The Revealing Word

The Tithe and Man's Labor

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:53:00 +0000

The law of the tithe as described in Deuteronomy 14:22-29 puts into question many of the things we think of as tithe today. It also puts into question the way we make our living in this world today, as well as gives us an understanding of the meaning of the things that are going on in the financial world, and the mark of the beast. I will point some of them out here.

The first thing the law of the tithe says is that the tithe comes from the "increase of thy seed." What is a seed? It is something that comes from living creatures that give those creatures the ability to reproduce themselves without outside influence. God was introducing to Israel something they had no chance to experience in Egypt -- fruitfulness that comes from God. All they had known was slave labor. They had never had the joy of God producing fruitful things for them. I know we would like to find some way to make today's style of economy fit into this, but there is no way we can consider money or earning wages as seed or the increase of seed. The phrase "fruits of our labors" is an oxymoron because labor does not bear fruit. Neither money nor our work for wages has the ability to regenerate itself like a living creature. So if money, or man's labor to get money, is not the increase of seed, is it within the confines of God's instructions to live by it or tithe from it?

The second thing is that not only did the tithe come from the fruit of seed, but it came from special fruit of seed: that is, from the inheritance God gave Israel. God was not only giving them a place of fruitfulness, He was giving them a fruitful place blessed by Him. God did not command them to tithe until they had the inheritance. Even if you look at Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they only tithed when they were residing in the land God promised them, not in Egypt or Haran. Is our job our inheritance from God? I think not. Can it reproduce itself with no outside influence? Is it at all fruitful? More importantly, is it fruitfulness that has been given to us by God? (Hint: Labor is of the curse.)

The third thing to remember from the law of the tithe is that for two out of three years, the tithe was consumed by the giver at the point of offering, at the place where God placed His name. It was only in the third year that the tithe was stored up for food for the priests and widows and orphans. There are two points. One, the tithe is consumed by the giver, not stored up or used for the purposes of supporting the priests (except every third year). And, where does God place His name now? Each individual born-again believer is the temple of God and the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 6:16, 1 Corinthians 6:19), not some building or organization. So, where do we take our tithes? To ourselves? The place where God and the Holy Spirit dwells? God wants to give us things that make us rejoice on the inside! Do the wages of man's labor make us rejoice? We all know that it doesn't.

The sum of this is this: God wants us to be fruitful. He wants us to be able to live in this world by a fruitfulness that sustains itself without any outside input. But not just any kind of fruitfulness, only the fruitfulness that comes from Him. And He wants us to praise Him and rejoice in His fruitfulness. This is the essence of Matthew 6:24-34: Seek first the Kingdom of God, His fruitfulness, and do right by the Kingdom, and all the everyday needs will be added to us. But our wages earned from labor is not the fruitfulness of God's seed and is not eligible to be tithed from. And if wages earned from work does not conform to this instruction from God, should we even be doing this? Should we continue to dwell in Egypt?

So, what does all this have to do with the economy and the mark of the beast? It gives us a further glimpse into God's desire for us to live by His fruitfulness. It also helps reveal to us how what we do to make a living in the world today stacks up against God's desire. Does the kind of economy that has existed in the world for the last hundred years or so allow us to be fruitful? Or has it snatched fruitfulness out of our hands? Is what we are doing with our everyday lives something we can rejoice in and celebrate God's fruitfulness? Or is it just the trusting in our own hard work that is only bringing us misery? (See Genesis 11). And the problem is that we have been in this labor and wage thing for so long that we have no idea how far we are from the fruitfulness of God, or how we could rejoice if we were living in it. The mark of the beast comes just as much to give us who are truly overcomers the push to really live as God desires, not just to punish those who choose man's way.

