Revelation Biblical Quotes

Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most "entire" context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God's revelation.

When the Qur’an critically evaluates the individual behavior of certain Jews, Christians, and pagans, it does so because these individuals serve as models for both what to do and not to do. Compared to the standards of harsh prophetic chastisement found in the revelations of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the Qur’an is a gentle critic—despite attempts by some translators to heighten the tension.

From one point of view, the Bible is the story of a romance, a heavenly Father seeking an earthly bride for his Son. Like every good romance, they ‘get married and live happily ever after’. But this climax is only reached in the Book of Revelation, without which we would never know whether the engagement (or ‘betrothal’; 2 Corinthians 11:2) ever came to anything or was broken off!

No one can speak of the beginning but the one who was in the beginning. Thus the Bible begins with God's free affirmation, free acknowledgment, free revelation of himself: In the beginning God created...

In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.” From the first book to the last the Bible tells of wayward children and the tortuous lengths to which God will go to bring them home. Indeed, the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion in the book of Revelation.

God's speech in nature is not to be confused with the notion of a talking cosmos, as by those who insist that nature speaks, and that we must therefore hear what nature says as if nature were the voice of God. 'Hear God!' is the biblical message, not 'Listen to nature!' Nature is God's created order, and in nature God presents himself.

This is God's world, so everything, even if it intends to efface God, bears witness to God – understood and interpreted through biblical eyeglasses.

It's Time2Know, Time2Understand!

We can answer the question “Who is God?” only by attending to who God has revealed himself to be.

The concept of divine revelation was central to Augustine's epistemology, or theory of knowledge. The metaphor of light is instructive. In our present earthly state we are equipped with the faculty of sight. We have eyes, optic nerves, and so forth- all the equipment needed for sight. But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he is locked in a totally dark room. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing. When Augustine speaks of revelation, he is not speaking of Biblical revelation alone. He is also concerned with "general" or "natural" revelation. Not only are the truths in Scripture dependent on God's revelation, but all truth, including scientific truth, is dependent on divine revelation. This is why Augustine encouraged students to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible. For him, all truth is God's truth, and when one encounters truth, one encounters the God whose truth it is.

Logos (The Biblical Manuscripts/Canon of Scriptures) & Rhema (The Person/Life/Words/Death/Resurrection of Jesus Christ): The 'special' & 'ultimate' revelation of God. Without these revelations God would be unsearchable, unknowable, and inscrutable." ~R. Alan Woods [2013]

When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God's love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it as a reality that humbles us even as it gives cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that marks each day rich with the possibility of salvation.

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the biblical prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished to go. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they have no Biblical record of the revelation.

Now you can look at the idea of a unified world system, what the Bible refers to as the future ‘Babylon,’ like a three-legged stool. Global Government, Global Economy, and Global Religion. In the Bible, each of those are prophesied to be world powers at the end of the age. And by the way, each of them will be destroyed by God according to biblical prophecy. You can read it for yourself in last book in the Bible, Revelation, chapters seventeen and eighteen.

The trouble is, nobody knows exactly how the world really works. We are all fallible people with limited knowledge. It is only through Biblical revelation from the One who knows how the world really works because He made it and actively sustains it that anyone can come to a competent understanding of the world.

The end product of biblical Christianity is a person—not a book, not a building, not a set of principles or a system of ethics—but one person in two natures (divine/human) with four ministries (prophet/priest/king/sage) and four biographies (the Gospels). But those four biographies don’t tell the whole story. Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story’s plotline of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.

We are called to fight for Biblical justice, Boden. It will be uncomfortable and even frightening at times because the world doesn’t take kindly to us speaking against it. What the world loves, we’re to hate. And what we love, the world hates. That’s what happens when we walk a different path and live in the light while they languish in the dark.

Marriage is a state of penance. It calls for prayer, fasting, alms-deeds, renunciation, and the intention to increase the Kingdom of God.

True worship is the experience of encountering God through the means that God usually employs, a conversation built on revelation/response.

With regard to the gospels, biblical scholarship has mixed-up theology with history, thereby turning the eschatology of the epistles into memoirs.

If we fail to understand the biblical story of Jesus, we will compromise our prophetic interpretations of the end-times. And that's exactly what we've done.

If we have the Word without the Spirit, we dry up. If we have the Spirit without the Word, we blow up. But if we have the Word and the Spirit, we grow up.

Thereafter, the enduring form of God’s presence with his people is as the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, present and active within believers.

Biblical eschatology fundamentally challenges the "official" scientific idea that the universe will end in a violent heat death, and instead that the cosmos will be set free from its decadence. It calls us to consider the sobering similarities between ancient pagan cosmologies (creation began with war & violence between the gods) and modern naturalism as a nihilistic, philosophical worldview (all will end in astronomical war & violence). Instead, the revelation (apocalypse) of the Lamb is that God created out of love and love will win in the end.

The world as man’s food is not something “material” and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically “spiritual” functions by which man is related to God. All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.

The book of Revelation is calling Christians to a cultural disengagement: we have woken up to find the prostitute in our beds and the beast raiding our possessions, and we seem to be okay with that.

I glimpse again that biblical rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, assertion-and-subversion. As that rhythm becomes ever clearer as the very heartbeat of the biblical tradition, we will see the basic solution for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Read it all carefully and thoughtfully, recognize radicality’s assertion, expect normalcy’s subversion, and respect the honesty of a story that tells the truth.

