HOLDING FORTH THE WORD OF LIFE

IN A CULTURE OF DEATH

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Noah’s Time?

British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948 - ) contends that “in the absence of divine law, it is likely that a civilisation will arrive at the condition of humanity before the Flood: corrupt and full of violence…”Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 261.

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Runnin’ Wild?

“When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild. But whoever obeys the law is joyful”

- Proverbs 29:18 (NLT)

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Our Joy and Heart’s Delight?

“Bible reading has declined since the 1980s and ‘basic Bible knowledge is at a record low.’”

Stephen R. Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), p. 30.

 

“When your wordscame, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty.”

- Jeremiah 15:16 (NIV)

Only one-third of Americans know that Jesus delivered the Sermon

on the Mount, ten percent of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, and a significant number of Americans believe that

Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.

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Nazis and the Bible

“Nazism is its very roots was a rebellion against the Bible, against the God of Abraham. Realizing that it was Christianity that implanted attachment to the God of Abraham and involvement with the Hebrew Bible in the hearts of Western man, Nazism resolved that it must both exterminate the Jews and eliminate Christianity, and bring about instead a revival of Teutonic paganism. Nazism has suffered a defeat, but the process of eliminating the Bible from the consciousness of the Western world goes on.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion Is An Island,” in Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 236.

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Erase the Prophets?!

On November 19, 1938, Friedrich Werner (1897-1955), President of the Nazi-supported Supreme Evangelical Church Council in Germany, ordered the name of Jehovah or Yahweh erased from wherever it was displayed in all Protestant churches as well as ordering the erasure of the name of all Jewish prophets, including all prophets of the Old Testament.

“Erase Name of Jehovah, Nazis Order,” The Chicago Daily News, November 19, 1938, p. 3.

“The Bible: The Weapon of Our Souls”

Noted Norwegian Lutheran Bishop Eivind Berggrav (1884-1959), who was imprisoned by the Nazis for two years at Bredtvet concentration camp in Oslo, Norway.

After the war, Berggrav told an audience in London that, “The Bible was the weapon of our souls. It was with us in suffering, it fought for us, and our foes feared it. Why did they hate that very old book? For the same reason we ourselves loved it. Because the Bible spoke to us as a voice closer to our trembling hearts than any other voice.” He concluded his remarks: “This small book is the charter of peace, the charter of freedom, the charter of the future life of mankind.”

Rome A. Betts, “The Bible Went Underground, Too,” The New York Times Magazine, June 9, 1946, p. 26.

 

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“What is at Stake?”

“The Western world is a world committed to the God of Abraham. What is at stake in this grave hour of history is the right understanding of that commitment. It is no accident that, in a considerable part of the world, the Bible has been eliminated. The tyranny of conformity tends to deprive man of his inner identity, of his ability to stand still in the midst of flux, to remain a person in the midst of a crowd. Thus the threat to modern man is loss of personhood, vanishing of identity, sinking into anonymity, not knowing who he is, whence he comes and where he goes. Being a Jew makes anonymity impossible.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Existence and Celebration,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 32.

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What is happening to us?

The median membership in a U.S. church is 75 members

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“…found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year”

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Our Joy and Heart’s Delight?

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True passion and joy of Bible reading

“And he [Ezra] read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law…. So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading. And Nehemiah, which is the Tirshatha, and Ezra the priest the scribe, and the Levites that taught the people, said unto all the people, This day is holy unto the LORD your God; mourn not, nor weep. For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law…. And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth, because they had understood the words that were declared unto them.”

Nehemiah 8:3, 8-9, 12

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“The average Christian spends more time watching television in one evening than he or she spends reading the Bible during the entire week.”

George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church: A Blueprint for Survival (Nashville, TN: Word, 1998), p. 123. 

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Is our way of thinking changing?

George Barna believes that the video age affects the way children and adults now process information: “The result is a new mode of thinking in which linear reasoning has been replaced with mosaic thinking, which integrates information and decision making in entirely unique ways. Attention spans have been affected, too: The average attention span among teenagers today is estimated at six to eight minutes.”

George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church: A Blueprint for Survival (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998), pp. 3-4.

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1818 1851 1891 1901 1911 1931 1961 1989

Percentage of Population Under Age 15 Enrolled in Sunday School in England and Wales

Sunday School Attendees19

Source: Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p. 44.

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Rescue Lost Opportunities

“See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil”

- Ephesians 5:16

“Redeeming”: exagorazo – “rescue from loss”

“Time”: kairos – “opportunity or occasion”

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“…I saw the souls of them beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God…”

- Revelation 20:4

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Epechó: To Hold or Not to Hold

STRONGS NT 1907: ἐπέχω

ἐπέχω; imperfect ἐπειχον; 2 aorist ἐπέσχον;1. to have or hold upon, apply: namely, τόν νοῦν, to observe, attend to, followed by an indirect question, Luke 14:7; τίνι, dative of person, to give attention to one, Acts 3:5; 1 Timothy 4:16 (with the dative of a thing, Sir. 31:2 (Sir. 34:2); 2 Macc. 9:25; Polybius 3, 43, 2, etc.; fully ὀφθαλμόν τίνι, Lucian, dial. mar. 1, 2).

2. to hold toward, hold forth, present: λόγον ζωῆς, as a light, by which illumined ye are the lights of the world,

HOLDING FORTH THE WORD OF LIFE

IN A CULTURE OF DEATH