Nov 28 2014

It All Just Happened

There are some things people just choose to believe, but I’m afraid I’ve never been very good at blind faith. I started asking “Why?” when I was about two years old, and over 60 years later it’s still one of my favourite words. One of the most incredible ironies in the modern world is that an enormous number of well educated people are blind to the fact that their worldview is based almost entirely on blind faith. Without really asking why, they believe in evolution as the origin of everything they can see, touch, smell, hear and taste; in reality what they believe is “it all just happened!” And yet they point to people of faith and say they do not use empirical evidence to come to their conclusions about the origins of all that exists in the material world.

Image from Smithsonian

From my years of observing the world around me I know without a doubt that everything that happens has a cause, nothing happens without a cause. It takes an incredible amount of blind faith to believe the universe simply burst into existence from nothing and then slowly, without any rational or intelligent external agency, became the superbly complex, intricately interdependent system we observe it to be today. Granted this faith is placed in experts, but these experts are just people, and scientists have been proven wrong many thousands of times before.

If I’m going to place my faith in something or someone, I want to have good reasons for believing. Over the years I’ve discovered the best way to understand the issues involved in any area is to look at it from as many perspectives as possible; to examine the data, or evidence, from as many angles as possible. Many years ago I decided I would not totally discount the idea that there is a spiritual world without examining it more thoroughly. It seemed obvious to me that if there really was a spiritual world it would never be possible to discover it through physical experiments – that just didn’t make sense. So I set out to investigate through study and observation of a number of different systems of belief. I must admit I was rather sceptical to begin with, but the 60s was also a time when anything goes, so I went with it.

The Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

People like Timothy Leary and The Beatles were doing it so it wasn’t an unusual pastime in the 60s to look into otherworldly ideas. But I think I approached it as a researcher, I really wanted to know if there was “another dimension” of reality. I suspended disbelief and threw myself into exploring the spiritual claims of as many concepts of a greater reality as I could find. What I found was a person, a trans-dimensional person who had lived on Earth, but had ascended to another plane of existence. He came to Earth as the only extra-terrestrial to be born on our planet and He changed the course of history. He also completely changed the course of my life.

It was many years after I met Jesus that I started to question my belief in evolution. After all, it had been proven, hadn’t it? But then, with my fondness for weighing up evidence, I asked myself why I had not looked at both sides of this debate, now that I realised there were two valid sides to the argument. It wasn’t long before I jumped ship. The more I read, the more I realised the evidence was just too strong to cling to such a flimsy film of science fiction. Following the rules of making the theory fit the facts, and not the facts fit the theory, I decided biblical creation was the most scientifically convincing view of the origins of life and the universe. Evolution is a carefully crafted story, but it is a story that really only holds water if you have already decided there is no God, and by that stage of my life I knew from the results of my earlier research that there is a God and He is very real.

The next jaw dropping realisation I made was that there are some Christians who seem incapable of letting go of their belief in evolution. They not only choose to hold fast to this scientifically unsound doctrine (nobody has ever observed evolution, we have observed adaptation, but that isn’t evolution), they refuse to even take a serious look at all the scientific evidence for biblical creation. If one is prepared to suspend disbelief in creation science, it does not take long to discover that the scientific support for the theory of evolution is extremely poor, and just like the fossil record, it is composed of more gaps than empirical evidence. Consequently, it would appear a belief in evolution is actually more a philosophical or religious belief, which creates a biased set of assumptions from which all data is interpreted.

Those who believe in evolution cannot look to sound science as the basis for their belief, they must place their faith in unobserved, hypothetical biochemical mechanisms to explain life, because of a prior commitment to philosophical naturalism. Unlike the founders of modern science, who had no problems with the idea of a creator God, science has now embraces a total commitment to naturalism. Why people who claim to be Christians should align themselves with this philosophical stance is a mystery to me. As Canadian science philosopher Dr Michael Ruse admitted:

….. at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things, come what may.

Although he later defended evolution by stating that, in his view, it works, nevertheless he also said,

evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically (1).

Those who are absolutely committed to a belief in evolution usually insist that it is only through purely materialistic science that we can hope to arrive at real truth in our understanding of the universe. This is philosophical naturalism, a metaphysical stance which has its roots in ancient cultures. The majority of evolutionists would contend that their ideas are modern, whilst insisting biblical creationists are simply adhering to outmoded concepts. These same adversaries would no doubt insist that biblical Christianity is now a “disproven relic of the past.” This understanding is far from the truth.

An old edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica gives an interesting insight into the religion of the Mayan people, who lived around 600 BC. They believed:

…themselves to be of one blood, descendants of a common ancestor. … Thus, the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are descended from a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight of its shell in walking … gradually developed into a man. The Cray-Fish clan of the Choctaws were originally cray-fish and lived underground, coming up occasionally through the mud to the surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, and, treating them kindly … taught them to walk on two legs, made them cut off their toe nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, after which they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their kindred, the cray-fish, are still living underground. The Osages are descended from a male snail and a female beaver (2).

It is possible that evolutionary thought began with the Hindu concept of reincarnation, and there is also reason to believe the Greek philosophers built on this idea, or perhaps the ideas of even earlier cultures (3). The Greek philosopher, astronomer, statesman and mathematician, Thales of Miletus (640–546 BC) proposed the idea that life originated in water (4), while his student, Anaximander (611–547 BC), developed his tutor’s proposals further, concluding that humans evolved from fish or fishlike creatures. He also suggested that these fish-men eventually cast off their scaly skin and moved to dry land.

Thales of Miletus

Sadly, theistic evolutionists choose to ignore the philosophical bias of evolutionary teachings and generally refuse to look at the masses of evidence for biblical creation. There are even websites set up by these sadly deceived people, who are trying to encourage others into their unholy compromise. I am at a loss to know why they would want to cling to something that is so patently false. The only explanation I can find is in Jesus’ words:

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they will show great signs and wonders; so that, if possible, they will deceive the very elect. (Mat 24:24)

Jesus does not say it is impossible to deceive people who choose to be deceived. And with the wonders of modern technology, those who are not prepared to accept the authority of The Bible are inevitably going to fall prey to the passing ideas of human society. The great signs and wonders of the modern age are the complex pseudo-scientific stories we are told from childhood, which are now accompanied by, not just elaborate charts and graphics, but convincing computer modelling and animations. We are even presented with robotic replicas of dinosaurs, which we are authoritatively told went extinct millions of years ago, despite the fact that some of their fossils still have tissue and red blood cells clinging to their bones. We are also instructed by the dictators of modern science that these magnificent creatures lived long before humans became humans. This leads me to the reason I am certain theistic evolution is an unholy compromise.

Although there are hundreds of reason for believing the earth is less than 10000 years old, the dominant geological paradigm has so smothered dissent, there is now almost no opportunity to be taken seriously when we try to present an alternative perspective on the age of universe. Not only is an alternative perspective smothered, it is also censored, so that the majority of people don’t even realise there is a viable alternative view.

This is why I am confident in calling this whole complex lie unholy. If it were of the Light it would welcome scrutiny, but even Christians who hold this perspective will rarely consent to discuss the topic with evolution sceptics. I have always followed the principle that if something is sound it stands up to any amount of scrutiny. However, whenever I have tried to join in discussions with people who are committed to a belief in evolution, rather than stay on topic, they inevitably resort to personal attacks or say they don’t really want to continue the discussion. As Paul told the Ephesians:

But all things being exposed by the light are clearly revealed, for everything having been revealed is light. (Eph 5:13)

Presenting evolutionists with robust scientific evidence that clearly points to biblical creation usually ends the discussion, shutters go down. It seems to me they prefer to keep any flaws in their theory in the dark. Even theistic evolutionists refuse to suspend disbelief in biblical creation long enough to examine their belief in evolution. Why choose to cling to something that is based on a philosophical bias that is diametrically opposed to a belief in God and needs so much blind faith to accept, while refusing to properly examine scientific evidence for biblical creation and a biblical timescale?

Despite the fact that well trained and qualified scientists all over the world have compiled tomes of robust, scientific information on biblical creation, some Christians have never taken the time to give it a second glance. Why these people should blindly place their faith in naturalism’s creation story is a mystery to me. Is it pseudo-intellectual pride? Fear of man? Fear of rejection by naturalist peers? Or just genuine, misplaced trust in “people who should know”, who assure them evolution is the truth?

The very nature of the Father we present under the theistic evolution lie is that of a god who was happy to use death and destruction in the creation process. Many creatures would have died long before Adam had developed to the stage where this god was prepared to call him man. To create a being in his own image, this god would have presided over millions of years of pain, death and suffering before he was ready to breathe his spirit into a creature ready for his purpose. This scenario clearly places physical death millions of years before Adam and Eve sinned.

