Tag: Christ

What does it mean to abide in Christ?

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We abide in Christ like a branch abides in a tree, but how do we do that in day to day life?

By Mark D. Harris

Paul Brand, the hand surgeon renowned for his discoveries in leprosy and his vibrant Christian faith, wrote often about the parallels between the church as the Body of Christ and the human body.   The metaphor Jesus used in John 15 about the relationship between Him and His people, that of a vine, is another powerful illustration of the intimate, dependent, and fruitful relationship we have with Christ our Creator and Sustainer.

As each organ, liver, brain, kidneys, and heart, is an integral part of the human body, so the branch is an integral part of the vine and each man an integral part of the body of Christ.  More precisely, as each human cell is vital to the life of man so each plant cell is to the life of the vine and each believer is to the body of our Lord.  To abide in Christ is, therefore, analogous to the relationship between a cell and the body and a branch and its vine.

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The Old Testament Prophets – What Did They Do?

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Prophets seem strange to us, but they also seemed strange to their contemporaries. Who were they, and what did they do?

By Mark D. Harris

Some Christians believe that the Old Testament (OT) prophets were men who predicted a distant future revealed to them by God.  Either the coming of Christ or the book of Revelation and the end times (or both) are seen as the main message of the Old Testament prophet.  Some critical scholars in the past have seen OT prophecy as unique or even fictitious; their messages brand new without any connection to Israel’s past and with no relevance for the future.  In reality, the primary mission of the prophets was to proclaim God’s truth to the people of their time and place, just like pastors and teachers today are called to do.

Were the prophets primarily ‘foretellers’ or ‘forthtellers’ or both?

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What about Those Who Have Never Heard?

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Skeptics sometimes say “If Jesus is the only way to heaven, then God is unjust, because some people have never heard of Him.” Between the Scriptures, the oral message, creation, dreams, visions, and the myriad of other ways that God speaks to man, there is probably no one who actually has never heard.

By Mark D. Harris

The discussion last Sunday, centered around how someone can be sure of his salvation and focused on Luke 23:32-43, the story of the thief on the cross, engendered some lively discussion. One issue which came up, which always comes up in lessons about salvation, was the question about what God is going to do with people who have never heard the gospel of Jesus.

The Bible teaches that everyone is a child of God, in the sense that we are all created by Him (Genesis 2:7), but some people are His children in the sense that they live in good relationship with Him (Galatians 3:26, 1 John 3:10). It also teaches that every person will live forever, some people with God and some people without Him (Matthew 13:40-43, Matthew 25:31-46, Revelation 20:11-12). In that sense, all religions and even non-religion lead to God because every person will stand before Him in judgment. To use a human analogy, every person is a child of their parents because they were “created” by them but not every person lives in good relations with their parents. Bible believing Christians hold that Jesus is the only way to eternal life; defined as everlasting life in good relations with our Heavenly Father.

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Why not God?

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Atheists and skeptics ask believers “Why God?” A better question might be “Why not God?” The choice determines eternity. 

By Mark D. Harris

Man believes that his existence and importance are self-evident and that God’s existence and importance are not. He therefore questions God, and in history billions of words have been deployed arguing for and against Him. Christians have used arguments based on moral law, causation, design in the universe, and the beauty of creation to support their belief in God’s existence. Non-Christians have attacked these arguments and deployed their own, primarily the problem of pain and suffering in the universe, to support their disbelief in God. On 24 March 2012, about 20,000 people at the Reason Rally in Washington DC celebrated “irreligion, nontheism and secularity”, and the event was billed as a “coming out” party for atheists in America.

If it is true that God is the foundational reality, not man, and “Why man?” is a far more reasonable question than “Why God?”, why is there such controversy about Him? If God is so dominant in the universe, why do so many people disbelieve? Why is so much venom and bile directed towards the One who is revealed in the Bible as being so loving and so good? We could ask, “Why not God?”

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Passion Week – The Intractable Conflicts that Sent Jesus to Calvary

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Manuscript Illumination with Scenes of Easter by The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Political tension, jealously, misunderstanding, fear, laziness, and all of the natural human sins and frailties led Jesus to Calvary. 

By Mark D. Harris

Jerusalem in the 1st century AD was an uneasy place.  A thin veneer of calm covered a seething cauldron of oppression, resistance, hatred, racial and religious conflict, and murder.  Palestine, known to all conquerors since antiquity as a hot bed of revolution, had by 30 AD been under Roman domination for nearly 100 years since Pompey conquered Jerusalem and desecrated the temple in 63 BC.

The political arrangement was simple.  The Roman conquerors wanted peace and taxes, the first to limit the expense in blood and treasure of holding Palestine, and the second to get as much as possible out of the province to finance their Imperial tastes and adventures.  Lacking a natural port like Greece, resources like Asia Minor, or major wheat harvests like Egypt, Palestine had little to offer their conquerors except for being an eastern outpost against the Parthians and a land bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa.  Many troops and lots of money were necessary to hold the land, so the Romans wanted the Jews to be quiet.

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