Phil Gons

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Rick Warren

My Church Is Better Than Your Church

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Rick Warren, one of America’s most popular pastors, tweeted earlier today to his 130,296 Twitter followers, “I challenge any church in America to match the spiritual maturity, godliness & commitment of any 500 members of Saddleback.” This tweet came on the heels of two earlier tweets:

RickWarren: Mary, it’s true. Over 10,000 Saddleback members have now served in missions overseas through our network & P.E.A.C.E. plan.

RickWarren: For 30 yrs our plan was to turn spectators into participators, consumers to contributors, an audience into an army. It worked!

The final tweet was later deleted, but managed to get quite a few responses from the Christian twittersphere. Here are a few:

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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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