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HOW TO TELL!

"The story is told of a young man who told his father at breakfast one morning that he was going to get married. 

"How do you know you're ready to get married?" asked the father. "Are you in love?" 

"I sure am," said the son.  "How do you know you're in love?" asked the father. 

"Last night as I was kissing my girlfriend good-night, her dog bit me and I didn't feel the pain until I got home."

"

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Marriage was never meant to be a "thing" between two people. Marriage was meant to be a three person experience with God, with Christ at the center---at the center of the relationship, and in the center of the man's heart and the woman's heart.

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Just thinkin' ....... maybe seeking scholarships is a sign of a poverty mentality? Humh. Pause and think about it.

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Watching endless tv is not your portion. You're the one who is supposed to be watched on TV.

The tv God made you to watch is the tv of your mind, your imagination. More than just being a tv, God intended your mind to be a video and film maker.

You are supposed to take the word of God and use your imagination to create vivid pictures by it. Make videos of what you want your life to look like--videos in your imagination. Those images in the mind will in turn morph into physical reality.

Remember we don't think in words. We think in pictures. That's why when someone says, 'dog' you don't think d-o-g. But rather your mind brings up a picture, perhaps of a dog you had at home in your childhood, or of a neighbor's dog or of a picture of one in a magazine.

So the best tv to watch is the tv of your mind fed with the raw material of what makes for abundant life.

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I highly and highly and highly recommend these two fabulous books

1. How Christianity Changed the World by Alvin J Schmidt

2. The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization by Vishal Mangalwadi

Get them for free on www.pdfdrive.com

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Check it out

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Understanding the fig tree "contradiction"

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WHAT WAS THE VOICE BEHIND THE NOISE OF THE PANDEMIC?

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The Great Escape-The Rapture

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Read this about climate change

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HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE CURSE IN GEN 3:16c

and your desire (teshuqah) [shall be] to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

There are two ways to understand what God was saying here and I believe they are both valid.

The Hebrew word teshuqah is translated 'desire' by most English Bibles but the early church fathers understood it differently.

They understood it as 'turning.' The woman's 'turning' would be towards or for her husband. As such they understood it in the sense of a power dynamic.

Jerome writing in the 300s in his Latin Bible, if we translate into English how he rendered the scripture, it would read this way, "and you shall be under your husband's power, and he shall have dominion over you."

With this in mind, teshuqah can be understood to mean 'liberty.' The woman's liberty would be constrained in an ungodly way. God here is predicting that there would be a general tendency by men to go beyond godly headship (given by God before sin came) and step into abusive male authority over their wives.

The second understanding of teshuqah is of course captured in the word 'desire'. The woman would desire to be cherished by her husband, but he would not respond as she wished.

These two strands of interaction in the marriage relationship have been common ever since.

To round off I will offer two paraphrasings of Gen 3:16c to capture the two nuances of meaning.

Your liberty will be under the power of your husband, and he will rule over you.

You will long for tender loving care from your husband, but he will disappoint you. And he will be the boss of you.

This is not prescriptive but simply predictive. God is not saying this is how things ought to be. He is only saying that the marriage relationship will not remain untouched by sin and corruption.

Salvation in Christ Jesus makes it possible to have godly male authority and leadership in the home and thus a great marriage.

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WHAT'S THE IMAGE OF GOD?

In Genesis 1:26 we are introduced to a heavenly deliberation on the sixth day of Creation Week

And God said, "Let us make man in our image (selem), according to our likeness (demut): and let them have dominion over the fish...birds....tame beasts....all the earth, and over every creeping thing upon the earth."

Ever since then the debate as to what 'image' of God is has never ceased.

Before we proceed, we first of all need to understand that selem and demut are not different but refer to one and the same thing. This is recognized in the fact that they are used interchangeably in a number of Bible passages such as Genesis 5:3.

