“In the great Olivet discourse of our Lord give us six “manys” of the last days. Many false Christs shall deceive many. Many shall be offended, and shall hate and betray one another. Many false prophets shall deceive many. Because lawlessness shall abound, the love of many (or most) shall wax cold. The faithful Christian today is one among the many.”

~Vance Havner

Living Only For God

April 17, 2015

When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!”
David said to Michal, “It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the LORD.” — 2 Samuel 6:20–21

The Torah portion for this week is Shemini, which means “eighth,” from Leviticus 9:1–11:47, and the Haftorah is from 2 Samuel 6:1–7:17.

In this week’s Haftorah reading, the Ark of the Covenant was returned to Jerusalem in a procession that is described by Scriptures as being exceptionally jubilant. In particular, King David is described as “leaping and dancing before the LORD” (2 Samuel 6:16). In his passionate desire to demonstrate his love for God, David danced unabashedly. However, when David returned home, his wife Michal, daughter of the former King Saul, had some words with him.

Michal greeted her husband by scolding his behavior: “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!” Michal was the daughter of royalty. She was keenly aware of how a royal figure should behave — and she found David’s behavior completely embarrassing.

Now, listen to David’s response: “It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the LORD.” David pointed out that God took away the kingdom from King Saul and gave it to him. But what did Saul have to do with this particular incident? Why was this David’s answer to Michal’s criticism?

Do you remember why King Saul was rejected by God? In 1 Samuel 15 the prophet Samuel confronted King Saul who had been sent on a mission to completely obliterate the evil nation of Amalek, including their livestock. However, Saul allowed the livestock to live. After trying to explain his mistake away by saying that the cattle were spared in order to be used as sacrifices to God, Saul finally admitted his sin. He confessed in verse 24: “I have sinned. I violated the LORD’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the men and so I gave in to them.”

It’s quite simple; Saul cared more about what the people thought about him than what God would think. He feared men more than his God at that moment.

Now we can understand why this was David’s response to his wife. He explained to her that while her father was diminished because he cared too much about what people thought of him, David would only be increased in God’s eyes for putting aside concerns of how he might look before other people.

That’s a good lesson for us. When it comes to the end of our days, we’ll only have to answer to God. Let’s make Him the chief observer of our lives and live only to please Him — no matter what anyone else might think. That’s called living with integrity – and it is most befitting of Gods’ royal children.

With prayers for shalom, peace,

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein

“In this nuclear age we must remember that survival is not the chief end of man. A little boy was asked what he hoped to be twenty-five years from now. He replied, “Alive!’ But it is better to die for a conviction than to live by compromise. “’Tis mans’ perdition to be safe when for the truth he ought to die,” said Patrick Henry. He did not say, “Give me liberty, death, or peaceful coexistence with George III.” Teddy Roosevelt said that among the things which would destroy America were “Peace at any price” and Safety first instead of duty first.””

~Vance Havner

Three-Way Christians

By Vance Havner

And believers were the more added to the Lord.
Acts 5:14

If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed.
John 8:31

Ye shall be witnesses unto me.
Acts 1:8

What is a New Testament Christian? He is a heart-believer in a crucified and risen Saviour and Lord. But our churches are filled with believers who do not continue in His Word and so are poor disciples. Salvation is free – not cheap- and we have only to trust Christ to be believers. But discipleship calls for all we are and have.

We have unwittingly created an artificial distinction between trusting Christ as Saviour and obeying Him as Lord. The New Testament recognizes no such false compartments of experience. “Believe on the LORD Jesus Christ,” said Paul to the jailer. No man can be a Christian by knowingly and willfully taking Christ on the installment plan, as Saviour now, as Lord later.

And we are all His witnesses, witnesses unto Him (Acts 1:8) and witnesses to the truth about Him (Luke 24:48). We are witnesses of His death and resurrection in our own experience and witnesses to Him in testimony. By life and lip we declare Him; we know Him and make Him known.

