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The Purposeful Contortion and Confusion of End Time Truth
A primary way Satan keeps people deluded about life and the world is by his contortion and confusion of either origin or end time truth. God reveals with pristine clarity the beginning and ending of everything. Both of these revelations are vital for faith and practice. Satan wants people deceived on how they got here and what will happen to them in the future.
Naturalism breeds more lust. I like to say, it means we got here by accident. No one’s your boss, so you’re your own boss. That sounds great to most people, doing what they want to do. Since they just happened, no design, they aren’t accountable to anyone or anything. They live like they want, which, based on the nature of man, means following lust.
Origins
Even if someone contemplates a possibility of God, that isn’t strong enough to replace the dominion of lust in a life. All the truths about God transmit from Him as origination of everything. Other truths about God diminish when He didn’t create us. The elimination of God creating man for HIs glory greatly decreases the power and importance of everything else scripture says.
The perversion of beginnings relates most to its compatibility with the theory of evolution. Modernists of the nineteenth century began rethinking the meaning of Genesis to fit with Darwinism. An allegorical interpretation of the first three chapters of the Bible allows to read evolution and an old earth into Genesis.
With people unsure about the beginning, it’s no wonder they doubt the ending. Even theologians turn eschatology into a non-essential now. They relegate prophecy to ambiguity. Many churches have removed most of their eschatology from their doctrinal statements. You don’t need a position to fit into a church. It’s too uncertain to require for even professing Christians.
Endings
On a recent prophecy post I wrote here, an anonymous commenter (whom I did not publish) called crazy (he used “nutjobs”) churches that talk about or preach prophecy. Opinions and speculation abounds on end time events.
The doctrines of Christ, salvation, man, and angels dovetail with prophecy. When Jesus arrived in the first century, very few were ready or awaited His coming, because they had detached from prophetic reality. The promises of God become of no effect as people falsify what He says will happen in the future. This then deadens their anticipation and smothers their hope.
History functions in a chiliastic manner. You could call it “going full circle.” Paradise lost and paradise regained. The destruction of the first necessitates the destruction of the last. This renders meaningless everything in between. Why believe anything if you can’t know how it starts and how it ends?
Many theologians and church leaders have capitulated to the attack on the origin and the ending. This relegates most everything to what people call, living in the present or living in the moment. I understand that concept in a positive way to a certain degree. Living in the moment requires mindfulness and focus on the task at hand and perhaps gratefulness for what you’re experiencing in the present. However, God wants futuristic living for the saints, an outlook of expectation.
A Forward Look
Scripture requires a forward look. Paul in Philippians said, “reaching forth unto those things which are before” (3:13) and “we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (3:20). Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33). If we can’t know our beginning or ending, we lose the basis for living like scripture says. An ultimate motivation for Paul was “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
‘Putting on the helmet of salvation’ (Ephesians 6:17) relates closely to last days events. Salvation is complete in the future. If people can’t be sure about most of the details, what can and do they mean? How would we be sure that these uncertain things could be true? This is where it stands in most ways today in eschatology.
Spiritualizing
The fastest growing view of the future is to spiritualize or allegorize the future. People allegorize almost all of the prophetic passages and they take on numerous different possible meanings. This has become not just possible but the preferred take in many places.
Now men spiritualize and allegorize the first few chapters of the Bible and the last book of the Bible. People can make it mean what they want. It’s no wonder people won’t take God’s Word seriously and churches are apathetic. If people can’t really know the beginning and the ending, why care about everything in between?
Cosmology, the Big Bang, and the Creation Description in Isaiah 40:22
Cosmology is not a degree in cosmetics, even though distantly related; it means “the science of the origin and development of the universe.” Kosmos is the Greek word for “world.” All forms of that Greek word are found 187 times in the New Testament, translated, “world.” With this in mind, I ask you to consider Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 (also Is 42:5, 44:24; Jer 10:12, 51:15) :
It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.
