Have you Not Read

03/20/2022

The Real Number One Cause of Divorce.

Studies always list the number one cause of divorce as either financial or infidelity. I disagree. I believe that the number one cause by far is the lack of a Christian marriage and an understanding of what that means. This is not a jab at non Christians, because it is nearly as prevalent with Christians; Christians who have never been taught what a Christian marriage entails.

You often hear excuses like “I fell out of love” or “our marriage grew stale”. One spouse will blame the other for their actions. But these are merely symptoms of that lacking.

You don’t fall out of love. You do fall out of infatuation. That’s because you are supposed to fall out of infatuation. That’s the place where true love can grow. Don’t get me wrong. The infatuation stage is great! All mushy sweet and deliriously magical. It’s the childhood of your relationship where everything is fun and games. But just like childhood, we must grow up and mature. Maturing isn’t always fun, but it’s where we go from superficial, to a deep, abiding love and relationship.

Love at this new stage can be tough, absolutely. No longer are we so swept away that flaws and habits don’t matter. Now our feet are back on the ground and we see our partner as they are, flaws and all. It can be a shocking, even frightening realization if we haven’t been prepared. That’s where a Christian marriage comes in. The good news is that even the non Christian can mimic it (though it is harder).

Throughout history, marriages weren’t based on infatuation or even love. They were usually arranged. Sometimes the couple might get lucky and have their marriage arranged with the one they loved. But usually, it was arranged with who the father thought could best provide or which spouse’s name and status best helped out their family’s standing. So without the initial infatuation and subsequent love, how did any marriage ever survive? The answer really, is simple: choice.

You see, the love it takes for a marriage to survive is not a feeling at all. It effects your feelings in profound ways, but in itself, it’s a choice. You see, you WILL fall out of infatuation (what some mistake for love). There WILL BE seasons where things slow down and may seem stale. There WILL BE times where every day things like finances seem overwhelming. And yes, your spouse WILL change, both physically and in personality as they too move from their infatuation into love. If that mushy feeling is all that you based your marriage upon, you will be in trouble.

This is where the Christian marriage comes in to play. Those arranged marriages lasted because they understood that true, abiding love is a choice! They CHOSE to love their spouse if for no other reason than that they were married.

You see, I don’t love my wife because of some feeling. I, like every other married person, have down days. Days where everything feels ho hum. Days where I miss that young, hot girl I married. The one who flirted with me and made me feel more than I am. And if we are truly honest, there may be days where I don’t even like her that much. But here’s the secret to not giving in to the lies that our marriage is in trouble:

I CHOOSE, EVERY DAY to love my wife.

I love her not because she makes me feel a certain way. Not because she fulfills some need or desire of mine. I love her BECAUSE she is my wife. I CHOOSE to love my wife despite all the world may tell me, despite the loss of my initial infatuation, despite any trouble we may be going through and I do so because that’s the promise I made.

To take it one step further, my wife is not my friend. I’ve had friends. I’ve had best friends. We’ve lost touch, moved on. That’s what time does and what time will do to your spouse if they too are your friend. No, see, in a Christian marriage, you are to keep your spouse as holy. Now, that word “holy” sounds very churchy. But it doesn’t have to be. The word “holy” simply means to be set aside and kept as special. Your spouse is not your friend, but something far greater. They are taken out of the realm of a mere friend and set off by themselves on a much higher plane than anyone else.

The love you have for a friend requires constant choices. How far will I actually go to support them? Will I be behind them even when I know they’re wrong? Will I forgive them when they wrong me? However, the love you have for your spouse only requires one: will you love them today, regardless, BECAUSE they are your spouse?

The difference comes in where the questions begin.

