First step in your journey - realizing the bible is truly God's word and not just stories penned of the opinions and fantasies of man.
Many people write me of their disillusionment
with church and God. We
share a similar story but with a different ending.
I was raised a Catholic. Went to church with mom, went to Catechism classes and didn't have a clue what the bible was really all about except it was a bunch of stories and the church was full of rules that didn't make a lot of sense to me and no one had proven to me why we had to follow those rules. By the time I reached college and started exploring other religions just to see how they differed, I discovered my Catholic religion was filled with lies, pagan practices, man's doctrines instead of God's, and wasn't following the real ten commandments. I was really angry about that discovery. I felt I had wasted all those Saturdays going to catechism classes and Sundays attending church when I could have been doing something else. And wherever I turned I discovered partial truths and politics instead of pastors following scripture and telling people what they needed to know. You can't just follow 8 or 9 of the commandments and be right with God. I was just about to throw in the towel and just follow the golden rule which I knew wasn't right either but I didn't like the other choices I was running into. Where was the truth about God?? Every sect had their errors along with the non denominationals I tried.
I believed in immortality , that our souls went someplace after we died, and then the Jehovah's witnesses who kept coming around had the audacity to tell me that wasn't true; that we just lay in the ground until the second coming knowing nothing and that I even had the word "soul" wrong - it meant a living person comprised of the elements of the body and the breath of life that went back to God when I died. It was not some "spirit" entity that went someplace as soon as I died. The worst part of it was, when I researched it; I discovered they were right. And recently, further research has changed my mind back again. There is just too much evidence via books written by people Jesus has taken to heaven and hell and back to tell us about these places, and from the near death experiences to ignore the fact we have a spirit part of us that transitions immediately upon death. Although we will not have our resurrections bodies at death (they were kinda right) we do have a spirit that will go to heaven or hell immediately at death and there is no changing travel plans when you end up at the wrong destination. Once in hell, there is no escape. It's a one way ticket only, no recourse. Your destination was determined while you were yet alive on earth. You either got your Jesus parachute strapped on all the time or you lose everything. At the second resurrection, we will get our glorified bodies and our spirit entity will be reunited with our glorified body.
And then I discovered there was no purgatory; that the Catholics made that up to extract more money out of people
way back when. I mean sheeeeessse. Where was the truth? I was back to keeping the golden rule until I had more evidence on what the right pathway was.
Then a couple things happened in my life to make me want to pursue the truth. Having gone through two marriages that only lasted nine years each I was wanting to get it right one last time. I met a gal named Irina on the internet; but she was in Russia. What are odds of retrieving a gal from another culture and making it work? To make a long story short, and you can read about us at
www.detailshere.com/ourstory.htm
where I have all the events posted; the sequence of events that occurred, that could NOT have happened without divine intervention, proved to me beyond doubt, that God was for real, his angels were for real, and that I needed to do something besides just keep the golden rule.
Just after I married Irina in Russia and got her and the kids back over here, on the interenet I came across Ron Wyatt's discoveries of Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the land bridge under the Red Sea where Moses parted the waters and the Israelites escaped from
Pharoh's army, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah he found, and thought,"damn, the bible must really be true". Maybe, just maybe, I should quit doing lip service for what God just did for me and I should try a different approach; independent study. (You can read about these discoveries starting with pics of the real Noah's ark today at
www.detailshere.com/noahsark.htm
). When the NASA satellite that was looking for warm Iraqie tanks and missile silos buried in the sand in the desert with an infrared device capable of finding temperature differences of a half a degree, found along with that a small red line going from upper Egypt, crossing the Red Sea and over to Mount Sinai - it became evident the exodus from Egypt depicted in the bible really did occur. Why the red line?? Because when 3 million people trample over the same trail it turns to powder and the 100% night humidity mixed with this powder and formed cement /concrete which has a different density
than the sand around it; so come mornings, this buried concrete trail if you wish exhibits higher temperatures than the surrounding sand and shows up as a thin red line on their
imaging. How fascinating the things God is revealing today to prove his existence.
If that wasn't enough, I then came across Josh McDowell's book entitled, "Evidence that demands a verdict", available through Amazon.com
,used, for about $8 - not bad for an 800 page book. Josh suffered a battered childhood with an alcoholic father and he hated God, especially after his mother committed suicide after he left the house, and
as a challenge issued to him at college one day by his friends, he set out to prove once and for all that the bible was NOT the word of God,
Jesus was NOT God's son and all this was just myth and stories. He didn't end up where he thought he would. He found that historically the documentation of Jesus and the things depicted in the bible was just too overwhelming to ignore. People who did NOT believe Jesus was the Messiah
still documented his birth, his life, his miracles, his death, and his resurrection - it was all there - put down in pen by those who didn't believe that he was who he said he was at the time but still documented such. I mean historical research has it narrowed down to within a two week time frame of when Jesus was even born; from Aug 27th to Sept 9th of the year 5 BC.