FEBRUARY 26 YOU WILL OVERCOME THE DEVIL BY THE BLOOD OF MY SON JUST AS THE blood of a lamb, sprinkled on the doorposts in Egypt by My chosen people, established a covenant of blood with Me and protected them from the destruction that I brought to those who had enslaved them, so too have I established a covenant of blood with you. Through the blood of My dear Son, Jesus, which covers you, I have redeemed you from the curse of sin and have adopted you as My own dear child. I have equipped you with everything good for doing My will, and I will work in you to cause you to do what is pleasing to Me. Through the blood of Christ you can have confidence to come into My presence. In His blood I have given you redemption, forgiveness of sins, and have redeemed you from the power of evil. EXODUS 12; HEBREWS 13:20–21; REVELATION 12:10–11 Prayer Declaration I have eternal redemption through the power of the blood of Christ. I have been raised to new life in Christ so that I may serve the living God. I overcome the devil through the blood of Jesus. Through Him I am made perfect and have the confidence to enter into the presence of God.

The antinuclear sentiments of both leaders were soon strengthened by a man-made nuclear catastrophe that seemed to fit right in with the biblical prophecy of Armageddon that had impressed Reagan so much: 'A great star fell from the sky, flaming like a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs. The name of the star was Wormwood; and a third of the water turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it was poisoned' [Revelation 8:10]. The Ukrainian word for 'wormwood' is Chernobyl.

God’s glory is not always immediate, but it is certain. He will be glorified for His holiness, for His defeat of Satan, for His righteous judgment, and for His grace to redeemed sinners (Revelation 5). This glory must have a backdrop of sin to be fully realized.

At the outset of Jesus’s ministry God tore apart the curtain of the heavens in order to come down and be present and active in Jesus. At Jesus’s death he tore apart the curtain in the temple in order to come out and be present and active through Jesus in the world at large.

If Jacob is now to find himself apart from his family, if he is to find who he can be in this newly uncertain world in which he is alone, he must also now find God as his own God. Not that he thinks of this for himself. It is not Jacob who turns to God but God who turns to Jacob.

John Houghton, in his article on Augustine and Tolkien, has made the point that there are in fact “two moments in the task of theology.” On the one hand, the theologian must “de-mythologize” and so render intelligible to his audience the meaning of divine revelation or sacred scripture by explaining it in terms of what they already know.2 It is this first task of theology with which St. Thomas was primarily involved, translating, as I suggested in the Introduction, the mythos of biblical revelation into the logos of Aristotle and the “vernacular” of late medieval scholasticism. “On the other hand,” Houghton continues, “the theologian faces the task of recovery, of restoring the power of images and stories that have grown weak from cultural change or from mere familiarity. In this sense the theologian’s task is not demythologizing but mythopoesis as...‘re-mythologizing’...

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities— be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart. In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ. Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God’s vision: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: “Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior’” (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God’s radicality and civilization’s normalcy? That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount preferred loving enemies and praying for persecutors while Jesus the Christ of the book of Revelation preferred killing enemies and slaughtering persecutors. It is not that Jesus the Christ changed his mind, but that in standard biblical assertion-and-subversion strategy, Christianity changed its Jesus.

Our hope is not in being beamed up to heaven upon death with suddenly perfected bodies. Our hope is informed and colored by John’s vision in Revelation 21: the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. Hope in suffering is never for a disembodied day when we can finally escape the bodies, relationships, and circumstances that have caused us so much pain. Biblical hope is expressed not in certainty but in curiosity, hearts that acknowledge and accept Jesus is already King, lives that look for the restoration of his rule right here, people propelled by a willingness to see Jesus turn every inch of creation from cursed to cured. The relationships that were broken will be made right; our relationship to our bodies, each other, the earth, and God will be fully and finally restored. The kingdom is already and not yet; living in its tension rather than panicking for release is the only way to be pulled into the trajectory of hope.

The lamp of divine, written revelation reveals the will of God for the believer. Whether it is expressed by biblical command or precept, by scriptural example or principle, the Word illumines the path every believer must take. This divine light in Scripture is not a mere option, but an absolute necessity for every follower of Christ.

Some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers...claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact. Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can't believe in evolution, and vice versa. But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can't believe in artichokes.

Elisha was a man of vision, a man of revelation, and he never let go of it. What about you? I don’t know what prophetic promise the Lord may have spoken to you. As Christians, we have the biblical promises as well as the current-day revelatory words that are spoken into each of our lives, which come in a multiplicity of manners. Sometimes they come by the quiet, still witness of the Spirit; at other times, through dreams or visions. They may come from God directly to you or through someone speaking to you what they have received from God. Whatever the case, don’t cast away your dream, for it will have a great reward. Don’t take off your dream coat in the presence of your enemy. Keep the vision God has given you before your eyes. Vision is a power that sustains a people.

Forgiveness is not automatic. It’s conditioned upon confession: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Christ offers to everyone the gift of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Revelation 22:17).

Eternal torture is nowhere suggested in the Old Testament Scriptures, and only a few statements in the New Testament can be so misconstrued as to appear to teach it; and these are found either among the symbolisms of Revelation, or among the parables and dark sayings of our Lord, which were not understood by the people who heard them (Luke 8:10) and which seem to be but little better comprehended today. [...]

