I’ll be leaving California next Monday, heading home to work as a supervisor on a firefighting/trail building team. I hope to develop my skills as a leader and firefighter while building close relationships with my fellow crew members. Using the knowledge I have gained from classes at my Christian College, I may even start a Bible study for any crew members who are interested. I also plan to spend a lot of time with family, whether that’s mountain biking with my brother, fishing and working on cars with my dad, or going out to coffee with my sister and mom.

Of course, the best part of summer will be getting MARRIED! August 10th can’t come soon enough!

Anyways, I’ll keep you posted as things develop. If possible, I may even post some pictures from any wildfires my team gets to fight.

Learning to think like this, and not just memorize, is especially important for students at Christian Colleges. I Peter 3:15 instructs believers to have an answer for why they believe what they do. It’s so easy to say that we believe in God. It’s so easy to say that Christ is Lord. It’s so easy to say that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. But can we back it up? Can we talk through our reasons for our beliefs, or do we just spit out things we have been told but never stopped to process for ourselves?

As you search for Christian Colleges, I encourage to try and find one that makes you think. If all you have at graduation is a bunch of memorized facts, then you will have missed the opportunity to develop your mind at a deeper level. But if you learn to process and digest information, you will truly be a smarter, wiser individual.

But that was last week. Now I am back at my Christian College and grinding away at papers and projects and presentations. Things are busy, but life is good. Sometimes when things get overwhelming, or I just want to be done with school and working in my career, I have to stop and remind myself what a blessing it is to be at a Christian College. I have good classes with godly professors. I have great friends and some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that won’t be available after I graduate. I also have to remind myself that God has put me at my school for a purpose. I can serve others and get equipped for ministry in the Church and in my profession. And that’s pretty sweet.

That’s right, I got engaged! I mentioned in my early blogs that I was dating a girl named Brett. Well, now we’re officially tying the knot. August 10th is the date we chose. In the meantime, we are doing premarital counseling together with some other couples from our church. The focus of our study is learning — from a biblical perspective –what marriage is, why God instituted it, and what it means to be a godly husband or wife. Marriage, after all, is really all about glorifying God and serving your spouse. It’s a picture of Christ’s perfect love for His bride, the Church.

After we get married, we both will have one semester left at our Christian College. Once we’ve graduated in December, we’ll be moving to wherever Brett’s graduate school is. She is going to study Physical Therapy, but we don’t know where yet since she won’t get acceptance letters until this fall. Lot’s of unknowns, but God knows! All we can do is plan flexibly and see what He has in store.

Stay tuned for more about my life as a student at a Christian College!

• God is sovereign over the nations and over all of history. The Lord raised up an entire nation from one man and providentially brought them into and out of Egypt and into the land of Israel, where He preserved them from and punished them with the surrounding nations. For example, II Kings 13 says that Jehoahaz, ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, was under heavy oppression from the Arameans, a nation to his northeast. Scripture records that God raised up a deliverer for Israel when Jehoahaz entreated God for help. Though the Bible doesn’t name this deliverer, a study of ancient near eastern history reveals that at this precise time the Assyrian king Adad-nirari III came and attacked the Arameans, freeing Israel from their pressure. Though Adad-nirari III by no means intended to save the little nation of Israel, the Lord used his campaign against Aramea to do just that. Just think about it for a minute. God literally raises up and brings down empires as easily as I wrote this sentence. That’s amazing!

• God’s preservation of His Word is astounding. There are absolutely no other ancient near eastern texts that even begin to compare. For example, if archeologists find fragments one short inscription from some other king during the same time, perhaps about where he built a city or who he killed in battle, it’s an incredible find. Yet we have the entire Word of God! Truly, we can have full confidence that what we read in our Bibles today is the revelation of God given to the biblical authors thousands of years ago. Also, as I have mentioned in previous blogs, the Bible is amazingly accurate and detailed in its historical records. They mesh exceedingly well with evidences from archeology and the relatively few ancient texts we have found. For instance, the Bible says in II Kings 15 that King Pekah of Israel had been killed and replaced with Hoshea. Tiglath Pileser III, king of Assyria at that time, says the same exact thing in his records.

