Summit Ministries

Hello to all those reading the Summit blog,

Each day at Summit gets better and better. And Wednesday was no different. Let's start with the morning.

The opening lecture was by Rod Thompson. As you may have heard from yesterday's blog, his message is that we need to read the Bible in light of the Bible. We can't take bits and pieces of it and drop them out of the surrounding context and think that they can apply to us. He illustrated this for us with the book of 2 Chronicles and Joshua 1:8. The end result of seeing Joshua 1:8 in its correct context and in light of the whole of the Bible (Christ's life, death, resurrection and the directives to New Testament believers) was that we gained a deeper appreciation of how Christ took the curse of our sin for us. Also, this text in the light of the whole Bible helps us identify the specific enemies to the Christian life that we are supposed to eliminate.

After Mr. Thompson we got Dr. Kurt Wise. He was Outstanding! The big idea that he got across to us was to look at the Creation around us in terms of the Nature of God. In the afternoon session, he said something that was amazing. When we look at the nature of God, we can see that He is creative. One of the ways that this comes up is in the variety of creation. When you think about it, do we need thousands of beetles or flowers or other organisms which live literally almost all over the globe? This isn't just creativity, it is and overabundance of creativity!

Then there was the fossil hike. Dr. Wise taught us how glaciers work, how most canyons were formed, a little about the Indian civilizations that lived in the area, some of characteristics of the trees in the area (if you could keep up with him in between stops. He walks fast!), and, oh yeah, we found some fossils!

The evening was the best lecture so far, for me anyway. There were two big messages that I got from it. The first was to trust God, not you apologetics. If your faith is in reason it can be overturned, and your reason has become the god of your life instead of God. The second thing that Dr. Wise shared in the evening session that impacted me was that no human is your enemy. We can be tempted to make the person who doesn't agree with us our enemy, but they are but a blind captive as we can read somewhere in 2 Corinthians where Paul reminds us that "the god of this world has blinded their eyes…

Well, I have to get back to Summit. I don't want to miss what is in store for me here!