After his wife died, in great pain C. S. Lewis realized, “If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came.”3 Our own suffering is often our wake-up call. But even if you aren’t now facing it, look around and you’ll see many who are. ... Suffering and evil exert a force that either pushes us away from God or pulls us toward him. ... Unfortunately, most evangelical churches—whether traditional, liturgical, or emergent—have failed to teach people to think biblically about the realities of evil and suffering. A pastor’s daughter told me, “I was never taught the Christian life was going to be difficult. I’ve discovered it is, and I wasn’t ready.” ... On the other side of death, the Bible promises that all who know him will fall into the open arms of a holy, loving, and gracious God—the greatest miracle, the answer to the problem of evil and suffering. He promises us an eternal kingdom on the New Earth, where he says of those who come to trust him in this present world of evil and suffering, “They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:3–4)

Assuming for the moment that I am right, and that the asteroid Apophis is biblical Wormwood and therefore 2029 represents a time around the middle of the Great Tribulation period when the trumpet judgments begin, Monday, October 13, 2025 (April 13, 2029, minus three and a half years), would be the approximate start date of the seven years of Tribulation foreseen in Scripture (see Matthew 24:21; Revelation 7:14; and Daniel 12:1).

As world events develop, prophecy becomes more and more exciting...This writer doesn't believe that we have prophets today who are getting direct revelations from God, but we do have prophets today who are being given special insight into the prophetic word. God is opening the book of the prophets to many men. This is one reason you will find on Christian bookshelves an increasing number of books on the subject of Bible prophecy.

Worship is God's gift of grace to us before it's our offering to God. We simply benefit from the perfect offering of the Son to the Father through the power of the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). Worship is our humble, constant, appropriate, glad response to God's self-revelation and his enabling invitation. Apart from this perspective, leading worship can become self-motivated and self-exalting. We can become burdened by the responsibility to lead others and can think that we might not be able to deliver the goods. We subtly take pride in our worship, our singing, our playing, our planning, our performance, our leadership. Ultimately we separate ourselves from the God who drew us to worship him in the first place. That's why biblical worship is God-focused (God is clearly seen), God-centered (God is clearly the priority), and God-exalting (God is clearly honored). Gathering to praise God can't be a means to some "greater" end, such as church growth, evangelism, or personal ministry. God isn't a genie we summon by rubbing the bottle called "worship." He doesn't exist to help us get where we really want to go. God is where we want to go. So God's glory is the end of our worship, and not simply a means to something else. In the midst of a culture that glorifies our pitiful accomplishments in countless ways, we gather each week to proclaim God's wondrous deeds and to glory in his supreme value. He is holy, holy, holy. There is no one, and nothing, like the Lord.

​In the light of Sister White’s counsel, it is clear drugs can bequeath a legacy of disease upon the human race. Unfortunately, most Adventists reading these statements have locked them into a time capsule, making them only applicable to medicine of the 19th century. Such a perspective is not cognizant of the facts. For example, an article published in the Polish Archives of Internal Medicine points out that prescription drugs kill approximately 200,000 Americans each year, making it the 3rd leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease.

Let us not think, I said, that we really have a choice between having a theology and not having one. We all have our theologies, for we all have a way of putting things together in our own minds that, if we are Christian, has a shape that arises from our knowledge of God and his Word. We might not be conscious of the process. Indeed, we frequently are not. But at the very least we will organize our perceptions into some sort of pattern that seems to make sense to us. The question at issue, then, is not whether we will have a theology but whether it will be a good or bad one, whether we will become conscious of our thinking processes or not, and, more particularly, whether we will learn to bring all of our thoughts into obedience to Christ or not. The biblical authors had a theology in this sense, after all, and so too did Jesus. He explained himself in terms of biblical revelation, understood his life and work in relation to God, and viewed all of life from this perspective. He had a worldview that originated in the purposes and character of his Father and that informed everything he said and did.

No man will stand before the Father and be able to give the excuse, “I was born unloved by my Creator (Jn. 3:16). I was born un-chosen and without the hope of salvation (Titus 2:11). I was born unable to see, hear or understand God’s revelation of Himself (Acts 28:27-28).” No! They will stand wholly and completely “without excuse” (Rm. 1:20), because God loved them (Jn. 3:16), called them to salvation (2 Cor. 5:20), revealed Himself to them (Titus 2:11), and provided the means by which their sins would be atoned (1 Jn. 2:2). No man has any excuse for unbelief (Rm. 1:20).

Only in the biblical revelation is the tension between law and love resolved, with vast social and historical implications, in the person and work of Jesus Christ. By His perfect righteousness and His vicarious atonement, the strictest requirements of law and justice were fully met and fulfilled, and the statutes of God observed to every jot and tittle, and yet, at one and the same time, the love of God unto salvation was manifested in and through Him. The cross thus is the symbol of the unity of law and love in Jesus Christ and of the full requirement and mutual integrity of both.

But for neither Moses nor Elijah did the opposition lead to violent death. Moses died peacefully and honored at an advanced age. Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. But for Jesus the bitter opposition he is to encounter will lead to his being put to death, as he has just recently tried to get across to Peter and the others. Paradoxically, being the beloved Son puts him in a special category that entails his violent death. God did not let Moses or Elijah suffer such a fate, but his unique and dearly beloved Son—him God will hand over to mocking, torture, and an abandoned death.

I’ve concluded there are four chapters missing from the working Bibles of all too many Christians, and these missing chapters are not some obscure ceremonial texts or dusty corners of the royal chronicles. Instead, they are the very bookends of Scripture: the first two chapters of Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation. And to miss these chapters—the first two about the creation, the second two about the new creation—is to miss the whole point of the biblical story. When these chapters drop out of our functional Bibles, our understanding of culture, power and salvation itself is badly weakened.

