Friday, February 21, 2025

Part I

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The Plane Didn’t Survive, But the Passengers Did: In Light of the Plane Crash in Toronto, We Must Learn from What Goes Right, and Not Just What Goes Wrong

We’ve seen some truly scary pictures of airline crashes and airline tragedies in recent weeks. And one of those pictures came to us, one of those images seared into our minds just so recently, as just days ago when a passenger airline crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport. The small passenger commuter jet ended up on its back. 80 persons were on the plane, and that includes all the passengers plus the crew, and 80 people survived. You look at that plane upside down and you see the gaping hole where one wing should be. Just the image of the plane upside down with, of course, scars and smoke seared onto it. It’s just an incredibly scary scene. And yet, 80 people came off that plane alive. Not one was killed. That and the aftermath, of course, of some just really horrifying incidents, including the one there at Washington National Airport. A midair collision that led to so much death. No one survived. So in one case, no one survived. In the other case, everyone survived.

And I just want to underline the fact that it’s not just a matter of fate and God’s providence is what’s behind all of this. And there’s some lessons that are to be learned here. There’ll be lessons learned from the unspeakable tragedy there in Washington, DC and there’ll be lessons learned from this accident, this crash that took place at Toronto Pearson International Airport. They are likely to be very different kinds of lessons.

And from a Christian worldview perspective, one thing we need to note in the Toronto incident, is that things worked. The airline was itself, in terms of its engineering, it was sound to survive that kind of incident. Even upside down, the fuselage was largely intact. We are told that advances in the engineering of the passenger seats had a lot to do with the survival of the passengers in this situation. In which you look at a modern airliner with these very thin seats. They look flimsy, but they’re not. They’re actually engineered to survive this kind of crash and to endure G-forces, gravity forces, beyond what the human body itself could sustain.

In other words, they are far more able to sustain those G-forces and, evidently, it worked in this case. Just consider the gravity forces, the G-forces, when a plane like this underwent that kind of trauma. Ends up on its back, the passengers hanging from the ceiling on their seats. So there was a lot that went into that, in the creation of those seats and the standardization of the equipment.

But also, the training of the people, of the crew on that plane. The crew acted, we are told, textbook. And that doesn’t come by accident, that means someone has to teach them the textbook. And it has to be so thoroughly drilled within them that they don’t think about what to do, they are simply programmed what to do. And in this case, that meant saving lives by getting those people off that plane safely as quickly as possible.

There were also other elements that worked within what appeared to be just a matter of seconds. It might’ve been a minute or longer. Just in a very short amount of time, you had emergency vehicles there, you had fire control, you had life-saving personnel. All that right there. Again, they knew what to do. They were in place. They had the equipment they needed. They responded with the acts and with the life-saving technologies available to them. The people were taken off the plane, those who needed medical treatment were taken for treatment, and all of them survived.

The plane didn’t survive. That’s another point. The plane’s expendable, the human beings are not. Now, we often lament at the face of a tragedy when things go wrong, when equipment fails, when the engineering was insufficient, when the personnel were not well-trained or did not well-respond. When we see that kind of tragedy, we learn from it.

But it’s quite easy to look at something like what happened in Toronto and say, “Nobody was killed, so we don’t have to pay that much attention.” No, we need to pay a lot of attention as no doubt, aviation authorities will be paying much attention to what worked in that situation. And we need to apply that two-fold lesson to other arenas of life: church life, institutional life, school life, public life, even family life. It’s very easy at times to say, “That really went wrong. We need to think about that and we need to fix that,” and that’s right. Even within the context of a family.

But from time to time, you just need to step back and look at the glory of God’s plan and a mother and a father and children within the household. And you just need to sit back sometimes and say, “You know, that really worked. This is a part of God’s wonderful plan. We get to see this every night. The kids are fed. They’re well-tucked into bed. They’re cared for. They’re ready for school in the morning,” and you have the parents related to one another. The family, the children related to each other. From moment to moment, it’s easy to pass by even as it’s easy to say, “Well, everyone survived. We need to learn maybe something from it.” Well, we also need to learn from healthy families, and healthy relationships, and healthy congregations, and healthy institutions how to get that right as well.

