Temple – We go to hard places and do hard things for the Church and community

Many people point to the sacrifice of the red heifer, detailed in Numbers 19, as a key sign of the end times, the rebuilding of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and the return of Christ. But the Temple Mount, the site of the Temple is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, considered the third most holy place in Islam. There is no room for both.

By Mark D. Harris, MD, MPH, MBA, MDiv, ThM, PhD, DBA

Many Christians are concerned about or fascinated by the end times, which in the Bible is the time when Jesus Christ comes back to earth to perform the last judgment and usher in His final kingdom. For Muslims and Jews, the end times also involve the final judgment (the Day of the Lord) and the restoration of all things. Traditions about sacrificing cattle to usher in prosperity now and the end times to come exist in many cultures. In ancient Chinese religion, the emperor sacrificed a bull in an annual ceremony in the Temple of Heaven to give man the blessing of Shang Di, the creator god.[1]

This article will look at the red heifer ceremony from the perspective of the Christian Bible. In the Old Testament, Isaiah 2:12, Joel 2:31, Amos 5:18-20, Zephaniah 1:8, and Daniel 12:12 mention the Day of the Lord. In the New Testament, Matthew 24:29-31, Acts 2:20, 2 Corinthians 1:14, and 2 Peter 3:8-10 expand on the earlier revelation.

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Schools, public and private, are places where people of all ages learn important things that will help them and others. They are also places of indoctrination and coercion, where truth is skewed to serve someone’s ideology. The following is an example of misrepresenting Christianity in a public school

By Mark D. Harris

My son is a high school student who is currently taking his required World History class. The teacher is covering religions, and has recently been studying Christianity. While sometimes students misunderstand an instructor’s point when they tell others what happened in class, parents can gain insight into the class by what the teacher sends home as well as what their children report. These issues came up in our discussion:

Allegation 1 – Paul invented the doctrine of Original Sin

To address this allegation, we must first understand the word “sin”. The Bible represents sin as a broken relationship between the Creator God and His creatures, human beings. The relationship was broken by the rebellion of man against the command of God in the original idyllic state, the Garden of Eden. Each individual commits sins, individual acts of disobedience to his Creator, but the human race as a whole is separated from God through our act of corporate rebellion. Whereas in other religions sin is considered a single act, usually involving breaking some taboo, in Christianity sin is a state of being. Since people are in this state, rebellion against God, they commit individual acts of sin. Stated another way, in other religions people may be sinners because they sin, but in Christianity people sin because they are sinners.

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