Ranking Bible Quotes

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1

It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy. Will You carry this too, Lord Jesus? But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

The message sent by this policy is that if women are to be accepted into the exclusive ranks of men, then they have to look like men: buttoned up, stuffy, and no-nonsense. As if to show a little cleavage, to highlight a curvaceous figure, or to in any way appear feminine would discount, discredit, and disqualify them. I strongly disagree with this idea. I feel that women should wear clothes that suit their bodies rather than forcing themselves into unflattering men's suits and that it is feminist to make a wide range of women's clothes acceptable business attire.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . . [F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . . In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . . The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . . The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . . They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . . Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . . Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.

The widespread use of gold in religious artifacts may be of special significance. Gold is a useless metal. It is too soft to be used in tools or cookware. It is also rare and difficult to mine and extract, especially for primitive peoples. But from the earliest times gold was regarded as a sacred metal, and men who encountered gods were ordered to supply it. Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountaintops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and is a heavy metal, ranking close to mercury and lead on the atomic scale. We could simplify things by saying that the atoms of gold, element 79, are packed closely together. If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.

The culture that created the KJV championed marriage as the ideal state decreed by God. The holy (male-headed) household formed the center of English society, from the household of the urban merchant to the lordly estates of the members of Parliament. Law codes favored husbands and male heirs by excluding women from inheritance, reducing married women to the legal status of children, and elevating marriage as key for securing masculine social rank and authority. Yet early modern biblical scholars found that marriage was puzzlingly absent from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), especially for an institution thought to be championed by God.

In both instances of Franklin and Jefferson, revisionist writers have emphasized those aspects of their beliefs that are consistent with Christian faith, while discounting their more rational, heterodox views. As stated, a common technique is to define deism narrowly, as promoting a worldview similar to atheism, and to portray it as incompatible with Christianity. A “true deist” would believe only in a “Clock-maker” deity and would eschew the value of prayer or any merit in the Bible. Any acknowledgment of providence now moves one from the ranks of deism into the bosom of Christianity, now broadly defined. Imagining the metaphorical cup as being half-full rather than the reverse, revisionist writers claim that any demonstration of faith makes one Christian or evangelical, instead of acknowledging how the beliefs of many Founders diverged from the prevailing religious orthodoxy of the time.

Even the massacre of nine Black Christians following a Bible study class was not enough to make American evangelicals face the fact that racism remained a major problem within their ranks. They looked to religiosity in symbolism to deflect scrutiny of their own shortcomings and historical failures with regard to the racism in their churches. This willful blindness would open the door for a man who would be revered by them despite all of his moral failings. Donald Trump, who won the Republican primary against sixteen opponents and won the presidency in 2016, would become both the savior and the nadir of the evangelical movement in America. Their embrace of this thrice-married casino-owning reality TV star would both give them new recognition in the Republican Party and destroy the image of morality and uprightness they had so carefully cultivated. Evangelicals’ embrace of an unrepentant racist solidified the place of racism in the history of American evangelicalism. More than that, their embrace tore the covers off the anti-Black racism that had existed since the nineteenth century.

There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything, is already an indication of a high rank. There is a delight in the nuances of respect which permits us to surmise a noble origin and habits. The refinement, good, and loftiness of a soul are put to a dangerous test when something goes past in front of it which is of the first rank, but which is not yet protected by the shudders of authority from prying clutches and crudities: something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tempting, perhaps arbitrarily disguised and hidden, like a living touchstone. The man whose task and practice is to investigate souls will use precisely this art in a number of different forms in order to establish the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will put it to the test for its instinct of reverence. Différence engendre haine [difference engenders hatred]: the nastiness of some natures suddenly spurts out like dirty water when some sacred container, some precious object from a locked shrine, some book with marks of a great destiny is carried by. On the other hand, there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation in the eye, an end to all gestures, things which express that a soul feels close to something most worthy of reverence. The way in which reverence for the Bible in Europe has, on the whole, been maintained so far is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of tradition for which Europe owes a debt of thanks to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance need for their protection an externally imposed tyranny of authority in order to last for those thousands of years which are necessary to exhaust them and sort out what they mean. Much has been achieved when in the great mass of people (the shallow ones and all sorts of people with diarrhoea) that feeling has finally been cultivated that they are not permitted to touch everything, that there are sacred experiences before which they have to pull off their shoes and which they must keep their dirty hands off - this is almost the highest intensification of their humanity. By contrast, perhaps nothing makes the so-called educated people, those who have faith in "modern ideas," so nauseating as their lack of shame, the comfortable impudence in their eyes and hands, with which they touch, lick, and grope everything, and it is possible that these days among a people, one still finds in the common folk, particularly among the peasants, more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, among the educated. Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil

There is an instinct for rank which, more than anything, is already an indication of a high rank. There is a delight in the nuances of respect which permits us to surmise a noble origin and habits. The refinement, goodness, and loftiness of a soul are put to a dangerous test when something goes past in front of it which is of the first rank, but which is not yet protected by the fear of authority from prying clutches and crudities: something that goes its way unmarked, undiscovered, tentative, perhaps arbitrarily disguised and hidden, like a living touchstone. The man whose task and practice is to investigate souls will use precisely this art in a number of different forms in order to establish the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will put it to the test for its instinct of reverence. Différence engendre haine [Difference engenders hatred]: the nastiness of some natures suddenly spurts out like dirty water when some sacred container, some precious object from a locked shrine, or some book with marks of a great destiny is carried by. On the other hand, there is an involuntary falling silent, a hesitation in the eye, an end to all gestures, things which express that a soul feels close to something most worthy of reverence. The way in which reverence for the Bible in Europe has, on the whole, been maintained so far is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of habits for which Europe owes a debt of thanks to Christianity: such books of profundity and ultimate significance need for their protection an externally imposed tyranny of authority in order to last for those thousands of years necessary to exhaust them and sort out what they mean. Much has been achieved when in the great mass of people (the shallow ones and all sorts of people with diarrhoea) the feeling has finally been cultivated that they are not permitted to touch everything, that there are sacred experiences before which they have to pull off their shoes and which they must keep their dirty hands off—this is almost the highest intensification of their humanity. By contrast, perhaps nothing makes the so-called educated people, those who have faith in “modern ideas,” so nauseating as their lack of shame, the comfortable impudence in their eyes and hands, with which they touch, lick, and grope everything, and it is possible that these days among a people, one still finds in the common folk, particularly among the peasants, more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, among the educated.

(KJV) King James Translation Important Facts An advantage of owning or reading a (KJV) King James Translation or Authorized Version, whether they are the older 1611 version or newer non-1611 version is that they are usually more accurate compared to many other bibles. They rank highly when translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. However all bible translations have many faults with the translation as does the King James Version which is not perfect by any means It’s a difficult task to master translation of hundreds of scrolls and manuscripts and compile them into a single book. With that being said, when choosing a bible you will usually have to choose between the lesser of the two evils, and it is always advised to have at least three translations if not more when you want to get a more accurate idea of what the writer is saying. One major disadvantage that the King James Bible (KJV) has is that the translators have replaced the holy names of The Almighty Creator and His Son, as many other translators have also done with other bible translations. This is never a good thing to do. To replace a proper noun or name, especially when it happens to be the name of our Heavenly Father or His Son our Messiah is a serious thing to consider changing. The bible clearly states in many verses to make His name “known” and proclaim it. It does not say to “change it” or to proclaim a different name. Our Opinion about Name Changes The reasons of why the translators chose to make these name changes is “not” something that we at Heavenly Publishers want to focus on. Instead, we prefer to educate readers of this fact, especially those that were not already aware of it and make suggestions as to how to fix this. Many translations around these days have this same issue and even other serious changes on top of this one. We would also like to encourage all readers to consider restoring the holy names of our Savior and Heavenly Father back into the bible and back into our reading and vocabulary. The example of how our Savior taught us to pray by starting out in prayer by acknowledging and revering the holy name of “Our Father” is something we should remember. The prayer starts out with the words, Our Father who art in Heaven, “Hallowed be Thy Name” and is a great example of how important and holy His name is. This word “hallow” means to render sacred and consider holy. So my question to you is can you imagine doing something like changing our Father’s holy name to something else? Never should this be done, but the translators of many bible versions have done this. The KJV is only one example of this spiritually criminal act. The people that have done this for whatever agendas they had will be held accountable and judged accordingly one day by their maker as He sees fit. It’s not our job to judge but to make others aware of this and hopefully reverse this wrongdoing.

