From Gary... Like "Mommy" or like "Daddy"?

What do you get, when you mix a Timer Wolf and a Malamute?  Answer- the bottom picture.  Of course, the top two pictures are not this dog's real parents, but I just wanted to represent the generic breeds.  Who does the "baby" take after? To me- Its the malamute; otherwise, I doubt if the animal would be on the sofa (or even in the house at all).  People are like this too.  Sometimes children are as different as night is from day. And the consequences are equally as obvious...

Genesis, Chapter 25

19  This is the history of the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Abraham became the father of Isaac.  20 Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban the Syrian, to be his wife.  21 Isaac entreated Yahweh for his wife, because she was barren. Yahweh was entreated by him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.  22 The children struggled together within her. She said, “If it be so, why do I live?” She went to inquire of Yahweh.  23 Yahweh said to her, 
“Two nations are in your womb.
Two peoples will be separated from your body.
The one people will be stronger than the other people.
The elder will serve the younger.”

  24  When her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.  25 The first came out red all over, like a hairy garment. They named him Esau.  26 After that, his brother came out, and his hand had hold on Esau’s heel. He was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. 

  27  The boys grew. Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field. Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.  28 Now Isaac loved Esau, because he ate his venison. Rebekah loved Jacob.

And this wasn't the extent of their differences; for Jacob followed after God and Esau did not. The result- Israel came from the former and Edom from the latter. This was still not the end of these things, for...

Malachi, Chapter 1

 1 An oracle: Yahweh’s word to Israel by Malachi. 

  2  “I have loved you,” says Yahweh. 

Yet you say, “How have you loved us?” 

“Wasn’t Esau Jacob’s brother?” says Yahweh, “Yet I loved Jacob;  3 but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness.”  4 Whereas Edom says, “We are beaten down, but we will return and build the waste places”; thus says Yahweh of Armies, “They shall build, but I will throw down; and men will call them ‘The Wicked Land,’ even the people against whom Yahweh shows wrath forever.”

Why did God hate Esau? Because of what he did. Question 1: What kind of life do you lead?  Question 2: Does what I do make God pleased or displeased with me?  Only you know the answers to them, but for your sake, I hope they are positive!!!

By the way- At 225 pounds, "baby" is one VERY BIG DOG!!!

From Gary... Bible Reading January 15

Bible Reading   

January 15

The World English Bible

Jan. 15

Genesis 15

Gen 15:1 After these things the word of Yahweh came to Abram in a vision, saying, "Don't be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward."

Gen 15:2 Abram said, "Lord Yahweh, what will you give me, seeing I go childless, and he who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?"

Gen 15:3 Abram said, "Behold, to me you have given no seed: and, behold, one born in my house is my heir."

Gen 15:4 Behold, the word of Yahweh came to him, saying, "This man will not be your heir, but he who will come forth out of your own body will be your heir."

Gen 15:5 Yahweh brought him outside, and said, "Look now toward the sky, and count the stars, if you are able to count them." He said to Abram, "So shall your seed be."

Gen 15:6 He believed in Yahweh; and he reckoned it to him for righteousness.

Gen 15:7 He said to him, "I am Yahweh who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give you this land to inherit it."

Gen 15:8 He said, "Lord Yahweh, how will I know that I will inherit it?"

Gen 15:9 He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon."

Gen 15:10 He brought him all of these, and divided them in the middle, and laid each half opposite the other; but he didn't divide the birds.

Gen 15:11 The birds of prey came down on the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.

Gen 15:12 When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. Now terror and great darkness fell on him.

Gen 15:13 He said to Abram, "Know for sure that your seed will live as foreigners in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them. They will afflict them four hundred years.

Gen 15:14 I will also judge that nation, whom they will serve. Afterward they will come out with great wealth,

Gen 15:15 but you will go to your fathers in peace. You will be buried in a good old age.

Gen 15:16 In the fourth generation they will come here again, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full."

Gen 15:17 It came to pass that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.

