A People for His Name

Donald Trump, Asking for Forgiveness, and Matthew 6:9-13

September 18, 2015

A Google search (at 9:50 pm tonight) of “donald trump asking for forgiveness” produced multiple hits:

These articles document that Presidential Candidate Trump appears to have testified publicly that he may have never asked God for the forgiveness of his sins.

Jesus has commanded that people pray for the forgiveness of their sins:

Matthew 6:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. 13 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.

If Candidate Trump has, in fact, never directly asked God for the forgiveness of his sins, may he do so very soon, just as Matthew 6:9-13 instructs all people to do.

In Prayer, Theology

Thirty Times through the Bible!

September 11, 2015

This morning, I finished reading through the Bible in English for this year! In my 25 plus years as a believer, I have now made it through the Bible 30 times (27 times in English, 2 times in Greek, and once in Spanish).

I praise and thank you, Heavenly Father, for giving me the priceless blessing of reading through your Word over and over again!

In Bible reading, Testimony

Joel 3 and the Future of National Israel

September 7, 2015

Especially in our day when many people who name the name of Christ deny that Israel has any future as a nation, we must allow Scripture itself to give us God’s perspective about the ultimate future of the nation of Israel. Joel 3 is one of many passages that plainly show what that future will be.

Divine Judgment against All Nations

The prophet Joel records God’s fixed determination about what He is going to do in the future on behalf of national Israel:

Joe 3:1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,

² I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.

The Lord here promises that there will be a time when He will restore Judah and Jerusalem (Joel 3:1). When He does so, He will also bring all the nations into the valley of Jehoshaphat to judge them for what they have done to His people Israel (Joel 3:2).

Because there has never been either such a restoration of Israel or such a judgment on all the nations in the history of the world, we can say with all confidence that this passage is a divine promise concerning events that are yet future. A closer look at the precise teaching of this passage fully confirms this interpretation.

The Lord specifies that His people who are in view in this passage are His heritage whom the nations have scattered among themselves. It is untenable to see this statement as somehow figuratively speaking about the Church—the nations have never scattered the Church among themselves.

Furthermore, God specifies that this judgment will be on nations who have parted His land (Joel 3:2). The parting of the land in view here refers literally to Israel, and it is impossible to make this teaching about the Church.

God further elaborates the sinfulness of the nations for which He will judge them on that day:

Joe 3:3 And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.

⁴ Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head;

⁵ Because ye have taken my silver and my gold, and have carried into your temples my goodly pleasant things:

⁶ The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from their border.

⁷ Behold, I will raise them out of the place whither ye have sold them, and will return your recompence upon your own head:

⁸ And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off: for the LORD hath spoken it.

Trying to apply these statements to the Church makes no sense; it is clear that God is speaking here about the nation of Israel.

Divine Blessing on the Nation of Israel

Beyond emphatically declaring the certainty of divine judgment in that day on all the nations for what they have done to the nation of Israel, God profoundly highlights how He will bless His people Israel in that day:

Joe 3:16 The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the LORD will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel.

¹⁷ So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.

They will come to know Him as their God who dwells in their midst on His holy mountain (Joel 3:16)! Jerusalem will then be sanctified in a way that it has never been in its entire history (Joel 3:17).

Moreover, God’s blessings on the nation of Israel will abound throughout their land in that day:

Joe 3:18 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of Shittim.

¹⁹ Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because they have shed innocent blood in their land.

²⁰ But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.

²¹ For I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the LORD dwelleth in Zion.

Again, close attention to the precise statements in this passage show that it is untenable to try to make these statements somehow figurative language that applies to the Church.

First, God promises that at this time He will make two nations desolate because they have unjustly killed His people. This is clearly prophecy concerning what will happen to actual geographical locations and not figurative teaching about who knows what.

Second, He promises that Judah and Jerusalem will dwell forever, and ties their doing so to His cleansing their blood that He has not yet cleansed. When the Lord avenges the blood of His people that the nations have wickedly shed, He will pour out the fullness of His blessings on His people, the nation of Israel!

