When we entrust our souls to Christ, He immediately ushers us into union and communion with the Father. Steven Lawson
Quote for the Day
Month: November 2021
God’s Word
Reflection on 1 Corinthians 15:50-58
Scripture
It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will be transformed.
Observation
Our dying physical bodies cannot inherit God’s kingdom. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed.
When the last trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to eternal life. Those who are alive at the time will be transformed and receive immortal bodies.
Death will be swallowed up in the victory of Christ. Sin is the sting that empowers death. Thank God! In Christ we have the victory over sin and death.
Application
There is much that is unclear about the end times. One thing that is certain is that those who are dead will be raised in a moment. Those who are alive in Christ will be transformed in the twinkling of an eye.
This promise is to everyone who puts their trust in Christ. Christ has defeated sin and death, and if we are in Christ we share the spoils of the victory.
Those who are not in Christ have not had their sins forgiven. They will be raised also, to be judged by God. They will be cast into a Lake of Fire along with satan and the demons.
Faith is a matter of life and death – eternal life and eternal death.
God is not wanting anyone to perish, so He delays the final day to save as many as possible.
Prayer
Thank you Lord Jesus for saving me. Yours is the victory and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 6:13
Here is my commentary on Ephesians 6:13. I am publishing these once or twice a week, but you can read all of the available articles at our web-site, http://www.new-life.org.au
Ephesians 6:13
“Therefore, take up the whole armour of God so that you will be able to withstand in that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.”
Paul again exhorts us to take up the whole armour of God. A soldier in battle with only part of his armour clearly remains vulnerable. Whenever we are engaged in spiritual warfare, that is everyday, we must be fully protected against the attacks of the foes describe in verse 12.
We must never underestimate the ferocity of the warfare in which we are involved. The enemy searches for any weakness that can be exploited, and he never gives up.
Paul talks about the “evil day.” While every day is a day of battles, some days are more ferocious than others. Our lesser battles are preparations for the greater battles or the evil day.
Our battles can be internal in terms of temptation and natural, but sinful, desires. There are days when we seem to have mastered these things. There are other days when the voices and images sown into our brains are amplified and become almost unbearably intense. How we respond to the lesser temptations will determine our response to the greater or more intense temptations.
The battle can also be external. Various pressures can come against us, such as persecution and other forms of opposition. We need to be prepared and ready to stand firm in Christ when these events come.
As we take up the whole armour of God, we will be able to withstand (more literally, “stand against”) these pressures. This suggests a positive resistance in which we not only refuse to give in, but we push back in order to stand our ground.
To stand against the enemy means that we do not just avoid giving Into temptation or persecution when they come. It means that we take the initiative, take the battle up to the enemy. For every temptation, we fight and we replace it with a positive virtue. For every opposition, we need to reach out to show love to those who persecute us.
Then, having done everything, we stand, even on the evil day.
To give up before the battle is over is to fall and be defeated. We have to do everything in our power, under the direction of God, to keep on fighting.
In the Second World War, and Australian seaman, Teddy Sheean, earned a Victoria Cross for extreme courage. As his ship was sinking after being hit by Japanese bombers, he strapped himself to an anti aircraft gun to protect his crew mates from strafing. Despite being already wounded by two bullets, he kept firing until the ship sank beneath the waves, taking down at least one enemy bomber.
This is an example of “having done everything”.
We might feel like we are being destroyed by the enemy, but we must do everything to stand against the evil one .
Finally, having done everything, we stand firm .
We stand firm in Christ, in the gospel, in the faith.
The aim of every believer, and the desire of God’s heart, is that we overcome all the opposition – external and internal – and we stand firm. No compromise. No retreat.
And if we fall, there is no condemnation from God. We stand up, fight the next battle, knowing that in God, even their our become stepping stones to greater victory.
Key points in this verse:
- We need the full armour of God
- There are greater and lesser battles, all are part of the constant spiritual warfare
- We must do all that we can to stand firm in Christ
Holy & Beloved
The Sad State of Science
Science, as it is popularly understood, is in a parlous state. Politics and activists have captured important areas of research such as climate science and virology. People make stuff up and rely on dodgy computer “models” to make apocalyptic predictions, and nobody is ever held to account.
Now we have major science journals publishing mountains of computer-generated gibberish. So much for peer review.
Jo Nova writes:
Sea level height based on aerobics and other gibberish published in top science journals
Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.
It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “
They are shocked that scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails.
In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published.
Indeed, no one even read the titles…
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Nature
Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.
Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.
Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist who uncovered nonsense papers, was shocked:
…it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.
The papers are computer generated junk:
71 articles have abstracts or titles that contain the words ‘dance’, ‘aerobics’ or ‘sports’ in relation to geoscience, including the articles ‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’ and ‘Rock stress and deformation characteristics based on SVM and sports high-intensity interval training’.
And it’s all happened before — in 2014 at least 120 papers were “computer generated nonsense” and were published and later retracted. It’s emblematic of the entire academic sector really. An industry using AI to produce nothing, discover nothing, get published, and then write papers about it?
So who benefits?
But the scammers’ motivations remain a mystery to Ivan Oransky, a journalist who runs Retraction Watch. Even the article titles, which would be listed as part of an individual’s publication record, often do not make sense, he says. “The papers are so obviously terrible, so why would you want them on your CV?”
Many of the papers were from authors based at Chinese institutions, and most contained nonsensical phrases that Elsevier thinks came from the use of reverse-translation software to disguise plagiarism.
Perhaps Western professors are trying to plump out their bio’s with statements about “publishing 412 Nature papers” and just paid a paper-scam generator in China. But who’d really want their name on papers like these? These papers are so bad, they look like the hoax papers done purposely to expose the rot in academia.Will a team appear next week admitting the papers were faked to test the system? Or are there just too many incentives for Chinese or other academics to “publish or perish”?
