God's precious and magnificent promises

God's promises in 2 Peter 1:4 are described as "precious and magnificent." I cannot think of two more wonderful words to describe the promises of God.

Many things are precious to me. My wife. My children. My church. My health. My home. A quiet hour with the Lord and a cup of coffee. A good book. A family walk. Earlier this week, I got to hold baby Ethan McCullah. That was precious. I'm so grateful for the precious gifts and memories God has given me, but more precious than all these things are the promises of God.

I have also seen many things that are magnificent. The sunrise. The moon. The Milky Way Galaxy. A shooting star. Niagara Falls. The Grand Canyon. The birth of a child. A Spirit-filled sermon. A concert pianist. A fighter jet soaring across the sky. I feel so privileged to have witnessed all these things, but more magnificent than all these things are the promises of God.

What are some of God's precious and magnificent promises? J. C. Ryle considers:

There are an abundance of promises supplied by God in the Word, revealing of His character, especially His infinite mercy and compassion. There are promises regarding His willingness to forgive, pardon and absolve the chief of sinners; there are encouragements to pray and hear the gospel and draw near to the throne of grace; there are promises that he will give strength for duty, comfort in trouble, guidance in perplexity, help in sickness, consolation in death, support under bereavement, happiness beyond the grave, reward in glory. His promises are so abundant that we fail to even concieve of them. (Holiness, p. 263)

God's promises are certainly abundant. But perhaps the most precious and magnificent promise of all is this:

1 John 3:2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

Hallelujah! Come, Lord Jesus.

Obama-Antichrist video

Many of you have probably seen this video, connecting Barack Obama with the Antichrist. I’ve had two people in the last week ask me about it, so here’s my response:

1. The biggest problem is equating Satan (Lk. 10:18) with the Antichrist. These are two different people, not the same (See Rev. 13:2) This should make us immediately question the integrity of the rest of the video.
2. Another problem is that Jesus explicitly told us the end would come unexpectedly (Mark 13:32-33). He would not have disclosed any specific details, even encrypted, to tell us when it’s about to appear.
3. It elevates the oral, speculative words of Christ above the inspired, written word of Christ. The NT was not written in Aramaic. (We don’t even know for sure that Jesus spoke regularly in Aramaic. He may have chosen to teach in the more cosmopolitan language of Greek.) It is highly speculative to assert what Jesus would have said in Aramaic, and then to draw conclusions from this. It opens up a Pandora’s box of hermeneutical and theological abuses. God gave us the inspired New Testament in Greek, and that is what He intends us to study.
4. Even the linguistic and grammatical support crumbles upon closer look. It is true that one Hebrew word for “lightning” is baraq, that the Hebrew word for “heights” in Isaiah 14:14 is bamah, and that there is an Aramaic conjunction waw (pronounced “u” in u-bamah). But please note, waw means “and.” Jesus did not say “from heaven and lightning.” He said “from heaven like lightning.” Even if Jesus had spoken in Aramaic, and even if He had chosen the words baraq and bamah (which is by no means certain), He would have joined them together with the preposition min, meaning “out of, from.” Thus, He would have said, baraq mi-bamah, and not baraq u-bamah.

This kind of stuff sounds good on the surface, even raising a hint of plausibility, but really undermines the clarity of Scripture. It delves into hidden meanings and connections, rather than encouraging people to seek the plain meaning of Scripture, found through the grammatical-historical method of interpretation.

I believe Satan is even content to use a video like this to get people anxious and distracted from the Person of Christ and clearly revealed Word of God.

To read more on the biblical identity of Antichrist, I would suggest checking out some recent articles by Bret Capranica.

Jews begin work on bronze altar

You may not have heard about this, but a group of Jews called the Temple Institute have been diligently working for the last three decades to reconstruct all the furniture for the Temple. (I actually got to see the menorah when I visited Israel ten years ago.) Their hope is to one day rebuild the temple and reestablish sacrifices. Hmmm. Sounds like something I read in Revelation.

The Temple Institute will begin building the sacrificial altar on Thursday, Tisha B’av, a fast day when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple some 2,000 years ago.

The sacrificial altar was located in the center of the Temple, and upon it the Kohanim (priests) offered the numerous voluntary and obligatory sacrifices commanded in the Bible.

The Temple Institute, which has already built many of the vessels for the Holy Temple, such as the ark and the menorah, has now embarked on a project to build the altar. Construction begins Thursday in Mitzpe Yericho (east of Jerusalem) at 5:30 p.m.

“Unfortunately, we cannot currently build the altar in its proper place, on the Temple Mount,” Temple Institute director Yehudah Glick said. “We are building an altar of the minimum possible size so that we will be able to transport it to the Temple when it is rebuilt."

Even a minimum size altar will work out to be approximately 2 meters tall, 3 meters long, and 3 meters wide. Workers have collected around 10 cubic meters of rocks weighing several tons already.

The rocks were gathered from the Dead Sea area and wrapped individually to assure they remain whole and are not touched by metal, as the Bible requires.

“The Torah says that no iron tools should be used on the altar’s stones,” Glick explained. “The altar represents a connection to life and to the creation of the world. Iron is the opposite – it is used to build tools of war, death, and destruction.”

HT: Todd Bolen