EPAPHRAS: THE APPOINTMENT is now available!!

Did you read EPAPHRAS: THE INTERVIEW? Did you like it? Are you interested in finding out more about Eps or Teddy or ....just about anyone else mentioned in those pages?

Well the sequel, which is a prequel, is now available. EPAPHRAS: THE APPOINTMENT can be found now at books.by/millerwrites. You will find out more about the early lives of our heroes and perhaps see how they developed their worldviews.

With ten major characters developed in the pages of The Appointment, you are sure to witness many (fictional) examples of the ways God works in the lives of man, and always with perfect timing. God is out to get your attention and hopes to have a personal relationship with you. A vital, joy-filled relationship, based on your finding forgiveness (the theme of The Interview) and salvation in Jesus Christ. 

Ecclesiastes 3:11

PS BOTH books are available at books.by/millerwrites

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Prophecy

A few things about Bible prophecy.

A prophet is not necessarily a "future predictor."  Not a fortune teller, but in the Biblical record a prophet of God was simply one who spoke for God.  He said whatever God wanted him to say.  Sometimes it had to do with future events, but not always.

Once in a while someone came along who wanted to be God's prophet but was not called by God to be so. If he ever stood up and said "Thus saith the Lord," he was subject to the strictest standard in the community: if he claimed that God did make a prediction, but it proved false, the "false prophet" would be stoned to death.  His extreme presumption was punishable by death.  God is serious.

And yet dozens of men and women stood up as prophets.  Hundreds of prophecies were made "in the name of the Lord" and all were either fulfilled in their particulars or...will yet be.  Many prophecies are related to future, end time, events.

With God, of course, every bit of it is concerned with the Good News!  Yes, His wrath will (soon) pour out on the ungodly; those who are absolutely resolved to resist Him and His love.  But by His grace, He offers hope and peace and joy and forgiveness of sin etc. etc. to every one who simply repents and turns to Him through Jesus Christ!

Come back to God.  Be reconciled to God by believing in, and receiving Jesus as your Savior.  
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Who is Jesus?

"A good man." is not an acceptable answer.  Jesus Christ claimed to be God.  A "good man" (who is NOT God), would not do that.

A gentle shepherd?  Nope, he was quite tough.  And did not pull any punches.

Was Jesus a liar? Who will go to a tortuous death to defend a lie?

Was He a lunatic?  For a regular man to claim he was God, he must be insane.  But no.  Jesus is world renowned for His wisdom, his eloquence, and His ability to relate well to people of every state.  He met with religious, political and military leaders, and also ministered to tax collectors and prostitutes.

Let the Apostle John tell us who Jesus is:

John chapter one:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

He refers to "the Word" as being "in the beginning" and having made all things.  Then in verse 14, below, John makes it clear who "The Word" is:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus Christ was God Himself.  He came to Earth, to suffer death, to die for our sins, and to rise to give us eternal life.


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What is Faith?

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  Hebrews 11:1

There is the answer.  This somewhat poetic description of faith is found at the beginning of what is called the "Hall of faith".  Hebrews 11 goes on to list many heroes of the old and new testaments; men and women who somehow exemplified what it means to live, at least the main thrust of their lives if not every bit of it, by faith.

Before we look closer at the "definition" given in verse one, let me share this real life descriptor that I heard recently.  The guy was saying that because of his good marriage, he can be at work through the day and have "faith" that his wife is at home taking care of the children.  He knows his wife so well, and knows of her love for him so completely, that even without calling and checking every hour, he can "know" that she is there and doing what she regularly does.

How does this relate to verse one?  Of course the man hopes that his dear wife will do as she has committed to do for him and for their children.  But it is his faith that gives him confidence in that hope.  And it is his faith that assures him, even though he does not call or watch some security monitor, that all is well at home.