• We are a covenant people, just like Israel was. We have been purchased by the Lord via the blood of Jesus the Messiah. We are members of the New Covenant prophesied in places like Joel and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. God is our Master. He owns us and we are slaves to Him now, not to sin. As members, we receive benefits like eternal life and sonship in the Kingdom of Heaven. We also have responsibilities, like serving the Lord and proclaiming His Gospel. In the words of Paul, we are not our own; we have been bought with a price (I Corinthians 6:19-20).

The modern term Negev, however, does not just mean the region I specified above. Negev today means all of southern Israel. Included in the broader Negev region would be such sites as Elat on the Red Sea (I snorkeled there) and Kadesh-barnea, from where Moses sent out 12 spies to examine the Promised Land.

A little bit to the north, near the bottom of the Dead Sea, is the ancient fortress Masada. It is a large fortress compound that saw its greatest days during the time of Herod the Great. He made it a “Rome away from Rome,” complete with imported foods, bathhouses, and multiple palaces. Jewish rebels took it over during the 1st Jewish Revolt, and only after building a massive siege ramp were the Romans able to capture the hilltop fortress. I personally ran up the winding path that leads to the top, and let me assure you that it would have been absolutely brutal to attack Masada with people throwing stones and shooting arrows at you. Sadly, about 960 Jewish people who were living in the fortress committed suicide rather than be captured by the Roman forces.

A little bit farther north, near the top of the Dead Sea, I visited the site of Qumran. This is where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. These scrolls, written between 200 BC and 68 AD, testify to the amazing way that the Lord has preserved His Word. When discovered and translated, the text of these scrolls matched extremely closely with existing translations from 1000 AD! The highlight of Qumran was standing in Cave 1 where the complete Isaiah scroll was discovered!

This was my last major trip while in Israel. The next time you hear from me, probably about mid-December, I will have just gotten back to the States. Shortly after that I will be back in California studying at my Christian college. Time flies so quickly…

Welcome to my first blog from the Holy Land! I have now been here for eight days, and won’t be leaving until mid-December. I am here with a group from my Christian College, studying the Bible in the land of the Bible. ALready, we have spent two days in Old City Jerusalem, and in the next week we will be spending at least two more. I have so much that I could say about where we are going and what we are doing, but suffice it to say that we are going to all of the main religious sites (e.g. Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Western Wall, etc.) as well as some more remote and harder to access sites that require hiking. Our final hike of the semester will be from Jericho to Jerusalem, which is about 14 miles long and gains 3600 feet of elevation.

I have already learned just how much I don’t know about Israel and Jerusalem. Both are so much smaller than I ever envisioned, and feel less “foreign” than I expected. I am definitely the ignorant American who has a lot to learn about other cultures haha.

Stay tuned for more as the semester goes on!

I’ll be working for the Bureau of Land Management as part of a Recreation Crew. We will be building and maintaining ATV, jeep,
dirt bike, and mountain bike trails, as well as other public use areas like campsites and restrooms. I will spend my time outside working with hand tools, riding the above mentioned vehicles to access our worksites, and interacting with people who recreate on BLM land. Pretty sick job.

I also hope to read some good Christian books, keep up with my Greek studies, learn some basic Hebrew, work out a bunch, and catch up with friends who I haven’t seen in a while. Not to mention spending time with family and going to some baseball games.

I’m definitely looking forward to summer, but maybe even more for what comes after… IBEX! For more information about what that is, see my earlier blog entitled “Studying overseas.”

Though schoolwork is definitely my first priority (after the Lord, of course), I have to be careful to not forget to take advantage of my flexibility as a student, and go do fun things when I can. Plus, I may never live near LA again when I graduate. Might as well take advantage of cheap NBA tickets, cause that sure isn’t an option back home!