God loved Abraham, and He had tested and tried him as few men have been.  Abraham had met the tests marvelously, and now, rejuvenated, God blessed him with a young woman.  Earlier (Gen. 24:1), we see Abraham “old, and well stricken in age.”  Now he married Keturah and fathers six sons, and he sees them grow to maturity.  More than what this tells us about Abraham is what it tells us about God.  God does not bless Abraham by finding some ancient monastery for him.  Rather, God provides for His friend (James 2:23) a fresh bride in his old age.  Failure to see this means a failure to know the God of Scripture.

From: R.J. Rushdoony: Commentary on the Pentateuch. Genesis. California 2002, p.182.

Technorati Tags: Abraham, Keturah

“The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.” Revelation 8:7

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.   Exodus 20:12

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of h peopleis household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”  1Timothy 5:8 

Source: Reuters

Fueled by the needs of a growing elderly population, spending on long-term health care under the Medicaid program will soar in the next 20 years, a report released Monday predicted.

Spending for long-term care for elderly and disabled people under the Medicaid health insurance program for the poor will total $3.7 trillion in the next two decades, according to the report by America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group.

That includes $1.6 trillion projected to be spent by individual U.S. states and $2.1 trillion in federal money, according to the report. Long-term care includes nursing homes and in-home care for people unable to live independently.

“Medicaid’s position as the payer of last resort for long-term care — despite the presence of long-term care insurance available in the marketplace today — will continue to create budgetary difficulties for states and the federal government over the next two decades,” the report read.

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USA Today has an editorial written by David P Gushee in which Mr. Gushee challenges complementarians that they are actually semi-,and they should be willing to openly acknowledge this. Gushee says that he writes about this issue as a moderate evangelical Christian.

Gushee writes that there are many theologically conservative Christians who accept Sarah Palin as the Republical vice presidential nominee. Yet at the same time:

…at the local church level many congregations would not accept Palin or any other woman even as associate pastor, or deacon, or youth minister or Sunday school teacher in a gender-mixed classroom. The most conservative would not consider it appropriate for her to stand behind a pulpit and preach a sermon, or teach from the Bible, or lead a praise chorus, or offer a prayer, unless her audience consisted entirely of women or children.

He notes that even CBMW (Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood) who Gushee calls “an influential advocacy group” and who are against women teaching men in the church, have no problem in allowing for a woman to serve as vice president of the country. CBMW has replied to the article welcoming Gushee’s questions:

Full Story…

Source: CNN.com

In the 19 years that Teresa Hairston has published her magazine, GospelToday, she has never faced a major situation with Christian bookstores across the country that carry the publication.

She’s tackled any number of issues over the years,and has featured a number of celebrities and ministers, ranging from Yolanda Adams to Bishop T.D. Jakes to Kirk Franklin.

But when the Atlanta, Georgia, entrepreneur decided to feature five female pastors on her cover this month, she says, Lifeway Christian Stores treated her like she had converted her Christian publication to something akin to the tastes of porn purveyor Larry Flynt.

Apparently, the owner of Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention, wasn’t too happy with Hairston telling the story of female pastors, because the women go against their 2000 decree that only men can serve in the role of reverend or pastor.

According to Hairston, the Christian company didn’t even give her the courtesy of a heads-up.

“We got an anonymous tip,” she told me Tuesday on The Tom Joyner Morning Show, and after checking it out, she discovered that the magazine had been removed from the shelves in all of Lifeway’s 100-plus stores nationwide and had been placed behind the counter.

“They have never called me,” Hairston said. “Never sent an e-mail. Nothing. I had to go see my distributor to verify what they had done.”

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“Almost invariably, when this occurs [revolt against taxation], the state will resort to the most vicious, the most destructive, the most hidden tax of all.  It will resort to the reprobate tax of inflation.  By doing so, it decapitalizes virtually all of society because it destroys the currency medium upon which society makes its economic decisions and judgements.  As the currency goes, so goes society and the state.  inflation is the final act in the state’s play at being God.  t is its final attempt to create wealth by fiat.  It is the primary claim by man that he can create material propserity ex nihilo (out of nothing) in the same manner that God created the world.  In the area of economics inflation is the ultimate claim of man that he can legislate whatever he desires into existence.  It is his claim of being God in the realm of political-economy.  And because it is one of man’s primary menas by which he claims to be God, it brings one of God’s most severe judgements upon man.  God’s wrath against such unrighteousness means the virtual destruction of man’s political, social, and economic structure.”

From Tithing & Dominion, pg. 58, by Edward A. Powell and R.J. Rushdoony

Source: WSJ.com

A few weeks ago, a group called Roman Catholic Womenpriests staged what it called an ordination, vesting three Boston-area women in white chasubles and red stoles. It told the local papers that the ordinations were valid, despite the Catholic Church’s teaching to the contrary; it even asserted episcopal approval from a rogue bishop whose name it won’t reveal. But, as a statement from the Archdiocese of Boston put it: “Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the Church.” In other words: The ordinations were not Catholic.

