would require more discipline than most humans could maintain. If you hated somebody, you would have to do everything in your power to make that person miserable, and suffer loses. These things are the opposite of what love would do.

Hating is not just not liking somebody or something. Mr. Webster seems to have come to a dead end when he came to hatred. Mr. Webster could only write that hate is dislike, to despise, etc. World Book says “hate” is to dislike strongly. I see “hatred” as wishing someone or something were dead or nonexistent.God hates perfectly. Just as He loves perfectly, He hates perfectly. The Bible tells us seven times that God hates. He hates people the same as things or ideas. God says in Malachi he hated Esau, and reiterates that statement in Romans 9:13. God could not love if He could not hate, and vice versa. God hates sin, rebellion, a proud look, and unbelief. Anything that is harmful to His creation is hated by God. God is capable of hatred because He is omnipotent and sovereign. The very fact that Hell exists is evidence that God hates. Hell is not a place of discipline, for no one ever comes out. Hell is eternal torture, prepared for the devil and his angels.

If I am capable of hatred, I admit that I hate atheists. Not just their unbelief, but because of their active attempts to cause others to reject God. I think I hate atheists because I wish they had never been born. However, wishing they had never been born is good for atheists, because it would be better for one that he were never born than to live and die in unbelief, and spend eternity in Hell.

But I understand that the atheist would have nothing but contempt for my emotions. The atheist cares not even for what God feels. Now that we have a president with strange, alien ideas, we can expect people with strange, alien ideas to uncover themselves. Along with those who are already uncovered, they will be more aggressive in their push to destroy America, and replace her with a mass of violent, lust-crazed individuals who see other people as sources of their own personal pleasure.

Acts and Facts is a monthly publication produced by the Institute of Creation Research (www.icr.org/resources). In the September 2008 issue, there is an article by Brian Thomas, M.S. The article, titled “Empiricism: A Glaring Flaw of New Atheism”, points out how men like Dr. Richard Dawkins, Dr. Christopher Hitchens, Dr. Sam Harris were not content to be atheists, but were evangelistic in their hatred of faith. “Their best-selling books are characterized by vitriolic disdain for those who believe in God.” (pg. 15, 1st paragraph.)

In delving into the lives of these men, I can find nothing that they have contributed to the benefit of human kind. They spent their lives as evangelists for humanism, evolution and atheism. They merely pandered to the lusts of mortals for more reason to reject the God who created them. They used their God-given talents to attack Him.

If I were an atheist, I would hope I would have the common sense to realize the “opiate of the people” is what makes the world tick. It is faith that brought man out of the caves, and forces him to go to work on Monday morning. It is faith that causes men and women to marry, and produce children who put some measure of happiness into their old age. What Dawson, Hitchens, Harris, and their sort advocate would soon annihilate man; and leave the planet for the creatures who worship God every minute of the day.

According to the testimony of the Lord, God loves the world. All the people on Earth are objects of His love, including atheists. He offers benefits of great value to all men. Atheists are among these objects of God’s love. God will not hate them until they die, or until they cross the eternal deadline of His offering of grace. Of course, atheism falls into the list of things God hates. The atheist would say, “If God hates atheism, he hates me, for atheism is me.” But God does not see it that way. He extends grace to the atheist just like all other dark-minded humans.

Neither do I hate atheists. I don’t like them. I hate what they do. “Love” and “like” are two different things, just as truly as the fact that “lust” and “love” are two different things. I think it was an atheist who said, “If I believed in Hell, I would crawl through broken glass to warn people not to go there.” That atheist didn’t understand that he wouldn’t accomplish anything by doing that, except convince people that he was a nut. Truth is, I don’t like any sinner (except children). I don’t like them because they hate my Lord. So I would do the same thing for an atheist as for anyone else who needs to be saved. I’d do my best to introduce them tp Jesus Christ.

There’s no greater love for a fellow human, than to express a love for his soul.

And so, if I could persuade an atheist that God loves him, I would, even if I had to make a great sacrifice. Yes, Mr. Atheist, I love you with a heart created in me by the Lover of all men’s souls. He died for all people everywhere.

What glory is thy kingdom,
Ye little royal boy?
Locked in a clammy dungeon
Where never entered joy.
Thy bony little grimy hand
Shall ne’er the scepter hold,
For foolish self and stubborn pride
Thy sire the kingdom sold.
The crawling things about thy feet
Thine only subjects be,
And dirty ringlets of thy hair,
Sole crown of thy glory.
Soiled tatters for thy royal robes,
And grime from head to toe;
Soon upon these cruel stones
Thy Bourbon blood shall flow.
What was thy fate, O little king?
The history books are vague,
Could thou have rescued mighty France
From proud Napoleon’s plague?
But, oh! for you, poor little boy,
A victim of thy birth,
Regardless of your final end,
What was your royalty worth?

