GODSAIDMANSAID.COM
|
From here to the end of any life is such a short distance. The Bible says that man’s life is like a “tale that is told” (Psalm 90:9)—once upon a time lived you. Insurance actuaries actually have statistical probabilities on whether you’ll make it to the convenience store for milk and eggs and back home alive or whether there will even be a home to return to. Day-to-day is filled with uncertainties. The insurance industry survives by protecting its policyholders from the cost of uncertainties.
God offers mankind an insurance policy, or more properly said, an assurance policy. Not just the unmatchable after-death plan of eternal life in Christ Jesus, but a complete plan for living that covers all of life’s uncertainties, where, with a childlike application of faith, even bad times turn good. A paragraph from God’s assurance policy in Romans 8:28 reads:
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Jesus speaks in Matthew 11:28-30:
28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
God’s policy of assurance was purchased for the fallen sons and daughters of Adam by the blood of Jesus Christ shed on Golgotha’s hill, and is available to all who believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ, repent of their sins, and follow Him. Jesus calls this place “born again” (John 3:3). Have you yet to be born again—born a second time, this time of the Spirit of God? Are you ready to shed the uncertainties? Would you like to have a very real communicative relationship with God? How about having all sin and shame expunged and the power to live a victorious life? You can have it all today. Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the miraculous Kingdom of God. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.
GOD SAID, Romans 1:20-24:
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
GOD SAID, Romans 1:28:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
GOD SAID, John 3:19:
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
GOD SAID, Psalm 19:1-3:
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
MAN SAID: We basically exploded out of nothing, a cosmic accident that happens from time to time.
Now THE RECORD. Hebrews 11:1:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:6:
But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Mark 9:23:
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.
Romans 10:17:
So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Faith is everything to the blood-bought. It is the standard of all commerce in the Kingdom of God.
Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature article 663 and today’s dose of Word Therapy. It will build up your faith, and that changes everything—everything! All of these features are archived here in text and streaming audio and are concentrated capsules of Holy-Ghost power, even functioning as powerful munitions to break open prison doors and to set captive souls free. Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one.
There are three convenient features on GodSaidManSaid that many have found very useful:
This GodSaidManSaid feature will review excertps from an excellent book authored by Pastor Richard Wurmbrand titled Proofs of God’s Existence. Mr. Wurmbrand is founder of the global ministry “The Voice of the Martyrs,” www.persecution.com. Under the heading “About the Author,” you’ll find this riveting account about a man whose life was and is in Christ:
Pastor Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001) was an evangelical minister who endured fourteen years of Communist imprisonment and torture in his homeland of Romania.
In 1945, when the Communists seized Romania and attempted to control the churches for their purposes, Richard Wurmbrand immediately began an effective, vigorous “underground” ministry to his enslaved people as well as the invading Russian soldiers. He was arrested in 1948, along with his wife, Sabina. His wife was a slave-laborer for three years on the Danube Canal. Richard Wurmbrand spent three years in solitary confinement, seeing no one but his Communist torturers. He was then transferred to a group cell, where the torture continued for five more years.
Due to his international stature as a Christian leader, diplomats of foreign embassies asked the Communist government about his safety and were informed that he had fled Romania. Secret police, posing as released fellow prisoners, told his wife of attending his burial in the prison cemetery. His family in Romania and his friends abroad were told to forget him because he was dead.
After eight-and-a-half years in prison, he was released and immediately resumed his work with the Underground Church. A couple of years later, in 1959, he was re-arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Pastor Wurmbrand was released in a general amnesty in 1964, and again continued his underground ministry. Realizing the great danger of a third imprisonment, Christians in Norway negotiated with the Communist authorities for his release from Romania. The Communist government had begun “selling” their political prisoners. The “going price” for a prisoner was $1,900; the price for Wurmbrand was $10,000.
In May 1966, he testified before the U.S. Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee and stripped to the waist to show the scars of eighteen deep torture wounds covering his torso. His story was carried across the world in newspapers throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Wurmbrand was warned in September 1966 that the Communist regime of Romania planned to assassinate him; yet he was not silent in the face of this death threat.