Q: “Will I love my spouse after the infatuation ends”
1. it depends on what they are like at that time.
2. Yes, because they’re my spouse

Q: “Will I love my spouse when things seem stale?”
1. yeah, but I may flirt around and see if I can find just a little piece of that freshness to keep me going.
2. Yes, because they’re my spouse

Q: “Will I love my spouse when temptation arises?”
1. yes, but what if I just push the line a little bit as long as it doesn’t go too far.
2. Yes, because they’re my spouse

Q: “Will I forgive my spouse if they hurt me?”
1. It depends
2. Yes, because they’re my spouse

Do you get the difference? If you wake up every day and choose your spouse, even if the magic is missing, even if you’re having problems, even if they’ve done something wrong, but you have chosen them, made them holy in your life and decided that ’today I choose to love, honor and commit myself to my spouse alone’, that is the when you are able to leave the infatuation stage and enter into true love. A love that will last through better or worse, richness or poorness, sickness or health.

In His service… Arthur Smith

AFTERWARDS
I know some will complain of the lack of Scripture in this post. There is much Scripture that will both confirm this as well as help you to follow it. I did not include them here because even though this is much easier to do with God’s help, the same principle of choosing to love your spouse daily, can be used by non Christians as well. So I purposely left out what they would not hear in the hopes they will hear the rest.

09/01/2020

Here’s another one I’ll have to move to notes eventually. It’s a highly controversial one with something for most people to disagree strongly with. So enjoy!

The Pre, Mid, Post Tribulation Rapture

The first part of Scripture that really caught my attention was end time prophecy. I was open to whatever as I was young and hadn’t formed an opinion. The problem was, I knew Scripture couldn’t be wrong nor contradict itself. Yet the more I studied, the more I saw Scripture pointing to all three positions. For example...

Pre-Tribulation

Revelation 3:10 - we are spared from the hour of testing
Revelation 4:1 - the command is given for us to “Come up here”
Revelation 4:4-10 - the saints already have their crowns

Mid-Tribulation
Matthew 24:29-31 “Immediately after the anguish of those days...” yet before the 2nd Coming.
Revelation 6:9 those slain for the Lord are already in His presence asking how long He will let the Tribulation go on.
Revelation 7:9 shows a great multitude of saints (as in all Christians are saints, not just the ones deemed by the Catholic Church - Rev 14:12, 1 Cor 1:2, ) standing before the throne, yet there are still seven trumpets yet to come.

Post-Tribulation
1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 says we will be caught up at Christ’s 2nd coming
1 Corinthians 15:5 days after the last Trumpet
John 6:40 - “and I will raise them up the last day.”

I could continue with several more for each, but you get the drift. These all can’t be true. Or can they?

When you read the accounts of tribulation, Scripture refers to them in three ways. Most the time it speaks of tribulations we will all have during life. So, ignoring that one, the rest speak of a time of great tribulation or the Great Tribulation. That’s two ways, so where’s the third? But wait! What if those last two are not the same?

What if the times of great tribulation are separate from the Great Tribulation? If those two events are indeed two separate events, all Scripture suddenly drops into place. The rapture would then happen POST times of great tribulation, PRE Great Tribulation and MID way between the two.

This view leaves one catch which are the verses saying clearly the rapture will occur at Christ’s second coming. But again back to Scripture, 1 Thessalonians 4:17 (and Daniel 7:13, Matthew 24:30, Revelation 1:7) says that Christ will return in the clouds, not physically to earth. However other verses clearly say to the earth (Zechariah 14:3-4, Acts 1:9-12). Again, making these two separate events solves the problem.

Other than that, this view has to explain the verses pointing to the trumpet or last trumpet. But the Scriptures that comment on these things, never say the last trumpet of what. We assume they mean the last of the seven trumpet judgments, but Scripture never says the ‘last trumpet of the seven trumpet judgments’. Throughout Scripture, trumpets are used to signal events. So connecting the two is just an assumption as are a few other such ‘proofs’. They take take a common event and connect it to a specific event in Revelation, when Scripture doesn’t actually connect them.

