Tag: faith

Hebrews 10, Christ’s sacrifice once for all, the new covenant, a new and living way, the just shall live by faith.

This chapter of the letter to the Hebrews was instrumental in solidifying my faith after salvation. It got a little lengthy, but enjoy!

“a body you prepared for me” is from the Septuagint, “but my ears you have pierced” is from the Hebrew Psalm. When a servant wilfully gave himself away to serve his master, the master pieced his ear to show voluntary bondage.

Jeremiah 31:33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

Let us take a look at the theology of covenants, this ties in naturally with this letter.

According to dispensation theology there are ten major covenants in Scripture.

Covenant theology has simplified all the covenants into just three

Dispensation theology emphasizes God manifests himself differently in the different dispensations, and yet He is the same God yesterday, today and forever.

We are now at the dispensation of grace, commonly known as the Church Age.

We go back a few verses in Hebrews 10

Jesus closed the scroll after “to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD“, stopped mid sentence  and did not read the end of the verse “and the day of vengeance of our God”

This gap defines the time of grace!

To determine which of these options is the right one, I turned to

To know which of these dates is true it would help to know when Jesus was born.

Enter

Dionysius set the birth of Jesus Christ to Dec 25, 1 BC, and the death at 33 Anno Domine, the only year according to the lunar calendar that made Good Friday occur on a Friday. ( check https://lenbilen.com/2017/04/14/when-was-the-crucifixion-of-jesus/ ) He was only off by a few years. The dates are now set to:

But it is getting even more complicated. Without vowel marks the word for seven can have three meanings dependent on how it is pronounced.

That’s when it hit me.

I had fallen into the same trap as so many before me. We live in the age of grace!

The word for today is “today”.

Now back to where we left off in Hebrews 10.

Bur the book of Hebrews also comes with warnings!

Here I am borrowing from a slide series from somebody else. I can no longer find the source, but thanks, whoever it was.

Knowledge of the truth is not what saves you.

A fortiori simply means that the argument in verse 29 is much stronger than the one in verse 28

And then there is

This then excludes option 1

Between option 2 and 3: God be the judge.

Verse 38 convinced me I had to be baptized in a believers baptism, even though I had been baptized as an infant. It really had nothing to do with salvation, that was settled at the time of belief. It was an act of faith and obedience to remain in close fellowship with God. And my living hope is that God will keep His promise, He will keep me eternally secure even if I lose my mind, which still may happen late in this life, but will be fully restored in the life to come.

Hebrews 7, Jesus Christ, high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

Melchizedek was either a real person, king of Salem, later to be named Jerusalem, or he was a Christophany, that is a manifestation of Jesus Christ.

Psalm 110:4b  Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

Psalm 110:4 The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

 

Hebrews 6, can you lose your salvation?

1. According to Roman Catholic doctrine no man can know if he is saved.

2. This is the Arminian position.

3. This is the Calvinist position.

4.  This seems to be the position of the author.

The difference between Arminius’ and Calvin’s five tenets.

Numbers 20:8 “Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink.”

9 So Moses took the staff from the Lord’s presence, just as he commanded him. 10 He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock and Moses said to them, “Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?” 11 Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.

12 But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.”

This is a clue to what the impossible verses really mean. Think of Jesus as the rock, which he is. God told Moses to speak to the rock , not strike it as he did the first time, but instead he struck the rock twice. Jesus was struck once at the cross for our sins, from now on we speak to Christ. The Hebrews came out of the sacrifice culture, and some looked wistfully at the time when they could atone for their sins yearly. The temple was still standing at the writing of this letter, and the pressure was high to go back to their old ways. After the cross there remains no more a sacrifice for sins, and this is why it says “To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”

Hebrews 4, the Sabbath-rest (“σαββατισμος”) for the People of God.

Psalm 95:11 “So I declared on oath in my anger,
    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

Genesis 2:2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.

