Guest post by Jeanette Andrade
December 29 Scripture Selection: Zechariah 9-11
Food for Thought: Zech. 9:9-10
If ever anyone was in doubt (or neglectful of the fact) of the divine nobility of Jesus, God’s Word sets the record straight, confirming His supreme position more than once. Announced centuries prior to His humble entrance riding on the foal of a donkey, and just as Zechariah, Solomon, and others had prophesied, every detail of His reign was fulfilled, proving His most high position and vast dominion “from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth (vs. 10).” (See Psalm 72:8; Matthew 21:1-11; John 12:12-16).
His place as Lord of our lives as we dwell in His Kingdom is so very important to realize and remain consciously aware of it. Our lives are not separate from Him. The Lord Jesus reigns and must always be honored as such, regardless of our decision or activity, for He is worthy. As the apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 10:31, “…whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (See also 1 Pet. 4:11.)
As the Lord Jesus is seated in heavenly places at the Father’s right hand, “far above all principality and power and might and dominion,” and the Father has “put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church (Eph. 1:20-22),” the only right—as well as beneficial—thing to do is give Him dominion over our lives and our hearts, acknowledging Him as our Lord. And as we give Jesus full reign in our lives, He, in turn, takes us from glory to glory right along with Him (II Cor. 3:18). It all begins with joining the multitudes throughout the expanse of creation who declare Him Lord and say, “Alleluia! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigns! (Rev. 19:6).”
Digging Deeper (What scriptures can further enhance today’s reading?):
Getting Personal (What has God shown you in today’s reading?):
Confession of Faith (Example: Lord, based on Mat. 1:21 and 23, I understand that Jesus is God, and I receive Him as my personal Lord and Savior.):
Important Events on This Day (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.):
suyts space 
Now we hear a lot about the islamic invasion of Europe so I thought, how does it look like worldwide. I always want to see the trends so here they are.
Some Christian demographics:
Practicing Christians as percentage of world population, time series chart;;
Percentage Western / non-Western Christians; time series chart.
http://jamesbshannon.com/2015/01/13/the-state-of-the-christian-church/
More time series charts:
World population vs. Christians by birth vs. Christian converts, total numbers
http://www.is-there-a-god.info/belief/converts.shtml
Good news all around.
Nice find, Dirk.
While trawling for numbers I also found this account of Christian conversion in the late Roman empire.
About the consequences of selective abortion of girls:
“If fewer girls lived to see the second day from their birth, still more died on their way to adulthood. The shortage of women, then, played further havoc on the population growth of the empire, as well as its economy and its morals. Homosexual activity was considered normal for married men.”
(that is, in the population which had not yet converted. Conversion to Christiantiy saved the Empire from population collapse. I grabbed the quote because it reminds one so much of the current gender campaigns.)
http://www.aquinascollege.edu/article/salt-empire-role-christian-family-evangelization-mike-aquilina/
…one could also say, the non-converts actively selected against their own survival, which is also observed in today’s leftist lifestylers.
And most leftists believe in evolution theory, so it’s interesting that they don’t comprehend the consequences of their actions.
Jim
Well they obviously don’t consider Leftism hereditary.
Which is funny because Marx probably did, being a big Darwin fan.
Dr. John C Sanford of Cornell U ; plant geneticist with 30 patents to his name: Darwin is wrong, evolution goes “down, not up”, each generation of humans has 100 mutations more, mostly negative, too much to be weeded out by evolution:
Short video 8min
Lecture and Q&A 100min:
“too much to be weeded out by evolution”
I should have said: “too much to be weeded out by selection” – as Dr Sanford’s discovery clearly makes standard Neo-Darwinian evolution impossible; selection though DOES happen (all the time)
Absolutely. Though, that concept seems impossible to communicate to a Darwinist.
Indeed, selection does happen all of the time. The Word says, clearly, the commandment made to biological life: “Be ye fruitful and multiply, lest ye be replaced”.
My training is chemistry, biology, and my longest career time was in applied diagnostics, applied statistics and pathologic physiology. It was learning chemistry and contrasting the notions of biologists derived from morphological classification that made me doubt the various theories of biological evolution. (It helped to have been exposed to raw nature growing food, catching fish and hunting tasty animals to keep a family fed ;P.)
To this day I wonder if the biologists have learned anything that the chemistry people were telling them. Biological life wearing a chemical body has its life mediated through chemistry and chemistry is rooted in laws of mass action, using energy flows. DNA/RNA families code protein families. I once saw a calculation that said that life shouldn’t exist based on ‘blind’ chemistry, yet life does exist. I believe that there is a law of the conservation of biological information. Mutations degrade that, so living systems running on chemistry harness chemistry to compensate. DNA/RNA hops from organism to organism (this is why I see no difference between direct manipulation and indirect manipulation, for they are both selective breeding.functionally) and it always has and always will until God changes it. Yes, life was designed, first by pure existence possessing intellect, and brought into being by that pure existence possessing intellect creating rules, then from the rules, an environment; and from an environment a suitable environment, and from that suitable environment, life. Then He rested and observes that it is good, and only intervened subsequently when Evil corrupted things and He cannot abide Evil.
