This year has started with a bang, both globally and personally. The speed with which Bible prophecies are falling into place is incredible, and the whole world seems to be losing its mind at times. Lots of times. And increasingly so.

But events the last few weeks have been intense for me personally, on a number of fronts. Shocking news has come from several directions all at once, and I see a virtual explosion of professing Christians falling away in droves. Why? Why now?

Certainly the suffering common to humanity has not changed significantly, nor the corruption of governments, nor the relentless attacks upon the Bible and the Christian faith. People who have suffered unspeakable agony for Jesus have held strong to the end, never wavering in their faith, while those living in relative ease seem to crumble almost without cause. Why? Why now?

We can’t brush it off as the result of “modern enlightenment”, of technology, of things learned from archaeology, of some kind of spiritual evolution, etc., because all of those things have been around for a long time; as Solomon put it, “there is nothing new under the sun”. But there seems to be an almost palpable darkness descending on the entire human race, one that even tests the faith of the saved. There have always been times of darkness and individuals who have gone through deep valleys in their lives, but what I’m sensing now is different. And I can’t describe it.

A sign of the end? Quite likely. Maybe Satan knows the time is short and is screaming to try and drown out all truth and light. But whatever it is, I feel a strong need to repeat, again, the basics of the faith, things I consider “givens” which are better than any others. Yes, it’s my opinion, but I’m a-sharin’ it!

1. Things exist, and they all run down. Therefore there is a First Cause outside of the laws of physics (that is, supernatural) since no physical thing can create itself.
2. Jesus rose from the dead, proving himself God.
3. Jesus treated the OT as the Word of God, and the NT is all about Him; therefore the Bible is God’s Word.
4. The fulfillment of prophecies, esp. Daniel, and along with world events, esp. the return of Israel to her homeland, are further proof of the Bible being the Word of God, and thus the authoritative text on both history and spirituality.
5. People are mortal because we all physically descended from Adam, who just couldn’t leave that fruit alone. One tree. In paradise. He introduced death to the world.
6. The earth itself is messed up because God cursed it. Why? Because Adam, who was made from that earth, defied God by blaming Him for his own sin. He couldn’t just eat the fruit, he had to try and pass blame.
7. Because Jesus became one of us, died for us, and rose again, all God asks of us in order to be reconciled and to eventually get immortal bodies is faith. He’s asking us to just trust Him. It isn’t much to ask. But we can’t see past our suffering, and we whine.
8. Want ultimate justice? Want eternal peace? Want God to dry your tears and give you payment with interest for all you’ve suffered? Go back and read these points again; there is a God, Jesus made Him known, and proved it with His own resurrection and the return of Israel, along with other fulfilled prophecies.

These are times of depression and blindness and deception, but they are temporary. They will end. And though at times we cannot stand the pain or the hopelessness of the world, we need to remember these basic facts and look beyond our own minds and hearts, our own experiences, and our own human frailty. Hopelessness feeds on self-centeredness, so keep looking up.

Hope that helps!

I sometimes read articles at Grace Thru Faith, mostly about prophecy. I consider Jack Kelley one of the better prophecy teachers, though I strongly disagree with him on some other matters. But today’s post made a most intriguing observation:

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)

(MY NOTE: The TNIV translates this badly. The Greek does NOT say “lives by believing” but “living and believing”.)

This is an amazing statement. The Lord had already said that whoever believes in Him would not perish but would have eternal life. (John 3:16) Here he provided more detail, saying that even though a believer experiences physical death, he will still have life. He was referring to the resurrection of those who die in faith. And then He said there would be some would never die, but would pass from this life directly into the next one. If we didn’t already know about the rapture, we wouldn’t see this, but since we do we can understand that He was talking about that one generation who will be alive when He comes for the Church, and will be changed from mortal to immortal without dying first. And once again the Lord confirmed that the single qualification for eternal life is to believe that His death paid the entire price for our sins.

I had never picked up on that detail in this passage before, so I checked my Greek interlinear to be sure that there wasn’t anything to stand against this interpretation. But I don’t agree that we would only see this if we first knew about the Rapture. This undermines his whole argument and gives those against the Rapture a reason to dismiss a valid interpretation of the passage. The words speak for themselves: Jesus speaks of two groups of people and does not appear to be merely using the poetic device of repeating a phrase. So rather than being dependent upon a prior belief in the Rapture, it serves as yet another supporting passage for discovering it.

And I disagree that “the single qualification for eternal life is to believe that His death paid the entire price for our sins.” We cannot fail to include the pivotal issue of the resurrection. As it says in 1 Cor. 15:3-4 and 2 Tim. 2:8,

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel

We can also cite 2 Cor. 11:4 which warns against “a different Jesus”. We must know who the real Jesus is, and is not. The real one said “I and the Father are one”, and “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me”. There are many paths to false gods, but only one path to the one true God.