We need only examine the life of Charles Darwin to understand how a father’s heart is torn by the physical death of his child. If our Father chose to encompass death, pain, decay and suffering in his creative process, He must have planned this as an integral part of the human experience from before the foundation of the world. No person who has experienced the death of a child could say this is “wholly good” (Gen 1:31). This is not part of the plan revealed by the Father in His Word, The Bible clearly states God created perfection. Adam and Eve were created fully and perfectly human, with vast amounts of genetic variability. Humans have been humans from their first appearance in the fossil record. The biblical account is clear, God created each kind and the first two humans without the need for any death to precede their appearance. Then the Creator gave Adam and Eve an enormous responsibility, along with enormous privilege, they were to have dominion over the creation (Gen 1:26), but they abused God’s trust.

God warned His new humans of the consequences they would face if they chose to ignore His only negative directive. They believed Satan’s lie, followed Satan’s guidance rather than their Creators, and death entered God’s magnificent creation. It could no longer be called “wholly good”, it was corrupted by sin. Adam and Eve, and all the other living things within their dominion began to die.

Some theistic evolutionists point to the death and destruction God brought about in the Old Testament (OT) and propose that death is not such a big deal to God. Once again they besmirch the character of God (Ezekial 33:11) and they also reveal a very limited understanding of God’s revelation. All the physical death in the OT was the direct result of people’s sin. Again and again this sin threatened to derail God’s plan to bring a human community to a point at which He could be born into their midst. God wanted only to bless and heal, but sometimes people had simply gone too far for Him to bring them back (Hos 6:4-7:2).

Despite thousands of years of careful preparation, Jesus was threatened almost immediately after His birth and His parents had to flee and hide Him away from danger. Finally, when He grew to manhood, many of the leaders of His own people contributed to His death. But the Father had worked hard to create an environment where there were enough people who would recognise their Messiah to carry on spreading His message of salvation to humanity. Since the birth of Jesus our Father has never called for the death of a single person. His mission has been accomplished.

To present the Father as one who is complacent about death, is to totally miss what it cost Him to send His Son and the teachings in the Bible’s bookends. Genesis begins God’s revelation to humankind by showing us that physical death is an enemy (1 Cor 15:26) that entered God’s creation because of sin (Gen 2:17; Ez 18:4; Ez 18:20; Rev 21:8), while Revelation reveals that God will eventually destroy death and recreate His universe without death or the accompanying pain and suffering that sin also produced (Rev 21:4). Death will be swallowed up in victory (1 Cor 15:54). If Christians try to add evolution to this revelation they completely compromise this message and belittle the physical death Jesus suffered on our behalf.

I believe theistic evolution is an unholy compromise. I don’t expect any theistic evolutionists to challenge this statement, as I have discovered neither they, nor their atheistic fellow believers, are open to discussion on the topic. They prefer to keep it in the dark away from the light of scientific scrutiny, whilst systematically besmirching both those who believe in biblical creation and the reputations of the scientists who carry out research from a biblical base, as opposed to a naturalist base. May our Father open the eyes of the brothers and sisters who have been deceived by this complex lie. It didn’t all just happen, our Father has given us a very accurate record of exactly how He brought His creation into existence.

1 National Center for Science Education, PO Box 9477, Berkeley CA 94709–0477, USA
2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Werner Co., New York, Vol. 23, p. 467, 1898
3 Osborn, H.F., From the Greeks to Darwin, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, p. 54, 1929
4 Birdsell, J.B., Human Evolution, Rand McNally, Chicago, p. 22, 1972

Nov 25 2014

Knowing, Caring and Praying

I’ve been reading Amy Carmichael’s book Lotus Buds. In this book she tells the story of her work in India as a missionary and how she found herself rescuing young girls, sometimes babies, from being dedicated to the Hindu temples. The inevitable fate of these innocent little souls was to become temple prostitutes – their sexual services would earn a living for the priests.

From a western perspective, it’s difficult to understand how parents could believe this was a choice they could make for their little ones. But circumstances sometimes forced them to give up their babies and this was one of the most acceptable ways of ensuring they would be “looked after”. No doubt, for some, it also held the hope of favourable treatment from the gods. Temple prostitution was banned in India in 1948 and I have no doubt that it was through the work and prayers of people like Amy that this came about. To undermine such a deep, culturally accepted custom, it often takes someone from outside the culture to point out the injustice involved in an entrenched practice.

Amy was a great prayer warrior and she wrote:

…..we write for those who believe in prayer—not in the emasculated modern sense, but in the old Hebrew sense, deep as the other is shallow. We believe there is some connection between knowing and caring and praying, and what happens afterwards. Otherwise we should leave the darkness to cover the things that belong to the dark. We should be for ever dumb about them, if it were not that we know an evil covered up is not an evil conquered. So we do the thing from which we shrink with strong recoil; we stand on the edge of the pit, and look down and tell what we have seen, urged by the longing within us that the Christians of England should pray.
Carmichael, Amy (2011-03-24). Lotus Buds (Kindle Locations 924-929).Kindle Edition.

As Christians we need to take seriously the battle that is raging for the souls of people lost in other faiths. Some people feel it is wrong to go against the entrenched culture of a nation. When Amy went to India, part of the culture of that nation was to give baby girls to temples to become prostitutes. She had to fight long and hard to free the children she saved from this fate. We are not our cultures; we are far more than our cultures. We have each been created in God’s image and He has a great desire to bring us into His eternal kingdom, through His one and only Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

India 1900 photo from http://www.carigold.com

False religions are simply cultural – they have nothing to do with the Creator of the universe. They have grown out of humanity’s ideas about God. They stand opposed to God’s revelation of Himself. To say that all religions are basically the same is to admit ignorance of the truth. It is like saying all economic systems are the same, because they are all about economics. No one, who took the time to look, could believe that a command economy and a free market economy are the same. They might use similar terminology, but they are very different approaches to the same issue. We need to be prepared to speak the truth about the uniqueness of Christianity, it might use similar terminology to other religions, but it is not just another path, it is the only true path to an eternal relationship with our Creator Father.

I pray God will show us how to become prayer warriors like Amy Carmichael and that the Christians of the world today should also pray in that deep way she talked about. It breaks my heart to think of the way many Christians have accepted pluralism in the 21st century. But the reality is, The Bible teaches us that, like the Muslim faith, the Hindu religion is another stronghold of darkness. These are not alternative paths to God, they are terrible strongholds of darkness and deception. Amy did not go to India with any sense of cultural superiority, she loved India and its people. She wrote:

We think of the real India as we see it in the thinker—the seeker after the unknown God, with his wistful eyes. “The Lord beholding him loved him,” and we cannot help loving as we look….. We see the spirit of the old land there; and it wins us and holds us, and makes it a joy to be here to live for India.

The true India is sensitive and very gentle. There is a wisdom in its ways, none the less wise because it is not the wisdom of the West. This spirit which traffics in children is callous and fierce as a ravening beast; and its wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. . . . And this spirit, alien to the land, has settled upon it, and made itself at home in it, and so become a part of it that nothing but the touch of God will ever get it out. We want that touch of God: “Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.” That is why we write.
Carmichael, Amy (2011-03-24). Lotus Buds (Kindle Locations 919-924). Kindle Edition.

Amy understood that despite the fact that Jesus is the only Way, God was still able to work in the hearts of people who had never heard the name of Jesus. She wrote:

We form no hard, presumptuous creed as to how the God of all the earth will deal with these masses of mankind who have missed the knowledge of Him here; we know He will do right.
Carmichael, Amy (2011-03-24). Lotus Buds (Kindle Locations 585-586). . Kindle Edition.

But 100 years later it is almost impossible to “have missed the knowledge of Him.” There may be a few remote outposts of the world where the name of Jesus has not been heard, but the real battle today is to stand against a watering down of the words of Jesus. He said He is the only Way to enter the eternal kingdom, there is no other Way. To give in to pluralism is to give in to these false, cultural claims about God. God has clearly revealed His Truth and we need to lovingly bring people to an understanding of this Truth.

This brings me back to the need for prayer. When we realise “the connection between knowing and caring and praying, and what happens afterwards,” we can do nothing other than be moved to prayer. Amy reminded us that we “stand on the edge of the pit, and look down and tell what we have seen.” What we have seen is that there is only one Way to the Father, and this is through His Son. And so we must pray for the masses who are yet in darkness. As Amy put it, our prayer must be, “not in the emasculated modern sense, but in the old Hebrew sense, deep as the other is shallow.”

We know there are billions of people in the world today who have heard the name of Jesus, but have no understanding of His Truth. These people are not only deceived by false “religions”, they are also deceived by materialism, atheism and pluralism. They may be known to us or unknown, well educated or uneducated, wealthy or poor. We may not be able to take ourselves to the mission fields, but every Christian alive today can pray. We don’t need to pray for revival, we need to pray for the lost, those who are at risk of losing their eternal destiny in the Lake of Fire.