And z the Word a became flesh and b dwelt among us, c and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son [4] from the Father, full of d grace and e truth. 15[†]( f John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, g ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”)

Proof of the beginning of time probably ranks as the most theologically significant theorem. This great significance arises from the theorem establishing that the universe must be caused by some Entity capable of creating the universe entirely independent of space and time. Such an entity matches the attributes of the God of the Bible but is contradicted by the gods of the eastern (and indeed all other) religions who create within space and time.

as one who had authority. Most teachers did not want to speak on their own authority; when possible, they cited earlier authorities that supported their teaching. By contrast, Jesus declares, “Truly I tell you” (5:18), and, most offensively of all, speaks of judging (vv. 21–23) and ranks his message with God’s law (vv. 24–27). On Jesus’ authority, cf. 8:9.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf of Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in the having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf on Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in that having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

Jesus told his disciples, 'I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth' (Matthew 28:18). He confers a derived authority on his male and female image bearers as his coregents--not to rule over each other, but to rule the earth to ensure both welfare and flourishing. Equality is a foundational truth that extends to every human being and is rooted firmly in our image-bearer identity. The Bible doesn't nuance or debate equality, but sets it in stone. Equality distinguishes the kingdom of God from kingdoms of this world that rank, rate, discriminate, and privilege some human beings over others. No second class rating, no marginalization, oppression, or mistreatment can alter this rock solid truth, for it is grounded in our unchanging God. Both concepts were distorted by the fall, along with everything else. God's image bearers turned authority and ruling on one another instead of jointly pursuing God's glory for the benefit of all creation. Equality went missing from human relationships as the human race plunged into self-seeking, murder, violence, power, and oppression. Evidence of how far the human race has fallen is rampant in the appalling oppression and violence perpetrated against women throughout the world. The New Testament restores authority and equality in the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Paul in ways that are truly 'not of this world.' Jesus did not come to affirm or make slight alterations to the world's way of doing things. He came to rebuild both load-bearing walls--to reconnect a lost and fallen humanity to our Creator and to reestablish the Blessed Alliance between men and women. His construction methods take us down a different, countercultural path.

[W]e may infer that it is also not possible to gather pink grapefruit from your juniper bushes, or pine nuts from your tomato plants, or lemons trom youur box hedge. Pursuing the analogy relentlessly, we may also surmise that you cannot send your child to a culinary school and expect to get back a mechanical engineer. You cannot send them to art school, and wonder why your son never became a doctor like you wanted. You can't pay for law school, and then be surprised when an attorney eventually shows up. We often act astonished when we have no right whatsoever to be surprised in any way. We say, wide-eyed with Aaron, that all we did was put in a bunch of gold, and "out came this calf" (Exod. 32:24). That has to rank as one of the lamest excuses in the Bible, and here we are, still using it. All we did was put in hundreds of billions of dollars, and out came this misbegotten culture. How could this have happened? We are frankly at a loss. And lest I be accused of being too oblique in the point I am seeking to make, you cannot send all the Christian kids off to be educated in a school system that is riddled with rank unbelief, shot through with relativism, and diseased with perverse sexual fantasies, and then wonder at the results you get.

