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Dear Friends,
Welcome to The Grace Perspective newsletter. Every month we will send you a series of articles to aid you on your spiritual journey. From current crises on the American landscape to ancient theological debates that still rage, The Perspective will offer scriptural answers to today's relevant questions. J.F.T. Woods will answer a question each month from his Out of the Woods column @ www.gracebeliever.com. There will be a Tools and Tips segment each month to give the new believer and the serious Bible student information and advice on personal Bible Study. We will have articles submitted from a wide range of Grace Bible teachers on such diverse subjects as Progressive Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church, Election, Eternal Security, Israel's Future, Which Translation, Law or Grace, and many others. Christian Financial Perspectives will offer sound advice and answers for any relevant questions you as a reader may have. And once in a while, a secular author or Professor, whose work sheds light on some element of the Christian worldview, will make a guest appearance (See Classics and War below. )

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Q. How are the Ten Commandments distinguished from the other ceremonial and dietary laws that we find in the Old Testament?

A. They are mentioned as "the ten" (Deuteronomy 10:4,13). Also, they alone were graven in stone (Deuteronomy 10:4; Exodus 24:12; 31:18; 32:15,16; II Corinthians 3:7-13).

Deu 10:4 And He wrote on the tablets, according to the first writing, the Ten Commandments which Jehovah spoke to you in the mountain out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly. And Jehovah gave them to me.

However, the law . . . civil, ceremonial, and moral is an indivisible unit (Matthew 5:18; Luke 2:22-24; 24:44) ; and binding in its entirety on those under its authority (James 2:8-10).

Jam 2:8-10 If you fulfill the royal Law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you do well. But if you have respect to persons, you commit sin and are convicted by the Law as transgressors. For whoever shall keep the whole Law and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

The Christian commits a grievous sin when he reduces the Law to "a rule of life" for today's believer, or when he places himself under a part of it (Galatians 3:10).

Gal 3:10 For as many as are out of works of the Law, these are under a curse; for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the Book of the Law, to do them."

The Law was not, and can never be, a rule of life. It is a system of command and penalty, of conditional blessing and cursing (Leviticus 26:3-ff; :14-ff; with Deuteronomy 28.) Thank God that you are not under it (Romans 6:14; 7:4-6)!

Rom 6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under Law, but under grace.

Rom 7:4-6 So, my brothers, you also have become dead to the law by the body of Christ so that you should be married to Another, even to Him raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sin worked in our members through the law to bring forth fruit to death. But now we having been set free from the Law, having died to that in which we were held, so that we serve in newness of spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

Meet you in the Clouds! JFT Woods

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March 15th, 44 BC, Julius Caesar began to make his way out of the Senate Hall. He had again refused the typical assembly of bodyguards that had been appointed him. Why should he worry? The wearing of arms in the city was not a Roman custom, and after all, it was his city and Rome loved him. His response to his friends on their concerns for his safety, was that if danger were at hand,

Nearly two years later, while preparing an army in Macedonia, legend tells us that this same Brutus had a vision. He saw an apparition approach and when he questioned the silent figure, the ghost replied,

While the legend of Brutus' premonition of evil may be apocryphal, scripture records the vision that would lead another man into Philippi nearly a century later with those who would 'turn the world upside down':

Acts 16:9
And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; there stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, come over into Macedonia, and help us.

The shadow of Rome would play a prominent role in both the founding of the Philippian church and the occasion of Paul's letter. The Apostle's frequent use of both political and military metaphors throughout this short letter indicates that he was keenly alert of his audience - a people both proud of their Roman heritage and to some their former service in the legions. Both citizen and legionnaire would be able to relate to the appeals and exhortations of their beloved apostle.

While affectionately known as the epistle of Joy to millions of believers, the purpose of the letter goes well beyond the theme of 'Joy through Suffering' that it has been reduced to by most commentators. It is true that Paul is expressing his joy amidst his present sorrow - under arrest, chained to a Roman guard around the clock, awaiting a trial that could end with his death, forsaken by the church in Rome, and yet the Apostle rejoices that the gospel is being spread both by his condition (in the Praetorium - Phil. 1:13) and because of his condition (boldness of other Roman teachers - Phil.1:14). And while the gift the Philippians sent by the hands of Epaphroditus may have occasioned a chance to express his gratitude, it is clear that there were some practical concerns about unity (both doctrinal and personal), as well as fears about those who would pervert the gospel (the Judaizers). The epistle to the Philippians, although a personal display of the apostle's affection for the church, is a letter to correct practical not doctrinal failure. While this is so, it has been rightly said that there is no practical failure apart from the neglect or rejection of sound doctrine. While it is a recurring theme in the Apostle's letter, joy is just one of the results - one of many blessings of having the mind of Christ.