We don’t need entertaining, we don’t need formulas and steps to follow, we just need to get down on our knees and lift our hearts to our Father and pray. Pray for the billions of souls who may forfeit their eternal destiny because we were too busy, or too tired, or too troubled. Start with the people you know, all those people in your life who don’t, as yet, know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Make sure you pray for them every day. God will lead and God will guide, but we must make ourselves available. Brothers and sister let us all give ourselves to prayer for the teaming masses of lost souls who share our planet this very day. Do it now and do it often – pray.

For the terrible day is almost here—the day of the LORD! It is a day of clouds and gloom, a day of despair for the nations. (Eze 30:3)

Photo from Lotus Buds by Amy Carmichael

Nov 22 2014

Become an Agent for Change

When I look at newscasts and think about the horrific problems millions of people face because of violence in the countries where they live, I am compelled to wonder how we can make effective changes so that innocent people do not need to flee their homes. How do countries, who open their doors to refugees, help these violent countries develop justice, liberty and equality?

Violence arises from faulty thinking. To think we have a right to attack another person is faulty thinking. Some of this thinking stems from faulty ideologies, some from purely selfish thoughts (I want what you have) and some from the inability or lack of inclination to control violent impulses. God expects us to control our violent impulses, and if we can’t, He has directed civilised societies to create legal systems to deal with people who are a threat to others. Human beings have known from the beginning of time that murder is evil, and there is no doubt about it, we will all stand before our Creator and give an account for the things we have done in this life.

Anyone who has the mistaken belief that in our world today a deity would want them to murder another person, has definitely accepted an ideology that is based on faulty thinking. And yet a large number of the people who are displaced in the world today have had to leave their homes because this type of faulty thinking is being acted upon with, at times, genocidal outcomes. This faulty thinking says, “These people don’t agree with my ideology, I have the right to kill them.”

How do sane, rational people deal with this form of faulty thinking? How should the rest of the world attempt to prevent wholesale murder on the scale we are seeing being perpetrated by IS? I believe we have to directly attack this faulty thinking and it is imperative that this attack comes first from within the community that has given rise to these murderous people.

Outsiders simply pointing out to these people that their thinking is faulty will not prevent the insane violence that is being spread through hate. These murderers claim their scriptures tell them that people who don’t believe in the things they believe in are not only deceived, they choose to be deceived, and therefore their blood is on their own hands. We hear the occasional cry of defence from Muslim leaders who maintain murder is not part of their religion. And yet every day for the last 20 years we hear about Muslims killing people.

If this is not an integral part of Islam, then the leaders need to stand up and say so, loud and clear. They need to teach their children that killing someone else, for any reason other than defending oneself or one’s community, is murder – plain and simple! And they need to educate their young men to think differently. Hate is not conducive to world peace. But perhaps this is what they are actually all about. Their ideology may be based on the idea that the Mahdi will come to a chaotic world filled with hate and violence. They may mistakenly believe they are agents of some twisted sort of good/god.

There is no denying the fact that the majority of people who have found it impossible to stay in their own countries have fled to countries that were founded on Christian principals. Christians can attack the faulty thinking that has led to so much violence and human suffering. We need to attack from the front with prayer. Prayer is our most powerful weapon and we need to use it now, because this is a spiritual battle and we are called to arms. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the world’s rulers, of the darkness of this age, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Eph 6:12)

Christian communities have no problem identifying and condemning murder. Jesus has not given us a mandate for attacking other people, even if they disagree with us and hate us we are commanded to love them and pray for them. The Christian faith is based on peace (Luke 1:78-79), love (John 13:35), forgiveness (Mat 6:12), charity (Mat 25:35-40) and equality (2 Cor 8:13-14). These are the standards the leaders of the Christian church should be setting for their people. God has not called us to be prosperous in this world, He has called us to take up the cross and follow Him (Mark 8:34). Christian leaders around the world today need to speak out about these standards and demand them of their people. All those people who claim to be followers of Christ should be showing love to their Muslim neighbours. We need to be the ambassadors of Christ in the 21st century world.

If these standards are also claimed by other faiths then let their leaders stand up and be counted. Let them speak out and tell their people that this is what is expected of them. If these are not the standards set by their faith, then this faith should be seen for what it is, nothing more than a group of murderous people with faulty thinking. Any faith that promotes violence and hate is a false, evil religion, because we know that God is Love (1 John 4:8).

Why should the rest of the world stand by and pick up the pieces as country after country is racked by the ruinous doctrines of an evil religion. If murder and violence are not part of the doctrine of Islam then let the leaders shout it from their minarets. There are innocent men, women and children who have been born into this faith who have no freedom to choose to look rationally at it and reject it. Apostasy is another choice that is punishable by murder. Outsiders cannot reform Islam, it is up to Muslims to show the world that they really are promoting a religion of peace, if this is indeed what they claim. But this is not what is evident from 1400 years of history.

I can only hope that I am wrong, that I have looked at this situation and missed something. But I simply have to look at the news to see that even if a small number of misguided people are promoting violent aggression in the name of Islam, it is enough to cause immense and unpardonable suffering. Christians around the world need to identify this faulty thinking with compassion and attack it with prayer. This is a call to every Christian in the world today to become an agent of change. Pray brothers and sister, pray like you have never prayed before. Pray for the souls of the lost and deceived, pray that they will see the Light and come to the only true God, their Creator.

Christians of the world must unite and attack this faulty thinking on the spiritual level. The Body of Christ needs to be an agent for change in the world today. Christian people all over the world need to dedicate some time to prayer. We have the most powerful weapon in all the world and we can use it for God’s glory. We need to show the world “proof of our love” so that the Lord Jesus Christ is glorified (2 Cor 8:2-3). Brothers and sisters let us pray.

“Father, let those people who have been born into countries where faulty thinking is the norm hear Your Truth. Lord, open their hearts and their minds to the Truth of Your gospel and bring them into Your Kingdom. Father let them hear about the great love You have for them. Let them truly understand that You sent Your Son to die for them, that they might have eternal life. They have been told that they will live in paradise because they are prepared to kill for their god. Break down this false hope Lord and open their eyes to Your Truth. We know it is only in and through the Lord Jesus Christ that we can be granted the gift of eternal life. Father, reach out to them now we pray and touch them mightily. Amen.”

Nov 18 2014

Who Is Jesus?

Who is Jesus? The answer to this question has occupied academics for centuries, as historian and author John Dickson asserts:

It is a conceit of every age to suppose that it has discovered the most important questions—and answers. The quest for the historical Jesus really began as soon as he left the scene in AD 30. Even the author of one of the four New Testament Gospels shows an interest in searching out the facts rather than opinions about the man from Nazareth.

Whether we believe Jesus of Nazareth is an historical figure may depend entirely upon our own pre-existing bias towards the concepts conveyed by His name. Despite the sceptics, there is very sound evidence to support the claim that Jesus was indeed a real person who lived in the Middle East 2000 years ago. Dickson suggests Luke, the physician and gospel writer was:

….. someone committed to weighing earlier sources, gathering (eyewitness) testimony, researching thoroughly and then providing an orderly account of the most reliable data.

In his orderly account (Luke 1:3) of the life and work of Jesus, Luke records Jesus posing this very question to His disciples. Luke writes:

He was praying alone, only the disciples were with Him, and He asked them, “Who do the multitudes say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist, but others say, Elijah, and others, that one of the old prophets has risen again.” And He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “The Christ of God.” (Luke 9:18-20)

I believe we must each ask ourselves this question: Who is Jesus? Or perhaps we should consider just what His life and claims about Himself have to do with us today? Like many other people, my interest in Jesus had waxed and waned throughout my life, but eventually I decided to pursue an answer to this question.

As a child I was sent to Sunday School, where I heard many stories from The Bible. Some of them were about the Baby Jesus, who, I was informed, was born a long time ago and a long way away. This baby grew up and became an Important Person, but He was killed by some soldiers, who nailed Him to a cross. Amazingly, He came back to life and spent some time with His disciples, before He rose up into the clouds and went back to heaven to be with God.

Growing up in an agnostic household, we didn’t talk about this story at home. My parents didn’t attend church but my sisters and I went to Sunday School, while Mum and Dad read the Sunday papers. Church was just something some people did, but it didn’t have any significant impact on our home life. Although I loved to read Bible stories in the books I won at Sunday School, I didn’t take them too seriously. In my mind they were similar to the classical myths I read in our Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, or the stories I devoured in my Fairy Tale collections and my book of Aesop’s Fables. I stopped going to Sunday School when I was about 11 and I don’t remember anyone talking about religion in our home after that.

Teenagers in the 50s and 60s were born not long after WWII and most of us hoped to live in a world that was free from the widespread violence and aggression our parents and grandparents had seen. Perhaps we thought the two horrific world wars that tore apart the very fabric of society in the first half of the century, were products of old thinking. As the past traditions had not prevented such human carnage, we were reaching for new ways. While the post war world began reconstruction, many people began to reconstruct their concepts of reality and a more progressive concept of Jesus began to emerge.

