Shabbat Sabbath

In the earliest records, there were three Marys: (1) Jesus’ mother, (2) her sister who was the wife of Cleopas and, however unusual, seems to have had the same name as her sister, and (3) Mary Magdalene—also known as Mary of Bethany. Later, after Jesus’ ascension, we read of another Mary, the mother of Mark, whose family owned the “upper room” of Pentecostal fame.

Mary Magdalene has been deified by Merovingian Catholicism—that secretive faction which seeks to displace the Virgin Mary from her Roman Catholic throne. In recent years they have been led by exiled Prince Michael of Scotland, whose chief publicist, Laurence Gardner, has written a number of books to popularize him. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is another man’s attempt to capitalize on this idea.

Over two thousand years ago, a Hebrew Psalmist wrote the beautiful words of Psalm 92 in honor of Yahweh and His Sabbath. The title of the psalm is a Song for the Sabbath day. Its first line tells us it is “good to give thanks unto Yahweh and to sing praises unto thy name…”.

This psalm is a song of praise, gladness, and faith in Yahweh. Beautiful, to be sure, but there is more to this psalm than meets the casual observer’s eye on first reading.

The psalmist took this psalm and organized it beyond just its words and their meaning. Hidden below the Hebrew poetic lines is a numerical structure that emphasizes the author’s theme and lifts the words into a different realm of praise and honor.

Did a planet in our solar system get destroyed and its matter strewn across space? Back here on earth, we see possible fingerprints of such an event: white, shiny fragments of metal called iridium (Ir). Part of the platinum family, iridium is plentiful in meteors and comets, but is very rare on earth, with one exception.

Most of the iridium on earth is found in the K-T boundary, a thin layer of sediment that marks the geologic point in earth’s history between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. Modern geology dates this period to approximately 65.5 million years ago. This is also the period when experts say the dinosaurs became extinct because of a massive asteroid strike, specifically the strike at the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Based upon his extensive research, the late David Flynn pointed out the following:

In the rabbinical text called the Genesis Rabbah 3:7, prior to creating this world, God created other worlds and then destroyed them. The Kabbalists teach that there were seven such creations prior to our own. These seven worlds are referred to as the realms of chaos, olam hatohu, or the world of Tohu. The secrets regarding these seven worlds are hidden in the Torah within the genealogy of the family of Esau in Genesis 36:31–39. It speaks of the “kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before there was a king in Israel.” These Edomite kings are an esoteric reference to those primordial worlds of old. It is said that these earlier creations did not properly receive the influx of God’s divine light. Each world is said to have been a vessel that needed to be filled with God’s light in order to exist. The seven worlds or vessels were not strong enough to receive God’s light and when his light did shine into them the vessels shattered and were destroyed.

An exhaustive study of Native American DNA from Siberians, Canadians and some natives from the tip of South America was conducted in 2012. Admittedly, the sample was relatively small, 750, and excluded representation of First Nations from the United States due to cost constraints and lack of natives’ participation. Still, it was one of the first studies of its kind in which archaeologists, linguists, paleoanthropologists, and geneticists were brought together to ascertain the origin of natives. Using cutting-edge technology, they made some interesting findings:

Ripan Malhi, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in an e-mail that the new data added [sic] nuance to a consensus view that had emerged that there was a single source population that gave rise to Native Americans. The team’s explanation that there were multiple waves of migration that interbred with the earlier groups in parts of North America helps explain the overall similarity of DNA among all Native Americans as well as some unaccounted for differences in groups from North America, he wrote [i]

To pick up a thread from earlier in this series and unravel a mystery, a discussion on DNA is required. If you will recall, the “land bridge” was briefly mentioned in the context of the migration of humans to North America.

The theory is simply that people who migrated from Siberia to Alaska crossed a land bridge that spanned the current-day Bering Strait. This bridge is speculated to have remained in place for thousands of years, and is, according to geneticists and anthropologists, responsible for Native Americans finding their way to the Americas. However, there is a huge problem with this idea, as an article on The Conversation website points out:

But genetic evidence shows there is no direct ancestral link between the people of ancient East Asia and modern Native Americans. A comparison of DNA from 600 modern Native Americans with ancient DNA recovered from a late Stone Age human skeleton from Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in southern Siberia shows that Native Americans diverged genetically from their Asian ancestors around 25,000 years ago, just as the last ice age was reaching its peak.

This week I’d like to look at the controversial question of Christ’s “imminent” return for the church, but from a different angle than most of you might have approached the subject before.

Today many of my peers believe that this event could have taken place at any point after the death and resurrection of Yeshua and that there is no “prophesied event” that needs to take place before this “rapture” of believers transpires. Here is how two of today’s highly respected evangelical prophecy teachers see the subject:

 A foundational aspect of the rapture, as taught in Scripture, is that it is imminent. By imminent we mean it could happen at any moment, and there is no prophesied event that has to take place first before the rapture can occur. It is the next event on the calendar. (Ed Hindson & Hitchcock, Can We Still Believe in the Rapture? (p. 123). Harvest House Publishers. Kindle Edition.)

Is Mr. Hindson & Mr. Hitchcock’s perspective on the subject accurate? To be fair, it’s a perspective shared by many respected expositors of the Bible.