Christianity and the End Times

Lujke was THERE, NN, he spent time among the apostles. And if there were documents written that covered what interested him WHY WEREN'T THEY ALREADY WELL KNOWN as the ones he mentions were? THERE WAS NO NEED FOR OTHER WRITTEN SOURCES, HE WAS THERE.

Oh think for a change. He had no reason to write what was already known to believers, all the wriotings he starts out saying were well known./ The only source therefore that he COULD have used would have been UNKNOWN to believers. Sheesh. Grow a brain.

As he SAYS, he is writing because he feels he has a good understanding of these things, he has no reason to repeat what believers already know, which he starts out mentioning. He wants to ADD to their knowledge from his own experience. He was writing to someone named Theophilis whom he knew personally. He says he knows he believes the same things he Luke also believes because of the writings of the eyewitnesses they are both familiar with, but he wants to give him MORE information from his OWN knowledge. Sheesh.

I'm so sorry to learn of your mental handicaps that prevent you from reading and understanding and making correct inferencesfrom simple information. My condolences.

There's a lot of original material in Luke, have you noticed?

The facts themselves wouldn't be a big deal, I wouldn't really care if Luke did happen to be a compilation, I just do not think it is true, for which I've given some good reasons, and it's offensive that modern scholars are always taking It upon themselves to change everything about the Bible as it had previously been understood. Who do they think they are? Both scholars and believers down the ages deserve more credit.Luke also wrote the book of Acts, right after his gospel I think, and it covers the life of Paul, with whom he traveled. Paul is still alive at the end of Acts. He is believed to have died under Nero's persecutions and that puts the timing of the writing of Acts in the 60s AD. That puts the gospel earlier than that.Again, if there were writings by eyewitnesses that he could draw on other than those we are familiar with, it doesn't make sense that they were not circulated among the churches along with the ones we are familiar with. If the information was useful to Luke's gospel then it was useful to the churches before he wrote it, so it makes no sense that it wasn't in circulation, and he is saying he wants to add to the accounts, not repeat them. He clearly is saying to Theophilus that he is writing something that is NOT known since he starts out talking about those eyewitness reports both of them were familiar with already.He claims to have a good understanding of the events. We know he had contact with the disciples because he traveled with Paul, and he wrote the book of Acts so he knew a lot about the early days of the spreading of the gospel. Why do you have to make the source somebody other than Luke himself WHO WAS THERE, who was with all those eyewitnesses, who talked to them, etc etc etc. What is this need to create distances that did not exist? He added many things to our knowledge of the events of the time that are not in the other gospels. WHY NOT FROM WHAT THE EYEWITNESSES TOLD HIM? What advantage would there be to his having read what those eyewitnesses wrote even if by some odd chance they failed to get circulated among the churches, which is impossible. But he talked to them himself. That seems to be implied in what he says at the beginning of his gospel and it makes good sense.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You say this sort of thing frequently but it just makes no sense. Prophecies given by the living Creator God cannot fail and that IS biblical. God as revealed in the Bible cannot fail. Do you doubt this is how the Bible portrays Him? Do I need to muster evidence?If God cannot fail and God is the source of the prophecies then they cannot fail. We simply start there, with that biblical fact.If you start with that biblical fact then it points you to different ways of thinking about the prophecy than if you start with the idea that prophecy could fail. There is nothing more "creative" about interpreting from the belief that prophecy cannot fail than interpreting from the belief that it can, and if you are wrong then your interpretation is not only "creative" but false. YOU are the one "putting your beliefs before the Bible" because you deny the fundamental biblical truth about the nature of God as infallible.So God is biblically presented as omnipotent and omniscient and impossible of failure. According to the Bible it is the sign of a true prophet that his prophecies come true because they come from God. What is NOT biblical is your idea that prophecy can fail. You start with assumptions about what a prophecy means and when that doesn't work out you call it a failure. But the biblical framework tells us that prophecy cannot fail so we correct our failed assumptions accordingly and look beyond any supposed "failure" to understand the greater context of the prophecy. Which you miss because of your cramped assumptions which are unbiblical.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This is such a complete obvious inversion of the truth I don't know how you manage to say such things. You must be reading some completely other Bible than I read. So quote please where the Bible says TRUE PROPHECY FROM GOD CAN FAIL.