The Glorification of the Curse

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:58:00 +0000

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground... - Genesis 3:19.
A major tenet of the teachings of the early promoters of capitalism -- Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo -- was that the value of any product that is manufactured and sold is equal to the value of the labor that is put into it. They believed that labor was value and that a man's value was in his labor. While most who read this will not know who these men are -- they are the founding fathers of capitalism -- their belief that labor is value is the backbone of our economic system.
This tenet that labor is value is in opposition to what God, through the prophets, apostles and Jesus himself, has taught us. We have what is called the Protestant work ethic, but scripture never places positive value on labor for labor's sake. In many places in scripture there is an implied disdain for labor. The scripture I quoted at the beginning puts the first negative light on labor. The whole story of the children of Israel going into Egypt and coming out again and into the promised land, is a glorification of God's gift, the Promised Land, over the labor of man, slavery in Egypt. In Romans 6:23, we see the apostle Paul comparing the results of sin to the wages of labor. Hebrews 4 tells us to cease from our own work and make haste to enter into God's rest. If we believe that the scripture is the inspired Word of God, we cannot escape the fact that somewhere in God's mind, He has a disdain for man's labor.
What does have value? Proverbs tells us about the ant (Proverbs 6:6 and 30:25)? But these sayings are not extolling the value of hard work alone, but rather diligence to gather in God's fruitfulness at the right time. The ant isn't valued just because he works, but because he puts himself to the task that's presented to him that has value for the future. When the apple tree has ripe apples on it, it's time to pick the apples. The value is in the apple, not the picking of the apple. Man pridefully puts great value in hard work alone. But God only puts value in the fruitful things He wants us to diligently pursue.
We Christians in America, for the most part, believe that capitalism is God's economic gift to mankind. But, in reality, capitalism is the glorification of the curse of Adam, and is an attempt by mankind to break the curse through the curse. Man thinks he can overcome God by his own craftiness. Not long after the flood of Noah, mankind decided that if they worked hard enough, they could build a great city, make a name for themselves and become a great people (Genesis 11). But God had other plans. He mixed their languages, scattered them abroad, and called the name of their city Babylon. After that, He set in motion His plan for setting us free from the curse of Adam through the blessing of Abraham (Genesis 12).
Are we going to continue to glorify the curse of Adam? Or are we going to accept the blessing of Abraham that comes to us through Jesus Christ?

God's Fruitfulness vs. Man's Labor - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:15:00 +0000

So why does God assign eternal punishment to the mark of the beast of Revelation 13:16? What is it about being so dependent on buying and selling that makes it worthy of such punishment? Is it because this mark is a despicable act of an evil person? Is it because buying and selling is bad? The answer to both of these is no. It is because we are choosing man's work over God's fruitfulness just like Adam did in the Garden of Eden.

So what's all this about? Why does the present state of our economy and what people are trying to do about it convince our hearts that we are in the end times? If we search our hearts we know it's true. We know that this merry-go-round we are on called the economy is all about man's labor. The family farms are mostly gone. Most agriculture is produced by large corporations. So even if you are out there picking tomatoes, you are probably working for a big company just as you would be if you were building cars. We are paid for our time in offices and factories. It's all about work and labor. We are not living, growing people, we are a workforce. The state wants us to be an educated workforce so we can compete with China's workforce. It's all about getting jobs and earning wages. Where is there room for fruitfulness?

The history of the United States is really a story of the world's transition from the dependence on the fruitfulness of land to the reliance on capital and labor. It is not simply coincidental that Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the American Revolution appeared in history at the same time: 1776. The first conflicts of this nations first administration were between Alexander Hamilton, who favored capitalism, and Thomas Jefferson, who was an agriculturalist. Essentially, the agriculturalists won out until the Civil War. We largely think of the Civil War as a war about slavery or states' rights, but these were really just subsets of the larger issue -- the transformation of America from a agriculture based society to a wage/labor based capitalist one. Each major war and economic collapse since has pushed us deeper into the quagmire of a wage/labor society. And over the last 50 years, we've exported this wage/labor society to every second- and third-world country in the world. Do we really think that the Chinese people are better off making toys in a factory for a dollar a day than out in the fields cultivating their rice patties? I think not.

But this history is really a transition from the dependence on what was perceived as a capricious God (who knows if the crops will grow this year?) to the complete reliance on our own selves. If I work hard enough, if I can invent the right tools, if I can produce enough goods, if I can amass enough gold and silver, I can assure myself that I will always be taken care of. I control my own destiny! I don't need God, I can do it myself. Self-reliance is America's creed. These actions of the last 233 years is the world choosing to embrace the curse of eating by the sweat of our face rather than enjoying the fruitfulness of God's kingdom. Every day we have been doing an Esau. That is, we are choosing the security of the bowl of soup made with man's hand, that is presently before us, over the blessing that comes from trusting in God's fruitfulness.

