TheSimpleAnswers.com

Are you afraid of snakes? Spiders? Sharks? Tornadoes, germs, lightning, thieves, bats? WHY?? Don’t you know that you are in CHARGE of them all? That God GAVE them to you??

Let’s get this straight right now. YOU ARE KING! They are all YOURS, to do with as you see fit! Unless… well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

From the beginning, God made Adam KING! Lord over ALL the earth, and everything that moved, crawled or wriggled upon it! Do you understand what that means? They have no power over you! None whatsoever! Unless… but I get ahead of myself. I want this point firmly established before I get into that!

Psalms 8:4-8 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

Do you truly grasp that? You are KING! They can’t in any way hurt you, anymore than you could hurt God! But you don’t believe that do you? You wouldn’t walk out, at pitch dark, in the middle of the jungle would you? You’d be too afraid!

You wouldn’t go swimming where there might be sharks - you’re too afraid! You fear bats, mice, elephants and cows, when you have no business fearing them! Unless… yes. Unless you AREN’T king over them!

And that is your problem, if you fear anything from the heaven of heavens to the deepest ocean. You aren’t their King anymore. Because you are sinning! You see, Adam was king of the earth for a short while. Then he sinned. Then what happened? He wasn’t King anymore! Satan was!

In the beginning, God gave Adam dominion, and made him King over all the earth. He was even King over Satan! Had you ever thought about that? Had Satan walked up before Adam and done anything to him, you know what he would have done? Adam would have said “The Lord rebuke you, Satan!”, and Satan would have fled with his tail between his legs!

Because Adam was King! So Satan couldn’t try the direct approach. So he went to Eve, quietly, and convinced her to sin! He still couldn’t attack her, any more than he could have attacked Adam, directly, because even she outranked him! But he convinced her to sin, and she in turn convinced Adam to sin, and HANDED THE THRONE OF THE EARTH RIGHT BACK TO SATAN!

Romans 6:16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?

Now Satan was king of the earth, not them! Satan is STILL King of the earth! He is the GOD OF THIS WORLD! (2 Corinthians 4:4) And if you FEAR anything, then you acknowledge that Satan, NOT YOU, is in charge of the world! And this CAN ONLY BE BECAUSE YOU ARE YET SINNING! Because YOUR HEART CONDEMNS YOU, you KNOW you are vile, and you KNOW you aren’t King!

Proverbs 28:1 The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.

Doesn’t that scripture sound like someone who is afraid of the dark? Would Christ have been afraid of the dark? It’s ridiculously easy to prove He wasn’t, so I won’t bother. Should you be?? No!

But if you are TRULY FOLLOWING God, then you ARE KING! You DO stand to inherit the promises, and one of those is that YOU are untouchable! Bulletproof!

Isaiah 54:14-17 In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee. Behold, they shall surely gather together, but not by me: whosoever shall gather together against thee shall fall for thy sake. Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD.

That is the heritage of the servants of the LORD. If that describes you, you need fear nothing. And I mean, nothing. Do you recall the incident of Christ and quelling the storm? How could He calm the storm? Simple. It was HIS STORM TO CALM! Just like it is YOUR STORM! God has GIVEN it to you! And He will see to it that NO HARM comes to you, no matter where you travel or what you do!

Psalms 105:6-15 O YE seed of Abraham his servant, YE children of Jacob his chosen. He is the LORD our God: his judgments are in all the earth. He hath remembered his covenant FOR EVER, the word which he commanded to a THOUSAND GENERATIONS. Which covenant he made with Abraham, and his oath unto Isaac; And… When they went from one nation to another, from one kingdom to another people; He SUFFERED NO MAN to do them wrong: yea, he reproved KINGS for their sakes; Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and DO MY PROPHETS NO HARM.

And YOU are the heir to that promise! It applies to YOU, if you do the works of Abraham (John 8:39), and BELIEVE God (Romans 4:3)! This is one of the perks of being in God’s service! No King, no beast, not even POISON dares to touch you!

