The step of obedience always precedes revelation. That pattern is evident all through the Scripture.
It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. –GEORGE WASHINGTON.
The Bible is the only book that hangs its entire credibility on its ability to write history in advance, without error.
If you want to know what time it is on God’s clock, look at Israel. Understand Israel – it’s the only nation that has its origin, history, ups and downs, and destiny all written out in advance for the diligent.
Don’t confuse disbelief and doubt. Doubt is healthy inquiry. Disbelief is a willful choice.
Someone has said, “If you squeeze a lemon, you should get lemon juice. If you squeeze an orange, you should get orange juice. If you squeeze a Christian, you should get Christ.
The word for one in Deuteronomy 6:4 is echad and is a compound unity, a collective sense. It implies plurality in unity, like in “one cluster of grapes.
The ideology of amillennialism has some serious problems, because it denies many unconditional Messianic promises written concretely throughout the Old Testament. It essentially calls God a liar. The prophecies in the Bible may be fulfilled once or twice or even three times, but they are always fulfilled literally and powerfully.
Some argue against the Rapture by saying the word doesn’t even appear in the Bible, but it does. As I’ve said, we have to read it in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. There the Greek word harpazo is translated rapiemur, the proper tense of rapio, the root of our English words “rapt” and “rapture.
Jesus was crucified on the fourteenth of Nisan and He was in the grave three days. So He rose on the seventeenth of Nisan. God’s new beginning of the Planet Earth under Noah was on the same date, in advance, as our new beginning in Jesus Christ.
It took only forty hours to get Israel out of Egypt – the Passover. But it took forty years to get Egypt out of Israel.
You don’t have a chance if you think you can clean yourself up before you come to the Lord. You come to the Lord first, then He will clean up your life. A fisherman cleans the fish after the fish are caught.
The Lion of the Tribe of Judah is an emblem of the Messiah, representative of Matthew. The ox was the classic symbol of a servant, as presented in Mark. Luke emphasized the Son of Man; and John, the Eagle. The same four faces that were the ensigns for the camps of Israel and appear on the cherubim seem to also characterize the four Gospels.
Thorns were then the symbol of the curse. On the Cross, Jesus bore those thorns, which were literally thorns, but also were emblematic of bearing the curse for all of us.
A pearl is the only jewel that is a response to an irritation, grows by accretion, and is removed to become an item of adornment. That is a perfect idiom for the Church.
Creation is important, please don’t misunderstand. However, I suggest that His greatest glory is His redemption of us and the earth and the heavens, because that is the focus of most of the rest of the Bible. We discover that probably 90% of the Scriptures, including the entire Book of Revelation, is devoted to God’s redemption of His creation.
In simple terms, John 13:18-19 records Jesus as telling them about the betrayal that is about to occur. He wants them to know about the event beforehand, so that when the betrayal occurs, they will realize that Jesus predicted that betrayal in his capacity of being God incarnate, using his sovereign omniscience and omnipotence to superintend the events of his own execution.
Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to give dead men life!
The Coming King We have therefore established the integrity of the package – the identity of Jesus Christ and His authentication of His identity by fulfillment of prophecy.
Jesus was born of a woman so you and I could be born of God. He humbled Himself so that we could be lifted up. He became a servant so that we could be made joint heirs with Him. He suffered rejection so that we could become His friends. He denied Himself so that we could freely receive all things. He gave Himself so that He could bless us in every way. Wow. Our Own Paradox The real issues aren’t the quarks that hold together our physical bodies.
The real issues aren’t the quarks that hold together our physical bodies. The real issue is our own personal nonlinearity – the real us. We can’t see our real selves; we only see the containers we happen to be in right now. The real “us” is software, not hardware, which means it’s without mass, which means it has no time. We are eternal – saved or not. That’s the problem, because we each have an eternity ahead of us. Where will we spend it?