In Revelation 5:8-9, after the Lamb has taken the book that could not be opened by any other, the four beasts and twenty-four elders fall down before Him and...
The "chariot of the cherubims" is part of the design of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. This chariot is not mentioned anywhere else in scripture. Neither does there seem to be...
An article in the May 12, 2006, edition of the "Wall Street Journal" reviews a couple of television programs dealing with reproductive technology that show how this technology is presently being used. Prospective parents are coming to the United States to choose sperm and eggs according to the donor's appearance, intelligence, ability in sports, music or other areas of interest. Many are coming from nations that do not allow the level of eugenics offered in the "land of the free." Others who cannot travel to America are turning in orders over the internet. The most popular choice is for blond, blue-eyed white children. Surrogates often have the children for them. One surrogate said of the babies she bears for income stated, "It may sound heartless, but I don't get attached." At some point, God will again look upon mankind as He did at the Tower of Babel and say, "and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do" (Genesis 11:6). At the Tower of Babel, He confounded their languages. We may wonder what He will do to end this renewal of a eugenics program that would have been envied by Adolf Hitler and his compatriots.
Yesterday I read Ezekiel 14:21, which states, "For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?" Of these four sore judgments, three make perfect sense to us today. The sword is war, famine is lack of food and/or water, and pestilence is disease in epidemic proportion. All of these are present concerns. However, we do not much think of the "noisome beast" as a threat. Of course, these beasts might come in the form of insects. However, we are seeing more conflicts from larger beasts. Today's newspapers report of a rash of alligator attacks in Florida. After only 17 deaths from such attacks since 1948, three people have been killed in separate incidents just this week. If God removes His protecting hand from us, we may have more to fear than we think from the "noisome beast."
The Lord is clearly interested in beauty. Some form of the word is used 76 times in the Bible. We are told that God "hath made every thing beautiful in his time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He so highly exalts the proper concept of beauty that He often associates it with holiness (Psalm 29:2; 96:9; 110:3). Unfortunately, men tend to pervert beauty as they do all that they touch. God reminds us that outward "beauty is vain" (Proverbs 31:30) and human "beauty is a fading flower' (Isaiah 28:1). Men corrupt beauty and make the "beauty of a man" a focus for idolatry (Isaiah 44:13). Eventually, man's perverseness causes his "beauty to be abhorred" (Ezekiel 16:25). The very concept of what is beautiful is no longer recognizable.
The following is an excerpt from Soldiers in Training by Brother Daryl Coats.