The Hope of Glory

by Pastor Cornelius R. Stam

We are taught in Romans 5 that the believer in Christ receives justification, peace with God, access to God and the “hope,” or anticipation, of sharing His glory some day. God wants His children to enjoy this coming glory by faith, to live in eager anticipation of it.

How much there is to humiliate us in this life! God created man in His own image and likeness, but man sinned and fell from his exalted position. To Adam God said:

“Cursed is the ground because of thee; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”

Since that dreadful day man’s life has been a constant struggle. Everything tends to go wrong rather than right. Each has his share of trouble, sorrow, sickness and then — death, the greatest humiliation of all, when in sickness and pain, or at best in utter weakness, he must give up this life itself.

Sin and the fall! This is what modern science and philosophy fail to face up to. Most popular scientists and philosophers today hold that man has come up from the slime pit and the ape to modern man; that man is improving all the time. But the truth of God’s Word is that man has fallen through sin and is growing worse morally and spiritually until now he can kill more of his fellowmen faster than he ever could before.

But it is this fact, this fact of sin and the fall that God has so graciously provided for. He took all the suffering and shame, paid all the penalty for our sins, and then rose from the dead so that we might rejoice in the hope, the eager anticipation, of glory to come!

As the Apostle Peter puts it in I Peter 1:3:

“[He] hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Inspired Prediction is Proof of Bible Inspiration

Why would anyone believe that the Bible is the Word of God, having been transmitted through men who were supernaturally guided by God? Because the evidence so indicates. One of the proofs of Bible inspiration is predictive prophecy. Men committed to writing detailed predictions that pertained to events several hundred years into the future. One such example is the prophecy recalled by the writer of the book of Hebrews in which he quotes from Psalm 40. He places the words in the mouth of Jesus, applying the prediction to Jesus’ incarnation and sacrifice on the cross. His citation is taken from the Septuagint version rather than the original Hebrew:

Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: Sacrifice and offering You did not de-sire, but a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, “Behold, I have come—in the volume of the book it is writ-ten of Me—to do Your will, O God” (Hebrews 10:5-7, emp. added).

The Bible teaches that Deity came to the Earth in human flesh in order to offer Himself as an atonement for the sins of the human race (Galatians 2:20; 1 Timothy 2:6; Titus 2:14; et al.). The book of Hebrews was written in the first century A.D. But the Psalms were written several hundred years before that, with Psalm 40, written presumably by David, a thousand years earlier. That means that a thousand years separates the prediction from the fulfillment. Even the most liberal treatment of the Psalms places their composition prior to the first century A.D. The Greek Bible is generally believed to have been completed in the third century B.C., which means the Psalms had to have been completed prior to that time.

But how detailed was this prediction? Did it contain vague generalities and ambiguous phrases that can be bent to refer to just about anything? By no means. Among the details of the prediction, observe that the passage represents God (the Father) as being responsible for preparing/providing a body for Jesus (the Son) to inhabit. This body would replace the animal sacrifices and offerings contained in the Old Testament economy for dealing with sin. Such predictions are hardly vague or ambiguous. In fact, they are extremely specific and complex.

One of the great marvels of the Christian religion is the virgin conception in which Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, enabling her to conceive a child (Matthew 1:18-25). That child was Jesus Christ who vacated the heavenly realm temporarily to fulfill the magnificent, incomprehensi-ble purpose of sacrificing Himself for lost humanity (Philippians 2:6-8). A physical, fleshly body was necessary to accomplish this purpose. Hence, the need to be “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4; cf. Genesis 3:15) by which Deity could inhabit a human body. Observe that the physical body was genetically derived from David via his descendent Mary (Luke 3:23,31; Romans 1:3)—in ful-fillment of another predictive prophecy (1 Samuel 7:12). But Jesus Himself is not to be confused with His physical body. Jesus Himself preceded the preparation and formation of the physical body that He inhabited in first century Palestine. Jesus Himself has always existed since He is Deity and eternal (Colossians 1:16; 2:9). Jesus Himself participated in the creation of the Universe (John 1:1-3; Colossians 1:17).

