Tuesday, March 29, 2005

God thinks it is funny

Psalm 2:4 is an interesting passage. In the passage it says that God laughs.

Exactly what is God laughing at?

The previous verse says that he laughs at the efforts of men to kill the Messiah. They think that by binding the Messiah to the cross with fetters and bands they can be free from the bands and fetters of God. They don't realize that their binding of the Messiah is what effects the salvation of God.

Irony. God gets a kick out of it.

Old Earth/Young Earth?

I do think that there is a knock down falsification argument against the most common young earth argument. Let me give it a shot on you and see what you think.

Young earthers often say that Adam was created to look a particular age, say 21 for the sake of argument. This makes sense. Further, their claim is that Adam would by appearances be that age.

If God created Adam with an appearance of age, then why not the earth?

Here is the knock down part - If God created the universe with an appearance of age, then no test could be found that would show it to be young. By each and every test it would have to be shown to be old. Otherwise, God missed something when He was "aging" the earth.

From a friend "Don S"
> There's a cleaner way to deal with the
> "appearance of age" theory. Just put
> the carefully deleted word back into
> the title and call it by its full name:
> the "false appearance of age" theory.
> That isn't God's style. Most Christians
> catch on right away - when you put it
> like that.
>
> -Don

Good point, Don.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Free Bible software

There are a couple of good sources of free Bible software for Windows. The price really is right.

One of these is On Line Bible. It has some pretty good reviews. I haven't tried it in a long time so I can't comment on how good it might be (comments appreciated).

The other program is e-sword.

I like e-sword
I use e-sword. It is pretty good. If you tried e-sword in the past and were disappointed, it has been significantly upgraded recently. You can now easily create links to Bible verses in your notes file. This lets you add easy cross references to any notes file. This makes for nice hyperlinked bible study notes.

Features of e-sword
There are more than 35 Bibles, more than 16 commentaries, a number of good Bible maps for e-sword. There are also a bunch of free books (mostly older conservative works such as Keil and Delitzsch's Commentary on the Old Testament).

Why I like e-sword
I like that I can create my own Bible notes. These are connected to each verse so that in the end I have my own Bible commentary.

Importing data
I like that I can easily import public domain text documents and have my favorite works in the same tool for easy search and reference.

How I am using e-sword
I have taken the Bible studies from my website and imported most of them into e-sword. The next step (after this busy Easter season) will be to put the study modules up for download. I will dump the QuickVerse index files since that seems to be a dead end with free e-sword. They are already imported into e-sword as commentary notes.

e-sword is completely free
I created an install disc for e-sword and am sharing it with people at church who want a computer Bible program for free. This is allowed under the copyright. You are free to copy and give away the program. You are not free to sell it. This is nice.