When the mark of the beast comes, that is the moment of revelation. Will we believe that man's economic system that depends on work and wages and buying and selling is the only way to live in the world? Or will we believe that God can take care of us out of His fruitfulness? The coming of the mark of the beast will separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the tares, the true believer from those who are only giving lip service.

But this is not really just and end-time decision. Jesus gave us the commandment nearly 2000 years ago. He has already declared that the curse of eating by the sweat of our brow has been rescinded. He has already said that we can live by the purposes of His kingdom and His fruitfulness. But every day we are deciding that we can only depend on the system of the world to live. Every day we believe that our job has greater power to take care of us than the Kingdom of God. Will God punish those who take the mark and not us, if we are doing as much as they, by choosing to depend on the world's system over God?

The reason why everyone is sitting up and taking notice now? Because we know we have been depending on the world more than God. We know that the state of the world economy is funneling us toward a place we do not want to go. And we know that everything is in place to force us to decide. Do we choose God or do we choose man? Now is the time for preparing our hearts and separating ourselves. We can't depend on being raptured out before all this happens. The scripture just isn't that clear that we will be taken away before these things happen. But the scripture is clear that God can and will take care of us if we believe His ability to be fruitful over the world's ability to give us wages. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ.

God's Fruitfulness vs. Man's Labor - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:49:00 +0000

This is a battle that has been raging since the beginning of creation. We have a choice: God's fruitfulness or our labor. Even the events of the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, were a choice on Adam's part. Would he trust in God's fruitfulness? Or would he rely on what he could do? He chose to rely on what he could do. And in punishment God said, "Okay, if you want to depend on your own work, I will let you." In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground... (Genesis 3:19). And what was the result of man's reliance on himself? And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Genesis 6:5).

The story of Cain and Abel is another example of the war between the fruitfulness of God's kingdom and the labor of man. You have to remember that God cursed the ground at the same time he cursed Adam. Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life... (Genesis 3:17). So for Cain, a tiller of the land, to be able to bring any kind of offering to God was extremely hard work. But all Abel had to do was watch the sheep and goats and cows graze in the field. So when God favored Abel's offering of fruitfulness over Cain's offering of work, Cain flew into a rage. It's no wonder that Cain was upset. He had worked so hard, but it seemed that God favored Abel's ease over his hard work. Don't you feel insulted if people don't appreciate your hard work?

But we see that even from the days of Noah, God was proceeding to remove the curse. After the flood, and after Noah had offered up a sacrifice, God said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake... (Genesis 8:21). And after leaving the ark, God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. (Genesis 9:1). He said to Abraham, in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 12:3).

Through the adventures and trials of Abraham and his descendants, God was beginning to show us that we can trust in His fruitfulness. Isaac and Jacob were rich and fruitful beyond any expectation of their labors, though they did not possess the inheritance. He sent the children of Israel into Egypt, brought then out and into the Promised Land as a living example of His desire to give man a fruitful inheritance. Many of the laws of Moses were instructions on how to appreciate and steward that fruitfulness. By these things God demonstrated to us that His way is the way of enjoyment of fruit and not the sorrow of labor.

Then we see Jesus. In Matthew 6:19-34, He is openly declaring an end to the curse that by the sweat of his brow a man shall eat. Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat or drink or wear! Do not sweat over it! Do the birds and the flowers sweat for what they have? Does not your heavenly Father know you have need of these things? And doesn't He love you more than the birds and the flowers? Jesus said the if we apply ourselves to His purposes, we can stop striving for survival, we can trust His fruitfulness. A trust He earned and proved by allowing Himself to be crucified for our sins, and then resurrecting from the dead to give us life.

So often we look at this saying of Jesus as an ideal and not a commandment. It's just too incredulous to think that eating by the sweat of our brows is over. But it's not just an ideal. God attaches eternal punishment to not accepting this realization. What are we going to choose? Our labor or God's fruitfulness?

