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Settle the issue today. This day—this time—is known by academia as the post-truth era, meaning there is no absolute truth. But, nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible—which has lead the households and the nations that have followed it to the pinnacles of success, to peace of mind, comfort, health, and overall prosperity—is absolutely the absolute truth and its formulas work exactly as prescribed. When Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defines truth, he uses John 17:17 as his primary example. That passage reads:
Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
When one surrenders to the Light of the absolute truth, things change quickly, even instantly.
This feature is GodSaidManSaid feature 900 that will once again certify the absolute inerrant truth of Holy Writ. All of these marvelous features are archived here in text and streaming audio for the edification of the saints and as ammunition in the battle for the lost souls of Adam. Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one. All reasonable doubt has been destroyed.
Dear visitor, have you been born again—born a literal second time, this time of the Spirit of God? Will today be the day you make your peace with God? Will today be your day where all your sin and shame is totally washed away? Will today be the day be the day Satan’s bondages are cast like stubble into the fire? Will you be free to believe? Move now while you still have time. Move now! Click onto “Further with Jesus” right now for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.
GOD SAID, I Thessalonians 5:17:
Pray without ceasing.
GOD SAID, Romans 16:25:
Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,
GOD SAID, Jonah 2:10:
And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
MAN SAID: The Bible is really just a bunch of nice children’s stories, nothing more!
Now THE RECORD: It’s not the truth man’s looking for, just validation of his unbelief. Man’s unbelief is a cloak for his sin. Jesus declares the carnal dilemma in John 3:18-20:
18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
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.
We’re well on the way to 200 mighty, certified God-proofs found in His glorious, inerrant, supernaturally-authored Book—proofs that demolish the foundation of unbelief, the deceivableness of unrighteousness. In this series, GodSaidManSaid has already recorded 130 God-proofs and this feature begins with God-proof 131:
131. I Thessalonians 5:17:
Pray without ceasing.
Is there some real, measurable benefit in praying to the invisible God of the Bible? Does empirical data demonstrate the invisible God actually hears and answers these prayers? The Bible certainly thinks so:
On the subject of prayer, Philippians 4:6-7:
6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Note that the prayer of faith generates peace. The prayer of faith shifts the load of stress and anxiety to the capable hands of Jesus Christ. Our Lord said in Matthew 11:28-29:
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.
Remember, the prayer of faith shifts stress (which is one of prayer’s supernatural benefits). Stress is truly a giant of destruction. Stress is complicit in regard to heart disease, high blood pressure, weight gain, digestive disorders, peptic ulcers, ulcerative colitis, insomnia, headaches, migraine headaches, and more. Stress is also known to damage the immune system, which makes one susceptible to a myriad of other maladies and premature death. Prayer shifts stress and brings peace to the troubled.
Concerning prayer, Dr. Dale Matthews of Georgetown University, author of The Faith Factor, reports that 75% of all research on studies of spirituality has confirmed health benefits. He said, “If prayer were available in pill form, no pharmacy could stock enough of it.” [End of quote]
The following excerpts are from a March 2003 article in Parade magazine titled, “Why Prayer Could Be Good Medicine:”
Dr. Dossey, a medical internist, authored Healing Words and Prayer is Good Medicine. In his book, he states: “I decided that not using prayer on behalf of my patients was the equivalent of withholding a needed medication or surgical procedure.” [End of quotes]
Harvard’s Mind/Body Institute found that those who prayed regularly were able to reduce blood pressure and ease symptoms of chronic pain and illness.
Again, the Knight Ridder article cites a 1996 poll of family doctors and found that 99% believed spiritual practices and prayer can be helpful in medical treatment. [End of quotes]
God said prayer; science confirms.
132. Psalm 14:1:
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Carnal man clings to unbelief because his deeds are evil:
Because they refuse to retain God in their knowledge, because unbelief is from whence their quest for knowledge begins, carnal scientists fall prey to the curse of the deceivableness of unrighteousness, which the Bible declares in II Thessalonians 2 and Romans 1. The results are strong delusion and reprobate minds. They will readily believe a lie over the obvious. The position of evolutionary scientists dominates the global narrative: According to them, the entire and intricately marvelous earth and all its magnificent lifeforms, and its awe-inspiring, precisely-calibrated universe exploded into existence from basically nothing—strong delusions, reprobate minds.
Another great pair of examples of the “deceivableness of unrighteousness” concerning the water buffalo and the banana are from the GodSaidManSaid feature “Their Imaginations Became Vain:”
Evolutionists were forced to come up with a plausible theory on how sea-going mammals such as whales, dolphins and porpoises evolved. Remember, mammals supposedly evolved from the sea, so how did these mammals end up back in the water? Some evolutionists suggest that an even-toed land mammal like the water buffalo is the likely candidate to have evolved into the present-day whale. They speculate that the water buffalo liked to hang around the water a lot and over eons of time his hind legs simply fell off and his front legs changed into flippers—and the science students said, "No kidding?" The water buffalo’s hairy hide simply changed into smooth thick blubber and his nostrils slid up to the top of his head to form a blow hole. Then his tail evolved into flukes and because he was floating around in the water all the time, his body became enormous—and the students said, "Isn''t that interesting?"
