I realize that probably 98% of the people who visit this site do it because they are already believers. If so, that’s great, but it’s the non-believer I want to talk to right now. That group includes people who attend church regularly, but have no real connection or understanding of what’s at stake here.
As a side note, I have said that these blog posts would be based, mostly, on the Sunday School class I lead (I can’t say teach, because I learn as much as anybody else from discussions we have). But today I feel the need to sidestep and talk about something that is really nagging at me.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post outlining a possible scenario that would indicate that the rapture of the church could happen as soon as the end of May, 2009. You can read that post here. I admit that the post is largely speculation, but it has done something significant in my life. I’ve started to think and live with the possibility that the rapture could happen in a couple of weeks and that has brought me to the realization that I have become what I hate to see in other Christians, complacent.
I don’t know if He is coming back for us this month, but the possibility has deeply affected my outlook on this life. I realized that the feeling of urgency about all things Biblical I feel now is the way I should have been feeling all along. It has reawakened the “baby” Christian that was so consumed with Him when I first got saved.
It is because of this reawakening that I started thinking back to why I became a believer at all. Part of the journey is outlined in the About page on this site, so I won’t go into it all here. But there was a time that I not only did not believe, but was ready to jump up and ridicule anything related to the Bible, God (in any form), Jesus and the mindless churchgoers that followed Him. I had been duped growing up as a Mormon and I just knew that the people who called themselves Christians were being duped, as well. What I wanted was the truth, not some empty belief.
I went on a search for that truth and was willing to accept anything that can be really proven to BE truth. Believing something because some book says so wasn’t going to do it for me. There are Christians out there that would say that just shows a lack of faith and I would have to agree. I HAD no faith. I had nothing to believe in and I wasn’t going to accept any belief system based on what was written on a page in some book. I have read a lot of great books over the years and gotten a lot of great things from them, but they were still just books. They were written by people. As far as I knew the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or any other religious book was no more based in fact than The Hobbit. If I was going to accept any belief system, it had to be able to prove that it was fact and not another work of fiction.
I grew up reading the King James Version of the Bible because that was the only Bible that was accepted as “Holy” by the Mormon Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Although I never voiced it, I questioned the reasoning behind this. What made all those “thees” and “thous” so spiritual? When we prayed, we were told we had to use King James English. Why? Jesus lived 1600 years before the King James Bible was translated and He spoke Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew. The King James translators weren’t even trying to set the standard for the proper language to use when speaking to God. The translation was done so that the common people could read and understand the Bible. I was a devoted actor when I was young and performed a lot of Shakespeare. There was nothing holy about his plays. In fact, some were downright dirty. We have just come to accept that saying “thy will” is much more reverent than “what you want”. I also had a problem with the fact that the King James Bible was still a translation. Languages change and one language can’t always express the same depth and feeling that another one can.
So, if the Bible was accurate and true, it had to be accurate and true in the original language. This was a big hurdle for me. I didn’t, and still don’t, read or speak ancient Hebrew or Greek. (The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek). What I had to do was look to see if the original text had been preserved through the years.
As a child going to Primary, a weekly meeting for children in the Mormon Church, we played a game called rumors. We would sit in a big circle and the teacher would secretly give a sentence to one child. That child would whisper the sentence to the next and so on around the circle. When it came to the last child, he or she would say it out loud. The teacher would then read the original sentence. These two sentences were never anywhere close to being the same. The teacher would then proudly say “and that’s what’s happened to the Bible. That’s why we need a prophet to tell us what the Bible is supposed to say”.
Even as a child, I felt that a God who could create the universe and not keep a simple set of scriptures intact was a very weak god, or at least a contradiction. If there was a God, I would expect that He should be able to keep His Word unchanged and unaltered by mere men.
That led me to investigate the history of the scriptures. That investigation took years and has too many parts to go through here, but I’ll list some of the highlights.
I found that the Levite scribes (I never really understood who these guys were before) spent their entire lives copying the scrolls of the scriptures in order to preserve them intact. This was done in many places throughout the Old World, but the way it was done was largely the same. A Levite priest would oversee the operation of several scribes. In some places a section could be copied, in others a line or even a single character. Then the priest would examine the work and compare it to the original. If it was exactly the same, it was approved. If it contained ANY kind of error, the entire scroll would be destroyed and the scribe would start over. This contradicted what I had been taught as a Mormon.
Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors.
Joseph Smith
The Hebrew text of what we call the Old Testament was translated into the language of the common man, Greek, in 356-323 BC. This translation is called the Septuagint Translation. It should be noted that the text we have today, circulated throughout the Christian churches, is identical to the text translated over 2000 years ago. This could only mean that either there was a massive conspiracy involving the Jewish and Christian leaders or the text is perfectly intact. Keep in mind that the Jewish religion is splintered, as is the Christian, into several factions that don’t get together to discuss the preservation of the scriptures.
Another point of evidence concerning the preservation of the original text is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been dated between 150 BC to 70 AD. The scrolls that contain copies of Biblical text are no different that the text that has been handed down through both the Jewish and Christian communities. This is an amazing feat considering 2000 years have passed since they were copied. If the game of rumors applied to the preservation of Biblical text, then the Dead Sea Scrolls should bear little, if any, resemblance to the text handed down through many separate cultures over the last 2000 years.
There is another area that jumped out at me. The existence of Bible codes. I know, this is an area of hot debate and I’m not going to go into a lot of depth here, but there is evidence that they are real. It is possible to find skip letter sequences in any work of literature, but the extent that they appear in the Old and New Testament reach way beyond coincidence. The most astounding thing about the codes is that the skip letter sequences in the Bible usually reflect the actual text they are embedded in. For instance, the accounts of Jesus on the cross are embedded with the names of all the disciples, EXCEPT Judas.
