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Many years ago in a conversation with a furniture salesman, the concept of hell arose. The furniture salesman informed me emphatically that there was no hell in the Bible; his grandmother had assured him so. This fellow was a skeptic and a mocker. I informed him that the Bible most certainly declares a hell, and even gives him it’s location and a description, complete with a man being tormented in hell. Still, the man said no! Knowing that money was his god, I challenged the skeptic to a $10 wager—about $30-$40 in today’s money—even though I do not gamble. The furniture salesman confidently took the challenge, unaware of my next move. I asked the cleaning lady who was working in the showroom to hold both ten-dollar bills until we both returned. Cattycorner from the furniture store was the city library. With the salesman in tow, we went to the library and I picked up the Authorized King James Version of the Bible, and turned to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 16, verses 19-28. In these verses, one will find the account of the rich man who is in hell fire—who has full cognizance—but who is dead unto God. The rich man exists in eternal punishment. Verses 23-24:
23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
I read the passage to the furniture salesman; he heard and saw. I closed the book, went back to the store, and promptly retrieved the $20 and put it in my pocket. That evening, I was going to a tent revival conducted by Pastor Tony Ross; I told the furniture salesman that his money would find its way into the offering plate.
There is life after death: Either eternal life in Christ Jesus or eternal, cognizant punishment in hellfire, and finally hell and its inhabitants to be cast into the lake of fire. But be assured that God has offered a way of escape from the certain damnation to come. John 3:16:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Jesus Christ names this place of salvation “born again.” John 3:3:
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
When one is born-again, he or she is literally born a second time, this time of the Spirit of God. Have you been born again, born a second time? Today can be your day of salvation where all your sin and shame is washed away and all Satan’s bondages broken. It’s time for a decision. Click onto “Further with Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.
GOD SAID, Mark 13:1-2:
1 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!
2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
GOD SAID, Psalm 139:14:
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
GOD SAID, Genesis 2:7:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
MAN SAID: GQ magazine recently published an article titled, “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read;” the Bible is on that list. How hip and urbane!
Now THE RECORD: Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature 906 that will once again certify the full inerrancy of God’s Holy Bible, the beautiful Book. All of these marvelous features are archived here in text and streaming audio for the building-up of the faith and as bait for the fishers of men. Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one. Thank you for visiting. May God’s face shine upon you with Light and Truth.
The world is full of blasphemy. The world’s skeptics malign every jot and tittle, they belt out expletives laced with the Lord's name, but it doesn’t help their situation. In fact, it only worsens it. They have Jude 1:14-15 to face very soon:
14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,
15 To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.
Today’s feature contains God-proofs 161 to 165. God’s Word is true and righteous altogether—yes, every jot and every tittle. The skeptics howl in vain.
161. Luke 19:41-44:
19:41 And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,
19:42 Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.
19:43 For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side,
19:44 And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.
Mark 13:1-2:
13:1 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!
13:2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
Biblical prophecy establishes the supernatural authorship of the Word of God. Jesus prophesies the doom and destruction of Jerusalem and the glorious temple nearly forty years prior to the Roman legions’ arrival to fulfill it. The following paragraphs on the destruction of the Temple are from Grant Jeffrey’s book, Unveiling Mysteries of the Bible:
The Romans went to war with the Jewish rebels beginning in AD 66, and their revolt was finally crushed by the Roman legions’ destruction of their capital, Jerusalem, and their beloved Temple on the ninth day of Av in AD 70. Over 1.25 million people were trapped inside the city by the encircling Romans. On the ninth day of Av, the Romans reached the Temple compound. The Roman general, Titus, gave strict orders that the beautiful Temple, the greatest building in the Roman Empire, must not be destroyed. He implored the Jewish rebels to surrender on terms so that their great city and their sacred Temple would not be destroyed. However, the judgment of God was declared almost forty years earlier by Jesus Christ (Luke 19:41-44), and this terrible appointment with destiny could not be postponed. The Jewish rebel leaders rejected the offers of General Titus, and the desperate battle for the Temple Mount commenced. Despite the clear orders of Titus to the centurions, the enraged Roman soldiers threw their torches into the Temple and, within minutes, the Holy Place became an inferno. An eyewitness, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, reported that General Titus stood in the entrance to the Holy Place beating back his soldiers with his sword in a vain attempt to save at least the Inner Temple from their act of destruction.
