We are halfway through the spring semester and are taking a break this week. There will be no classes on Thursday. Enjoy the sunshine (while we have it)!
In our adult Sunday school class, we are studying the book of Esther. Here's a timeline for that period... And here is a reading guide for Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
When I came to faith in Jesus Christ in 1971, one of the early encouragements that I received was learning about the many prophecies in the Old Testament that testified to the coming Messiah, our Lord Jesus. Along with teaching regarding the reliable eyewitness accounts of the New Testament apostles, I was realizing that my trust in Christ was not based upon a psychological mood or wish fulfillment. ( Frankly, at first, I did not wish to be changed in the way Jesus would bring changes... ) My faith was resting on historical events and upon prophetic witness. In his Pensées, Section 11 (The Prophecies), Blaise Pascal (above) writes that it is one thing for a person, one individual, to make predictions before an event takes place, and quite another for many different individuals to make a variety of predictions over centuries of time, all of which are all fulfilled in turn. He writes... When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent...
"For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:19-20 ESV) I've finished reading again Paul's Epistle to the Galatians -- and what a wonderful charter of freedom it is for the Christian! I've been helped with two companion studies. They are The Origin of Paul's Religion , by J. Gresham Machen (1921), and Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free , by F. F. Bruce (1977). Here are just a few highlights from each... "One fundamental feature of the experience has too often been forgotten—the appearance on the road to Damascus [Acts 9] was the appearance of a person. Sometimes the event has been regarded merely as a supernatural interposition of God intended to produce belief in the fact of the resurrection, as merely a sign. Undoubt...
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