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Tuesday, August 15, 2017
'Keep Your Eyes on Jesus,' Not the Eclipse - CBN News Julie Stahl
Created by Don Davis with NASA HEC support © Rice University 2017
'Keep Your Eyes on Jesus,' Not the Eclipse
08-15-2017
CBN News Julie Stahl
JERUSALEM, Israel – God can speak to us through signs in the heavens, but the primary way God speaks to Christians is through His Son, said Stephen Bridge, the director of Jerusalem's Garden Tomb.
Some 300,000 Christians from around the world are expected to visit the Garden Tomb this year. Many believe that it's the garden and sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, and therefore a possible site of the resurrection of Jesus.
In light of the upcoming solar eclipse, which will be visible across parts of the United States on August 21, CBN News asked Bridge if he thinks God is still speaking to us by signs in the heavens.
"I think that some of that depends on our own personality – and I'm not downplaying that – but the biggest way God speaks is through His Son," Bridge said.
"So the writer to the Hebrews draws that out. In former times God spoke in many and various ways through the prophets, but in the last days He's spoken through His Son and so for us that Jesus is the revelation, Jesus is the Word made flesh, Jesus is the ultimate sign and His death and resurrection, the ultimate sign of that," Bridge said.
The Bible tells us there were three hours of darkness when Jesus was hanging on the cross and the moment he gave up his spirit "the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; the earth shook and the rocks split."
"The four Gospel writers each pick out different facts that are not in any way contradictory but they are highlighting different facts in order to make strongly the points they particularly are trying to make," Bridge explained.
Matthew is the only Gospel that mentions the darkness. But the central theme of all is that "that the word became flesh and the flesh, the Word of God, died on a cross just outside the city walls of Jerusalem and that in so doing God carried in His own body of the Messiah the sins of the world and through Him reconciled all things to Himself," he said.
Matthew is the only Gospel that mentions the darkness. But the central theme of all is that "that the word became flesh and the flesh, the Word of God, died on a cross just outside the city walls of Jerusalem and that in so doing God carried in His own body of the Messiah the sins of the world and through Him reconciled all things to Himself," he said.
Could that darkness have been an eclipse and what did it mean?
According to NASA, a solar eclipse, when the sun is darkened, only lasts a few minutes. Based on that information, it couldn't have been an eclipse.
"We have no explanation of what it was or even what it meant, but it certainly would have invoked in the people who were there a profound sense of something monumental, which indeed it was," Bridge said.
So how should believers relate to the upcoming astronomical events?
"Keep our eyes on Jesus," Bridge he said, pointing out that so far everyone who predicted a date for the return of Jesus or the start of the tribulation has been wrong.
"So I think we just need to be cautious, fix our eyes on Jesus, hold firmly to scripture and keep proclaiming the mystery and the profound victory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah."
"So I think we just need to be cautious, fix our eyes on Jesus, hold firmly to scripture and keep proclaiming the mystery and the profound victory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah."
Archaeologists Unearth Roman Era Stone Water Pots near Biblical Cana - CBN News Tzippe Barrow,Julie Stahl
Archaeologists Unearth Roman Era Stone Water Pots near Biblical Cana
08-15-2017 CBN News Tzippe Barrow, Julie Stahl
JERUSALEM, Israel – Israeli archaeologists are excavating a 2,000-year-old stone quarry and production center for stone vessels not far from the ancient city of Cana where Jesus performed his first recorded miracle, turning water into wine.
Archaeologists uncovered the small cave during construction work for a municipal sports center by Reina's local council. They are excavating two sites at Reina, about a kilometer (half mile) apart, just south of the modern village of Kafr Kanna in the lower Galilee. Scholars believe Kafr Kanna may be the site of biblical Cana.
"On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding. And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, 'They have no wine...Now there were six stone water jars set there for the Jewish custom of purification, containing twenty to thirty gallons each." (John 2:1-3, 6)
The excavations at Reina are the third and fourth such workshops uncovered to date in Israel. The other two were discovered decades ago near Jerusalem.
Excavation director Dr. Yonatan Adler, who is a senior lecturer at Ariel University, said the discovery attests to the importance of ritual purity in the lives of Galilean Jews during Jesus time.
"The reason for this curious choice of material seems to have been religious. According to ancient Jewish ritual law, vessels made of pottery are easily made impure and must be broken. Stone, on the other hand, was thought to be a material that can never become ritually impure, and as a result ancient Jews began to produce some of their everyday tableware from stone," he said.
Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre, an expert in the Roman Era Galilee, says fragments of Roman era stone vessels have been found alongside pottery fragments in both rural and urban Jewish settings over the years.
"The fact that Jews at this time used stone vessels for religious reasons is well attested in the Talmudic sources and in the New Testament as well," Alexandre said. "It is possible that large stone containers of the type mentioned in the wedding at Cana of Galilee story may have been produced locally in [the] Galilee."
Ancient chisel marks covering the walls, ceiling and floor of the cave indicate it was a hewn cave.
Adler explained that the production waste unearthed in the cave indicate workers produced mainly mugs with handles and various sizes of bowls.