The Bible is not an intellectual sinecure, and its acceptance should not be like setting up a talismanic lock that seals both the mind and the conscience against the intrusion of new thoughts. Revelation is not vicarious thinking. Its purpose is not to substitute for but to extend our understanding. The prophets tried to extend the horizon of our conscience and to impart to us a sense of the divine partnership in our dealings with good and evil and in our wrestling with life’s enigmas. They tried to teach us how to think in the categories of God: His holiness, justice and compassion. The appropriation of these categories, far from exempting us from the obligation to gain new insights in our own time, is a challenge to look for ways of translating Biblical commandments into programs required by our own conditions. The full meaning of the Biblical words was not disclosed once and for all. Every hour another aspect is unveiled. The word was given once; the effort to understand it must go on for ever. It is not enough to accept or even to carry out the commandments. To study, to examine, to explore the Torah is a form of worship, a supreme duty. For the Torah is an invitation to perceptivity, a call for continuous understanding.

One author, in writing of the Bible’s uniqueness, put it this way: Here is a book: 1. written over a 1500 year span; 2. written over 40 generations; 3. written by more than 40 authors, from every walk of life— including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, etc.: Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt Peter, a fisherman Amos, a herdsman Joshua, a military general Nehemiah, a cupbearer Daniel, a prime minister Luke, a doctor Solomon, a king Matthew, a tax collector Paul, a rabbi 4. written in different places: Moses in the wilderness Jeremiah in a dungeon Daniel on a hillside and in a palace Paul inside a prison Luke while traveling John on the isle of Patmos others in the rigors of a military campaign 5. written at different times: David in times of war Solomon in times of peace 6. written during different moods: some writing from the heights of joy and others from the depths of sorrow and despair 7. written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe 8. written in three languages: Hebrew… , Aramaic… , and Greek… 9. Finally, its subject matter includes hundreds of controversial topics. Yet, the biblical authors spoke with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. There is one unfolding story…

The first and fundamental question of this book is this: How do we Christians know which is our true God— our Bible’s violent God, or our Bible’s nonviolent God? The answer is actually obvious. The norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ. Christ is the standard by which we measure everything else in the Bible. Since Christianity claims Christ as the image and revelation of God, then God is violent if Christ is violent, and God is nonviolent if Christ is nonviolent. This is even given in what we are called. We are called Christ-ians not Bible-ians, so our very name asserts the ascendancy of Christ over the Bible.

There is a powerful tendency in fallen human nature to drift from God-reliance to self-reliance, with the woeful results to which Teresa of Avila testified. At the very heart of the biblical revelation is a profound insight into the incapacity of the human being, apart from Christ, to live the Christian life. The primacy of grace, and our response in faith to this gift, is the clear biblical witness and an absolutely foundational element of the spiritual life. We have to be very clear on this as we proceed in exploring the elements of the spiritual journey. To neglect the very foundation, the primacy of grace, is to build a shaky structure that won't stand.

The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here—and—now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew—laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” (Ps 90:5), or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do. It is this God who speaks to us through the psalmist as he wakes from sleep, amazed, to declare, “I will bless you, Lord, you give me counsel, and even at night direct my heart” (Ps 16:7, GR). It is this God who speaks to us through the prophets, reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation. When it comes to the nitty—gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation, a concept that is beautifully summed up in an ancient saying from the monastic tradition: “Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Pior that every day he made a new beginning.

The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true, because it might nevertheless be a fabrication; but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely. If Matthew speaks truth, Luke speaks falsehood; and if Luke speaks truth, Matthew speaks falsehood: and as there is no authority for believing one more than the other, there is no authority for believing either; and if they cannot be believed even in the very first thing they say, and set out to prove, they are not entitled to be believed in any thing they say afterwards. Truth is an uniform thing; and as to inspiration and revelation, were we to admit it, it is impossible to suppose it can be contradictory. Either then the men called apostles were imposters, or the books ascribed to them have been written by other persons, and fathered upon them, as is the case in the Old Testament. Now, if these men, Matthew and Luke, set out with a falsehood between them (as these two accounts show they do) in the very commencement of their history of Jesus Christ, and of who, and of what he was, what authority (as I have before asked) is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterwards? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God, begotten by a ghost; and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? If they lied in one genealogy, why are we to believe them in the other? If his natural genealogy be manufactured, which it certainly is, why are we not to suppose that his celestial genealogy is manufactured also, and that the whole is fabulous? Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and related by persons already detected of falsehood?

Here was the shattering of the second wall: I had read the Bible many times through, and I saw for myself that it had a holy Author; I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of sixty-six books with a unified biblical revelation. I heard for myself that when the words “this is mine” came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was attesting to this one, simple truth: that the line of communication that God ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture, and that I truly wanted both to hear God’s voice breathed in my life, and I wanted God to hear my pleas. The fog burned away. The whole Bible, each jot and tittle, was my open highway to a holy God.

once a person or a culture adopts the idea that this world is all there is, as is typical of myth, certain things follow regardless of the primitiveness or the modernity of the person or culture. Among these are the devaluing of individual persons, the loss of an interest in history, fascination with magic and the occult, and denial of individual responsibility. The opposites of these, among which are what we have taken to be the glories of modern Western culture, are the by-products of the biblical worldview. As that worldview is progressively lost among us, we are losing the by-products as well. Not realizing that they are by-products, we are surprised to see them go, but we have no real explanation for their departure.

think of that story when people question the reality of Satan. If the devil isn’t real, then someone else like him is continually assaulting us. How else can we explain the extent of evil in the world? Make no mistake. Satan is real. He may rarely be recognized, and his existence may often be denied, but he is real. The Bible is full of references to him, and God’s Word is our only reliable source for information about Satan, demons, and spiritual warfare. As E.M. Bounds notes, “The Bible is a revelation, not a philosophy or a poem, not a science. It reveals things and persons as they are, living and acting outside the range of earthly vision or natural discovery. Biblical revelations are not against reason but above reason.”2 Biblical revelation unveils the reality of an evil being named Satan.