As I read the article’s mention of “the water of life” another observation came to mind. In Mt.3:11 we see John the Baptist say,

“I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

God flooded the world with water, but at the end he will consume it with fire. The connection between water baptism and the Flood is made in 1 Peter 3:20–21, and both this and the connection between the fire of the Holy Spirit and the destruction of the earth is made in 2 Peter 3:5-7, 10. We could say that water may symbolize law, whereas fire may symbolize spirit. If this is so, then we could also say that those still clinging to the law are “waterlogged”! And we should remember that water (the law) puts out fire (the spirit).

Know your Savior, live free in his “light burden”, and hope for his sudden and glorious return. That’s what it’s all about.

I’ve been experimenting with making my books ordinary web pages which can be read online or downloaded in “print” format. Whatcha think?

There’s a lot of good info in blogs and other sites, but people tend to only read what’s current and forget what’s been written before, especially if it’s been on the order of months or years. But the problem with archives is that unless people keep linking to them (as is more common with blog or forum posts), you lose page rank and nobody will find them.

Books, on the other hand, tend to be links people hang on to. They also allow the author to present a better case with much more information, as opposed to the “sound bite” bickering that seems to be the norm elsewhere. Unlike blogs, the topic of a book is not hashed and rehashed endlessly as each new wave of commenters arrives. And people have to read the whole thing before commenting.

I’m thinking of taking my podcasts, which are hopefully going to be a more planned-out sequence of lessons, and eventually making a book out of them. The Nicolaitan book encompasses all I’ve written before about equality and hierarchy in the church and between the sexes, so the next book might be a summary of all I’ve written and podcasted on everything else.

Comments? Ideas? Lumps of coal?

As another year winds to a close, many people try to look back at what has been, and try to improve on what is to come. Some resolve to stop old habits and others to start new ones.

I’m a practical person, and it seems that after blogging for quite a while now, I feel as though I’m going in circles. I’m running out of ways to talk about a repeating theme: the abysmal state of churchianity today, especially its hierarchies and heresies. So while I have no intention of taking this blog down, I’m not sure I’ll be finding much more to talk about in the coming year.

What I see in the more popular blogs is that a lot of people prefer to keep going over the same ground, whether it’s women in the church, legalism, wolves in sheep’s clothing, or a thousand other things. Nothing is ever solved; no progress is ever made. But there are many more who only read or “lurk”, and we have no idea how many minds have actually been changed, or how many lives have been saved.

But that’s what isn’t happening here, on any significant scale, if the stats chart is any indication. I know, right now isn’t the time to base any judgments on, since the time of “peace on earth” is probably the busiest of the year. But I feel that my time might be better spent trying to interact more on other blogs, to go where the people are meeting (Acts 16:13).

So talk to me; do you think God is calling me elsewhere? I will say that I intend to continue the podcasting site, and use it as a kind of audio summary of my understanding of scripture, in the order I might follow were I teaching a class for new believers to help them grow to maturity.

Also, if I won’t be blogging anymore, do you think I should re-arrange the site so the archives are easier to navigate?

If you only read mainstream news media, you don’t know much about “climategate”. It’s the news that scientists in charge of the global warming scare, with emphasis on it being somehow caused by humans, have been exposed as frauds. Yes, it’s proof of a large-scale conspiracy, and proof that there is a global agenda to abolish all national sovereignty and send civilization back a thousand years. But that’s not the most important point.

What this incident does is show the tip of the iceberg. It isn’t just global warming that is covered in lies and whose purpose is global domination. There are many other avenues of conquest, including evolutionism and socialism. But the most glaring and pervasive and obvious at the moment is Islam.

At the Frontpage site you can read about the book, A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan, a former Muslim. She exposes the lies of Islam fearlessly, something the traitors in our western governments hate for anyone to do. Islam is their ticket to the New World Order, their “goon squad” of global governance. It is ruthless and intolerant, warring and deceitful (see more at the Religion of Peace site). They should read this very telling quote from Wafa:

Wafa speaks powerfully about what America means to her. It manifests itself in little things. She leaves her house at 5 am and makes her way to Starbucks to have her coffee without fearing that someone might see her and accuse her of immoral behavior. To her, America means saying “good morning” to her neighbor and chatting with him for a few moments without being accused of having spent the night with him. America, for this courageous woman, means that her daughter can come home and tell her that she had lunch with her boyfriend without being beaten or accused of having impugned the family honor.

The more we capitulate to Islam, the closer we are to becoming all that Wafa ran from. She goes on to explain why this will happen:

“But I was afraid,” she explained when I interviewed her recently, “to express my feelings. I was afraid to express my thoughts, because under Islamic sharia, a Muslim who dares to leave Islam or dares to convert to any other religion is to be killed. And every Muslim has the right to kill someone who has left Islam without being asked a question. This is the Islamic law. Once you were born as a Muslim, you’re not allowed to leave it. This is simply the Islamic law, and it seems to me it’s very hard to convince Americans that this is the way it is.”