Sound absurd? Do you think I''m exaggerating? The following excerpt is from volume 50 of National Geographic, written by V. B. Scheffer:
The whale''s ascendancy to sovereign size apparently began sixty million years ago when hairy, four-legged mammals in search of food or sanctuary ventured into water. As eons passed, change slowly occurred. Hind legs disappeared, front legs changed into flippers, hair gave way to a thick smooth blanket of blubber, nostrils moved to the top of the head, the tail broadened into flukes, and in the buoyant water world, the body became enormous.
Finally, consider this idea. Evolutionary biologist Robert May was quoted in the January 2001 issue of Discover magazine: "The more we learn about genome, the more it teaches us about our own place in the web of life. For example, we share half our genes with the banana. (Actually, it would be more accurate to say bananas share half their genes with us, because their genome is smaller.) This is a fact more evident in some of my acquaintances than others." The article''s author said, "This year the mapping of the genome shocked us, revealing a truth even more humbling and amusing: We are not just monkeys but their favorite snack as well." The title of the article is, "Your Cousin, The Banana." And the class of students said in concert, "No kidding?!"
Again concerning the whale:
Some evolutionists used to imagine that whales could evolve from an animal like a bear. Charles Darwin considered how black bears can swim for a long time. Once, he wrote about such bears:
…swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.
The fool hath saith in his heart there is no God.
133. Jonah 2:10:
And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
Jonah and the whale is ridiculed by the world’s academics and this GodSaidManSaid feature will once again set the record straight—solidly confirming that God’s Word is true and righteous altogether, miracles and all.
The city of Nineveh was the royal city of the Assyrian kingdom. They served multiple gods, one of which was a vicious god they called Ashur. The Assyrians were known for their brutal savagery. They impaled their enemies on stakes; hacked off noses, ears, fingers, and gouged out their enemies'' eyes; tore off lips and hands. Historians say the Assyrians covered the city wall with the skin of their victims; erected piles of skulls to terrorize their enemies, and hung the heads of the king’s enemies from the trees in the king’s garden. Fear of the Assyrians was not listed in the Book of Jonah as one of Jonah’s reasons for resisting God’s charge to preach destruction to the wicked Assyrians, and that in itself was quite a testimony to this Old Testament prophet.
What’s the backstory to Jonah and the whale? What accounts were left by the merchant marines who threw Jonah into the sea and possibly saw him swallowed alive by a sea monster? Did they see Jonah again—alive—or did they hear of the account of a man being vomited up on the beach by a great whale? Did anyone see that event? Does history and archaeology concur?
The question posed at GotQuestions.org is “Was Jonah truly swallowed by a whale?” Excerpts follow:
Critics also find Nineveh’s repentance (Jonah 3:4-9) hard to believe, though it isn’t technically a miracle. In actual fact, Nineveh’s repentance makes perfect sense given Jonah’s extraordinary arrival upon the shores of the Mediterranean and the prominence of Dagon worship in that particular area of the ancient world. Dagon was a fish-god who enjoyed popularity among the pantheons of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean coast. He is mentioned several times in the Bible in relation to the Philistines (Judges 16:23-24; I Samuel 5:1-7; I Chronicles 10:8-12). Images of Dagon have been found in palaces and temples in Nineveh and throughout the region. In some cases, he was represented as a man wearing a fish. In others, he was part man, part fish—a merman of sorts.
As for Jonah’s success in Nineveh, Orientalist Henry Clay Trumbull made a valid point when he wrote, “What better heralding, as a divinely sent messenger to Nineveh, could Jonah have had, than to be thrown up out of the mouth of a great fish, in the presence of witnesses, say on the coast of Phoenicia, where the fish-god was a favorite object of worship? Such an incident would have inevitably aroused the mercurial nature of Oriental observers, so that a multitude would be ready to follow the seemingly new avatar of the fish-god, proclaiming the story of his uprising from the sea, as he went on his mission to the city where the fish-god had its very centre of worship.”
Some scholars have speculated that Jonah’s appearance, no doubt bleached white from the action of the fish’s digestive acids, would have been of great help to his cause. If such were the case, the Ninevites would have been greeted by a man whose skin, hair, and clothes were bleached ghostly white—a man accompanied by a crowd of frenetic followers, many of whom claimed to have witnessed him having been vomited upon the shore by a great fish (plus any colorful exaggerations they might have added).
Jonah needed only to cause enough of a stir to gain himself admittance to the king who, upon believing Jonah’s message of imminent doom for himself, would have the power to proclaim a citywide day of fasting and penance. According to the Biblical narrative, that’s exactly what happened (Jonah 3:6-9). So we see that, given the caveat that Jonah was spewed upon the shore by a great fish, Nineveh’s repentance follows from a very logical progression.
