Welcome to the Sunday Edition of the Chaplain's Corner and I am glad to see you here.
Let's Pray and seek the Lord
Heavenly Father, How good it is to know you as Lord, and to study your word, I ask now that your Holy Spirit will show us from your word your truths and guide us and direct our paths.
I pray for those who are sick and have the flu or worst, and ask you Lord for their healing and that in all things, your perfect will will be done.
in your name we pray
aman
Yes, There will be sinners in Heaven who have had their
sins washed in the blood of the lamb. Redeemed and saved for all Eternity.
Not one person will ever be able to say that he was
there because of anything he himself did. No, No one will boost there.
Ephesians 2:8-9 (King James Version)
8 For
by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift
of God:
9 Not
of works, lest any man should boast.
Heaven
will be a wonderful place and there will be no sin in Heaven at all. We will be
Perfect, no sickness either and whatever medical problems you have in this
life, they won’t be in Heaven.
Adam and Eve
strayed from the way of God by eating fruit from the tree that God had
forbidden. Thus, man, whom God created in His own image, chose to follow Satan,
the enemy of God. Before Adam and Eve sinned, they rejoiced whenever God came
to the garden to talk with them, but now, when they heard the voice of God,
they were afraid and ashamed and tried to hide from God among the trees of the garden!
However, God pursued Adam and Eve, spoke with them, and declared to them what
their sin would
bring into the world: trouble and suffering, thorns and thistles, sickness and death.
Consequently, from that day until today, the
shadow of death hangs over Adam's descendants. All of Adam's children are
conceived in sin and born with an evil nature.
Whether we like it or not, we
all share the character of our forefather, Adam. "A rat
only begets that which digs." It is because of Adam's sin that we are all
born sinners. Truly, "an epidemic is not confined to the one from whom it
originates!" {Wolof proverbs} And just as Adam's sin separated him from God, so has our
sin separated us
from God. That is what the Scriptures say,
"Sin entered the world through one
man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all
sinned. (Rom. 5:12) "All have sinned
and fall short of the glory of God." (Rom. 3:23) "Your
iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden His face
from you." (Isa.
59:2)
Thus, we see
how Adam's one sin separated the whole human race from
God. On the day that Adam disobeyed God, Adam (and the whole
human race yet to be born) left the kingdom of light and entered the kingdom of
darkness. They no longer had any share in the Kingdom of God. Because of their sin,
their portion was with Satan, who had taken them as his
captives and slaves.
Now, they couldn't hope for anything in this life, except
slavery to sin and fear of death-and in the hereafter, endless punishment in
the eternal fire!
If the Scriptures ended here, we could only
close the book and weep bitterly like someone lost at sea, with no hope of
rescue. If God had not opened a way of salvation to save the children of Adam,
we would be doomed forever! But blessed be the Lord our God, the Scriptures of
the Prophets do not end with the story of Adam's sin.
God,
who is great in mercy, has opened for the children of Adam a door of salvation!
Thus, the Word of God says,
"Where
sin increased, [God's] grace increased all the more." (Rom. 5:20) "Do
not be afraid, because I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all
the people!" (Luke
2:10) "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all
men!" (Tit. 2:11)
God is holy and, therefore must judge sinners. God
is righteous and cannot merely "forget" sin. He must punish every
sin. The penalty for sin is death and eternal separation from God. God never
changes and the penalty of sin never changes. However, today, we will begin to
read in the Scriptures how God, the Holy One, designed {Lit. wove} a
plan to deliver sinners from the penalty of sin. Thus, we will learn that
God is not only the Holy One, but He is also the Merciful One! God, our
Judge, wants to become our Savior!
On the day that
Adam and Eve sinned, God began to make known His wonderful plan to save
sinners. Let us continue now in the Torah, in the book of Genesis, so that we
might learn about this Good News. We are reading in chapter 3, verse 15: God
said to Satan who was in the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will
strike his heel."
This difficult verse contains many profound and
important truths which God's prophets would later explain in detail. The
contents of this verse, can be summarized like this: God
was beginning to make known His plan to bring into the world a Savior {or Deliverer} who would redeem the children
of Adam from the dominion of Satan.
This is the first verse that mentions the coming of
the holy Redeemer {orMediator}. In this verse, let us consider
four truths concerning the Redeemer whom God promised to send.
1.) The first truth is this: God was announcing
how this Redeemer would be born of a woman only, that is, a
virgin. All of us have a male and a female parent. However, the Redeemer who
was to come, would be born only of a woman, by the power of God. He would not
have an earthly father.
The Savior of the world could not come from Adam,
because all of Adam's descendants are stained by sin. The Savior of sinners had
to be without sin. He had to come forth from God, from heaven. Thus, the first
thing we may learn from this verse is this: God promised a holy Redeemer who
would be the offspring of a woman, but not the offspring of a man.
