Archive for the ‘Bible’ Category

I love the book of Revelation with all its teachings, prophecies and insights into the mind of The Lord, but I also love that it is full of mystery and intrigue. In Revelation chapter four we read in verse four about twenty-four elders sitting round the throne of The Lord. Every time I read this I pause and wonder who the 24 elders are. So to get a hint of who these elders may be, we want to find another reference to the number twenty-four in the bible. In the Old Testament we find references of twenty-four concerning time periods, but when the number relates to people, it is in relation to David dividing the priestly duties by separating and sectioning the time periods of their duties into twenty-four courses.

So now we can ascertain that these elders may have something to do with the priesthood. If this was the only reference to them in Revelation, that would be a very weak link indeed, but the next chapter gives us more insights on who these elders represent. In Revelation chapter five verses nine and ten we find them falling down before the lamb and singing a new song. In this song, they specifically sing to the one that is worthy to open the book, someone who was slain and was resurrected and redeemed them by His blood. By now, the evidence shows us they are singing to Christ. If we look further, in the next verse we see that they sing something specific to Him, they sing their appreciation to Christ for making them kings and priests (ah hah, a clue!). We have already learned that there are only three times in the bible that people are referred to as being a king and a priest in the scriptures; Melchizedek in Genesis, Christ our savior and the body of Christ, the church. Therefore it seems pretty plain to me that the twenty-four elders represent the church in heaven at this time.

Let’s take it a little further, though.

Still looking in Revelation chapter five, we see in the first few verses, that John was shown a scroll written on both sides and sealed and he wept because we read this in Revelation 5:3-4 And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon. And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. (KJV)

Notice what it said? “and no man in heaven, nor in earth, nor under the earth…” This indicates there are people populating heaven at this time…not just one person, who is Christ, but many people…I find that interesting. Of course Christ is the only man worthy of opening the sealed scroll. OK, who could these people be? I think we are shown additional clues who they may be in the following chapter, for we find as Christ opens each one of the seals, something happens. Let’s look at what happens when he opens the first seal.

Revelation 6:1-2 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. (KJV)

Many commentators as well as many casual readers of Revelation seem to think this appearance of a rider on a white horse is an appearance of Christ and they base it upon the fact the rider is riding a white horse and because he has a crown and a bow. One thing I noticed immediately that they appear to ignore is Christ is the one opening the seal. Could He be opening the seal and also be the rider shown when the seal is opened? Yes, it could be possible, but let’s look at the rider in context. The rider is going forth conquering…that in itself is OK, but let’s look at his buddies. When Christ opens the other seals, the riders that we are shown each have different purposes for the inhabitants of the earth, none of them too pleasant for we have war, destruction, famine and pestilence…which one of these horsemen is Christ suppose to be again?

If it’s not Christ, then who is this first rider? The first thing we find is the rider is riding a white horse, which normally signifies purity. I guess that’s where the mistake comes in misidentifying this horseman. He also has a bow that is an indication of a covenant; similar to the bow (rainbow) that God gave to Noah as a covenant to never destroy the earth again through a flood. We read also that our horseman is wearing a crown, demonstrating prominence and power. So, standing back and looking at the evidence, we find a horseman that initially appears Christ-like with a covenant and a position of power, but a horseman that is part of a quartet of death and destruction. With these identifiers spread before us, I believe that this horseman is most likely the Anti-Christ (Greek meanings include deceiver or ‘in place of’).

OK, if this is the Anti-Christ, then we know that one of the prerequisites of the appearance of the Anti-Christ is the rapture of the church. Therefore, I believe the men mentioned inhabiting heaven by John in Revelation chapter five are saint of the raptured church. This is a Revelation to me (pardon the pun…I couldn’t help it), and I hope you find this link to the raptured church followed by the Anti-Christ wreaking havoc on the earth interesting, also.

Christ does show up in Revelation 19 triumphantly riding a white horse, but when you compare the horses and the riders from Revelation 6 and Revelation 19, the differences between the two are night and day!

