It was God's purpose to re-populate heaven with the human family, if they would show themselves obedient to His every word. Adam was to be tested, to see whether he would be obedient, as the loyal angels, or disobedient. If he stood the test, his instruction to his children would have been only of loyalty. His mind and thoughts would have been as the mind and thoughts of God.
God assembled the angelic host to take measures to avert the threatened evil. It was decided in Heaven's council for angels to visit Eden and warn Adam that he was in danger from the foe. Two angels sped on their way to visit our first parents. The holy pair received them with joyful innocence, expressing their grateful thanks to their Creator for thus surrounding them with such a profusion of his bounty.
Everything lovely and attractive was theirs to enjoy, and everything seemed wisely adapted to their wants; and that which they prized above all other blessings, was the society of the Son of God and the heavenly angels, for they had much to relate to them at every visit, of their new discoveries of the beauties of nature in their lovely Eden home, and they had many questions to ask relative to many things which they could but indistinctly comprehend.
The angels graciously and lovingly gave them the information they desired. They also gave them the sad history of Satan's rebellion and fall. They then distinctly informed them that the tree of knowledge was placed in the garden to be a pledge of their obedience and love to God; that the high and happy estate of the holy angels was to be retained upon condition of obedience; that they were similarly situated; that they could obey the law of God and be inexpressibly happy, or disobey, and lose their high estate, and be plunged into hopeless despair.
They told Adam and Eve that God would not compel them to obey--that he had not removed from them power to go contrary to his will; that they were moral agents, free to obey or disobey. There was but one prohibition that God had seen fit to lay upon them as yet. If they should transgress the will of God, they would surely die. They told Adam and Eve that the most exalted angel, next in order to Christ, refused obedience to the law of God which he had ordained to govern heavenly beings; that this rebellion had caused war in Heaven which resulted in the rebellious being expelled therefrom, and every angel was driven out of Heaven who united with him in questioning the authority of the great Jehovah; and that
this fallen foe was now an enemy to all that concerned the interest of God and his dear Son.
They told them that Satan purposed to do them harm, and it was necessary for them to be guarded, for they might come in contact with the fallen foe; but he could not harm them while they yielded obedience to God's command; for, if necessary, every angel from Heaven would come to their help rather than that he should in any way do them harm. But if they disobeyed the command of God, then Satan would have power to ever annoy, perplex, and trouble, them. If they remained steadfast against the first insinuations of Satan, they were as secure as the heavenly angels. But if they yielded to the tempter, He who spared not the exalted angels, would not spare them. They must suffer the penalty of their transgression; for the law of God was as sacred as himself, and he required implicit obedience from all in Heaven and on earth.
The angels cautioned Eve not to separate from her husband in her employment; for she might be brought in contact with this fallen foe. If separated from each other, they would be in greater danger than if both were together. The angels charged them to closely follow the instructions God had given them in reference to the tree of knowledge; for in perfect obedience they were safe, and this fallen foe could then have no power to deceive them. God would not permit Satan to follow the holy pair with continual temptations. He could have access to them only at the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
But absorbed in her pleasing task, she unconsciously wandered from his side. She soon found herself gazing with mingled curiosity and admiration upon the forbidden tree. The fruit was very beautiful, and she questioned with herself why God had withheld it from them. Now was the tempter's opportunity. As if he were able to discern the workings of her mind, he addressed her: "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?"
Eve's curiosity was aroused. Instead of fleeing from the spot, she listened to hear a serpent talk. It did not occur to her mind that it might be that fallen foe, using the serpent as a medium. It was Satan that spoke, not the serpent. Eve was beguiled, flattered, infatuated. Had she met a commanding personage, possessing a form like the angels, and resembling them, she would have been upon her guard. But that strange voice should have driven her to her husband's side to inquire of him why another should thus freely address her. But she enters into a controversy with the serpent. She answers his question, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." The serpent answers, "Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
Satan would convey the idea that by eating of the forbidden tree, they would receive a new and more noble kind of knowledge than they had hitherto attained. This has been his special work with great success ever since his fall, to lead men to pry into the secrets of the Almighty, and not to be satisfied with what God has revealed, and not careful to obey that which he has commanded. He would lead them to disobey God's commands, and then make them believe that they are entering a wonderful field of knowledge. This is purely supposition, and a miserable deception. They fail to understand what God has revealed, and disregard his explicit commandments, and aspire after wisdom, independent of God, and seek to understand that which he has been pleased to withhold from mortals. They are elated with their ideas of progression, and charmed with their own vain philosophy; but grope in midnight darkness relative to true knowledge. They are ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
So we have the Second Coming, then we have the delivering of the kingdom. They are two separate events that according to Revelation 20 are 1000 years apart. Take careful note how in many of these Bible references there are two separate things listed. What we have here is a breakdown of those events into what happens before and what happens after this 1000 year period. To see each of these texts in their original state without this breakdown please look them up in your own Bible.