Mark 16:17-18 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Fear snakes? Spiders? Ridiculous! No spider would DARE bite the servant of God! Even a spider knows that God is in charge of the universe!

Genesis 9:2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

They should fear YOU, not the other way around! They’d BETTER fear God! Do you think a microbe doesn’t serve the God of the universe? Or that a rock, or a cell of your body doesn’t work for Him? It will DO as HE TELLS IT TO DO! And if you WORK FOR HIM, then it will do what YOU TELL IT TO DO!

Mark 11:23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

If you serve God, if you KNOW that you are serving God, the foremost missing requirement in your faith, as has been explained in many other articles on this website, among them “Why Isn’t God Answering Your Prayers”, “Why Hasn’t God Given You More Faith”, etc, then you need not fear anything, for YOU ARE KING. The entire earth is on your side, and at peace with you. The darkest jungle of Africa, or the steaming deserts of the world, it’s all yours. None of it can hurt you.

Job 5:19-23 He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. In famine he shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the power of the sword. Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue: neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh. At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh: neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.

But I strongly caution you NOT to practice this with a dirty conscience! If your heart condemns you, then you are NOT king, and they do NOT work for you, and you are at their mercy. If you act like a King, when in fact you are a pauper, you will soon be slapped down, and pay the price for your misguided arrogance!

Acts 19:13-16 Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

Did you see what these men did? They didn’t believe in the Christ whom Paul taught. They didn’t do what He said. But they took upon themselves to exercise power over the devils. Ha! That worked out well, didn’t it!

They acted like a King, when in fact they were nothing but beggars in the street! And the Demon KNEW he wasn’t under their authority! Did you catch what he said? “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but WHO ARE YOU??”

This Demon acknowledged that he was under Jesus’ authority! And he KNEW that he was under Paul’s authority! This demon knew that PAUL WAS KING OVER HIM! And he also knew that these seven sons of Sceva weren’t!

Paul was King, not only over the devils, but also over the entire world. Just as you SHOULD be, if you were actually doing your part in this life instead of wimping out of most of your responsibility!

Acts 28:3-6 And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live. And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.

If you fear anything, it is because you are unrighteous, and some part of you knows it. This world is yours, or should be, along with everything in it. Nothing can hurt you. God has said so.

Luke 10:19 Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

Whether bacteria or devil, lion or hurricane, You Are King! Act like it!

1. THY WILL BE DONE?

You should NEVER pray “Thy will be done” - it totally ROBS your prayer of it’s power!

The first objection most people raise is “Well, in Luke 11:2 Christ TELLS us to pray “Thy will be done”!” But read the exact quote and see for yourself if that’s what He said to do!

Luke 11:2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.

“Thy will be done” is NOT an isolated phrase - it is part of a sentence! Christ was not saying “I want bread, I want forgiveness, I want delivered from evil, but NOT MY WILL, but THY WILL be done”! He was talking about something TOTALLY different! He was saying “I pray for the time when YOUR KINGDOM is here, WHEN your will SHALL be done AS IT IS DONE IN HEAVEN”!

Do you really think God NEEDS your permission to do His will? Remember, His will IS WHAT IS ALREADY BEING DONE! Read the rest of this entry »

Prayer - the only verbal contact you have with God. And yet, most people totally destroy their prayers! They rob their prayers of the POWER they should have by ignoring the GRAVITY of the enormous responsibility they bear when praying! Prayer should MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. It should GET THINGS DONE. Sadly most prayers are more for show, and habit, or out of fear God will be mad, or most commonly, to be seen by other people as “Godly”. This is WRONG! ALL OF IT! Prayer is for a DEFINITE, CLEAR purpose - and it is NOT any of the reasons you’ve heard!

WHY PRAY

Did you ever ask this question? Did you ever wonder WHY prayer is in the Bible - and more importantly, why YOU should use it?

I’ve heard often, and I’ve said myself “Why should God listen to me? What do I know? What good is MY advice, my request to Him? Isn’t He in charge of the universe - doesn’t He know what is best to do?”

