Cover story: “Political talk and the Christian.” Answering the question “Should Christians avoid political conversation and action?”, Dr. Ritch Boerckel says “That is a bit like asking if Christians should avoid breathing air.”

Rules to implement health care law require separate abortion premium. By Jed Stuber.

Temptation and sin: Where’s the line? By Ed Buch of PureLife Ministries.

Member Spotlight: Dr. Jonathan Sarfati and a sidebar on his challenges to atheist Richard Dawkins. By Michael Miller.

“Hate Crime“: Term obscures difference between sin, crime. By Rob Slane.

By Jed Stuber

Rules to implement the new federal health care law require every individual in qualified plans to pay a separate monthly “abortion premium.” According to analysts from the Bioethics Defense Fund, the rule also instructs insurers to hide the abortion coverage from advertising or information listings in state exchanges.

Abortion Memorial (Photo credit: DrGBB)

Pro-life groups including LifeSiteNews.com, Americans United for Life, The Family Research Council, LifeNews.com, and LifeIssues.org have reported on the rules since they were issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on March 12, but the story has been overshadowed by the Supreme Court hearings on the individual mandate and doesn’t seem to get enough attention to make national news.

Here’s how the rules work. Insurers may include abortion coverage as part of health care plans approved under the state exchanges to be created by the health care law. All enrollees in such a plan must make a payment of not less than $1 per month into an account exclusively for paying for abortions.

A notice about abortion coverage must be provided in the paperwork only at the time of enrollment. Monthly bills do not have to break out the abortion premium, and the rule specifies that advertising about the policy only need provide information about “the total amount of combined payments.”

The Bioethics Defense Fund has pointed out that these rules raise significant religious liberty concerns, because people who don’t want to pay for abortions will end up doing so in three ways. First, many will unknowingly buy a plan that covers abortion without realizing it, because the rules are designed to squelch transparency. Second, employers will choose plans that cover abortion, contrary to an employee’s wishes. Third, many people will be compelled to buy a plan that covers abortion, because there won’t be alternatives that have the coverage or provider networks they need. The Bioethics Defense Fund explains that this situation amounts to millions of dollars in subsidy to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

The mandates in the health care law have added another dimension to the religious liberty concerns and caused many who were unaware to begin asking questions, but the problems are not new.

When officials at Colorado Christian University heard about the health care law’s mandate that abortifacient contraception be covered, they decided to mount a legal challenge. As administrators began to scrutinize their health insurance policy, they discovered to their horror that their plan had covered abortion for years. It had simply never occurred to them to check. One professor said, “I suspect this is not unique to CCU. I bet everybody’s looking at their policies now …”

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, published a report from the Bioethics Defense Fund and then did a follow-up article to point out that the issue had gotten almost no coverage in the media. And does anybody actually read their insurance policies?

Consider recent events in the State of Kansas. Pro-life groups there lobbied the legislature to pass a law requiring that insurance policies could offer coverage for elective abortion only on a separate rider.

As a result of the law, insurance companies in Kansas sent notices to policy holders offering them a rider to cover abortion for an additional $6.95 a month. Upon receiving this notice, one woman was so appalled she dropped her health insurance and joined Samaritan Ministries. She sent us a copy of the notice.

This woman works for a pro-life ministry that takes an explicit stand against abortion. Although she is highly informed about pro-life issues, she didn’t realize that her insurance company did indeed sell policies that cover abortion.

The simple, clear, notice informing her that her insurance company would cover abortion for an additional monthly fee is what caused her to recoil at the idea her money was going to a company that pays for abortion.

Stories like these raise so many questions.

How many insurance companies offer abortion coverage? How many policies cover abortion? How many people don’t realize that abortion coverage is buried in the fine print, or disguised with terms like “preventative care” or “reproductive services”?

How many church boards have bothered to check whether the health insurance policies for the church staff cover abortion? How many church members have inquired? How many churches know if their insurance provider sells policies that cover abortion? What would it take to switch policies or companies? Are there even feasible alternatives available that don’t cover abortion? How many know about Samaritan Ministries?

We won’t know until we ask.