Gen 15:18 In that day Yahweh made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates:

Gen 15:19 the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites,

Gen 15:20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim,

Gen 15:21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites."

 

Jan. 15, 16

Matthew 8

Mat 8:1 When he came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him.

Mat 8:2 Behold, a leper came to him and worshiped him, saying, "Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean."

Mat 8:3 Jesus stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, "I want to. Be made clean." Immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

Mat 8:4 Jesus said to him, "See that you tell nobody, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them."

Mat 8:5 When he came into Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking him,

Mat 8:6 and saying, "Lord, my servant lies in the house paralyzed, grievously tormented."

Mat 8:7 Jesus said to him, "I will come and heal him."

Mat 8:8 The centurion answered, "Lord, I'm not worthy for you to come under my roof. Just say the word, and my servant will be healed.

Mat 8:9 For I am also a man under authority, having under myself soldiers. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and tell another, 'Come,' and he comes; and tell my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it."

Mat 8:10 When Jesus heard it, he marveled, and said to those who followed, "Most certainly I tell you, I haven't found so great a faith, not even in Israel.

Mat 8:11 I tell you that many will come from the east and the west, and will sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven,

Mat 8:12 but the children of the Kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Mat 8:13 Jesus said to the centurion, "Go your way. Let it be done for you as you have believed." His servant was healed in that hour.

Mat 8:14 When Jesus came into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever.

Mat 8:15 He touched her hand, and the fever left her. She got up and served him.

Mat 8:16 When evening came, they brought to him many possessed with demons. He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick;

Mat 8:17 that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying: "He took our infirmities, and bore our diseases."

Mat 8:18 Now when Jesus saw great multitudes around him, he gave the order to depart to the other side.

Mat 8:19 A scribe came, and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go."

Mat 8:20 Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

Mat 8:21 Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord, allow me first to go and bury my father."

Mat 8:22 But Jesus said to him, "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead."

Mat 8:23 When he got into a boat, his disciples followed him.

Mat 8:24 Behold, a violent storm came up on the sea, so much that the boat was covered with the waves, but he was asleep.

Mat 8:25 They came to him, and woke him up, saying, "Save us, Lord! We are dying!"

Mat 8:26 He said to them, "Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?" Then he got up, rebuked the wind and the sea, and there was a great calm.

Mat 8:27 The men marveled, saying, "What kind of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

Mat 8:28 When he came to the other side, into the country of the Gergesenes, two people possessed by demons met him there, coming out of the tombs, exceedingly fierce, so that nobody could pass that way.

Mat 8:29 Behold, they cried out, saying, "What do we have to do with you, Jesus, Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?"

Mat 8:30 Now there was a herd of many pigs feeding far away from them.

Mat 8:31 The demons begged him, saying, "If you cast us out, permit us to go away into the herd of pigs."

Mat 8:32 He said to them, "Go!" They came out, and went into the herd of pigs: and behold, the whole herd of pigs rushed down the cliff into the sea, and died in the water.

Mat 8:33 Those who fed them fled, and went away into the city, and told everything, including what happened to those who were possessed with demons.

Mat 8:34 Behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus. When they saw him, they begged that he would depart from their borders.

Does the Bible Teach Geocentricity? by Bert Thompson, Ph.D. Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A.

http://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=11&article=1151

Does the Bible Teach Geocentricity?

by	Bert Thompson, Ph.D. Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A.

Q.

Does the Bible teach that the Sun revolves around the Earth, in contradiction to modern scientific knowledge on this matter?
A.
The medieval Catholic Church maintained that the Bible taught geocentricity (i.e., that the Sun and planets revolve around the Earth) as opposed to what we now know as the Copernican idea of heliocentricity (i.e., that the planets all revolve around the Sun). This situation began when Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria restated the ancient Ptolemaic geocentric theory in the second century after Christ, and was able to predict the motion of the celestial bodies with far greater accuracy than the existing theory of heliocentricity. Somewhere along the line, scientific dogma became enshrined in theological dogma, and passages in the Bible were found to consecrate Ptolemy’s theory. According to the theologians, man was the focus of God’s creative act, and therefore the Earth must be the center of God’s creation. After all, if we were dwelling on one average planet, rotating around one average star, in one average galaxy in an infinite Universe, how could we be the sole focus of God’s attention, and why should His only Son be sent just to this middling planet, as the Bible suggests?
Needless to say, this revolution of thought provided great fuel for the atheists, skeptics and agnostics. According to Paul Steidl:

The truths of God’s word and the work of Jesus Christ in no way depend on our position.... If anything, our lack of a unique position in the natural universe is only an illustration of the natural man’s lack of a unique position before God (1979, p. 6).

In other words, the presence of our material selves in the material Universe is not as important to God as our immortal souls. On the other hand, it is difficult to doubt that God has placed our planet in just the right place, and set it in motion in just the right way, to benefit the survival of humanity.
Copernicus submitted his ideas in the early sixteenth century, stating that geocentricity was incorrect after all. Some of Copernicus’ ideas could not be defended scientifically, but science generally had little to do with the attacks on this theory. Calvin, for instance, criticized Copernicus by appealing to passages in Joshua and Psalms that supposedly show the fixity of the Earth relative to the Sun. Galileo came along a hundred years later and firmed up the Copernican theories with better mathematics and with more accurate and numerous measurements. Unlike Copernicus, Galileo was persistent, arrogant, and prepared to stand up to the wrath of the Inquisition. Galileo’s assertion that the Bible should be interpreted in light of man’s knowledge of the natural world, and that Scripture should not have authority in scientific controversies, did little to endear him to church leaders. Thus, rather than being the case of “science versus the Bible,” it was “dogmatic scientist versus religious dogmatism.” This, of course, is not all the story; the remainder would be covered in a good history book.
One of the passages used to defend the biblical basis of geocentricity was Joshua 10:12-14, and later references to the same event, in which Joshua prayed, “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon” (v. 12), that he might defeat the numerous armies assembled against his people. God immediately answered Joshua’s prayer, and in the following verse he wrote: “And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed.” Keil and Delitzsch have suggested that either the day appeared long to the warriors of Israel because of the greatness of the task they performed (i.e., defeating the enemy), or that God miraculously caused the day to be lengthened so the Lord’s army could perform its task. The former is consistent with similar language in other parts of the Old Testament, and the latter explanation is totally consistent with God’s infinite power over the Universe (1982, 2:106-112). In any case, as Joshua goes on to say in verse 14, “there was no day like that before it or after it.” Thus, whether miraculous or not, to say that these verses teach that the Earth continues to stand still, and that the Earth is the center of the Universe, is both a gross misinterpretation and a misapplication of the verse. This passage does not teach geocentricity, despite Calvin’s claims to the contrary.
In addition to Joshua 10, Calvin used Psalm 93:1 in defense of geocentricity. The verse simply suggests that the Earth is stable, and cannot be moved, but is it trying to say that the Earth is totally motionless in every sense? As the passage is primarily concerned with God’s majesty and power, it is more likely that the psalmist is saying, “Who but God could move the Earth?” Besides, the Earth is set in an unchanging orbit around the Sun, all the while rotating at a steady speed on a fixed axis.
Psalm 19:6 is a passage that often is cited as another example of Scripture teaching pre-Copernican astronomy. In this verse, the Sun is said to move, rather than the Earth, and therefore is said by some to imply that the Sun revolves around the Earth. There are many other verses in the Bible that talk about the Sun “going down” or “rising up.” This hardly should be surprising, however, since events in the Bible often are written in accommodative or “phenomenal” language—i.e., the language used to express phenomena as man sees them. Even today we teach our children that “the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west,” and astronomers and navigators use the Earth as a fixed point for purposes of simple observation, expressing distances and directions in relation to it. The weatherman on the evening news often will state that the Sun is going to “rise” at a certain time the following morning and “set” at a certain time the following evening. Why does no one accuse him of scientific error? Because we all are perfectly aware of, and understand, the Copernican view of the solar system, and because we likewise understand that our weatherman is using “phenomenal” language.
In addition, scientific foreknowledge could be claimed from Psalm 19:6 if a more literal interpretation was applied in the following way. Astronomers now know that the Sun moves in a gigantic orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy; traveling at 600,000 miles an hour it would take the Sun 230 million years to make just one orbit! It also is believed that our galaxy is moving with respect to other galaxies in the Universe. The Sun’s going forth is indeed from one end of the heavens to the other. In any case, there is no way to substantiate the claims that the Bible teaches geocentricity, or that it promotes any other anti-scientific concept.