Part II

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Does Genesis 3:24 Point to God’s Creation of the First Weapon? If So, What Does That Tell Us About Humans Advancing Weapons Technology? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 17-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

All right. We’ve talked about a lot this week. Now, I want to turn to what you want to raise in terms of the questions that you have sent in. And once again, I respect the questions and the questioners and let’s talk about what’s on your mind. All right. The first question that lands before me comes from a 17-year-old young man in North Carolina. He said he got into a conversation with some friends on Genesis 3:24. He said, “We had a hard time coming to an answer.”

The question is, “Did God create the sword?” This is the first reference of a weapon in Scripture and we believe the first reference to a weapon in this sense in all of world history, all of human history. Just to remind ourselves, this is when the Lord casts Adam and Eve out of the garden. In verse 22, we read, “Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also the Tree of Life and eat and live forever.’ Therefore, the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.”

Verse 24, “He drove out the man and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the Tree of Life.” So, interesting question coming from a teenage young man here in conversation with his friends, where’d the sword come from? Well, God clearly, clearly created it, but he also created the cherubim or the cherub, in this case, as an angel. Basically, an angelic creature of power and of authority, a guard. A guard who was given a sword that cut every way, in every dimension. Now, that’s one dangerous sword and God’s judgment is indicated in this.

You have this heavenly being assigned by God to keep humanity out of the Garden of Eden. So that’s where that comes from. And you know, I took this question not just because it’s on the top of the stack here. But because this really gets to a very interesting question about, say, where power and authority, even the use of lethal force, comes from and it becomes necessary in a fallen world. And it becomes necessary for one thing, even as used by God on assignment with the cherubim here to guard, lest human beings seek to re-enter the Garden of Eden by force. So that sword’s a sign of divine authority. It’s also a sign of divine judgment and it is a sign of divine danger. All those things we need to see.

And here, you had this young man ask this question about a conversation he had with his friends and it’s just a humbling reminder to us of how quickly we can read over something in Scripture and not think about it. And it’s good every once in a while to look at just about every word and every line and ask, “I’ve known this text for so long. What did I miss here before?” These young men also went on to ask about what this means for humans and advancing weapons technology or the fact that the idea of weapons was created by God.

I love the question and it does make very clear that God’s justice and judgment are indicated by the power of the sword, the power of the sword right here. It’s reflected also when you get to a text like Romans chapter 13 in the New Testament, where we are told that government is instituted by God and that the emperor does not hold the power of the sword in vain. And the reference there is to the sword of judgment in the arena of justice. And you also have, of course, wars fought in the Old Testament by divine command with the instruments of warfare that Israel was assigned and given.

And I would just argue that the most advanced weapons systems beyond the sword, those we know today and those that will, no doubt if the Lord tarries appear tomorrow, they are just moral extensions and technological extensions of the sword you see here in Genesis chapter 3. Deadly is deadly and I’m glad you asked the question. Thanks for sending it in.

Part III

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What is the History of the Phrase ‘Asking Jesus Into Your Heart,’ and Why Is It So Widely Used? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay. This is a really good question. A listener writes in, “We are very careful in our household about expressing to our daughters that the biblical command is to repent and believe on Jesus for salvation. That is the expression repeatedly used in the New Testament. However, these pre-teen girls frequently hear the phrasing about inviting Jesus into their heart. They’re curious where that expression came from and why it is so widely used.” Okay. This is a dad asking and I really appreciate the question. And let me just say, there are some biblical roots to the language you’re talking about here.

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” So the heart in this sense refers to the inner person. Sometimes theologically, we refer to this as the inner man. There’s the outer man and there’s the inner man. The Apostle Paul uses that very expression. And the heart in biblical imagery is the seed of reason and the seed of meaning, the seed of ultimate inner revelation. That is the revelation who we really are. As we are in our heart, that’s who we are.

Well, as you think about the asking Jesus into your heart, you think about the heart imagery and the Christian life. We could jump from Scripture. We could go from the Old Testament to the New Testament to the early church. You have a figure such as Augustine, the towering theological figure in the early church. The Bishop of Hippo there in North Africa. The dominant theologian of the early church.

And in portraiture, he is sometimes portrayed as holding a heart pointing to his own concern about interiority. Even wrote a book entitled, Confessions. The heart’s very powerful in terms of his imagery. You have, in the medieval era, what becomes the devotion to the Sacred Heart as it’s called in medieval devotion. Then, you go to the reformers and both Luther and Calvin make reference to the heart. And Calvin, very classically, looking at the heart as the revelation of who we are.