This analogy between a man's faith in his wife and a Christian's faith in God breaks down of course, because things might happen to a man or woman that interfere with the hope we have in each other.  Things that can never counteract the God of the universe, nor His ultimate good will.

When we hear glib cliches like "keep the faith" thrown about in the culture, we must ask; Faith in what?  Or in whom?  The value of faith is in the object of the faith, not in faith itself.  There really is no one and nothing on earth we can rely on perfectly.  We have words like heartbreak and tragedy and shock and even dismay, always ready for the occasions when either somebody we loved or trusted, or when the weather or planet itself, has let us down.  Only faith in God our creator truly suffices.

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R is for RESURRECTION

[This is the MILLERWRITES contribution to the 2012 Blogging A to Z April Challenge  Here is my INTRODUCTION to this particular series, and an opportunity for you to influence which alphabetically aligned weird words I will comment on this month.  THANK YOU for stopping by!]

Three weeks ago tomorrow, we Christians celebrated the RESURRECTION of Jesus Christ.  Perhaps the word is not so 'weird', and the day has been renamed Easter (which has as its root, the Saxon goddess Eostre, who was offered sacrifice around the same time Passover was celebrated by the Jews, which was going on the same weekend Jesus died and was RESURRECTED), but I suggest we simplify our holidays by naming them for what we are holidaying about: in this case, RESURRECTION SUNDAY.

Anyway...I suspect that most people today are too 'educated' and 'scientific' to believe that Jesus ever did actually rise from the dead.    OK.  But may I suggest that you should then be ready to give up belief in just about every other ancient figure and event you've ever heard about.

The historical evidence, first for the existence of Jesus, then for the main events of his life, death AND RESURRETION is at least as substantial as it is for any other person we typically accept without question.  If a report is given you about Julius Caesar, a contemporary of Jesus Christ, do you even wonder about its credibility?  For example; our knowledge of Caesar comes largely from Plutarch, who was born shortly after Caesar died.  His history is obviously second hand.  Three of the Gospels were written by men who literally walked with Jesus, yet their testimony is doubted.  Why?  That's the real question.

Like the overwhelming geological evidence for a worldwide flood on this planet is denied, and as the parsimonious evidence for a sudden recent creation is ignored, the legal and historical support documenting Jesus' RESURRECTION is also resisted and denied, ultimately I believe, for personal reasons.

Everything written these days has critiques and rebuttals written against it now, and they can be found on the internet.  I have looked over some of the responses given to this book that I will recommend, and have found the complaints to be weak and vain.  I hope you will look for Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ, consider his reasoned conclusion about evidence for the RESURRECTION (Strobel was the Chicago Tribune's lead legal correspondent, and an atheist), and find the personal salvation won for YOU through the real and meaningful RESURRECTION of Jesus Christ.




By the Way...
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O is for OMEGA

[This is the MILLERWRITES contribution to the 2012 Blogging A to Z April Challenge  Here is my INTRODUCTION to this particular series, and an opportunity for you to influence which alphabetically aligned weird words I will comment on this month.  THANK YOU for stopping by!]



“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”  Revelation 1:8

OMEGA is simply the name of the last letter in the Greek alphabet.  Alpha, is A, and OMEGA is equivalent to our Z.  Here in the opening of John's 'revelation from Jesus Christ', Jesus claims that He is the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the start and the finish, of all things.  We find out at various points in the Bible that it was Jesus who did the creating of Genesis, the first book of the Bible which tells us about the 'beginnings' we could not have witnessed for ourselves.

And here in the final inspired book of the Bible; an intriguing and mysterious, mostly prophetic, description of last things is given.  But right off the bat we are comforted with the insight that the Jesus we know and love as our personal Savior will be right there at the end.  Before He ascended bodily Jesus promised never to 'leave us or forsake us'.  He keeps His promises.  

The philosopher in me then wants to understand what it suggests that there is an 'OMEGA', or end.  If we are to live an eternal life, how could there ever be an 'end'?  My answer is that He is referring to the triumphal end of what I might call the 'Grand Interruption'.  

