Love can never die and can be recovered. Being "In Love" cannot...in my opinion. Once a kid knows that Santa was never real, they wont recover the innocence of that early belief. What I don't understand is those here who claim to have once believed and now do not---and they never recover that first love.
I really wish you wouldn't take what people say here so seriously...
I have to be honest. I trust my critics and opponents to a degree because I dont see them as agents of satan or any different than you or I.
but all I can do is pray for you.
Thats all any of us can do. That and attempting to be honest with our statements and our feelings. Do I believe in an End Times? Logically I see many great challenges coming that will topple the US middle class and transfer much of the wealth left to us by our parents into paying the darn bill that the US has acquired. This ongoing event alone will make many of us bitter and will test our faith.
Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith
You can "get answers" by watching the ducks. That doesn't mean the answers are coming from them.~Ringo
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In 1853 the Taiping forces captured Nanjing, making it their capital and renaming it Tianjing ("Heavenly Capital"). Hong converted the office of the Viceroy of Liangjiang into his Palace of Heavenly King. Since Hong Xiuquan had been supposedly instructed in his dream to exterminate all "demons", which was what the Taipings considered the Manchus to be, thus they set out to kill and wipe out the entire Manchu population. When Nanjing was occupied, the Taipings went on a rampage killing, burning and hacking 40,000 Manchus to death in the city[7] They first killed all the Manchu men, then forced the Manchu women outside the city and burnt them to death.[8]
At its height, the Heavenly Kingdom controlled south China, centered on the fertile Yangtze River Valley. Control of the river meant that the Taiping could easily supply their capital. From there, the Taiping rebels sent armies west into the upper reaches of the Yangtze, and north to capture Beijing, the capital of the Qing dynasty. The attempt to take Beijing failed.
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The God Worshipping Society (拜上帝教) was a religious movement founded and led by Hong Xiuquan which drew on his own unique interpretation of Christianity and combined it with Chinese folk religion, faith in Shangdi, and other religious traditions.[1] According to historical evidence, his first contact with Christian pamphlets occurred in 1836 when he directly received American Congregationalist missionary Edwin Stevens' personal copy of the Good Words to Admonish the Age (by Liang Fa, 1832). He only briefly looked over and did not carefully examine it. Subsequently, Hong had supposedly experienced mystical visions in the wake of his third failure[a] of the imperial examinations in 1837 and after failing for a fourth time in 1843, he sat down to carefully examine the tracts with his distant cousin Feng Yunshan, believing that they were "the key to interpreting his visions" coming to the conclusion that he was "the son of God the Father and the younger brother of Jesus Christ who had been directed to rid the world of demon worship."[3][4][5][6][7][8][8][9]
Clearly the Prophecy and End Times movement is a bloody business.
I remember first reading about this kingdom (decades ago) in some official 7th Day Adventist book.
Saturday seemed to be the day of worship with this kingdom.
A sincere Christian movement that nevertheless had visions to exterminate entire peoples.
Imagine if this Christian Kingdom (with its visionary group of believers) wasn't hell bent on genocide, but more on ever better military strategy training and even more successful operations. The group might have had a perpetual hold on vast parts of China and the world's largest nation might have had a vastly different history.
There might have been 2 Chinas.
(Actually the Christian Chiang Kai-shek and the nation Taiwan alongside means there ARE TWO TOTALLY SEPARATE CHINAS)
And I mean on the mainland.
Christians have a history of creating two Chinas, it seems.
Lamentations 3:22-23 English Standard Version (ESV)
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;[a] his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Faith, the mercies of the Lord are fresh EVERY MORNING. Don't you know how to apply the cleansing blood of Christ to all the previous night and previous day?
Each new day you should begin by believing that His cleansing blood has washed away all your errors, failures, sins, mistakes, shortcomings, etc. I was taught how to apply the blood of Jesus to have short accounts.
Yesterday is under the blood of Jesus. Tomorrow belongs to God. You have TODAY. You have each day.