In his likely tale of how God created the visible whole, Plato makes a distinction between two kinds of gods, the visible cosmic gods and the traditional gods—between the gods who revolve manifestly, i.e., who manifest themselves regularly, and the gods who manifest themselves so far as they will. The least one would have to say is that according to Plato the cosmic gods are of much higher rank than the traditional gods, the Greek gods. Inasmuch as the cosmic gods are accessible to man as man—to his observations and calculations—whereas the Greek gods are accessible only to the Greeks through Greek tradition, one may, in comic exaggeration, ascribe the worship of the cosmic gods to barbarians. This ascription is made in a manner and with an intention altogether non-comic in the Bible: Israel is forbidden to worship the sun and the moon and the stars which the Lord has allotted to the other peoples everywhere under heaven. This implies that the worship of the cosmic gods by other peoples, the barbarians, is not due to a natural or rational cause, to the fact that those gods are accessible to man as man, but to an act of God’s will. It goes without saying that according to the Bible the God Who manifests Himself as far as He wills, Who is not universally worshipped as such, is the only true God. The Platonic statement taken in conjunction with the biblical statement brings out the fundamental opposition of Athens at its peak to Jerusalem: the opposition of the God or gods of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the opposition of reason and revelation.

Here Jesus and his chosen disciples withdraw to themselves to await participation in the Passover Festival. Undoubtedly because Jesus has indicated that the coming of his kingdom is imminent, the apostles begin to discuss who among themselves is the greatest. Is it conceivable that, after having been with Jesus throughout his ministry, and having listened to all his teaching about the nature of the kingdom, his chosen 12 still have political aspirations for power and rank within an earthly kingdom? What must Jesus do to convince them otherwise? Taking on the role of a servant, Jesus begins to wash the feet of his disciples in order to teach them the need, not for power and position, but for humility and service to others.

For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels - everything got started in [Jesus] and finds its purpose in him.

The whole thing boils down to this paradox: if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification for your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men. After all, they can't grant the immortality of your personal soul. As Rank argued in the breathtaking closing chapters of Art and Artist, there is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it. The artist's gift is always to creation itself, to the ultimate meaning of life, to God. We should not be surprised that Rank was brought to exactly the same conclusion as Kierkegaard: that the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one's life as a gift to the highest powers. Absolution has to come from the absolute beyond. As Kierkegaard, Rank showed that this rule applied to the strongest, most heroic types-not to trembling and empty weaklings. To renounce the world and oneself, to lay the meaning of it to the powers of creation, is the hardest thing for man to achieve-and so it is fitting that this task should fall to the strongest personality type, the one with the largest ego. The great scientific world-shaker Newton was the same man who always carried the Bible under his arm.

Paradoxically, this very Jewish work is written in an excellent Greek style, which ranks among the best in the New Testament and appears to be the work of a trained Hellenistic writer.

Today, people try to rank the gravity of sins; they think that homosexuals, thieves, and murderers are greater sinners than liars or gossips. But in the eyes of the Lord, all these sins have the same weight and the same pay. The Bible tells us, "The wages of sin is death" "the soul that sins will die." (Romans 6:23) (Ezekiel 18:20) My friends and brothers, I invite you now to accept Jesus' invitation. Jesus is extending His hand of mercy to you if you repent. The Word of the Lord tells us that the one that changes his ways and repents will be given mercy. It is much better to believe now, than to wait and find out the hard way later. God bless you.

There are deceivers among Muslims as there are among Christians who go on Scripture (i.e., Qur'an/Bible) with "Sola Scriptura" attitude and behaviour. They take this path thinking that they purify themselves from an evil doctrine which was attached to Scripture, as if it were a legitimate act of scholarship and Scripture would be cleansed by such a self-proclaimed entrepreneurship endeavour. It helps them foremost in attracting new converts in environments that are not tolerant of historical Scripture and its culture in the first place. However, such an unscientific stance will inevitably lead to their dependence on the text rather than the authority of the whole package (i.e., text, history, science, reason, context ..etc) which The Lord has endowed the truth with, and sooner or later they'll end up worshipping the text itself; and eventually the book (i.e., the paper and its cover)! If one cannot differentiate between the authority of the Messengers of God and other creatures and yet refuse to simply believe that their role is not substitutable by others, then worshipping materialism in form of atoms/particles or spirit/consciousness will unequivocally follow and conclude the development of their faith/religion establishment. Playing that role of the Messengers (i.e., revelation reception) when there is no such communication/relation with God in the first place, will certainly lead to establishing a contact with that being that lurks in the darkness in the absence of light awaiting those stray children of Adam. If God wanted to establish faith using Socialism, He'd have inscribed Scripture on a mountain for example so that all creatures/humans have equal access unto it! But this is not how The Lord created and intended the universe to be; there are ranks, preferences and degrees. He who transgresses the limits is not guided by God and is to be held responsible for his stray choices.