Fortunately the essence of this revelation did not escape Mary despite the angel's obscure speech, and, much surprised, she asked him, So Jesus is my son and the son of the Lord, Woman, what are you saying, show some respect for rank and precedence, what you must say is the son of the Lord and me, Of the Lord and of you, No, of the Lord and of you, You're confusing me, just answer my question, is Jesus our son, You mean to say the Lord's son because you only served to bear the child, So the Lord didn't choose me, Don't be absurd (...) Is there any real proof that it was the Lord's seed which engendered my first-born, Well, it's a delicate matter, and what you're demanding is nothing less than a paternity test which in these mixed unions, no matter how many analyses, tests, and globule counts one carries out, can never give conclusive results.

Radical modernity is the enemy equally of autonomous human reason and of biblical revelation. The core of radical modernity is radical skepticism, a dogmatic skepticism that denies that we do have, or can have, any genuine knowledge of the external world. This dogmatic skepticism denies that either philosophy or revelation in the traditional understanding are possible. It denies that either Socrates or the prophets could ever have distinguished, as Thomas Hobbes put it, whether God had spoken to them in dreams or they had dreamed that God had spoken to them. Hobbes was the precursor of modern scientific positivism, which regards all knowledge as essentially hypothetical and experimental. Its core conviction is that we know only what we make. In constructing a world from hypotheses, we ourselves are the source of all creativity: there is neither need nor room for God. In constructing a world from hypotheses, we have a priori perfect knowledge of that world: there is neither need nor room for philosophy.

Whatever the reason, if we don’t read the Bible and see God’s love for sinners, we miss one of the greatest truths in the Bible. To be clear, the Bible is about one thing and one thing only: the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. From Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, the Bible relentlessly points to the Cross. God sent His Son to die for sinners to demonstrate His mercy, grace, and loving-kindness. Everything in this universe exists to serve Him and bring Him glory. However, if we overlook God’s love for us as we read the Bible, we miss the very thing He is trying to demonstrate. We also miss a lot of comfort, security, hope, and joy. It is easy to fall into one of two ditches when we read about God’s love. We can focus only on how much He loves us and conclude the universe exists for us. Unfortunately, we can fall into the other ditch of forgetting that God really does love us and we can become rather despondent. In order to appreciate God’s true love for us and remain humble, we must read our Bibles with balance.

...the Kabbalist was interested not in the perfected text whose author is dead and can no longer respond but in contact with the living Author for whom the text is an intermediary. Even when the pneuma was needed in order to better understand the Bible, the content of this deeper apprehension was, in many cases, a better insight into divine matters. According to the French philosopher, the death of the author is a condition for finalizing the text and rendering it into a static perfection, allowing for a "complete" relation. This request is based upon a rigid attitude toward the contents, which are to be approached when they can no longer change. It is an axiom of the Kabbalists that the sacred text is in an ongoing process of change, evidently a symptom of its inherent infinity and divinity. For them, Scripture is a way of overcoming the post-prophetic eclipse of revelation, an endeavor to recapture the presence of the Author and its nature; the biblical text produces a silent dialogue and eventually even union between Author and reader,..

The Bible, however, teaches that change comes about through confession, repentance, and obedience. There is no need for hours and hours of free association, venting, and dream analysis; no need to structure contrived rewards or punishments; no need to sit in front of the mirror every morning reciting your "Twenty Affirmations." The process of change (what the Bible calls sanctification) is accomplished by following these simple steps: First, you must recognize your action as sinful (not merely ineffective or self-defeating) (Ecclesiastes 7:20; Romans 3:23) and confess it to God, to whom you owe worship and obedience (John 1:9; Revelation 3:19). Second, you need to ask for His forgiveness. Third, you must repent. Repentance involves putting off your former manner of life, seeking to renew your mind, and putting on the new habits that God commands (Ephesians 4:22-24). Finally, you must habitually practice each of these steps in faith (Philippians 4:9). As you seek to do these things, you'll be empowered by the Holy Spirit (2 Thessalonians 2:13) and enlightened by the Word (Psalm 119:130). Remember,

