No more head scratching...

Adolf Eichman was the Holocaust architect. Have you ever wondered how someone could do something so barbaric? He rounded up entire Jewish communites and shipped them like cattle to concentration camps. He knew exactly what he was doing. When he was finally tracked down 15 years after the war had ended, he said his only regret was that he had not been able to do a more thorough job.
For an exciting account of the search for him, read Hunting Eichman by Neal Bascomb. But Bascomb does not explore the roots of Eichman's thinking. For that you need to go to Creation Ministries and read their article "The Trial and Death of Adolf Eichman." Evolutionary thinking had permeated German society. Rejecting God as creator, they also rejected him as law-giver. The necessary consequence of this is that man's law is understood to be the highest one. There is no longer a higher law by which all of men's laws must be weighed. Eichman said he was only obeying orders. Man's orders. And because he was dead to the consciousness of his having broken God's law, he did not see his need for God's grace.
We should not scratch our heads if, throwing out God's good and perfect law, fallen man turns to barbarism. It is inevitable. Dispensing with God's law is like dispensing with the heavy glass cage that keeps your boa constrictor from slithering around your apartment.

Refreshing Brooks

Thomas Brooks is like a mountain stream on a steep hike in hot weather. In The Privy Key to Heaven he quotes Bernard "O saint, knowest thou not...that they husband Christ is bashful, and will not be familiar in company?" In other words, it is in private prayer that God will meet us most sweetly and intimately. Let us not be so easily content that we forgo God's choicest gifts.

"...did you really believe this..."

In the morning I like to read a few paragraphs of Thomas Brooks' excellent book The Privy Key of Heaven. It is on prayer, and excellent. I can't resist giving a few quotes from what I read today: "God, in the great day, will recompense his people before all the world, for every secret prayer, and secret tear, and secret sigh, and secret groan that that hath come from his people." Brooks then goes on to say that "did you really believe this" you would:
1 Walk more thankfully.
2 Work more cheerfully.
3 Suffer more patiently.
4 Fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil, more courageously.
5 Lay out yourselves for God, his interest and glory, more freely.
6 Life with what providence hath cut out for your portion, more quietly and contentedly. And,
7 You would be in private prayer more frequently, more abundantly.