REFERENCES

Keil, C.F. and F. Delitzsch (1982 reprint), Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
Steidl, Paul (1979), The Earth, the Stars, and the Bible (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed).

From Jim McGuiggan... Enter the Dragon (2): His method

Enter the Dragon (2): His method

Satan's overarching purpose is to cause wreck and ruin and since he knows he cannot hurt God himself he goes about hurting him by attacking God's darling creation--humans. Milton saw so much truth and in that marvellous way that great poets have he opens our eyes to greater depths and wider ramifications of the truth we think we know.

In his Paradise Lost, Book 2, the demonic council admits they can't harm God directly but rather than sit and nurse their eternal wounds in the dark, Beelzebub tells of a new world where God's darling children live and advises that the evil hosts should attack him by attacking them. It would even be better if the inhabitants of the new world were seduced into joining ranks with them since this would add bitterness to God's pain when he punished the darling newcomers for their satanic rebellion.

Though Heaven be shut,
And Heaven's high Arbitrator sit secure
In his own strength, this place may lie exposed,
The utmost border of his kingdom, left
To their defense who hold it: here, perhaps,
Some advantageous act may be achieved
By sudden onset--either with Hell-fire
To waste his whole creation…or, if not drive,
Seduce them to our party…This would surpass
Common revenge, and interrupt His joy
In our confusion…when his darling sons,
Hurled headlong to partake with us, shall curse
Their frail original, and faded bliss... 

That is Satan's agenda and seducatio is to be his weapon (click here) so he works to seducehumans to turn against God because from his own experience he knows full well, "Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe." In seducing the humans he gives grief to God and by his satanic attack he interrupts God's pleasure which comes as the result of the satanic defeat. If he, Satan must suffer, then God will suffer also by the loss of his children as they join in the satanic rebellion. This is the Dragon's agenda and he goes about it in many ways that include the suggestions that will follow!

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com
 

From Ed Healy... Knowledge That Gives Understanding!

Knowledge That Gives Understanding!

As I reach out into the community about me, I have opportunity to bring the good news message to different people. One reaction I have received from time to time is that of someone having never read the Bible; some people don't even own a Bible. Their concept of Christianity or its principles is based only upon what someone has said or taught them from childhood.

There is good news in the Gospel. It is not just the words in the Bible, but it is what those words are saying and what they represent. The Gospel is the Living Word of God as declared in the person of Jesus Christ. He is our example for living a life with hope. The Gospel is living the word of God in our lives as instructed by the Holy Spirit through the apostles. When I respond to the Gospel I am making Christ the master of my life. As Paul said so many times in his letters, he viewed himself as being a bond-servant to Jesus Christ.

God's words are very important, but just having knowledge of the Bible will not change a life to be Christ-like. I must understand the life of and in those words, then live it in my own life.

The Bible is God speaking to me that I might come to know Him, the only True and Living God. Yes, God's Word has life in it because it deals with the good news of true life in Christ Jesus.

God's words are very important for me to know, to understand and most of all to live. In God's word is revealed the meaning and purpose of life. It is very important that I know and understand what God reveals to me and how He wants me to live according to His word.

We should not just pass on the ideas of Christianity to others. We should encourage personal study, understanding, and most of all personal living of God's word in our lives.

2 Tim 2:14-16 Keep reminding them of these things. Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. Avoid godless chatter, because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. (NIV)