First, the biblical descriptions regarding the coming of Jesus the Jewish Messiah bear many striking resemblances to the coming Antichrist of Islam, whom Muslims refer to as the al-maseeh al-dajjaal (the counterfeit Messiah). Second, the Bible’s Antichrist bears numerous striking commonalities with the primary messiah figure of Islam, who Muslims call the Mahdi. In other words, our Messiah is their antichrist and our Antichrist is their messiah. Even more shocking to many readers was the revelation that Islam teaches that when Jesus returns, He will come back as a Muslim prophet whose primary mission will be to abolish Christianity. It’s difficult for any Bible believer to read of these things without becoming acutely aware of the satanic origins of the Islamic religion. In 2008, I also had the opportunity to coauthor another book on the same subject with Walid Shoebat, a former operative for the Palestine Liberation Organization. This book, entitled God’s War on Terror, is an almost encyclopedic discussion of the role of Islam in the last days, as well as a chronicle of Walid’s journey from a young Palestinian Muslim with a deep hatred for the Jews, to a Christian man who spends his life standing with the Jewish people and proclaiming the truth concerning the dangers of radical Islam. Together these two books have become the cornerstone of what has developed into a popular eschatological revolution. Today, I receive a steady stream of e-mails and reports from individuals expressing how much these books have affected them and transformed their understanding of the end-times. Students, pastors, and even reputable scholars have expressed that they have abandoned the popular notion that the Antichrist, his empire, and his religion will emerge out of Europe or a revived Roman Empire. Instead they have come to recognize the simple fact that the Bible emphatically and repeatedly points us to the Middle East as the launchpad and epicenter of the emerging empire of the Antichrist and his religion. Many testify that although they have been students of Bible prophecy for many years, never before had anything made so much sense, or the prophecies of the Bible become so clear. And even more important, some have even written to share that they’ve become believers or recommitted their lives to Jesus as a result of reading these books. Hallelujah!

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.

Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15

What if I say to the church, “God chose you for salvation and Jesus died for you,” and then some of those people fall away and apostatize and end up in hell? Haven’t I lied to them? No, I haven’t. I have spoken the truth. In Scripture, truth is more than just conformity to the facts. It is trustworthiness and faithfulness.10 I have spoken to these people in a trustworthy manner. I have spoken to them in a faithful manner, a manner that they can bank their whole lives on, because I have spoken to them in accordance with God’s revelation. There is a tough, challenging, and surprising passage in Ezekiel 33:13 and following. The Lord says there: When I say to the righteous, he will surely live, and he so trusts in his righteousness that he commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered; but in that same iniquity of his which he has committed he will die. But when I say to the wicked, “You will surely die,” and he turns from his sin and practices justice and righteousness, if a wicked man restores a pledge, pays back what he has taken by robbery, walks by the statutes of life [NASB margin] without committing iniquity, he will surely live; he shall not die. None of his sins that he has committed will be remembered against him. He has practiced justice and righteousness; he will surely live.11 Yet we want to say to God, “You said to the righteous man, ‘You will surely live’—living you will live, in the Hebrew idiom—but he died. You said to the wicked man, ‘You will surely die’—dying you will die—and he lived. You lied to them, didn’t you? You didn’t tell the truth to them.” But who are we to teach God how to speak the truth? This is how God speaks. He says to people, “You will surely live,” and then they die because they trust in their own righteousness instead of trusting in Him. But God was telling the truth when He said to them, “You will surely live.” He was not lying to them. He was saying something trustworthy. When He says to the wicked man, “You will surely die,” He’s saying something trustworthy to that man and the man takes heed to what God has said. He trusts what God has said. He believes that if he stays on the path on which he is going he will surely die. In faith he trembles at the warning and he will surely live. God speaks this way and we must learn from him how to speak. God speaks to His people and He calls them elect, and therefore we also need to speak to God’s people this way. We must. We have no other choice but to let God teach us how to address his people, even if we don’t have it all worked out in our minds. If we are not comfortable with biblical language, not only hearing it but also saying it, if biblical language sounds strange to us, and if our theology gets in the way of our speaking and receiving the language of Scripture, then what has become of us—we, who are to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord?

Without divine revelation, human beings have no capacity to have true premises with which to conclude anything about what they observe. Schools instead are teaching students that they merely need to agree on the premises. They don’t need to prove that the premises are true since they can’t possibly prove that the premises are true without divine revelation. They teach students to base all their thinking on made-up stuff.

Pope Francis is seen by prophecy scholars as matching the description, and my former volume, Petrus Romanus, details how he satisfies a nine-hundred-year-old prophecy pointing toward the False Prophet or second beast in the biblical Apocalypse (Revelation 13:11). Pope Francis is confirming this identity by asserting universal salvation: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!”[402] Of course, the idea that atheists are redeemed is contrary to the teaching of Jesus (Matthew 7:13–14) and the New Testament in general (Galatians 2:16; Hebrews 11:6). Whether or not Pope Francis is the False Prophet remains to be seen, but it is indisputable that he is a false prophet. We’ve seen plenty of evidence for the transition—the paranormal paradigm shift—but who

I suspect that these monks would have found baffling, if not downright comical, our either/or mentality, our fussing and fuming over whether scripture is literal or symbolic, historical or fantastical. Although their access to scholarly tools was primitive compared to what is available in our day, their method of biblical interpretation was in some ways more sophisticated and certainly more psychologically astute, in that they were better able to fathom the complex integrative, and transformative qualities of revelation. Their approach was far less narcissistic than our own tends to be, in that their goal when reading scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

his enemies in chapter 19 as the “great supper of God” where the birds of prey eat the flesh of his defeated foes (19:17). While Leviathan is not included in this Revelation passage, it is the same kind of nature banquet motif as described in Psalm 74: creatures feasting on the flesh of the enemies of God. The “banquet of flesh” was a common way of symbolizing deliverance from and victory

Clearly a mark of the in-breaking kingdom is the relief of suffering. As the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World” reminds us, Jesus “comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.” Relief of suffering is a good and necessary thing. This in fact is where history is going; in the new heavens and earth there will be no crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). So when we seek to bring relief from suffering now, we are keeping in step with God’s plan of redemption. As the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs said, contentment is “not opposed to all lawful seeking for help in different circumstances, nor endeavoring simply to be delivered out of present afflictions by the use of lawful means.”1 I believe medications can certainly be one of those lawful means. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking relief from present suffering.

