Timothy's Thoughts

S ome people make the claim that if God has ever willed the death of an innocent child then he is not worthy of a Christian’s worship. What? Where do they get that? You may not like to hear this, but God kills people. And yes, he has killed babies who, as far as we can tell, never did anything wrong. David’s son with Bathsheba, is just one example. That’s the facts, plain and simple. He willingly let Satan kill Job’s whole family and Job was a just man who offered sacrifice for his children. Innocent in all points of the law. That’s the facts. God kills people and makes no apology for it. If, as they claim, a god like that isn’t worthy of our worship then God is not worthy of our worship. But that’s not what God says. God says that he is worthy of our worship. Are Christians worshiping the wrong God? Or are the people who have made that claim idiots? The thing is, we don’t get to pick and choose. There is one living God, he is what he is, and he demands our worship. We may not li...

Y esterday, I mentioned the omnipotence of God and how it is not open for debate. But though all things are possible with God, that doesn’t mean that he will do all things or that he does not allow us to have freewill. Since all things are possible, one of the “all things” that he can allow is for us to make our own choices about many things, including whether to accept or reject his Son. We know that it isn’t his will that any perish. We know that he could force us to accept his Son. But he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he? I don’t know, but he doesn’t. One of the questions people ask is whether God could create a rock that he could not push. Yes, I’m sure he could, but I don’t think he is going to. What we see instead is an even bigger problem. God created man. God wanted a relationship with us, but he gave us the ability to sin. God cannot have a relationship with sinful beings. That makes it seem like there truly is a rock that God can’t push. So God got creative. Instead of writing us of...

W hat is debatable? Some people seem to think that pretty much anything is debatable. Recently, a literary agent invited me and all of her other acquaintances to get involved in a debate on a client’s blog about whether God is omnipotent. How is that debatable? Jesus declared in Matthew 19:26, “with God all things are possible.” That sounds pretty omnipotent to me. So people who would debate this subject have rejected the Bible and the words of Jesus as the foundation of truth. That is a problem because it is the Bible that tells us what God is like. If all we have to go on is what we see around us, then we would conclude that he is very powerful, but we would have no way of knowing if he is all powerful because we can’t see far enough to know. Our telescopes can’t even see the end of what he has created, so how could we possibly know whether there is something out there that he doesn’t have power over. Simply put, it is not debatable. Paul seemed to think that even less was debatabl...

A critic once wrote, “the hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story.” ( The Times , 13 September 1968) Why is this? Why must the hero triumph? Stories are about encouraging people to understand and to do what is right. When we look at a story like Jack and the Beanstalk, we see a good for nothing character who turns his life around by accomplishing something amazing. That is what we want to encourage men and boys to do. We want them to strive to be the hero. We want them to strive to overcome their imperfections. If the giant had killed Jack, then we wouldn’t be encouraging boys to try but we would be causing them to fear to make the effort. I believe the exception to that is in a call to arms story. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin , the bad guys won. In other words, the giant killed Jack, but what makes it different is that it was clear that the mostly white readership o...

T hough I will never promise to end all of my stories without tragedy, I’m a big fan of happy endings. People like to reach the end of the story and feel glad that things turned out the way they did. We need sad endings too. Books like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold have their place. Part of the reason I know sad endings have their place is because some of the stories in the Bible have sad endings. What could be more sad than a man achieving a great victory in war and then coming home and sacrificing his daughter? We need those to remind us that not everything works out the way we would like. But happy endings give us hope. I am so much a fan of happy endings that I’m convinced that unless an author has something that can only be said through a sad ending, he should plan on a happy ending. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin for example. It is about a black slave who is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But in the end he dies a terrible death. The ending is somewhat happy because h...

D eborah is an interesting character in the Bible. We don’t actually know much about her, other than she had a lot of spunk. But I’ve got a couple of theories. Actually, they are more like suppositions than theories. One is that the reason she was a judge was because the men weren’t doing their jobs. That’s not to say that she was wrong to do what she did, but Judges is written about a time when the Jews had turned away from God. They weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They weren’t worshiping God like they should have been. They weren’t following the leaders they were supposed to follow. I suspect there was a man who God had called to be a judge but was not doing his job. That leads me into the next supposition. Deborah was a prophetess because her husband was a prophet, not because she was called to be a prophet. Consider the wife of Isaiah. She was called a prophetess because she was his wife, not because she was getting messages from God. So it could be that Deborah’s hu...

A new year, a new story. Last year, I wrote two books, and published three, but none were novels. This year, I intend to write at least one novel. I found a story in the Bible that I would like to retell in a modern setting. It’s a great story, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where to begin. The basic outline is there, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where the main character is coming from. I know what has to happen, but why? The Bible account is a little vague on that point. It states the facts of the situation, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what is going through people’s heads at the time. Besides that, the Bible account takes up only two chapters, with the second chapter saying much of the same thing the first chapter did. Essentially, I have to take three pages of information and expand them into 300 pages. But after struggling with how to begin, I decided not to begin. Instead, I wrote the final chapter first. I began with the final event and detaile...