How in the world could any mere human have predicted, hundreds of years in advance, that a person would be born who, unlike all other humans ever born, was in fact God inhabiting a physi-cal body? No mere human could have predicted such an event. Hence, the Bible bears the attributes of a supernatural origin.

Copyright © 2015 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
We are happy to grant permission for items in the “Inspiration of the Bible” section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.
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Seek God and Be Happy

April 19, 2015

But may all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you;
may those who long for your saving help always say,
“The LORD is great!” — Psalm 70:4

For all the books that are included in the Torah, there are countless others not included. Some prophets’ prophecies are included in the Bible, others weren’t. For example, the book of Obadiah is only one chapter long. Do you think that Obadiah only prophesied one chapter in his whole life? No! Yet, that was the only one included. Why? Because for all the wondrous things that were prophesied about over thousands of years, the only words canonized in our Torah are those that are eternally relevant to each and every generation.

With that background, let’s look at this verse from Psalm 70: “But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you.” King David declared that “all” – every single person for all time – who seek God will be rewarded with joy and gladness in Him. Not just some people, not just fully righteous people, but all people. These words are as relevant today as they were when David first penned them thousands of years ago. Imagine that you are standing before David today, and he personally issues this promise to you: “Seek God and you will find joy.” How might that put a spring in your step?

It really is that simple. However, where many people get stuck is in how to seek God. What does it mean to seek God? In 1 Chronicles 22:19 we read, “Now devote your heart and soul to seeking the LORD your God.” Seeking God means devoting your heart and soul to finding Him in every situation, in every moment, of every day.

Seeking God means walking outside and taking in the nature around you and seeing the Creator. It means looking at sweet children or beautiful animals and seeing God, their Maker. Seeking God also means that when you find yourself in an uncomfortable confrontation at work or at home, we need to see beyond the circumstances and see how God is orchestrating the situation for our very best. What joy to know that even our toughest moments are from God for the good!

Seeking God most definitely includes studying His Word and integrating His messages. It certainly means calling out to God in prayer and supplication. When we set our hearts on seeking God, we can find Him in all we do, and with that mindset, David promises joy.

How might you seek out God today? Keep God first place in your awareness and notice how you are filled with joy and gladness as you recognize that God is everywhere when we seek Him.

With prayers for shalom, peace,

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein

God, Prophecy, and Miraculous Knowledge

The honest-hearted person who comes to recognize God’s existence and contemplates His marvelous nature cannot help but stand in awe of His omniscience. As the psalmist professed,

O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether…. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell [sheol], behold, You are there (139:1-4,6-8).

The Bible declares that God “knows the secrets of the heart” (Psalm 44:21), that His eyes “are in every place” (Proverbs 15:3), and that “His understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5). Simply put, God “knows all things” (1 John 3:20). He has perfect knowledge of the past, the present, and even the future. Job was right to ask the rhetorical question, “Can anyone teach God knowledge?” (21:22).

God’s Omniscience and the Divine Inspiration of the Bible

God’s omniscience and proof that the Bible is the Word of God is inextricably woven together. The main, overarching reason that the Bible can be demonstrated to be of divine origin is because the writers were correct in everything they wrote—about the past, the present, and the future. Such a feat is humanly impossible. “With God,” however, “all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). An omniscient, omnipotent God could produce written revelation for His human creation that was flawless in its original production. He could guide uneducated men to write about events that occurred thousands of years before their time with complete accuracy. He could “move” (otherwise) ordinary men (2 Peter 1:20-21) to write flawlessly about any number of contemporary people, places, and things. He could even guide men to write about future events with perfect accuracy. He could—and He did.

Mankind can reasonably come to the conclusion that mere human beings did not pen Scripture because human beings are not omniscient. An uninspired person cannot, for example, foretell the future. Yet the inspired Bible writers did just that—time and again (e.g., Ezekiel 26:1-14,19-21; see www.apologeticspress.org for more information). Is it not logical, then, to conclude that the omniscient Ruler of the Universe gave us the Bible? Interestingly, though the atheist does not accept the Bible as “God-breathed,” even he understands that ifthe Bible writers predicted the future accurately, then a supernatural agent must be responsible for the production of Scripture (see Butt and Barker, 2009, pp. 50-51).