The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament written by Moses, contain a skip letter sequence at intervals of 49 characters in Genesis and Exodus that spell “Torah” (in Hebrew, naturally). The last two books of the Torah, Numbers and Deuteronomy, have the same sequence… in reverse. The book in the middle, Leviticus, has a 7 character sequence that spells “YHWH”, again in Hebrew – the name of God. So the first two books point forward to the third, the last two point back to the third where we find the name of God. An illustration that the law of the Torah leads to God.
Another item that jumped right out at me was the Camp of Israel. I won’t go into it here, because I did a post on it that you can read here.
Probably, though, the most astounding proof I found was in the accuracy of Bible prophesy. More than 300 prophecies in the Old Testament speak to the arrival of Jesus and His purpose. I definitely can’t go into all of them here. There are entire books on the subject that just scratch the surface. However, I will highlight one of my favorites.
After Jerusalem had been destroyed and the Jewish people were held in captivity in Babylon (believed to be a myth until it was discovered in 1898 and excavated by Robert Johann Koldewey beginning in 1899) Daniel, the lion’s den guy, received a prophecy from the Archangel Gabriel that the Messiah would be revealed on a particular day. I won’t go into all the math here, but it was 173,880 days (roughly 473 years) from the decree to rebuilt the city of Jerusalem. That decree was issued by Artaxerxes Longimanus on March 14, 445 B.C. Counting ahead from the decree we come to April 6, 32 A.D, the exact day that Jesus rode a donkey through the streets of Jerusalem allowing himself, for the first time, to be hailed as the Messiah.
There are countless examples I could give demonstrating the accuracy, not just general, but specific, of Bible prophecies. These are just a few of the points that led me to the undeniable fact that the Bible is not only accurate, but could only be the words of someone living outside our realm of reality. Every line, every word, every character of the original text has been preserved, unchanged, throughout the last several thousand years.
The question now remains… what does it mean? How does this relate to me? Does this mean that in order to follow this God I have to obey all the rules of the law as set out in the Torah? Am I supposed to chew root of a Manzanita bush while jumping up and down on one foot and balancing 14 bowls of rice pudding on my head? After studying the Bible, I found that the unbelievably detailed rules listed in the Old Testament were put there for one purpose. To convince us that there was no way that we, as men, could follow ANY set of rules to make us holy enough to stand in the presence of a being that is as pure and holy as the Creator of the universe.
Jesus came, in His own words,
Matthew 5:17 (New King James Version) 17 “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.
When He was asked what the greatest commandment of the law was, He said,
Matthew 22:37 Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
Forget all the rules imposed by men. Forget all the rules in the Old Testament. There is only one set of rules we need to follow… Jesus’ Rules.
Romans 10:8-10 (New King James Version) 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): 9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
The reason this is such a big issue in my life right now, is that I know that from all the studying I have done that we are at the very end of time here. I made a case in my other blog for the possibility that the rapture of the church could possibly happen as soon as May 29-30, 2009, Pentecost. Let me state that I am about 80% to 90% sure that the rapture will happen on Pentecost. Whether it is this Pentecost, I don’t know. But the possibility remains. If it does, it means that those still here on the earth won’t have very long (probably a few years) before the last seven year period begins.
Don’t think that you can suddenly accept the fact that Jesus died to save you after the Christians disappear (and it will probably be a lot fewer than most Christians think). The scriptures state that people will be given over to the “lie” and turn even further from God during this period. I don’t know what that “lie” is going to be. Maybe it’s Darwinism, maybe something to “explain” the rapture, itself. There will be people saved during the last seven year period, but from my reading, it looks a lot more difficult than it sounds. Apart from that, the Holy Spirit, that indwells every believing Christian, giving them the strength to stay close to God, will no longer be available. You’ll be on your own.
My point is this… We’re running out of time. The world is heading in a direction that the Bible has spoken of for thousands of years. A direction that seemed impossible just a few years ago, but now appears to be inevitable. The economy of the entire world is collapsing, morals are not only shunned, but openly criticized and Islam is quickly becoming the single largest religion on the planet. Islam now encompasses almost all of Asia, the Middle East and is now the majority religion in Europe. The United States, while passing legislation to censor Christian thought, is taking an embracing and tolerant stance toward the religion that drove the planes into the World Trade Center.
Again, time is running out. There may be as little as a couple of weeks left before it all starts breaking loose. If you are still around after the rapture of the church, don’t be lulled into complacency by the sudden peace that covers the earth. The Bible says that the first 3 ½ years of the last seven (and that could start anywhere from a few months to several years after the rapture) will be peaceful while the main power of the earth is concentrated in the Middle East. But the last 3 ½ years will be pure hell. After that, it’s over, no second chances, no saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize”. It’s over.
I’ll do another post outlining the events that will take place during the Tribulation at another time. Right now, it’s more important that you ask yourself “Is there a God? Is it the one in the Bible? What do I really know about Him? Is what I know based on what I see in the movies and TV? Or is there something the world isn’t telling me?”
Don’t let bias and prejudice keep you from finding the truth. Don’t let preconceptions of what a “Christian” is color your decision. Most people that attend church and call themselves “Christian” have no idea who Jesus really was and what He did for us.
You can say you don’t believe in gravity all you want, but if you step off a cliff, you’re going to fall.
Randy Reed
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