GENESIS 3
Dr. Stephen J. Gould is a professor of biology, geology, and history of science at Harvard University, that great fortress of truth. He is a prolific, and excellent writer with a seemingly unlimited store of knowledge. If anyone can be torn away from his faith in the Bible, and made an evolutionist, Dr. Gould is the man who can do the tearing. Dr. Gould is a master of sleight of pen. He can relate a story in which an evolutionist does an absolutely inexcusable act of deception, and then turn that thing around to make the evolutionist look like a solid gold hero.

A case in point is found in his book, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. Dr. Gould relates the story of Nebraska man and the relationship between Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Jennings Bryan. Dr. Osborn was a theist, whatever that means, who despised Bryan and the Bible he loved. Incidentally, no one could have been less qualified to prosecute an evolutionist than Mr. Bryan because he was uncertain about when the earth was created. (It should be pointed out that Mr. Bryan did not have the information provided by creation scientists in the last fifty years.) On March 14, 1922, Dr. Osborn received a tooth found in Nebraska by a rancher, and consulting geologist, Harold J. Cook. “Within a week or two, he was ready to proclaim the first momentous discovery of a fossilized higher primate, perhaps even a direct human ancestor, in America. He honored our hemisphere in choosing the name Hesperopithecus, or “ape of the western world.”1

This was just three years before the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and Mr. Bryan was crusading for the elimination of evolution teaching in the schools of the states. Dr. Osborn used this tooth to ridicule Mr. Bryan, and publicly embarrass him and damage his credibility. Evolutionists enjoy using words from the Bible in their attacks on creationists, and Dr. Osborn did that with a vengeance. He used Job 12:8 as a challenge to Mr. Bryan. “. . .speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee:. . .” Later Dr. Osborn used part of this verse as the title of a book in which he attacked Bryan. The title is The Earth Speaks to Bryan.2 In a magazine article, Dr. Osborn went so far as to refer to his precious tooth fossil as Bryopithicus, since the thing had been found in Bryan’s home state. Mr. Bryan must have suffered a great deal of consternation and anguish because of all this rude and unscientific treatment. It was probably some relief when it finally leaked out that the Nebraska man fossil (the tooth) was just a pig’s tooth. Hesperopithecus was not a name to honor this continent, after all, it was a wicked hoax. Not the first, and by a long shot, not the last. Mr. Bryan died soon after the trial, and one is left to wonder if this treatment may not have contributed to his demise.

But Dr. Gould’s magic pen can make it all come out to make Dr. Osborn a knight in shining armor. Here is how he does it: “The story of Hesperopithecus was certainly embarrassing to Osborn and Gregory in a personal sense, (of course, it didn’t matter what it did to Mr. Bryan, Ed.) but the sequence of discovery, announcements, testing, and refutation - all done with admirable dispatch, clarity, and honesty - shows science working at its very best. Science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths. The fundamentalists, by ‘knowing’ the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science - or of any honest intellectual inquiry. The actual story of Hesperopithecus could teach creationists a great deal about science as properly practiced if they chose to listen, rather than to scan the surface for cheap shots in the service of debate pursued for immediate advantage, rather than interest in truth.”3 Of course, Dr. Osborn’s attacks on Mr. Bryan were not “cheap shots” based on “scanned surfaces.”

I don’t believe I have ever read anything to equal that statement for sheer hypocrisy, given what happened. Dr. Osborn uses a pig’s tooth as an instrument to forge a blatant lie, and then uses it to embarrass a great American, and then when he is caught red-handed, he is suddenly the honest scientist brimming over with integrity, using “dispatch, clarity, and honesty” to confess he had made a colossal blunder. No apology was offer Mr. Bryan. Is the evolution hypothesis so unimportant that such a monumental proclamation can be made on the basis of one worn tooth? Then, Dr. Gould lectures creationists about their ” ‘knowing’ the answers before they start,” and “scanning the surface for cheap shots.” It’s enough to dehydrate you. This is the same intellect that called Dr. Henry Morris a “yahoo.” This thing, as well as Piltdown man, were used in the Scopes trial, and evolutionists expect Christians to deny their faith and embrace a notion that can’t detect the difference between truth and falsehood.