Our next study will include:
• The Gospel goes to Europe - Where's Barnabas?
• Fear and Distraction - Recipe for failure!
• Recovery - Having Christ Esteem!

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In HIS Word, GOD tells us not to store our treasures here on earth. Instead, we are to first focus on eternal matters. We aren't to love money but each of us has the responsibility to plan our finances and be prudent with our GOD-given finances.

How can this be accomplished? In this series of Financial Planning articles, we'll explore strategies that promote success without loving money.

You may be in a position of just barely getting by. Perhaps you have health problems and money is a concern. Maybe you were just given your termination notice. Or, you could have very little financial concerns. It doesn't matter. We are all children of GOD and can use financial advice.

The first strategy is to ascertain what you have. Gather all your bank statements, fund accounts, IRAs, broker statements, and any other documents. It really isn't hard to do...just a little time is needed.

Once you gather all documents, consolidate on one piece of paper. Many can accomplish this through accounting software programs. Divide the assets into bank accounts, non-retirement assets, and retirement assets. This paints a fairly clear picture of your portfolio balance. Only now can the astute eye appreciate future financial moves.

Asset allocation is important and will be addressed in future articles. For now, work on gathering that information. You'll be glad you did.

If we, as Christians, control our debt, we can run the financial race and win. We are called to be prudent spenders and savers. We are called to support the grace message of GOD. Controlling your finances puts you on the inside track of the financial race. By GOD's wonderful grace, you will win.

All Glory to GOD,
Bob Mecca, CFP, MBA

Bob is a Certified Financial Planner with a Masters Degree and 30 years experience. He teaches investment classes and has co-authored financial articles in the Sun-Times. To contact him, write to BobMecca@aol.com

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Victor Davis Hanson, Professor of Classics, California State University, Fresno

The following is an abridged version of Dr. Hanson's lecture at a seminar on "Liberal Education, Liberty and Education Today," delivered in Phillips Auditorium at Hillsdale College on November 11, 2001.

The study of Classics - of Greece and Rome - can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance - and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen on American campuses. If more in our universities really understood the Greeks and Romans and their legacy in the West, then they would not see this present conflict through either therapeutic or apologetic lenses. As Classics teaches us, war in classical antiquity - and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization - was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition - a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury their sons rather than sons fathers. In others words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. But it does happen. So war, the poet Hesiod concluded, was a "curse from Zeus." Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out - and very frequently so - because we are human and thus not always rational. War is "the father, the king of us all," the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Even the utopian Plato agreed: "War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state." How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace, not war, the real "parenthesis" in human affairs. Warfare could be terrifying - "a thing of fear," the poet Pindar summed up - but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil. No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. While all tragic, wars could be good or evil depending on their cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. The Greek defense against Persian attack in 480 B.C., in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epigram mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his dramas), was "glorious." Yet the theme of Thucydides' history of the internecine Peloponnesian Wars was folly and sometimes-senseless butchery. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks' naval victory at Salamis, but not with the slaughter at the battle of Gaugamela - Alexander the Great's destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III's empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

The Roots of War

If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides tells us, can be envious - and even rude and pushy. And if they can get away with things, they most surely will. Thucydides later says states battle out of "honor, fear, and self-interest." How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior and weak to serve them. To the Greeks, such rotten peoples also fought mostly over tangible things - more land, more subjects, more loot. Wars were a sort of acquisition, Aristotle said. Bullies, whether out of vanity or a desire for power and recognition, will take things from other people unless they are stopped. And if they are to be stopped, citizens - among them good, kind and well-read men like Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Demosthenes - must fight to protect their freedom and to save the innocent. To a student of the Classics who trusts Thucydides or Plato more than Marx, Freud, or Michel Foucault, the present crisis, I think, looks something like this: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, invites envy because of the success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets that threaten both theocracy and autocracy alike. That we are often to be hated - and periodically to be challenged by those who want our power, riches, or influence and yet simultaneously hate their own desire - is to be often regretted, but always expected. Our past indulgence of Osama bin Laden did not bring us respect, much less sympathy. Rather, human nature being what it is, our forbearance invited ever more contempt and audacity on his part - and more dead as the bitter wages of our self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation. The enemies of free speech and tolerance - German Nazi's, Italian fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist communists, or Islamic fundamentalists - always attack us for what we are, rather than what we have done, inasmuch as they must innately hate freedom and the liberality which is its twin. Only our moral response - not our status as a belligerent per se - determines whether our war is just and necessary. If, like the Athenians, we butcher neutral Melians for no good cause, then our battle against the innocent is evil and we may not win. But if we fight to preserve freedom like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the GIs on the beaches of Normandy, then war is the right and indeed the only thing we can do. Caught in such a tragedy, where efforts at reason and humanity fall on the deaf ears of killers, we must go to war for our survival and to prove to our enemies that their defeat will serve as a harsh teacher - at least for a generation or two - that it is wrong and very dangerous to use two kilotons of explosives to blow up 5,000 civilians in the streets of our cities.

