Thursday, May 14, 2009

Who But God...?

For several years, there has been an email circulating with pictures of a rare flower from Thailand called the Parrot Flower. It is a form of Internet apologetics that asks, "Who but God could do this?"





Just as there are people who fabricate things like this--I assume to make Christians look gullible--so too there are people who call anything of this sort a hoax because it makes the Christian's point a little too nicely.

But Hoax-Slayers tells us that this is indeed the rare Impatiens psittacina that grows in Thailand, Myanmar and portions of east India. Psittacina means "parrot-like."

"[I]nformation about the plant was first published in 1901 in the Curtis Botanical Journal Magazine by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. And the now famous photographs included above were taken by a Thai grower of the plant in 2001."

For the full story on these remarkable creatures, go to The Exotic Rainforest and for more pictures, consult the same folks here.

It is marvelous that God would limit such a glorious work to so small a region, the way he places beautiful, colorful fish in the deep depths of the ocean where no one can see them.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Devil Is In The Antitheses

Donald A. Carson, Prof. of New Testament
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School



On the Emerging Church movement:

So which shall we choose?

Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?

Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.

Donald Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234.

You can hear D. A. Carson's sermons at SermonAudio.com.