Guy Harrison and the kingdom

In a former blog we mentioned that the ‘short’ Gospel Guy Harrison refers to is deficient.

We cannot understand Jesus’ work on earth in isolation from the Kingdom. Jesus and others preached consistently about the Kingdom of God. In Genesis 1 we read that God created the heavens and the earth. He is the Owner and Ruler of the universe and He plans an eternal Kingdom of peace and happiness.

 

A kingdom consists of a king, citizens and a country. God is planning a perfect country or Kingdom (the key word to remember for God’s Kingdom is ‘Peace’). He will be the King who loves His people and they will love and obey Him. There will be no crime, disease, or any problems whatsoever. The easiest way to understand it is to envision a country like that. The leader is perfect with no flaws. The citizens all love the leader and obey the laws of the country. It sounds like the place to be.

 

Another way to understand God’s kingdom is to think what would make your neighbourhood peaceful and safe? All criminals will have to be jailed to eradicate theft, murder, alcohol abuse, lying, cheating, gossip, et cetera. That is precisely what God will do. He will allow no-one into His kingdom who will disturb the peace and happiness. So He tests us in this life. God observes and writes down what we do. If we love and obey Him here, we will do it there (on the renewed earth).

 

For God’s eternal planet of peace, He wants the same attitude in His people that the Trinity have towards each other (happiness, contentment, peace and love). God’s commands all have to do with love, peace, harmony, forgiveness, et cetera. Obedient citizens will be very important because God is the all knowing, holy Ruler with no skeletons in His cupboard. Yet on this side of the grave, people consistently fail to obey God’s laws of peace and love. The whole Old Testament is essentially a history of how men failed to obey God (it is called sin).

 

This makes the eternal Kingdom of peace that God plans impossible. All people have a ‘criminal record’ of disobedience and therefore cannot be part of God’s kingdom. No country accepts immigrants with criminal records and neither does God. How did God handle this problem that people consistently fail? He sent His Son Jesus to fulfil God’s decree that, ‘the wages of sin is death.’ On the Cross Jesus died for our sins. So:

• We can have our criminal record annulled by His blood shed on the cross.
• He also circumcises our hearts (cuts out the bad nature) so that we can obey God.
• He brings us back into a good relationship with the Father.
• He gives us the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us.
• He prepares us to live eternally with God on the renewed earth, loving our Lord and serving Him.

 

As we can see, Jesus did not only ‘save from sins.’  He did much more in preparation for the eternal Kingdom. Salvation is a kind of ‘subset’ of God’s message. It is a very important aspect, so important that without it, there can be no Kingdom.But it is still only a part of Jesus’ much bigger work described in the 66 books of the Bible. The lesson: don’t believe Guy and minimise Jesus’ work.

4 Bible truths about a local or world wide flood

The film, ‘Noah,’ once again drew people’s attention to the Genesis flood. The Bible says the water covered the whole earth, but some people canvas that it was a local flood. That leaves us with the following perplexing questions:

• Why did the animals board the ark? In a local flood, they could have migrated to safe places.
• Why does Scripture affirm that all life outside the ark perished. It is impossible with a local flood.
• Why did God give the rainbow as a sign that He will never again destroy the whole earth by water? Surely He didn’t mean a local flood, because that happens often.

 

If you chop and change parts of the Bible it affects other parts. It is called The Domino Principle: the 66 books of the Bible are interconnected; they don’t stand in isolation; if you scrap one Bible truth, others begin to crumble. By the universal flood God demonstrated His intention to judge all people, not only a certain group.If the flood was local, 3 Bible truths must go:

1. The White Throne Judgement must go. There is a connection between the judgement by water in the past, and judgement in the future by fire, ‘By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgement and the destruction of ungodly men.’ ¹  If God’s judgement by water was local, why will His judgement by fire be universal?  If the fire judgement will be local, many people will still be alive after the fire. The Bible says ‘the dead great and small stood before God’s throne to be judged.² So all those who will be alive will not appear at the judgement. That means judgement cannot take place. Scrap the judgement.
2. The hope of a new heaven and earth must go. If the flood was local and the fire will be local, how will the heavens and earth be totally renewed? God will bring the new out of the ashes of the old, ‘…But in keeping with His Word, we are looking forward to a new heaven and earth.’ ³ This will happen after the earth is destroyed by fire.  A local flood means a local fire. Scrap the hope of an a new heaven and earth.
3. Jesus as the Truth must go. Jesus said, ‘Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.’ ⁴ According to Jesus, all life perished, except life forms on the ark.  Did Jesus lie? If He lied here, why do you expect that He talked the truth at all other times? He said He came to testify to the truth. ⁵ A lier cannot testify to the truth. Scrap Jesus.
4. If you scrap Jesus, you scrap Him as the Creator.⁶  That means, scrap the Bible.

Denying the universal flood eventually leads to scrapping the whole Bible. That demonstrates the extreme danger of changing God’s Word.

 

Conclusion

Some people believe they can chop and change Scripture, but God gave us His revelation as a ‘fixed’ body of facts. He does not ask us to ‘improve’ it or ‘improvise.’ Scripture stands despite educated people’s opinions. The flood covered all the high mountains under the entire heavens. ⁷  The fire will also be universal. It will engulf everything and afterwards God will renew it all, beautifully prepared for His faithful, chosen followers.

 

References

1. 2 Peter 3:6-7
2. Revelation 20:12
3. 2 Peter 3:13
4. Luke 17:26-27
5. John 18:37
6. John 1:3, Hebrews 1:2, Colossians 1:16
7. Genesis 7:19-20

Why 6days?

We live in a society filled with the ‘science’ of evolution. Charles Darwin, the ‘father’ of evolution, sent the message into the world that there is no Creator, because everything just evolved naturally. 

It would be interesting to know how many books, lectures, time, money, scientific experiments and research is done to disprove Genesis 1:1, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ These words display the authority of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The creation establishes Him as the Owner, the One who commanded and it was created.

The first chapter in the Bible is all about the six days of creation. It is a very contentious issue in the Church today. Why does creation in 6 days cause so much debate? It is because:

1. It is the foundation of the Bible. If the first verse in the Bible (6 day creation by God) is not true, why should we trust the rest of the Bible?
2. The message of the Bible is that God is establishing His eternal Kingdom. He is able to do that because the universe belongs to Him. The creation of the heavens and the earth gave Him the right of ownership.
3. Without the account of creation in six days, we would have no reason to believe in miracles. If God is not the Creator, there is no way to explain miracles. If He is, miracles are commonplace in His kingdom. God’s power displayed in creation is the basis of all the other miracles, whether by Him or Jesus (who is the Creator, John 1:3).
4. Because of creation, God has the right to make decrees or laws, like ‘the wages of sin is death’, or ‘forgiveness is only through blood.’ That is why atheists and unbelievers are so adamant that God has no right to make laws (according to them He is not the Creator).
5. To get rid of God, you have to get rid of Israel. It is mostly in that geographical area that God revealed Himself in history.
6. To get rid of the Creator you have to explain how the genetic code evolved without an intelligent programmer. That can never be done, therefore atheism is a mind exercise: they have to believe God doesn’t exist, but there is no evidence that He doesn’t.
7. In Revelation 21:1 we read about ‘a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.’  If God did not create the present heavens and earth, how will He be the Creator of the new heaven and earth? If God did not create in Genesis 1, then Revelation 21 will remain a myth, a dream and a pie in the sky.
8. The devil knows the importance of creation. He devotes lots of his time to debunk it, especially through evolution, and lately through the heightened efforts of atheists and unbelievers.  The war against the Word of God is raging in our contemporary society with a hostility that is almost unbelievable, considering the ‘civilised’ world we live in.

The Bible stands or falls with creation in six days. Genesis 1 displays the wisdom, intelligence, and omnipotence of the most holy God. The character of the Bible depends on Genesis 1. People, places, times and history all came and come from Genesis 1.

We will discuss what the Bible and science teaches us about this contested issue.