Is There Another Possibility?

Some might surmise that a Bible writer practicing pagan divination could also have accurately recorded what would happen in the distant future (in Tyre, Babylon, Jerusalem, etc.) because Satan or some wicked spirit-being revealed the information to him. Such a conclusion, however, is unjustifiable for a number of reasons:

• First, the prophets condemned all sorts of witchcraft, including divination and soothsaying (Deuteronomy 18:9-14; Jeremiah 27:9-29:9). Thus, they would be condemning themselves if they were actually diviners and soothsayers.
• Second, since God, by His very definition, is the only omniscient, omnipotent Being (cf. 1 John 4:4), neither the created and fallen devil nor any other non-eternal spirit-being (Colossians 1:16; 2 Peter 2:4) can choose to know whatever he wants. He may be able to acquire knowledge quickly from other beings or from personal experience, but ultimately, wicked spirit-beings can only have knowledge of what the Creator allows them to know (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:11). If, for example, a wicked spirit-being knew of future events, it would be due to the omniscient Ruler of the heaven and Earth granting him such knowledge for His own purposes. “Who is he who speaks and it comes to pass, when the Lord has not commanded it?” (Lamentations 3:37). Simply put, no one accurately foretells the future unless God informs him of it. [NOTE: Diviners may occasionally and vaguely predict something that comes to pass, but such guesswork or weathermen-like predictions are far from the revealed, supernatural foreknowledge of God, which was revealed during Bible times to His true spokesmen.]
• Third, God revealed throughout Scripture that those who accurately foretell the future are genuine prophets of God. Jeremiah wrote: “When the word of the prophet comes to pass, the prophet will be known as one whom the Lord has truly sent” (28:9). On the other hand, those who prophesy things that do not come to pass, “the Lord has not sent;” “they prophesy falsely” (Jeremiah 28:15; 29:8-9). “‘How shall we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:21-22). If non-God-inspired diviners could actually have foretold the future by the power of some wicked spirit-being, then how could the honest-hearted person ever know for sure what and who to believe and obey? Concluding that pagan diviners have been given power by wicked spirit-beings to flawlessly foretell the future contradicts what the true, inspired prophets of God taught, and prevents truth-seekers from being able to know truth.

Conclusion

God Almighty is the only omniscient, omnipotent Being. Only He knows everything. Ultimately, He alone knows the future—the revelation of such Divine thoughts being one of the chief ways man has logically concluded that a particular message was actually God-inspired. It seems quite dangerous to conclude that fallen spirit-beings know the future and have revealed such miraculous information to wicked diviners. Yes, uninspired fortunetellers have doubtlessly been tempted and influenced throughout the ages by powerful forces of darkness, but such beings are non-omniscient “deceiving spirits” (1 Timothy 4:1), who take after their “father, the devil,” “a liar” in whom “there is no truth” (John 8:44).

*Originally published in Gospel Advocate, March 2015, 157[3]:27-28.

Reference

Butt, Kyle and Dan Barker (2009), Does the God of the Bible Exist? (Montgomery, AL: Apologetics Press).

Copyright © 2015 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

We are happy to grant permission for items in the “Inspiration of the Bible” section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

For catalog, samples, or further information, contact:

Apologetics Press
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Montgomery, Alabama 36117
U.S.A.
Phone (334) 272-8558(334) 272-8558

http://www.apologeticspress.org

The All-Inclusive Loyalty

By Vance Havner

Married to another…to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
Romans 7:4

If the issue is Christ, then surely for us the issue is just to be Christians. A Christian is a Christ-ian, and his supreme loyalty is to Christ. Better than that, his loyalty to Christ is all-inclusive; it comprehends all lesser devotions.

