In order to understand the New Testament teaching on John the Baptist, it is important to be aware of the foundational prophecy that he was to fulfill. In Malachi 3:1, God tells the children of Israel, “I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me, and the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of his covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, he is coming.” He then continues a chapter later and says, “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse (Mal 4:5-6).” These passages are the cornerstone of a very foundational Jewish belief, which Jews have held to for about 2500 years, that Elijah would return, prior to the coming of the Messiah, in order to prepare the people to recognize their King and lead the nation in repentance.

One of the chief criticisms...

Read More »

It seems that, in the Bible, the number forty generally corresponds to a period of testing, temptation or trial and is usually followed by a call to ministry. We see this with Moses, who lived forty years in Midian after fleeing from Egypt. After forty years in Midian, he received a call from God, through the burning bush, to go back to Egypt and set the captives free. The children of Israel were also forty years in the desert after refusing to enter the Promise Land, but upon completion of the forty years, they were allowed to enter the land under the guidance of Joshua. Jesus spent forty days in the desert being tempted by the devil, and followed his temptation with the beginning of his public ministry. Ultimately, the number forty generally corresponds to a hardship that somebody will be facing and which will serve to prepare the person, nation, or whatever else to begin something important. After the period of forty is complete, it seems that there is the realization of the promises or a fulfillment of the...

Read More »

In the first century, believers would go to each other’s homes and eat communion as a part of a meal. Often times, certain believers would show up early and consume all of the food and wine. Those that showed late would miss out on the meal altogether. Those who overindulged would often end up getting drunk and sick from the large amounts of food that they ate. This is the chief abuse Paul is warning against in I Corinthians 11:23-34. Here he tells the members of the church to wait until the whole congregation had arrived and partake together. He also councils them to take only what they need and not overindulge in anything. Largely, as a result of Paul’s warnings, the church began to regulate the amount of bread and wine each believer used. This is why we use the little wafer and the small cup today (we have also substituted grape juice for wine so as not to make people who struggle with drunkenness stumble): we do it to keep people from overeating and drinking too much.  With this in mind, Paul warns the disciples...

Read More »

What communion is and why it is done is laid for us in four different passages of Scripture. We first read about it in the gospels when Jesus sat down to celebrate his last Passover meal (a meal commemorating the deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt). In the midst of the meal, Jesus held up a piece of unleavened bread and, breaking it, told his disciples that the bread was his body which would be broken for all. He then distributed the pieces of bread to each of his disciples and told them to eat of it. He followed this ritual with the giving of wine, which he described as the “covenant in his blood” for the forgiveness of sins (see Matt. 26:26-30, Mark 14:22-26, Luke 22:14-23). During this ritual, Jesus told his disciples to mimic what he was doing by eating the bread and drinking the cup and, as often as they did so, to do it in remembrance of him. The significance of this act was not really made known to them until later. Later that night, he would be arrested and the next day he would be put to death....

Read More »

The terms B.C. and A.D. are abbreviations of "Before Christ" and "anno Domini," which is Latin meaning "The Year of our Lord." This division was first used in 525 A.D. by the Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus, who set about to calculate the birth of Jesus using the Roman Calendar which started with the founding of the city of Rome (ab urbe condita, or AUC: April 22, 753 B.C.). He calculated the birth of Christ in the Roman year 753. His calculations were a bit off, but his chronology was introduced into Christian historical writings by one of my favorite historians, The Venerable Bede in the 8th century.

Chronological confusion continued with the Catholic Church using the old Roman calendar which was 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the solar year. The inaccuracy built up till 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII corrected things by dropping ten days from the calendar, and instituting the Gregorian calendar we use today. The birth of Christ was originally then fixed at December 25, 1 A.D. but modern scholars...

Read More »

We hear a lot at Christmas time about the Old Testament prophecies concerning Jesus the Messiah. Depending on how you count, there are about 300 messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. What are the chances that any one person could fulfill these prophecies? To understand this, let’s take eight distinct Old Testament prophecies that we can clearly see were fulfilled in the life of Jesus Christ, fulfillments that he could not have arranged himself, and see what it takes to fulfill them.

This is an illustration that Chuck Missler uses, which calculates the mathematical probabilities for the fulfillment of eight prophecies by any individual in human history. Example: Out of the world's historic population, how many people have been born in Bethlehem? We estimate 1 in 280,000? Remember, no one can choose their birthplace.

Here are the eight examples of Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in Jesus’s life with some estimates as to the probability of a person fulfilling them by chance. If you think about...

Read More »

The Bible teaches clearly that sin separates man from God (Romans 6:23). When we become Christians, we repent of our sin and ask God to forgive us of our sin. He does this because Jesus has paid the penalty for everyone’s sin by his death on the cross. It is that payment we are putting our faith in. It is very important to understand what the Bible says happens at this point when we become Christians. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that, "He [God] made Him [Jesus] who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him [Jesus]." Simply put, God takes Christ’s payment, his atoning sacrifice for sin, and applies it to our sin "account." Christ’s payment is sufficient to cover all our sin past present and future, and when it is applied to us, God declares us to be righteous, on the basis of Christ’s atonement. This is what theologians call Positional Righteousness. God has given you Christ’s righteousness and now He begins to work in our lives to conform us to the image of His Son. (Please...

Read More »