Conclusion

God is not through with the nation of Israel. He has not abandoned them as a nation. He will gloriously restore them to their land and bless them with incomparable blessings that have never been theirs.

Regardless of however many believers may insist emphatically that the nation of Israel has no future, God has purposed that Israel as a nation will have a glorious future ahead of it, and it will be so!

In Exposition, Interpretation, Theology

Cuatro Oraciones por Los Misioneros

September 2, 2015

Te rogamos, oh Señor, que ninguno de nuestro misioneros haga nada malo y que ellos sean hechos perfectos (2 Cor. 13:7, 9).

Oramos por ellos que te sirvan en la plenitud de la bendición de Cristo (Rom. 15:29).

Padre, concédelos que sean prosperados en todas las cosas, y que tengan salud, así como prospera su alma (3 John 2).

Señor, salva a todas las personas que están en los ministerios de nuestros misioneros que no creen en Jesucristo de verdad.

In Prayer, Spanish

Finished all the Duolingo Spanish Lessons!

August 30, 2015

Over the past 8 months, I have been learning more Spanish with the help of the hundreds of free lessons on duolingo.com. Today, I finished the last lesson and earned this award:

I praise God for providing this valuable free resource to help me progress in my Spanish and for the grace to persevere in making it to the end!

In Spanish, Testimony

Why Christians Must Esteem the Lord’s Day above All Other Days

August 24, 2015

Many believers think that Paul teaches that whether a believer esteems the Lord’s Day above other days is a matter of Christian liberty (Rom. 14:5-6). For several key reasons, this is a serious misapplication of Paul’s teaching in Romans 14:5-6.

Divine Consecration of One Day above the Others

In the beginning, the Lord created light and called it “Day” (Gen. 1:3-5a). He so created the universe that “the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5).

Having finished His work of creating all things in six literal 24-hour days, “God . . rested on the seventh day from all His work which God created and made” (Gen. 2:3). He then blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Gen. 2:3). These statements show us that even though God was the one who made all the days, He set apart one day as special above the other days.

Adam, Eve, and all others who were among God’s people prior to the giving of the Mosaic Law would thus have had direct divine activity that would have unmistakably made clear to them that they were to esteem the seventh day above the other days of the week.

Divine Mandate to Esteem One Day above the Others

Through His giving the Decalogue to Moses, God revealed to His people His command that they were to esteem the seventh day above other days:

Exo 20:8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

⁹ Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

¹⁰ But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

¹¹ For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

We should notice that God directly ties His commands concerning the Sabbath day to what He did at creation on and concerning the seventh day. God’s people from this point until the Resurrection of Christ and the birth of the Church on Pentecost had both divine consecration and divine mandate that would direct them unmistakably to esteem one day above the other days of the week.

Divine Possession of One Day above the Others

God raised His Son Jesus Christ from the dead on the first day of the week (Matt. 28:1-8) and gave Him glory so that our faith and hope might be in God (1 Pet. 1:21). Apostolic use of Psalm 118:22 in Acts 4:10-11 shows us that the Psalmist’s statements in Psalm 118 about the day which the Lord hath made are not to be taken generically to apply to every day but specifically are prophetic prediction about the first day of the week when God would raise Christ from the dead and make Him the head stone of the corner! God’s people ever after are to rejoice and be glad on the day the Lord has made—the Lord’s Day!

Furthermore, on Pentecost, God birthed the Church on the first day of the week (Acts 2). In obedience to an apostolic command (1 Cor. 16:2a), His people thereafter assembled to worship Him on the first day of every week (cf. Acts 20:7), including giving offerings for helping meet the pressing needs of His saints (1 Cor. 16:1-4). All these facts show that the first day was a special day for His NT people in many respects.

