Shabbat Sabbath

In Romans chapter 12 Paul explains, to a great degree, how Christians should treat one another. Of course, when we read these passages from Paul’s letters, we must remember that he is only talking about the members of the body, “those who are Israel”, which has nothing to do with aliens. From Romans chapter 12: “4 Just as in one body we have many members, but the members all do not have the same function; 5 in this manner we are many in one body with Christ, and each one members of one another. 6 But having varying gifts according to the favor which is given to us: whether interpretation of prophecy according to the proportion of faith; 7 or service in the ministry; or he that is teaching, in education; 8 or he that encourages, in encouragement; he that is sharing, with simplicity; he that is leading, with diligence; he showing mercy, with cheerfulness. 9 Love without acting; abhorring wickedness, cleaving to goodness: 10 brotherly love affectioned towards one another; in…

This lengthy Midrashic commentary has three Meshalim, Parables of how God tests the righteous: a flax worker who beats his flax, a potter who strikes his well-made pots, and a householder who places his yoke upon the strong cow. God does and will test His children. God tested Israel in the wilderness. For us who are in Christ, the church we also find ourselves in situations where we are being tested through trial and tribulation. “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if…” (1 Peter 1:6-7).

The resurrection of the human body from the grave is clearly taught in God’s Word. Job, the oldest of the patriarchs, said: “For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25-26). It is evident that Job was firm in his belief in the resurrection of his body and a future life beyond the grave.

Abraham, the founder and father of his race, lived to be one hundred seventy-five years old, and “died in a good old age” (Genesis 25:7-8), but “he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). He never saw that city in his earthly pilgrimage, for earth to him was a “strange country.” The godly old patriarch shared with others who “desire a better country, that is, an heavenly; wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city” (Hebrews 11:16). But Abraham believed that the heavenly city would be inhabited by a fleshly body, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead . . .” (Hebrews 11:19).

David was confident of a future life. He said: “My flesh also shall rest in hope” (Psalm 16:9), and “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness” (Psalm 17:15). These words of the man of God refute the erroneous teaching that the resurrection refers to the spirit of man, and not to his body. Neither the soul nor the spirit of man dies, but it is his body which dies and is buried. Therefore it must be the body that is raised from the dead, and not the soul or spirit.

When our Lord Jesus was here upon earth, He taught that all men who die will be raised again at some future date. “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, And shall come forth . . .” (John 5:28, 29). We affirm and avow our belief in the resurrection of the human body from death and the grave. Without this hope our Christian faith is vain, our brightest hopes are merely bursting bubbles, the Bible is not a true and reliable record, the men who wrote it were poor deluded victims of falsehood, and Jesus Christ is the….

For Scott Stripling, one archaeologist’s trash has become his treasure.

Through a process called wet sifting—a methodological revolution bringing to light small or hidden artifacts that were previously missed at many archaeological digs—Stripling and his team have made an incredible discovery on Mount Ebal in the mountains of Samaria that could very well be one of the most significant finds in biblical history.

Stripling, the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, and his team traveled to Mount Ebal, about 50 miles north of Jerusalem, for a dig at the altar described in Joshua 8:30: “Then Joshua built an altar to the Lord God of Israel on Mount Ebal, as Moses commanded the children of Israel.”

It was a site that Stripling said Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal had excavated in the 1980s and had “done a very good job on it.” Stripling said he wanted to “check his dump pile there” to see if Zertal had missed anything of significance.

Through wet sifting, what Stripling and his team found in Zertal’s “dump pile” was a lead folding tablet with writing on the inside estimated to be 3,400 years old. Stripling says it’s the oldest Hebrew writing that has ever been found, in a proto-alphabetic script.

“That predates biblical Hebrew, or paleo-Hebrew, which is what we think of from the First Temple period, the earliest writings we had previously,” Stripling says.

The entire context of Stripling’s team’s findings can be found here.

The inscription on the tablet included the name of Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God used in the Bible, twice.

Stripling said the tablet was about the “size of a business card folded in half.

“Think about the book of Job, for example, which is the oldest book in the Bible,” Stripling says. “And listen to what Job said in Job 19:23-24: ‘Oh, that my words were written! Oh, that they were inscribed in a book! That they were engraved with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever!'”

Stripling said hundreds of these types of tablets have been found in Israel, what they call death pixels or curse tablets. But all of them to this point, Stripling says, had writing with very “petty or stupid” curses on them.” But this one, he says, was a “very serious thing.”

“In this case, this is a judicial type of curse and it’s self-imprecatory (to invoke or call down evil or curses upon a person), which is exactly what they did at the end of Deuteronomy. They pronounced blessings from Mount Gerazim and self-imprecatory curses from Mount Ebal. And what did we find on Mount Ebal, on the altar, by the way, the one that Joshua built, but a table with a curse inscription on it.”

“All my life I’ve wanted to be known as a blessing, but as it turns out, what we found was a curse,” Stripling says. “And the curse is actually a blessing in disguise. Essentially, there are 48 very small letters and the curse reads like this: ‘Cursed, cursed, cursed, cursed are you by the God, Yahweh. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed you are by Yahweh, cursed, cursed, cursed.’ It has a literary structure to it what we call a chiasm. Some of the Psalms are written this way.

