General Articles

Coronavirus: Curse or blessing? :: By Terry James

Published on: by RR7

American stock-market gurus are astonished and baffled. The Dow and other financial/economic averages have plunged in unprecedented fashion. It is not a crash, as in the 1929 stock-market crash. But it has never gone from an unprecedented high to a 10 percent loss in such short order.

The stock market has since somewhat rallied, but still is tremendously down.

It is all, of course, because of a panicked selloff by those whose whole reason for being revolves around making money, the love of which, God’s Word says, is “the root of all kinds of evil.”

At the core of the panic is the coronavirus. The spreading disease—of which little is known as far as its cause and ultimate effects—is feared to eventually bring to a standfill the consumption of products around the world.

It is thought that factories will be unable to produce goods and parts to sell to other manufacturing entities, because workers either won’t, due to illness, be able to attend work, or because workers are afraid to be around other people. This, it is feared, will ultimately bring on a major depression—or something even worse.

The hyperbole is rampant. At the heart of it all are the Democrat Party leaders, the mainstream news media, and the Trump haters, all of whom see in the hyperbole political advantage as the US presidential election date comes into view.

Leaders of that party weighed in almost immediately, accusing President Donald Trump of being inadequate to handle the crisis. They charged that he is doing too little, and compared the coronavirus to Hurricane Katrina of the George W. Bush era. A number of mainstream broadcast networks and cable channels saw their program hosts join in with their Democrat guests. The tenor and tone of their analyses seemed to be that this disease will be Trump’s Katrina.

This refers to the charge made against President Bush that he was inadequate to handle that crisis, so many people died and great dangers existed that wouldn’t have if a Democrat had been in office.

One host urged her guests to just start calling it the “Trump Virus.”

It remains to be seen, of course, just where this outbreak will end. The stock market has fallen, as stated above, and, indeed, unless things turn around and there is a bounce-back of the bottom of the fall, things could severely damage an economy that has been perceived as booming.

My own take has been, as most who read these commentaries know, that the Rapture will occur at a time of economic uptick, not during a global fiscal disaster.

My belief hasn’t changed. I still contend that the Lord Jesus prophesied it will be business as usual, or even better than usual, when He next catastrophically breaks in on the affairs of mankind.

It will be catastrophic for those left behind. But it will be glorious beyond imagination for those who go to be with their Lord in that electrifying instant of Rapture.

All the experts I’ve heard lately say that America isn’t in real danger of the outbreak at the moment, but things could change. They expect measures taken by this administration to keep the coronavirus from becoming pandemic within the borders of the United States.

The experts also say almost as one that it will take many months, perhaps even years, to develop a vaccine that is highly effective against the disease. This is quite troubling to consider.

God has His mighty hand on it all, and that is the spiritual prompting upon which I base my optimism that the resolution to the problem will be forthcoming sooner rather than later.

The following news item speaks to that internal, spiritual prompting I sense.

Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus, according to Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis. If all goes as planned, the vaccine could be ready within a few weeks and available in 90 days, according to a release.

“Congratulations to MIGAL [the Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough,” Akunis said. “I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

For the past four years, a team of MIGAL scientists has been developing a vaccine against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which causes a bronchial disease affecting poultry. The effectiveness of the vaccine has been proven in preclinical trials carried out at the Veterinary Institute. (Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman, “Israeli Scientists: ‘In a few weeks, we will have coronavirus vaccine.’” Jerusalem Post, February 20, 2020, https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-scientists-In-three-weeks-we-will-have-coronavirus-vaccine-619101)

It is within prophetic purview to conjecture whether the Lord might be about to bring forth evidence of why Israel is His chosen people. It will be fascinating to watch developments.

The Lord has said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse; and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:1–3)

 

Study Through Romans: Lesson 9 :: By Sean Gooding

Published on: by RR7

Chapter 2:17-29
Hypocrites and the Law

“Indeed you are called a Jew, and rest on the law, and make your boast in God, 18 and know His will, and approve the things that are excellent, being instructed out of the law, 19 and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, 20 an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having the form of knowledge and truth in the law. 21 You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that a man should not steal, do you steal? 22 You who say, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? 23 You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law?

“24 For ‘the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,’ as it is written. 25 For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. 26 Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision? 27 And will not the physically uncircumcised, if he fulfills the law, judge you who, even with your written code and circumcision, are a transgressor of the law? 28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; 29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.“

The book of Romans is raw and hits us (at least me) in the heart. The Holy Spirit, if we are listening, cuts right to the heart of the matter and convicts us. This is the whole point of the Law. It was never designed to save; rather it was designed to show us that we needed a Saviour. In Galatians 3:24-46, the Apostle Paul tells us this very thing:

“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith has come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.”

There are still many who try to live by the Law. They don’t eat this, and think that only those who worship on Saturdays are saved. But if you follow the ministry of Jesus, you will see that He did a lot of healing on Sabbath days. He defied the conventional thinking about the Sabbath, yet He never sinned. There are some today who observe some of the Law but not all of it. The Bible says in James 2:10-11 this about the Law:

“Whoever keeps the whole law but stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For He who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.”