In my late teens I started to think about this person Jesus again and it was then that I came across the Theosophists’ concept of Maitreya, who was, they claimed:

….. an advanced spiritual entity and high-ranking member of a hidden Spiritual Hierarchy, the so-called Masters of the Ancient Wisdom. According to Theosophical doctrine, one of the Hierarchy’s functions is to oversee the evolution of humankind; in accord with this function the Maitreya is said to hold the so-called Office of the World Teacher. Theosophical texts posit that the purpose of this Office is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about the true constitution and workings of Existence to humankind. Humanity is thereby assisted on its presumed cyclical, but ever progressive, evolutionary path. Reputedly, one way the knowledge transfer is accomplished is by Maitreya occasionally manifesting or incarnating in the physical realm; the manifested entity then assumes the role of World Teacher of Humankind.

From astrogems.com

Jesus as an incarnation of Maitreya seemed more appropriate for the end of the 20th century, particularly if humanity had evolved to a higher level of awareness and we were now ready for the masters to transfer information suitable to this higher plane. I found this teaching much more palatable than the ideas I remembered from the “religious” people who went to church.

From my perspective, church people appeared narrow minded and seemed to have little imagination; I perceived them as people who had simply swallowed ideas that had been passed down to them from repressive leaders, who used religion as a means of maintaining control of the masses.

This new version of Jesus was far more in line with psychedelic thinking. This Jesus had come to Earth to teach humanity a different way to the one the established church presented. Through New Age teachings I thought I could find a way to higher consciousness and enlightenment by emulating Jesus’ lifestyle and teachings. I decided Jesus was one of a number of examples we could model our own lives after, if we seek world peace and enlightenment.

It was during this time that I embarked on a quest for Truth. I had a rudimentary understand of truth being relative, and I toyed with this idea. However, I was beginning to encounter a range of “cosmic” teachings about higher consciousness and I felt it would be interesting to explore some of these ideas, which were becoming more prominent in the youth culture through the hippie movement and people like Timothy Leary. Perhaps there really was such a thing as Truth.

I started reading books I bought at The Theosophical Society bookshop. The writers of these tomes presented Jesus as a very different person to the one I’d learned about at Sunday School. One of the books I purchased was The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by Levi Dowling. This Jesus was portrayed as a well travelled sage, and from Dowling’s book I learned that:

By making himself, through desire, effort, ability and prayer, a fit vessel, Jesus enabled The Christ to dwell within him. Christ is therefore used as a term for the seemingly perfect human being that Jesus exemplified, a human being that has been “Christened” (anointed) and therefore made holy.

This idea struck a cord with me. I had discovered the concept of Christ Consciousness and read about the Cosmic Christ, who, along with other enlightened sages, would help guide humanity on its journey of spiritual evolution. I also discovered the concept of the ascended master. The followers of this idea believe ascended masters are:

….. individuals who have lived in physical bodies, acquired the Wisdom and Mastery needed to become Immortal and Free of the cycles of “re-embodiment” and karma, and have attained their “Ascension”. … According to the Ascended Master Teachings, gaining “mastery over matter planes” means learning to consciously use 100% of one’s Creative Power of thought, feeling, and spoken word to create greater perfection, joy, and love in the world, as opposed to using thoughts, feelings, and words to create greater limitations, bondage, and chaos in one’s own experience and in the world at large through carelessness and lack of awareness of the extent of one’s influence in the world.

In the course of my quest I left my job and went to live on a commune in the hinterland behind Cairns, far north Queensland. This property was owned by a fellow called Jan Daube, who had come to Australia from Germany, with the express purpose of setting up a community for people to come under the spiritual guidance of his Master. According to Jan, his Master had ascended from a community in Spain in the middle ages, and she was drawing people to the Cairns commune to learn from her through Jan.

We were to learn about living in such a way that we would elevate our cosmic vibrations, enabling us to more easily communicate with higher forms of consciousness. These were the gods of the universe, who would be our guides as we moved into the Aquarian Age. We lived on a strict gar shu vegan diet, which meant we avoided animal products that would lower our vibrations and anything that grew under the ground, away from the purifying rays of the sun. I spent many months learning from Jan about the Master’s teachings.

Towards the end of my time in this community I came to the conclusion that, rather than following Jan’s Master, I would adopt Jesus as my Ascended Master. Jesus became my guru and I began to speak with him throughout the day. My life took on a completely new shape. Where there had been a sense of emptiness and a longing for love and a place in the world, I found peace.

Jesus became my friend and companion and when I moved from the commune back to Sydney I decided to seek out other like minded people. However, most of my friends were into Indian gurus, they saw Jesus as western and not at all exotic, and of course, he represented the western culture against which they were rebelling. I didn’t mind, Jesus had brought something into my life nothing else had ever achieved.

Although I still believed in conservation and a counter culture philosophy, I found the whole hippie lifestyle very disappointing. People continued to be people, and many used and abused those around them, while chanting peace and love. I decided I needed to get out of the hustle and bustle of Sydney so I found a little shack I could live in and moved back to the country to pursue my “spiritual” studies through meditation and the library of books I had collected relating to spiritual growth. I still saw Jesus as one of the ascended masters, he was one of many who could help people on their way to self-actualisation and enlightenment, but he was my Master.

From astrogems.com

During hunts through second hand bookshops I discovered Brother Lawrence’s book The Practice of the Presence of God and also Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. Then one day I found a book called The New Life by Andrew Murray. With the help of this battered old volume I began to read the little Bible I had carried with me through years of hitch-hiking up and down the east coast of Australia. It had been a present from my parents for my 10th birthday, but I never actually read it, I just liked the way it looked and felt. It was beautifully bound and it had rice paper pages with gold edging. What I discovered was that the words inside The Bible were more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.

In The Bible I read:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him; and without Him not a thing was brought into being that has been created. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can not overtake it. (John 1:1-5)

The Bible was telling me that my Master, Jesus, was actually the Creator of all that existed on both the physical and spiritual planes – He brought all things into being. He was also the Light carrier, who was far more powerful than any dark force. I also read:

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. (1 John 4:7-9)

I had traveled thousands of miles wearing plastic sandals with Peace painted on the back of one and Love on the back of the other, but I had now found both at the feet of Jesus. He became not only my Master, guru and friend, but also my Lord. I began to understand that He is unique. He is not an ascended master, He is the only begotten Son of God and the only person who has ever been raised from the dead with an immortal body. The uniqueness of Jesus began to unfold before me as I read The Bible. I also read:

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life: no one comes to the Father, but by me. If you know me, you know my Father also: from now on you know Him, and have seen Him. (John 14:6-7)

This is a momentous claim. Jesus is asserting He is totally unique, He is the only Way for us to know the omnipotent, omniscient God who created all things through Him. This God, who has revealed Himself through The Bible, His Son and the Holy Spirit, calls Himself our Father, and Jesus is the human embodiment of the Father. He is indeed God incarnate.

Until that time I had perceived God as an impersonal force; in a sense I saw Him as the collective consciousness of all lifeforms in the universe – He was therefore nothing more than a product of evolution, just as all living things were. We were a great cosmic accident that was unfolding and becoming. Now I discovered we were no accident. There was a God who was immortal, eternal and infinite and He had a very specific message for the people He had created in His own image. He said:

Truly, truly, I tell you, We speak about the things we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and you don’t believe our witness. If I tell you about earthly things and you refuse to believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? And no one has ascended into heaven, but He that descended out of heaven, the Son of man, who is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whoever believes may have eternal life in Him. For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:11-16)

I came to understand that the real Jesus is the Jesus revealed in the pages of His Bible, the written Word of God. The only way to know this Jesus, who is the only begotten Son of God, is through the teachings in His Word that are opened to His followers by His Holy Spirit. This Jesus came to Earth from heaven and went back to heaven, and He said quite clearly that He was the only one to do so. He assured His followers that those who believe in Him and His teachings will be given eternal life.

It took me some time to come to terms with just a few of the ideas I found Jesus preached through the pages of His Word. It became evident that His teachings were not only multifaceted, they were multilayered. I had started with the concept that God is Love and moved on to the uniqueness of Jesus and His claim to be the only Way. I did not begin to explore the concept of sin for a number of years after I started to follow Jesus, but when I did it enabled me to more fully understand why He went to the cross. From the book of Hebrews I read:

…..He has once for all, at the close of the ages, appeared to abolish sin by His sacrifice. And just as it is appointed for all people to die once, and after that face the judgment, even so it is that Christ, having been offered once to take upon Himself the burden of the sins of many – once for all – will appear a second time, not to carry any burden of sin nor to deal with sin, but to bring to full salvation those who are eagerly waiting for Him. (Heb 9:26-28)

There was so much to unpack in this passage. This teaching dealt the final blow to my ideas on reincarnation. If I was to follow the teachings of the biblical Jesus I must accept that people will die only once, and then face judgment. I was not a continually reborn person, I was uniquely me and the choices I make in this life will influence my eternal destiny.

