Phil Gons

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Archives for 2010

Calvin on God’s Permissive Will

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Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion

After reading my post on Zac Smith’s cancer a while back, a friend of mine saw a link in the sidebar to a related post, “The Grace of Cancer,” and left a comment challenging my choice of words when I repeatedly said that God gave cancer to a man from our church to bring him to repentence.

I responded by encouraging him to read Calvin’s Institutes, I, xviii (esp. 1), where he discusses the “distinction [that] has been invented between doing and permitting,” and Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.”

I spent some time rereading Calvin’s chapter on the issue of permission, “The Instrumentality of the Wicked Employed by God, While He Continues Free from Every Taint,” and I thought much of it was worth quoting here at length. I’ve bolded the most pertinent portions.

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Was the Oil Spill an Act of God?

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Rick Warren tweeted earlier today, “When people call an ocean oil spill caused by human drilling ‘an Act of God,’ THAT, friends, is taking God’s name in vain!”

To my surprise, I enjoy a lot of what Warren tweets, but in this case I think he has it precisely backwards. Failing to attribute to God complete sovereignty over all of the events of His world—even the “accidental” ones for which man is at some level responsible—is to rob God of His glory.

Amos wrote a few thousand years ago, “Does disaster [רָעָה] come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?” (Amos 3:6). Amos was speaking of intentional disaster (an invading army seeking to overtake a city), not events resulting accidentally or from carelessness like an oil spill. If the former is rightly attributed to God, certainly the latter would be as well.

Job’s response to the loss of his children by a great wind bringing the house down upon them was, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).

Both of these biblical writers saw God as the ultimate actor behind natural disasters and the evil of men.

And let us not forget that the cross itself, with all its evil, was an act of God (Acts 2:23; 3:18; 4:27–28).

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Memorial Day vs. Trinity Sunday

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Today was a special day in many churches around the world. Some churches in the US anticipated Memorial Day and remembered those who have fought to defend our nation’s freedoms. Others celebrated Trinity Sunday and reflected on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity—God’s being both one and three. Some may have done both; others neither. I’m curious what your church did.

Take the poll.

[poll id=”5″]

Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 for $55

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Logitech Webcam Pro 9000Living thousands of miles away from where we grew up (Ohio and Minnesota), we’ve been incredibly thankful for modern technology that allows us to have face-to-face conversations with our families. We almost exclusively use Skype now instead of our mobile phones to communicate with our parents and siblings. A really cool new feature coming in Skype 5 (currently in beta) is the ability to have video conversations between three and five computers at the same time. It looks really cool, but unfortunately it sounds like it may not be free.1

Along with Skype, we use the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 (formerly called the Quickcam Pro 9000) and love it. It’s an HD webcam that outputs video at 720p, so you get a really nice quality picture. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the extra money, I can assure you that it is if you plan on using it regularly. Your family will thank you, especially when you have a little one come along like we did six-and-a-half months ago.

The Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 usually runs somewhere between $75–100, but Amazon currently has it on sale for only $55 with free shipping. That’s a really good deal for this webcam. If you’re in the market for one or want to get one for someone in your family as a gift, I’d strongly encourage you to pick this one up while it’s on sale.

  1. The Skype 5 page says, “This beta version comes with a free trial of group video calling.” [↩]

Save $60 a Year on Your Internet

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Linksys Cable ModemIf your internet service provides a cable modem for you to use to get your internet from the wall to your computer, they’re probably also charging you $5 a month for the modem rental (like Comcast has been doing to us for the last two-and-a-half years). Save yourself the $60 a year by buying this Linksys Cable Modem. It’s on sale today only for $19.99 with free shipping. It’ll pay for itself in four months. I picked one up a month or two ago, and it’s worked perfectly. Getting Comcast to switch us over to the new modem took only 5–10 minutes. If you’re looking for ways to save a few bucks a month, I encourage you to take advantage of this offer.

Free Episode of Planet Earth in HD

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Planet EarthIf you’ve never gotten around to watching BBC’s Planet Earth yet, now’s your chance to check it out for free—and in HD—and find out what you’ve been missing. Amazon Video On Demand currently has Planet Earth: Season 1, Episode 1: “From Pole to Pole” (49:16) available as a free download—both the standard and HD versions. And it’s the good one, the one narrated by David Attenborough (not the one narrated by Sigourney Weaver).

I’d encourage you to watch it. It contains some amazing footage that will often lead you to worship our great and glorious Creator God, whose “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly seen “in the things that have been made” (Ro 1:20; cf. Ps 19:1–6).

For more on Planet Earth, see Andy Naselli’s two posts: “Planet Earth: A Theological Documentary” and “Piper on Planet Earth.”

Also, be on the lookout for Life, a forthcoming BBC production, also narrated by David Attenborough.

Greg Bahnsen Lectures and Debates on YouTube

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Greg BahnsenOn Saturday night I discovered the Greg Bahnsen channel on YouTube, which has five video lectures (in 32 parts) and two audio debates (in 20 parts). Greg Bahnsen delivered the video lectures in 19911 as a five-part series, Basic Training for Defending the Faith (Amazon | Monergism), to soon-to-be college students. I spent a little while listening to bits and pieces of them, and they look terrific. The audio debates are the classic against Gordon Stein and the lesser-known against George Smith. I’ve heard them both before—the former more than half-a-dozen times. If you haven’t yet listened to them, I’d encourage you to do so, especially the one against Stein.

Here’s the complete list of everything that’s available:

Video Lectures: Basic Training for Defending the Faith (Five Parts | 4:49:29)

Part One—The Myth of Neutrality (5 Parts | 48:52)

  1. Greg Bahnsen—The Myth of Neutrality (Part 1 of 5) | 9:40
  2. Greg Bahnsen—The Myth of Neutrality (Part 2 of 5) | 9:55
  3. Greg Bahnsen—The Myth of Neutrality (Part 3 of 5) | 9:51
  4. Greg Bahnsen—The Myth of Neutrality (Part 4 of 5) | 9:59
  5. Greg Bahnsen—The Myth of Neutrality (Part 5 of 5) | 9:27

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  1. I’m inferring this number from his reference to Terminator 2 coming out “this summer.” [↩]

How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts

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Greek Manuscript

If you use Greek and Hebrew in your blog posts, here’s a tip that will help you make it look good and give you the ability to make changes across your entire site in just a few seconds. There are two main things you need to do.

Step 1: Add Styles to Your Style Sheet

The first thing you need to do is find your style sheet. Your style sheet is the global control for how your site looks—text, colors, images, and more. If you’re familiar with creating styles in a word processing program like Microsoft Word, then you already understand the concept. You create and define a style, apply it to various units of text, and then when you edit that style in your style sheet, all of the text tagged with the style is instantly updated.

Find Your Style Sheet

If you use the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can find your style sheet in the admin panel by going to Appearance > Editor. Your style sheet is most likely named style.css. Click on it to load it, and then scroll to the bottom to add your new styles.1 You can access your style sheet via FTP2 by going to /public_html/wp-content/themes/{your-theme-name}/style.css. I typically use Dreamweaver to open and edit my style sheet. Other blogging platforms should be pretty similar.

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  1. Some themes provide you with a secondary style sheet for adding your custom styles so you don’t lose them when you upgrade your theme. In these cases, you might be looking for a custom.css file instead. [↩]
  2. FileZilla is a good free FTP client for Windows. [↩]