In providing His climactic revelation to mankind, however, God revealed that the first day of the week was now special to Him in a singular way unlike any other day was—it was “the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10)! The Greek construction used here reveals a crucial truth:

Rev 1:10 I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet,

Rev 1:10 ἐγενόμην ἐν Πνεύματι ἐν τῇ Κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ· καὶ ἤκουσα ὀπίσω μου φωνὴν μεγάλην ὡς σάλπιγγος,

In the expression τῇ Κυριακῇ ἡμέρᾳ (‘the Lord’s Day’), the Holy Spirit inspired the apostle John to use the Greek adjective kuriakos (“belonging to the Lord,” [Shorter Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, 115]) to teach us that the Lord now has possessed this day in a unique way that was and is distinct from all other days.¹ Yes, He created all the days of the week at Creation, but through His work of raising His Son from the dead on the first day and giving Him glory, the Lord took possession of that day in a glorious new way!

The Holy Spirit thus teaches all believers that the first day of the week is the Lord’s Day that He distinctively possesses and that His people are to esteem that day above all the other days of the week. Romans 14:3-5 most definitely does not apply to how a Christian should esteem the Lord’s Day, and Christians must esteem the Lord’s Day above all other days!

¹ I am indebted to my pastor Dr. Mark Minnick for his excellent teaching through which I first learned this glorious truth.

In Biblical Greek, Exposition, Interpretation, Theology

Should Public Christian Worship Include Dancing to the Lord?

August 17, 2015

Some evangelicals use 2 Samuel 6:14 as evidence to assert that many fundamentalists are lacking in their public worship of the Lord. Some even go so far as to imply that fundamentalists try to “put a spin” on such texts about dancing to the Lord in order to resist the supposed force of this record of David’s exuberant and uninhibited worship of the Lord.

For many reasons, 2 Samuel 6:14 is not a text that shows that public Christian worship should include dancing to the Lord.

The passage is not a record of a normative occasion of public Israelite worship. It records what one man did on a once-in-a-lifetime occasion of immense national significance—moving the Ark of the Lord from the home of an individual to Jerusalem to put it in the middle of the Tabernacle of the Lord.
The passage does not provide definitive proof that David’s public worship of the Lord routinely included such dancing because we do not have other unambiguous accounts of David dancing as part of his worshiping the Lord publicly. David does testify elsewhere of the Lord’s turning for him his mourning into dancing (Ps. 30:11), but the passage is not explicit that David is here testifying of his dancing publicly before the Lord in a worship context.
The passage does not include any explicit divine commendation of David for what he did.
The Old Testament does not anywhere record even one other spiritual “giant” of the faith who danced before the Lord as part of his worship of the Lord. Neither Job nor Samuel nor Hezekiah nor Josiah nor Daniel is ever recorded as dancing before the Lord in worshiping him.
The Old Testament does have two references that record commands to worship the Lord with dancing (Ps. 149:3; 150:4), so we must hold that dancing was a proper and necessary part of Israelite worship of God at least in some manner on some occasions. Key passages, however, that record faithful Israelite worship of the Lord on pinnacle occasions of divine worship in Israel’s history make no mention of such dancing (for example, 2 Chronicles 5; 29:20-36; 35:1-19), which suggests that these commands in Psalms 149 and 150 were in some unstated manner of limited scope for specific settings.
The New Testament does not even once record that dancing was a part of Jewish or Christian worship of the Lord. Nor are there any commands or instruction in the NT about dancing as part of proper worship of the Lord.
Biblical passages that reveal information about heavenly worship never mention dancing as a part of the worship of heaven.

Based on these points, it is illegitimate for evangelicals to assert that fundamentalists are willfully resisting unmistakably clear implications of 2 Samuel 6:14 as a text that shows that faithful worshipers of the Lord should dance before Him when they worship Him publicly.