According to a study from Digital Book Today, here are the rankings for the most book sales per day on Amazon (the percentages are the percent of total sales for the week): 1. Monday 17.6% 2. Sunday 17.4% 3. Wednesday 13.8%

We picture the scene: host beyond host, rank behind rank. The millions among the nations of the world, all crowded together in the presence of the One who sits upon the throne, the One who looks intently at each individual. We are accustomed to human judges; we know their partial and impartial verdicts. In the presence of the Almighty, all previous judgments are rendered useless. Many men and women acquitted on earth before a human judge will now be found guilty before God. Men who have been accustomed to perks, special privileges, and legal representation now stand as naked in the presence of God. To their horror they are judged by a standard that is light-years beyond them: The standard is God Himself. . . . For the first time in their lives they stand in the presence of unclouded righteousness. They will be asked questions for which they know the answer. Their lives are present before them; unfortunately, they will be doomed to a painful, eternal existence.

The term condescension is used in two significantly different ways in contemporary discourse. It evokes negative emotions when it is used in the sense of “a patronizing attitude or behavior,” but the connotation is much different when it indicates “voluntary descent from one’s rank or dignity in relations with an inferior.”10

•A candidate running for president in 2012 referred to higher education as “mind control” and “indoctrination.” He ran again in 2016.         •A former Governor and 2012 presidential contender blamed the separation of church and state on Satan. He also sought to solve his state’s drought problem by asking its citizens to pray for rain. He ran again in 2016.         •A 2012 presidential contender claimed, “there’s violence in Israel because Jesus is coming soon.”         •A Georgia congressman claimed that evolution and the Big Bang Theory were “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” adding “Earth is about 9,000 years old and was created in six days, per the Bible.” He’s a physician, and a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee.         •From another member of the House Science Committee: “Prehistoric climate change could have been caused by dinosaur flatulence.”         •From the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “Global warming isn’t real, God is in control of the world.”         •A former Speaker of the House -- a born-again Christian, and convicted felon – declared, “One thing Americans seem to forget is that God wrote the Constitution.”         •The Lt. Governor of a southern state claimed that Yoga may result in satanic possession.         •A Southern senator claimed, “video games represent a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”         •A California state representative proudly stated: “Guns are used to defend our property and our families and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live.”         •Another California representative suggested that abortion was to blame for the state’s drought.         •From a Texas representative: “The great flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”         •An Oklahoma representative said: “Just because the Supreme Court rules on something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional.”         •From another Texas representative: “We know Al Qaeda has camps on the Mexican border. We have people that are trained to act Hispanic when they are radical Islamists.”         •A South Carolina State representative, commenting on the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage said, “The devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!

Let me remind you right now though of this one thing: your wife is not a child. Your wife is your equal, your partner, your peer, and a whole host of other things, none of which give her any less rank in the home and marriage than you have. So, though your natural inclination when she makes a mistake may be to judge, correct, and/or reprove her, you may NOT do so. ... You've been tasked to be many, many things to your Queen, my son, but disciplinarian is not one of them.

Throughout history the church has always zeroed in on “ezer” (pronouncedazer with a long sounding ¯a, as in razor) as the preFall piece of Eve that defines a woman’s role and remained intact despite her sin. God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper [ezer] suitable for him” (Genesis 2:18). The meaning of ezer, however, was diminished when translators rendered it “helpmeet” and restricted it to marriage.4 A woman’s mission centered on home and family — vital spheres of ministry to be sure, but only a slice of the vast mission God originally cast by calling women to rule and subdue the earth. Thinking regarding the ezer began to change when scholars pointed out that the word ezer is used most often (sixteen of twenty-one occurrences) in the Old Testament to refer to God5 as Israel’s helper in times of trouble. That’s when ezer was upgraded to “strong helper,” leaving Christians debating among themselves over the meaning of “strong” and whether this affects a woman’s rank with respect to the man. Further research indicates ezer is a powerful Hebrew military word whose significance we have barely begun to unpack.6 The ezer is a warrior, and this has far-reaching implications for women, not only