CREATION-FALL-REDEMPTION-CONSUMMATION IS NOT THE GOSPEL Many Christians have outlined the story of the Bible using the four words creation, fall, redemption, consummation. Actually that outline is a really good way to summarize the Bible’s main story line. God creates the world, man sins, God acts in the Messiah Jesus to redeem a people for himself, and history comes to an end with the final consummation of his glorious kingdom. From Genesis to Revelation, that’s a great way to remember the Bible’s basic narrative. In fact, when you understand and articulate it rightly, the creation-fall-redemption-consummation outline provides a good framework for a faithful presentation of the biblical gospel. The problem, though, is that creation-fall-redemption-consummation has been used wrongly by some as a way to place the emphasis of the gospel on God’s promise to renew the world, rather than on the cross.

First, the biblical descriptions regarding the coming of Jesus the Jewish Messiah bear many striking resemblances to the coming Antichrist of Islam, whom Muslims refer to as the al-maseeh al-dajjaal (the counterfeit Messiah). Second, the Bible’s Antichrist bears numerous striking commonalities with the primary messiah figure of Islam, who Muslims call the Mahdi. In other words, our Messiah is their antichrist and our Antichrist is their messiah. Even more shocking to many readers was the revelation that Islam teaches that when Jesus returns, He will come back as a Muslim prophet whose primary mission will be to abolish Christianity. It’s difficult for any Bible believer to read of these things without becoming acutely aware of the satanic origins of the Islamic religion.

The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It is about realization and not performance principles.

One fascinating revelation in scripture is just how sacred human sexuality exists for God. The Bible sings with this truth, and Donna dives into this mystery to reveal the greatest love story ever told!

NAR apostles establish the foundational government of the church, first, by “hearing what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches.” In other words, they receive new revelation from God. This new revelation is often referred to by NAR leaders as “present truth” or “new truths.” Wagner says the new revelation can only be received by apostles and prophets.

Scripture participates in the sacramental reality of the spiritual realm as well as the material realm and is a suitable revelation to us creatures, who, made up of both bodies and souls, inhabit both the material and spiritual realms. So biblical interpretation involves both a vertical and a horizontal dimension.

Under his guidance, Anabaptism moved away from bloody revolutions and private revelations. The Mennonites were to be peaceful and biblical. Thus Menno sealed the victory of the Zurich Anabaptist martyr Felix Mantz’s nonaggressive, biblical radicalism.

The biblical teaching on the priesthood of the believer is found in such passages as 1 Peter 2:5, 9 and Revelation 1:6; 5:10. In the Old Testament God set aside one tribe (Levi) as his representatives to serve him on behalf of the others. In the New Testament he has called and set aside all believers as his priests to serve him as well as his body, the church. The point is we’re all to be involved in ministry in our churches. Service or ministry is necessary and vital to the life of every church.

The biblical text is fundamentally androcentric and regularly (though not exclusively) patriarchal. Yet there are texts in which God or the narrator addresses women directly, texts in which women and their children and other vulnerable people are the primary concern of God and the text (not to mention texts in which feminine language and imagery is used for God). Women in the Scriptures function in various capacities: monarch, prophet, judge, shepherd, entrepreneur, musician, slave, and slaveholder. The complexity of the biblical texts is part of what draws me to them and commends them to me. I wrestle with the texts, more bruised than blessed while God-wrestling the Torah as a surrogate for the One who revealed her and the ones who claim(ed) clear and certain apprehension of that revelation in the name of the One.

Susan Sewell 5-Star Review "A supercomputer enhanced with artificial intelligence causes havoc in the life of its creator in the thrilling and suspenseful science-fiction fantasy, AI Beast by Shawn Corey. Since he was a child, Professor Jonathan Anthony Edwards dreamed of creating a sentient computer. Finally, his dream is coming to fruition, and his AI computer program, Lex, is almost ready to launch. To add to his delight, he has found someone with whom he can share his life. Beverly is an enchanting and beautiful woman who captivates Jon at first sight. In an unbelievable coincidence, her son, Nigel, is a student of quantum computing and is excited to be a part of Lex's debut. One day, while Jon and Nigel are working alone with Lex during a storm, something goes very wrong, and Jon is injured and sent into a coma by a blaze of light. When he finally regains consciousness, everything has changed at the University, and Nigel is in charge of Lex. While he has been out of commission, Nigel, Lex, and powerful world leaders seem to be working together to alter the world and humankind. What happened to Nigel and Jon that stormy day? Did Lex modify their psyches to use them to enact her secret plans? Incorporating prophecy from the book of Revelation and combining it with the element of artificial intelligence, AI Beast by Shawn Corey is a brilliant blend of science fiction and religion. Filled with suspenseful and intense, action-packed scenes, the tale chillingly portrays the terrifying conceptualization of a viable source that could be responsible for the fulfillment of the Bible's prophesied end times. From the beginning, the story flows at a quick pace, building momentum and culminating in a dramatic and explosive finale. Well-written with a solid, riveting plot, fascinating characters, and an intricately woven storyline, it is a stunning novel that is impossible to put down. The book contains deceit, passion, and exciting action scenes that will enthrall fans of Christian thrillers and science-fiction novels with a biblical influence. Due to some sexually intimate scenes, the book is more suitable for mature readers.

