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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 »

Picture yourself. Thousands of years in the future, a king and priest in the family of God. Endowed with the nature and power of God, second in rank only to God the Father. You will be worshiped, and you will have every right to that worship. God says so.

Revelation 3:9 …behold, I WILL MAKE THEM to come and WORSHIP before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.

Of course, now, you are no where near deserving of that. You haven’t overcome. You haven’t conquered your own carnal nature. Even now that nature is pecking away at your resolve, searching for a chink in your armor so it can coerce you to rebel against God and fulfill its lusts. As long as that is the case, you can never be trusted with ultimate power - and therefore, cannot be worshiped as God is. Even Jesus, while He had that nature in Him, was not worthy of worship. Again, He said so.

Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou ME good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

Of course, He was greater than we are, or any other man who had lived (Matthew 12:42). And He was perfect, and He ultimately proved that He COULD be trusted… And none of us have done that yet. Now, He has been resurrected, “born of God”, as we one day shall be, and the carnal nature no longer has any influence over His nature, for it has been replaced by the nature of God.

1 John 3:9 Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

But even now, we will be worshiped at times - not worshiped as a God, but worshiped just for being right. Or for being wise, or wealthy, or any of the other things men respect. Christ even gave us specific instructions for HOW to be worshiped by men! … 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 »

I’ve often told the joke “Hey, who was the first person to break the commandments”, and I get various responses such as “Adam” or “Lucifer”. Then I told the punchline “No, Moses was the first person - he walked off Mt. Sinai and broke ALL TEN at once!”Ok, so it isn’t the funniest joke in the world but most of mine aren’t. The point is, Moses did break those tablets and had to go back to the mountain and get a second set. But did you ever notice… that God carved the first tablets out of Mt. Sinai with his own hand, and wrote on them with his own finger? I’m sure you did.

Exodus 32:16-19 And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. [and Moses walked down the mountain] … And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

But did you notice that God commanded MOSES to carve out (but not write upon) the second tablets? And if you did, did you ever ask WHY? These things happened to Moses and the Israelites for SYMBOLS; pictures of the plan of God so that we could understand them and learn from them TODAY. WHY did Moses cut the second tablets?

Exodus 34:1 (NKJV) And the LORD said to Moses, “Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I will write on these tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.

The Bible goes way out of it’s way to EXPLICITLY say that God cut the stones for the first tablets out of the mountain, and then just as explicitly says that Moses made the second tablets. Now that wasn’t an accident. The words were the same on both tablets, and God personally wrote the ten commandments on both tablets… but the tablets themselves were different…. 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 »

Genesis 4:15 … And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.What was this mark? I’ve heard lots of fanciful answers - usually based on which races the person answering didn’t like the most - but no BIBLE answers. But there should be one, don’t you think? I mean, I know lots of people who believe that it was at this point that God gave Cain a hook-nose to make him the classic Jew. Many others believe that God made Cain black, to begin the black race.

But let’s face it, they made that up because they didn’t like Jews or Blacks or whatever race it was they were bashing at the time. There is not one hint nor shred of proof in the Bible or any other text to show that Cain received a hook-nose or dark skin or any PHYSICAL characteristic as a “Mark”.

So what is the REAL mark of Cain? What is the BIBLICAL explanation of this “mark”? To answer that, you first have to understand the situation a little better… Read the rest of this entry »

Where is your identity? What do you think of when you think “me”?

If you have to describe yourself, where do you start?

What would crush you the most if you were to lose it?

Most people define themselves by their “stuff”. In fact, I can scarcely name anyone I’ve met who isn’t the house, the car, the money, something. None of these people would admit that they are all about those things, but there can be no doubt that it is “for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.” (Luke 6:45). The stuff coming out of your mouth, the stuff your mind always leans towards talking about, is who you think you are. If you always talk about the Dallas Cowboys it’s because you don’t really have a life of your own; 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 »

Anyone who has ever kept the passover has asked “what does footwashing represent?”. We drink the wine and eat the bread, and those symbols are well defined. But footwashing? It isn’t mentioned in Matthew, Mark or Luke, and John doesn’t tell us a lot about it, just the command to do it; so true Christians everywhere wash each other’s feet and either don’t know what it means, or make up something. And if you must obey God in ignorance of why you’re doing what you’re doing, then by all means obey Him in ignorance; but if we can KNOW what it symbolizes, why we go through this ritual year by year, then we certainly should.

John 13:2 And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him;

First let’s set the stage; this happened after the “supper”. We know from harmonizing this with the other gospels that the old testament lamb had already been prepared and eaten this night to fulfill the old testament passover first. The old testament passover was to be killed and eaten between the two evenings, the period of twilight between sundown and complete darkness. So since supper was finished the sun’s light was probably about completely gone; most likely the footwashing took place about an hour and a half after sundown when supper was finished.

After that ceremony Jesus set into place the new symbols which would, from now on, be the new passover service. But before He did that, in the space between the old and new testament passovers that night, Jesus washed the disciples feet.

Before going into that further, let’s make a few facts clear:

1. No one washed Jesus’ feet that night
2. The disciples did not wash one another’s feet that night
3. Peter was not the first one washed
4. Jesus specifically changed his clothes for this ceremony, then changed back when it was finished before going on with the passover service

Those facts tend to challenge what we’ve always believed, but read through John 13 and no mention is made of anyone washing anyone except Jesus washing the disciples. This is important, so remember it… Read the rest of this entry »