Founder of the Christian mission The Voice of the Martyrs, he and his wife traveled throughout the world establishing a network of over thirty offices that provide relief to the families of imprisoned Christians in Islamic nations, Communist Vietnam, China, and other countries where Christians are persecuted for their faith. His message has been, “Hate the evil systems, but love your persecutors. Love their souls, and try to win them for Christ.” [End of quote]
What causes men to cast off fame and fortune and to jeopardize all that life calls dear for the Cross of Christ? The vile Roman emperor hung Christians on their own crosses outside of Rome and lit them up at night in a spectacle of cruel and deadly mockery. Down through the ages, millions have sacrificed their all that they might win Christ and so it was with Brother Wurmbrand. We have lifted various random excerpts from Proofs of God’s Existence that demonstrate the love, the firm foundation, and joy of salvation that caused Richard Wurmbrand to jeopardize his all.
Pastor Wurmbrand writes concerning one of the founders of Communism:
Lenin said correctly that if deep passions and pressing interests were involved, men would contest even that two and two are four. [End of quote]
The simplicity of this idea plays out in an obvious way when one considers the enormous academic dodge that carnaldom mounts to darken the very obvious truth that God created man and his universe in six literal days just over 6,000 years ago. Man passionately rejects this uncontestable 2+2=4 truth and Jesus declares why. John 3:19-20:
19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
The following excerpts from Proofs of God’s Existence are random and are not necessarily connected:
Excerpt #1: As early as 1912, Lenin wrote the following in a letter to Russian author Maxim Gorki: “Millions of acts of violence, of illnesses and epidemics, are much less dangerous than the most purified, the slightest idea of a God. … God is the personal enemy of the Communist society.”
He also wrote, “Religion is a kind of spiritual vodka, in which the slaves of capital drown their human features and their reverence for a somehow dignified human life.”
Excerpt #2: According to Darwin, human speech is the result of chance mutations. But in order for a man to speak, great changes had to take place simultaneously in the brain, the neck, the jaws, the mouth, the tongue. What is the probability of such a fortuitous coincidence?
Excerpt #3 What richness there is in the whole creation! One elm produces 295,362 quintillions, 11,136 quadrillions, 1,584,000,000 seeds, which means 6 sextillions in the fourth generation, enough to fill the solar system with elms alone.
A cod produces 9,384,000 eggs. Thus God says in the Bible, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life…” (Genesis 1:20).*
Excerpt #4: In a teaspoon of water, there are approximately as many molecules as there are teaspoons of water in the Atlantic. No man-made computer could calculate how many there are. [End of quotes]
The legendary scientist Albert Einstein was not an atheist. Mr. Wurmbrand continues:
Excerpt #5: “Cosmic religion is the most powerful and most noble impulse for scientific research. … The most beautiful and deepest which man can experience is the sentiment of mystery. He who has not known it appears to me as if dead, or at least blind. … The knowledge of the existence of the—for us—impenetrable, of the manifestations of deepest reason and shining beauty, to which our reason can accede only in its most primitive form, this knowledge and feeling is true religiosity. … It is certain that a conviction about the reason and intelligibility of the world akin to religious sentiment is the basis of all finer scientific work. … My religiosity consists in a humble admiration for the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the little which we can know of reality with our weak and transitory reason.”
Excerpt #6: The fact is that as science advances, it discovers what was said thousands of years ago in the Bible. To give just one example: It was predicted by the Evangelist John in Revelation 21 that a city, called New Jerusalem, about 2,500 km high and wide and deep, would come to Earth out of heaven. For 2 millennium, science has denied such a possibility. Now, we launch skylabs from our tiny planet and seriously talk about space—“cities.”
Excerpt #7: Perhaps you would like to know what the great German physicist Max Planck says in his scientific autobiography. He is the author of the theory of light. Here are his words: “Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been and always will be ‘unto God.’”
Eventually atheists might admit that some scientists are religious, though simply by tradition, and that religion does not really play a significant role in their lives. This is not true. Einstein was an atheist in his youth. By birth, he was a Jew, so his whole upbringing prejudiced him against Christianity. But his scientific achievements made of him a religious man and a great admirer of Jesus Christ.
