Building on the Foundation

  If you perform a search on BlueLetterBible.org, you’ll find that God’s Word mentions the words “seven” or “seventh” nearly 600 times! Naturally, we don’t have time or space to cover each of those mentions today. Nevertheless, the number 7 remains one of the most important and most fascinating numbers in Scripture. As we’ve observed several times before, there’s no filler in God’s Word. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). If God tells us a number, He has good reasons for doing so. Whoever neglects numbers is missing out on an amazing part of Scripture. So what is God telling us through the number 7? It actually portrays several things in Scripture, and we find them at the very beginning, at Creation. The number 7 pictures completeness, for God completed His creation in seven days: “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on t...

Man has a long and lugubrious track record of failure. Ever since Adam obeyed the voice of his wife Eve, man has been on a steady downward trend that is swiftly headed for great disaster. If we look at the back of the book, it’s pretty easy to see how things end,  which can either bring a lot of anxiety and worry or a sense of peace depending on how you handle it and whether you are one of Satan's kids, or one of God’s children. Our track record of failure brings us little comfort when it comes time to select another leader of the so-called free world. Every four years we get the joy of an extra helping of anxiety delivered by our media and politicians that pairs nicely with a glass of a 6,000-year-old bottle of apocalypse.  We are at a place in human history where men no longer seek after God, but instead seek after what they or some other man can do to save them and care for them. The government is god to these people, with the medical profession its healing right hand. Scie...

The morality of man is a hard thing to come to terms with. Or shall I say the lack of morality, because our base nature is very lacking in morality. We are all wandering around doing what is right in our own eyes, more or less, and very few of the people in the world adhere to the proper standard. When we step back and look at things, the standard we are all aiming for goes beyond simple morality since morality is usually nothing more than not doing something. As Christians, our most basic pattern of morality is the Ten Commandments, and of those ten, only two tell us to do something. Only one of those two gives us a pattern of action, the other is simply remembering to do nothing.  Ninety percent of our moral code, in other words, is what not to do. Of course, if we read the rest of the Bible we find that there are a lot of things that we should be doing, especially where walking as Christ walked is concerned, but walking as Christ walked is not simple morals. Jesus was the most m...