Commentary on Psalm 127:3

In Calvin's commentary on Psalm 127:3, he once again asserts God's sovereignty in every area of life. (Emphases mine.)

Lo! children are the heritage of Jehovah. Solomon here adduces one instance in which, in a particular manner, he would have us to recognize the truth which he has hitherto asserted generally -- that the life of men is governed by God. Nothing seems more natural than for men to be produced of men. The majority of mankind dream, that after God had once ordained this at the beginning, children were thenceforth begotten solely by a secret instinct of nature, God ceasing to interfere in the matter; and even those who are endued with some sense of piety, although they may not deny that He is the Father and Creator of the human race, yet do not acknowledge that his providential care descends to this particular case, but rather think that men are created by a certain universal motion. With the view of correcting this preposterous error, Solomon calls children the heritage of God, and the fruit of the womb his gift; for the Hebrew word skr, sachar, translated reward, signifies whatever benefits God bestows upon men, as is plainly manifest from many passages of Scripture. The meaning then is, that, children are not the fruit of chance, but that God, as it seems good to him, distributes to every man his share of them. Moreover, as the Prophet repeats the same thing twice, heritage and reward are to be understood as equivalent; for both these terms are set in opposition to fortune, or the strength of men. The stronger a man is he seems so much the better fitted for procreation. Solomon declares on the contrary, that those become fathers to whom God vouchsafes that honor.

Family Voting

Now that I'm old enough to vote, I've been spending a fair amount of time looking into the various measures that are on the ballot for my home state of Oregon. As I was researching, I thought I should call Dad and get his opinion on one of said measures, the thought dawned on me "What if I don't agree with my dad on one of the measures, do I really want to have the effect of nullifying his voice, by voting contrary to him?" That begs the question, what will I do if I disagree with my dad, what will I do? As far as I can tell there are three possible options:

Option 1: Copy how dad votes, and just hope for the best.
Option 2: Thumb my nose at him and vote the way I want to.
Option 3: Work through the issues, and try to come to resolution.

Now, obviously option one and two are absolute non-options (if it were possible to burn bits and bytes, number two at least, should be burned). The third option is the one that I want to elaborate on, which I will procede to do, thusly.
In the unlikely event that we're unable to come to agreement on an issue on which I have a scriptural conviction, I feel that I would have to, as respectfully as possible, cast my vote based on biblical principle.
Thankfully, I don't expect the above situation, and I think that the most desirable outcome would be that through respectful and loving discusion, one of us would be convinced of the others position, thereby bringing harmony.
However, where that isn't possible, I feel that it would be my duty, and my honor, as my fathers son, who, not being married (and thus, head of my own household), is still under his direct authority, to vote the same way as he does, so long as doing so would not violate scripture (i.e. pro-life vs pro-choice). Even if he did not require me to do so, I would not relish the thought of negating the effectiveness of my fathers voice. Praise the Lord that He gave me such God fearing parents, and I think that this voting season will go quite smoothly.

Semper Reformanda!

Creativity

Have you ever thought about creativity, and how it comes about? I've been trying to come up with an idea for a short film, but story telling has never been my strong suit. I know that there are people from whom stories and strains simply emanate, but that's not me. So I got to thinking, is that sort of creativity always a gift, or a talent, that you either have or don't? Or is it a skill that can be developed like math or writing? If so, how does one go about said daunting task?

Movie Survey

Over at the Botkin sister's blog: Visionary Daughters (which I would highly recommend), they have a Movie Survey going right now. I just finished taking it, and the results are pretty interesting. It just says that they're gathering intel for a project they are working on, so the more people that answer it, the better!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

The Importance of being honest.

My Dad runs a trucking company, so we hear about the administrative things that happen there from time to time. I just talked to Dad briefly on the phone this morning, but I happened to call him just as he was pulling into the shop, and he said that he had two terminations that morning. I asked if a truck had rolled or something (that being a common cause of a termination), but it wasn't an accident. The two drivers had been fudging their logbooks (drivers equivalent to a time card). So they're being fired, not because they did a bad job, but because they were dishonest. So no matter how good of a job you do, if you aren't honest, it's all for naught.

Honoring your Parents

If you ever feel contention between you and your parents, the cause could very well be that you're not honoring them like you should. That was the situation with me not to long ago. There was this ongoing tension between me and my parents, and I was starting to get frustrated because it seemed like they were being unreasonable. However, one day my older brother told me over the phone that the reason they were being strict was because I wasn't honoring their requests, which ment that I wasn't honoring them. That was like a solid kick in the pants. I wanted to argue with him, but I knew he was right. I could think back to multiple instances where I hadn't obeyed, or had drug my feet, when they asked me to do something. As the Lord says in John "If ye love me, keep my commandments." That's true for our relationship with our parents as well.

If I were to tell my dad that I love him, but then went out and disobeyed everything that he told me to do, do you think he would believe me when I said that I loved him? Why should he?

Our words aren't worth anything unless they are backed by action. And that's precisely what I've been failing at for the last few months. But by God's grace, I have confessed my sin to them, and we can start rebuilding the relationship once more!

So, if I, a sinner, guilty of this sin as well, may give you, my reader, an admonition, it would be this: Honor your Father and Mother, no mater the cost, no mater the inconvenience it may cause you. It will all be worth it. When you are grown and married, and have a great relationship with your parents, which grew out of years of honoring them, you will look back on the times when it was hard, and thank the Lord for giving you those opportunities to honor them.

Semper Reformanda!

Paul

SteadiCam and My Absence

Sorry all that I've been gone for so long. I'm spending all my spare time working on my steadicam, which I hope to sell small scale, and I want to have prototype V2 ready by this friday, because my brother Ross and I will be driving to CO for Generations with Vision's Shepherding Conference. I know that there will be some people there more involved with the Christian Independent film market (like Kevin Swanson), so hopefully I'll be able to get some advice, and maybe even some exposure!
We will be leaving this friday, and It's a twenty hour drive from here to there, and we're pretty much going to do it all at once, so maybe I'll have some time then to get some photos up.

Where the Photos went

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted any photos lately. Well, here's why.
I use a program on my Mac called Aperture for all of my photo organization and editing. I have two macs, one's a MBP, and the other I built out of windows parts and got OS X running on it, Known as a mackintosh. My Hackintosh's OS drive got corrupted somehow, and I've just finally got it to the point where I can recover the files and reformat it, but I have to get another 2TB hard drive to copy all the files too. So I can't use that one yet for photo editing. And would you guess what happened to my MacBook Pro's hard drive? Yep! You guessed it! The hard drive went bad! Thankfully I have a backup of it, so After I got a new hard drive, I discovered that my backup had some troubles!! Thankfully I was able to fix all of those, (due to a nifty new program that I just bought) so now (in theory) I just need to restore my MacBooks hard drive from that backup.
Needless to say, I can't really access my photos right now, and even if I could, I've been spending most of my free time trying to get both my computers working.

More Valuable than Rubies

We value items based on a couple of things. One of those is how much we paid for it. When we get something for free, it's not a big deal if it gets damaged. But if we spend a lot on something, we get really upset if it gets even the smallest of scratches.
How much more then does the Father care for us? He didn't redeem us for free, He paid the price of His own Son's blood as our ransom!

We are so valuable to Him, how it must grieve Him when he sees us not walking with Him, according to His commands and desires?

Just an interesting thought from church this week.

Focus on the lord

Our pastor said this today, and it really struck a chord with me.

"The more preoccupied we are with the lord, the more he can entrust us with physical blessings, without worry of derailing our focus on him."