Words From Jesus Christ

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.

Anyone who hears and obeys these teachings of mine is like a wise person who builds a house on solid rock.

Anyone who hears my teachings and doesn’t obey them is like a foolish person who builds a house on sand.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.

If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

Don’t use the Lord’s name to make a promise unless you are planning to keep it.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Do Not Let The Prophets Deceive You

Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you.
They fill you with false hopes.
They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.
Do not let the prophets among you deceive you.
Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.
They are prophesying lies to you in my name.
I have not sent them.
(Jeremiah, The Bible)

When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people enquire of their God?
(Isaiah, The Bible)

Did God Once Have A Wife?

You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God.
But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: there is only one of Him.
He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many.
Or so we like to believe.
Archaeological evidence including inscriptions, figurines and ancient texts as well as details in the Bible, indicate not just that he was one of several worshipped in ancient Israel, but that he was also coupled with a goddess.
She was worshipped alongside him in his temple in Jerusalem.
Yahweh, the God we have come to know, had to see off a number of competitors to achieve his position as the one and only God of the ancient Israelites.
The biblical texts name many of them: El, Baal, Molek, Asherah.
Despite Yahweh’s assertion in the Ten Commandments that ‘you shall have no other gods before me’, it appears these gods were worshipped alongside him, and the Bible acknowledges this.
Far more significant is the Bible’s admission that the goddess Asherah was worshipped in Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem.
In the Book of Kings, we’re told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her.
In fact, although the Bible condemns all of these practices, the biblical texts suggest that goddess worship was a thriving feature of high-status religion in Jerusalem.
What, then, was her relationship to Yahweh?
Yahweh is often called ‘El’ in the Bible and he performs many of the same roles.
Despite numerous references to Asherah worship in the Bible, there wasn’t enough evidence to link her explicitly with the high god of ancient Israel, Yahweh.
Until, that is, the discovery of a remarkable ceramic inscription in the Sinai Desert.
Dating to about the 8th Century BC, the inscription is a petition for a blessing.
Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from ‘Yahweh and his Asherah’.
Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair.
Similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.

Marriage Is Defined Around One Man And One Woman

Homosexual couples should not be allowed to use churches for civil partnership ceremonies.
The Bible teaches that marriage is defined around one man and one woman.
The church was established to preach the words of the Bible and the words of God.
Homosexuals demand respect for their choices but people who wish to adhere to biblical principles are seen as bigots.
You can’t have gay couples getting married in a church with a religion which believes homosexuality to be sinful.
It’s like walking into a mosque eating a bacon sandwich.

Do Angels Sing?

Following astronomical clues in the gospels, the date of the crucifixion has been calculated most probably as April 3 in AD 33.
According to Isaac Newton’s calculation, it happened on April 23, AD 34.

Despite the tale of three wise men paying homage to baby Jesus, the Bible never gives a number.
Matthew’s gospel refers to merely ‘wise men’.

There is no reference to angels singing anywhere in the Bible.

Many theologians estimate that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th but sometime in September between 6 BC and 30 AD.

Astronomers believe the star of Bethlehem, which guided the wise men to Jesus, may have been a comet or the planet Uranus.

Whatever We Sow We Will Also Reap

Surely God would not have created such a being as man to exist only for a day.
No, man was made for immortality.

Blessed are those who endure when they are tested.
When they pass the test, they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

Remember, each of us will stand personally before the judgement seat of God.

In God’s eyes, the greatest heroes of faith are not those who achieve prosperity, success, and power in this life, but those who treat this life as a temporary assignment and serve faithfully expecting their promised reward in eternity.

What we do affects others.
Kindness brings happiness to other people,
While selfishness will result in misery and pain.
The Bible wisely says that whatever we sow we will also reap.

The Bible was not given to increase our knowledge but to change our lives.

The People Of Israel

The Genesis account of Abraham and his immediate descendants may indicate that there were three main waves of early Hebrew settlement in Canaan, the modern Israel.
One was associated with Abraham and Hebron and took place in about 1850BC.
A second wave of immigration was linked with Abraham’s grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel (‘may God show his strength’).
He settled in Shechem, which is now the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank.
The Bible tells us that Jacob’s sons, who became the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, emigrated to Egypt during a severe famine in Canaan.
The third wave of Hebrew settlement occurred in about 1200BC when tribes who claimed to be descendants of Abraham, arrived in Canaan from Egypt.
They said that they had been enslaved by the Egyptians but had been liberated by a deity called Yahweh, who was the God of their leader Moses.
After they had forced their way into Canaan, they allied themselves with the Hebrews there and became known as the people of Israel.
The Bible makes it clear that the people we know as the ancient Israelites were a confederation of various ethnic groups, bound principally together by their loyalty to Yahweh, The God of Moses.
The biblical account was written down centuries later, however, in about the eighth century BC, though it certainly drew on earlier narrative sources.

The Bible Gives A true Account Of The World

The biblical authors were dealing with the same issues that confront us – issues of faith and understanding that do not fade in a thousand years or in ten thousand.
Who is God?
What kind of world has God made?
Who are we, human spirits and souls and bodies, who find ourselves in this world?
What are the limits of our existence and our power,
And what lies beyond them?
Why is suffering a part of our lives?
Why does this world not measure up to the best that we might hope of it?
And why does it give us so much more than we could have asked?
The mysteries of our existence remain with us.

The Christian claim about the scriptures is that in them we hear the word of God.
That means that, like all inspired works, the Bible gives a true account of the world.
It need not be scientifically true, in detail, nor even historically accurate.
But it must be true in the larger sense that it calls to our attention those things which are most significant in our universe and places them in a meaningful perspective.
No matter how badly we interpret it or how little we expect of it, it will not lose the ability to break through to the mind and spirit of our age, because truth cannot be kept quiet forever.
The Bible gives a fuller and truer perspective than that of any other single work.

The Church Is Subject To The Bible

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

The Christian community is dependent on the Bible for its life and integrity.
Once Christians have accepted the Bible as embodying the word of God – the message that lies at the heart of our existence as Christians – from then onward the Bible has a certain authority over against the church.
The church must interpret the Bible so that the Bible will have a living voice in each age, but the church must not use the process of interpretation merely to justify what the church itself happens to be.
The church, as the living community of faith, will always go on changing and developing, but not every change and development will be good.
A church that breaks radically with its scriptural foundations will no longer be a community of Christian faith but something else.
The church is subject to the Bible, just as the Bible is dependent on the church.
Without the Bible, the church can only degenerate into something no thoughtful person would care to be associated with.

Absolute Authority Belongs To God Alone

The authority of The Bible is an earthly authority and therefore cannot be absolute.
Absolute authority belongs to God alone.
And even when speaking through scriptures, God does so in a way limited by the very nature of the written word and the created world within which it exists.
For us as Christians, The Bible is only one of the authorities that give us guidance.
Under God, it is coordinate with the church, whose living voice acts as the practical authority for Christians most of the time.
The great significance of the Bible is that it stands outside the present in which the church and the individual Christian live.
The Bible, because it stands outside our present, always bears witness against us, showing that we are not all that we might be or that God has prepared for us to be.
The authority of the Bible discloses itself in making us dissatisfied, in offering us new perspectives, in giving us the hope of a better fulfilment of God’s will for our humanity.

The words of scripture come to us from ages past and recount God’s dealings with people whose experience is likely to have been worlds away from ours.
Yet the very remoteness of scripture opens our eyes to see that God may deal with humanity in many ways other than the ones we ourselves have encountered.
There is a kind of dangerous contentment with the present, or at least a willingness to stay caught in it, that is the greatest possible barrier to our becoming what God intends for us.