Kenneth Copeland: “I was shocked when I found out who the biggest failure in the Bible actually is . . . The biggest one is God . . . I mean, He lost His top-ranking, most anointed angel; the first man He ever created; the first woman He ever created; the whole earth and all the fullness therein; a third of the angels, at least—that’s a big loss, man . . . Now, the reason you don’t think of God as a failure is He never said He’s a failure. And you’re not a failure till you say you’re one” (Praise the Lord: Praise-a-Thon, Trinity Broadcasting Network, April 1988).

The Firstborn Over All Creation   (Col. 1:15–20) This passage includes a powerful defense of Christ’s deity. Apparently, a central component of the heresy that threatened the Colossian church was the denial of the deity of Christ. Ironically, throughout the centuries some cults have used the phrase “firstborn over all creation” (1:15) to undermine Christ’s deity. The assumption is that if Jesus was born at creation, then He is more like us than He is like God. The Greek word for firstborn, however, can refer to one who was born first chronologically, but it most often refers to preeminence in position or rank (Heb.1:6; Rom. 8:9). Firstborn in this context clearly means highest in rank, not first created (Ps. 89:27; Rev. 1:5) for several reasons: • Christ cannot be both “first begotten” and “only begotten” (see John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9); and, when the firstborn is one of a class, the class is in the plural form (1:18; Rom. 8:29), but “creation,” the class here, is in a singular form. • If Paul were teaching that Christ was a created being, he would be agreeing with the heresy that he was writing to refute. • It is impossible for Christ to be both created and the Creator of everything (1:16). Thus, Jesus is the firstborn in the sense that He has the preeminence (1:18) and that He possesses the right of inheritance “over all creation” (Heb. 1:2; Rev. 5:1–7, 13).

This petition very wisely reminds us of how prayer works. If people prayed this prayer, and then sat back and waited for bread to fall into their hands, they would certainly starve. It reminds us that prayer and work go hand in hand and that when we pray we must go on to work to make our prayers come true. It is true that the living seed comes from God, but it is equally true that it is our task to grow and to cultivate that seed. Dick Sheppard, the famous pacifist and preacher, used to love a certain story. There was a man who had an allotment; he had with great toil reclaimed a piece of ground, clearing away the stones, eradicating the rank growth of weeds, enriching and feeding the ground, until it produced the loveliest flowers and vegetables. One evening he was showing a pious friend around his allotment. The pious friend said: ‘It’s wonderful what God can do with a bit of ground like this, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ said the man who had put in such toil, ‘but you should have seen this bit of ground when God had it to himself!’ God’s bounty and human toil must combine. Prayer, like faith, without works is dead. When we pray this petition, we are recognizing two basic truths – that without God we can do nothing, and that without our effort and co-operation God can do nothing for us.

*The majority of evangelical growth is through conversion. Islam, on the other hand, often uses threats and persecution to build up the ranks. These “conversions” are not based on conviction but are merely “survival techniques.” *Eighty-five percent of the world has a Bible available in their native language. *There have been 6.5 billion viewings of the Jesus film. *It is estimated that when Father Zakaria Botros (a Coptic Christian apologist who debates Islamic clerics) is on television in the Middle East, 60 million viewers watch. Al-Qaeda has honored him with the words “one of the most wanted infidels in the world,” and has put a million dollar bounty on his head. *In Iran, 7