The recent Rifqa Bary apostasy case shows how right Wafa is about that, and how urgent her message is. Rifqa Bary is the teenage girl, a Muslim in Ohio, who left Islam four years ago and converted to Christianity. When her father found out about her conversion, she fled from her home in fear for her life. She said she ran away to Florida because she wanted to get as far away as she could — because not only her family but the mosque and the community in Ohio is very devout, and as an apostate she is in danger. But now she has been returned to Ohio, in large part because American authorities don’t know anything about Islamic apostasy law.

If they had read A God Who Hates, Rifqa might be in a safer place today. “This case,” said Wafa, “showed America in a very ugly light, that we will sacrifice a young girl on the altar of political correctness rather than do the right thing.”

I have sent emails to my governor and others, and of course I’ve gotten no response. He is sympathetic to CAIR and especially to the Somali population in Columbus, who apparently helped to get him elected. Those are his true constituents, not the people of Ohio. And if we continue to stand for this, by silence or reelection, we have the blood of all the Rifqas who have died or will die in this country at the hands of their own parents or brothers. Yes, it can, and already has, happen in America.

Wake up! The leaders of the world have betrayed us. Don’t trust them or the media that they control. This is NOT a free country and has not been for some time, though we have held on to many small-scale freedoms so far. But it will not last, and if we care about our children at all, we must get rid of all the traitors to our Constitution. Don’t let the 2010 election see you doing the same old thing.

Look at what’s going on in the rest of the world too, especially at “carbonhagen” where the elites intend to forge ahead with their man-caused warming fearmongering in order to take away our rights. They blame western civilization for everything, ignoring all the advances in medicine and level of comfort we’ve enjoyed as a result of freedom. We are not the evil gluttons they paint us as, and the third-world countries are not suffering because of us. They suffer because their leaders confiscate aid at the borders, deny people the freedom to own and farm their own lands, and only care about power.

This is a rant and a warning, not a time to haggle over politics. It is a time to stand against globalism, starting here in this once-free country.

A friend alerted me recently to the suicide death of a popular mega-church pastor named Thomas Young (see also this blog and a bio here). While we cannot know all that went on in the final moments of this man’s life, there are disturbing statements being made to try and make sense of it.

This man was a Mark Driscoll success story, a bad boy turned preacher and church planter. Yet he chose to abruptly end his life after a fight with his wife. Which raises the question: can a saved person, especially a preacher, be saved and commit suicide? When we read the guy’s conversion story it all seems obvious because of the drastic change in his life. But consider a very similar story here, where the turn-around is attributed to “Alcoholics Anonymous, meditation and looking to a higher power”.

While some would call the other guy’s story a salvation experience, scripture does not support this at all. God is not a vague “higher power” and salvation is only through Jesus. So we have here two very similar lives and “conversions”, but the one that clearly wasn’t saved is not the one who took his own life.

And that brings me to the disturbing statements. He was not “called to go home to be with his heavenly father”; he “called” himself. He did not “make a bad choice” as if he had been trying to decide which suit to wear; he chose to punish his family and God for things that weren’t going his way. And if “the father of lies deceived him”, then God lied when He promised to keep us from falling and to prevent us from suffering anything that we could not bear (Mt. 6:13, John 17:15, 2 Thes. 3:3, 1 Cor. 10:13, 1 Peter 1:5, 1 John 5:18, Jude 1:24). It also absolves the man of any accountability to say “the devil made him do it”. And don’t these people always say that Eve and all women are the deceivable ones? If a man like this can be so deceived, then who was he “covering”?

Again, we cannot know whether there might have been some chemical imbalance or anything, and God is still the ultimate Judge of souls. But if we can only explain the suicide of an apparent believer by denying scriptural promises, then we don’t have any grasp of the great salvation we preach. And since unbelievers can mimic the same changed lives, and sometimes greater peace and self-control, then we have all the more reason to carefully consider what it is that saves and how we can recognize a fellow believer.

This incident highlights the vital need to sharply define the gospel. Spirit and Truth must walk together, and above all, no Christian leader should ever be unaccountable to others who are not in his or her “inner group”. There are always signs and red flags preceding a “choice” of this magnitude, and somebody somewhere along the line was not facing them or wasn’t allowed to speak of them. And we must wonder why this church planter, this life so changed, this preacher of righteousness, was in possession of a loaded gun during a fight with his wife.

When things don’t add up, we are most unloving if we turn a blind eye or try to cover it up so nobody ever learns a lesson. Keeping quiet is never the answer.