Best Links of the Week

Cosmic Microwave, Background Radiation

Full sky image of the complete Universe, highlighting the cosmic microwave background radiation.  I believe this image is significant in the way that it dovetails with the reality that the Universe had a beginning.

Iran declares war mullets.

Fascinating Wikipedia article on “Bombe,” the decryption device that decoded the Enigma machine on German U-Boats.

A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God is available for free as an audiobook for the month of July from Christianaudio.com.  Use coupon code:  JUL2010.  (HT:  JT)

The U.S. Government is now Cyber-Policing the Internet (and the people of the United States) with a new agency that seems to report to the NSA.  The new logo for said department also contains a mysterious code in the logo, “9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.”

Update:  It appears that the code has already been easily broken, details here.  (HT:  Aaron Massey)

Inventor of the pixel suggest new medium of transmitting picture.

Reading on Kindle and iPad up to 10% slower than their print counterparts.

A.W. Tozer Critique of the “New Cross” of Popular Evangelicalism

I ran across this quote from A.W. Tozer in his relatively unknown book, The Pursuit of Man.

But if I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament.  It is, rather, a new bright ornament upon the bosom of self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of Cain.  The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them.  The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses.  The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it.  The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter.

Tozer wrote this in 1950:  eerily prophetic, alarmingly true.

A.W. Tozer on “The Veil” that Keeps Us from Spiritual Progress

The Pursuit of God - A.W. Tozer

There are few books that I purpose to re-read every year:  one of those few is The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer.  It is short but cuts straight to the heart.  The first three chapters alone are worth the price of the book.  Here is one of my favorite passages:

There is something more serious than coldness of the heart, something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence.  What is it?  What but the presence of a veil in our hearts?  A veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us.  It is the veil of our fleshley, fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated.  It is the close-woven veil of the self-life whihc we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross.  It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify.  We have but to look into our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress…

It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit.  They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies their subtlety and their power.

To be specific, the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them.  They dwell to deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them.  The grosser manifestations of these sins – egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion – are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders, even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy.  They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel.

Guilty as charged, this passage is the main reason I re-read this book.  We are blessed beggars in God’s economy of grace.  May it convict you as it has me time and time again.