HIS APPEARING (The Second Coming)
“Jesus Christ ... shall judge the quick“ 2 Timothy 4:1.
“they that are Christ’s at his coming” 1 Corinthians 15:23
“they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life“ John 5:29
“some to everlasting life” Daniel 12:2
“I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” John 14:3
“the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout ... the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. So shall we ever be with the Lord” 1 Thessalonians 4:16,17
“the great day of His wrath has come” Revelation 6:17
“He hath ... avenged the blood of His servants ...” Revelation 19:2
“The earth ... shall fall ... the LORD shall punish ... the kings of the earth.” Isaiah 24:20-22
“he that hath part in the first resurrection ... the second death hath no power” Revelation 20:6
“the Devil ... bound ... a thousand years” Revelation 20:2
HIS KINGDOM (Delivered to the Father)
“Jesus Christ ... shall judge ... the dead” 1 Timothy 4:1
“But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished” Revelation 20:5
“we shall judge angels” 1 Corinthians 6:3
“thrones ... they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them ... and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” Revelation 20:4
“the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and the dead were judged” Revelation 20:12
“some to shame and everlasting contempt” Daniel 12:2
“they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” John 5:29
“whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” Revelation 20:15
“This is the second death” Revelation 20:14
“the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” Revelation 21:2
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them” Revelation 20:9
“Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God” 1 Corinthians 15:24
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men ... the former things are passed away” Revelation 21:3,4
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” Matthew 5:5
“for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away” Revelation 21:1
TO SUM UP
When Jesus returns He will destroy the living wicked, all who have rejected Him one way or the other. The living Saints, His true followers, will watch as He raises from the dead those who were His true followers from every other generation of human history. Both together are changed and fly off to Heaven for a period of 1000 years. An exception to this is a special resurrection for those who “pierced Him” (from Revelation 1:7).
This Millennium time has God’s people with Him judging the fallen angels and the wicked. In other words, He will explain why those He didn’t take to Heaven lost out on the chance He gave them. They made their own choices each and every one. Every single question will be answered, every single mystery will be solved. We’ll get a chance to see world history from His point of view. We’ll see when the angels, particularly our guardian angels, came to help us and offered help to the wicked that was turned down. The “bottomless pit” of Revelation 20:1-3 is obviously symbolic of the earth as a wasteland as the rest of the chapter clearly describes events that happen on the surface of the earth. Satan will be “bound” by a chain of circumstance, as he will have no one to lie to or tempt into sin. With all his people dead and God’s people all in Heaven, he’ll have nothing to do but think about the horrible things he has done in ruining this world.
At the end of this time period when the Heavenly City comes down to the earth as Revelation 21 speaks of, God raises all the wicked together, and this is the one point in history where every knee does bow before Jesus Christ in recognition of His justice as it says in Philippians 2:9-11. We’ll be satisfied with His justice, that He did try to reach those who are lost, and they will be shown where they had a chance to be saved and turned it down as well. Satan makes his final effort to deceive the wicked and one last time they show their contempt for God’s mercy by trying to attack the City as described in Revelation 20:7-10.
After all sin and sinners are completely wiped out of existence by that fire, God will make the earth anew and it will be the home of the saved forever. The earth will then be the capital of the entire universe and the door will be opened to a brave new world of exciting adventures for God’s people. There will always be something new to learn, always be something interesting to do. We will see Jesus face to face and we’ll always be reminded of the great love He has for us by seeing the scars in His hands, feet and side. Isaiah 66:22, 23 gives us this promise “’For as the new heavens and the new earth Which I will make shall remain before Me,’ says the LORD, ‘So shall your descendants and your name remain. And it shall come to pass That from one New Moon to another, And from one Sabbath to another, All flesh shall come to worship before Me,” says the LORD.’” All flesh here includes the redeemed people of earth, the angels and every other intelligent being on every other planet.
HIS APPEARING (The Second Coming)
“Jesus Christ ... shall judge the quick“ 2 Timothy 4:1.
