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What Do You Mean, "Last Days?"

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  If I were to guess your beliefs, I would guess you probably believe that we are living in the last days, and that Jesus Christ will return to this earth sometime in the next few decades, if not within just a few years. I, too, am inclined to believe this, and most readers of this blog probably are as well. For most of my life, I’ve heard that we are living in the last days, and that Jesus Christ’s return is imminent. Most of you probably have as well. This has been proclaimed for many decades, if not centuries. And what about the apostles who lived and died around 2,000 years ago? Men like Peter, Paul, John, and others? Didn’t they also believe that Christ’s return was imminent, within their own lifetimes? It’s often asserted that they did, and those who say so can point to several Scriptures as support. For example, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come...
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The Gospel According to Job

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  In your English Bible, you’ll probably find that the Book of Matthew is titled “The Gospel According to Matthew”; Mark, “The Gospel According to Mark”; and likewise for Luke and John. The Four Gospels, as we often call them, tell the story of Jesus Christ’s ministry, miracles, teachings, death, and resurrection. But the gospel begins elsewhere. Whenever Jesus or His apostles preached the gospel, the good news of salvation, they preached from the so-called “Old Testament,” the only Scriptures that existed then. Jesus began His ministry by reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18; quoting Isa. 61:1). So the gospel begins in the Old Testament. The Book of Hebrews declares that even the Israelites under Moses heard the go...
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A Holy Kiss

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  David and Jonathan We have a little problem with the Bible.   How do we decide when a command that is given is based on culture and when it is a command we still have to follow? That question in itself supposes that if a command is based on the culture in which it was given, then it no longer applies to us at all. Cultural context is by far the most common reason that people think certain things no longer apply or were never meant for us.  All of the New Testament commands for women, for example, were conveniently given based on their culture alone and therefore were not meant for anyone but those people.  Women today are therefore under no restraints at all and are free to be as rebellious as they desire to be, simply because that culture was one in which Paul needed to give those instructions, but ours is not.   I jest, of course, but it does put the question I asked in a different light, and perhaps reveals the true question at the heart of the issue ...
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