Dr. Scott Huse is a scientist. He wrote: “Years after the Scopes trial, the entire skeleton of the animal from which the initial tooth came was found. As it turns out, the tooth upon which Nebraska man was constructed belonged to an extinct pig. The ‘authorities’ who ridiculed Mr. Bryan for his supposed ignorance, created an entire race of humanity out of the tooth of a pig! Needless to say, little publicity was given to the discovered error. Surely, there is a lesson here for us concerning the reliability of so-called ‘expert testimony,’ which is so often used to manipulate and intimidate the layman.”4

Dr. Gould goes to some lengths to justify this whole affair, and make it appear that pure science was at work, but never does he give any evidence that anything was ever done by anyone to apologize to Mr. Bryan, or to make any effort to reduce the damage they had done to him, and the pain they had caused him.

Gould expresses considerable contempt for Dr. Osborn, going so far as to call him an expletive.5 But in the interest of defending evolution, he proceeds to list five episodes which he offers as justification for the errors made, and to illustrate how well science worked in correcting them. Number three in the list states that if Dr. Osborn “had been grandstanding” he would have locked up the erring tooth, and kept it secret. That won’t hold water for two reasons. First: Dr. Osborn knew the history of what happened when Dr. Eugene Dubois did exactly that same thing with Java man. (See Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. 223ff. Order this book by calling 800 628 7640). You can’t keep a dead dog hidden under the noses of people who are sniffing fo the truth, not even your own colleagues. Second: This “pompous, self-assured . . . ,” as Dr. Gould called Dr. Osborn, would have been so certain about his conclusion about the tooth that he would have challenged the world of paleontology to prove him wrong.

Creationists and evolutionists obviously have different ideas about what science is. A creationist does not consider what Dr. Osborn did as science. Dr. Osborn held a tooth in his hand, and made certain conclusions about it based upon unfounded preconceptions. Creationists would suspect that God indeed “spoke from the earth” to Dr. Osborne who ignored Him, rather than to Mr. Bryan, and that God’s wrath abides upon those who use the laboratory coat as a high priest’s robe while they preach their religious philosophy. Dr. Gould may be interested in the truth, but he never will find it while rejecting the Source of Truth. Everyone must choose between truth and evolution, for that is the basic question. Truth is perfect and never changes. “Thy word is truth.” Jesus Christ is truth (John 14:6).

I Timothy 6:20: “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:.. . . .”

II Peter 3:4: “And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
_______
1. Stephen J. Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1991), p. 434.
2. Ibid., p. 434.
3. Ibid., p. 437.
4. Scott M. Huse, The Collapse of Evolution (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, pg. 98, 1983. [Available from ICR, 800 628 7640])
5. Gould, p. 439.

GENESIS 1:1The first twelve chapters of the epic book of Genesis are the basis of The Alabaster Box Ministries, and so they are under constant study, and our knowledge and understanding of them increases, not only spiritually, but from a scientific viewpoint. A scientific viewpoint is helpful in understanding these chapters because they involve God’s creative work, and to say the cosmos was designed and built is to say that science was involved. We live in a day because man’s knowledge of the works of the LORD from the universe to the atom, is greater than it has ever been in the history of the world. Truly “The heavens declare God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. . .” as we learn more about it. Genesis 1:1 is the beginning in more ways than one. It is enough for a man to think about all his life, just to know the first four words of Genesis 1:1: “!n the beginning God.” John 3:16 begins with “. . .For God.” It speaks more than a man can ever comprehend. The thought of God challenges every brain cell in the human head with a task for eternity. If man does not have God he will invent a god for no man can live without worshiping something even if it is no more than the notion that there is no God, or the idea that matter is God.