Jim Bussell 3-28-21

The concept of “irreducible complexity” is having something the least complex it can be and still work.

Take a mousetrap; there are five basic components, if it is missing any one of these five parts, it simply doesn’t work…it was designed and engineered around these five parts. You can go up in complexity, for instance, you could add paint for color, add a sensor that would notify you when the little rodent came to its end and even a camera that would record it’s grizzly execution…but unless you’re a sadist, these additional parts are not necessary. However, if you remove any of the basic five pieces of the trap and attempt to use it, you will find it simply will not work.

OK, the mousetrap is a basic example of human design, but let’s climb up a few more rungs of the complexity ladder. Another example of irreducible complexity would be the mammalian eye. Once again, we have five basic components1, a cornea, pupil, iris, lens and retina. If any one of these components is missing it doesn’t work. This means that the eye couldn’t have progressed along an ‘evolutionary’ assembly line where you see a little, then a little better, then a little better, until it progressed to our eye…if any one of these components is missing, it simply doesn’t work…you would be blind and there is no evolutionary advantage that could be gained by being blind for eons until the eye developed sight…evolution makes no sense here…that means the eye was developed and engineered from the beginning as a unit around these five major parts, just as the mousetrap is manufactured as a working unit.

Let’s then look down at the micro level at a single cell bacterium. This single cell organism has a flagellum2 tail that propels it by turning in a corkscrew manner, operated by a motor comprised of forty different components. If any one of these forty parts of this motor are missing, it simply doesn’t work. This one example is simply mind-boggling to me. We have a single celled organism, specializing as a bacterium, with its propulsion being provided by a variable speed electrical motor powered by sub-atomic protons and it sounds more science-fiction than fact.

Why is that? We humans are barely at the level where we can begin to look at and understand the micro world, much less replicate it…that’s why to most of us it reads as science fiction. Everywhere we look from the macro to the micro, from the large to the small, we see design everywhere and it drives some in the scientific community bonkers to see their theories of Darwinism lying in tatters. Evolutionary progression cannot explain how this can be…only design…who was, and is, the designer? The Creator of everything, The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Our Lord, Jehovah Jireh.

This is only a couple of examples from a pool of tens of thousands that could be looked at and they all explode the theory of evolution to pieces and prove that everything that exists is digital and by design.

1 http://www.tedmontgomery.com/the_eye/

2 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v325/n6105/abs/325637a0.html

If we stop and think about the question, we realize that the bible from the opening passages to the closing passages deal with Satan’s attempts to screw up God’s plan that he has laid out in advance, and it is The Great Deceiver’s intention to prove that he is as great and as powerful as The Lord, as we read in Isaiah 14:12-14 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (KJV). We could probably spend years listing all the events through history that has Satan’s signature and seal stamped on them. I have just covered a couple of seemingly obvious one to me.

There have been several ways that Satan has tried to thwart the plan of God throughout history, but what immediately came to mind when I thought about this subject was one way that Satan has tried to thwart the plan of God that is still continuing to this day. The way I am referring to is to sow derision, doubt and conflict within the Body of Christ.

All the different groups within the religious body called Christianity, for the most part, are separated by seemingly insignificant differences. These differences can find their beginnings in the first years of The Way*1, as the group of people that followed the teachings of The Christ were called in the book of Acts. Satan was able to insert false prophets and sow doubt and deception within the Christian movement almost from the beginning. Small, subtle changes here and there, a doubt about the real meaning behind this passage or that passage and Satan’s ability to convince scholars and teachers that taking passages out of context is OK all resulted in the beginnings of the division of the Body of Christ. He was also very successful in his campaign to deceive the early church fathers into questioning the meaning of the scriptures, which allowed them to start creating their own interpretations of the Word, which resulted in a more palatable form of religion for the Holy Roman Empire. The disgust with the end product of the religious/political superpower that it morphed into resulted in the reformation movement*2. Part of the problem that the reformation movement left us with is many of the reformed protestant religious entities that formed didn’t take the reformation far enough, which has resulted in many of our ‘siblings’ in the Body of Christ still firmly believe in allegorizing the scripture, just as they did in the fourth century to make the lessons and commandments of the Word of Our Lord easier to accept and therefore a little less rigid, and a lot less ‘black and white’. Therefore many of our brethren teach traditional interpretation of the word instead of what the scripture really says. To do this effectively, they have to do several things.