This meant the Hindu understanding of karma was also out. We will not work our way to enlightenment by improving our behaviour over successive rebirths. We will indeed reap what we sow, but this law of consequences is something that tends to bear fruit in this present life. Although the life to come is also dependent on our deeds, the judgment that we must each face (Mat 12:36) is more dependent on whether we are prepared to accept our Creator’s Way.

As I read The Imitation of Christ, I realised that there is not a single person in the world who could stand up to the standards God has set for the holiness people need to possess to be part of His eternal family. Indeed Paul told the Romans that everyone has sinned (Rom 3:23). I had been deceived into thinking I could make the grade. I had believed that if I was prepared to give up the worldly things (thoughts, deeds and possessions) that held me back from enlightenment, I could ascend to the next plane of existence.

Instead, I came to understand that Jesus is the only person who has ever lived a sinless life. God intends to dwell in the midst of sinless, eternal people, but to achieve this end He has allowed His perfect creation to be corrupted for a short time before He destroys it and remakes the heavens and Earth to be a home for people who have accepted the righteousness of the Jesus of The Bible (Rev 21:1-5). It will be His righteousness that makes us able to eternally coexist with the Holy Eternal Father.

The issue of sin began to make its way into my thoughts. The word sacrifice was something I had not really contemplated. I finally saw my own selfishness for what it was. I wanted enlightenment simply for my own peace and fulfillment. Despite this, the Father was offering me a place in His eternal kingdom through His Son. The wondrous truth is that Jesus is going to abolish sin. My sins, and the sins of every person who has ever lived, will be dealt with, and then abolished (John 1:29). This will be done with complete and perfect justice. Selfishness, greed, jealousy, envy, hate, malice, lust, hypocrisy, deceptiveness and all the other negative human traits that plague us will be gone.

I finally realised that I needed Jesus as my Saviour and Redeemer and the gracious provision the Father has made is that every person who repents of their sin and accepts Jesus’ sacrifice on their behalf, can be freed from the penalty of that sin. This is because God has declared that the death of His one and only Son is the sacrifice He demanded from the very foundations of the world (Mat 13:35; 25:34; Eph 1:4; Heb 4:3; Rev 13:8). As Peter put it:

God chose Him as your ransom long before the world began, but He has now revealed Him to you in these last days. Through Christ you have come to trust in God. And you have placed your faith and hope in God because He raised Christ from the dead and gave Him great glory. You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart. (1 Peter 1:20-22)

After coming to an understanding of the world’s problem with sin, I also came to realise that Jesus is not the person we want Him to be, He is not an aesthetic, mystic, philosopher, sage, ascended master or great teacher, He is the man revealed in the pages of The Bible, the Saviour of the world. Any other man is not the Lord Jesus Christ of The Bible, and therefore is not God’s only begotten Son, who came into the world to deal with sin. I had followed the Cosmic Christ, the Mystic Christ and the Aquarian Christ, but the Christ revealed in The Bible is God’s only Son, He does not need repackaging for the modern world.

I was now a member of the Body of Christ, the church, the universal body of believers, and I had learned that we can look to God’s inerrant Word and know that the words in The Bible can be taken at face value. If this were not the case there would be no way to know who Jesus is and what He believed and taught. There would be no way to be a Christian. Jesus came to Earth from heaven and was born into history. He had painstakingly prepared a nation into which He would be born and He then thoroughly prepared His apostles to write the New Testament books of The Bible.

Jesus wisely and meticulously provided The Bible so that all Christians throughout history can come to the same set of core beliefs. One need only examine the writing of Christian authors from the beginning of the Church Age to find their work reflects the same core beliefs followers of Jesus hold today. This is because they also recognised The Bible as the final authority for their doctrine. The real Jesus is the Jesus of The Bible and it is He who offers each and every person the gift of eternal life. This Jesus is not bound by denominations or traditions, He is the living embodiment of the invisible God. As Paul told the Colossians:

…The Father has given us a part in the heritage of the saints in light; He has made us free from the power of evil and given us a place in the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have our salvation and the forgiveness of sins. Jesus is the image of the unseen God, He existed before anything was created and through Him all things were made, in heaven and on Earth – things seen and things unseen, authorities, lords, rulers, and powers – all things were made by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things have their being. And He is the head of the body, the church: the starting point of all things, the first to rise from the dead; so that in all things He might have the chief place. For God was pleased to be in Him in full measure. (Col 1:12-19)

An important piece of the picture that just wouldn’t fit was finally highlighted for me when I read passages like:

For you have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end. Your new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal, living word of God. (1 Peter 1:23)

This led me to re-examine the concept of an immortal soul, which I had accepted as truth and simply carried over into my Christian walk from eastern mysticism. After reading The Bible for more than thirty years I finally decided to go against a teaching that had been introduced into Christian tradition in the 2nd century. It gradually became clear to me that The Bible does not teach that we have immortal souls or spirits. God warned Adam and Eve they would die if they chose to reject His clear guidance. He calls this rebellion against His rightful authority sin, and He told Adam and Eve that the penalty for this sin would be death (Gen 2:16-17). Satan lied to Adam and Eve and assured them death would not be the outcome of their disobedience (Gen 3:4). It was! Death entered God’s perfect creation and people, plants and animals began to die.

From the very beginning of its pages The Bible teaches that immortality is no longer part of the human condition; we must each make a choice to give our lives into the hands of the immortal Father, through His Son, to be given the gift of eternal life. If we choose to reject this gift, then Jesus has warned us, we will perish (John 3:16).

Jesus, God’s only Son, accepted the role He must play in the Father’s rescue plan for humanity. From before He created the universe God had determined He would redeem those who were prepared to accept His Truth: He would give them the gift of eternal life. Jesus was, “In the beginning”, and as John explains, He is with God, and He is God. (John 1:1) It is only through Jesus that God is able to transform mortal humans into eternal beings and make us able to join Him in His eternal kingdom.

NLA photo collection

Surprisingly, Jesus made a bit of an impact on the youth culture when He became a Superstar, and Webber and Rice’s musical came to Australia in 1972. This didn’t have a noticeable impact on my hippie friends at the time, as the Jesus Movement was only just beginning in Australia and the distorted theology in the show was far from biblical. But eventually a number of people from the hippie scene started to look into Jesus and by the late 70s there were hundreds of Jesus Freaks in Australia who had discovered who Jesus is.

The musical has recently made a comeback but the real Jesus has always been here, reaching out to us through His Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life and if He is not already, He can be your Lord, Saviour and Redeemer. But we must each listen to the teachings He has provided through His Word so that we can hear what it is He wants to say to our hearts. Why not find out for yourself the answer to the question, Who is Jesus?

Nov 14 2014

Coming – Ready or Not

One of our favourite games when we were kids was Hiding. Someone would cover their eyes and everyone else would find a place to hide. The person whose eyes were covered would begin to count, then call, “Coming, ready or not.” During the counting we’d all scamper around looking for a place to hide, and I’m sure, being small children, we found a lot more places to hide in those days than we’d find now.

At the moment I feel a little like we are facing a countdown. I believe our world is poised for the second most momentous event in its history, The Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. The most important event in history so far, the birth of Jesus, changed the world immeasurably. Even though many modern historians are trying to write His influence out of history, they will find it difficult to alter the calendar around which the 21st century world revolves. Every time we write a date we are making reference to that world-changing event, when God was born into the world to save humanity from destruction.

Some people insist they don’t need saving. I remember hearing someone at the National Gallery of Australia, who was standing in front of a renaissance painting of the crucifixion, saying, “I didn’t ask Him to die for me.” It wrenched my heart to stand there and look at someone who had no idea of their enormous need. We need to be changed to meet our Creator. And no matter whether we’re ready or not, Jesus will come again. He told His disciples a number of times He would return after His ascension and the early Christians continued to repeat the message of His imminent return.

God gave details of the return of Jesus in such a way, that throughout the history of the church, the followers of Jesus were always hoping He would come in their lifetime. Knowing this, why should we have any confidence in the idea that He will actually return in the immediate future? Why is it that many Christians believe it will actually happen very soon?

The answer is to be found in the study of Bible prophecy. Prophecy is a particular way of communicating a message that will only be understood by the people it is intended for. If Christians do not take the time to prayerfully study prophecy, they may not hear God’s message to them. Until recently, not everyone had access to the scriptures, but now that so many people can study the Bible for themselves, many Christians are looking very carefully at New Testament prophecies, and also at those in the Old Testament that appear to be awaiting fulfilment. And a surprising number of these believers feel the signs point to Jesus returning in the not too distant future.