“they that are Christ’s at his coming” 1 Corinthians 15:23
“they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life“ John 5:29
“some to everlasting life” Daniel 12:2
“I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” John 14:3
“the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout ... the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. So shall we ever be with the Lord” 1 Thessalonians 4:16,17
“the great day of His wrath has come” Revelation 6:17
“He hath ... avenged the blood of His servants ...” Revelation 19:2
“The earth ... shall fall ... the LORD shall punish ... the kings of the earth.” Isaiah 24:20-22
“he that hath part in the first resurrection ... the second death hath no power” Revelation 20:6
“the Devil ... bound ... a thousand years” Revelation 20:2
HIS KINGDOM (Delivered to the Father)
“Jesus Christ ... shall judge ... the dead” 1 Timothy 4:1
“But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished” Revelation 20:5
“we shall judge angels” 1 Corinthians 6:3
“thrones ... they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them ... and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” Revelation 20:4
“the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and the dead were judged” Revelation 20:12
“some to shame and everlasting contempt” Daniel 12:2
“they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation” John 5:29
“whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire” Revelation 20:15
“This is the second death” Revelation 20:14
“the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” Revelation 21:2
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them” Revelation 20:9
“Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God” 1 Corinthians 15:24
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men ... the former things are passed away” Revelation 21:3,4
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” Matthew 5:5
“for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away” Revelation 21:1
TO SUM UP
When Jesus returns He will destroy the living wicked, all who have rejected Him one way or the other. The living Saints, His true followers, will watch as He raises from the dead those who were His true followers from every other generation of human history. Both together are changed and fly off to Heaven for a period of 1000 years. An exception to this is a special resurrection for those who “pierced Him” (from Revelation 1:7).
This Millennium time has God’s people with Him judging the fallen angels and the wicked. In other words, He will explain why those He didn’t take to Heaven lost out on the chance He gave them. They made their own choices each and every one. Every single question will be answered, every single mystery will be solved. We’ll get a chance to see world history from His point of view. We’ll see when the angels, particularly our guardian angels, came to help us and offered help to the wicked that was turned down. The “bottomless pit” of Revelation 20:1-3 is obviously symbolic of the earth as a wasteland as the rest of the chapter clearly describes events that happen on the surface of the earth. Satan will be “bound” by a chain of circumstance, as he will have no one to lie to or tempt into sin. With all his people dead and God’s people all in Heaven, he’ll have nothing to do but think about the horrible things he has done in ruining this world.
At the end of this time period when the Heavenly City comes down to the earth as Revelation 21 speaks of, God raises all the wicked together, and this is the one point in history where every knee does bow before Jesus Christ in recognition of His justice as it says in Philippians 2:9-11. We’ll be satisfied with His justice, that He did try to reach those who are lost, and they will be shown where they had a chance to be saved and turned it down as well. Satan makes his final effort to deceive the wicked and one last time they show their contempt for God’s mercy by trying to attack the City as described in Revelation 20:7-10.
After all sin and sinners are completely wiped out of existence by that fire, God will make the earth anew and it will be the home of the saved forever. The earth will then be the capital of the entire universe and the door will be opened to a brave new world of exciting adventures for God’s people. There will always be something new to learn, always be something interesting to do. We will see Jesus face to face and we’ll always be reminded of the great love He has for us by seeing the scars in His hands, feet and side. Isaiah 66:22, 23 gives us this promise “’For as the new heavens and the new earth Which I will make shall remain before Me,’ says the LORD, ‘So shall your descendants and your name remain. And it shall come to pass That from one New Moon to another, And from one Sabbath to another, All flesh shall come to worship before Me,” says the LORD.’” All flesh here includes the redeemed people of earth, the angels and every other intelligent being on every other planet.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Daniel and the Revelation, page 635 also says “We call (Miller’s) investigations a consistent study of the prophecies, because he adopted a sound rule of interpretation. This lies at the base of every religious reformation, and of every advance movement in prophetic language. This rule is to take all the language of the Scriptures, just as we would that of any other book, to be literal, unless the context or the laws of language require it to be understood figuratively; and to let scripture interpret scripture. True, on a vital point he made a mistake, as will be explained hereafter; but in principle, and in a great number of particulars, he was correct. He was on the right road, and made an immense advance over every theological system of his day.”
The fact that Miller was right about so much combined with the practicalities of his message had the effect of testing the entire Christian world as to whether they really were sincere or not. Think about it. If you were told Jesus was coming back this Thursday, how would that make you feel? Would you be afraid, or would you say “I can’t wait to see Him”? It’s a principle that for every thing God does, Satan finds ways to counterfeit the Lord’s workings.
Have you ever pondered the meaning of 2 Thessalonians 2:11&12? “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” Why would God send someone a lie? Well, think about it this way; Miller preached the truth and they rejected it. The message went everywhere Christianity had. When they heard the message, they were all convicted that what they currently believed in was not right. However, since they did reject the message, they were now left with nothing. What they did believe in wasn’t true and didn’t work and they knew it. So they had to turn to new ideas that were also untrue. It’s an act of mercy for the Lord to have allowed it to happen to allow for people’s free choice.