First, the fact that the holy scriptures from Genesis to Revelation is a single, cohesive message system with a beautiful woven tapestry of meaning and purpose about God, his peoples and his Son has to be ignored and tossed out the window is the first and most important thing that must be done. Once this is accomplished, the rest becomes easy. After they destroy the cohesiveness of Our Lords message, it becomes easier to take and chop the word of Our Lord up into individual sections that don’t relate to each other significantly or not at all to be able to build the traditions and religious philosophy the the church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people. This mindset and philosophy is referred to as replacement theology*3 and too many of our brethren teach this doctrine weekly from their pulpits as gospel.

Looking at this particular religious philosophy from a microscopic perspective, or even a planar perspective, it may seem to pass muster, but if you back up and get above it look at it from a distance you can see clearly that they have taken the flowing structure of the Word and chopped and cut and ripped the beautiful tapestry of the scriptures into pieces and then in a sordid attempt to try and justify their view they have taken the portions and blindly reassemble them into some sort of ugly jigsaw puzzle that they have hammered and taped back together into an non-fitting picture that more resembles a Jackson Pollack painting than a smooth flowing message system that easily fits and continues from end to end, the way the Holy Spirit wrote it and the way the Creator of All Things intended. By doing this, these unknowing minions of Satan have created great tears and gaps in the message of Our Lord that keep getting larger over time. These chasms that they have opened up allow false teachings, ideas and deceptions to enter into the scriptures and drive ever-widening wedges between those different groups that cling onto their own particular ideas or viewpoints that has been torn from the flowing structure of the Word. This could be compared to wounds in our skin that allows harmful germs and bacteria which can cause great harm if left open and untreated. We as the Body of Christ are much like extremely dysfunctional siblings that are constantly fighting and squabbling over minor issues and irrelevant things that, for the most part, have been caused by the attempts to destroy the intricate tapestry of the scriptures, to the point that most of our energies are absorbed in this in-fighting instead of taking the Word to the lost of the world. This has to be one of Satan’s more successful campaigns in his plan to thwart the plan of Our Lord.

While I was proofing what I had written above, another thought struck me. Another one of Satan’s great successes in his attempt to thwart the plan of God was his successful ability to control and deceive the Jewish leadership throughout the period of the Old Testament by causing them to doubt and ignore part of their own Torah through the lack of diligence in following the commandments of the Lord to read the Torah at certain times of the year while examining other parts of the Torah through a microscope (sound familiar?). This is easily inferred as we read the historical records of Israel and the prophets. I’m sure Satan went to far greater lengths than that, probably through deception and centuries of whispering in their ears to create doubt that God really doesn’t mean this and that. Satan really did some impressive work here; the leadership completely ignored Daniel chapter nine as if it never existed, because it told them precisely what day to expect the Messiah’s entry into Jerusalem and on the day that Gabriel gave to Daniel five hundred years earlier for all to see and hear, instead of welcoming their king, they grabbed him and treated him as a heretic and a criminal.

