Zechariah 12:8
"On that day the LORD will defend the people of Jerusalem; the weakest among them will be as mighty as King David! And the royal descendants will be like God, like the angel of the LORD who goes before them!"
With the help of their up-to-date Soviet weaponry, beginning on October 6, 1973, Egyptian/Arab armies attacked Israel, taking advantage of Israel’s soldiers being away from their posts observing Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi forces joined them. And, unfortunately, our President Nixon's slowed response to aid Israel didn't help matters much.
The Arab/Egyptian goal was to reclaim territory lost during the 1967 Six Day War and, upon success, move on to defeat and destroy the Jewish State.
This is yet another example of how terribly difficult the peace process has always been since the rebirth of the Israeli nation.
And yet God's divine hand can be seen throughout all these conflicts.
Here's one example:
By October 9, Israel was down to only six tanks protecting the northern section of the country. During the Yom Kippur War, a small impossibly outnumbered Israeli force held back a large portion of the Syrian army. 1,400 Syrian tanks invaded Israel from the north. Not only was Israel caught completely off guard and outnumbered, now the vast majority of her soldiers were at their weakest.
As the Golan Heights were about to be captured, the Syrians were armed with hundreds of tanks there. At one point, it was said to be just three Israeli tanks against one hundred and fifty Syrian tanks. And somehow miraculously the Syrians retreated, just when the Israeli force was on the verge of collapse. The Syrians thought they saw the fresh Israeli equipment arriving and assumed it was the vanguard of major reinforcements. They immediately began to retreat. It was also said that one tank driver continued to race back and forth behind the hills and kept appearing and reappearing, shooting from many different positions causing the Syrians to believe they had miscalculated the numbers of defending tanks. One Syrian soldier swears an army of Angels surrounded those few tanks Israel had and considering the rate of miracles surrounding the small country of Israel, that could truly be what happened in what is now known as, the Valley of Tears.
(Information taken from Israeli Defense Forces: 17 Miraculous Israeli Military Victories -May 2015 jewishvirtuallibrary)
God does bring Israel under judgment, the prophecies make this clear, but he also defends the weak. This one battle is one among many stories about miraculous Israeli military operations.
Just know, if your goal is the destruction of Israel, you've made a very bad decision.
I remember these events even though I was a very young man at the time. I'm 63 years old now, and I've never seen peace in Israel throughout my entire life. It's not going to happen. It's not supposed to happen until Messiah returns.
Pray for that day to come soon.
Philippians 1:10b-11
"Live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return. May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God."
Since the fall of man, Adam and every human being that followed, lost the capability to exercise holy reign over the whole of creation. Adam violated the holy command and every generation that followed did likewise. David and the nation of Israel continued this sinful trend. They too were unable to fully manifest God’s kingdom here on earth because of their unrepentant sin. Zerubbabel’s lackluster performance after returning to Jerusalem following the exile into Babylon proved that there always remains a spiritual problem of faithlessness to the law of God, a problem so prevalent that even God's wrath cannot cure it.
And I suppose this is why many Israelites rejected Jesus as the Messiah. His earthly mission was to inaugurate the kingdom and restore ...
Isaiah 5:18-19
"What sorrow for those who drag their sins behind them with ropes made of lies, who drag wickedness behind them like a cart! They even mock God and say, 'Hurry up and do something! We want to see what you can do. Let the Holy One of Israel carry out his plan, for we want to know what it is.'”
The soul believes that God is. The hearts believes that Jesus is the truth and full of grace, the heart believes that he's telling us the truth. And the Spirit through the word of God reveals the truth about grace and brings that truth both into recognition and into remembrance, making that truth clearer and more relevant for the believer. Spirit, soul, and body. By the works of these supernatural forces, faith comes to the hearer. Christianity then becomes what that hearer does with that truth and grace.
Today, there's a dichotomy of worldly ideologies surrounding the Christian church. The polarization is split between progressivism and bigotry. Neither is a good thing. Neither is a Christian worldview. The progressives starting ...
Zechariah 14:4-5
In that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives that lies before Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west by a very wide valley...Then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him."
The Mount of Olives is east of the city across the Kidron Valley and is higher than the temple mound. Jerusalem becomes the source of living water when The Lord splits the Mount in two and a valley opens up from East to west. And a vast underground river rises up and pours out over the land towards the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean. The Dead Sea is healed and becomes a fishing resort. And Jerusalem will be raised up, elevated above her geographical surroundings.
Zechariah 14:10
"The whole land shall be turned into a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem."
And all the heavens will change. All we know about the universe will change. There will no longer be day or night. No darkness. Only the light of The Lord. One day, neither day nor night, as if ...
Matthew 1:16
"and Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus who is called the Messiah."
Joseph and Mary were engaged. In the Hebrew culture this was the first of three steps in the marriage process. This engagement is basically an arrangement to be married. This could have taken place very early in their lives, even as small children. Engagement was usually arranged by the parents. Espousal followed this arrangement period and lasted about a year in the case where the couple are of age. This espousal stage was considered to be marriage to a certain degree, but the couple were set apart to prepare themselves for full consummation and so they were kept apart sexually. In fact the father kept tokens of his daughter's virginity in case any questions arose later on. It was at this point that "it was discovered before they came together that she was pregnant from the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 1:18b)
Joseph was a righteous man, a Nazarene, a descendent of David. And he didn't want to disgrace Mary and open her ...
Matthew chapter 1
"This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham..."
From Abraham to the Messiah, by his seed (Abraham's), some 42 generations later, the birth of Jesus Christ (the Messiah) came to pass. Jesus' earthly father Joseph, the descendant of king David by the line of David's son Solomon, bore the genealogy of a cursed royal line because of Jeconiah. And yet Luke looks to Jesus as the son of Mary who traces her lineage from Nathan the son of king David, though Nathan is not of the kingly line, but he's also not cursed by the sin of Jeconiah. It seems that Jeconiah birthed quite a bit of trouble, I'm thinking about his grandchild Zerubbabel who was particularly problematic. Looking back to the minor prophets we've recently studied, maybe we'll recall, that Zerubbabel tried to lead a messianic movement for himself. Whether or not he did indeed try to lay claim to Messiah status is a little unclear, but he was indeed involved in the coming of Christ. Both Matthew and Luke list ...
Yesterday I wrote an article/devotion about Nostra aetate and the notion that some hold that there are many paths to God, or that all religious paths lead to the same cross of Jesus. The impetus was the Pope's recent comments about his belief in what I believe is a heretical doctrine.
Today, I want to address what's really going on here for so many in the Catholic Church and in Christian universalism in general. It's really about evangelism, or the lack thereof. Maybe you could say, if you were Methodist, it's about prevenient grace. The desire is to open doors for evangelism. I get that. I also know it only ever really opens the window, but hardly ever the door.
Why?
Why doesn't it work to convert and disciple the worshippers of other "gods" to just meet in ecumenical mingled worship?
Simple answer:
They aren't making disciples, they're making excuses.
And unfortunately this Nostra aetate universalist notion has bled out into all the many Christian communities. And the result is, evangelism and disciple making has been nearly eliminated in most Christian ...
