Devotion Begets Devotion: Encountering God in the Bible
God reveals himself to us in the pages of this holy book. To the novice and the expert, to the young and the old, God offers himself to those who would take up and read.
The force of gravity that one object exerts on another depends on a few factors: the mass of each object, a gravitational constant, and the distance between the two objects. But in the calculation, distance is in the denominator of the fraction, meaning that, all other things being equal, gravitational force and distance have an inverse relationship. The closer the two objects are, the greater the gravitational pull.
If you have trouble with formulas and forces, picture a whirlpool. A feather caught in the outside of the spinning water starts to move slowly in a circle. But the longer it stays in the whirlpool, the faster it moves, pulled steadily inward and down until it disappears.
A Book Like No Other
The Bible is a book like no other. We do not read it like a biography, a novel, or a textbook. We can return to it again and again with much profit. It is deeper and greater and more wonderful than anything else we could ever read.
Why do Christians read the Bible? If you are a Christian, why do you read the Bible?
We read the Bible to know God. About the Bible, the Westminster Confession of Faith states that “it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church” (my emphasis).
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A Review of “Against the Great Reset,” Edited by Michael Walsh
The revolutionaries always want to create a new world order, but always end up destroying man and civilisation in the process. Nothing new here. But the Davos elites have no interest in history. We should, however. If we will not learn from history, the prospect looks very bleak indeed. Hopefully a volume like this will wake up enough people to take a united and forceful stand against this great globalist evil.
This is not the first book to appear in recent times critiquing the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and related matters. Some of these volumes I have already reviewed here. But this is the newest and perhaps the best. At nearly 500 pages, the collection of essays found here is first rate.
The editor has assembled a great lineup of leading intellectual heavyweights, including Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Angelo Codevilla, David Goldman and a number of others. All up the book has 16 important essays, plus introductory and concluding pieces by Walsh.
All the key issues are examined here: Covid tyranny, socialism, globalism, economics, politics, China and the social credit system, Big Tech, national sovereignty, the WHO, the WEF, Schwab, Bill Gates, critical theory, green energy, population matters, politicised science, cultural Marxism, climate alarmism, health fascism and so much more.
It is good that all the bases are so carefully being covered here. Given the rapid pace at which the nefarious agenda items of the Davos elitists are being realised, this book could not be more timely. The plans the activists have for their globalist utopia are not something that lie ahead – all this is already well underway.
Walsh explains early on why such a volume is so very much needed. It will be too late if we wait around for the history books to look back on the Great Reset. The issue NOW is whether “the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters.”
And he is right to speak of how the secular left West is so receptive to all this: “In an age of atheism and disbelief, note the religious fervor of neo- and cultural-Marxism and the messianic quality of Schwab’s anti-humanistic Great Reset.” Quite so. Once you ditch Christianity, plenty of false religions will rush in to take its place.
His closing paragraph nicely informs us of just where we are heading in the Schwabian dystopia: “The satraps of Davos don’t want to simply reset a post-Covid world. Or a post-fossil fuels world. Or even a post-racial world. They want to run it, forever, and while they no longer have need of a god, they’ll always need an enemy. They may not believe in a power higher than themselves, but they certainly believe in demons, and their most irksome devil is you.”
Others pick up on the quasi-religious nature of all this. As Hanson puts it in his essay, “When ‘great’ is applied to a proposed transnational comprehensive revolution, we should also equate it with near religious zealotry.” Marxism and radical greenism have both been pseudo-religions, and they come together in the Great Reset.
He and others of course note how Schwab and Co have capitalised on Covid, and want the whole world under their thumb in order to ‘keep us safe’ from further pandemics, including climate change disasters they assure us are just around the corner.
Many of the writers give us terrific descriptions of who these folks are and what they want. But I especially like how Conrad Black characterises our Davos Divines:
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Pain, Presents, and a Prophecy
The great message of Scripture to all mankind is that the promised King and Savior has come. His name is called Jesus for He saves His people from their sins. Jesus Christ is the greatest gift one can receive, for the “gift of God is eternal life.” I cannot buy eternal life. You cannot buy eternal life. Forty camel loads of gold will not help you on that great day. But 2,000 years ago Christ came freely into the world to save sinners. How can you receive that gift? Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
So Hazael went to meet him and took a present with him, of every good thing of Damascus, forty camel-loads; and he came and stood before him, and said, “Your son Ben-Hadad king of Syria has sent me to you, saying, ‘Shall I recover from this disease?’” And Elisha said to him, “Go, say to him, ‘You shall certainly recover.’ However, the Lord has shown me that he will really die.”
II Kings 8:9-10 NKJV
What percentage of your assets would you give in order to recover from a deadly disease?
Governments around the world have spent billions and perhaps trillions of dollars in an attempt to recover from present diseases. Wealthy individuals have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find and eliminate the part of DNA they assume leads to aging and death. Naaman the leper brought Elisha nearly 100 pounds of gold and silver and many other costly gifts. Perhaps Ben-Hadad remembered the great work the Lord had done for his chief general and outdid that previous gift (1), by sending forty camel-loads of “every good thing of Damascus.” He who was in great pain unto death and turmoil of soul was willing to give great possessions for help.
At the moment of trial, all the treasures of the world are of little use and will fly away from us or we will fly away from them. They cannot add a day to our lives.
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For Thine is the Kingdom
To go back to Jeremiah 32:38 it is because of the promise the people have of belonging to something bigger than themselves, “They shall be my people and I will be their God.” That is the source and foundation of all of our hope and peace. We belong body and soul to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and we will have our needs met in no other. It is because of this majesty that we see the way the martyrs and the elders bow and shout at the foot of the throne of God.
As you likely already know the Lord’s Prayer is repeated, not verbatim for reasons we’ll get into here in a second, in Luke 11. Most of the content is the same, but the last petition (among other differences) which is in the prayer in Matthew 6 is absent from the latter. One of the things this teaches us is about how Christ intended for us to use the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not a mantra we repeat, but a model for the way in which we are to approach our Heavenly Father so it makes sense that they don’t match up one for one. Each in their own way gives help to our devotional life and grants support for hearts that are seeking to bring troubles to the Lord of peace.
With that being said I rarely, if ever, get into technical stuff in these lessons. It’s not really the place for it and not really why I do these bi-weekly devotionals. Yet, it is important at this point to know something about translations of the Bible and Q.107. If you have an ESV you’ll notice that the words used in Q.107 are completely absent. If you have an NASB you’ll see something like this: [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’]. Now, why do I mention it? There are those (like the translators of the ESV/NASB and others) who do not believe that this last clause of the Lord’s Prayer is Christian Scripture. Without getting even further into the weeds here we all know that the English Bibles we use are translations from the Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament. There are two “families” of manuscripts that while agreeing 98% of the time have some differences, and Matt. 6:13 (plus John 7:53-8:11, 1 John 5:7, etc…) is chief among them.
As you also already know I prefer the KJV for private devotions and preach and teach from the NKJV on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings, etc… I do that for a reason, because I believe that the “Received Text” (see our Westminster Confession of Faith Ch. 1, Section 8 for more info) which undergirds the KJV/NKJV is from the more faithful family of Greek manuscripts. I also believe that the word of God is inerrant not just in the autographs (the actual copies that the Bible writers wrote), but in the apographs as well (the copies passed down to us).
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