Dependency on Buying and Selling

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:57:00 +0000

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. - Revelation 13:16-17

Even though we live in a world where our riches are worse than uncertain, it would be easy to shrug our shoulders and say that we just have to live with the economic system we have. What can any one of us do to fight the current of the world's economic system? That's what I would be inclined to do myself until I read Revelation 13:16 and 14:9-10. Those are the scriptures that describe the mark of the beast and the punishment attached to receiving it. These scriptures tell us that the evil beasts of the end days will cause everyone to receive a mark in their hands or forehead that they will not be able to buy and sell without, and that anyone who worships the beast or his image and receives that mark will receive the wrath of God and will burn forever.

So, what does this mark of the beast have to do with the economy? There are only two things in scripture that God says we cannot be forgiven of. One is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and the other is receiving this mark. For whatever reason, God attaches buying and selling to this mark. One might be inclined to think that this prophecy is the words of someone predicting the future. Since God knows everything, it is easy for Him to tell us what's going to happen. But this prophecy is not God describing the future, it is God ordering the events of the future. This attaching of buying and selling to the mark of the beast is not the capricious doings of an evil person, but the revelation to us of the attitude of God about certain things that are happening in the world. After all, this book is the Revelation of Jesus Christ. We have to conclude by this that there is something about the way the economy exists in the world at the time of the mark that causes God to attach punishment to it.

Interestingly, until about 150 years ago, Revelation 13:16 wouldn't mean anything to the vast majority of the people in the world. It's hard to imagine in our time, but most people bought and sold very little until the Industrial Revolution. Only the very rich, the rulers and the merchants bought and sold much. So most back then would look at this scripture and say, "So... I don't buy and sell anyway. This has no affect on me." Today, though, everything we do is tied to buying and selling. We have to sell ourselves to the employer to get a job and the employer buys us (or rents us). When we are working, we are either manufacturing goods to be bought and sold or we are trying to sell our goods and services to those who might want to buy them. When we receive our paycheck, everything we need to live on or want to enjoy is bought and sold. In contrast to life 200 years ago, if someone today declared that we could not buy and sell without taking a mark, it would seriously affect our whole lives.

So, is there something about being totally dependent on buying and selling that is wrong in God's eyes? That is a hard question to answer. Certainly there is no scripture that says, "Thou shalt not be dependent on buying and selling." But I believe the Word of God talks about certain aspects of our Christian life we often ignore that relates directly to the economy and why God may be against the way things are going. Those include:

Fruitfulness - the relationship between work/wages and fruitfulness, and how God tends to favor fruitfulness over labor and wages;
Loyalty - the battle over who owns our time and heart;
Faith - whether or not we believe God when He tells us that our lives are in His hands and He is well able to take care of us;

If we can understand these things, we will know why God attaches such dire circumstances to buying and selling in the end days, and, most importantly, why He will judge everyone by these standards not just those living in the last days. I will talk more about these issues in future posts.

Today's Riches Worse Than Uncertain

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:36:00 +0000

"Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy..." - Paul to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:17.

The economic situation that exists today, March 2009, certainly has every one's attention. It has many people paying attention to their stock portfolios or the job market. But it has my attention for a different reason. It makes me wonder just how wise, sound, or even biblical, our system is. I have to ask if riches were so uncertain in Paul's day, how much more are they uncertain now?

Back in the those days, in fact in every era up until the beginning of the Industrial Age, all wealth was based on commodities. Wealth was based on your possession of land, livestock, fruits and vegetables and grain. If you had money, it was coinage of some type of precious metal -- gold, silver, copper, etc. All wealth was based on the existence of physical, tangible things.

It is not so today. All of those commodities still exist in the world, but, with the exception of land, none of it is consider wealth or riches. I could have a 10,000 square foot warehouse stacked to the rafters with food, or a hundred barns full of cattle and sheep, but if I have no money, I am not wealthy by today's reckoning. You might say that I could sell all those commodities for money and then I would be rich. Well...that is one way of looking at it. But what if no one had any money? Or worse yet, what if we all had plenty of money but there weren't any commodities? Are we wealthy then? Today, our wealth is based, not on the possession of physical commodities, but on the possession of money.