Psalm 95:7b Today, if only you would hear his voice,
8 “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,[quarreling]
    as you did that day at Massah[testing] in the wilderness,

 

Paul’s letter to Philemon, slavery and redemption.

The Apostle Paul wrote this short letter to Philemon in A.D. 60. Philemon was a slave owner and Onesimus  was a runaway slave. Paul was in prison in Rome, and somehow Onesimus had a conversion to Christianity after running away.

Paul is sending this letter to Philemon together with the letter to the church of Colossi using Tychius and Onesimus as the letter carriers!

Colossians 4:7 Tychicus will tell you all the news about me. He is a dear brother, a faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord. 8 I am sending him to you for the express purpose that you may know about our circumstances and that he may encourage your hearts. 9 He is coming with Onesimus, our faithful and dear brother, who is one of you. They will tell you everything that is happening here.

Senders are Paul and Timothy!

Philemon had the right to punish Onesimus and recapture him as a slave, but because of Paul’s faith in the redemptive powers of Christ he is sending him anyway.

Paul promises to pay back the money Onesimus stole from Philemon when he ran away. This is how business between Christians should be conducted!

This is just a short letter from one man to another. So why is it in the Bible? Paul had written many other letters to individuals and none of them made it into the Bible. (Paul’s letter to Titus was really for the church in Crete which was being formed and for universal use on qualifications for leadership in churches.)

It is my belief this short letter is included in the Bible is because of slavery. Paul’s co-writer Timothy writes in 1 Timothy 1:7 They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm. 8 We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

If Philemon had recaptured Onesimus he would have been a slave trader, and this letter is in the Bible to affirm that slave trading is out of bounds to Christians.

On the other hand Muhammad, the prophet of Islam Owned, bought and sold slaves, making him a slave trader, and slave trading has been the tradition of Muslims through the ages. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in the 1950’s, and Mauritius abolished it in 2007. As of now there is no country that has slavery as an official policy, but world-wide human trafficking is on the rebound.

What we need is a revival among followers of Christ and an awakening among people to turn to true Christian values

The sign of Jonah, the great eclipse of 2017 and the tearing down of statues.

Jonah was prophet during the reign of the second King Jeroboam (c.786–746 BC)

2 Kings 14:25 He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.

Gath Hepher is only a few miles north of Nazareth,  in Galilee.  Jonah was a prophet coming out of Galilee. Yet the Pharisees said to Nicodemus in John 7:52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”

Jonah offered himself willingly, and in so doing became a type of Christ

This is the sign of Jonah. He was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Jonah in a way was dead, buried and resurrected, a type of Christ.

Something had happened to prepare Nineveh, a Solar eclipse.

The path of totality of the Bur-Sagale Eclipse, which is one of the most famous solar eclipses in ancient history, occurred just north of Nineveh on 15th June, 763BC during the reign of King Ashur-Dan III of Assyria, and was recorded for posterity in the Assyrian Eponym Canon – a series of cuneiform tablets discovered in the 19th century.

 

 

Even though Jonah obeyed God and did His will, he was still full of hate towards the Ninevehites, remembering all the evil they had done to the Israelites during the ages.

God still provides a lesson for Jonah.

So God has compassion on children and animals. The Ninevehites repented after the sign of total eclipse, and then Jonah came after God had made the people receptive.

On Monday is the first day of Elul, the last secular month in th Jewish calendar. Elul is the month of last harvest, final gathering and repentance as preparation for the new year. The eclipse of April 8, 2024 is on the first day of Nisan, the beginning of the sacred new year in the Jewish calendar.

One cannot help but notice the two total eclipses form a cross right where the three mighty rivers Missouri, Mississippi and Ohio rivers combine into the lower Mississippi. They combine right over the New Madrid earthquake area.

Is this a sign from God mentioned in Isaiah 18:7 “At that time gifts will be brought to the Lord Almighty from a people tall and smooth-skinned,
    from a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech,
    whose land is divided by rivers— the gifts will be brought to Mount Zion, the place of the Name of the Lord Almighty.” ?