I am a mathematician - I had two majors in college, Math and Physics. I understand probabilities. This is where Josh's book hit home with me. Josh's book
analyzes the prophesies in the bible (there's like 8000+ of them) that have either come true or are yet to come true if they regard end times, and talks about the astronomical mathematical probabilities of even just a few things coming true, not the thousands that have. Just as an example. Between 250 and 500 years before Jesus was born there were approximately three hundred specific prophecies relating just to his birth, his life, his miracles, his death, and his resurrection. Let's just take eight things. 1. Place of birth 2. Time of birth 3. Manner of birth 4. Betrayal. 5. Manner of death 6. People's reactions 7. Piercing and 8. Burial
Page 193 of Josh's book addresses only these eight specific prophecies that people are in total agreement with. The chance that any one man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is one in ten to the 17th power or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. To put that in better perspective. If you take the state of Texas and put it two feet deep in silver dollars and try to find just one coin out of all of those you would have the probability of just eight of these three hundred prophecies coming true. This is the same chance that the prophets had in writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them according to their own wisdom. The probability of all 300 of them coming true; which they did, is beyond mathematical comprehension. Peter Stoner's book, Science Speaks, pp100-107, expands that to 48 prophecies with the chance that any one man could fulfill all forty eight as being one in ten to the one hundred and fifty seventh power -
also an unimagineable number - yet all 300 prophecies came true. If we expand that into the thousands of prophecies that have come true in the bible; it starts to paint a picture that the bible was truly penned by the holy spirit and even though the ink was put down by the hands of men, it was truly God's words being penned. Want some specifics on these prophecies? Go to
http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/messiah.htm
and they are all listed right there for you along with the passages in the bible that states them. Chapter 8 of Josh's book "Evidence that demands a verdict" also lists these specific prophecies that were ALL fulfilled. I
also have them posted at http://www.detailshere.com/propheciesfulfilledbyjesus.htm
You are probably asking yourself
"How do eight prophecies" yield a probability of 10 to the 17th
power?
If I
predict correctly all four digits in a four–digit lottery, the likelihood of
that occurring by chance is one in 10,000 because for each digit, the
probability is one in ten.
ten x ten x ten x ten = 10,000. If I predict another four digits
correctly, the likelihood of this event occurring by chance is one in
100,000,000, ten thousand times ten thousand. If I predict correctly another
four digits, the probability of this occurring by chance is one in
1,000,000,000,000; ten thousand times ten thousand times ten thousand.
The correct prediction of a four-digit lottery three times in a row is extremely unlikely to occur by chance. The correct prediction of an 8 digit lottery in the same manner is beyond comprehension. It is more likely to have happened by design. This could happen if I control the process of selecting the winning numbers. This could happen if I have knowledge of the future (prescience). Where has this ability come from? One explanation is that it is from an omniscient intelligence.
Predicting one specific historical event in the future is possible by guessing. Predicting many specific historical events in the future is very unlikely by guesswork. Predicting a series of specific historical events in a specific order is even more unlikely by guesswork. Predicting just eight historical events relating to just one person in the sequence they occurred during the time frame they occurred is simply beyond yhe concept of any probability.
If we take that a step further and dwelve into what's happening with the discoveries being found in bible code today via computers, it becomes even more evident that the bible is not a book of myths. To understand how The Bible Code works, imagine that The Old Testament is constructed like a giant crossword puzzle. It is encoded from beginning to end with words that connect to tell a hidden story. Each code is a case of adding every fourth or twelfth or fiftieth letter to form a word. Skip x spaces, and another x spaces, and another x spaces, and the hidden message is spelled out. Hidden code in The Bible reveals the details of events that have taken place thousands of years after The Bible was written. The assassination of Rabin is dramatic confirmation of the reality of The Bible code. The hidden text in The Old Testament/Covenant reveals the future and proves the existence of God. Rabin's assassination was not the only modern event found. In addition to other assassinations, hundreds of other world-shaking events are also encoded in The Bible - everything from World War 2 to Watergate, from Winston Churchill to Bill Clinton, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, from the Moon landing to the collision of a comet (Shoemaker-Levy) with Jupiter. Again, mathematical probabilty precludes any other explanation than the bible was penned by Yahweh himself via the holy spirit instilling the prose on paper through the hands of men. See
www.detailshere.com/biblecode.htm
for much more on this subject.
Josh's book as well as what is being found in bible code, proved to me beyond the shadow of any doubt that the people, places and events depicted in scripture actually did happen. It's all for real. Now, the reasoning went; if all of these things in the past that were predicted came true; then there's probably a pretty good chance that the events mentioned in both Daniel's and John's Revelation, depicting what's to come in the future, will probably come true too. When I started studying this issue, revelation, I didn't like what I was discovering. We are in for some challenging times ahead. Although revelation is written in symbolic language; there is enough help on the internet today from a multitude of resources to get it mostly figured out what to expect and where we are in this timeline today. My page at
www.detailshere.com/understandingrevelation.htm
takes the mystery out of what revelation says.
