Tag: Revelation

Digging in Deeper: Revelation 20:7-8

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“And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Hell is hard.  Perhaps no orthodox Christian doctrine is as difficult for folks to get their hearts and minds around as is the notion that those who finally reject God will, upon final judgment, spend an eternity separated from Him in Hell.  And, I’ll say this as gently as I can: If the doctrine doesn’t give you at least a bit of unease, you may not be paying very much attention to it. Read the rest…

Morning Musings: 1 John 2:22

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“Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?  This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Although it is not so much a topic of conversation as it was a few years ago, there is a fair bit of interest in the idea and the person of the Antichrist.  In popular literature of varying sorts, the Antichrist is going to be the figure at the end of the world who unites the forces of evil against the forces of good, and who must be defeated to avoid the end of the world. Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Revelation 9:20-21

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“The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

This is the real key of this chapter and, really, one of the main themes of the entire record.  There appear to be two goals of the various acts of cataclysmic judgments described in Revelation.  One goal is the punishment of sin.  God has been patient long enough and now it is time for judgment.  It is time to let people see and experience the full weight of their sin.  Just like with the nation of Israel in the days leading up to and during the conquest of Jerusalem and the exile, the time for the whole world has come up and sin is finally being judged on a large scale. Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Revelation 6:1-2

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“Now I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, ‘Come!’  And I looked, and behold, a white horse!  And its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering, and to conquer.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Now we get into the meat of John’s revelation of the end of the world.  This is the part of the story that tends to start drawing the most varied and often creative interpretations.  This is also the part that tends to serve as the most inspirational for various occult and apocalyptic stories today. Read the rest…

A Hellish Problem

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In this third part of our Reasons to Believe series, we spent yesterday morning wrestling with one of the more challenging doctrines of orthodox Christianity: The doctrine of Hell.  In popular imagining for centuries, the idea of Hell has been one of fiery agony stretching on into eternity.  In the modern mind, shaped as it is by tolerance and pluralism, this idea presents a huge impediment to the faith.  We are left with two choices: Reshape the doctrine to fit modern mores, or try to understand it better to see if it doesn’t present us with a stumbling block at all, but rather a reason to believe.  In what follows we aimed for the latter.  Thanks for reading and listening.

 

A Hellish Problem

Well, this morning as we continue our series, Reasons to Believe, we are taking on a challenge.  We’ve already confronted head-on the objections that truth can’t really be known and that the Bible is untrustworthy in terms of revealing anything about God to us.  This morning we are going to take on a challenge that is much more emotional than either of these previous two.  For many folks it is epitomized in the sermons of men of old, kind of like this one: Read the rest…