Jesus Christ had warned thirty-eight years earlier, “For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation” (Luke 19:43-44). When the Roman army burned the Temple, the tremendous heat of the fire melted the sheets of gold that covered much of the Temple building. The molten gold ran down into every crack between the foundation stones. When the fire finally died down, the Roman soldiers used wedges and crowbars to overturn every stone to search for this gold, thus fulfilling exactly Christ’s prophetic words. [End of quote]
162. Psalm 139:14:
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
Evolution is carnal academia’s god of choice. According to evolutionists, an explosion—out of basically nothing—occurred, and from that basic nothingness, all the marvels of the earth, its life, and universe evolved. Ralph Muncaster, author of the 604-page book Examine the Evidence, examined the evidence. Consider the following excerpts:
⚫ The human body contains 1028 atoms—more than all the stars in the universe.
⚫ Isotope studies indicate that 90 percent of our atoms are replaced annually.
⚫ Every five years, 100 percent of our atoms are replaced.
⚫ In the last hour, 1 trillion of your atoms have been replaced.
⚫ In a lifetime, a heart beats 2.5 billion times, never stopping to rest.
⚫ In a lifetime, 60 million gallons of blood are pumped through your body.
⚫ A red blood cell runs around your body 200,000 times over 120 days, only to be destroyed in the spleen on the 200,001st trip.
⚫ Your body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels—the equivalent of two-and-a-half times around the earth.
⚫ The number of red blood cells in your body, if laid end to end, would circle the earth four times.
⚫ Billions of white blood cells die every time you get a fever, so that you may live.
⚫ You breathe about 23,000 times each day, and the quantity of air you breathe each day weighs about 22 pounds.
⚫ The small air sacs in your lungs (the alveoli), if cut apart and laid flat, would cover half a tennis court.
⚫ The lung cilia that sweep mucus up the trachea vibrate at a rate of about 1,000 times per minute.
⚫ It would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray Supercomputer time to simulate what takes place in your eye every second.
⚫ In the retina, there are 120 million rods (for dim, night, and peripheral vision) and about 7 million cones (for color and detail vision).
⚫ The eye can distinguish millions of shades of color.
⚫ The ear has a million moving parts.
⚫ In addition to its complex hearing system, the ear has over a hundred thousand motion-detecting hair cells that allow us to maintain balance and motion.
⚫ Your nose can determine 10,000 different smells.
⚫ Your body has 450 “touch” cells per square inch.
⚫ There are estimated to be 100 billion neurons in the brain.
⚫ Each neuron is estimated to have 10,000 branching fibers connecting it with other neurons.
⚫ The brain has the capacity to store the amount of information contained in 25 million books (8 million more than are now in the Library of Congress).
⚫ The brain makes about a thousand trillion computations per second.
All of the above—and much, much more—just from one tiny DNA molecule that somehow “knew” exactly how to build and what to do for a particular person. Your body is vastly more complex than all manufacturing facilities in the entire world together. The idea that the body’s vast microbiological complexity could have evolved from a simple bacterium exceeds belief. Where did all the information come from? [End of quote]
Fearfully and wonderfully made.
163. Psalm 139:15-16:
15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
Things that today’s science are just beginning to comprehend were recorded in the Bible thousands of years before and its inside knowledge that only the Maker, the Creator, could know. A prime example is the human DNA molecule. A copy of the DNA of every human alive would fit into one aspirin tablet...what an amazing marvel of design, design at a very microscopic level. In Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for a Creator, you’ll find the following information:
Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, said, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”
A headline in the publication Science read, “Finally, the Book of Life and Instructions for Navigating It.” Imagine, the DNA molecule is a 3.3 billion-letter book. The Bible records, “…in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” Note the strange grouping of words, words only the Creator would know.