And another answer I found that I didn't like. If God made the earth in 7 days and to him a day is a thousand years; and the time from Adam and Eve to present is 6000 years plus or minus a year or two; guess what?? It's time for the earth
to rest for a thousand years. But before it gets to rest, this thing called tribulation has to occur; and it doesn't take that long, but boy does it get nasty in the process. My religious upbringing told me I would be raptured out of here if I was good and wouldn't have to go through any of the hard times. Wrong; that was another truth I found out; there is NO pretrib rapture; we are going to have to stick it out to the end.
(www.detailshere.com/rapture.htm ) Well, that certainly threw a different light on the subject. These discoveries then started a very serious bible study. That was several years ago. But you know what, figuring it all out today with all the tremendous resources available on the net is a whole lot easier than it would have been going to a library and using traditional methods. A library would not avail you to the quantity of information (as well as misinformation) that the net will. Many who have visited my site at
www.detailshere.com/bible.htm
are overwhelmed with the quantity of information and study lessons there. What I have done is that I have tried to save you a lot of research time on the important issues such as death, immortality, hell, spiritualism, etc.; things you need to know the right answers to so you don't get sucked into Satan's deceptions. My site does not promote any specific sect.
It is my opinion that Christ's endtime remnant church is not Lutheran or Methodist or Baptist or Mormon or Jehovah's Witness or
Catholic or even 7th Day Adventist which lays claims to that notion. It is comprised of those people who keep God's ten commandments; all ten of them including worship and rest on the right day of the week; and who do believe in and accept the salvation of Jesus and will refuse the mark of the beast when it becomes required to either buy or sell. It's that simple.
On the page at www.detailshere.com/bible2.htm
there is a section near the beginning called "How to get to Heaven". There's only
six things there. It's not a difficult complicated issue. And it's non secular. Christ's church is NON SECULAR.
It is comprised of those people of all faiths who will keep the ten
commandments, accept the salvation offered by Jesus, and refuse to take the mark
of the beast coming at us soon.
Time is now short. Of the 7 seals, 7 trumpets, and 7 bowls of revelation - we are now in the fifth seal it is felt by many; the persecution of Christians ( see
www.detailshere.com/bibleprophesy.htm for a good explanation of that) . Once we hit the first trumpet ( a meteor firestorm following a worldwide huge earthquake) things start to happen rapidly - it isn't another thousand years to the end; it happens from step to step rapidly; in a matter of just days and it is going to happen to this generation. Preparing yourself and your family for this period in earth's history will not be an easy task; especially when you are sitting on the fence not even admitting that the bible and scriptures are in fact God's words, as many are. I have made the journey easier if you will, by the material and lessons I have posted at
www.detailshere.com/bible2.htm , but read the material and follow the links. It is but a time commitment that many are not willing to make. The consequences are dire, permanent elimination, for not doing so.
There is only one chance to go to heaven. And that is at the second coming, which may very well happen in our lifetime, maybe even
within the next ten years. Those that go to heaven will either be the righteous dead who are raised first at the second coming, or the righteous living who are transformed at that moment (raptured if you will) also and taken with Jesus to heaven. Everyone else is either killed by his fiery presence or will remain in the grave until the second judgment and resurrection a thousand years later. But none of those people go to heaven. They either remain on the new earth
if they come around to God during the test period at that time, or are tossed into the lake of fire
on earth at that time for permanent disposal; what we now know of as Hell.
The rewards are great for making that journey to understand and know God; unending immortality in an exquisite environment, the new earth, for believing in God's word, accepting salvation, doing the will of the Father, and knowing what the beast will do and not accepting his mark. The answers do not have to be vague and ambiguous; the answers are there if you will but research and ask. Spend some time with my page at
www.detailshere.com/bible.htm and don't be afraid to ask me questions at
berry@detailshere.com I don't claim to have all the answers; but I have some pretty key people to toss questions to that come up with some pretty good answers to the toughies.
But the first step in the journey is to realize that the bible is God's word, and not the notions of man.
Is the bible perfect?? NO. Man has penned errors in the bible. But they are not
enough to worry about. For most part it tells us what we need to know about God
and the life of Christ and the promise that Jesus justified our sins at the
cross if we but accept the gift of grace offered to us.
The above was prepared to get you past that first step. Without making it past that first step, you cannot climb the rest of the ladder. It only took me 50 some years to get past that first step; but I did, and nobody can retract it now that I know those truths. Please join me in the rest of the journey at
www.detailshere.com/bible.htm
Ber