And then, you fast-forward to the modern age. And here’s the thing, in the modern age, this becomes something that in the era known as revivalism in the United States, it gets translated into the invitation system and translated into an appeal to persons to come to Christ. And seeking, I think in the best sense of the term, let’s put it in the best light possible, seeking to make very clear the call to the inner person. One way to describe this is to say you’re inviting Jesus into your heart or accepting Jesus into your heart.

Okay. Here’s the problem. There is no depiction of the gospel in the Scriptures which is merely human beings coming to salvation by deciding to invite Jesus into their heart. Jesus is not waiting to be invited into our hearts. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe and he has declared, and the New Testament declares, just as his Father says, that salvation is in his name and the command is to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, I think we should use the biblical language. I think we should avoid confusion. When I hear someone say that they became a Christian when they invited Jesus into their heart, I don’t want to say, “No, you didn’t.” I do want to get to a deeper level and make certain that they have believed upon the Lord Jesus Christ and repented of their sin and that’s not just some kind of emotivist expression.

And I think that emotivist expression turns out to be pretty dangerous when you have a large number of people who seem to think they’re Christians, because they did something like just invite Jesus into their heart with no apparent change in their lives and no apparent growth or a movement towards Christian maturity. Nor even the knowledge that they haven’t grown towards Christian maturity.

So I appreciate the question. I don’t want to throw everyone who’s used that expression under the bus, so to speak. I do want to say, it is our responsibility to get the words and phrases and expressions and sentences as right as possible, as faithful as possible. I say, we lean into the New Testament.

Part IV

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I Agree With What You Said About Certain Kinds of Books Not Being Present in Public Schools Libraries, But Wouldn’t That Include the Bible As Well? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right. Another listener who wrote in responding to something I’d said on The Briefing. And he says he agrees with most of what I said, “almost everything,” indeed he says. But when you start by saying, “I agree with almost everything,” that means there’s something and there was a disagreement. So here’s how he continues. “However, I think we have to be careful about the banning of books. I’m concerned that this is a setup for Bible banning.” This listener goes on and says, “The terms they use include multiple parts of the Bible including sex, violence, destruction, homosexuality, the non-Christian agenda, plans for future issues, and are subversive in their patterns.” Well, no doubt about that.

And it’s one of the reasons why I’m not really for anything called book banning in reality either. I want to make clear that the word book banning is often indeed almost always misapplied here, because the books are available. I’m not going to give a name, but you can order them on a vast internet site that sells books. You can go down to your local bookstore and get them. You’re not in prison for holding them. No one’s going to come into your house and try to find them in terms of anything but the most subversive or illegal material including, say, child pornography. So yeah, ban those things without apology.

But when it comes to literature, books, Das Kapital, when it comes to Feuerbach and Nietzsche, when it comes to the most toxic ideas, Leninism and Marxism, no, we shouldn’t ban the books. The debate, however, is primarily over what books should be in schools and what books should be in libraries accessible, particularly to minors. And here’s where I think we do have to draw the line and I think as Christians, we have to do so honestly. And I’ll contend for the Bible being in the collection and the awful stuff not being in the collection. But honestly, the Bible’s not in a lot of these collections in any kind of prominent way anyway. It really is coming from a very leftist environment where, quite honestly, the propaganda which they want to present to our children is daunting. It’s not only a matter of concern. It should be a matter of our action.

So I’m not in favor of book banning, I am in favor of taking responsibility for what are in collections particularly presented to children and young people. And I’ll do so without apology. You raise a good point. It can be turned against us if we act wrongly in this matter, but I’m going to take the risk to act even if this ends up being used against us.

Part V

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What Happens When a Senator or Member of the House Becomes a Part of the President’s Cabinet? Who Takes Their Place? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay. Young woman, a senior in high school being homeschooled by Christian parents. This young woman says, “Lord willing, I will start college in the fall pursuing a degree in political science.” That’s great. She says she enjoys listening to The Briefing. I appreciate that. And she goes on to ask, “What happens when a president selects senators or representatives to be members of his cabinet? For example, Marco Rubio who is now our Secretary of State, but was formerly a senator for Florida. Who will take his place as senator and how does that person get appointed?”