The timing of the Lord’s return has always been an important issue for His followers. Matthew records an incident that occurred during Jesus’ time on Earth:

And as He sat on the mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of you coming, and of the end of the world?” (Mat 24:3)

Most people would be aware that if we do not know the language or culture of another person, it is very difficult to understand what they are saying to us. In the same way people need the Holy Spirit to open Bible prophecy up to them so that they can understand what God is saying. As Peter wrote:

Know this, no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation. For no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:20-21)

Prophecy is not meant to be understood by non-Christians, it is God’s special message to His people, who are filled with His Holy Spirit. God opens His Word to people at just the right time, and now, at this point in history, as people have been seeking to understand the signs Jesus gave to His disciples, He has been opening the scriptures up to indicate that His return is at hand.

Over the past 100 years Christians have been studying and sharing ideas on the many biblical passages surrounding this topic and many believe that Jesus will actually return twice. The first will not really be a return of the Lord Jesus to Earth, Jesus will come to lift the believers out of the Earth. This may not be a time when unbelievers will actually see Him, they may only be aware that many people, who were followers of Jesus, suddenly disappeared. Paul described this episode in his letters. He writes:

Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. (1Cor 15:51-53)

To the Thessalonians Paul wrote:

For they keep talking about the wonderful welcome you gave us and how you turned away from idols to serve the living and true God. And they speak of how you are looking forward to the coming of God’s Son from heaven—Jesus, whom God raised from the dead. He is the One who is rescuing us from the wrath to come. (1Thes 1:9-10)

In the same letter he goes on to say:

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thes 4:13-18)

Paul is concerned that believers should not be ignorant, or “uninformed”, about Jesus’ return, like people who “have no hope”. He is writing to assure believers that “those who have fallen asleep in Jesus”, that is, born-again believers who have already died, will be resurrected and will “rise first”, before the believers who are still alive at that time are transformed to be united with them. Then they will all be “caught up together” to meet the Lord Jesus Christ in the air. This is a description of an event that has come to be known as The Rapture (from the Latin rapturo or raeptius, which means to seize, carry off or to snatch out or away).

Paul clearly explains that this event is a time when believers will be rescued, when they will be snatched away from the wrath to come. He then goes on to explain what will happen next:

But of the times and the seasons, brethren, you don’t need me to write to you. For you know perfectly that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. For when they are saying, “Peace and safety”, then suddenly destruction will come upon them, like labour pains upon a woman with child – and they will not escape. But you, brothers and sister, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. You are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God has not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ. (1Th 5:1-9)

This event does not sound like the Second Coming, because Jesus does not come all the way down to Earth during this event. He only comes to meet the believers in the air. Paul explains that The Rapture will be a comfort to believers, because it will be a supreme act of God’s grace, when His love and mercy rescues them from the wrath and sudden destruction that is about to be poured out on the Earth during a period called The Great Tribulation. In his letters Paul is describing two incidents occurring in two different places. The children of the light have the hope of salvation and will be lifted away, while those who persist in darkness will remain to experience the wrath to come.

Believers will be rescued from the worst of the persecution, wars, natural disasters, and judgments that the Revelation, the book of Daniel and the other prophetic scriptures explain will occur during the seven year period leading up to the Second Coming. Christians will not to be caught off guard by The Rapture because they have been warned to remain watchful and sober.

However, unbelievers will be feeling reasonably safe and secure at this time and they will not be prepared to listen to their Christian friends who are waiting and watching for their Lord. For the unbeliever, Jesus will come “like a thief in the night”, to snatch away the saints. He will come and take away His people, and because they will not be watching for Him, the unbelievers may not even be aware it is happening until after the event.

Although there are some Christians who reject this understanding of prophecy, it creates a striking harmony between the many scriptures that cover the topic. I have written in far more detail about my reasons for coming to this conclusion in my book (see the Revelation chapter). I have also covered a number of reasons why many students of eschatology feel the Lord’s return is imminent.

Sadly, people who are not born-again believers in Christ at the time of The Rapture, will remain on the Earth to live through what Jesus referred to as the Great Tribulation (Mat 24:21). However, the Bible teaches that people who repent and turn to Jesus as their personal Saviour and Lord during the Tribulation, will be forgiven of their sins, regenerated by God’s Holy Spirit and saved from ultimate judgment and eternal destruction. These new believers will still have to endure the horrors that will occur on the Earth during that time, and many will face martyrdom, but I believe God will give them a special outpouring of His Spirit to enable them to reach out to the lost in God’s last momentous attempt to reach people before Jesus returns and this present age draws to a close. This will be the time when people are offered their very last chance to be part of God’s eternal kingdom.

When Paul describes the “sudden destruction” as being like “labour pains” (1 Thes 5:3), he is using the same concept the Lord Jesus used when He explained that the world will experience “birth pangs” in the last days (Matthew 24:8). At that time Jesus was talking to a Jewish audience, and just as with Paul, He then went on to give a description of the Tribulation, during which time He will be reaching out to His people, the Jews, in a mighty effort to bring them back to Himself (Is 27:12,13). Revelation tells us God will recruit 144 000 Jews to perform this task of evangelisation during the Great Tribulation (Rev 7:4).

While we don’t know exactly when The Rapture will occur, it seems it will not come during a time of intense “contraction” such as a major economic or military upheaval or natural disasters, but rather, during a time of “release”; a time when things appear to the non-Christian world to be peaceful and safe. We know labour pains start out with long pauses between contractions, and gradually become more frequent and more intense. Jesus explained that there would be signs that were simply the beginning of the labour pains and that once these began to occur people would know the end was near. As no one could possibly describe any moment during The Great Tribulation as a time of “peace and safety”, it follows that the Rapture cannot take place during this time when God pours out His wrath on a world that has resolutely refused to turn to Him.

For those of us who are eagerly anticipating His return, Jesus tells us:

“I leave you peace. It is my own peace I give you. I give you peace in a different way than the world does. So don’t be troubled. Don’t be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am leaving, but I will come back for you.’ (John 14:27-28a)

Jesus was assuring His disciples that even though He was about to be crucified, He would return and they should not be afraid. If He were to return for the saints at the end of the Great Tribulation, it would be very difficult for Christians not to be troubled by the events that will precede His coming. In the book of Revelation we have a very clear picture of a time that would terrify even the most pious of saints. Instead, the Lord assured His people He will rescue them from this horrific time.

Following the resurrection, Jesus did return to His people for a short time. However, His last instruction for them before He ascended was that they should tell people everywhere about Him. This is exactly what Christians have been occupied in doing since He went to be with the Father. In the 21st century, Christians have added a new aspect to this message – anyone who wants to be part of God’s rescue program, which is scheduled to occur just before the Great Tribulation, can find their hope of salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.

After Jesus was caught up in the clouds at His ascension, some angels assured His watching followers that Jesus would return again. As Luke described it:

“But the Holy Spirit will come on you and give you power and you will be my witnesses. You will tell people everywhere about me – in Jerusalem, in the rest of Judea, in Samaria, and in every part of the world.” After Jesus said this, He was lifted up into the sky. While they were watching, He went into a cloud, and they could not see Him. They were staring into the sky where He had gone. Suddenly two men wearing white clothes were standing beside them. They said, “Men from Galilee, why are you standing here looking into the sky? You saw Jesus carried away from you into heaven. He will come back in the same way you saw him go.” (Act 1:8-11)

Throughout the history of the church Christians have eagerly anticipated the return of Christ (1 Cor 1:7; Php 3:20; 2 Tim 4:8; Heb 9:28). Today, many believers are not anticipating having to endure the Great Tribulation, because the Lord has promised they will be spared from God’s wrath. Instead, these believers are anticipating being taken away to be with the Lord forever (1 Thes 4:18). This is a wonderful hope. The fact that Jesus has not, as yet, returned simply means more people will have the opportunity to be part of His rescue plan and His eternal kingdom. But before this kingdom can be realised on Earth, there is yet the Great Tribulation to be actioned on Earth. As Matthew records, Jesus told his disciples:

“For then shall be Great Tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, nor ever shall be.” (Mat 24:21)

The Great Tribulation will be the time when God’s judgment on evil will be executed on Earth. It is hard for mortal people to understand the immortal, omniscient, omnipotent God who created the universe, but He has given us His Holy Spirit and His Word, The Bible, through which we can learn a great deal about His purposes and plans. God has very good reasons for this final outpouring of His wrath upon the Earth. I address these reasons more fully in my book. We can choose to avoid this horrific time by simply acknowledging our Creator as having supreme authority over us and giving our lives into the hands of His Son. He has been reaching out to humanity with love and mercy from the beginning of time, but He will not allow evil to endure forever. In Revelation we find:

And the kings of the earth, and the princes, and the chief captains, and the rich, and the strong, and every bondman and freeman, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains; and they say to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of their wrath is come; and who is able to stand? (Rev 6:15-17)

This will not be a game. God created a magnificent planet and filled it with miraculous living creatures, but humanity has despoiled God’s creation. People have lied, hated, cheated, killed, polluted, perverted and destroyed, and they have resolutely refused to be subject to their Creator. This is His universe and many choose to be wilfully ignorant of His plans and purposes for their lives. During the Great Tribulation there will be nowhere to hide from the Creator or from His Truth. However, this is not the end. Jesus said:

“But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” (Mat 24:29-30)

This is not part of the events described by Paul during The Rapture, this is a description of the Second Coming, which all the world will see. It will occur at the end of the Great Tribulation, when Jesus returns to the Earth with the transformed saints to establish His thousand year reign on Earth (Rev 19:11-20:6). He will come, whether we’re ready or not.