At the moment the evidence leaves no other option, it seems.
They tried to create situations where they had water evaporate from an amino acid solution, to enforce formation of longer chains of amino acids, which worked, but that’s all they got.
Now Sanford’s simulations indicate that there’s basically no viable way UP from primitive first life forms.
The total absence of combinatorial estimates , i.e. numbers, from popular presentations of evolution made me suspicious.
We are left with the Young Earth hypothesis OR a creator or E.T. who regularly revisits creation to replenish the dwindling supply of viable lifeforms it seems – a universe with maintenance, or an Earth with maintenance; which I would not find surprising – as it is compatible with miracles.
Alternatively we would need new physics along the lines of Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields, to overcome entropy and combinatorial possibilities.
Heh, let’s get in some evolution bashing before the New Year. Despite the problems with evolution theory, you still have the fossil record to deal with. Assuming one believes in the fossil record (and I know many don’t), then you have a long, long record of evolutionary changes that are consistent. Even though some organizations, such as CRS (https://www.creationresearch.org), try to create inconsistencies.
Why, for example, do all reptiles, mammals, and birds have the same basic, flawed eye design? Whereas, most cephalopods have a much better eye design? Why were dinosaurs the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years and then disappeared or changed 65 MYA?
Jim
Jim, I have no beef with evolutionists. A friend send me the link, and it’s a great topic. How do species survive the mutational load if it is that high? Sanford is extremely credible.
I’m not interested in erecting and knocking down strawmen. What biochemical mechanism could there be that counteracts this degeneration?
Some warmunists honestly believe humanity is threatened by a small rise in temperatures. Should there not be much more fear of a genetic meltdown? Should there not be a ton of research into the exact genome of previous generations to track this fitness decline and prove or disprove it?
I’m currently looking for valid explanations by evolutionists and will post anything that they found, if any. (Yes I have no life, my family is safe and happy and I have loads of free time on my hands! This is fun for me!)
You might remember that I talked about the genetic programming experiments I did to find smart trading algos, with little success I might add, and like all genetic programmers I made everything so that my population survives under the mutational/crossover load I created. We create sandboxes to maintain the population. And we do all kinds of tricks to just keep the thing going. We are the intelligent designers of our genetic sandboxes. And of course that works somewhat to solve some mathematical problem.
So I’m very interested in exactly this genetic stability / Complexity issues. Not in just bashing Dawkins, which is a different kind of fun entirely.
Of course selection influences evolution. How could it not?
And, one might say, we’ve ‘evolved’ our ability to create those sandboxes. Just because physical evolution happens at much slower pace than intellectual, doesn’t mean it didn’t, or isn’t, happening.
And yes, it did not start on it’s own.
For now, my reserach shows that the concept of “mutational meltdown” is widely debated in the Heavy Metal music scene but no serious exploration by evolutionist researchers.
🙂
Well, let me know when it shows with complete certainty that every species in existence today will be the exact same species 10 million years from now.
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DirkH says:
December 31, 2015 at 9:34 am
You might remember that I talked about the genetic programming experiments I did to find smart trading algos, with little success I might add . . . .
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Yes I do. We started talking about it on this thread(https://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/climate-reminder-global-climate-change-means-drier-summers-in-the-us-climate-change-accelerating/). I don’t have a link to the argument we had at a later time, but I remember not faring very well.
Jim
Thank you
Pondering the evolution conundrum further:
Consciousness is a different thing than intelligence.
Consciousness is neither measurable nor predictable by materialist science, but rather pervades the universe invisibly.
This reminds one of the Logos, and the human body as the temple, i.e. the gate to godliness, the biblical way of saying that the nervous system of the human body is the gate to the spiritual world.(the consciousness) – the gate to the Logos.
The Logos in turn would be the way to get around the combinatorial impossibility of evolution – helping it to win the lottery time and again. (and possibly also maintaining and stabilizing lifeforms in the face of the mutational meltdown predicted by Dr. Sanford)
Starting with that, I found this interview.
Near the end Hameroff says, we (different people) run on the same platonic(?) values (we receive from the “cosmic consciousness”) “which we’re also changing”.
That’s interesting because on the one hand it’s probably a very common experience for everyone to “receive inspiration” (materialists would likely blame this on noise in neuron interaction, i.e. random events filtered by neuronal networks); but would also point to a certain efficacy of for instance prayer, i.e. conscious attempts at influencing future events (which I would say works, but my examples for that are of course unprovable anecdotal evidence).