Data sources All these components give you feedback and insight into how best to configure your campaigns, although the data sources are often spread around in different places and sometimes difficult to find and interpret. Campaign types Search & Partner Dynamic Search Display Network Remarketing & Dynamic Remarketing Google Shopping for eCommerce Google Merchant Center Data feeds Google Shopping Campaigns Device selection PC / Tablets Mobiles & Smartphones Location Targets & Exclusions Country Metro State City Custom and Radius Daily Budgets Manual CPC Enhanced CPC Flexible Bidding strategies Conversion Optimizer (CPA) Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Conversion Tracking Setup and configuration Transaction-Specific Conversion Tracking Offline Conversion import Phone call tracking - website call conversions Conversion Rates Conversion Costs Conversion Values Ad Groups Default Bids Keyword Themes Ads Ad Messaging & Demographics Creative Text & Formatting Images* Display Ad Builder* Ad Preview and Diagnosis Account, Campaign and Ad Group Ad Extensions Sitelinks Locations Calls Reviews Apps Callouts Ad Rotation & Frequency Capping Rotate Optimise for Clicks Optimise for Conversions Keywords Bids Broad Modified Broad Phrase Exact Destination urls Keyword Diagnosis User Search Queries Keyword Opportunities Negative Keywords & Match Types Shared Library Shared Budgets* Automated Rules Flexible Bid Strategies Audiences & Exclusions* Campaign Negative Keywords Display Campaign Placement Exclusions* NEW! Business Data and Ad Customizers Advanced Delivery Methods Standard Accelerated Impression Share Lost IS (Budget) Lost IS (Rank) Search Funnels Assisted Impressions & Clicks Assisted Conversions Segmentation Analysis Device performance Network performance Top vs Other position performance Dimension Analysis Days & Times Shopping Geographic User Locations & Distance Search Terms Automatic Placements* Call Details (Call Extensions) Tools Change history Keyword Planner* Display Planner* Opportunities* Scheduling & Day Parting Automated Rules Competitor Ad Auction Insights Reporting* AdWords Campaign Experiments* Browser Languages* *indicates an item not covered in this version of the book

To justify their plans, they took preexisting notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe with rungs inside that designation, the English Protestants at the very top as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight over North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom—African captives transported to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for twelve generations.

But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” I would look about us as Betsie read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors. . . . It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute—poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not “we shall be.” We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.

Abolitionists declared their first major victory in 1772 with the Somerset case, which was popularly interpreted as outlawing slavery in England. In ruling on the case, Lord Mansfield consulted with the great legal theorist William Blackstone, whose four‐volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was required reading for students of law in England and America and “ranked second only to the Bible as a literary and intellectual influence on the history of American institutions.” Blackstone's understanding of slavery was richly ambiguous. On the one hand, he argued that only a positive law sanctioning slavery could override the natural law of freedom. On the other hand, he suggested that in certain circumstances natural law could trump positive law. Although Lord Mansfield based his decision in the Somerset case primarily on the precedent of villeinage, arguing that slaves could not be treated worse than villeins and thus could not forcibly be removed from England, Blackstone nevertheless contributed to its antislavery interpretation. British lawyers defending the slave James Somerset relied on Blackstone to argue that slavery was contrary to natural law; and Lord Mansfield acknowledged this while ruling in their favor. Somewhat inadvertently, Lord Mansfield established a precedent for Blackstone's theory that slavery could be sanctioned only by positive law. According to the legal scholar Robert Cover, the Somerset decision “gave institutional recognition to antislavery morality.” It influenced the gradual abolition of America's northern states, including Vermont's Constitution of 1777 (the first constitution in history to outlaw slavery), and the Quock Walker case of 1783, which effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts. Blackstone's Commentaries, coupled with the Somerset decision, would contribute to the antislavery platforms and ideologies of the Liberty, Free‐Soil, and Republican parties.

The profound insight of the passage as a whole is that human wickedness in all its rank variety is a manifestation of one basic evil, namely, trust in ourselves rather than trust in God

It is no easy task to throw one's rank into the shade by one's virtue, or to gain the affection of men who are forced to yield you precedence.

Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate. This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would have been the apostles of Jesus. In the Gospel accounts, we find that most of Jesus’s disciples are simple peasants from Galilee—uneducated fishermen, for example. Two of them, Peter and John, are explicitly said to be “illiterate” in the book of Acts (4:13). The apostle Paul indicates to his Corinthian congregation that “not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:27)—which might mean that some few were well educated, but not most. As we move into the second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated

I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.

Interpreting Bible prophecy using current events has grown immensely in the last few generations.  Many Christian bestsellers come from the ranks of prophecy books predicting the soon coming of Christ and the end of the world.