Use Christ's redemption and His blood to shut the mouth of the accuser.
And pray over His word to nourish your spirit at the beginning of each day.
Thanks. No, I have lousy discipline. Maybe partly because I became a believer on my own by reading books and got in the habit of depending on external inspiration rather than personal discipline. Thanks though, that is good advice.
I got so enthused about the Rapture in the last few weeks the idea of missing it is too depressing to contemplate. What if it happens on this coming Rosh Hashana, just a few weeks away? All the signs are in place. Though it could be next year or the next I suppose. Well, all I can do is pull myself together and spend every day seeking Him harder than ever.
I know there are reasons to believe it won't be the entire Church that is raptured, but on the other hand when Paul tells the Thessalonians that "we" will meet Him in the air he's talking to ordinary Christian believers.
Been listening to a lot of talks on the end times recently, especially those focusing on the Rapture and the Great Tribulation. I consider Jonathan Cahn to be prophetically astute and I like his presentation of the seventy weeks of Daniel in this interview:
(In another talk by Cahn I heard recently he mentioned that the name Trump is no accident, referring to the Last Trump. I noticed that too when he became President. God uses all kinds of clues and signs to keep us hopping. Cahn is focused on Israel, and the fact that Trump acknowledged Jerusalem as its capital city on December 6th of last year has prophetic significance, which he also discusses in this interview.
All of this enlivens the possibility of this coming Rosh Hashana as the Rapture date. Why Rosh Hashana? Well, the Spring feasts of Israel, which are all tied to Harvest times: Passover, Unleavened Bread and Pentecost, have already been fulfilled in the coming of Christ and the establishment of His church. The Fall feasts which occur around September of every year and are also Harvest celebrations: Rosh Hashana or Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles, have not yet been fulfilled so they're next and would have to be fulfilled in order just as the first three were. You can find talks on this at You Tube also.
(No we won't know the date but as it gets close we are charged with knowing the seasons and the times and not missing it as so many of the Jews missed the coming of Jesus although they also had the Seventy Weeks prophecy to guide them.)
abe: Here's another interview of Cahn on a different prophetic subject. He finds prophetic significance in the unearthing and establishment in Berlin of the "seat of Satan" a temple originally in the city of Pergamum, the church at which is addressed by Jesus in the first chapters of Revelation, which Cahn connects with the rise of Hitler. Cahn has a nose for this sort of historical correspondence that nobody else has that I know of.
Jonathan Cahn, the Ghost Kingdom which is the Roman Empire
Good for Jonathan Cahn. Already three years ago he was saying what I just figured out recently, that the Roman Empire doesn't need to be revived in order to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel 2, it never left us.
As he puts it in the interview I link below, it's been spreading throughout the world since its official collapse. He refers to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, to the titles based on the word "Caesar" as in "Kaiser" as I mentioned in Message 88 and even to the Roman Catholic Church as continuing it which I've also mentioned. He talks about the European nations that sent out explorers and established colonies all over the world.
He even mentions the fact that the US government buildings are based on Roman architecture, which I demonstrated earlier in this thread (Message 292). I hadn't been following Cahn for a few years but it makes me laugh: of course he would be the one to recognize all this with his amazing ability to see such historical and symbolic connections that most of us miss.
Thanks. No, I have lousy discipline. Maybe partly because I became a believer on my own by reading books and got in the habit of depending on external inspiration rather than personal discipline. Thanks though, that is good advice. I got so enthused about the Rapture in the last few weeks the idea of missing it is too depressing to contemplate. What if it happens on this coming Rosh Hashana, just a few weeks away? All the signs are in place. Though it could be next year or the next I suppose. Well, all I can do is pull myself together and spend every day seeking Him harder than ever.
I know there are reasons to believe it won't be the entire Church that is raptured, but on the other hand when Paul tells the Thessalonians that "we" will meet Him in the air he's talking to ordinary Christian believers.