Daniel and the Revelation, page 661 “The acceptance by Protestantism of the first angel's message would have enabled the church to become a light to ‘all nations.’ But betraying her trust by her rejection of the message, she left the nations without the witness of present truth that they might have had, to grope in the darkness of error and superstition resulting from the intoxicating and stupefying influences of the system of false doctrines she had built up and refused to relinquish.”
There are of course, as many counterfeits to the truth in this world as there are people it seems. There are a few though we could almost call “great counterfeits” such as secularism (trying to build a world without God or at least one where religious faith is nothing more than a fairy tale), rationalism (the belief that there is no such thing as absolute truth) evolution and communism. They came to approximately the same generation of people that heard and rejected Millers teaching and are now world-wide in their influence. The Christian world has embraced these errors to one degree or another and as the Christian world has expanded to include the entire world today, these errors have come along with it. The French Revolution had brought in militant atheism, the basis for these counterfeits. However, the Revolution fell apart and because of the horrors of the reign of terror that generation stayed with the Bible. Once the Great Disappointment happened those who were opposed to the Bible grew bolder when they saw such a movement fall apart after their one critical mistake.
This boldness is the basis for the great moral decline of the last 50 years especially. However, the trend was already in motion well before that. Many today should be able to identify with this description of Albert Einstein’s childhood from “Giants of Science” page 146, a direct result of growing up within the changed religious culture that resulted from the rejection of the Advent message. “Although Einstein’s parents were Jewish, they were not interested in any religion and sent Albert to the nearest school, which was a Catholic elementary school. At the age of ten he was sent to a ‘secondary’ school, called a Gymnasium, which prepared students to enter the universities. ... While in the Gymnasium, Einstein received instruction in the Jewish religion. He had learned about Catholicism in elementary school. As a result he gained a lasting respect for the ethical values of religion but felt that all religious rituals were superstitions designed to prevent man from thinking independently.”
"Today it seems that the great Hebrew-Christian moral tradition, the most ancient part of our heritage, is crumbling to pieces before our very eyes. . . . The faith in science has grown so strong, so self-sufficient, so deeply rooted in the processes of our society, that many of those who feel it have lost all desire to combine it with any other. . . . The man who trusts a physical science to describe the world finds no conceivable place into which to fit a deity. . . . The philosophies that express their [men's] basic interests today are no longer concerned, as they were in the nineteenth century, with vindicating a belief in God and immortality. Those ideas have simply dropped out of any serious attempt to reach an understanding of the world. . . . The present conflict of religious faith with science is no longer with a scientific explanation of the world, but with a scientific explanation of religion. The really revolutionary effect of the scientific faith on religion today is not its new view of the universe, but its new view of religion." John Herman Randall, "The Forces That Are Destroying Traditional Beliefs," Current History, June, 1929, pp. 359-361, quoted in Daniel and the Revelation, page 659.
That is the real reason the world is the way it is today. That’s what’s really going on. Our world is building to the time of trouble Daniel 12:1 speaks of. As smart as we are we are not God and we cannot solve all our problems on our own. Revelation 11:18 The nations were angry, and Your wrath has come, And the time of the dead, that they should be judged, And that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, And those who fear Your name, small and great, And should destroy those who destroy the earth. No matter how hard anyone tries, human selfishness is still there. It was to solve that problem of selfishness that God sent His Son into the world to save it.And of course the two great counterfeits we have been discussing the most here in this blog are the twin ideas that science has defeated the Bible and the fact that science fiction can meet the spiritual needs of those who adopt this purely rationalistic world view.
Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth are the authors of “The Truth Is Out There – Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction”. Their title is obviously borrowed from the end line of each episode of the TV show “The X Files”. On page 10 they say: “It is not scientific investigation and knowledge that is an enemy of Christian belief …. Rightly understood, increasing our knowledge of creation results in greater understanding and appreciation of the Creator.”
On page 163 they say: “Whether it is H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1897) or Stanely Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the well-wrought science-fiction story nearly always carries at least a tinge of what philosopher of politics and history Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) calls the theophanic event: the in-breaking on everyday life of a sublime vision of things that says to its witness that this rather than the narrow everyday assumption about life and the world is the truth, and says so in such a way as to demand from the witness a total transformation of his or her existence.” (Emphasis the author’s)
At same time all these counterfeits have been developing the Lord has also been working to restore the real truth as well. Truths like the ones we looked at in this chapter that have been ignored or misunderstood by most believers are now being showcased again. More than that though, the truth about our origins and what life itself is about are now being proclaimed worldwide. You didn’t just stumble across this blog; God guided you to it for a theophanic event of your own. That event is contained within our final two chapters. There you will see that what you thought was a boring old story, that of Adam and Eve, is just as exciting as Star Wars, Star Trek and every single other science fiction franchise combined
Read on, and be amazed at what you see.