“It is a self-imprecatory curse the Israelites [used], just like Deuteronomy says: ‘We’re bringing upon themselves and it may happen to us if we don’t keep the terms of God’s Covenant.'”

Stripling says that most scholars and places of higher learning have denied the literacy of Moses and Joshua, but this tablet proves otherwise.

“[Scholars assumed] The Bible couldn’t have been written until 1000 years later because there was no alphabet with which they could write,” Stripling says. “Well, now we know there was. They have said the Israelites were illiterate. Well, then why is God telling them to write, why was He telling the people to read. Why would people write things down if nobody could read it. And now we have proof of that literacy.

“So, the tablet is written and then laid on the altar. … An innocent animal is slaughtered and the blood…that covers the curse. So, this starts way back in Genesis—the shedding of innocent blood to cover the guilty. And so, this blood covers the tablet and now the man who will come to the altar, in other words, repent and accept responsibility for his actions. Those curses are not going to come to him. It’s only the man who will not repent, who will have those curses upon him.

“And the curse is a big problem because it doesn’t say cursed you are by Satan. We could deal with that. This is cursed by Yahweh. That’s checkmate, okay? There’s no getting out of this curse, except through the blood. So, Leviticus 17:11 says that ‘through the shedding of blood, there is forgiveness of sin.'”

Sound familiar? Does Jesus’ crucifixion ring a bell?

While Stripling says the discovery was made in 2019, he and his team left Israel and thought the project was over. Everything that was found was put in storage, and Stripling assumed he would return to Israel a few months later to take the research project through the “normal protocols.”

But then the COVID pandemic hit, and Stripling and his team were “locked out” of Israel for two years. Once they returned and accessed the tablet again, they took it to a lab in Prague where they had formed a collaborative partnership with a company that had expertise in tomography and scanning through lead.

On his collaborative team, Stripling says two scientists, two experienced tomographers from Prague, were able to independently verify the tablet. Stripling said that the tablet they found was “several hundred years older than the earliest version that we have. And it includes the name of God.”

What could possibly be the motivation to risk everything?  At the LHC restart in March of 2015, even Stephen Hawking was concerned about the creation of mini black holes. However, the brainiac physicists at the LHC dismissed the concern out of hand because they said that the chances were so infinitesimal that no one needed to be concerned about it. Excuse me? Infinitesimal? Isn’t any fraction of 1 percent enough to make one reconsider the consequences of the experiment? Especially, because if that fraction of a percentage did happen, the world would be destroyed? Instead, this arrogance from the academics and intelligentsia says, “Don’t worry about it. We have it all under control.”

What could be worth the risk of blowing up the world? Surely even the search…

Mount Everest may be the highest peak on Earth, but the BBC reports that there are staggeringly tall mountains deep inside our planet’s interior that dwarf the tallest ranges on the surface — and scientists are puzzling over the origin of these geological marvels. These gigantic buried mountain ranges, called ultra-low velocity zones (ULVZ), are located in the core-mantle boundary inside Earth, around 1,800 miles deep. Some can be “4.5 times the height of Everest” or more than 24 miles in height, researchers told the BBC, and completely hidden until they were revealed by seismic data from earthquakes and even atomic explosions. “We found evidence for ULVZs kind of everywhere,” University of Alabama…

This section of Paul’s writing not only has been confused regarding women ministers, it also has launched endless interpretation debates about the use of tongues during the church service. I don’t plan to make a theologically “absolute” statement on tongues (as that is not the purpose of this series), but I do wish to point out that Paul, to the church at Corinth, was: a) in favor of tongues (14:5), but b) in opposition to them under circumstances wherein they disrupt the service (14:6–25). Consider his words in verse 23: “If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?” The ESV renders this: “If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds?”

Weaponizing public schools for sinister purposes, an obscure United Nations institute is quietly working to transform education worldwide to impose radical political and spiritual values and beliefs on children. It is all happening under the guise of “social-emotional learning,” or SEL, a scheme hatched at a New Age organization whose founder and namesake was a follower of Lucifer Publishing Company chief Alice Bailey.   

The organization in question, part of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is known as the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, or UNESCO MGIEP for short. Dominated by pagans, communists, New Agers, and fringe psychiatrists, the India-based UN institute has global reach, boasting that it guides education policy worldwide. Even a brief perusal of its website and reports reveals serious cause for alarm. 

At first glance, those unfamiliar with the manipulation of language used by New Agers and communists may not even notice the warning signs. For instance, the organization publicly claims it is merely working to give children “kinder brains” through its programs so the world can be more peaceful and “sustainable.” But in reality, the institute is a key vehicle for injecting occult “spirituality” into classrooms worldwide, as called for in Chapter 36 of the UN’s Agenda 21 global plan for “sustainable development.”

In a suburb of Tel Aviv, a group of choristers were getting ready for the moment they will rejoice at the reconstruction of the Jewish temple some 2,000 years after its destruction, which they believe will accelerate the arrival of the messiah.

But for others, realising their goal would massively inflame tensions around the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

Chorister Shmuel Kam said Jews have been “waiting” two millennia for the revival of the temple.

Members of the Orthodox Jewish group claim to be descendants of the biblical Tribe of Levi, which performed hymns and music at the holy site.

“When the temple will be built, we will ask the Levites to come sing and they won’t know. They have to learn,” said Menahem Rozenthal, director of the men-only choir created a few months ago by the Temple Institute.