I have to admit that as a Christian I find this whole discussion very discouraging. Jesus said that He didn't know when the Father would do whatever it was that the Father would do, yet here you are trying to suggest that you can figure it out when Jesus couldn't. Paul tells us that we shouldn't judge, as if we do we will be judged. Why not just let God do what He is going to do and instead focus on what we are called to do and it is very simple.
We are called to love others as we love ourselves. We are called to humble kindness and justice. Essentially we are called to love sacrificially and to reflect God's love into the world which He created, and even gave us the Holy Spirit to be with us in that, and yet here is another case of humans trying to insert themselves into God's business.
He has told you, O man, what is good ; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God.
...here is another case of humans trying to insert themselves into God's business.
What an odd idea. We are told so many times in scripture to watch and be ready, to discern the times so we won't be surprised as by a thief in the night and so on, it would be sheer foolishness not to pay attention to the signs of what is coming. Jesus TOLD us to. And although we can't know the exact timing of events we are certainly to know the times and the seasons so we will be watching and praying as they approach. And it's also quite possible that those who live right at the time of a major prophesied event WILL know the exact time, at least when it is "at the door." Again Jesus chided the Jews who missed His coming. Why does God bother to give us prophecies if He doesn't want us to exert ourselves to understand them?
Matthew 24:32-33 writes:
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.
Re: Jonathan Cahn, the Ghost Kingdom which is the Roman Empire
Faith writes:
I bet you never even heard of Jonathan Cahn until now, and certainly bet that you didn't listen to one word of the interview.
Of course I did not listen to the interview, partly because I have heard of Jonathan Cahn but mostly because I have read the Bible and do know both history and reason and understand his basic premise is dishonest, sopomoric and could only be marketed to the willfully ignorant who are totally disconnected from all reality.
Just because a Roman Arch is used as support for a bridge or door does not make it Rome. Just because some words were adopted from Greek and Latin does not make them Rome.
The man is simply another carny apologist and no thinking person could ever take anything he says seriously.
You already missed The Rapture, Faith. It happened in 1922, and got three people in Kentucky and one in Connecticut. That’s all. Poor reporting back then accounted for the lack of publicity. And none of them were driving when they were taken.
Re: Jonathan Cahn, the Ghost Kingdom which is the Roman Empire
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Good for Jonathan Cahn. Already three years ago he was saying what I just figured out recently, that the Roman Empire doesn't need to be revived in order to fulfill the prophecy of Daniel 2, it never left us.
Rome is pretty much irrelevant to Daniel. The only mention refers to the Republic’s intervention in Antiochus’ war on Egypt.
And of course the Roman Empire is gone. You just have to try to pretend otherwise because your twisted interpretation of Daniel doesn’t even work for you.
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As he puts it in the interview I link below, it's been spreading throughout the world since its official collapse. He refers to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, to the titles based on the word "Caesar" as in "Kaiser" as I mentioned in Message 88 and even to the Roman Catholic Church as continuing it which I've also mentioned. He talks about the European nations that sent out explorers and established colonies all over the world.
The Holy Roman Empire was never Roman in anything more than name, and not even an Empire. The Catholic Church claimed power on religious grounds, split with the Eastern Empire which was the real continuation of the Empire and frequently ran into trouble with unruly monarchs even before the Reformation. Now, the Holy Roman Empire is long gone and the Catholic Church’s power has greatly declined.
A few remnants of cultural influence here and there hardly constitute the Empire continuing. No more than the remaining cultural influence from the Babylonians or the Persians constituted those Empires surviving in the prophecies of Daniel.
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He even mentions the fact that the US government buildings are based on Roman architecture, which I demonstrated earlier in this thread
Classical influence in architecture is no great secret. But how does aping Roman - or Ancient Greek, or even Egyptian - architecture prove that the Roman Empire still exists ? There is no Emperor or army, no rule. The US is an independent state with an elected leader - who has limited power and serves for a limited term. It is not the Roman Empire nor subject to it.
This Ghost Kingdom is not a kingdom at all it’s just a phantom conjured up by imagination, based on scraps of cultural influence.
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