Great question and is particularly acute in this cycle with the second Trump administration, because he has chosen several members of his cabinet from within the Senate and from within the House. The big issue here is the House. Because the numbers between the Democrats and the Republicans are so close, the Republican majority is so slim. That, honestly, the loss of some of these seats as Republican seats, even for a short amount of time, could be quite significant. But that is how the President chose his cabinet. He had the right to do so. And then, you could look at the Senate and the classic case is indeed, as you say, Marco Rubio, long-term US senator from the State of Florida. Now, the United States Secretary of State. That Senate seat became open. How did it get filled? It got filled by the appointive power of the Governor of Florida.

Now, the US constitution looks to the states for the precise mechanism whereby the states will make that determination. And in most states, it is the governor who has the power to make such short-term appointments. How short-term? Well, in the case of the Marco Rubio seat, the successor in his seat is Senator Ashley Moody and she was Florida’s Attorney General until that point. And so, even as Marco Rubio resigned from the Senate to become the US Secretary of State, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Ashley Moody, the Attorney General in the state, to the new role as the United States Senator from Florida. She becomes the second woman from Florida as a Senator, Republican senator. And she also will have to run for election if she wants to continue in that role in November of 2026, so about two years away.

The situation can be a little more complicated in some states, but this is the norm. And so, in this situation, you have the governor having the authority to do this. Ashley Moody is from Plant City, Florida. The Moody family, extremely well known there. Both my parents are from Plant City, which was a very small town at that time. And so, this was one of those appointments that also means that you had the position of Attorney General in Florida then open and the governor gets to move into that decision-making as well. There have been cases, by the way, in which some governors have appointed themselves to an open Senate seat and have left their own position as governor. That’s even more complicated. And well, let’s just say, Governor DeSantis didn’t do that.

Part VI

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If Adam Named All the Animals, How Did He Name the Sea Creatures If He Did Not Live By the Ocean? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 7-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

All right. Then, I need to turn. Next in my stack is, well, it’s an inquiry with two questions. One from a seven-year-old son and the other from the seven-year-old son’s dad. The first question comes from the seven-year-old, “If Adam named all the animals, how did he name all the ocean creatures if he didn’t live by the ocean?” Okay. What a great question. What a seven-year-old boy question. The question is great and the answer is, “I don’t know exactly how Adam did it.”

But I want to point to the fact that as you look at Genesis and you see chapter 1. After God has brought forth all the creatures according to their kinds and then he makes human beings. He makes Adam and then He makes Eve. He makes human beings male and female created he them. What you have even before the direct creation of human beings with reference to Adam, “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So I think when you look at Genesis chapter 2, where we are told that Adam was given the responsibility to name all the creatures, well, I think that catalog has been given to us in Genesis chapter 1. Now, specifically in chapter 2, we are told that God formed him and brought to Adam every beast of the field, every bird of the heavens, and he brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. And by the way, that was to help Adam also to understand his need, because the animals came two by two and he was alone.

So I’ll just point out that in chapter 2, it doesn’t specifically say that Adam there named all the creatures in the sea. But the dominion was already assigned and the naming is a demonstration of that dominion, so I don’t know that the Scripture absolutely tells us when Adam named all those creatures. But you know what? It’s the exercise of dominion and the Scripture has given it including the fish of the sea. So I don’t know anything to do, but to leave it there and stand back once again in awe of a question from a seven-year-old.

Part VII

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Can I Sin in My Dreams? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Oh, but again, the dad had a question, “There are times when I’m dreaming that I feel I can make choices. What if I make a sinful choice in my dream? Is that sin?” This is a question of a different level. And by the way, it’s a question that would be quite shocking indeed, implausible from the seven-year-old. Coming from the seven-year-old’s dad, it makes sense. What’s the difference? Seven-year-olds have not yet developed what’s known as complex analytical reasoning. They can’t abstract themselves from themselves.

They may be troubled by a dream, but they’re more likely just to be scared by something that’s frightened them in a dream. Those of us who have reached adulthood, we can think about things in our dreams and then we can abstract ourselves and wonder, “What was I doing in that dream? What does this tell me about myself?” We can be very scared by our dreams, scared about what they reveal about ourselves and the Scripture takes this very, very seriously.