The bad thing now is that even our money is no longer commodity based. The United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971. We have paper and coin, which might be assigned some value. Perhaps if I have a dollar bill, I could trade it for something. Even so, paper currency are simply promissory notes issued by the government backing it. Technically, you should be able to take that currency to the government and exchange it for something of value like gold. That's why we kept gold in Fort Knox. But that's no longer possible. There is not enough gold and silver in the world to exchange for all the currency that's out there. What's even worse is that the vast majority of money is no longer even paper and coin, it is simply numbers in computers.

So what does all this mean for us today? It means that riches are now worse than uncertain, they are illusory. Wealth based on money only exists in someones imagination. What does the money represent? There's no gold out there we can trade it for. There's not enough food in the world that could be purchased by all the money the government is pumping into the economy. Apparently there's not enough of it in the every day person's hands to buy cars. What does it represent? Our hard work? (Hmm... That is an interesting thought that I will deal win in a future post.) Money represents nothing! If the money represents nothing, how can it be wealth? Riches today are little more than an illusion created by the wand of the magician.

Today, Monday, March 9, 2009, Warren Buffet said, "everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that's ever been created." Well, it's not going to be all right. We cannot continue playing this game. Wealth based on nothing cannot sustain us. What we are going to learn in this mess and others to come is that we cannot bypass God's true riches and blessing that come from fruitfulness by the illusions of our own minds.

Not Appointed to Wrath

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:30:00 +0000

There are basically three things that scare us about the end days: natural disasters, economic collapse and spiritual tyranny. These are things that Revelation says will happen and all at the same time. It's scary. And because it is scary, it is easy for us to hope for and accept that God will snatch us away from here when it all begins.

Indeed, God has not appointed us to wrath, but He does not have to remove us from the earth to help us escape it. For that matter, if we were to escape God's wrath while living here on earth, how much more would it glorify God when He delivers us from wrath in the face of all the sinners in the world? When they see us prospering when the whole world's economy has collapsed, when they see us untouched by all the natural disasters in the world, when they see us spiritually strong in the face of all the delusions that fill the earth, such a display of God's glory will totally overwhelm the people of the earth. It's no wonder they will institute stringent economic laws and seek to put us all to death. But at first glance, it would seem, based on the Christianity that we have been taught, that coming to this point of overcoming victory in the face of world collapse, is an unattainable fantasy, and it would just be better if God would just snatch us away before it all begins. But God has provided the way within the pages of scripture, which declare the Word of God, if we will only believe and receive it.

Natural disasters. Those we have very little power over. But we have plenty of examples in scripture where God altered the natural course of the world for the benefit of those who believe on Him. Maybe the best example is the promise of the Lord to Abraham to not destroy the righteous with the wicked. He would have saved Sodom and Gomorrah for ten righteous people (Genesis 18). Even then, when He could not find ten righteous men, He pulled Lots family out of there to a safe place (Genesis 19). God knew how to protect Noah from the flood without taking him away from the earth (Genesis 6-8). So we don't have to worry about the natural disasters that are coming upon the world because God knows how to take care of us, even if He leaves us in this world.

Economic Collapse. We can't just sit back, live the status quo life, and expect God to deliver us from the coming economic collapse. But He has given us the way found in Matthew 6:24-34. Jesus said that if we seek first the Kingdom of God and the righteousness of God, God will see to it that the needs of our physical lives are met. I don't know all the details, or even very many of the details, of how this is supposed to work out in the world. I'm not even sure that God would tell us the details unless we committed to it first. But we do have a hint. Jesus says at the beginning that we cannot serve God and mammon. We cannot serve God and capitalism. We can't spend our lives expecting capitalism to meet our needs. ( Don't worry. I'm not a Communist. I believe in free enterprise. I just don't think we should be serving money.) There's another way. Capitalism is going to fail. But that's okay because God does not intend for us to live by capitalism, but by His Kingdom. He has provided the way we can live and be prosperous in the coming days. We just have to learn it, receive it, and live by it.