This is a good question! Typically, you hear answers like “Praying is to GET TO KNOW God”, or “Prayer is to get your mind off of yourself”, or other equally unsatisfactory, “CHURCH-SPEAK” answers. But that is NOT the purpose of prayer at all! Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that the primary, if not SOLE purpose of the book of Jonah was to condemn patriotism? To condemn people who have “support our troops!” on their bumper sticker?

That’s not a message you’ve heard before! But it IS exactly what Jonah teaches!

You see, Jonah was soft-on-sin. He put his COUNTRY before his GOD, and his nation before what he KNEW was right! Jonah was a loyal patriot!

Jonah 1:1-2 Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.

God told Jonah to go and prophesy against Nineveh, to tell them God was going to destroy them for their sins! But Jonah didn’t want to go! So he tried to run from God. Now the question is, WHY did he run? WHY didn’t he want to speak to Nineveh? Read the rest of this entry »

What is the TRUE, BIBLICAL, definition of Self-Righteousness? Was Job self-righteous? Were the Pharisees? Is the concept even found in scripture?

To begin with, the term “Self-Righteous” is not to be found in the Bible - it simply isn’t there. You should be very careful using terms that were made up by the world’s churches!

What do people mean when they call you self-righteous?

They are trying to say “Well, if you think you’re righteous, you don’t need Christ anymore!”. They will tell you that to try to be righteous, will actually offend God - it will do despite to the spirit of Grace! People seem to FEAR righteousness - of all the silly ideas!

Let’s examine the scriptures from which they have drawn the ideas about self-righteousness, and see what they REALLY say.

Romans 10:3 For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.

On the surface, this could say more or less what they said - but look at the verses preceding:

Romans 10:1-2 Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.

This is not talking about someone who is RIGHTEOUS, but someone who DOESN’T really understand righteousness, and MAKES UP A RIGHTEOUSNESS of their OWN… Read the rest of this entry »

According to what we’ve been taught in school, man started his communication by pointing at things and grunting, then developed different grunts for different things, and then spontaneously developed a single language about 50,000 years ago, full of syntax and verbs and nouns, and then went on to develop different languages such as Sanskrit and Akkadian, Chinese and Hebrew.

To date there is no indication of why we were able to spontaneously go from having ape-like grunts to Shakespeare-like prose. As one scholar frankly admits “we simply don’t know how language originated. We suspect that some type of spoken language developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.” (The Study Of Language, George Yule)

Bottom line, no one knows and everyone disagrees about exactly what happened. All we know is that apes can’t speak and we can. But the general assumption, in keeping with the theory of evolution, is that one ape said “ouch” involuntarily when he bit his finger and so when a baby went to put his finger in his mouth, the mother would point at the finger and point at the mouth and say “ouch!” to warn that pain would result from biting the finger. Thus the word “ouch” meaning “pain” entered the language.

Then words that mimicked animal sounds like “woof!” became the word for dog. This is a rather brutal generalization but you get the idea. Gradually this built up to a more complex language with more abstract ideas. But this is the OPPOSITE of what FACT tells us!… Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered WHY the Corinthians gloried? WHAT it was they did that they thought was worth being proud? Let’s read the story, just to get it clear…

1 Corinthians 5:1-2 It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.

These people were puffed up - they were PROUD that this was happening! Had you ever thought about that? WHY were they puffed up? And did you know that YOU are probably guilty of the same thing?

Verse 6-7 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:

These people were GLORYING, downright THRILLED with themselves for having this vile sin in their midst! Why?? Read the rest of this entry »

How can you know WHICH Bible is correct? We have all sorts of versions out there - KJV, NIV, ASV, RSV, and quite literally hundreds of others - but which should you read? Does it matter? What’s the difference? Setting aside for the moment ease of use for the modern reader, which version is MOST TRUSTWORTHY? Are any inspired by God? Some would tell you that the King James Version of the Bible is “the word of God, from cover to cover includin’ the cover!” - is that true? Should you use the Septuagint? What about the Apocryphal books like the books of the Maccabees, Judith, Jubilees, and Enoch? Or the dead sea scrolls?