Scientists look at space, “the heavens,” and what they see there looks, acts, and interacts like Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 describe. If you start with what you see, the physical universe, you would say that Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 describe it. How did Isaiah know? He didn’t have the information that modern day astronomers and physicists possess. He didn’t own a telescope. However, I will say that he had the information. It was given to him by God, because God stretched out the heavens as a curtain.
Scientists see an effect that is what Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 describe, but with a naturalistic presupposition or bias, the Big Bang as the hypothesis. All the scientists see is the effect. There is no proof a big bang occurred. Before the Big Bang theory, Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 were written. However, supernaturalism answers all the questions, connects all the dots.
The language of “stretcheth out the heavens” in Isaiah 40:22 and 45:12 affirm an expanding universe. It is from a Hebrew term, which was used in tentmaking. If any of you have erected a tent, you know that part of the process is stretching out or expanding outward the tent material. If creation is treated as a hypothesis or theory, there is epistemic support in the beginning of a finite, expanding universe. Concerning the big bang, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cosmic background radiation, Arno Penzias, said:
The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.
I like to compare what we see to walking on to a crime scene. No one but the one who committed the crime knows what happens. Everyone else is looking at the same evidence. No one is neutral. With the science, a creationist still approaches the physical evidence like a scientist.
One illustration I’ve read is a wet car in the drive way. Why is it wet? It’s wet, but the road is dry. The sky is blue. Not only that, but a bucket with a wet sponge sets beside the car on the driveway.
The more evidence we get, the more clues we have, the better or the more likely the explanation of divine creation. It doesn’t get easier to give a naturalistic explanation.
Power Comes from Somewhere
When you turn on your lights or your appliance and open your refrigerator and see it working, you know that power comes from somewhere. It didn’t just happen. Your heart is beating, the power for that comes from somewhere. You look up and see a burning sun. The power for that sun comes from somewhere. Nuclear, gravitational, and chemical energy all come from someplace. They have their start somewhere.
We all need power. Our body is burning energy, our brains are using it, our heart needs it, and every other creature does too. It’s there. People are but dust. Power holds this dust together in a complex and functioning form.
The Big Bang Theory supposedly explains the origin of matter, but the explosion could not have occurred without energy. Senior writer and editor of Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover, wrote on June 6, 2019:
The Big Bang theory . . . . pioneered 50 years before Hawking’s lecture by the Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who later served as president of the Vatican’s academy of sciences — rewinds the expansion of the universe back to a hot, dense bundle of energy. But where did the initial energy come from?
The Big Bang theory had other problems. Physicists understood that an expanding bundle of energy would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge, smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe.
Men guess, but they don’t have an answer to the origin of energy or power.
The English word “power” is found 272 times in the King James Version. The first time the English word appears, it is koah, and it refers to God’s strength, ability, might, and force. That Hebrew word is used 126 times. The first is used of God in Exodus 15:6, “Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.” Another one is Exodus 32:11, “And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?” A lot of the usages of koah are like that one.
Another Hebrew word translated power in 1 Chronicles 29:11 is gebera, the verse reading: “Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all.” That word is used 61 times in the Old Testament with another example, Psalm 21:13, “Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.”
The New Testament uses mainly two Greek words, which are translated “power” in the King James Version. Matthew 6:13 reads:
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
“Power” here comes from dunamis. The English “dynamite” comes from dunamis, which BDAG, the foremost Greek New Testament lexicon, says means:
potential for functioning in some way, power, might, strength, force, capability
That Greek word is used 120 times in the New Testament. The very next usage of “power” in the New Testament is in Matthew 9:6:
But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.
1. a state of control over something, freedom of choice, right2. potential or resource to command, control, or govern, capability, might, power
1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. 2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
James 4:12, There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?Matthew 10:28, And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
The Fine-Tuning Argument, to be abbreviated by FTA in what follows, claims that the present Universe (including the laws that govern it and the initial conditions from which it has evolved) permits life only because these laws and conditions take a very special form, small changes in which would make life impossible.
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