164. Genesis 2:7:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The scientific discoveries that certify the accuracy of the Genesis account are daunting, but there is more than science. Adam, whose name literally means “red dirt,” had the breath of life breathed up his nostrils. Adam is imprinted on the very historic memory of the non-Biblical peoples of the world.
The accounts that follow did not come from God’s firsthand account in the book of Genesis, but were verbally passed down from Adam to his direct offspring and then on to subsequent generations. The following excerpts are from Theodor H. Gaster’s book, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament. There are many examples of ancient, non-Biblical accounts of man being created from dirt; several follow. Gaster writes:
This fancy is, however, by no means confined to Scripture. The Mesopotamians too conceived man to have been fashioned in such manner. [In a cuneiform text from Ashur, the earlier capital of Assyria, the goddess Aruru is said to have pinched him out of clay; and by virtue of this expertise it is the same goddess who likewise fashions the hero Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh. ...
A similar legend was current among the Greeks. Prometheus is said to have moulded the first man out of clay mixed with water of the River Panopeus in Phocis; [while in one of the mimes--ancient play--of Herondas, a pander--pimp--bringing charges against a man who has broken into his brothel observes tartly that “he ought to know what kind of fellow he is and of what clay he is compounded.”]
The Australian blacks in the neighbourhood of Melbourne said that Bunjie, the Creator, cut three large sheets of bark with his big knife. On one of these he placed some clay and worked it up with his knife into a proper consistence. He then laid a portion of the clay on one of the other pieces of bark and shaped it into a human form; first he made the feet, then the legs, then the trunk, the arms, and the head. Thus he made a clay man on each of the two pieces of bark; and being well pleased with his handiwork, he danced round them for joy. Next he took stringy bark from the eucalyptus tree, made hair of it, and stuck it on the heads of his clay men. Then he looked at them again, was pleased with his work, and again danced round them for joy. He then lay down on them, blew his breath hard into their mouths, their noses, and their navels; and presently they stirred, spoke, and rose up as full-grown men.
A very generally received tradition in Tahiti was that the first human pair was made by Taaroa, the chief god. They say that after he had formed the world he created man out of red earth, which was also the food of mankind until bread-fruit was produced. Further, some say that one day Taaroa called for the man by name, and when he came he made him fall asleep. As he slept, the Creator took out one of his bones (ivi) and made of it a woman, whom he gave to the man to be his wife, and the pair became the progenitors of mankind. This narrative was taken down from the lips of the natives in the early years of the mission to Tahiti. The missionary who records it observes: “This always appeared to me a mere recital of the Mosaic account of creation, which they had heard from some European, and I never placed any reliance on it, although they have repeatedly told me it was a tradition among them before any foreigner arrived.
In Nui, one of the Ellice Islands, they say that the god Aulialia made models of a man and a woman out of earth, and when he raised them up they came to life. He called the man Tepapa and the woman Tetata.
The natives of Malekula, one of the New Hebridges, give the name of Bokor to the great being who kneaded the first man and woman out of clay.
The inhabitants of Noo-hoo-roa, in the Kei Islands, of New Guinea say that their ancestors were fashioned out of clay by the supreme god, Dooadlera, who breathed life into the clay figures.
The Bagobo, a pagan tribe of South-Eastern Mindanao, say that in the beginning a certain Diwata made the sea and the land, and planted trees of many sorts. Then he took two lumps of earth, shaped them like human figures, and spat on them; so they became man and woman. ...
