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...
My heart is empty. All the fountains that should run With longing, are in me Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one That drips to find the sea. I have no care for anything thy love can grant Except the moment's vain And hardly noticed filling of the moment's want And to be free from pain. Oh, thou that art unwearying, that dost neither sleep Nor slumber, who didst take All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep Watch for me till I wake. If thou think for me that I cannot think, if thou Desire for me what I Cannot desire, my soul's interior Form, though now Deep-buried, will not die, -- No more than the insensible dropp'd seed which grows Through winter ripe for birth Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws Sweet influence still on earth, -- Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes Still turning round the earth. C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress...
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