I will address these questions a bit later on, but for now I want to lay the groundwork of the philosophy of how you SHOULD approach this question. If there is a God - and you must believe there is, if you’re wanting to read the book He wrote - then God, if He is powerful enough to be worthy of being CALLED a God, can take care of Himself. He can protect Himself. And He can protect His word.

Does God need YOUR help to protect the Bible? If He does, He’s a pretty useless God if He can’t even keep His own inspired writings from getting burned or wet or lost! The point of this is that GOD is ABLE to save His word; God WANTED to save His word, and God DID save His word. If you don’t approach this question with that in mind, you will certainly come to the wrong conclusion and walk away in frustration.

Religious scholars tend to get caught up in the details and forget that this is a book written by God, not Hebrews; it was the words of God, not Jews, that were written down; it was the thoughts of the Creator, not the created, that we find in the pages of the Bible. All too often they’re too busy looking at the words under a microscope to read what they say…. Read the rest of this entry »

The world today has a completely skewed picture of justice. Even the churches, who are supposed to teach the law, have largely done away with it. But even those churches who teach that there is no obligation to keep any divine law still understand that some things are bad. Some things shouldn’t be done.They all have a list of sins, arranged by their personal prejudices and opinions, from greatest to least. Usually subconscious, but the list is always present. They react with greater horror to one sin than to another. From my observation, it seems that your average list of cardinal sins in a conservative area would go something like this:

1. Child molesting
2. Murder
3. Homosexuality
4. Adultery
5. Judging
6. Fornication
7. Greed
8. Bigotry
9. Stealing
10. Cussing

And so on. Some churches would include dancing, singing, card-playing, reading literature from another denomination, and so on. Of course everyone’s list is a bit different, but if you listen to sermons you’ll see this common thread; yeah, they all tacitly admit that killing is really bad, but after that adultery is the next biggest thing you hear about. It is the one primary sin you hear pounded on, from every pulpit in the land.

But is it the most important commandment? Is it what every preacher SHOULD be talking about, day in, day out? God gave us ten commandments, and He gave them in order. But what is their relative gravity? How serious is, say, fornication compared to, say, owning a dreamcatcher?

If you had to judge a situation and determine who should be punished worse, would you punish a sabbath-breaker or a liar more seriously? Is a doctor who performs abortions is a better person in the eyes of God than a Vegas hooker? And would you say that Charles Manson deserves more or less punishment than someone who owns a statue of Buddha?

These are questions that, to live and reign with Christ, you MUST understand. These are fundamental questions that explain how God looks at sin, which sin is more harmful, and which must be corrected first, and which deserves the most punishment. Which deserves the most “sermon time”, and which is so far down the list that it’s not even worth talking about for now. You MUST learn to look at these things as God does, and put these sins in their relative place.

So which IS the greatest commandment? (and the second, third, and fourth?) Read the rest of this entry »

In a preceding article I asked “Do You Trust Yourself” (Click to read it), and showed that you must if you ever intend to be in the Kingdom of God. But I neglected to cover in that article HOW you can trust yourself. Just how DO you learn to trust yourself? The question is of absolutely vital importance because it is a cornerstone of faith; having your prayers answered depends more on this one question than any other. Do you trust yourself? ARE you doing everything you know to do? Are you SURE you can be trusted? And HOW can you be sure?

Today, we are expected to trust everyone; if you don’t trust a complete stranger they are offended. So we pretend to trust people, while keeping our hand on our wallet. Because no matter what we try to do, it is completely impossible to fully trust someone that has not earned that trust. But to earn trust, a small amount of trust must be gambled. You might have to trust someone with $5 before you trust them with $500, and with $500 before you trust them with $5,000. There must be risks involved, and it must be built from the ground up.

People are basically scum. The Bible says so on many occasions; “deceitful above all things, desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9), that sort of thing. And no matter how you lie to yourself, you know that it is true - about other people, but most importantly about yourself as well. And so you must EARN trust. Others must earn it from you, and you must earn it from yourself… Read the rest of this entry »