Studies on the Fringe of Christianity
Chapter 5 of the book of Matthew starts off with Jesus listing the Beatitudes, given in the Sermon on the Mount. These items are the characteristics of true believers. Immediately following these blessings, Jesus gives what is called the Similitudes about salt and light, which describe the functions of our Christian character. This study will …
Someone asked me, the other day, if I believed that aliens were here. They weren’t talking about legal or illegal people from a foreign country living in the United States, but of intelligent beings, other than human, from outside the earth’s boundaries. This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this question and it is …
I have covered some of this biblical information about people’s names in bits and pieces of other articles over the last few years, but never consolidated the data into a study of its own. We will look into how people’s names during bible times were chosen, and more importantly, why were they sometimes changed into …
Have you ever heard a Pastor tell his congregation that it is not necessary to tithe? Well, although I may get a lot of criticism for writing this article, let me state right here and now that there is no New Testament authority for mandatory giving of money to the Church. Tithing was part of …
This article is not a discourse on the whole book of Job in the Bible, but only concerns the second half of chapter 4, where one of Job’s friends explains a dream he once had. The friend believes it is divine wisdom from God, and we will examine the dream to see if that is …
A Study of Daniel Chapter 3 Most times that I’ve brought up the story in the Book of Daniel about the three Hebrew boys being thrown into the fiery furnace, people respond to the event as being mostly just a child’s Bible story. It is a good story with life applications for youngsters trying to …
The Ten Commandments are ten principles given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai after the enslaved Israelites were delivered out of Egypt. These ten major rules were written upon two tablets of stone and called the Decalogue,1 but best known as the Ten Commandments. These commandments are listed in the Bible in two forms, …
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28, KJV).1 Over the years, I’ve been asked …
The Bible scholar Robert Baker Girdlestone was accurate when he stated, “The difficulty of the translator usually begins with the name of God . . . it has caused perplexity, if not dissension, in the case of many new translations.”1 This dilemma is caused by many problems inherent to the Hebrew language and the facts …
I’ve tried to write this article several times, over the last couple of years, and always ended up putting it aside “until later.” Even this time I started to repeat my frustration, realizing that even a few thousand words could not explain this subject properly, but I persevered by believing what scant information I could …