2.) There is something else that God announced
on the day that Adam and Eve sinned. Concerning the promised Redeemer, God said
to Satan: "You will strike his heel." Thus, God began to announce how Satan
would torment the Savior that
God would send from heaven. In coming lessons, we will see that the prophets
foretold how Satan would incite men to persecute, torture and kill the
Redeemer.
A stricken Redeemer would be part of God's plan. In order to bring us
back to God, the Savior of the world would have to die as a sacrifice for sin;
the Righteous One dying for us, the unrighteous. He would willingly lay down
His life to pay sin's penalty: death.
3.) The third truth concerning the Redeemer was
that God told Satan, who was in the serpent, that "he (the Redeemer) would
crush his (Satan's) head." That was bad news for Satan, but good news for
whoever wants to be delivered from the power of Satan, sin and hell! Thus, God
began to announce that the Redeemer would, in the end, defeat the devil and set free the children of Adam who
had become slaves of sin.
4.) Finally, God began to announce that there
would be two lines (groups) of people in the world: The people of Satan and
the people of God. The people of Satan are those who refuse to believe the Word
of God. The people of God are those who believe God's Word and put their trust
in the promised Redeemer. (John 1:9-13)
THE MESSAGE IS TO YOU TODAY THAT JESUS CHRIST DID COME
AS MESSIAH, AND WAS CRUCIFIED ON
THE CROSS FOR YOU TAKING YOUR SIN AND MINE UPON
HIMSELF AND
ROSE FROM THE DEAD PROVING HE WAS GOD.
John 3:16
16 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.
Galatians
2:20
I
have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me.
Romans 10:8-10
8 But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and
in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach;
9 That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt
be saved.
10 For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the
mouth confession is made unto salvation.
The Face of Jesus Christ
"And they shall see his face; and his name shall
be in their foreheads." (Revelation 22:4)
This is the
last reference in the Bible to the face of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a
glorious promise it is, with its assurance that all His servants will finally
see Him face to face! Although they give us no specific description of His
physical appearance (the only description of His appearance is in Revelation 1:13-16), the
gospel writers do frequently mention His face.
On the Mount of
Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John saw how "his face did shine as the
sun" (Matthew 17:2), as He spoke
of His forthcoming death. Shortly after this, "he stedfastly set his face
to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51) to meet His
death.
A few days
after His entrance into Jerusalem, He was delivered into the hands of wicked men who took delight in
desecrating that face which, in loving grief, had just wept over the city and
its indifference to God. But first, in the garden just before His arrest, He
"fell on his face" in agonizing prayer (Matthew 26:39).
Then the Roman
soldiers began "to cover his face" (Mark 14:65), and to
"spit in his face" (Matthew 26:67), and
finally, "they struck him on the face" (Luke 22:64). In fact, they
abused Him so severely that "his visage was so marred more than any man,
and his form more than the sons of men" (Isaiah 52:14).
But when He
comes again, the Christ-rejecting world will cry out to the mountains to
"fall on us, and hide us from the face . . . of the Lamb . . . from whose
face the earth and the heaven fled away" (Revelation 6:16; 20:11). All the redeemed,
on the other hand, will rejoice forever in "the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). HMM
The Fire of Hell
"And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity:
so is the tongue among our members that it defileth the whole body, and setteth
on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell." (James 3:6)
The word for
"hell" in this verse is gehenna, and this is the only one of
its eleven occurrences in the New Testament that is not a direct quote from the
lips of Christ. Since the tongue is not a literal fire and since its misuse can
in effect make it a "world of iniquity," this passage suggests that
hell itself is the ultimate world of iniquity which has made the uncontrolled
tongue an extension of itself.
The Bible
speaks of this future hell as a place of "everlasting fire, prepared for
the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41). However,
if these were fires such as we have here on earth, it is difficult to see how,
as Jesus said, God will "destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). Fire would
destroy the body, but what about the soul?
The fire of
hell may include some kind of spiritual fire or environment whose destructive
nature can only be characterized by the metaphor of fire. The "lake of
fire" cannot be on earth, of course, because the Beast, the False Prophet,
and Satan will all be sent there before the disintegration of earth in
its present form, whereas all lost human souls will be sent there after
that event (Revelation 19:20; 20:10-11, 15). The awful lake
probably is somewhere far out in the "outer darkness" (Matthew 25:30; Jude 13).
And it will be
"a world of iniquity" where "he that is unjust |will| be unjust
still: and he which is filthy |will| be filthy still" (Revelation 22:11). Those
who have opted not to be with Christ will be given their chosen status forever.
That means no light, no peace, no rest, no joy, nothing at all associated with
the Lord. One should certainly "flee from the wrath to come" (Matthew 3:7) while he can.
HMM
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