For myself, this is the only way that I have seen that allows all the prophecies to be true and avoid conflicts and contradictions. Every other option, has to ignore or twist its way around verses that contradict. However, in the end, what really matters is that none of this matters. The end will happen precisely as God has commanded, even if it goes against our preferred interpretation. Our duty is not to insist that our interpretation is correct, but to be ready whenever He calls us.

In His service,
Arthur Smith

07/02/2020

Once Saved Always Saved: The Missed Prodigal

The question always comes up, “Is it ‘once saved always saved’ or can we lose salvation at some point?” The problem here is the question is asked as if it were one question: “Is it ‘once saved always saved’ or can we lose salvation at some point?” When it is really two (or three) separate questions: “Can we ever loose our salvation.” “Is ‘once saved always saved’ true? Explain.”

I believe one of the most missed Scriptures explain this perfectly. That being the Prodigal Son. Yes it’s about God’s forgiveness, but it’s about so much more.

In it we see the father, which we all know to represent God. We see He has sons. That’s us. But the critical point, is they were BOTH His sons. BOTH had an inheritance. Our inheritance as sons (yes and daughters, but I’m sticking with the parable wording so won’t clarify that from here out) of God is eternal presence with Him in Paradise.

So what happens? The one son rejects his father and squanders his inheritance here on earth. As taught in Matthew 6, he has then had his reward. What is important and usually missed is that regarding this time that his son has rejected the Father and spent his inheritance, the father (God), says about his son (us), that he is “lost” and “dead”. What does it mean to be lost and dead to God? To have no inheritance coming from God? Luke 19:10 says clearly, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Christ came to save the lost, so if you’re lost, you’re not saved. If you are dead in Christ, you’re aren’t saved. If you have spent your inheritance, you have none left to claim.

Of course the parable goes on, the prodigal returns, the father rushes out to welcome him back and restores his inheritance. In doing so, the father declares, “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” So the prodigal (one of us):
- WAS a son, WAS alive (as evidenced by ‘alive AGAIN’) and DID HAVE inheritance coming from the father (God).
- rejected the father (God) and was then lost and dead to God having no further inheritance (Heaven) coming
- returned to the father (God) and was AGAIN made alive and found as a child of the father having had his inheritance restored.

Two important notes:
1) The prodigal did not LOOSE his place with the father and neither can we.
2) He did however, REJECT his father and turn from him becoming dead to the father and having no inheritance from him. Just as we can REJECT God, even having once been one of His, and be dead to God having no further inheritance coming from Him.

So we are clearly NOT ‘once saved, always saved’. We can not loose our salvation by messing up, or not going to church or by not doing this, that or some other thing. But we can go from saved to not saved by rejecting God.

08/02/2017

Long read, but worth it

Signs of the end. The series: The rise of atheism in science.
Reasons why evolution is just another atheist myth for adults
The atheist myth of evolution was scientifically debunked, their lies and frauds were exposed so many times, but the godless people still accept it because they love to live in a lie, to live in sin, without a moral code from God, because their nature in bad and they reject the Light because of that and they prefer the darkness, that is according to their inner nature, as the Bible states:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14
You can reach God only through love, you are capable to see the Light, to understand the Truth and to receive Divine Knowledge and Wisdom only when you have purified your evil soul, when your inner nature was changed by God and not in any other way. „Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”1 John 4:8

The theory of evolution is false. Actually, it is just a fairy tale for adults based on ancient pagan philosophy that hundreds of millions of people around the world choose to believe with blind faith. When Charles Darwin popularized the theory of evolution, he didn’t actually have any evidence that it was true. And since then the missing evidence has still not materialized. Most Americans would be absolutely shocked to learn that most of what is taught as “truth” about evolution is actually the product of the overactive imaginations of members of the scientific community. They so badly want to believe that it is true that they will go to extraordinary lengths to defend their fairy tale. They keep insisting that the theory of evolution has been “proven” and that it is beyond debate.
Reasons why evolution is just another atheist myth for adults:

#1 If the theory of evolution was true, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero.
#2 When Charles Darwin came up with his theory, he admitted that no transitional forms had been found at that time, but he believed that huge numbers certainly existed and would eventually be discovered…
“Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?”
#3 Even some of the most famous evolutionists in the world acknowledge the complete absence of transitional fossils in the fossil record. For example, Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History and author of “Evolution” once wrote the following…
“I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them …. I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”
#4 Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University, once wrote the following about the lack of transitional forms…
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”
#5 Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University has also commented on the stunning lack of transitional forms in the fossil record…
“In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.”
#6 If “evolution” was happening right now, there would be millions of creatures out there with partially developed features and organs. But instead there are none.
#7 If the theory of evolution was true, we should not see a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Instead, that is precisely what we find.
#8 Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki, an evolutionist, once commented on the fact that complex life appears very suddenly in the fossil record…
“A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants – instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.”
#9 The sudden appearance of complex life in the fossil record is so undeniable that even Richard Dawkins has been forced to admit it…
“It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative.”
#10 Nobody has ever observed macroevolution take place in the laboratory or in nature. In other words, nobody has ever observed one kind of creature turn into another kind of creature. The entire theory of evolution is based on blind faith.
#11 Evolutionist Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, openly admits that “the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.”
#12 Even evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University has admitted that the record shows that species do not change. The following is how he put it during a lecture at Hobart & William Smith College…
“Every paleontologist knows that most species don’t change. That’s bothersome….brings terrible distress. ….They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that’s not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, its not evolution so you don’t talk about it.”
#13 Anyone that believes that the theory of evolution has “scientific origins” is fooling themselves. It is actually a deeply pagan religious philosophy that can be traced back for thousands of years.
#14 The odds of even a single sell “assembling itself” by chance are so low that they aren’t even worth talking about. The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Gray’s book entitled “The Forbidden Secret“…
Even the simplest cell you can conceive of would require no less than 100,000 DNA base pairs and a minimum of about 10,000 amino acids, to form the essential protein chain. Not to mention the other things that would also be necessary for the first cell.
Bear in mind that every single base pair in the DNA chain has to have the same molecular orientation (“left-hand” or “right hand”) As well as that, virtually all the amino acids must have the opposite orientation. And every one must be without error.
“Now,” explained Larry, “to randomly obtain those correct orientations, do you know your chances? It would be 1 chance in 2110,000, or 1 chance in 1033,113!
“To put it another way, if you attempted a trillion, trillion, trillion combinations every second for 15 billion years, the odds you would achieve all the correct orientations would still only be one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion … and the trillions would continue 2755 times!
“It would be like winning more than 4700 state lotteries in a row with a single ticket purchased for each. In other words…impossible.”
#15 How did life learn to reproduce itself? This is a question that evolutionists do not have an answer for.
#16 In 2007, fishermen caught a very rare creature known as a Coelacanth. Evolutionists originally told us that this “living fossil” had gone extinct 70 million years ago. It turns out that they were only off by 70 million years.
#17 According to evolutionists, the Ancient Greenling Damselfly last showed up in the fossil record about 300 million years ago. But it still exists today. So why hasn’t it evolved at all over the time frame?
#18 Darwinists believe that the human brain developed without the assistance of any designer. This is so laughable it is amazing that there are any people out there that still believe this stuff. The truth is that the human brain is amazingly complex. The following is how a PBS documentary described the complexity of the human brain: “It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells.”
#19 The following is how one evolutionist pessimistically assessed the lack of evidence for the evolution of humanity…
“Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination.”
#20 Perhaps the most famous fossil in the history of the theory of evolution, “Piltdown Man”, turned out to be a giant hoax.
#21 If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and therefore life would not be possible. How can we account for this?