Don’t tell that to Judy Lee, one of the “priests.” She insists that the archdiocese’s pronouncement will be a dead letter: “We are Roman Catholics. . . . The all-male hierarchy and their legal traditions came along with the spiritual package that we embrace. We do not have to embrace both if they are contradictory.” Bridget Meehan, spokeswoman for Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which claims 61 priests in North America, including one bishop, insists: “Nothing or no one can stop the action of God’s Spirit moving in the Church. . . . We are not discouraged by excommunication. In fact, in many ways, it is a catalyst for growth.” Ms. Meehan, who was ordained in 2006, believes that a “more transparent, community model” can bring nonpracticing Catholics back into the fold.

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The U.S. Congress has just voted to categorize tobacco as a drug, handing the FDA regulatory authority to control the advertising, marketing and sales of cigarettes. This hilarious move, if approved by the Senate and signed by the President, would put the FDA in the position of approving the sale of a “drug” that the entire medical community openly admits kills millions of people. According to the CDC, tobacco kills 438,000 people each year in the United States alone (1). Now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, the FDA could soon be the government office responsible for allowing these 438,000 deaths each year!

Think about it: Right now, FDA-approved drugs kill around 100,000 Americans a year, and that’s if you believe the conservative figures from the American Medical Association (the real numbers are at least double that). Add tobacco deaths to that list, and you come to the startling realization that if tobacco is considered an FDA-approved “drug,” then FDA-approved drugs will kill well over half a million Americans each year! (538,000 fatalities a year due to FDA-approved drugs, using government statistics.)

That’s a level of fatalities that terrorists haven’t even come close to approaching.

Why the FDA doesn’t want to regulate tobacco
Obviously, the FDA does not want to find itself in this position, because if regulatory authority over tobacco is shoved onto the FDA, it would be forced to declare tobacco an unapproved, unsafe drug and ban its sale.

Why? Because there have been no clinical studies whatsoever supporting the use of tobacco as a medicine. And if it’s considered a drug, then the FDA must apply the same rules to tobacco that it applies to other substances. And there’s absolutely no way a series of clinical trials could show tobacco to be safe or effective at treating disease. (Unless, of course, Big Tobacco funds the studies, in which case cigarette smoke could be made to look like it CURES cancer, thanks to fraudulent science and corrupt researchers…)

Thus, if the FDA were to follow its own rules, it would have to ban tobacco outright, considering it an “unapproved drug” and raid all the tobacco companies, confiscating their inventory and dragging them into court just like the FDA does with diet pills companies or cherry growers.

Of course, the FDA could decide to selectively NOT enforce its own rules against tobacco companies, but that puts the agency in an even worse position of making an exception on its drug enforcement policy, singling out the most dangerous “drug” ever created as one that suspiciously escapes regulatory action. That would make the FDA look like even more of a regulatory failure than it does already, calling into question whether the FDA simply bases its regulatory decisions on the size and influence of the corporation affected rather than genuine public safety.

Because, let’s face it: Cigarettes will kill you. There’s no debate anymore. Even the doctors — who are the slowest people in the world to accept new ideas — are on board with this one. Sure, it took them a few decades to stop running Big Tobacco ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and doctors used to take money from the tobacco companies to say cigarettes are “Recommended by doctors,” but those days are long gone. Today, virtually everyone agrees smoking cigarettes is one of the most dangerous activities a consumer can engage in when it comes to health.

So how on Earth, then, could the FDA allow cigarettes to continue to be sold at all? If it enforces its own rules, it would simply have to ban cigarettes altogether.

And I say banning cigarettes outright is a huge mistake. Here’s why:

Read on

A new Harvard study suggests men who eat higher amounts of soy-based foods become “feminized” – confirming a series of reports documented by longtime WND columnist Jim Rutz and drawing outraged protests from the soy food industry.

According to a report from Reuters, the study was done by Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, whose work appeared in the journal Human Reproduction.

It reportedly is the largest study of humans to look at the relationship between semen quality and a plant form of the female sex hormone estrogen known as phytoestrogen, which is plentiful in soy-rich foods.

“What we found was men that consume the highest amounts of soy foods in this study had a lower sperm concentration compared to those who did not consume soy foods,” Chavarro told Reuters.

“It was a relatively large difference,” he said.

The researcher said animal studies already have linked eating the plant-derived estrogens called isoflavones with infertility, but that’s not evident in humans yet.

The researchers looked at 99 men who went to a fertility clinic between 2000 and 2006, and their intake of soy-based foods, including tofu, tempeh, soy sausages, bacon or burgers, soy milk, cheese and yogurt.

Chavarro reported men in the highest intake category had 41 million sperm-per-milliliter fewer than men who ate no soy foods, prompting him to suggest soy has a “deleterious effect” on the reproductive system.

Full story at: wnd.com

The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to debate two bills that could give the federal government unprecedented control over the way parents raise their children – even providing funds for state workers to come into homes and screen babies for emotional and developmental problems.

The Pre-K Act (HR 3289) and the Education Begins at Home Act (HR 2343) are two bills geared toward military and families who fall below state poverty lines. The measures are said to be a way to prevent child abuse, close the achievement gap in education between poor and minority infants versus middle-class children and evaluate babies younger than 5 for medical conditions.