That’s why his most recent book, The Greatest Hoax on Earth?, took on evolution’s and atheism’s most popular promoter, British scientist Richard Dawkins, whose most recent book is The Greatest Show on Earth.

The subtitle of Dawkins’ book is The Evidence for Evolution. That of Jonathan’s book is Refuting Dawkins on Evolution.

’Nuff said?

“Dawkins is widely regarded as a champion of evolution and Darwinism and atheism,” Jonathan says. “He’s a vocal atheist, anti-Christian, and evolutionist. It’s very interesting he wrote his book on the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth because he admits that his previous books really did not prove evolution, but assumed it to be true. In The Greatest Show, he was trying to remedy that by producing the best possible arguments he could for evolution.”

But, in Greatest Hoax?, Jonathan shows that “here’s the best they can do, and here’s how it can’t add up.”

Jonathan ably plows through Dawkins’ arguments point by point, highlighting not only the weaknesses in Dawkins’ science, but his failures in logic as well.

For example, when Dawkins complains in Greatest Show that the human body is inefficient and wouldn’t have been created by an intelligent designer as it is, but more likely is the product of haphazard evolution, Jonathan deftly exposes the fallacies of his argument.

“An assertion about what a designer would or would not do is actually a pseudo-theological argument, not a scientific argument that mutations and natural selection could produce a particular complex design.” (Emphasis in original, page 266.)

Creationism works better as science because it doesn’t have the “prior assumption of materialism, which is being a hindrance to science in so many ways,” Jonathan says. (Materialism maintains that material things are all that exist and that nothing supernatural can exist.)

Instead, the creationist view “encourages research in the beginning because we’re given dominion over creation (Genesis 1:28) and the great early scientists believed that they were following God’s dominion then by doing scientific research,” Jonathan says.

“Atheism and evolution can’t justify the scientific endeavor.” 

By Rob Slane

Special to the Christian Health Care Newsletter

Watching the Trayvon Martin case unfold from here in Britain, I note that the American media and political classes seem to suffer from the same disease that the media and political classes over here have contracted. That is, without being in possession of practically any of the facts of the case, they jump to the hastiest of conclusions, pronouncing their verdicts with the kind of certainty which really ought to be reserved for divine omniscience alone. Whatever else we can say about the case, there appears to be an awful lot of Proverbs 18:13 going on: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” (KJV)

The shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman seems to have reopened a lot of old wounds that we might have hoped had been firmly closed. At the time of writing, it is not clear whether Martin was the innocent victim of a racially motivated crime, or whether Zimmerman’s claim of acting in self defense against an attacker stacks up. What is clear though is that many have used the incident as an excuse to hitch up the “race” bandwagon, alleging—without any possible means of knowing—that this was a “hate crime” in which Zimmerman was driven by an ideological hatred of black people. Whatever did take place, may the truth be established and may Zimmerman be punished severely or acquitted accordingly!

But whatever the outcome of the case, what are we to make of the phrase “hate crime?” The term is a relatively modern invention, first being popularized after the Second World War. Unfortunately, like many modern expressions it tends to obscure much more than it reveals. Biblically speaking there is simply no such category as a “hate crime,” as distinguishable from another type of crime. There are “hate sins,” but no “hate crimes.” According to Deuteronomy 19:6, if there was a killing, the judges of the case needed to establish whether the one responsible for the death had a motive—some kind of grudge against the victim. If one was found, then the killer was deemed a murderer “worthy of death,” but if no motive was found, then he was deemed to be “not worthy of death.” In other words, while it was vitally important to determine whether the killer had a motive, the only reason for this was to establish his guilt or innocence. It mattered not what type of hatred it was. All that mattered was to establish whether he was guilty of murder, in which case he would be put to death, or to establish if the killing had been accidental. The crime was therefore in the murder alone, not in the motive. The motive itself, while sinful, was not of itself a punishable crime.