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.

the biblical interpretations of history are inspired (in-spire = breathe into), that the human writers of the Scriptures were given unique direction and insight by God in order to interpret correctly God’s presence and activity in the history of Israel and especially in the ministry of Jesus. In short, it is to believe in divine revelation, such that the Bible yields more than simply a human perspective on the events it describes.

Biblical truth comes as a revelation to the elect

Nevertheless, Reformed epistemology does not regard belief in God as groundless or arbitrary. Plantinga distinguishes between evidence and grounds, the former being what apologists look for in theistic proofs, while the latter is more straightforward. Direct experience provides grounds to justify belief even without argumentation. One’s experience of God appropriately grounds belief in His existence.33 Reformed epistemologists stress the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit as confirming, for example, that the Bible is the reliable revelation from God. Stephen Evans believes that those who dismiss this Reformed approach as fideism (i.e., irrational faith based solely upon personal experience) try to understand it in evidentialist terms.34 He says that it should be understood in externalist terms, which means that the factors that determine whether or not I am justified or warranted in holding my belief do not have to be internal to my consciousness. At bottom the externalist says that what properly “grounds” a belief is the relationship of the believer to reality.35 For Reformed epistemologists such as Evans, the biblical story is self-authenticating in the sense that “through the work of the Spirit the story itself produces a conviction of its truth in persons, and it is in that sense epistemologically basic.”36

The crucified man on the cross is looking in only one direction and that is the direction of God and Christ and the Holy Ghost and the direction of Biblical revelation and the direction of world evangelization and the direction of the edifying of the church, the direction of sanctification and the direction of the Spirit-filled life.

Thus, an aspect of man’s revolt against maturity and against life is his revolt against knowledge. Whereas the natural man may seek knowledge as a substitute for God, and as a means of becoming God (Gen. 3: 5), he soon turns from knowledge itself because it is inescapably revelational of God.

evangelical commitment to the country remains vibrant—and cannot be separated from evangelical interpretation of Revelation. In a recent poll by Lifeway Research, some 80 percent of evangelicals believe that the establishment of the state of Israel was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that shows that we are now closer to the second coming of Christ.23

The second effect of the book of Revelation—namely, instructing God’s people how to live in the last days—is achieved in large part through two symbols: the New Jerusalem and the figure of the martyr.

In this sense—not in the sense of offering a neutral standpoint—Revelation can be called a critique of ideology. The Christian critique of ideology is not neutral; it is personal.

One of the effects of reading the book of Revelation is to break the reader’s political illusions and offer another perspective on earthly empires: God’s perspective.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

For this reason, the rainbow may represent the bow (weapon) of God and that it has been placed at rest in the clouds as a symbol of God’s rest from judgment (see Deut. 32:23, 42; Pss. 7:12[13]; 18:14[15]; Hab. 3:9). It is also worth noting that the rainbow is a feature associated with the throne of God and the divine presence: “Like the appearance of the [rain]bow in the clouds on the day of rain, so is the appearance of the brightness around him” (Ezek. 1:28). This theme is picked up in the book of Revelation, where the clouds and the rainbow attend the divine presence: “And I saw another strong angel coming down from heaven clothed with a cloud and the rainbow was around his head” (Rev. 10:1; see 4:3). Perhaps the rainbow represents God’s royal presence as the one who rules this world and sustains the covenant of common grace.55 We know that Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood,

Since the evolution of the human race shifted from a mother-centered to a father-centered structure of society, as well as of religion, we can trace the development of a maturing love mainly in the development of patriarchal religion. In the beginning of this development we find a despotic, jealous God, who considers man, whom he created, as his property, and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases. This is the phase of religion in which God drives man out of paradise, lest he eat from the tree of knowledge and thus could become God himself; this is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood, because none of them pleases him, with the exception of the favorite son, Noah; this is the phase in which God demands from Abraham that he kill his only, his beloved son, Isaac, to prove his love for God by the act of ultimate obedience. But simultaneously a new phase begins; God makes a covenant with Noah, in which he promises never to destroy the human race again, a covenant by which he is bound himself. Not only is he bound by his promises, he is also bound by his own principle, that of justice, and on this basis God must yield to Abraham's demand to spare Sodom if there are at least ten just men. But the development goes further than transforming God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief into a loving father, into a father who himself is bound by the principles which he has postulated; it goes in the direction of transforming God from the figure of a father into a symbol of his principles, those of justice, truth and love. God is truth, God is justice. In this development God ceases to be a person, a man, a father; he becomes the symbol of the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena, of the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within man. God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, something finite. How can God have a name, if he is not a person, not a thing? The most striking incident of this change lies in the Biblical story of God's revelation to Moses. When Moses tells him that the Hebrews will not believe that God has sent him, unless he can tell them God's name (how could idol worshipers comprehend a nameless God, since the very essence of an idol is to have a name?), God makes a concession. He tells Moses that his name is 'I am becoming that which I am becoming.' 'I-am-becoming is my name.' The 'I-am-becoming' means that God is not finite, not a person, not a 'being.' The most adequate translation of the sentence would be: tell them that 'my name is nameless'. The prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all, aims at the same goal, that of freeing man from the idea that God is a father, that he is a person. In the subsequent theological development, the idea is carried further in the principle that one must not even give God any positive attribute. To say of God that he is wise, strong, good implies again that he is a person; the most I can do is to say what God is not, to state negative attributes, to postulate that he is not limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is not, the more knowledge I have of God. Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence; God becomes truth, love, justice. God is inas much as I am human.