Does God reveal Himself to man? Is it possible to be an inhabitant of this tiny speck of matter drifting in the universe and know One Who is bigger than the universe? According to the Apostle Paul who has the distinction, according to his own appraisal, of being the worst sinner who ever lived. There are many gods. He worshiped some of those gods before he met God on the road to Damascus. One of the many popular gods is the god who says “come unto me in faith believing, and I will save you,” and then by his own arbitrary plan and purpose says, “I will not save you because you are not one of those I have chosen for eternal life.” I want no part of such a god, and I will oppose him until I die. Another popular god is the one who says “come to me by faith alone, and I will redeem you,” and then says to the repentant sinner, “I am not able alone to save you, you must be immersed in the baptismal pool of this particular church.” I hate such a god, and will warn all who will listen that this god will cause the eternal loss of all who listen to him. Such are false gods that God will destroy-”. . .against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.” (Exodus 12:12).
There is another god who declares that there is nothing too hard for him, but then says, “No, I was unable to create the world by the power of my word, I had to work for billions of years, allowing trillions of helpless creatures to die, while I used evolution to bring the world to its present state, and I must continue that work for billions of more years before it is at last perfect.” That god is a fraud, and can in no wise help anyone in a world of sin.
There are multitudes of other gods going about deceiving men, living in their minds like parasites, eating away at their faith and hope. I will not worship such a puny god. With my last breath I will labor to expose him for what he is. To worship such gods as these, a man must send his spirit down into the black bottom of a slimy pit, and kneel at the altar of perdition. A man who worships at the altar of a false god does so at the risk of his eternal soul, and the souls of all who know him. This man’s hope rests upon a scaffolding of card board and balsam nails, glued together with a night cloud. His knowledge is like a library filled with scrolls written by a troop of howler monkeys. The god he worships had a beginning somewhere, and will also have an end.
And so Who is this God spoken of in Genesis 1:1 and John 3:16? Who is this God Whose power, knowledge, and presence is without limit? Who is this God for Whom nothing is too hard? Is He a book? Does He reside in some object? Does He have need of anything that man can provide? Is He accessible to man? Does He know that man exists? We can recognize God because He was in the beginning. There was nothing to create Him or maintain Him before there was anything but Him.
Ask me how I know there is a God, and I will ask you how you know there is not a God? Ask me how J know there is a God, and I will ask you how you can avoid knowing there is a God. You say you have never seen Him’? Have you ever seen the wind? Do vou believe there is such a thing as wind? Have you ever seen magnetism? Do you believe there is such a thing as magnetism? The greatest fool who ever lived who revealed his foolishness to the world, was the Russian astronaut who proclaimed from the space craft in orbit around the earth, that he knew there was no God because he had been in heaven and had not seen him.
You do not believe in the soul? You say that human bodies have been peered into and no one has ever seen a human soul? Have those physicians ever seen love while gazing into the interior of a human heart? Have they ever seen anger, or life itself? The grandest things are those things which cannot be seen “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: (Colossians 1:16). Is there such a thing as the beginning? When was the beginning of that tree, tell me if you can? You say you can cut it down and count the rings. I say that tree existed from the beginning because that is when God created the matter that composes those rings. Have you ever read that “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall he; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). I know I worship the true God because the God I worship was in the beginning, and it’s from His plans and power that all things exist. He is the First Great Cause. He is the only rational explanation for whatever question man has. Men who do not believe in the true God believe such things as the notion that whales evolved from critters that looked like a cross between a mean, mean wart hog and a wolf. Man who does not believe that God could create the world as Psalm 33:9 says, “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”, is apt to believe that God is not able to save a human soul by His own power and purpose. God that “. . .spake, and it was done. . .” speaks truth. A liar could not have given a commandment that would have been obeyed by matter that did not exist.
It seems the easiest thing of all to believe that God was the beginning and that He began everything that there is. Why would man compass Heaven and Earth to find explanations for things when the explanation is right in front of him everywhere he turns. Do we mean that there is no need for science or for research or exploration? Indeed not, we do assert that all man’s investigation into the unknown would yield better results if man first of all acknowledged that “In the beginning God.. . . .”
Knowing that God was in the beginning is to know that there is sense to everything that follows, and therefore. things are worth pursuing. Sense could not come out of an explosion, and if there is no sense in anything, then we are all ignorant brutes. Intelligence should study intelligence. Order surely can be recognized and surely one can know that order cannot come out of disorder without intelligent help.
Matter is complex but not nearly so complex as the things that cannot be seen. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen. being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” ( Romans 1:20).
“Thou, even thou, art LORD alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and thou preserved them all; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee.” (Nehemiah 9:6).
“The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.” (Psalm 89:11).
“O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth: thou hast made heaven and earth.”.(Isaiah 37:16)

The rarest gems are often found
midst the hardest, driest ground;
likely dull with ancient dust;
encased in unmolested crust;
waiting long their joy to share
with one who’ll lay their beauty bare.

An ancient picture on the wall,
cobweb veiled - about to fall.
Not always was it happy smiles
for sorrows came thoughout the miles.
For years they’ve been beneath the sod,
their souls at home with gracious God.

A dusty book upon the shelf.
In poem written by one’s self.
In corner crevice long neglected
where no joy is ere expected;
in blessed Bible, holy book.
Gems are everywhere I look.

A kindly smile or soft caress.
Heart-jewels that forever bless.
A little baby’s tender sigh.
A Saviour who awaits on high.
This world’s goods I cannot buy,
but wealthy live until I die.