I’m going to digress here for a moment for I think the link between Daniel and the birth of The Christ is extremely cool and it could possibly be a link that Satan missed. As a child, knowing the story of Christ’s birth, I always wondered who these guys called the Magi were. All anyone could say was they were wise men from the east. Historical research indicates that the Magi were members of the Medeo-Persian Priesthood*4 and we find that Daniel*5 was chief of the Magi according to Daniel chapter 4. Daniel 4:9 “Belteshazzar*5, chief of the magicians, because I know that the Spirit of the Holy God [is] in you, and no secret troubles you, explain to me the visions of my dream that I have seen, and its interpretation. (NKJV) This scripture tells us Daniel held this office over these magicians and this is an indicator that creates a link to the appearance of the Magi in the gospels and apparently it is one of those events where the bible implies a Messianic prophecy that didn’t make it out of the Holy Spirit’s editing room for us to read, though Daniel seemingly knew the specifics of it and it seems he taught his dedicated followers to pass on this prophecy down through the centuries to their successors*6. So what happens? The fact that five hundred years later this imposing procession of important foreigners suddenly shows up at Herod’s doorstep in Jerusalem looking for the new born king of God’s chosen people, means they had to be there following some precise instructions, and the fact they were descendants of the Magi priesthood that was under the leadership of Daniel the prophet several centuries earlier says linkage to me. Where am I going with this? My personal opinion is that Satan read the Holy Word and knows every prophecy, every covenant, every commandment and every screw-up of the Israelites in there. My thought is that this prophecy that guided Daniel to instruct the Magi to pass the prophecy down through their ranks from generation to generation was missed by Satan, causing him to ignore these pagan priests that are conveying the message of the expectation of a Jewish Messiah appearing under certain miraculous conditions to their following successions of priests. OK, if that’s true, why was it left out? We could throw out conjectures all day, but I believe this visit by the Magi gives us an indication, on a much smaller scale, of what celebrations should have been taking place in Israel if the Jews had known to look for the Messiah, is one possibility. Another possibility is their visit was an end-run around Satan’s deception campaign, which in part, was designed to prevent such an announcement to be heralded, but the Magi succeeded at announcing to the Jewish leadership that the Messiah and king was among them. Or maybe it’s a combination of the two thoughts. Regardless whatever could have happened, the Jewish leadership were, once again, asleep at the wheel and ignored this event, which is only one of the most important events this creation has ever witnessed.

Because Christ as the Messiah was rejected by the nation of Israel, The Lord turned his back on them as prophesied throughout the Torah, (though Hosea’s is my favorite) which resulted in the catastrophe in 70 AD and the diaspora*7 of the Jews.

I have a non-traditional view of the scripture (to put it kindly, according to some). In my mind’s eye, I see God discussing with the others in the Trinity over steaming cups of nectar, his script for our universe before zapping us into existence. We all know what happened…Satan immediately threw a wrench into the works, casing the Lord to rewrite the script of our complicated sim game*8, so to speak. I look for patterns and, I guess conspiracies and one pattern that I see is; after the Jews turned chicken and refused to invade Canaan the first time, The Lord sent them wandering for thirty eight years before they were allowed to occupy the land. Fast-forward several hundred years and we have the Jewish nation reject God again by rejecting His Son. Thirty eight years later, the Romans destroyed the temple and massacred over a million Jews in the process of the siege and occupation of Jerusalem. I can’t help but wonder if this was simply a modified script from the original one, one where possibly the Jews accepted him and thirty eight years later, the chosen people, with Christ as their King, started the rule of the earth from Zion. Just as they had captured and occupied the promised land so many years ago.

In hindsight, we can look back and think, “what dorks, these guys had these prophecies about the Messiah, mainly the one from Daniel chapter nine, right there in front of them and they ignored it and see what it got them.”. Before we get all holier-than-thou, we need to look at ourselves. Heck, forget religion, here in America, our leaders ignore and reject our own constitution, they reject moral judgments and teachings, much less the teaching of the scriptures and we’ve only had a couple hundred years to do it in. At least Israel seemed to hold it together longer than that.