Western societies have, in recent years, gone way beyond this principle and have effectively turned various types of hatred—including racism, sexism, and “homophobia”—into crimes, rather than sins. And so the term “hate crime” is increasingly being used by the civil authorities to pass stiffer sentences for those who kill because of the reason for the killing, than had they killed for another reason. Now in many ways killing someone because of the color of their skin is worse than killing someone for their mobile phone, as undoubtedly much more sin lay behind it. But at the end of the day a dead man is a dead man, and whatever the reason for the killing, the duty of the civil authorities is simply to prosecute the crime and not the sinful reasons that lay behind it.

Allow me to continue by stating what I hope is obvious to all Christians: despising another human being because of their skin color is a heinous sin. Any Christian who doesn’t agree with this statement needs to go through the Bible and read all those bits about man (that is all men) being made in the image of God (eg. Genesis 1:27); about God having made of one blood all nations of men (Acts 17:26); and about God redeeming a multitude made up not just of people of a certain tint or hue, but of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues (Revelation 7:9). There is no doubt about it: despising another human being because of their skin color is not only antithetical to God, it is ultimately despising the God who made that human being in His image.

But while racism is clearly a sin, is this the same as saying that it should be treated as a crime? The Bible says no, but increasingly the modern world is saying yes. Just to give one example, in Britain recently, a 21-year-old student was jailed for 56 days for making racist comments on his Twitter account. Many who read his words were offended and contacted the police who subsequently arrested him. His comments were not only despicably racist, they also contained almost every foul word his small mind could conjure up. All in all, his comments were reprehensible and deserved condemnation. But did they warrant a jail sentence?

What the phrase “hate crime” does is effectively obscure the difference between sins and crimes. Under the Law of Moses, God laid down a series of civil penalties for certain sinful activities. These were therefore crimes.

But not all sins were dealt with in this way. There was also another category of sins for which no civil penalty applied. For example, the 10th commandment prohibits the coveting of a neighbor’s wife or his property, but it does not attach a judicial punishment for the breach of it. No one was deprived of his liberty or received a flogging for looking over his neighbor’s fence and envying his wife and his stuff. Until the actual point of adultery was reached or the thing stolen, the man was guilty of a sin but not a crime.

The Law of Moses was also clear that hating your brother is fundamentally wrong. Leviticus 19:17-18 states that, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart… Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And lest the children of Israel should think that this only applied to fellow Jews, Leviticus 19:34 went on to apply the same principle to outsiders who came and joined themselves to the commonwealth of Israel: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself…”

Although this demonstrates that hating another person in your heart is extremely wicked, there was no civil penalty for it, which suggests that it is was a sin and not a crime, and that it is God Who will judge such matters, not the civil authorities.

The distinction between sins and crimes is important for three reasons. Firstly, it shows that God gives the role of prosecuting crimes to the civil magistrate, but that He does not assign to them the task of prosecuting thoughts, opinions, and motives.

Secondly, handing down jail sentences for our words, views, and even our comments on social networking sites is extremely dangerous. In the aftermath of the jailing of the student mentioned above, many have commented saying that the jail sentence sends out a message deterring others from doing the same. Maybe it does, but it also sends out another message, which is that if a man can be jailed for causing offence, rather than for the actions he takes, then potentially none of us is safe, because there are a whole host of people out there who disapprove of what we believe and would love nothing better than for the law to punish us for our views.

But the final reason is one that is fundamental to the whole issue of racism and how God wants it to be dealt with. If God categorizes hatred toward our brother as a sin, but not as a crime, then it follows from this that its cure is not to be found in judicial punishments—that is law— but being of a “heart” nature it can only be dealt with by the Gospel. Those who advocate stiffer punishments for someone who murders another for the color of their skin rather than, say, for their mobile phone, do so because they believe that this will eradicate racism. Well, no it won’t. Racism—like covetousness—is a sin of the heart and cannot be cured by law. Its cure is the Gospel. You will never change the heart of a racist by threatening him with jail for his racist views. You might stop him from killing someone by the threat of the death penalty for murder. But you cannot change his heart this way.