The Bible says God cannot fail, and you are denying that.I have no preconceived ideas about any of this either, but you accuse me of it anyway. But denying God's infallibility is you putting your beliefs ahead of the Bible which clearly declares Him infallible.There is nothing in the quote from Jeremiah that contradicts the infallibility of prophecy. He is not talking about prophecy at all, he is talking about the effect of sin and disobedience versus righteousness and obedience on the destiny of a nation. If a nation changes from one to the other it will reap the appropriate rewards or punishments. That has nothing to do with prophecy.

I've BEEN telling you what ONE of the traiditional views is. They are all mostly in accord but there are, as usual minor differences. From a conservative blogger:I don’t read Luke as dissatisfied with the other reports, since he refers to them as reporting what had been preached by the eyewitnesses to them already: I read it as his wanting to fill out the accounts with more historical detail, which is clear from the gospel itself that he did.And here he gives a scathingly accurate portrayal of the methods of the liberal scholars: Sorry this is rather sloppy, and I may need to go find other statements. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Of course not. But the Bible to a believer is God speaking to us, often personally but always to believers in general.I've been trying to find a sermon I just heerd this morning by a Josh Moody on "The reliability of the Bible" which he ends with a wonderful statement about how the Bible speaks to us as believers. If I find it I'll reference it although it's an audio sermon so probably nobody will listen to it anyway.Another recent comment comes to mind, by Rosaria Butterfield describing her conversion from a happy life as a lesbian professor of English literature to Christian wife of a pastor, "My Train Wreck Conversion" and other versions of her testimony can be found at You Tube.; Anyway she describes discovering that the Bible is a supernatural work, and her knowledge of literature allows her to apply some strong adjectives to it as having "edgy poetry, compelling narratives, sophisticated (I don't think that was her word but something similar) philosophy" and so on, even from the time when she first started reading it in order to debunk it and still hated its worldview.The Bible is God speaking to us. I can hardly open its pages without being overwhelmed by a palpable sense of peace that seems to emanate from it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not exactly resuming the debate yet but at least bringing us back to the topic of end-times prophecy, as I think I mentioned earlier, spending time in the Daniel prophecies has unexpectedly strengthened my belief in the "pre-trib Rapture" idea, that is, the idea that Christian believers will be transported alive to the presence of Christ before the unfolding of the Seventieth Week of Daniel. (There are various ideas about the timing, some saying it won't be before but in the middle and even after, but at this point I think it's before.) Paul teaches in various places that those who remain alive at the coming of the Lord will be so transported to His presence, changed and transported. The traditional idea has been that this will occur at the actual Second Coming, believers rising in the air to meet Him as He descends. The idea that it would occur before some final events occur just before His actual return is fairly new. What has been tipping me toward this idea is the impression that the Church is not present in the book of Revelation, but also the way the seventieth week splits off after the revelation of the Messiah and the Church Age begins.This doesn't mean I believe all the theology surrounding this idea. For instance I believe the Antichrist was revealed centuries ago while most believers today think he's yet to be revealed. I've been doing some reading up on this view. Those who hold it deny the Rapture. I believe in both the Rapture and the interpretation of the revelation of the Antichrist as historically past.On this subject a long list of the Reformers all shared the same view of his having already been revealed, and there is also a list of Early Church Fathers who had the view that he would be reveled as soon as the Roman Empire came to an end. This is maybe surprising, in fact it is still somewhat surprising to me beause I don't see the prophecy as requiring the fourth empire to come to an end before the little horn of Daniel 7, which is understood to be this Antichrist, takes his role in history. Nevertheless MANY in the early church had this view. They even prayed that the Roman Empire/Caesar would be preserved by God because they didn't want this Antichrist to emerge.Clearly the Early Church Fathers knew they were in the Fourth Empire of Daniel's prophecies, knew it was the Roman Empire and were looking for further fulfillments as yet future. This is certainly an argument against PaulK's insistence that Daniel's prophecies were fulfilled in the time of the Maccabees.And then the Reformers discovered all this as they began to see the errors in the Roman Church of which they were all a part. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Nobody says it was "written out of his own head," whatever that could possibly mean. Did all the other gospel writers "write out of their own heads"L Or if you think they relied on other written material, did the writers of THOSE accounts "write out of their own heads? If any did, then any of them could have, the events being so noteworthy they would have been strongly impressed on the minds of those who experienced them. But none of them needed written accounts even if some were made use of here and there. They talked to each other, the gospel was being preached everywhere, the facts were being constantly rehearsed in their hearing and also preached by themselves.Luke wrote it the way people write about events they know about from eyewitnesses or their own experience. He probably had notes. He certainly HAD read many eyewitness accounts. He was probably keeping a journal during his travels with Paul. No writer tries to rely exclusively on his own memory. And all the traditionalists say he had to have interviewed many of the people who were eyewitnesses to the events he recounts.And do note the comment of the blogger I posted about how the "scholars" area all relying on their own subjectivity rather than objective criticial thinking, objective facts, anything they actually KNOW. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No I'm not. I've been arguing based on various facts and not my own feelings, and I just pointed to the list of their errors provided by the blogger. The 'scholars'' just sit around making up stuff according to their preconceived antisupernatural bias, and maybe voting on it,.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, sorry, not fulfilled, but that the Maccabean period was the intended target of the prophecies.I wonder what you'll all think if the Rapture does occur and you can see some prominent leader "confirming a covenant" for seven years, probably with Israel, probably promising a protection of some sort. I suppose there will be many theories about how it was the wicked people who were taken away not the true Christians, well that's pretty much guaranteed to be forcibly promoted, because of course there will be a lot of "Christians" still on the earth, and they will be much more likeable than some who were taken, such as myself. They will probably be in favor of gay marriage and abortion as a woman's right rather than murder, and unprotected borders and whatnot. Yes, of course. Those who remain and don't think such things are going to suffer terribly though. I really wish I had the gift of evangelism so that I could persuade some of you to join us now and be raptured rather than have to go through all that.Anyway. Since I've changed my mind about the pre-trib Rapture I've been reading up on people who promote it. A lot of it is concerned with figuring out when it is most likely to occur. Well, we know date setting is wrong, people keep getting in trouble for doing that, but it isn't wrong to think about the "times and the seasons" that point to a general timing for it, since Jesus Himself said we should be doing that, chiding the Pharisees who didn't know when the Messiah would come in their day, since scripture was quite clear about that. Especially the Book of Daniel which pretty much said right out that they were living in the time at the end of the Seventy Weeks prophecy.Well in our time it would be the revelation of the Antichrist and the making of the seven-year covenant that starts the ticking of the clock for the final Seventieth Week of Daniel. I think the Antichrist has already been revealed, although I do hold out the possibility that it will be a political leader along the lines of a Hitler, who will convince many that he's a good guy who is going to make things right for everybody; but the covenant would be the confirmation.Somebody I heard on this subject pointed out that Jesus mentions the reading of signs that tell us when summer is near, and then I heard a reading of the book of Jeremiah in which the lament is given "The harvest has come, summer is over, and we are not saved" which kind of stood out in the reading. Hm. Summer. Gee wouldn't it be terrific if we got raptured this summer. Oh happy day.But there's another consideration. Major events in the Church have so far happened on the Jewish Holy Days and there are still the High Holy Days coming up in September. Jesus died as the sacrificial lamb on Passover/Pesach, and the Church was "born" as they say on the Feast of Weeks or First Fruits or Savuot, when the Holy Spirit came on the believers and they spoke in tongues and received miraculous gifts. Pentecost is the last day of the first harvest season of the agicultural year that begins on Passover with barley harvest and ends on Pentecost with wheat harvest. Harvest is a major symbol of salvation in the Bible.SO there is always a looking toward the Fall High Holy Days for the next fulfillment of prophecy, in this case the pre-trib Rapture. Rosh Hashana is the next in line of the Holy Days. This yaar it occurs from the evening of September 9 to the evening of September 11. Is there anything about this particular Rosh Hashana that makes it likely to be THE day? Well, some are arguing for the year 2018 but in ways I can't really follow, so I don't have any reason to think so myself. I certainly like the idea though, I'm ready to leave.Again I feel really bad for those who will remain though. Some people very close to me. You can still get saved but at a terrible price. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.