God created everything in 6 days, rested on the seventh, setting up Adam and Eve in the garden where He Himself walked with them 'in the cool of the day'.  But then came the interruption to God's good plan.  Eve and Adam chose to believe in their own human judgement, instead of in God's faultless word.  That day, after they had eaten the 'forbidden fruit', God introduced His plan to sacrifice Himself to redeem mankind.  In chapter 3, as God put a curse on the serpent for its part in tempting the young couple, He described how Jesus would retake the dominion which Adam gave to Satan: 

"...And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”   Genesis 3:15

The entire Bible then tells the story (His-story) of how God worked through the ages to prepare man to recognize his need, and to let us prove to ourselves that we could not keep any law perfectly.  Galatians 4:4 tells us... 

But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law

In the end, after these few thousand years of God again entrusting His work to man (this time, that of sharing His Good News around the world, instead of simply subduing the earth), the GI (Grand Interruption) will have run its course.  Once again God will walk freely with all those who individually accept  the invitation. From the OMEGA chapter (the last chapter) of the last book; Revelation 22:3-5, we see that...

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Man's debt of sin was paid by Christ.  From the cross, Jesus declared the end of man's bondage when He said  "It is Finished"!  Perhaps those ultimate days of eternity, when our fellowship with Him is restored and implemented without any strain of sin, will be dated and known not as BC or AD, but PI,  for Post Interruption!

L is for LAMB OF GOD

[This is the MILLERWRITES contribution to the 2012 Blogging A to Z April Challenge  Here is my INTRODUCTION to this particular series, and an opportunity for you to influence which alphabetically aligned weird words I will comment on this month.  THANK YOU for stopping by!]

Maybe Jesus was just a really really clever fellow who grew up to play the best prank ever!  He was well read enough in the scriptures to know what the Messiah would be like, and decided to try and manually fulfill all the prophecies written about that long sought-after hero.  (open this link to kind of follow along)

His first trick was to plot out that he would be born to a virgin, and then that it would happen in Bethlehem, but also that he would be 'from' Nazareth, and come 'out of Egypt'!  Of course he contrived to be a descendant of David, and managed to arrange for the slaughter of his two year old contemporaries in Bethlehem while he escaped to Egypt (taking his parents with him of course).

Some of the arrangements were easy.  He could teach with parables. He could just hire someone to let him ride into town on their donkey, and get his cousin John the baptist to go before him calling for repentance, and calling Jesus THE LAMB OF GOD.  It got a little tricky when, at the same time he tried to prove he was the Messiah, he had to get the religious leader to reject him and the general population to ignore him.  But some of the prophecies were very tricky to meet indeed!  He had to pull off some very convincing miracles of healing people and raising them from the dead, for example.

And then there's the end game.  Somehow he got Judas to betray him for exactly 30 pieces of silver, then have him throw the money back, and get the Sanhedrin to buy the Potter's field with the money.  He fixed it so that his friends would deny him, force himself to stand quiet at one of his 'trials', have his beard plucked out, be beaten, be nailed through his hands and feet, have vinegar offered on a hyssop branch, and unlike every other crucified person, he would not have any bones broken but have his side pierced instead.  He probably even suggested to the Roman assassination team, from the cross, that they divide his clothes and gamble for his robe.

Finally, even though he was fully dead, he got himself buried in a rich man's tomb.  Oh yeah.  And just to complete the ruse...HE ROSE FROM THE DEAD!

Jesus took the place of all those sheep and goats and oxen that were sacrificed over the many centuries to atone for the sin of God's chosen people.  They had to go through that awful ritual year after year, to get a sense of how God views the import of our fallen state.  But Jesus, 'in the fullness of time', came to become the ultimate and final sacrificial LAMB.  He went through the same ritual, for you, but from the other side of the knife.

John 1:29
The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!