Either way, Western Civilization is paying tillions of dollars to change the weather based on “The Science” according to peer review — which appears to have no more intellectual prowess than a Nigerian 419 email scam.
Peer review is anonymous and unpaid and worth every cent.
Quote for the Day
The blood of Jesus is able to cleanse the vilest offender and present him faultless before the throne of God with full acceptance (1 John 1:7, 9). Steven Lawson
Immeasurably more
Reflection on 1 Corinthians 15:35-49
Scripture
Our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory. They are buried in weakness, but they will be raised in strength.
Observation
Paul turns to the question of what our resurrection bodies will be like. He uses the analogy of a seed that is placed in the ground and dies before being raised into a new body.
There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. They have varying kinds of glory. In the same way, our earthly bodies are put into the ground in brokenness, but raised up with a spiritual body of strength and glory.
Just as we like Adam, the earthly man, we will rise like Jesus, the Heavenly Man.
Application
As you get older, your body needs more maintenance because things wear out. One day, my body will be beyond repair and I will die.
My body will be put in the ground, and I will rise to take on a new body. My broken physical body will be replaced with a glorious heavenly body.
There is much we do not know about eternity. We do know that followers of Jesus will live forever, and that we will have bodies that will also live forever.
Sin and death, and the general degradation of creation, take their toll in this life. But in the next life there will be no more sin and death. Everything will be perfect.
That is something to look forward to!
Prayer
Thank you Lord for the promise of new life. There will be a time when everything is new and perfect again. Praise the Lord! Amen.
Ephesians 6:12
Here is my commentary on Ephesians 6:12. I am publishing these once or twice a week, but you can read all of the available articles at our web-site, http://www.new-life.org.au
Ephesians 6:12
“ for our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
A more literal translation of this verse is:
“For our struggle/ wrestling is not against blood and flesh, but against the principalities, against the authorities, against the cosmic rulers of this darkness, against the evil spirits in the heavenly realms.”
Paul changes his analogy briefly from the soldier in the army to the wrestler on the ground, to make the point that the struggle is personal, one in which every christian is engaged.
With ever-evolving military technology taking warfare from a battlefield to the safety of a computer lab, we can think of the life and death struggle of warfare as being a comfortable thing for us. No, we are wrestling an enemy, it is hand to hand, brute strength wrestling.
Our enemy in this struggle is not blood and flesh, but spiritual. When we are rejected, mocked, hated, or suffer violence for our faith in Christ, we are not to hate those who who oppose us, but love them. They are not doing it to us, but the spirits and rulers of the heavenly realms are doing it.
Paul here lists four different spiritual powers that oppose us. These are evil spirits, not human beings. They are the fallen angels who serves satan in various areas and with various levels of authority and power.
There is a definite hierarchy in the infernal kingdom, just as there is a succession of authority in God’s Kingdom. it is unwise to make too much of these various terms for spiritual rulers and powers. God has not given us a detailed description all these spirits that oppose us, except to highlight that there is a struggle, and the sacrifice of Christ on the cross of Calvary has ensured their defeat.
The rulers or principalities (in Greek “archas”) are spirits which rule over geographic areas such as cities, regions, nations, and so on. They influence culture through religious expressions, through arts, media and governmental institutions. Wherever there are people, there are principalities seeking to control them, and most importantly, resist the gospel in an area.
A biblical example of this is Daniel 10. Daniel has a vision of an angel who describes a three week struggle against the prince over the kingdom of Persia. This is a real struggle initiated by Daniel’s prayer and fasting.
The authorities are spirits which exercise governmental power to oppose christians. They persecute believers and stand in the way of the preaching of the gospel. In many countries, they may take a nationalistic cover, or a religious cover ( for example Islamic or Hindu), or a civil religion such as secularism that opposes all public expressions of belief. Extreme forms such as Nazism, communism, and fascism, result from a combination of authorities and principalities which hold people in extreme bondage, sometimes over generations.
The “cosmic powers of this darkness” are spirits which energise seemingly impersonal forces that control the lives of large swathes of humanity. These would include wars, revolutions, abortion, ritualised murder, drugs, and so on. They seem impossible to overcome because their power is not localised. As soon as one manifestation is defeated, another pops up to replace it. The ongoing strife in the Middle East and in Afghanistan are examples of this.
The “evil spirits in the heavenly realms” are the kinds of spirits which bring affliction, addiction, torment, and destruction to individual lives and family groups. These are the demons which Jesus dealt with daily.
As christians, we are involved in fighting this battle each day. The fact that the battle is fought in the heavenly realms does not make this battle less real than other struggles we might engage in.
For Western christians, there is widespread ignorance of the spiritual realm. Our modern mindset ignores anything that is non-material. When we ignore the power that satan exerts over us, we are unable to fight effectively.
The other problem is that we have failed to discern the spirits and the nature of the struggle. We end up fighting the wrong battles against flesh and blood enemies. The battle must be fought at the heavenly level not at the ground level. The enemy is not coming against us with tanks and artillery, but bombs and missiles. Our warfare must be fought in the air, not on the ground.
Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 10:4 that the weapons of our warfare and not fleshly but spiritual. In verse 13 of Ephesians 6, he describes what the weapons are which God has given us.
Key points in this verse:
- We are not struggling against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers
- This is a personal wrestle which every christian is engaged in
- The enemy has a wide variety of spirits embedded in various layers of society and culture
- We need to discern the true nature of the battle or we will be consumed by the enemy
New Life Narrabri 