The fact that Miller was right about so much combined with the practicalities of his message had the effect of testing the entire Christian world as to whether they really were sincere or not. Think about it. If you were told Jesus was coming back this Thursday, how would that make you feel? Would you be afraid, or would you say “I can’t wait to see Him”? It’s a principle that for every thing God does, Satan finds ways to counterfeit the Lord’s workings.
Have you ever pondered the meaning of 2 Thessalonians 2:11&12? “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” Why would God send someone a lie? Well, think about it this way; Miller preached the truth and they rejected it. The message went everywhere Christianity had. When they heard the message, they were all convicted that what they currently believed in was not right. However, since they did reject the message, they were now left with nothing. What they did believe in wasn’t true and didn’t work and they knew it. So they had to turn to new ideas that were also untrue. It’s an act of mercy for the Lord to have allowed it to happen to allow for people’s free choice.
Daniel and the Revelation, page 661 “The acceptance by Protestantism of the first angel's message would have enabled the church to become a light to ‘all nations.’ But betraying her trust by her rejection of the message, she left the nations without the witness of present truth that they might have had, to grope in the darkness of error and superstition resulting from the intoxicating and stupefying influences of the system of false doctrines she had built up and refused to relinquish.”
There are of course, as many counterfeits to the truth in this world as there are people it seems. There are a few though we could almost call “great counterfeits” such as secularism (trying to build a world without God or at least one where religious faith is nothing more than a fairy tale), rationalism (the belief that there is no such thing as absolute truth) evolution and communism. They came to approximately the same generation of people that heard and rejected Millers teaching and are now world-wide in their influence. The Christian world has embraced these errors to one degree or another and as the Christian world has expanded to include the entire world today, these errors have come along with it. The French Revolution had brought in militant atheism, the basis for these counterfeits. However, the Revolution fell apart and because of the horrors of the reign of terror that generation stayed with the Bible. Once the Great Disappointment happened those who were opposed to the Bible grew bolder when they saw such a movement fall apart after their one critical mistake.
This boldness is the basis for the great moral decline of the last 50 years especially. However, the trend was already in motion well before that. Many today should be able to identify with this description of Albert Einstein’s childhood from “Giants of Science” page 146, a direct result of growing up within the changed religious culture that resulted from the rejection of the Advent message. “Although Einstein’s parents were Jewish, they were not interested in any religion and sent Albert to the nearest school, which was a Catholic elementary school. At the age of ten he was sent to a ‘secondary’ school, called a Gymnasium, which prepared students to enter the universities. ... While in the Gymnasium, Einstein received instruction in the Jewish religion. He had learned about Catholicism in elementary school. As a result he gained a lasting respect for the ethical values of religion but felt that all religious rituals were superstitions designed to prevent man from thinking independently.”
"Today it seems that the great Hebrew-Christian moral tradition, the most ancient part of our heritage, is crumbling to pieces before our very eyes. . . . The faith in science has grown so strong, so self-sufficient, so deeply rooted in the processes of our society, that many of those who feel it have lost all desire to combine it with any other. . . . The man who trusts a physical science to describe the world finds no conceivable place into which to fit a deity. . . . The philosophies that express their [men's] basic interests today are no longer concerned, as they were in the nineteenth century, with vindicating a belief in God and immortality. Those ideas have simply dropped out of any serious attempt to reach an understanding of the world. . . . The present conflict of religious faith with science is no longer with a scientific explanation of the world, but with a scientific explanation of religion. The really revolutionary effect of the scientific faith on religion today is not its new view of the universe, but its new view of religion." John Herman Randall, "The Forces That Are Destroying Traditional Beliefs," Current History, June, 1929, pp. 359-361, quoted in Daniel and the Revelation, page 659.
That is the real reason the world is the way it is today. That’s what’s really going on. Our world is building to the time of trouble Daniel 12:1 speaks of. As smart as we are we are not God and we cannot solve all our problems on our own. Revelation 11:18 The nations were angry, and Your wrath has come, And the time of the dead, that they should be judged, And that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, And those who fear Your name, small and great, And should destroy those who destroy the earth. No matter how hard anyone tries, human selfishness is still there. It was to solve that problem of selfishness that God sent His Son into the world to save it.And of course the two great counterfeits we have been discussing the most here in this blog are the twin ideas that science has defeated the Bible and the fact that science fiction can meet the spiritual needs of those who adopt this purely rationalistic world view.
Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth are the authors of “The Truth Is Out There – Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction”. Their title is obviously borrowed from the end line of each episode of the TV show “The X Files”. On page 10 they say: “It is not scientific investigation and knowledge that is an enemy of Christian belief …. Rightly understood, increasing our knowledge of creation results in greater understanding and appreciation of the Creator.”
On page 163 they say: “Whether it is H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1897) or Stanely Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the well-wrought science-fiction story nearly always carries at least a tinge of what philosopher of politics and history Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) calls the theophanic event: the in-breaking on everyday life of a sublime vision of things that says to its witness that this rather than the narrow everyday assumption about life and the world is the truth, and says so in such a way as to demand from the witness a total transformation of his or her existence.” (Emphasis the author’s)
At same time all these counterfeits have been developing the Lord has also been working to restore the real truth as well. Truths like the ones we looked at in this chapter that have been ignored or misunderstood by most believers are now being showcased again. More than that though, the truth about our origins and what life itself is about are now being proclaimed worldwide. You didn’t just stumble across this blog; God guided you to it for a theophanic event of your own. That event is contained within our final two chapters. There you will see that what you thought was a boring old story, that of Adam and Eve, is just as exciting as Star Wars, Star Trek and every single other science fiction franchise combined
Read on, and be amazed at what you see.
Friday, February 5, 2010
If you’ve never heard of this concept before of the resurrection, it can be a little startling. We don’t become ghosts when we die means there’s very few people in heaven right now. So far it’s only Enoch, Moses, Elijah and a small handful of others who rose with Jesus the day He did. Enoch and Elijah were taken to heaven without having to die and Moses was resurrected. Jude 9 speaks of it and of course Moses and Elijah were both with Jesus when He was transfigured. The others were given a special resurrection early to illustrate what Jesus will do for His people when He returns again. Matthew 27:52, 53 speak of them.
The resurrection can be illustrated by a scene from the 1998 movie version of “Lost in Space” starring Matt LeBlanc of TV’s “Friends”. In this one particular scene the family is being attacked by spider-like alien creatures. They barely get back to their own ship alive leaving the robot to continue fending these creatures off. Then when the robot is overwhelmed Will, the youngest boy, steps into a special holographic chamber and takes direct control of the robot because he can fight the aliens better than the robot can. After a certain point though, things are still going badly. So before the ‘spiders’ destroy the robot, the boy downloads all the robot’s software onto a disc and later builds a new robot. He then inserts the disc and reloads everything the old robot once had.
You and I are in a battle here on earth with an alien force out to destroy us. That force is Satan and his angels. They are doing everything they can to lead us into temptation and get us to cut ourselves off from God. They are constantly on the attack and they never give up. What Jesus did in living a perfect life was to defeat satin by being tempted the same way we are and never giving in. Now that He is in heaven, if we will surrender ourselves to Him, it’s like Jesus lives out that life in us again. We are not robots in that we have free choice. However, we have inherited weaknesses and tendencies toward sin. It is easier for us to give in than to stand firm. Only through God’s power in our lives can we have hope.
There comes a time though when every one of us will die. What Jesus does then is ‘downloads our minds’ essentially. On the day Jesus returns again He will use the same power He did when He originally created this world to recreate new bodies for his friends. Then He will ‘reload their minds’ into those bodies. Again however, this is only for those who have surrendered to Him and are His faithful followers. There’s two resurrections, one to take His friends to heaven and one to rid the universe of those who hate truth and goodness. They’re brought back to life only for a short time to show them all how much God did try to save them.
This explains why there is so much multi-level prophecy in the Bible. From any one person’s point of view, they face death, go into their graves, and come up on the other side not knowing anything about the time that passed in between. Remember to them it’s like being asleep. So in any one generation when God spoke through a prophet and gave a promise of reward to the faithful or punishment to the unfaithful, though they were going to receive whichever reward at the end of history; from their point of view that end would be as soon as they died. The prophecies were worded in such a way as to appeal to the needs of the immediate generation receiving them and also appeal to the later generations who would be influenced in their respective times by the current generation’s actions as world history rolled on.
The resurrection can be illustrated by a scene from the 1998 movie version of “Lost in Space” starring Matt LeBlanc of TV’s “Friends”. In this one particular scene the family is being attacked by spider-like alien creatures. They barely get back to their own ship alive leaving the robot to continue fending these creatures off. Then when the robot is overwhelmed Will, the youngest boy, steps into a special holographic chamber and takes direct control of the robot because he can fight the aliens better than the robot can. After a certain point though, things are still going badly. So before the ‘spiders’ destroy the robot, the boy downloads all the robot’s software onto a disc and later builds a new robot. He then inserts the disc and reloads everything the old robot once had.
