From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] daily devotional
Evening...
Matthew 28:20
Lo, I am with you alway.
The Lord Jesus is in the midst of His church; He walketh among the golden
candlesticks; His promise is, "Lo, I am with you alway." He is as surely with
us now as He was with the disciples at the lake, when they saw coals of fire,
and fish laid thereon and bread. Not carnally, but still in real truth, Jesus
is with us. And a blessed truth it is, for where Jesus is, love becomes
inflamed. Of all the things in the world that can set the heart burning, there
is nothing like the presence of Jesus! A glimpse of Him so overcomes us, that
we are ready to say, "Turn away Thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me."
Even the smell of the aloes, and the myrrh, and the cassia, which drop from His
perfumed garments, causes the sick and the faint to grow strong. Let there be
but a moment's leaning of the head upon that gracious bosom, and a reception of
His divine love into our poor cold hearts, and we are cold no longer, but glow
like seraphs, equal to every labour, and capable of every suffering. If we know
that Jesus is with us, every power will be developed, and every grace will be
strengthened, and we shall cast ourselves into the Lord's service with heart,
and soul, and strength; therefore is the presence of Christ to be desired above
all things. His presence will be most realized by those who are most like Him.
If you desire to see Christ, you must grow in conformity to Him. Bring
yourself, by the power of the Spirit, into union with Christ's desires, and
motives, and plans of action, and you are likely to be favoured with His
company. Remember His presence may be had. His promise is as true as ever. He
delights to be with us. If He doth not come, it is because we hinder Him by our
indifference. He will reveal Himself to our earnest prayers, and graciously
suffer Himself to be detained by our entreaties, and by our tears, for these
are the golden chains which bind Jesus to His people.
1 Timothy 6:20-21
(20) O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding
profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: (21)
Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee.
Amen.
The Amplified Bible makes these verses clearer:
O Timothy, guard and keep the deposit entrusted [to you]! Turn away
from the irreverent babble and godless chatter, with the vain and empty and
worldly phrases, and the subtleties and the contradictions in what is falsely
called knowledge and spiritual illumination. [For] by making such profession
some have erred (missed the mark) as regards the faith. . . .
Paul warns Timothy about "the subtleties and contradictions of what is
falsely called knowledge and spiritual illumination." The word translated
"knowledge" in most translations ("science" in the King James Version) is the
Greek gnosis. Literally meaning "to know," it forms the root of the word
Gnosticism. It is possible, even probable, that Paul refers to Gnosticism here,
since both of his letters to Timothy contain warnings against false teachers
bringing in foreign concepts that were undermining the faith of church members.
Remember, however, that his warning is against a particular type of
knowledge that induced some members to stray from the faith, knowledge that was
subtle and yet contradictory. That it was contradictory is interesting because
Gnosticism not only contradicts the truth, but within Gnostic beliefs there are
also many contradictions.
Recently, the newly-discovered Gospel of Judas, an example of what is
called a "Gnostic gospel," has made headlines worldwide. It was not written at
the same time as the four canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—but
appeared a couple of centuries later. The Gospel of Judas contradicts the true
gospel accounts by asserting that Judas Iscariot was actually the hero, who had
been given secret knowledge that the other disciples did not possess.
The opening line of the Gospel of Judas demonstrates this secret
knowledge: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in
conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated
Passover." This so-called gospel gives a quite different view of the
relationship between Jesus Christ and Judas, and its defenders say that it
offers "new insights" into Jesus' betrayal, and the nature and character of
Judas. "New insights" is another common theme of Gnosticism.
Several years ago, another Gnostic gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, was
all the rage in the scholarly community. Its opening lines also emphasize this
secret knowledge: "These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and
Didymos Judas Thomas recorded. And [Jesus] said, 'Whoever discovers the
interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.'" Notice that the
emphasis is immediately on discovering an interpretation and on increasing
knowledge as a way to eternal life. It contains nothing about salvation coming
through one's relationship with God or even about living a godly life. In this
Gnostic gospel, eternal life comes from the secret knowledge that will explain
the obscure sayings.
Not only were the Gnostic gospels written long after the fact, but they
are also full of statements that oppose the text of the Bible. For example, in
the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus allegedly says, "If you fast, you will bring sin
upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to
charity, you will harm your spirits." Scholars say that Jesus is advocating
"fitting in" and "being true to oneself," phrases often repeated these days.