For those who know and love Him, Jesus will return to take them to be with Him eternally. Those people who have chosen to remain on planet Earth during the Great Tribulation will then live through the worst seven years humanity has ever endured. During this time many will turn to their Creator, having been driven, finally, to an understanding of their need for salvation. However, those who resolutely refuse to acknowledge the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ as their Creator may try to hide. But eventually, we must all face our Creator. Will we stand before Him as a beloved child, redeemed, cleansed and transformed, or as a rebellious renegade, doomed for destruction?

Nov 10 2014

Eternity

When I was young I lived and went to school in the city of Sydney. Many times during my early days I saw the message “Eternity” written in chalk in beautiful copperplate handwriting on the footpaths of our beautiful harbour city. I have no idea how much this one word effected me, but I do know that now it is one of the most important words in my life.

When I consider this word my mind jumps in two directions, the first and most powerful is the thought of those people around me who will miss out on Eternity. It breaks my heart. I want to strap on a sandwich board and stand in the centre of the city alerting people to their need for repentance. But what would they understand if they heard the word “Repent”? I was saved and had committed to living my life for my Saviour some time before I really understood anything about repentance.

The man who wrote Eternity on the streets of Sydney during the 50s and 60s was called by God to do so. God called him and God enabled him; he could hardly write his own name, but when he wrote Eternity on the streets of Sydney it was beautifully executed. Arthur Stace, who came to be known as Mr Eternity, had lived a desperate, profligate life; mostly drunk from the age of 15. When he met Jesus his life changed completely and he understood just what Eternity was all about. He’d been to the depths of depravity and the light of Eternity was a beacon for his soul. How do we reach out to the people of the 21st century and alert them to God’s offer of Eternity?

I think we need to be clear in our minds about the issues involved. A large portion of the population today have a sort of sentimental idea that they will be reunited in some other place, and live on in some other life, with departed loved ones. This is because many people, including some Christians, believe in an immortal soul.

I also have a number of friends who are atheists and they are very pragmatic; as far as they’re concerned the soul is nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. Their catch-cry is, “When you’re dead, you’re dead”. To a certain extent I agree with this sentiment. It is far more biblically sound than the sentimental journey the after-lifers imagine awaits us. The difference between the atheists’ idea of death and that of The Bible is that before the final, second death we learn about in Revelation, there is a Day of Judgment. This is when those who have rejected God’s gift of Eternity will understand just what it is they will loose. They will meet their Creator and know without doubt that He loves them, but that He has a plan for the future that they can only be part of by being in Him (Romans 8:1).

We don’t really know much about life in Eternity, but those of us who know Jesus know we will be with Him, and that is more than enough to assure us that Eternity will be magnificent. This, of course, is the second thing that comes to my mind when I think of Eternity. It will be unbelievably wonderful. If we could make it clear to people that they have a choice between Eternity with a Father who loves them so much He was prepared to die for them, and the second, final, irreversible death, perhaps they would have a better understanding now of what this momentous choice is all about.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the church has swallowed the Greek idea of an immortal soul, although Christians historically have referred to it as an immortal spirit. This is not a biblical concept (see What is the second death? for a more comprehensive discussion on this topic), this idea was imported into the church in the second century by converted Greek philosophers and perhaps originally came from Hindu teachings.

This belief is a direct result of Satan’s first recorded lie to humanity, when he told Adam and Eve they would not die (Gen 2:16-17). Sadly, many people today have believed this lie. Demonic spirits use the idea to great advantage through spiritualism and mediums, and even those who refuse to believe in the God of The Bible can be heard to refer to some departed person “looking down on” or “watching over” them.

Christians carry this concept of an imagined afterlife into ideas about the fate of the unsaved. As Christians, we need to find doctrinal truth in The Bible, and not blindly accept church traditions, they can be wrong (Mat 15:6). The Bible teaches that after we die we are resurrected to face judgment. Christians will be judged before the Bema Seat of Christ (2 Cor 5:10), where they will either receive their rewards or find themselves surrounded by cinders (1Cor 3:12-15), but all will go on into Eternity, because they have been given eternal life. Before receiving this gift we are dead in our trespasses and sins (Mat 8:22; Eph 2:1).

Unbelievers will not be resurrected until after the millennium, when they will stand before the Great White Throne of their Creator to be judged. John tells us in The Revelation:

And I saw a great white throne and the One sitting on it. The earth and sky fled from His presence, but they found no place to hide. I saw the dead, both great and small, standing before God’s throne. And the books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead. And all were judged according to their deeds. Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. (Rev 20:11-21:1)

Thus we learn that the present creation will disappear just before this judgment, and a new heaven and a new earth will be created immediately after this judgment. Between the destruction of the old creation and the appearance of the new one the fate of the unbelieving dead is sealed. We are told that they are judged “according to what they had done”. I believe a valid interpretation of these verses is that some people, who had not consciously accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour before they died – perhaps because they had never come across the gospel during their lifetime, may indeed find their names recorded in the Book of Life. If their names are not in this book then logically they will have no life beyond the judgment, they will experience the second death.

We do not have eternal life unless we accept this great gift from the only One who can make it, the only One who has conquered death. Without the gift of eternal life we will have no Eternity. Nowhere in The Bible do we read that God gives eternal life to the unbelieving dead to go on in some unknown state forever. Those who have received the gift of eternal life and are part of the new creation will find:

He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” (Rev 21:4)

I believe this verse is telling us that even the second death is gone. All these things are gone forever, the Lake of Fire and everything in it will disappear, along with the old creation. Eternity is a place for the living, and only those who have accepted eternal life from the Lord of Life will go on into Eternity.

What an incredible opportunity we are missing by creating this unbiblical afterlife for the unbeliever. The idea that we can claim God is love, but then go on to insist He will send unbelievers to eternal torment, is not logical. This fact is not lost on the lost. We have created an unbiblical doctrine, presented it as Truth, and then told those who reject it that they are rejecting the love of God.

What many of these people have rejected is a contorted doctrine about a tyrannical God who knew He would be sending people to eternal torment and nevertheless went on with His plan. Although He is holy and just, the God of The Bible is indeed a God of love. He loves people so much, He will not force them to spend Eternity as sinful, fallen humans. It would be intolerable living eternally with our selfishness, greed, insecurities, arrogance, hate, malice, deceitfulness and all the other products of sin that plague unredeemed humanity.

God offers each one of us the opportunity to choose His alternative to the second death. We must be born again of God’s eternal spirit to live in Eternity. There is no other alternative. In John’s first letter he explains that eternal life is only found in Jesus and that those who are in Jesus can be assured they have eternal life:

And this is the witness, that God has given to us eternal life; and this life is in His Son. He that has the Son has life: he that has not the Son of God has not life. These things have I written to you that you may know that you have eternal life who believe on the name of the Son of God. (1 John 5:11-13)

God’s new creation will be without sin, pain, death and suffering, and only those who have been transformed by God’s Holy Spirit (John 3:5) will be fit for Eternity. We must each make a momentous choice. If you don’t already know you have eternal life, will you now choose Jesus Christ as your Saviour? Through Him you can be saved from the second death and go on into Eternity?

Nov 9 2014

The Power of Love

I’m reading The Koran. Admittedly I can’t read it in Arabic, but then I would imagine many Muslims can’t read it in Arabic either, so I’m working my way through an English version. Right now I’m saying to myself, “Will the very fact that I’ve stated here in this public forum that I’m reading The Koran make some people want to harm me?” It’s a frightening thought. But a religion that encourages terrorism is a frightening reality, which I guess means that the terrorists have achieved their goal, we feel terrified. I’m still totally at a loss to understand how anyone can think the God who created the universe would want this sort of violent behaviour to be carried out in His name. But then I read passages in The Koran like:

Make ready then against them what force ye can, and strong squadrons whereby ye may strike terror into the enemy of God and your enemy.

And also:

Strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every finger-tip. This, because they have opposed God and his apostle.

