Search Results

Open Doors and Secure Pillars Small magnitude earthquakes can happen hundreds of times each day around the world. Major earthquakes take place about once a month. The ancient city of Philadelphia was located about 28 miles southeast of Sardis, in a region where earthquakes often took place. The city had nearly been destroyed by a large quake...

The Poverty of Wealth A recent study showed that people can tell whether you are rich or poor simply by looking at your face. According to psychologist Thora Bjornsdottir, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, even expressionless faces give off hidden signals about social class. According to today’s passage, it is also possible to...

A View of Heaven In recent years many books claim to describe a visit to heaven, usually the result of a near-death experience. Some skeptics view these accounts as fiction, and others attribute them to chemical changes in the dying brain. In a few cases the authors have admitted they made it all up. Today’s passage is different. John doesn’t...

The Martyrs’ Cry A popular saying goes, “I don’t get mad; I get even.” The desire for payback is understandable. In its righteous form, it reflects a longing for justice. When the fifth seal is broken, the martyrs cry from under the altar: “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our...

Sealed by God Important documents such as marriage licenses or certain contracts often have a seal on them. Some are fancy; others are plain. The important thing is not what the seal looks like but what it does. A seal is an authenticating mark that validates the document. At the end of Revelation 6, those who realized that the time of God’s...

Satan's Menagerie Many people know some Bible facts. For instance, nearly everyone knows that Jesus said, “Judge not” (Matt. 7:1). Many have heard of the Antichrist and know that his number is 666—although they probably didn’t learn this from the Bible but got it from a movie. They might be surprised to learn that the Antichrist appears in...

The Great Fall Sociologist Edward T. Hall has called culture “the silent language” that controls our lives in unsuspected ways. Because we are embedded in culture, we intuit the rules but rarely give them conscious thought. Hall warns, “Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from...

The Arrival of the King of Kings Many people gather at Christmas or Easter to hear a performance of the oratorio Messiah by George Frideric Handel. A highlight of the piece is the “Hallelujah” chorus, which acclaims Jesus as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” Anyone who has heard the work cannot read today’s verses without hearing Handel’s...

Human Silence: Israel and the Silence of Unbelief In Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming, a depressed character named Will Barrett decides to put God’s existence to the test. Is He really there or not? Will enters a cave and resolves not to come out unless God gives him a sign. If not, he will die. Rather humorously, during this experiment...

Divine Silence? Our Feeling of Despair Rodrigues, a seventeenth-century missionary in Japan in the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, wrestled with the silence of God. Where was God, he wondered, when His church was suffering? Where was He when powerful and godless authorities exploited the poor and insulted His name? Where was He when new converts...