That does not exclude the lesser loyalties. A man is a better citizen of his country if he is faithful to his own family. A man is a better member of the whole household of faith if he is loyal to his own local church and religious group.

But when the lesser loyalty transcends the greater, then there is trouble. There is a place for political parties, but any man who puts party above the country and plays cheap politics in an hour of peril is a traitor. A man should be first as American before he is a Democrat or Republican. There is a place for local and group loyalty in the church, but a man who cannot, and will not, be a Christian first is a traitor to Jesus Christ.

We are married to Christ. A wife takes her husband’s name, and a true wife will make all other human loyalties subservient to that. A Christian bears the name of Christ and his loyalty to Christ includes and glorifies all other relationships. Christ does not merely come first, He is Alpha and Omega, and includes the alphabet of all our interests and affections.

God Will Provide

April 20, 2015

“The priest is to examine the sore on the skin, and if the hair in the sore has turned white and the sore appears to be more than skin deep, it is a defiling skin disease. When the priest examines that person, he shall pronounce them ceremonially unclean.” — Leviticus 13:3

The Torah portion for this week is a double reading, Tazria-Metzora, from Leviticus 12:1—15:33. Tazria means “conceived” and Metzora means “diseased.” The Haftorah is from 2 Kings 7:3–20.

In this week’s Torah portion, we are first introduced to the spiritual malady, with physical manifestations, called tzara’at in Hebrew. This skin-defiling disease was something that the priests had to diagnose. In this portion, we learn the laws and regulations regarding the diagnosis of tzara’at. As the root of the malady was a spiritual one, it was the job of the nation’s spiritual leaders to declare the condition and prescribe its healing.

A story is told in the Jewish tradition about a Temple priest who was worried about his family’s financial situation. He told his wife: “I’m going to leave town and look for a way to make money elsewhere. In the meantime, I will teach you how to declare skin conditions as pure or contaminated. All sorts of people will come to you with skin conditions, and you will have to be able to declare the status of each individual.” The man continued with the first lesson. “You know that every hair is nourished from a particular follicle. If an entire hair is white, then it’s a sign that the person does indeed have the defiling skin disease.”

Right then and there, the priest’s wife cut him off. She said: “Have you no shame? God created a follicle to nourish every hair — except for you? If every hair is nourished where it grows, then you are, too.” With the lesson from his wife, the priest canceled his plans to travel and continued to serve God as he was meant to and have faith that God would provide.

This wise woman taught her husband a lesson from which we can all benefit. In the Jewish Grace after Meals, we affirm that God “nourishes the entire world in His goodness — with grace, with kindness, and with mercy. He gives nourishment to all flesh, for His kindness is eternal.” Yet, no matter how many times we say these words every day, there is a difference between saying them and living the words. We say that God will provide, but we need to live that way as well.

Now, Judaism maintains that we must put in effort to make a living, but after that, we let God handle the rest. We shouldn’t worry all the time about how we are going to make ends meet at the end of the month. We shouldn’t lose sleep at night over how we will support ourselves when we retire (especially if retirement is still decades away!). God knows what we need and He knows where we live. He can certainly deliver! Work hard, pray harder, and sleep well at night. God has you in the palm of His hand – you shall not want.

With prayers for shalom, peace,

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein

Better Christians

By Vance Havner

Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
II Peter 3:18

The First business of a Christian is to become a better Christian, to know Christ better, to decrease that He may increase. “That I may know him” was Paul’s supreme ambition.

It is possible to major on the negative side of this matter on separation alone or to stress solely the positive aspect in the victorious life, or Spirit-filled life, so that we develop a fad. The Christian life is Christ Himself. There is the positive, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” and the negative, “Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof,” and it is all simply more of Christ and less of self.

Here is a weak spot today. For all our religious wheels within wheels, we have no time for he cultivation of our souls, no time to know Christ better. How does He become more real? “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him” (John 14:21). He makes Himself real to the obedient disciple. And the obedient disciple is daily a better Christian than he was the day before.