For Camping’s followers: it’s May 22, let’s have a serious talk

May 21 has come and gone. You won’t hear an “I told you so” from this Christian. No jokes. No funny looks. No condescending pity. Only concern.

When someone predicts a date for the rapture, it is not a miscalculation, but an actual sin.[1] It is a sin that has dreadful consequences for those who believe a lie. Harold Camping’s teaching is one such lie.

Nor can we say, well, he was wrong about the details of the rapture, but it was good because at least it got people thinking about God. Nonsense! People are using the failed prophecy right now as an excuse not to think about Christ or his coming. May 21 at 6pm, and you know what was happening at the Family Radio headquarters? People were dancing to rock music and making jokes about the Lord. Family Radio has set back the course of the gospel.

What will Camping do next? If history is any guide, he will take one of these options: (more…)

Published in: on May 22, 2011 at 11:47 am  Comments (2)  
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For followers of Harold Camping and Family Radio – “Take the May 22 Challenge”

Please also see my blog after May 22: http://justinofnablus.com/2011/05/22/for-campings-followers-its-may-22-lets-have-a-serious-talk/

There are thousands of followers of Family Radio who believe that the Lord will return on May 21, 2011. I have read the material of Harold Camping and am thoroughly convinced that his calculations are groundless. He is a man of boundless imagination but he uses it to wiggle out of the clear truth of God’s Word.

Please take it from someone who has loved Bible prophecy his whole life that Harold Camping’s dating system is a house of cards and will not come to pass. Of course, he would use my opinion as “proof” that I am the one who is apostate. That is what is known as circular reasoning.

Mark 13:32 says that “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” (I’m using the KJV, since Camping does). Like many false teachers, Camping has “proven” that that verse does not apply to him. In fact, it does. This means that Camping is claiming that he knows that which the Son of God does not know. This is not a question of an error, or miscalculation, but false teaching. And this is why people cannot be neutral about him, or say, “Well, who knows, it’s interesting, perhaps yes, perhaps no.” By definition Camping and Family Radio have committed sacrilege. (more…)

Published in: on May 9, 2011 at 2:31 pm  Comments (24)  
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Have they Discovered the Lost Prayer Diary of Elijah?

The following is a scholarly address, which I seem to remember giving many years ago before the International Association of Scholars, Theologians, Philosophers and other Professional Thinking Persons (AFL-CIO).

Thank you for your invitation to address this scholarly assembly. Webster’s defines “scholarly” as “Of, relating to, or characteristic of scholars or scholarship”; but later on it gives a couple of other definitions,including #3 “depressingly and numbingly monotonous, dull, or wordy.” That seems to land us just about where we need to be. My lecture today concerns a recently discovered manuscript from around the Dead Sea that has by chance fallen into my hands, the so-called Prayer Diary of Elijah.

This discovery could shed new light on James 5: “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.”

Yet some scholars have doubts as to the new manuscript’s veracity (more…)

Published in: on March 20, 2011 at 5:53 pm  Comments Off  
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Is sin “missing the mark”?

Have you been told that the word for “sin” literally means “missing the mark” in the original Greek? In fact, it does not.

The verb “hamartano” (αμαρτανω) was sometimes used in pre-Classical and Classical Greek to refer to missing a target. (more…)

Published in: on December 28, 2010 at 8:19 pm  Comments (5)  
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How did they train disciples in the Early Church?

Paul didn’t just pass out workbooks and tell his disciples to fill in the blanks for next Sunday. He didn’t go on TV and tell millions of people how to live, then pack up and go home. No, he was a day-to-day living model of how a Christian should live: “you became imitators of us and of the Lord” (1 Thess 1:6a); “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). This method is traditionally known as mimesis.