God Bless, Jim

*1 Acts 9:2 and Acts 19:9, 23

*2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation

*3http://www.gotquestions.org/replacement-theology.html

*4http://ldolphin.org/magi.html

*5 Belteshazzar was Daniel’s Persian name

*6 Numbers 24:17 tells of a star in prophecy, but if you read it in context, I don’t see the link to Christ’s birth…

*7http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora

*8 I personally think we are some sort of giant SIM game where our reality is all smoke and mirrors and the real reality is what we refer to as the ‘spirit world’. The apostle Paul supports that view, by the way in Ephesians 6:12

Is space basically empty? When I was going to school we were taught that space was empty, but in the last few decades the concept of the universe being full of dark matter has been bandied about. Why? There is simply too much stuff going on, energy-wise, in our universe for the measurable matter to account for, mathematics and physics have shown.

In fact when they crunch the numbers, it seems they are missing a little matter…no?…more? OK, they are missing some matter…no?…even more? OK, they are missing almost 90% of the matter of the universe and they can’t find it, it seems…it apparently is hiding somewhere, so they came up with the tag of ‘dark matter’. One crazy example of this concept is something called ‘zero point energy’.

We learned about thermodynamics in school (whether we realize it or not), that is the concept that matter gives off heat to the background creating energy in exchange. If there is no potential difference in temperature between an object and the background, no work can be performed. The temperature of space is very, very cold while matter that resides within the universe has different levels of heat that they give off to the ’empty’ space background. That cold temperature is called ‘absolute zero’. That is as cold as you can get…you can’t get any colder. When matter gets as cold as the background there is a term for that and it is called heat death. At this point science tells us that there is no exchange of energy…matter is as dead as it can get. That means everything we know stops…everything ceases being all movement ceases, even down to the sub-atomic particles. Kind of sad to think about, isn’t it?

However, that isn’t the end to the story…remember the dark matter, as they call it? Science has found out that even when the background of space is at absolute zero, there is an unexplainably massive amount of energy stored within that ’empty space’. Science can’t explain where it comes from, but they have realized that this zero point energy is a constant source of energy at the sub-atomic level that keeps the electron in their orbits. This energy somehow keeps replenishing it’s self from outside the universe…ooohh creepy…or it simply means that the Creator is still at work…I’ll take the latter explanation, I think. If it weren’t for the zero-point energy replenishment, we or nothing else would be here for the atomic structure of life would destroy itself…empty space…I don’t think so, it seems someone is still holding it all together.

Colossians 1:16-17 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. (NKJV)

There are a few deep space telescopes that can look at very distant objects in our universe, including thousands upon thousands of galaxies of all different sorts. If we choose to look at just spiral galaxies we notice that despite how far away they are, the arms seem to be extended about the same because of the gravitational and centrifugal effects. What is intriguing about that is because of the limitation of the speed of light, the ones we see far away are snapshots of the galaxy long ago in the past, where the ones relatively close are glimpses of only a few years past. In other words, the light we see from a galaxy far, far away left that galaxy millions of years ago, meaning what we are seeing from far away galaxies is a potentially millions of year old snapshot of that particular galaxy. While the photo of Andromeda galaxy is only a few years old. When you compare the photos of the near and the far galaxies you notice that the arms are extended about the same regardless of distance away from us. This intrigues me because using the current theory of the age of the universe, that should not be so…the far distant ones are pictures of spiral galaxies taken millennia ago and the arms should be less well developed that the closer ones, or not developed at all. So what does that mean to us? What that means is that all of creation including all portions the universe, including the galaxies, were created at the same time. For them to be created at the same time denotes creation and the perfect candidate for that is God.

God Bless, Jim

I was sure that when I began the research for this that I would conclude that Paul had an eye malady as many bible scholars seems to think…but after looking at several passages and after researching several different sites and praying, I don’t think that is what it was. Let’s start attempting to unravel this question by visiting the passage where the term ‘thorn in the flesh’ came from.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10 Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me—to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (NASB)

At first I just read this and then I decided to look at the verse seven a little closer. I examined it with the interlinear tool at Blue Letter Bible and this passage indicates that the thorn in his flesh was an angel of Satan…I’m not making it up, that’s what it says. OK, what does it mean? The word messenger seems to always refer to a human being or angel or Christ. By contrast, thorns are seen continually in scripture, as a sign of those who are against Israel, or of Satan. I think it means what it says, that his thorn in the flesh was an angel of Satan.