The Modern View of War

This depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any longer with us. It was not the advent of Christianity that ended it; Christian philosophers and theologians long ago developed the doctrine of "just war," having realized that nonresistance meant suicide. More likely, the 20th Century and the horror of the two World Wars - Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima - put an end to the tragic view of war. Yet out of such numbing losses - and our arrogance - we missed the lesson of the World Wars. The calamity of 60 million dead occurred not only because we went to war, but also because we were naïve and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914 and 1939 - at a time when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished. The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment - Marxists and Freudians - gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to 'prove' to us that war was always evil and therefore -- with help from Ph.D.s - surely preventable. Indeed, during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances, such as the poverty arising out of the usual list of sins: colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism. In response, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution theory," a sort of marriage counseling or small claims court taken to the global level. Rich and conceited Westerners simply could not accept the idea that more people in the twentieth century were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao off the battlefield than on it. How depressing to suggest that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, and the Serbians went on killing when left alone - and quit only when either satiated or stopped! In the new moral calculus of the American university, bin Laden figures to be no Xerxes or Tojo. He is not even an inherently evil man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few in the university understand that bin Laden wishes to make decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, they insist that he is either confused (call in Freud) or has legitimate grievances (read Marx), and so we must find answers within us for what he does. Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians? Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick - bin Laden has cited them all. To stop the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, the tragic Greeks would make ready the 101st Airborne and the Rangers, while too many in academia would rather that we chitchat with him, fathom him, or accommodate him, as did the Clinton State Department. Seeing war, as "Zeus's curse" in this age of our greatest learning and wealth -and pride - is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated elite promise that prayer, talk, or money can yet prevail. But if we deem ourselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop killers, then - as Socrates and Pericles alike remind us - we have become real accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of what the Greeks once warned us.

Western Exceptionalism

Finally, Classics teaches how unique the Greeks and Romans were among the peoples of the ancient world; theirs was an anti-Mediterranean culture whose approach to politics, culture, literature, and religion was antithetical to almost every state in Africa, Asia, and tribal confines of northern Europe. In our ignorance, too many Americans have made the fatal mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far worse than us - as if the current war in the Middle East is largely due to a misunderstanding among equals, rather than reflective of a vast fault line that goes back to the very origins of our civilization. Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned their property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; not so in Persia and Egypt. Thucydides was able to criticize his mother country, Greece; Persian clerks who recorded Darius's res gestae on the walls of Persepolis were not. The Greek language and its European descendants have a rich vocabulary of words for "constitution," "citizen," "Freedom," and "democracy"; this is true of neither old Persian nor modern Arabic. Such differences are not perceived, but real and critical, for they affect the manner in which people conduct their daily lives - whether they live in fear or in safety, in want or in security. If our students and professors today would study the Classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture - and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are in fact profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion. Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, sociology, and nearly any discipline with the suffix "studies" would lecture us that the Taliban's desecration of the graves of the infidel, clitorectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and destruction of the non-Islamic is merely "different" or "problematic" - almost anything other than "evil." Yet a world under the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy that Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no free expression, no voting, no protection from arbitrary and coercive government, but instead theocracy, censorship, and brutality in every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis, and so too is the contest now with the Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as we are to the Greeks.
Such ignorance of one's own past can weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidences, power, humanity - and hope - those less fortunate abroad. This new species of upscale and pampered terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. He despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality. He recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as importantly, he realizes that there is an aristocratic guilt within many comfortable Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our ignorance of our own foundations, but also both decadence and weakness. Rather than appreciating Americans' self-confidence or simple manners when we accept rebuke so politely, our enemies despise us all the more, simply because they can - and so easily, and without rejoinder. Classics, then, can teach us who we once were - and thus who we are now in the present war.

Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).

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