So the 'image' is the 'likeness' and the 'likeness' is the image. In our theme scripture, they are used side by side for literary emphasis, to underline what God says next.

The following shades of meaning apply to selem and demut: statue, image, copy, pattern, model, likeness, outline. And a deeper look at, "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness" is better understood as God saying, "Let us make man our image, our likeness."

The word 'image' is best understood by the immediate context. That context sees God give man rule or dominion or mastery over the rest of his living and non-loving creation. In this we recognize the primary signification or explanation of what 'image' is.

Man as the 'image' of God is his special representative ruling creation on behalf of God.

So 'image' signifies: special representative, regent, powerful deputy.

Just as a statue represents and bears the likeness of the person or entity it was fashioned after, even so man is the 'statue' of God.

But he is a special and unique "statue" in that he's a living, breathing, moving, and speaking "statue."

This (that man is God's image) is a powerful refutation of the whole concept of idols and the worship of them.

In idolatry, an idol (image) is made from wood, stone, metal, or some other material. The idol (representating a lesser god) can neither move, speak,or undertake any action.

This is why the Israelites we're commanded by Moses not to bow down before idols, for these idols are lesser images than man (Exodus 20:4,5). The idols are lesser statues than man.

The superiority of man to idols symbolizes the superiority of Yahweh, the God of the Bible to all the lesser gods. Only Yahweh can create living "statues." This is something the lesser gods can't do!

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WHEN DID THE NEW TESTAMENT BECOME RECOGNIZED AS SCRIPTURE?

Very early, when the writers, the first apostles were still alive.

During the lifetimes of the first apostles, their Writings and those of some of their immediate disciples were already circulating and authoritative--being regarded and accepted as part of the canon of Holy Scripture, at par with the Old Testament Scriptures (2 Peter 3:14-16).

In the scripture quoted above, Simon Peter referred to the letters of Paul as Scripture, and the two of them were very much alive when that happened.

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EYE WITNESSES

The apostles were eyewitnesses of Jesus' glorified resurrection. They saw him alive for 3 or so years, then they saw him dead (Jn 19:26-42).

Three days later, they saw him alive, back from the dead. They ate and drank with him, and touched him, and associated with him for the next 40 days.

This enabled them to confirm and ascertain that he was no ghost but a real person with a physical--though supernatural body (1 Jn 1:1; Lk 24:35-43; Acts 10:39-41).

The fact that they were eyewitnesses is what makes their record (New Testament) so powerful and reliable. This is why almost all of them died as martyrs for their beliefs. They knew what they had believed for they had not followed "cunningly devised fables" but accurate, historical events that they had first hand knowledge of.

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Check it out

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WHAT IS TRUTH?

John 18:37-38 (KJV); Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

When Pilate asked, ‘what is truth?’, he touched one of the fundamental inquiries of ancient and modern philosophy.

Over the course of human history, truth has been theorised, debated, and rationalised. But, regardless of the countless theories, numerous debates and the rational expositions of truth, the Bible answers this question infallibly.

The truth is not a theory or a philosophy, the truth is a person. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “ I am the way, THE TRUTH, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

In Ephesians 4:21, the Bible reveals that the truth is in Jesus.

For any man on a quest for truth in any form or in any area of his life, this is the starting point. Everything within the mystery of Christ defines truth and anything outside Him is not true.

The world will present you with facts about your health, about your finances, about the economies of this world and about the dynamics of living. If facts are presented outside the reality of Christ, they are just that, facts.

What makes things factual is that we recognise them with our physical senses within the confines of the physical world. However, simply because something is factual does not necessarily make it true.

What makes things true is that they find their basis and reality in the person of Jesus Christ.

FURTHER STUDY: Ephesians 4:21, John 17:17

GOLDEN NUGGET: What makes things factual is that we recognise them with our physical senses within the confines of the physical world. However, simply because something is factual does not necessarily make it true. What makes things true is that they find their basis and reality in the person of Jesus Christ.