But I think it’s also important to say that in understanding, say, our dreams we’re not in total control of our dreams. Our dreams may truly scare us because of things we think or even things we might imagine doing or happening to ourselves. Even, as you say here, moral choices. I’m going to just suggest that at least one thing I will want to think about is that God is using that dream, regardless of exactly how it came about, in your dream state there in sleep, I’m going to assume that God is using that even if you are troubled in such a way, as to edify you for the moral fight to which you are called.

I think it’s also true sometimes. And anyone who has been an adolescent male, let’s just say this, certainly knows that you have some dreams in which you just have things you know are outside of your control, that can just be just horribly troubling and completely perplexing. And this is where we do just affirm there are things outside our conscious control. I don’t think any father talking to a 15-year-old son is going to say, “You premeditated that dream.” That’s not the case.

But we’re responsible for everything that’s within our conscious control. And so, that helps to build the conscience and I hope that will have that effect in you. I think it has by the very fact you asked the question the way you asked it. And if something like this really concerns you, this is where also in the Body of Christ there ought to be safe place for Christian men, in particular, let’s just say, on the one hand, and Christian women on the other hand, to talk about some of these things for mutual counsel and edification.

Part VIII

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How Do I Confront My College Classmates About Their Wrong Views on LGBTQ Issues? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right. Another young man. In this case, a 19-year-old college student wrote in. He is a freshman at a major university in his home state. He joined a college ministry. Since he’s joined it, he’s been troubled by the fact that many other members talk about how they support the LGBTQ movement and abortion. And he’s rightly concerned about their spiritual health. He says he’s prayed about it, but he’s not sure what to do, whether to confront them or what.

I want to say to this young man, I understand the predicament. And at some point, I think just about every Christian is going to be in some kind of predicament like this. And I don’t know exactly what the college ministry you’re talking about, what it believes, what its convictions are. And so, these other young people, they might be outside those convictions. On the other hand, if the ministry itself is unbiblical in its convictions on these issues, then I would say you need to find a truly biblically ordered ministry. And thankfully, in most major university campuses, at least close to the campus, there are some really healthy church and some really more faithful Christian ministries.

However, the question doesn’t say that it’s the leadership of the organization, but members. And here, I would say enter into fruitful conversation. And be honest about your convictions and honest about your concern. It doesn’t have to begin with an absolute debate, but it does require you to be faithful in such a way that you don’t acquiesce to join them in what are unbiblical beliefs, beliefs inconsistent with biblical Christianity.

It’s a test being on a major university campus and this is just one of those tests. And I’m thankful you have the relationships. And I’m going to pray the Lord will give you wisdom to know exactly how to apply your responsibility in the midst of a conversation with fellow students on some of these issues. But I also hope you’re in a good gospel church while you’re there in college, because that’s necessary for our grounding. And I think you’re going to find a lot of Christians your age and, frankly, older who are in a similar situation. If not on campus, then, say, at work.

Part IX

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What Was God Doing Before Time Existed? — Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter from a 7-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing

One final question is another seven-year-old. In this case, a seven-year-old little girl who asked a question, “How was it that God existed before He made the universe? What was He doing during that time?” Well, I am not going to try to explain the difference between time in eternity in a deep sense with a seven-year-old. I do want to make very clear, time and eternity are not the same thing. But I also want to be clear about something else.

In our humility, we need to affirm the fact that God has told us everything he intends for us to know in this age about himself in Scripture. But he hasn’t told us everything we might want to ask, including, “What was He doing before the creation of the world?” But that invokes a time-space continuum that God does not experience, but we do that he created for the creature. So this is a question we can’t really answer on those terms theologically, but we also really can’t answer it simply because we just don’t know. It’s not been revealed to us. So it’s a good question from a seven-year-old.

And it’s a good thing to say here’s what Scripture says, God exists for his glory, and that’s what he was doing, let’s just say, because we have no way around this, before the creation of the world. One glimpse we have into all this is in the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the Gospel of John where he prays to the Father about the glory they shared together before the creation of the world. We know that much. We’re not given more. It’s good for all of us to know that we come to some questions and on scriptural authority we have to say, “We don’t know. God has not answered that question in Scripture.”