Spiritual tyranny. Things are happening in the spiritual world that have never happened before. Allegiences are going to be demanded of us that have not been asked of anyone for a long time. Even the Christian world is changing and morphing in such a way that those who have gone on before us would be astonished to see. But yet in our view the change is so subtle that we hardly recognize it. Spiritual forces working against us, some overt and some covert, are strong and are on the offensive. But God has provided the way to victory. The Apostle Paul spoke of the "exceeding greatness of [God's] power to us-ward who believe" (Ephesians 1:19). Peter said that we have been "given all things that pertain to life and godliness" (2 Peter 1:3). Paul in another place said we are new creatures in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) and changed to the image of Jesus by the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). Again Paul said that we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if the Spirit of God dwells in us (Romans 8:9). The salvation we have in Christ is powerful beyond words and is able to make us overcomers over all the principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places, that will try to destroy us in the last days. But we have to be willing to receive it. We have to be willing to let God kill the flesh and turn us away from the pleasures of this world. We have to let go of humanity and put on God's new creation. When we do, we will have the spitirual strength to be overcomers in the end days.

So, you see, we can escape the wrath that is to come even while living in this world. God has made a way. We just have to be willing to believe it, receive it, and live by it. As the end nears, God is going to magnify His glory by tightening the screws. He is going to display those who are His and those who aren't by these very things. Are we believing that God can protect us from natural disasters? Are we living by seeking God's kingdom rather than cashflow? Are we receiving spiritual strength from the Spirit of God? Those who fail these tests will fall on a very bad side of God's wrath. But those who pass will be overcomers and will rule and reign with Him.

Stresses of the Economy - Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:58:00 +0000

The economic downturn in the United States and the world in 2008 draws our minds toward the possibility that we are in the end days. Let it be known, the things that are happening in the economy now are the results of mens' stupidity, not prophetic of the end times. There have been economic up-cycles and down-cycles since capitalism began and there have been years of drought and years of plenty since the beginning of time. This being said, the world economy IS a very integral part of the prophecies of the end days.

What I want to do over the next weeks and months is talk about some very interesting questions and issues regarding the economy that have come to my mind when thinking about the end times. Some of these thoughts include:

If riches in Bible times were uncertain, how much more are they today? What does it mean that our wealth is no longer commodity based?
We can think about the history of the world economy, the path it has taken from the fruitfulness of land and commodities to a complete money-based, wage-earning, society, and how the major historical events of the United States has propelled us in that direction.
We can compare Adam's curse in Genesis, Jesus' admonishment to seek first the kingdom of God, and the mark of the beast. What does this progression mean to us today?
We can look at the harlot of Revelation 18 as a picture of the lavish, self-indulgent, capitalist-based society America promotes.
And, how does all this add up to worshipping and serving the creature more than the creator as mentioned by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1?

So the first pictures we are going to look at in God's picture album of the end days are the ones about the economy. This may take awhile to go through. I hope you can stick with me.

God's Photo Album

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:36:00 +0000

We like to think of the book of Revelation as a chronological ordering of the events of the end times. Perhaps a prophetic journal of events given to us by God. But Revelation is not so much a journal of events as it is a photo album. Perhaps if John had the artistic giftings of Leonardo DiVinci, he would have produced paintings of the Revelation rather than words. In a sense, though, that was what God was doing for him. God was showing John His photo album, His paintings. John's job, then, was to describe in words the pictures he saw.

Once we understand that God was giving us snapshots of the world in the end days, it gives us an opportunity to understand the Revelation in a different way. We can understand that perhaps the written description is not as important as the picture being described. This is God's photo album. What do the pictures mean?

These snapshots show us several things. They show us judgment: the judgment of Christians, the judgment of the earth, the judgment of the Beast and its followers, the judgment of all the people who have ever lived on the earth. These pictures show us stresses in the world: stresses of the economy, stresses of the physical earth and stresses of spirituality. They also show us the glory of God: the glory of His throne, the glory of His salvation in us, and the glory of the future coming Kingdom. These pictures will tell us everything we need to know about God if we can see them.

So when you are thinking about the end days or reading the Revelation in the Bible, look at the pictures and understand what God has in store. What I am going to be doing in this blog (hopefully, a lot faster than I've been progressing) is talk about some of these pictures and try to get some understanding of the days we are living in.