This God appears to be very different to the God the Lord Jesus Christ came to reveal. Jesus taught:

“But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, offer the other cheek also. If someone demands your coat, offer your shirt also. Give to anyone who asks; and when things are taken away from you, don’t try to get them back. Do to others as you would like them to do to you. “If you love only those who love you, why should you get credit for that? Even sinners love those who love them! And if you do good only to those who do good to you, why should you get credit? Even sinners do that much! (Luke 6:27-33)

I know many non-Christian people cite Old Testament passages to make the claim that Christianity also promotes violence, but that’s because they don’t understand what The Bible is all about. They don’t understand that there is a New Covenant and a New Commandment. Under the old covenant God was preparing a people and a place into which the Messiah would be born. Now we have a New Covenant and under this covenant we are learning about the power of love. This is a radical idea. I was once told by a Muslim that Jesus was a coward because He didn’t take up arms against His enemies. This man did not understand the power of God’s love. He also did not understand that it is this love that will ultimately be victorious.

Throughout history, some people who claimed to be Christians (see my article What is a Christian) also did not understand this important truth. In the 16th century a godly man called William Tyndale was persecuted and eventually hanged and burned at the stake by the religious leaders of his time. Although these people claimed to be Christians, they appear to have completely missed the teachings of Jesus. Not only did they not follow His teachings, they worked hard to maintain control of the Word of God, while Tyndale was trying to get God’s Word into the hands of the “common” people.

Today there are people who claim to be Christian whose beliefs appear to me to be closer to the teachings of The Koran than to The Bible. They promote the idea of eternal torment. This teaching is found over and over again in The Koran. The gruesome details of the horrific fate awaiting the infidel is related many times, but one sentence in particular grabbed me.

He that feareth God will receive the warning, and the most reprobate only will turn aside from it, who shall be exposed to the terrible fire, in which he shall not die, and shall not live.

This is exactly what many Christians claim is the fate awaiting unbelievers. I can find no scriptural support for this concept in The Bible, yet people who choose to believe this idea do so with strong conviction. If we lived in Tyndale’s time I could understand such ideas being prominent, in those days people did not have access to God’s Word, but today most Christian’s can read God’s Word in their own language. And still they cling to this doctrine.

I believe that people who understand God as an omnipotent being, who is preparing eternal torment for a large portion of the human race, must surely make allowances for themselves when they lack love and compassion. Belief in this sort of violent retribution corrupts the soul. Even for the Christian love becomes a relative term. God is love, but this love must be understood in the light of the understanding that he will allow the torture of people for eternity. This is not the God of The Bible, this is the God of The Koran.

The God of The Bible expects His followers to live as Jesus did. John wrote about this concept and he also talked about people who claim to know God but don’t follow Jesus’ teachings. He wrote:

If someone claims, “I know God,” but doesn’t obey God’s commandments, that person is a liar and is not living in the truth. But those who obey God’s word truly show how completely they love Him. That is how we know we are living in Him. Those who say they live in God should live their lives as Jesus did. Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment—to love one another—is the same message you heard before. Yet it is also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you also are living it. For the darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining. (1 John 2:4-8)

May the darkness that accompanies this horrific doctrine be overwhelmed by the light and love that shines forth from God’s Word. And may people who believe terrorism is an expression of God’s will discover another way, the Way of love.

Nov 7 2014

The Morality of God

Recently I read an article on a friend’s blog (macarisms.com) about The Morality of God in the Old Testament. As a pastor of a church, my friend has a real gift for clearly laying out biblical teaching. In his article he states that:

…….. this isn’t really the atheist’s problem—this is a problem that the Jews and the Christians need to deal with. For the atheist, the problem is not with God, for he/she/it doesn’t actually exist, but with the people who claim to believe in God. Their criticism is fundamentally toward religious people justifying their immoral behaviours in the name of an imaginary divine being. However, for the Christian who believes that God is real, that he has revealed himself to people, and that he is involved in human history—there are real issues to consider when it comes to trusting that God is morally pure.

I couldn’t agree more, and I believe Christians need to tackle this issue head on if we hope to reach out to the lost in the postmodern, western world. In our 21st century western culture, the Christian church is being increasingly marginalised through a progressively dominant, humanist moral compass. Although there have been many books written on the nature of God, from His Word we learn that God is love (1 John 4:8,16). This Truth has been a guiding light for many followers of Jesus in our Christian walk, but the issue of the morality of God, as revealed in The Bible, has so perplexed me, I’ve spent the last 40 years thinking it through.

Eventually, in an attempt to address criticisms from people like Richard Dawkins, I felt moved to write a book. These antagonists do not know our God and Father, who has revealed Himself as Love, and I believe Christians need to step up and really examine God’s revelation of His own plans and purposes in allowing universal suffering to exist and endure.

I have called my book The Bible’s Bookends, because Genesis and Revelation shape our understanding of the nature and character of our Father. These two books of The Bible deal with the perennial question – “Where did we come from and where are we going after we die?” If we get Genesis and Revelation wrong, then we present the Father as a God who is not at all like the loving Father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). When I consider the way many believers present the God of The Bible I can truly understand the accusations of Richard Dawkins and other vocal atheists. And I sincerely believe both the atheists, and some believers, are slandering our Father unnecessarily.

The Bible is an enormous document to come to terms with, but until I had a sense of, what my friend calls “the overall shape of The Bible,” I simply listened to what other people had to say and compared their ideas to scripture. When I eventually came to what I believe is a basic biblical understanding of the issues involved in understanding the nature and morality of God, I was amazed that I had never really heard it preached from the pulpit.

If we believe death was part of God’s original creation process, then it is difficult to understand the Creator God as an omnipotent but loving Father. However, a plain reading of The Bible reveals death, pain and suffering entered God’s perfect creation as a result of sin, when Adam and Eve exercised their free will, believed Satan’s lie that they would not die (Genesis 3:4) and rejected God’s clear guidance (Genesis 2: 16,17).

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

With this understanding, it is easier to see how much the Father grieves over His creation, which is now groaning with sin, pain, suffering and death. He is so grieved He has revealed in His Word that He will eventually destroy this present universe and all that is not saved from eternal destruction by the blood of the Lord Christ Jesus. He will then create a new Heaven and a new Earth where sin, pain, suffering and death will be no more (Rev 21:1-4).

At first, the commands of God to destroy all the Canaanites in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua bothered me greatly, but then I realised they were obviously once-only commands for a very specific purpose – to prepare a nation into which the Messiah would be born and raised to carry out His mission of deliverance from the final, ultimate destruction awaiting this world. The Flood and the other OT commands to remove evil (Sodom and Gomorrah etc.) were necessary to ensure God could be born into a nation with some depth of understanding of His holiness. Even then only a handful recognised their Messiah and went on to become part of the Body of Christ, through which the Holy Spirit would build His church. There is absolutely no mandate under the new covenant Jesus introduced for such genocidal actions to be perpetrated by these new believers. The Messiah has come! The new commandment He brought was to love even our enemies (Mat 5:44).

What really bothers me is that many Christians seem to blindly accept and propagate the idea of eternal torment for unbelievers. Most people understand the concept of eternal judgment. From the scriptures we understand that this is not something God will continue to do throughout eternity, this final judgment will take place once for each person, and it will have dire, eternal consequences. Eternal salvation, eternal destruction and eternal punishment are also actions that have eternal consequences. Without eternal salvation and the gift of eternal life from the Messiah, the eternal punishment of Matthew 25:46 will be the eternal destruction mentioned throughout The Bible (Psalm 92:7; 2 Thes 1:9; Rev 17:8). This is the dreadful default position for all who have not accepted the gift of eternal life. When the Father deals evil its final blow, they will indeed perish, as Jesus succinctly explained (John 3:16).

In His Word our Father has clearly outlined His program to remake His creation without sin, pain, suffering and death. From the very foundations of this present world (Mat 25:34) God put His rescue plan in place to redeem people who choose to be part of His new, eternal family. The redeemed will not be destroyed with the old creation, they will have eternal life and be free from the curse of death brought into the world through Adam and Eve’s sin. God did not lie – we will all die because of that sin unless we accept the gift of eternal life from the only One who can make this offer. This is the big picture The Bible presents.

I can only hope there are more discussions in the Body of Christ on this vital topic. If we get Genesis and Revelation right, we can be prepared with answers for many of the difficult questions our non-Christian friends present us with (1 Peter 3:15), even though there are some questions that are more difficult than others and some that we really can’t answer (1 Cor 8:2). My book, which I have chosen to publish here on WordPress, is an attempt at addressing the issue of the morality of God with scriptural support, sound reasoning and evidence-based science.

Our Father truly is a loving Father, who has prepared a place for us to live without sin, pain, suffering or death (John 14:1-3). He was born onto the planet He created to take upon Himself the death we deserve. He has also revealed that it is only through His gift of eternal life that we can be part of His eternal kingdom. He offers this gift to everyone, everywhere, throughout all of human history, because He loves us so much. To understand the morality of God we must understand The Bible’s bookends and God’s big picture.

The Way & The Truth

Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6)

Monthly Archives: November 2014