#22 If gravity was stronger or weaker by the slimmest of margins, then life sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would also make life impossible. How can we account for this?
#23 Why did evolutionist Dr. Lyall Watson make the following statement?…
“The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin!”
#24 Apes and humans are very different genetically. As DarwinConspiracy.com explains, “the human Y chromosome has twice as many genes as the chimpanzee Y chromosome and the chromosome structures are not at all similar.”
#25 How can we explain the creation of new information that is required for one animal to turn into another animal? No evolutionary process has ever been shown to be able to create new biological information. One scientist described the incredible amount of new information that would be required to transform microbes into men this way…
“The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus).”
#26 Evolutionists would have us believe that there are nice, neat fossil layers with older fossils being found in the deepest layers and newer fossils being found in the newest layers. This simply is not true at all…
The fossil layers are not found in the ground in the nice neat clean order that evolutionists illustrate them to be in their textbooks. There is not one place on the surface of the earth where you may dig straight down and pass through the fossil layers in the order shown in the textbooks. The neat order of one layer upon another does not exist in nature. The fossil bearing layers are actually found out of order, upside down (backwards according to evolutionary theory), missing (from where evolutionists would expect them to be) or interlaced (“younger” and “older” layers found in repeating sequences). “Out of place” fossils are the rule and not the exception throughout the fossil record.
#27 Evolutionists believe that the ancestors of birds developed hollow bones over thousands of generations so that they would eventually be light enough to fly. This makes absolutely no sense and is beyond ridiculous.
#28 If dinosaurs really are tens of millions of years old, why have scientists found dinosaur bones with soft tissue still in them? The following is from an NBC News report about one of these discoveries…
For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue(!!!), including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.
#29 Which evolved first: blood, the heart, or the blood vessels for the blood to travel through?
#30 Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to p**p?
#31 Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen?
#32 Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones?
#33 In order for blood to clot, more than 20 complex steps need to successfully be completed. How in the world did that process possibly evolve?
#34 DNA is so incredibly complex that it is absolutely absurd to suggest that such a language system could have “evolved” all by itself by accident…
When it comes to storing massive amounts of information, nothing comes close to the efficiency of DNA. A single strand of DNA is thousands of times thinner than a strand of human hair. One pinhead of DNA could hold enough information to fill a stack of books stretching from the earth to the moon 500 times.
Although DNA is wound into tight coils, your cells can quickly access, copy, and translate the information stored in DNA. DNA even has a built-in proofreader and spell-checker that ensure precise copying. Only about one mistake slips through for every 10 billion nucleotides that are copied.
#35 Can you solve the following riddle by Perry Marshall?…
1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.
2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.
3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.
If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you’ve toppled my proof. All you need is one.
#36 If humans have been around for so long, where are all of the bones and all of the graves? The following is an excerpt from an article by Don Batten…
Evolutionists also claim there was a ‘Stone Age’ of about 100,000 years when between one million and 10 million people lived on Earth. Fossil evidence shows that people buried their dead, often with artifacts, cremation was not practised until relatively recent times (in evolutionary thinking). If there were just one million people alive during that time, with an average generation time of 25 years, they should have buried 4 billion bodies, and many artefacts. However, even if the bodies had disintegrated, lots of artefacts should still be found.
#37 Evolutionists claim that just because it looks like we were designed that does not mean that we actually were. They often speak of the “illusion of design”, but that is kind of like saying that it is an “illusion” that a 747 airplane or an Apple iPhone were designed. And of course the human body is far more complex that a 747 or an iPhone.
#38 If you want to be part of the “scientific community” today, you must accept the theory of evolution no matter how absurd it may seem to you. Richard Lewontin of Harvard once made the following comment regarding this harsh reality…
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
#39 Time Magazine once made the following statement about the lack of evidence for the theory of evolution…
“Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn’t fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate.”
#40 Malcolm Muggeridge, the world famous journalist and philosopher, once made the following statement about the absurdity of the theory of evolution…
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”
#41 In order to believe the theory of evolution, you must have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself. Do you have that much blind faith?