In another place in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted as saying,
"[Blessed is] the one who came into being before coming into being." This makes
absolutely no sense to us, but it does make a kind of sense to Gnostics, who
believe in a dualism of flesh and spirit. Thus, they understand that "Jesus"
implies that the spirit could come into being before the flesh. Many Gnostics
were followers of docetism, the belief that Jesus and Christ were two separate
beings in one body. Docetists believed that the man Jesus was born, and that
the pre-existing god Christ entered into Him when He was baptized and left
again before He was crucified. This, then, is an example of coming into being
before coming into being.
Also in the gospel of Thomas,
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?" Jesus
said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end?
You see, the end will be where the beginning is. [Blessed is] the one who
stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.
Again, knowing something is shown as the antidote of death. In this
case, another element of dualism is that every person has a little spark of God
in him or her, and that we have an eternal spirit (or soul) that is trapped or
imprisoned within a body of flesh.
Gnostics generally believed that all spirit was inherently stable and
good (overlooking the fact that Satan and his demons are spirit and yet also
unstable and evil), while all matter and flesh was inherently evil
(contradicting God's statement in Genesis 1:31 that everything God had made was
"very good"). Plato reinforced this belief, writing, "The soul is the very
likeness of the divine—immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and
indissoluble, and unchangeable." He also declared, viewing the body as a
temporary house in which the soul is imprisoned, "The soul goes away to the
pure, the eternal, the immortal and unchangeable to which she is kin."
The Gnostic goal was to learn the secret knowledge that would allow the
inner spirit to be released from the confines of the flesh, enabling it to
rejoin God in the spirit realm. Thus, the Gnostics linked the beginning and end
(often depicted in the figure of a snake swallowing its tail), because if a
person could figure out how the divine spark was infused into the flesh in the
first place, he could then reverse it and release the spirit. We find the same
basic tenet in the modern doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the
widespread belief that our "home" is in heaven, and that we go to this home
when we die.
David C. Grabbe
From Whatever Happened to Gnosticism? Part One: False Knowledge
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daily devotional
Evening...
Isaiah 40:5
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
We anticipate the happy day when the whole world shall be converted to
Christ; when the gods of the heathen shall be cast to the moles and the bats;
when Romanism shall be exploded, and the crescent of Mohammed shall wane, never
again to cast its baleful rays upon the nations; when kings shall bow down
before the Prince of Peace, and all nations shall call their Redeemer blessed.
Some despair of this. They look upon the world as a vessel breaking up and
going to pieces, never to float again. We know that the world and all that is
therein is one day to be burnt up, and afterwards we look for new heavens and
for a new earth; but we cannot read our Bibles without the conviction that-
"Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
Does his successive journeys run."
We are not discouraged by the length of His delays; we are not disheartened
by the long period which He allots to the church in which to struggle with
little success and much defeat. We believe that God will never suffer this
world, which has once seen Christ's blood shed upon it, to be always the
devil's stronghold. Christ came hither to deliver this world from the detested
sway of the powers of darkness. What a shout shall that be when men and angels
shall unite to cry "Hallelujah, hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent
reigneth!" What a satisfaction will it be in that day to have had a share in
the fight, to have helped to break the arrows of the bow, and to have aided in
winning the victory for our Lord! Happy are they who trust themselves with this
conquering Lord, and who fight side by side with Him, doing their little in His
name and by His strength! How unhappy are those on the side of evil! It is a
losing side, and it is a matter wherein to lose is to lose and to be lost for
ever. On whose side are you?
Galatians 5:20
(20) Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife,
seditions, heresies,
Paul obviously saw anger and hostility as a basic element of human
nature. Of all the negative attitudes that are part of the spiritual mark of
the beast, hostility and anger are probably the most frequent expressions
against God and others. But how often does the Bible show Jesus, our Model—the
One we are to pattern our lives after—angry?
Consider this interesting observation that Solomon made: "Be not hasty in
your spirit to be angry: for anger rests in the bosom of fools" ( Ecclesiastes
7:9). Jesus was no fool. Thus, we do not see much in the Bible about Him being
angry. The Proverbs say, "A soft answer turns away wrath: but grievous words
stir up anger" ( Proverbs 15:1). It is not very frequent that an angry, hostile
person speaks softly.
"By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaks the
bone" ( Proverbs 25:15). "The discretion of a man defers his anger; and it is
his glory to pass over a transgression" ( Proverbs 19:11). Anger hardly ever
helps a situation. It divides. It almost invariably makes things worse. It
forces the other person to defend himself, and then a vicious cycle is
generated.
John W. Ritenbaugh
From The Spiritual Mark of the Beast
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