You cannot pick and choose which laws you want to keep and which ones you want to ignore. If you say that you want to live by the Law, then do them all is what the Bible says. Jewish men were not allowed to shave their faces; they had to wear blue tassels on their clothes to identify them as children of God in Israel. They could not wear clothing made of mixed fabrics; and on and on we can go. I dare say that many of the people who think they know the Law of Moses, don’t. One which is often overlooked is the law about travel. In Exodus 16:29-30 we see this command from Moses to the people, based on the law of God:

“‘See! For the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore, He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days. Let every man remain in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.’ So the people rested on the seventh day.”

Do not go out of your home. Over the years there came to be known the phrase “a Sabbath’s day’s journey.” This was the allowed distance to be traveled on the Sabbath day; the priest’s homes and the synagogues would have been a Sabbath day’s journey from the homes in the town. We see this phrase used in Acts 1:12, where Jesus took His disciples out about a Sabbath day’s journey before He was taken up before their eyes. There was to be no travel beyond this distance on the Sabbath. So people who pretend that they follow the Law, yet travel more than 2,000 cubits or about 3,000 feet, are breaking all of the Law. If you want to truly keep the Law, stay home.

  1. Hypocrites, verses 17-25

We are all hypocrites. Some less and some more, but all hypocrites nonetheless. Why? Because we do things that we tell people not to do, and we often make ourselves out to be more than we truly are. We put on an air of piety, and as people get to know us, they realize that we have a lot of chinks in our armour. Read the Gospels and pay close attention to the followers of Jesus; these men were fraught with doubts, they had internal fighting about who would be the greatest, they had unbelief and they had issues with faith. While we pick on Peter for denying Jesus that fateful night on His arrest, ALL of the disciples fled; they all forsook Jesus; only John and Peter followed Him.

One of the best parts of the New Testament is that we find the apostles and the disciples to be real people. They had real issues. Peter and Barnabas were challenged face to face by Paul about their Jewish hypocrisy:

Galatians 2:11-13 “Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed; for before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy.”

To some degree, this is the very heart of the challenge of Christianity. The fight between the old man and the new man is real and at times dirty. The gap between what we should be and what we all feel is like an uncrossable divide. The Apostle Paul has a remedy for that; and all through the epistles, he reminds us that he was and is a great sinner. The most famous of these declarations is in 1 Timothy 1:15:

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”

Paul called himself the head, the chief of all sinners. Notice that he is addressing a young preacher named Timothy, and he is showing him how he should present himself: as a sinner, and not just a sinner but the chief of sinners. The Apostle John would tell us in his letter that if we say we are not sinners, we are liars; rather we are to confess our sins to God. We are to confess our sins one to another as well. While we are to teach that one is to be obedient to the Lord and that one should flee sinful actions and lusts, the fact of the matter is, we will sin and, sadly, sin often.

We are not to present ourselves as someone who has arrived, but rather as someone on the journey who was and is in need of more grace than anyone else on the journey. But, man, do we like to make ourselves out to be more than we are! We love the accolades of men, but sin is at the door, and it will raise its ugly head.

We do almost irreparable damage to the Lord’s churches when we make ourselves out to be something we are not. We set up people to get hurt and to be very angry with God, all because we put on some holier than thou attitude that was just a façade. This was the very hypocrisy that Jesus called out with the Pharisees. The self-righteousness that created a class structure in the local church. We all get to heaven the same way, clothed and covered in Jesus’s righteousness, not our own. No one has arrived in Heaven to fanfare for their own personal righteousness.

  1. The Law was Designed to Make you a Sinner, verses 25-29

No one has ever been saved by keeping the Law, no one. In Romans 7:7, Paul writes this:  

“What then shall we say? Is the Law sin? Absolutely not! Indeed, I would not have been mindful of sin if not for the Law. For I would not have been aware of coveting if the Law had not said, ‘Do not covet.'”

The Law told me what sin was, and showed me that I was incapable of keeping the whole Law. As such, I am guilty of the whole law, and the penalty for breaking the Law is death. We needed someone to come and fulfill, obey the Law in its entirety; and that is where Jesus came in. Hebrews 4: 14-18 tells us this:

“Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Jesus never sinned, not even once, even though He was tempted in ALL points like we are. He satisfied the need to be perfect for all of us, and it is in Him only that we can be saved. No one will be saved by keeping the Law; no one will go to Heaven because they only worshiped on the Sabbath; no one will go to heaven by not eating pork or shrimp or not wearing mixed clothing. In Galatians 2:20-21 Paul writes this:

“I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. I do not set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the Law, Christ died for nothing.”

If righteousness came by the Law, then Jesus died for nothing. To say that you can get to Heaven by the Law is to negate the death of Jesus, to diminish what He did on the cross and make His bloodshed nothing more than a show, to say that we really do not need Him. But righteousness cannot come through the Law; it is only in Christ that we can become righteous.

Repent of your self-righteousness and fall on the grace and mercy of the Living God.

Ephesians 2:8-10 “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

God bless you,

Pastor Sean Gooding

Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

Missionarybaptistchurch76@yahoo.ca