"The finished products were marketed throughout the region here in Galilee, and our finds provide striking evidence that Jews here were scrupulous regarding the purity laws," he said.
Photos and Video, Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority, Samuel Magal
Ben Shapiro, Lila Rose and the Rising Tide of Young Conservatives - MICHAEL BROWN CHARISMA NEWS
Ben Shapiro, Lila Rose and the Rising Tide of Young Conservatives
MICHAEL BROWN CHARISMA NEWS
If there's anything that opinion polls teach us, it's that the younger generation is much more liberal than the older generation, especially when it comes to LGBT issues. This younger generation, we are told, has grown up without many of the biases and bigotries of the older generation, and they are not as constrained by religious dogmas.
That's why they are more embracing of same-sex "marriage" and transgender identity, and that's why their children will be even more embracing than they are. Accordingly, the narrative goes, once the older generation dies out, resistance to LGBT activism will be virtually gone.
This certainly does sound like a reasonable argument, and it carries a certain air of inevitability. But is it inevitable? Are there are any signs suggesting that things may not be so cut and dry?
On the one hand, the polls certainly confirm this narrative, and it could well be that our society has made an irreversible turn.
On the other hand, there are several factors that make me wonder if the future is as fixed as it appears.
First, many young people become more conservative as they get older. As the old (exaggerated) saying goes, if you're not a liberal when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not a conservative when you're old, you don't have a brain.
Second, the left in general, along with the LGBT activism in particular, has a habit of overplaying its hand, thereby creating resistance to its agenda. How many James Damores are there in the Googles of this world, ready to push back against the diversity thought police? How many young people are becoming uncomfortable with the intolerance of the tolerant, finding "progressivism" to be quite repressive?
Third, liberalism really doesn't work. What happens when the promises of socialism fail to deliver? What kind of backlash will that produce? What happens when the ever-evolving family structure starts to collapse? What will the failure of the radical left agenda leave in its wake?
Fourth, there is a rising tide of young conservative voices, implying that there is a growing number of young conservatives. Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid, and perhaps some on the left are being persuaded by the arguments on the right.
The National Review recently noted that Ben Shapiro's podcast had moved up second place on iTunes, behind only Oprah Winfrey, which is quite an amazing accomplishment. And is there any ambiguity on where Shapiro, himself just 33 years old, stands on today's moral and cultural issues?
Shapiro's podcast is ahead of TED talks, ahead of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, ahead of the Joe Rogan Experience. Not only so, but when Shapiro recently appeared on Rogan's show, their YouTube video immediately went viral. And note that their conversation included a lengthy exposé of transgender talking points, which also went viral when it was posted by itself. As of this writing, that segment on YouTube showed 13,704 Thumbs Up to 1,182 Thumbs Down.
And who makes up the majority of Shapiro's audience? When I emailed him that question a few days ago, he wrote back, "The majority of our audience is under age 35."
What do you know!
And what about people like Lila Rose, leader of Live Action, and one of a growing army of young, pro-life activists?
Rose is just 29 herself, but she has been an unstoppable force of godly opposition to the Goliath called Planned Parenthood. The momentum of her movement is increasing, not decreasing. In fact, many young pro-lifers believe that their generation is more opposed to abortion than their parents' generation.
If the tide could shift here, why not in other cultural areas as well? At the least, the alleged inevitable, national embrace of abortion that we were told to expect years ago has not materialized.
Roe v. Wade settled nothing. Instead, it became the rallying point of the pro-life movement, which is still pushing back more than four decades later. Could the same thing happen one day with Obergefell vs. Hodges?
Other young voices, like the popular blogger Matt Walsh, or the radio sensation Steven Crowder, or groups like Campus Reform, all point in the same direction: Lots of young people are not going along with today's PC narrative, and that means that the future is not as fixed as our friends on the left would suggest.
And let's not forget the voice of young conservative scholars like 35-year-old Ryan T. Anderson, refuting leftist arguments with academic acumen and grace.
I'm 62 years old, clearly part of the older, supposedly more bigoted generation. But my single largest audience on social media is in the 25-34 year-old bracket. In fact, on our page Facebook, we have slightly more followers aged 18-24 than aged 55-64. Not surprisingly, wherever I go to speak, young people, many in their teens, thank me for taking a stand and being their voice.
Let's also not forget about conservative schools like Liberty University, currently with a student body of 110,000, roughly 15,000 on campus and 95,000 online. A professor there told me that Liberty is now producing half of all military chaplains. What does this say about the future?
And as secular universities lurch farther and farther to the left, how many parents and teens will seek out other schools of higher learning?
There's also a spiritual factor that greatly encourages me, as the large majority of Christians devoted to day and night prayer for America are young people. Surely this is another good sign. Perhaps God has something to say about our future as well
Again, I know how the polls look, and I know how dramatically our nation has shifted, especially in terms of the consistent, far-left message put out so much of the media.
But the rising tide of young conservative voices cannot be denied, and I assure you that they will not be silenced.
Dr. Michael Brown (www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Saving a Sick America: A Prescription for Moral and Cultural Transformation. Connect with him on Facebook or Twitter.
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