You and I are in a battle here on earth with an alien force out to destroy us. That force is Satan and his angels. They are doing everything they can to lead us into temptation and get us to cut ourselves off from God. They are constantly on the attack and they never give up. What Jesus did in living a perfect life was to defeat satin by being tempted the same way we are and never giving in. Now that He is in heaven, if we will surrender ourselves to Him, it’s like Jesus lives out that life in us again. We are not robots in that we have free choice. However, we have inherited weaknesses and tendencies toward sin. It is easier for us to give in than to stand firm. Only through God’s power in our lives can we have hope.
There comes a time though when every one of us will die. What Jesus does then is ‘downloads our minds’ essentially. On the day Jesus returns again He will use the same power He did when He originally created this world to recreate new bodies for his friends. Then He will ‘reload their minds’ into those bodies. Again however, this is only for those who have surrendered to Him and are His faithful followers. There’s two resurrections, one to take His friends to heaven and one to rid the universe of those who hate truth and goodness. They’re brought back to life only for a short time to show them all how much God did try to save them.
This explains why there is so much multi-level prophecy in the Bible. From any one person’s point of view, they face death, go into their graves, and come up on the other side not knowing anything about the time that passed in between. Remember to them it’s like being asleep. So in any one generation when God spoke through a prophet and gave a promise of reward to the faithful or punishment to the unfaithful, though they were going to receive whichever reward at the end of history; from their point of view that end would be as soon as they died. The prophecies were worded in such a way as to appeal to the needs of the immediate generation receiving them and also appeal to the later generations who would be influenced in their respective times by the current generation’s actions as world history rolled on.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The Secret Keys That Unlock the Real Truth Post One
A few years ago a friend of a friend told me about a practical joke someone once played that I thought was really funny. The victim of the gag was a woman hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. She had made effort upon effort to get everything just right for the special meal. What she didn’t know was that hours before, one of her guests had snuck into the kitchen and stuffed a Cornish game hen inside the turkey. When she went to carve up her beautiful bird, there was this other bird inside it. As the scene unfolded, the hostess was overwhelmed with shock, guilt and horror. “I killed the baby”, was her only thought. Morbidly funny I’ll admit, but think about this situation, birds lay eggs right? All birds do, yes, WITHOUT EXCEPTION! If this was the first case ever of a bird giving birth like a mammal, why wasn’t the baby bird whole and intact? Why was it prepared for eating just like the turkey? Even though the evidence in that immediate moment seemed completely overwhelming, logic and truth needed to prevail because what she saw was only a trick played on her by someone else.
What if you were in a similar situation? What if you saw something so overwhelming it had to be true, even though every single bit of logic and truth said it wasn’t, what would you do? What would you believe? People who buy into the modern, scientific mindset have no room in their belief system for the spirit world at all. Yet miracles still happen that science cannot explain all over the world. However, what very few are willing to consider is that there is such a thing as a false miracle. This is not to use the word ‘false’ in the sense of some slight of hand magician’s trick. What I mean is a real, supernatural event, but one that does not come from God.
First and foremost the Bible very clearly speaks of two supernatural forces working on this planet. On one side we have God and on the other there is the devil. 2 Corinthians 11:14 says “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” In other words, you can’t always tell them apart. God will work in your life and when He does He will make sure you know it is Him who is working. Satan will work in your life and will also try to make you thinks its God working. So how then can you tell? You can’t just trust your own eyes and ears; you need a standard beyond yourself. Satan has the power to work miracles that lead people to believe his lies. This kind of question is something the whole world has to face more often than people realize, especially in stories of near-death experiences. Millions of people say, “But I know what I saw, it was real!” Was it really? Why would God clearly and consistently say one thing about what death is really like for 59 centuries and then contradict Himself in our time?
Isaiah 8:19, 20 says “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” There you have it. Satan’s false miracles are always shall we say, “flashy”; they’re designed to wow people with no real purpose. When God works, there’s a message there. The “law and the testimony” refer to the Bible and the Ten Commandments. A true miracle from God will pass the test of His word. Notice something else here. That is a connection between false miracles and death. The God of the Bible is referred to as the Living God. He works through living people, who are called prophets. Satan’s way of working is very often contained in “messages from beyond the grave“.
So the very first secret key we’ll look at is the fact that when you die you really do die. We have already found the proper balance between creation and evolution, that God has been creating solar systems for countless eons of time, but that each one was created and did not evolve. He has the power to cause matter to come into existence and that’s what makes Him God, among other things. Therefore the creation story of Genesis chapters 1 and 2 is not mythical but a realistic account of the very first week in planet earth’s history and it happened about six thousand years ago.