The Mississippi rever divides the United States into “West of the Mississippi” and “East of the Missisippi” We normally think of the Mason-Dixon line as the division between the North and the South, but another division would be the Ohio River and the Missouri river.

Right now there is much hate in the world. Monuments that have been standing for thousands of years are being destroyed.

Screen grab from CNN video showing the giant Buddhas of Bamyian being destroyed by the Taliban on March 12, 2001.

 

 

 

 

The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Persian: بت های باميان – bott-hâye Bāmiyān) were 4th- and 5th-century[2] monumental statues of standing buddha carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan

Not to be outdone the Islamic State blows up tomb of prophet Jonah in Iraq Nineveh,July-25-2014.jpg

The tomb was the Muslims tomb of Jonah, not the Jews tomb of Jonah.

Yes, Jonah is mentioned in the Quran, Sura 37: 139 – 148 And Jonah was one of the messengers. When he fled to the laden boat. He gambled and lost. Then the fish swallowed him, and he was to blame. Had he not been one of those who praised. He would have stayed in its belly until the Day they are raised.5. Then We threw him into the wilderness, and he was sick. And We made a gourd tree grow over him. Then We sent him to a hundred thousand, or more. And they believed, so We gave them enjoyment for a while.

ISIS wants to change history and have it begin with them.

When Israel ceded the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority one of the first things the Palestinians did was to destroy Joseph’s tomb.

Slide15

Jihad: Joseph’s tomb was destroyed.

Old history now null and void.

In the p;ace where he laid

a new Mosque is displayed.

The fruits of Jihad: I’m annoyed.

 

This week confederate statues are being destroyed.

Have we not learned anything from history?

 

 

The Statue of Robert E. Lee, revered in history, now history?

The Statue of Robert E. Lee,

A symbol of South history:

FDR praised his name.

All the Democrats fame;

They try to erase memory.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered an enduring hero of the left, particularly for the New Deal. Few would say he was an avatar of white supremacy. Yet, he spoke at the dedication of the  Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas back in 1936 — and what he said about the general then is something that liberals everywhere would like to erase.

“I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee,” FDR said at the dedication ceremony, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“All over the United States, we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general. But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that. We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.”

Things change. What once was the proud symbol of the Democratic South is now considered repugnant by people wanting to erase history, and in so doing repeat it.

Genesis 22, Abraham tested, God will provide himself a lamb.

On the third day.

 

Isaac submitted willingly.

This is now the eighth name of God introduced.

On the stone on mount Moriah where Abraham offered up his son Isaac is now standing The Dome of the Rock. It was originally a church – shrine, but after the Muslim takeover of Jerusalem it has become a Muslim shrine. To justify the takeover of Jerusalem the Muslims claimed Muhammad made a night trip from Mecca to Jerusalem, called “The story of Isra” It is mentioned in the Quran [17:1] KHALIFA: Most glorified is the One who summoned His servant (Muhammad) during the night, from the Sacred Masjid (of Mecca) to the farthest place of prostration, whose surroundings we have blessed, in order to show him some of our signs. He is the Hearer, the Seer.  The Isra’ story, greatly elaborated by tradition, relates that Muhammad made the journey astride Buraq (q.v.), a mythical winged creature, in the company of the archangel Gabriel. Muhammad meets Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in Jerusalem; he then officiates as leader (imam) of the ritual prayer (salat) for all the prophets assembled and establishes his primacy among God’s messengers. For the full story go to: “http://www.geocities.com/khola_mon/myth/Miraj.html”

The dome of the rock is on top of the temple mount, sacred by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

It is so important that it is also on the Iranian 1000 Rial bill.

In the Quran Abraham also offers up his son.

After explaining God’s intervention the Quran introduces the birth of Isaac, which to a Muslim means the son of Abraham offered up on mount Moriah was Ishmael.