The abolition of the slave trade in Britain was achieved largely by the tireless efforts of William Wilberforce. Through his love for God and his love for his fellow men, God used this gracious and zealous man to convince many of the evils of slavery. By the grace of God, hearts were changed, opinions altered, and lives reformed through his tireless efforts. This is the kind of pattern of how God would have us use to deal with racism. Not by classing racism as a civil crime and passing laws against it, but rather by the gracious and tireless spreading of the Gospel, reaching the hearts of those whose lives are filled with hatred and bitterness for those of a different skin color, and showing them the new way of living—the way of the cross, the way of love, the way of Jesus Christ.

Rob Slane is the author of The God Reality: A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A former atheist, Slane is now a member of Emmanuel Church in Salisbury, England, where he and his family live.

If you abide in Me, and My Words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 15:7

“Ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.” How can this be?

Parents and other human authorities can never keep such a promise, no matter how great their love. None of them have unlimited resources, so some things are just beyond their ability. It is a promise that only God can keep.

There are also some things loving parents will not give, even if they have the ability to give them. They will not give things to their children they know will be harmful. Likewise, there are some things Jesus will not give us, because He knows they would not be good.

How can we know what to ask? Jesus says that we must have a solid connection to Him—we must abide in Him. He also says His words must abide in us—transforming our hearts. When these things are true of us, we can ask whatever our heart desires, and it will be done for us. There is no limit to what our Lord can give.

The Apostle Peter tells us that Christians should be prepared “to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

Dr. Jonathan Sarfati and the other scientists at Creation Ministries International are ready to supply ammunition for that defense when it comes to battling the materialistic and atheistic theory of evolution.

“Our ministry concentrates on equipping the Church,” says Jonathan. “That’s what most of our talks are to churches, because the Church is the Body of Christ appointed to spread His message and His Word.”

Jonathan and his wife, Sherry, moved to the U.S. a couple years ago when the Australia-based Creation Ministries International launched its new U.S. office in Atlanta. The Sarfatis and other CMI staffers turned to Samaritan Ministries for their health care needs. Jonathan says he’s grateful that Samaritan “seems a better value than insurance companies” and that it doesn’t fund procedures like abortion.

Jonathan’s academic accomplishments—he holds a doctorate in chemistry and also has graduate qualifications in physics—are put to use in a variety of ways as CMI works to equip the Church. He’s the author or co-author of several books, co-editor of Creation magazine, writes and reviews articles for the peer-reviewed Journal of Creation and writes for CMI’s website. But he’s also a capable Christian apologist, co-founding the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society in New Zealand, where he grew up. For Jonathan, defending the faith includes science, logic, and a thorough knowledge of Scripture.

“Christianity is not a blind faith,” he says. “It’s actually a logical faith, an intelligent faith.”

And it includes not just defense, but offense as well.

“In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul tells us to demolish any arguments against God, to take every thought captive and bring it to Christ,” Jonathan says. “So there’s the positive of defending the Christian faith, but also the negative of demolishing arguments arraigned against the Christian faith.”

Those defenses and offenses are complex when it comes to evolutionary theory, which has the backing of most of the establishment scientific community, despite the Christian origins of science and the gallery of great creationist scientists like Francis Bacon, Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton, and Blaise Pascal.

One of the reasons that it looks like the Church is playing catch-up on origins-of-life issues is that when Charles Darwin’s mid-19th century evolution claims began to gain popularity, Christians dropped the ball.

“A lot of the Church, instead of challenging the secular world, retreated into their pietistic church ghetto, retreated from the world, which meant that the atheists filled the vacuum,” Jonathan says. “Christians pulled out of science and the culture in general.”

Now the battle is being fought not just in the scientific arena, but in the Church itself, Jonathan says. Many of those Christians who didn’t retreat actually joined the Darwinian movement, striving to reconcile Genesis with Darwin.

“Peer pressure is a big thing,” Jonathan says. “Too many in the Church desire academic respectability. Therefore, they invent all these schemes that try to mix millions of years with evolution and impose it upon the Biblical picture, but it can’t be done. However, why should we crave the respect of people who think we are rearranged pond scum? Their position is ridiculous.”

Jonathan has fought back against this problem with books like Refuting Compromise: A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of “Progressive Creationism” (Billions of Years) As Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross.

