Select Page
  1. I liked Charles Spurgeon’s morning devotional for May 23, especially these words:

“If there is one stitch in the celestial garment of our righteousness that we must insert ourselves, then we are lost; but this is our confidence—what the Lord begins, He completes. He has done it all, must do it all, and will do it all. Our confidence must not be in what we have done, nor in what we have resolved to do, but entirely in what the Lord will do. Unbelief insinuates: ‘You will never be able to stand. Look at the evil of your heart—you can never conquer sin; remember the sinful pleasures and temptations of the world that beset you—you will be certainly allured by them and led astray.’ True, we would certainly perish if left to our own strength. If by ourselves we navigate the most frail vessels of our lives over so rough a sea, we might well give up the voyage in despair; but thanks be to God, He will complete that which concerns us and bring us to the desired haven. We can never be too confident when we confide in Him alone, and never too eager to have such a trust.”

How can you not shout hallelujah! after reading those words?

2. I liked Part 1 of Tuesday’s edition of The Briefing. In this segment, Al Mohler reflected on Archbishop Salvador Cordileone’s barring of Nancy Pelosi from communion due to her views on abortion. (Pelosi, who claims to be Roman Catholic, staunchly supports and defends abortion—a view explicitly condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.) Pelosi responded to Cordileone’s censure on MSNBC’s program Morning Joe: “I respect people’s views about that [abortion],” Pelosi said, “But I don’t respect us foisting it onto others.” In Thursday’s edition of The Briefing, Mohler reacted to these comments, which are worth considering:

Here, you have the speaker of the house. I repeat myself, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. What does the House do? The House makes law. In other words, it foists judgment onto others. But now, when it comes to abortion, the speaker of the house who just pushed through radical abortion legislation through the House of Representatives says that she respects people’s views about abortion, “but I don’t respect us foisting it onto others” . . . . In politics, one way or another, the law is going to foist value judgments upon the people. That’s what the law actually does.

Mohler is absolutely right.

As Phil Johnson wrote, the “law provides symbolic public affirmation for some worldviews and values and implied public repudiation of others.” After all, the law makes judgments, and all judgments are value-laden. Further, as Arthur Leff argued in his seminal essay, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” ethical evaluations are only binding if they have “supernatural grounding.”

One last point on this: Those insisting that religious claims should be excluded from this debate, should read and give serious consideration to philosopher Francis Beckwith’s essay, “The Courts, Natural Rights, and Religious Claims as Knowledge,” as well as legal scholar Steven D. Smith’s book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.

3. I liked Scotty Smith’s prayer in response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, “Jesus, You Must Help Us.”