Twelve Unlikely Heroes

When I was given John MacArthur’s newest book Twelve Unlikely Heroes to read for a review, I was excited because of how much I enjoyed his earlier books Twelve Ordinary Men and Twelve Extraordinary Women. I am also glad to say that I was not disappointed with this newest addition.

While there are twelve heroes written about, there are only ten chapters because MacArthur twice groups people together. The heroes that he covers are Enoch, Joseph, Miriam, Samson and Gideon, Jonathan, Jonah, Esther, John the Baptist, James (the brother of Jesus), and Mark and Onesimus.

As he did in the other two books, Pastor MacArthur thoroughly investigates the lives of each person, using every biblical reference to them to build his biography. But he goes even further, turning to outside historians and the writings of church fathers to fill in other details about culture and some of the events not recorded in Scripture. Pulling from Josephus, Origen, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and others, MacArthur gives the reader a closer look into the lives of these heroes.

This book should inspire Christians by reminding that God can use anybody to accomplish great things for the ministry. It also serves as a great resource by teaching on the lives of these twelve unlikely heroes.

Comments

The “Christians Hate Gays” Myth

During these Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) hearings before the Supreme Court I keep hearing how much Christians hate gay people. This was news to me since I am a Christian and I don’t hate gay people. I also go to church with over 1000 other Christians, and if any of them hate gay people, they sure haven’t told me. Before moving to South Carolina I worked at or attended several churches in Texas; prior to that I spent a decade going to church in Florida. Guess what? No one hated gay people. In fact, I don’t know any Christians who hate anybody. The very uniform of a believer is his love, and if a person does not show consistent love, then he is not actually a believer. Are there non-believers who hate gay people and claim to be Christian? Of course. But that doesn’t represent Jesus or His church. Equating hateful sign-wavers with Christianity is like equating a kindergarten baseball team to the New York Yankees. They may claim to be playing the same

To Save a Life

(Like my blog about the peace symbol, this blog was written as a default response to all the parents, students, and other people who are asking my opinion of To Save a Life.) By now you have probably heard of the movie To Save a Life, which opened nation-wide in theaters on January 22nd. The movie deals with so many issues that teens face today, like suicide, cutting, drinking, drugs, premarital sex, teen pregnancy, and abortion. At first glance this movie looks like an awesome resource that we should recommend for our teens, parents, youth pastors, and youth workers. But a closer look at the movie reveals a few disturbing things. For starters, according to pluggedin.com, there are 2 uses of the “A” word, 5 uses of hell (used as a curse word), and once the “D” word is used. There are other crude terms used to describe a girl, and crude terms for referring to sexual activity. There is also a bedroom scene that shows a girl removing a boy’s shirt, then afterwards the girl putting he

Famous Frauds in Homosexual Science Part 2: Twin Studies

A second piece of shoddy science has been heralded as proving people are born gay. This time, instead of cadavers, living twins were studied. This study compared male identical twins to male fraternal twins; in each set of twins, at least one man was homosexual. 22% of the fraternal twins showed both brothers to be gay, compared to 52% of the identical twins. Since identical twins are closer genetically than fraternal twins, this study claimed that genetics play in to homosexuality, or that people are born gay. But an obvious question that arose from this study is, why did 48% of the identical twins only have one gay brother? If they are so close genetically, then 100% of the identical twins should have two gay brothers. This study does more harm than good to the argument from genetics. There are other factors to be considered. One is that the men doing the study (Richard Pillard and Michael Bailey) could have intentionally picked fraternal twins that the

Tommy Mann

Search This Blog