Christian leaders must assume that they are always being watched and imitated. In this way they ar (more…)

Published in: on November 11, 2010 at 6:20 pm  Comments (8)  
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Bible Commentaries and Dictionaries, a word of advice from Logos and myself

Kyle Anderson from Logos software just published a fine article on how to use Bible dictionaries (http://blog.logos.com/archives/2010/10/improving_your_bible_study_with_dictionaries.html). He warns against simply reaching for a commentary when we are studying the Bible. I heartily applaud this basic sentiment. As Christians, we are supposed to be enjoying the Bible, not reading the tale of how some other person enjoyed it. It is refreshing to read the following from Gordon Fee, in his NICNT commentary on First and Second Thessalonians (p. x): “…as has been my lifelong habit, I write the commentary first and then consult the secondary literature, making any necessary adjustments and adding the proper footnotes.” Of course, this is Gordon Fee, who is able to write a basic commentary on the text without any secondary literature, a feat far beyond what most of us can handle. Still, the ideal is the same.

How sad to realize that many commentary writers are spending much more time in the secondary literature than they are in the text of Scripture. (more…)

Published in: on October 27, 2010 at 9:47 am  Comments (2)  

Will God Heal Us? A Re-Examination of Jas. 5:14-16

By Gary Shogren, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

Originally published in Evangelical Quarterly 61 (1989): 99-108; bibliography and some ancient references updated in 2008.

“Are any among you ill? Let them summon the presbyters of the Church and let them pray over them after anointing them in the name of the Lord with olive oil. And the prayer offered in faith will deliver the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and if they are in the state of having committed sins, they will be forgiven them. Therefore confess (your) sins to each another and pray for each other so that you might be healed.” James 5:1-16a (author’s rendering from the Greek)

Jas 5:14-16 is intriguing on several counts: (1) because it seems to give an unqualified promise of answered prayer, as in Jn 14:13-14; (2) because it involves physical healing; (3) because the Catholic Church bases two of its sacraments on it; (4) because anointing with oil seems exotic to many Protestants. The need for a careful study of Jas 5 is all the more valid in an age when medical technology has taken on religious connotations of its own, when religion and science are neatly divided into Cartesian categories, with healing generally being claimed by the category of science. The issue is further heightened with the latter-day spread of holistic treatment and the Health and Wealth Gospel with its sometime rejection of medical technology,[1] movements which soften the distinction between supernatural healing and natural law. (more…)

Published in: on October 9, 2010 at 10:00 am  Comments (4)  
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Did they discover a giant skeleton in Greece (or Egypt or Saudi Arabia?). Well, no…

 By Gary Shogren, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

Don’t believe everything you read. When it comes to spams, the rule of thumb is, reject it unless you have credible proof (a second spam is not credible proof). To put in another way, an e-mail that has obviously been circulating for a while with the header THIS IS REALLY COOL is probably not the best source for reliable information.

I keep receiving spams in Spanish and in English, claiming that they have discovered skeletons of giants. This is said to prove the truth of Genesis 6:4, that there were giants in the land. The spam offers pictures, which, of course, have supposedly been hushed up by the secular news media.

In fact, it was an entrant in a photo-editing contest by the group “Word 1000″ by a guy using software. It’s a complete hoax.

See http://www.snopes.com/photos/odd/giantman.asp

Enjoy your Bible…use common sense…reject hoaxes.

Published in: on September 22, 2010 at 9:45 am  Leave a Comment  
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The First Amendment, beta version

By Gary Shogren, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

Newt Gingrich is on record as saying: There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

I am not taking this out of context, as can be seen at http://www.newt.org/newt-direct/newt-gingrich-statement-proposed-mosqueislamic-community-center-near-ground-zero. Note that Mr. Gingrich is not arguing against the wisdom or the propriety of the Cordoba Center. What he says is that American citizens of Saudi origin should not enjoy freedom of religion – which has always included freedom to erect religious centers. (more…)

Published in: on September 7, 2010 at 2:41 pm  Leave a Comment  
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The Parable of the Lost Coin, Luke 15:8-10

By Gary Shogren, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica

8 “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she has found it, she calls her friends and neighbors together, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I lost!’ 10 Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

I lose things all the time: the other day it was my constant companion, my iPod. I couldn’t listen to my Audible Book. So, I think, when did I last have it, and eventually I found it where I thought it might be. But I lose stuff so often, I can’t be bothered to get upset. My wife said: “It’ll turn up!” “Yeah, it’ll turn up.” And it did.

The people in the parables of Luke 15 are not that blasé – they feel their loss. (more…)

Published in: on August 15, 2010 at 7:56 pm  Comments (6)  
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