A priest of the Natchez Indians in Louisiana told Du Pratz “that God had kneaded some clay, such as that which potters use, and had made it into a little man; and that after examining it, and finding it well formed, he blew upon his work, and forthwith that little man had life, grew, acted, walked, and found himself a man perfectly well shaped.” [End of quote]
An expert on ancient history, author David Rohl, weighs in on Adam and dirt in his 454-page book, Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation. He refers to Aratta in this first paragraph:
The mountains here are rich in mineral resources, especially gold for which Aratta was renowned. The walls of the city of Aratta were plastered in rich red-ochre mined from the mountain known as Kur-Hashura whilst we had seen just such a ‘red mountain’ near Takht-é-Suleiman. Red ochre was also the substance used to cover the remains of the deceased in prehistoric times as attested at archaeological sites in this area. Indeed, the name Adam (‘red earth’) may be connected to this ritual.
Again, Rohl writes:
Here the word aphar is translated as ‘dust’ for poetical reasons, but this word also has the meaning ‘clay’. So in both the biblical and Mesopotamian traditions Man was made from clay. [End of quotes]
165. Psalm 22:1:
22:1 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Christ’s coming was the most miraculously predicted and awaited event of all time. Students of the Scriptures have catalogued over 300 Old Testament prophecies of the New Testament Christ that were written hundreds and thousands of years in advance.
Approximately 1,000 years before the babe born in a manger, King David, of whom Jesus Christ claims earthly lineage, prophecies of the coming Messiah. Psalms Chapter 22 is especially telling on numerous points of the crucifixion of the King of Glory. The plain reading of Psalm 22:1 and the fulfillment of that prophecy in Matthew 27:46 is that Jesus thought God had forsaken Him. How could this be? Part of the secret for such a strange, out-of-character statement from God’s Christ is revealed in the book of Job, arguably the oldest book in the Bible, in Chapters 1 and 2. God was highly impressed with His servant Job. Satan contended that God’s favor was misplaced because Job only served God as a result of all the benefits God had heaped upon him. Satan argued that if God would remove those benefits, Job would curse Him to His face (Job 1:11). In one day, Satan destroyed all that Job had—even his ten children—but Job did not curse God to His face. Instead, Job 1:20-21:
20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,
21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother''s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.
Satan’s argument was defeated in Chapter 1, so he regrouped and made his ultimate challenge in Job 2:3-5:
3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.
4 And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.
5 But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.
Jesus Christ hung upon the cursed Cross, suspended between heaven and earth. He had been beaten, spat upon, scourged, and ridiculed; and now He hung between two thieves. A crown of thorns was upon His head—a crown of mockery. Nails had been driven into His hands and feet, and He was bleeding out before the eyes of Satan and his entourage while they gazed on and railed upon this Lamb of God.
Instead of cursing God to His face—even when He thought His Father had forsaken Him, even when He knew He would soon die—Christ instead said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34) and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
To the carnal eyes that looked on that day, and even to His disciples, it appeared that all was lost, but that is not what Satan and his evil angels saw. They knew they were spoiled and ruined by Christ and His sacrificed body, by His cross and shed blood, and through it all, He did not curse God to His face. Instead, Jesus prayed for His murderers and commended His spirit unto God. One thousand years earlier, the prophecy reads, Psalm 22:1:
To the chief Musician upon Aijeleth Shahar, A Psalm of David. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
Jesus fulfills it on Golgotha’s hill. Satan and his argument has been spoiled by the Lamb of God.
When God says yes, the world’s carnal champions will all shout no! But, be advised, yes is the correct answer. Choose Jesus Christ and live forever.
GOD SAID, Mark 13:1-2:
1 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!
2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
GOD SAID, Psalm 139:14:
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
GOD SAID, Genesis 2:7:
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
MAN SAID: GQ magazine recently published an article titled, “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read;” the Bible is on that list. How hip and urbane!
Now you have THE RECORD.
References:
Authorized King James Version
GodSaidManSaid, “Adam and Eve and the Ancient Record”
Jeffrey, G., Unveiling Mysteries of the Bible, Waterbrook Press, 2002
Muncaster, R., Examine the Evidence, Harvest House Publishers, 2004