Pre-tribulation Rapture?

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:17:00 +0000

Before we can even think about studying the end days as revealed in the Bible's Book of Revelation, we have to come to terms with the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture. First, of course, we have to define "pre-tribulation rapture." The intent and definition I am using for "rapture" is the removal of believers from the sphere of the earth, and "pre-tribulation" means that this happens before the occurance of the horrible and destructive things, known as the Great Tribulation, described in the Revelation. It is contended by some that true believers in Christ will be removed from the earth sometime before the beginning of this horrible time. If this be so, there is not particular need for us to be talking about these things. There are basically three reasons to doubt the existence of a pre-tribulation rapture, and I will talk about them here.

First of all, if the true Christian is gone, what was the point of God giving these visions to John? The Bible is very vague about what we'll being doing during the thousand-year reign of Christ on the earth (see Revelation 20). It is even more vague about what we'll be doing for all eternity. And that's because those are things that are not important to this era of our existence. However, there is very much detail about what will be happening on the earth up until the beginning of the thousand-year reign, including what's known as the Great Tribulation. It is not hard to assume by this that God considers these to be very important events to those this vision is written to -- the church. Certainly, it would be pointless for God to give the Revelation if the true Christian was not going to be here. But God has made a point to tell us about these things in much detail, and since He did, I have to assume that these events are or will be a very important part of our lives.

The second reason why I have a hard time believing in the Pre-Tribulation Rapture is that if it is true, the prophecies of Revelation seem to require a higher standard of holiness for those who live during the end times than those who had lived before. Or, to turn it around, believing in a pre-tribulation rapture seems to make today's Christian think he or she can relax and take it easy. But the writer of Hebrews is quick to say (Hebrews 13:8), that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. And Jesus himself, in four places in the book of Revelation, describes himself as the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Jesus has always been the same. God's standard of holiness has always been the same. What He expects of His creation has always been the same. There's no reason to think that somehow God is going to require something more of those who live at the end of things than of those who lived before. But believing in the pre-tribulation rapture causes us to dismiss in our minds some of the strong requirements of "the saints" that are found in the pages of the Revelation. I believe we are doing this to our own destruction.

But the third and perhaps most important reason to doubt the pre-tribulation rapture is that it is never mentioned in the Bible. Those who teach the pre-tribulation rapture have to go away from the synoptic descriptions of the end days and the second coming of Christ given by Jesus, the Apostles Paul and John, and provide obscure interpretations of unrelated scriptures to prove their point. Those synoptic descriptions -- found in Matthew 24, Luke 21, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 5, 2 Thessalonians 2, and Revelation -- do not mention anything other than the one-time, very visible and noisy return of Christ, at which time He will gather the saints to himself and send the sinners to destruction. Surely, God could find some way to plainly tell us about this pre-tribulation, secret removal of the church from the world, but He does not. But God could not tell us about something that wasn't true, could He?

Certainly, having to go through the tribulation of the end time seems scary from here. But I hope you will throw off the fear that causes most to ignore that the book of Revelation was written to the present-age church, to not realize that God's requirements for us today are the same as for those who will live at the end, and to hope that God is going to do some heretofore unmentioned thing to secretly remove us from the earth before things get really bad. And instead of looking at the book of Revelation as something to make your heart fail with fear, view it as an instruction book on not only how you can get through this bad time, but how you can become so much a stronger Christian than you could ever imagine.

The Revealing

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Prater) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:59:00 +0000

When we think about the word "apocalypse" we think of great tragedy or calamity. But as the English title of the last book of the Christian Bible suggests, the word actually means, "a laying bear." That is, that apocalypsis is the uncovering of what was previously not known. In the case of the last book of the Bible, it is the uncovering of what was previously not known about Jesus Christ. So, our studying of the apocalypsis is not going to be a study of disasters and calamities, but rather a revealing of what the purposes of God have always been for those who believe Him and for those who do not. I will not necessarily attempt to go into great detail about what every image or creature means. What I will be doing is revealing the key messages God has for the true believer as found in the book of Revelation.