Westy's Weekly Blog

  Someone once remarked that the Bible’s teaching about ‘original sin’ doesn’t need any proof.   The flawed nature of humanity is just too painfully obvious.   We see it in just about every news program and in the headlines of our daily newspapers – to say nothing of seeing humanity’s flaws in our own neighbourhoods... even in our own families.   And – as I mentioned in a previous Blog – we even see it in the flawed characters of the Bible’s heroes. It’s strange then that there is still this very common misconception that human beings are inherently good.   If we just make sure that we have the right environment in which to live and if only we remove the negative stresses from our surroundings, all will turn out okay.   At the beginning of the 1900s there was much optimism about humankind.   It seemed unshakeably sure that we could create our own Utopia here on earth. We wish!   Two World Wars later we’re not so confident anymore.   O...

For some years I’ve been interacting with people in jail.   It’s through an organisation known as Crossroads Prison Ministries which specialises in Bible lessons for people who are incarcerated. Recently I was checking a new student’s first lesson.   He had never ever read the Bible before but what he discovered blew him away.   He expected the Bible to be all about people who were particularly good... better than your average Joe Blow.   Hey, isn’t religion all about saints with haloes..?   With some amazement he wrote, “It so surprises me that all the characters of the Bible are flawed... many of them deeply flawed.”   That’s so true, isn’t it?   Adam and Eve disobeyed a very simple command, not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.   Their son Cain murdered his brother.   Seven generations later we have another murderer who was a bigamist to boot.   Noah was a great bloke but he once got as drunk as a skunk!   Abraham decided...

The young couple had been church-goers all their life – so had their parents.   Church-going and Christianity was a generational thing for them.   No one ever asked, “Do we go to church today?”   That was a given..!   Not surprisingly then, when they moved to our neighbourhood they turned up the first Sunday at our morning worship service.   They had even brought a membership certificate from their previous church. But there was something different at their new church.   One of our elders made them welcome and after church introduced them to some other young couples.   He then invited this young couple to join their home fellowship group.   And they did.   They enjoyed the friendly group of young people – but right from the beginning they sensed there was something others had that they didn’t have.   The elder who led the group and who had invited them noticed that too.   So he and his wife took this young couple under their win...

Our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, did the one thing they were not allowed to do.   They flunked the test of their loving obedience and took the forbidden fruit.   The rest of us human beings have had to live with the consequences of their selfish rebellion ever since.   And – by the way – let’s not do what our first parents did and pass the buck: “The woman put me up to it”; “it was the serpent that was the culprit!”   No!   The Lord God made quite clear our human responsibility – it rested with them and with them alone. The question I want to ask though is, “Why didn’t Almighty God just wipe them out and begin again? I’ve enjoyed doing some woodwork projects at Men’s Sheds in my retirement.   But there have been times when a project somehow got botched up along the way.   I’m afraid I didn’t have the patience or the inclination to painstakingly fix up my mess – instead it ended up in the rubbish bin.   Discarded..! ...