“It’s an authority issue,” he says. “If we have the Bible as our final authority—and Jesus says Scripture can’t be broken (John 10:35)—you’ll never get millions of years or evolution from the Biblical text. It’s always imposed from outside the text, which is why these ideas never came in until secular geologists started to push the idea of an earth millions of years old.

“The other thing is that the Bible is quite consistent in saying that death and suffering are the result of sin, in particular of the sin of the first man, Adam. In Genesis 3, Romans 5 and 8, and 1 Corinthians 15, you have this whole sin-causing-death view. If evolution were true, you’d have this millions of years of death and suffering long before Adam sinned. You’d have to chop out so many parts of the Old and New Testaments.”

Genesis in particular is foundational for all Christian doctrine, Jonathan says, “and this is the book that’s mostly being attacked in the education system and in the media, so people need to know how to defend it.”

Creation Ministries’ go-to places for that are its online, searchable repository of more than 8,000 articles written by CMI’s scientists and apologists, and works like The Creation Answers Book (available in PDF form at this link).

“There should be something there for everyone of different levels,” Jonathan says. “Most of our articles are not written in technical language, but they’re all reviewed by people with technical expertise, with doctorates in their relevant areas.”

Yet sometimes even that isn’t necessary. Enter common sense.

“It’s certainly amazing even after a talk by one of our scientists, so many of the lay people get it because creationism is quite a common sense idea,” Jonathan says. “We show the evolutionary picture of a fish forming a fossil: It dies, slowly sinks to the bottom, is covered up over millions of years. Then we ask, ‘Who owns fish? What happens when your fish dies?’ Well, they float to the top, then rot or are eaten by other fish. These are arguments people can relate to.”

But being armed with more than 8,000 articles and dozens of books and videos doesn’t hurt either.

The following books by Dr. Sarfati are available through most booksellers:

Refuting Evolution

Refuting Evolution 2

Refuting Compromise

Creation Answers Book (co-author)

15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History (co-author)

By Design: Evidence for Nature’s Intelligent Designer—the God of the Bible

The Greatest Hoax on Earth? Refuting Dawkins on Evolution

“We’re constantly struggling with finding the balance in setting the budget and trying to keep costs as low as possible, because we recognize we are dependent upon the Body of Christ,” Gary says. “We don’t want to be wasteful or careless about a single penny that we’re trying to raise. … Samaritan has been an enormous cost-saving solution for us.”

Word of Mouth is a series of recorded phone interviews with Samaritan Ministries members, who talk about why they joined and how it has helped them meet their health care needs.

I will miss the daily encouragement from Samaritan members. The cards of sympathy and faith helped keep my eyes focused on the hope that Jesus offers—even in the face of death. We are traveling through the valley of the shadow, but God’s faithfulness and guidance are sure! Thank you to Samaritan Ministries for all of your support and to each member who sent checks to help share in Daryl’s, my late husband’s, medical bills. Our burdens are lightened because you care and share.

 If you abide in Me, and My Words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 15:7

Children do not always know what is best for them. The child of one of our friends once requested a breakfast “cereal” of chocolate chips and milk—certainly a tasty choice. The child’s mother gave him something else that, while still tasty, had more of the nutrients that are necessary for good health. If the child had understood what his mother knew, he could have made a request that would have been granted.

Like children, we do not always know what we should ask from our Heavenly Father. We need training, and He delights to teach us when we seek Him.

How does our Father teach us? The passage above tells us to abide in Jesus Christ and let His Words abide in us. When we study the Scriptures and meditate on them as we live our lives, our Lord transforms our thinking. Our relationship with Him is deepened, and His desires become our desires.

When our desires are in line with what our Heavenly Father knows is best, we can ask whatever we wish and it will be done for us.

Are you abiding in Him and letting His Words abide in you?

“The whole experience was tremendously encouraging, both to my wife and my daughter and to me,” he says.

This is part 2 of Gary’s thoughts on Samaritan Ministries membership.

Word of Mouth is a series of recorded phone interviews with Samaritan Ministries members, who talk about why they joined and how it has helped them meet their health care needs.