In Interpretation, Theology

Five Things God Will Not Make New in the New Heavens and the New Earth

August 9, 2015

A glorious day is coming in the new heavens and the new earth when God will have made “all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Based on what other Scripture passages say, however, we know that there are five things that God will not make new:

God will not make new the serpent, which will still eat dust (Gen. 3:14; Micah 7:17) in the Millennium (Isa. 65:25). Whether the serpent will be made new in the new heaven and the new earth is unknown because Scripture does not provide any revelation about animals in the new heaven and the new earth.
God will not make new all the unredeemed humans of all the ages who failed to repent of their sins and believe in Him. They will all perish eternally in the lake of fire (Rev. 20:15).
God will not make new the seas that He created as good (Gen. 1:10). In fact, there will be no sea in the new earth (Rev. 21:1), which proves that there will not be a “restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21) without any exceptions.
God will not make new the lake of fire, which He prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41).
God will not make new Satan and his demons who have sinned against God. They will never be renewed to their unfallen state (cf. Ezek. 28:15). They will be punished eternally in the lake of fire (Matt. 25:41; Rev. 20:10).

Scripture, therefore, does not teach that God will make all things without any exceptions new.

In Interpretation, Theology

An Excellent Evangelistic Illustration

August 3, 2015

Many people think that as long as they are not hurting anyone else with what they are doing, they should be able to do whatever they want. At a funeral service this past Saturday, I heard a great illustration by my pastor Dr. Mark Minnick that explains in an excellent way why such reasoning is flawed.

Here is my version* of that illustration that so clearly explained why such a belief is false:

On a long, straight 40-mile stretch of highway in the middle of a desolate part of a Western state of the US, a lone vehicle speeds along at 25 miles above the speed limit with the driver completely oblivious for quite some time to the fact that he is going far faster than is legal. Given that there is no one else anywhere on the road on the entire stretch of the highway, the lone driver of this vehicle “innocently” exceeds the speed limit without even knowing it for a long time because he is caught up in his thoughts about many other things.

When the driver realizes that he is going way too fast, he thinks to himself that what he is doing is not wrong because there is no one else on the road that he is hurting by what he is doing. He decides to keep going at 80 mph instead of the posted 55 mph maximum speed.

About 25 miles down the highway, the driver notices flashing lights coming up behind him and realizes that a state trooper is coming after him. He pulls over and tries to tell the officer that what he was doing was not wrong because he was not hurting anyone else by what he was doing.

After all, there was no one else on the road with him at all. Of course, the office does not buy his argument and tickets him heavily for going way above the speed limit.

Just as the trooper in this illustration did not buy that what this driver was doing was right to do just because the driver thought that he was not hurting anyone, so God is not going to excuse anyone who breaks one of His laws simply because he thought that what he was doing was right to do because he thought that he was not hurting anyone else by what he did. Whatever God says is wrong to do is wrong to do whether we think otherwise because we think we are not hurting anyone by what we are doing.

To read the good news of what God offers to all of us because we have done wrong before Him, please read this post.

* My version maintains the key points of the illustration as it was told by Pastor Minnick. I wrote this version because I wanted to share this great illustration with others and do not have the time to listen to the illustration over and over again and transcribe it exactly as he told it.

In Evangelism, Mount Calvary Baptist Pulpit

Mi Oración por La Ofrenda – 8.2.15

August 2, 2015

Padre celestial, oh Dios de paz, que resucitaste de entre los muertos a Jesús nuestro Señor, el gran Pastor de las ovejas mediante la sangre del pacto eterno, haznos aptos en toda obra buena para hacer tu voluntad, obrando Tú en nosotros lo que es agradable delante de Ti mediante Jesucristo, a quien sea la gloria por los siglos de los siglos. Gracias por esta ofrenda. Te rogamos que bendigas esta ofrenda y la uses para glorificar tu nombre. En el precioso nombre de Jesús. Amén.

In Ministry, Prayer, Spanish

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Divine Judgment against All Nations

Divine Blessing on the Nation of Israel

Conclusion

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Divine Consecration of One Day above the Others

Divine Mandate to Esteem One Day above the Others

Divine Possession of One Day above the Others

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