And because we are dealing with Einstein, we quote from him again: “Most people say that it is intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong, it is the character.” Now, character is created not by atheism but by religion. And one cannot be a true scientist without having a character of honesty and integrity, which is foreign to atheism.
Excerpt #8: In 1983, Professor Dr. James Gould of Princeton University spoke at a conference in the U.S. about an astonishing experiment he made with bees.
He put a dish with sugar water at a distance from a honeycomb. After the bees discovered the syrup, he gradually moved the dish farther from the honeycomb. He continued to do this, moving the dish farther from the honeycomb using the same measurement each time. Finally, while Professor Gould was on his way to the sugar water’s next place, he had a surprise: The bees were already there waiting for the sugar water.
The bees knew the distance increased each time and had calculated where the dish would be next.
When Gould was asked if he had an explanation, he replied, “No, I would have liked they should not have done it.” This is because he stood before a riddle. Animal abilities are without explanation except for a God who thinks for them.
Excerpt #9: Compare our experience with antibiotics. These miracle substances can heal many deadly diseases. But doctors have often abused their usefulness by prescribing them for every little sneeze and wheeze, cough and cold. The result is that resistant strains of bacteria have developed. A dose of Penicillin-G sufficient for the treatment of gonorrhea 30 years ago must now be increased 25 times to be effective, and it is still doubtful if the offending organism will disappear.
In like manner, we Christians have abused our religion, which is truly effective “medicine,” but needs to be administered wisely. Therefore, we children of God will have to resolve to be 25 times holier than before to overcome their atheism.
But we beg that you revise your attitude, too, and acknowledge your sin.
Chairman Mao once asked this question at a Communist Party meeting: Who are smarter, men or swine?”
Without waiting for an answer, he replied: “Swine. If they come to a fence and cannot advance, they turn around and go back. But there are men who refuse to turn.”
Mao himself was such a man, whereas Frederick Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator and chief propagator of atheism, returned to God in his old age. In his treatise about the theologian David Strauss, he wrote: “Life must be brought back to the One who freely died on the cross for all men.”
We recommend you be smarter than Mao’s swine. Return to the God who certainly exists. Such highly complex structures as the liver, heart, thyroid gland and eye, not to mention chromosomes, could not arise of themselves. Neither could the brain that serves even atheism with such great skill.
Excerpt #10: Max Planck, founder of the quantum theory, said: “Religion and natural science both need faith in God. For the one, God comes at the beginning; for the other, at the end of all thinking.”
Excerpt #11: Albert Einstein once wrote: “No man can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word.
“I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene. … Jesus is too colossal for the pen of the phrasemongers, however artful.”
Excerpt #12: And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, “Verily, I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 2,3).* Church history tells us that the child was Ignatius, who later became Bishop of Antioch and was martyred.
Ignatius was martyred under the persecuting Roman Emperor Trajan. As Ignatius was led away from the Senate to the pit of the lions, he frequently mentioned the name of Jesus as he talked with the other believers. When he was asked why he mentioned His name, he answered, “My dear Jesus, my Savior, is so deeply written on my heart, that I feel confident, that if my heart were to be cut open and chopped to pieces, the name of Jesus would be found written on every piece” (Van Braght, T.J., Martyrs Mirror, 1660, pp. 106-107). [End of quotes]
Brother Wurmbrand’s love for the souls of men is manifest in his outreach to all, especially to those of the atheistic regimes that imprisoned and tortured him—wounds he counted as his opportunity to participate in the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. Why are the born-again willing to jeopardize all for the Cross of Christ? It’s because the born-again have been redeemed from the deadly curse of the sons and daughters of Adam and made worthy to be called the sons and daughters of God. Jesus Christ is worth any price.
GOD SAID, Romans 1:20-24:
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
GOD SAID, Romans 1:28:
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
GOD SAID, John 3:19:
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
GOD SAID, Psalm 19:1-3:
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
MAN SAID: We basically exploded out of nothing, a cosmic accident that happens from time to time.
Now you have THE RECORD.
References:
Authorized King James Version
Wurmbrand, R., Proofs of God’s Existence, Living Sacrifice Book Company, 2007, www.persecution.com
*[Note: We have taken the liberty of converting these passages from the New King James Version to the Authorized King James Version text.]