Could Paul have been suffering from demon possession with The Lord’s permission? At first I thought, yes he could have. If we read 1 Samuel 16:14 we learn that The Lord became fed up with Saul and sent an evil spirit to trouble him. The Lord allows evil spirits to possess people but, after asking the Holy Spirit for guidance on this, praying about it and sleeping on it, I feel demon possession is highly unlikely. However, in a Job-like manner, God could have allowed an angel of Satan to torment, or maltreat Paul and to cause physical problems that manifested themselves outwardly. Could the angel of Satan have been anything else? Yes, instead of ‘agents’ of Satan causing a thorn in the flesh, it could have been ‘agents’ of Satan attempting to thwart Paul’s efforts at spreading the word, by trying to throw roadblocks in his way because as Paul became more effective at bringing God’s message to the people and his reputation became better known, he increasingly was becoming more and more of an extreme irritant to Satan and his design to thwart The Lord’s plan. Paul himself said he survived, beatings and stonings and imprisonment and three shipwrecks in his journeys spreading the word and even so, Paul became one of The Lords most effective tool at spreading the word to the Jews and the Gentiles that the early church had ever known and I’m sure Satan would have crushed Paul like a bug if God had allowed him to.

Now let’s look at another view, from the letter to the Galatians.

Galatians 4:13-15 You know that because of physical infirmity I preached the gospel to you at the first.  And my trial which was in my flesh you did not despise or reject, but you received me as an angel of God, [even] as Christ Jesus. What then was the blessing you [enjoyed]? For I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your own eyes and given them to me. (NKJV)

OK, here, it seems he was suffering from a physical malady that was evident to those he was preaching to in Galatia, as we find out from this letter he wrote at a later date after they started slipping back to the old ways of Judaism. Dr. Chuck Missler seems to think it was eye problems that were a carry-over from the blindness Christ caused him to have (which is a type of the blindness He pronounced upon Israel that also is a temporary thing). That is a logical assumption except for one issue; if we look back at 2 Corinthians 12:7 it says it was a messenger from Satan sent to torment him. The blindness came from God, not ‘a messenger of Satan, and the two causalities don’t mingle, so I don’t believe Paul would have confused eye problems relating to the blindness caused by Our Lord as having come from Satan.

At this point, I believe God was allowing Satan, in a Job-like manner, to harass Paul in ways that manifested itself by causing outward signs of some aberrant physical condition to a limited extent, and to also, at the same time, throw roadblocks in his way in the manner of delays, shipwrecks, beatings, stonings and imprisonment because of The Lord’s faith in His servant. Paul besought The Lord to remove this burden from him three times, just as Christ was beseeching His Father three time to rid Him of His burden in the Garden. The Lord chose not to heal this ‘thorn’ in Paul’s side, possibly for the reason so that Paul would take the burden and use it as a tool to aid him in his ministries, which he did.

How is this principle of Paul’s thorn in his flesh applicable to me today? Paul was a sinner, but he was a very effective sinner that turned trouble into triumph and used the thorn in his flesh to his advantage to show he was still a sinner saved by grace, as we all would be, tempted to be exalted. That is a lesson that I need to work on because I sometimes try to take charge and, as usual, wreck the train, and allow troubles and temptation to be the excuse that they are designed to be, therefore giving my arch foe, Satan an advantage. Oh, you weak, weak man, Jim.

Dear Father, I need your strength, for I have none. I need your light for I exist in darkness, I need your hand to guide me out of the abyss I plunge myself into. Oh, Father save me from myself for I’m a worm on the ground, once again waiting for the carrion of Satan to snatch me up without you. Dear, blessed Father, thank you for the grace and mercy I never have and I never will deserve and I still don’t understand why you rescued me, Lord. Show me how to be like Paul, triumphing in life, while spreading your word, Father. In Christ name, Amen.

God Bless, Jim