Genesis 2:7 gives us the process whereby the Lord created our first father, Adam. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” The word being there is translated soul in other Bible versions. This is something that must be fully understood, Man does not HAVE a soul man IS a soul. The combination of a physical body and this ‘breath of life’ make a soul. The Bible uses the word ‘soul’ almost 1700 times and never calls it immortal.
A SOUL IS NOT A GHOST! So says 1 Peter 3:20 “who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.” Did eight ghosts get onto Noah’s Ark? No, eight living, breathing people did.
What most people think of when they use the word soul is this “breath of life”, which is another great mystery we’ll never fully solve and simply have to accept. Whatever it is, it has something to do with the ability to breath and something to do with the electricity that runs our minds. This ‘breath’ is also called ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’ in certain Bible verses. It is the energy God gives to make life. This energy is not a conscious entity of its own. Job 27:3 puts it this way “As long as my breath is in me, And the breath of God in my nostrils”. When Paul spoke to the Greeks of his day, from whom we get our modern science, he said in Acts 17:28 “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
Life comes from God and only from Him. Think about the computer you are using right now to read this blog. It has a hard drive and a processor, which are physical piece of equipment that parallel the functions of your brain. These cannot work unless the machine is turned on and plugged into the electrical power source, which is simply energy and nothing more. There is no way to communicate directly with that energy, it simply powers the machinery.
What if you were in a similar situation? What if you saw something so overwhelming it had to be true, even though every single bit of logic and truth said it wasn’t, what would you do? What would you believe? People who buy into the modern, scientific mindset have no room in their belief system for the spirit world at all. Yet miracles still happen that science cannot explain all over the world. However, what very few are willing to consider is that there is such a thing as a false miracle. This is not to use the word ‘false’ in the sense of some slight of hand magician’s trick. What I mean is a real, supernatural event, but one that does not come from God.
First and foremost the Bible very clearly speaks of two supernatural forces working on this planet. On one side we have God and on the other there is the devil. 2 Corinthians 11:14 says “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” In other words, you can’t always tell them apart. God will work in your life and when He does He will make sure you know it is Him who is working. Satan will work in your life and will also try to make you thinks its God working. So how then can you tell? You can’t just trust your own eyes and ears; you need a standard beyond yourself. Satan has the power to work miracles that lead people to believe his lies. This kind of question is something the whole world has to face more often than people realize, especially in stories of near-death experiences. Millions of people say, “But I know what I saw, it was real!” Was it really? Why would God clearly and consistently say one thing about what death is really like for 59 centuries and then contradict Himself in our time?
Isaiah 8:19, 20 says “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” There you have it. Satan’s false miracles are always shall we say, “flashy”; they’re designed to wow people with no real purpose. When God works, there’s a message there. The “law and the testimony” refer to the Bible and the Ten Commandments. A true miracle from God will pass the test of His word. Notice something else here. That is a connection between false miracles and death. The God of the Bible is referred to as the Living God. He works through living people, who are called prophets. Satan’s way of working is very often contained in “messages from beyond the grave“.
So the very first secret key we’ll look at is the fact that when you die you really do die. We have already found the proper balance between creation and evolution, that God has been creating solar systems for countless eons of time, but that each one was created and did not evolve. He has the power to cause matter to come into existence and that’s what makes Him God, among other things. Therefore the creation story of Genesis chapters 1 and 2 is not mythical but a realistic account of the very first week in planet earth’s history and it happened about six thousand years ago.
Genesis 2:7 gives us the process whereby the Lord created our first father, Adam. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” The word being there is translated soul in other Bible versions. This is something that must be fully understood, Man does not HAVE a soul man IS a soul. The combination of a physical body and this ‘breath of life’ make a soul. The Bible uses the word ‘soul’ almost 1700 times and never calls it immortal.
A SOUL IS NOT A GHOST! So says 1 Peter 3:20 “who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.” Did eight ghosts get onto Noah’s Ark? No, eight living, breathing people did.
What most people think of when they use the word soul is this “breath of life”, which is another great mystery we’ll never fully solve and simply have to accept. Whatever it is, it has something to do with the ability to breath and something to do with the electricity that runs our minds. This ‘breath’ is also called ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost’ in certain Bible verses. It is the energy God gives to make life. This energy is not a conscious entity of its own. Job 27:3 puts it this way “As long as my breath is in me, And the breath of God in my nostrils”. When Paul spoke to the Greeks of his day, from whom we get our modern science, he said in Acts 17:28 “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”
Life comes from God and only from Him. Think about the computer you are using right now to read this blog. It has a hard drive and a processor, which are physical piece of equipment that parallel the functions of your brain. These cannot work unless the machine is turned on and plugged into the electrical power source, which is simply energy and nothing more. There is no way to communicate directly with that energy, it simply powers the machinery.
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