Tuesday, June 21, 2022

J. C. Ryle on End Times Prophecy

Valuable resource. J C Ryle on the Sercond Coming of Christ, a book of sermons on the subject written in 1879, or better to say, compiled. In his preface to the book Ryle lays out the elements of prophecy he's entirely sure of, and lists elemtns he doesn't discuss because although he has opinions about them they are too speculative and he wants to stick only to what he knows.

Among what he considers to be known from scripture are the certain return of the jews to their ancestral land, to be dealt with in the Great Tribulation; the identify of the Harlot Church, Mystery Babylon and the Antichrist with the Roman Catholic Church, although he thinks there will probably be a fuller expression of it by the time of the end; that includes the identify ot the Roman Church as the Great Apostasy; the resstoration of the Earth in the Millennium following the return of Christ when SWatan is bound for a thousand years. Among the things he won't discuss because he can only speculate on them, is the Rapture of the Church.

So far I've only heard the Preface. I' mm looking forward to the sermons.

John MacArthur on the Problem of Evil

Now I think this one is MacArthur's best sermon ever:

The Bible Means What It Says, Just Believe It.

Jordan Peterson does very much appreciate the bible as the foundational text of western civilization. It's a very important recognition:



If only he believed it. Early into this video he says he can't understand what believers in the bible mean when we say it is true. That is boggling to me. Perhaps he's absorbed too much of postmodern inability to recognize what truth is.

Seems so simple: What it says is true. Just as written. God made the heavens and the earth. Adam and Eve are really our first parents. Really. Cain really did kill Abel. They were both real people. Jesus Christ really was born of a virgin so that He had God for His literal father. That was so He would be sinless because only a sinless man qualified tro die in the place of sinners to pay our debt for us. He really did die. The text says He died. You lie about it whehn you insist He didn't really die because it says He died. And He came back to life. Really came back to life. But in a new body that would walk through walls. Yes really. We don't have any problem knowing what true means. It can only be that Peterson does because he simple can't believe what it says so he finds it "true" in some other sense than that it really is true in the sense that iwhat it says really happened.

When you read it, simply believe what it says. Very simple.