As for Jonah’s aquatic experience (which is the crux of the story), while there is no conclusive historical proof that Jonah was ever swallowed by a fish and lived to tell about it, there is some provocative corroboratory evidence. In the 3rd century BC, a Babylonian priest/historian named Berosus wrote of a mythical creature named Oannes who, according to Berosus, emerged from the sea to give divine wisdom to men. Scholars generally identify this mysterious fish-man as an avatar of the Babylonian water-god Ea (also known as Enki). The curious thing about Berosus’ account is the name that he used: Oannes.
Berosus wrote in Greek during the Hellenistic Period. Oannes is just a single letter removed from the Greek name Ioannes. Ioannes happens to be one of the two Greek names used interchangeably throughout the Greek New Testament to represent the Hebrew name Yonah (Jonah).
As for the missing “I” in Ioannes, according to Professor Trumbull, who claims to have confirmed his information with the renowned Assyriologist Dr. Herman V. Hilprecht before writing his own article on the subject, “In the Assyrian inscriptions, the ‘J’ in foreign words becomes ‘I,’ or disappears altogether; hence Joannes, the Greek representative of Jona, would appear in Assyrian either as Ioannes or as Oannes."
Nineveh was Assyrian. What this essentially means is that Berosus wrote of a fish-man named Jonah who emerged from the sea to give divine wisdom to man—a remarkable corroboration of the Hebrew account.
134. Genesis 7:1-2:
1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
Could it be true?
When science looks without the presuppositions of evolutionary theory’s uniformitarianism and “time and chance,” they consistently find God and His young earth. No scientific discovery has ever controverted one principle of God’s Word—not one. Try as the skeptics may, failure should be their only expectation.
The headline on ScienceNews.org reads, “Well Traveled: Gene split arose early in domesticated goats.” An excerpt follows:
Present-day domestic goats may look humble, but they harbor more genetic diversity than any other livestock species. In fact, analysis of goats’ mitochondrial DNA have shown that these animals evolved through five distinct maternal lines that spread from the Near East and central Asia across Europe.
Geneticists report the world’s goats descend from five distinct maternal lines, all hailing from just where God said they did. The Bible records seven goat mothers, for they were clean creatures, but they dropped to six immediately. Genesis 8:20:
And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
How they got to five could have happened in any number of natural ways, or perhaps the geneticists are even missing one. God’s Word is true and righteous altogether.
135. Exodus 20:11:
For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Some Christians assert that the Bible does not date the age of the earth, but it certainly does:
The age of the earth and its universe is surely known, even down to the year, day of the week, and even the time of day. For example, Genesis tells us the evening and the morning were the first day. God’s days begin in the evening. Work began in the evening, in the darkness. God’s creation process began the first day of the week, which would be Sunday evening, with the evening preceding the day: evening and the morning were the first day. Genesis 2:1-3:
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
This weekly cycle is foundational to life even in our biological clocks. From Genesis, we understand that the creation process began on Sunday evening with the evening preceding the morning.
Many chronological markers are laid out in the Scriptures that are used to date the earth. The genealogical record is pivotal. Genesis 5:3:
And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
From the birth of Adam on the sixth day to the birth of his son Seth was 130 years. Tracking the genealogical dates between father and son, we discover that 1656 years transpired from the day Adam opened his eyes until Noah’s flood. Moving forward from Noah, tracking genealogical spans to the years of the kings and other chronological markers, you can date the age of the earth, its universe, and all mankind. Anglican Archbishop James Ussher, famous for dating the earth in the scholarly tome he wrote in the 1600s—known as The Annals of the World—used all of the methods noted and more. In Appendix B of The Annals of the World, revised and updated by Larry and Marion Pierce, you’ll find the following:
In preparing this work, Ussher first made the assumption that the Bible was the only reliable source document of chronological information for the time periods covered in the Bible. In fact, before the Persian Empire, very little is known about Greek, Roman, and Egyptian history, or the history of other nations. Much rests on speculation and myths. Dates in secular history become more certain with the founding of the Media-Persian Empire.
For events before this time, Ussher relied solely on the data from the Bible to erect his historical framework. He chose the death of Nebuchadnezzar as a reliable date to anchor all the earlier Biblical dates to. Hence, working backward from that date, he ended up with his date for creation of October 23, 4004 BC. [End of quote]
The date of October 23, 4004 BC is according to the Julian calendar. According to the Gregorian calendar—still used today—and according to Ussher, the beginning of time is Sunday, September 21, 4004 BC.
Now, add the years since our Lord Jesus Christ and you have an earth just over 6,000 years of age.
No scientific truth has ever controverted this fact.
Settle the issue. Embrace the absolute truth—truth that lives forever.
GOD SAID, I Thessalonians 5:17:
Pray without ceasing.
GOD SAID, Romans 16:25:
Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,
GOD SAID, Jonah 2:10:
And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
MAN SAID: The Bible is really just a bunch of nice children’s stories, nothing more!
Now you have THE RECORD.
References:
Authorized King James Version
GodSaidManSaid, “Jonah and the Whale—Why do the Heathen Rage?”
GodSaidManSaid, “Noah’s Goats”
GodSaidManSaid, “Things We Know to be True: “Scientific American” Challenges God (Part 2)”
