Grace Walk
Introduction
This evening (August 5, 2005) marks the beginning of our home-based Bible study entitled, Grace Walk. Tonight and next Friday, we’ll be viewing two new documentaries recently released by The Discovery Institute on the subject of Intelligent Design. The first, entitled Unlocking the Mystery of Life, approaches the subject from a biological perspective. The second, entitled Privileged Planet, approaches the subject from a cosmological perspective.
Our third week will address the subject of "How We Got Our Bible". Most Christians accept the Bible as infallible and inerrant without really knowing anything about the process of origination or any of the several steps through which it passed before being translated into English. I’ve actually had people tell me, "If the King James was good enough for Jesus and Paul, it’s good enough for me!"
Some of you may be wondering why I have chosen to begin by using these two documentaries…so I’ll tell you. The reason there are so many different and often opposing ideas about "what the Bible says" is grounded largely in the fact that different assumptions govern the minds of those who search the Bible and they are very likely to only find "support" for their assumptions. When I approach the Bible, at this time in my life, my assumption is that the God of the Bible is the sovereign Creator and that the universe around us came into existence by intelligent design and for the purpose of demonstration. The specifics of the purpose of the demonstration will become clearer as we study the book of Romans which we’ll begin on our fourth Friday evening, unless lesson three takes more time than I expect.
I don’t really know how long we’ll be in Romans…the last time I led a group on that subject, we had only just started chapter 4 after 18 lessons when the class ended! I don’t want to go too slow, but certainly don’t want to needlessly rush through what I consider to be the most complete theological treatise in the Bible.
Each week, I’ll post notes from the previous Friday’s lesson on our website at ne14grace.org.