Kingdom Ready

Alright, time to get back in the habit of posting new content here on KR!  Sorry everyone for being absent from around here. I’ve got a ton of stuff from last month’s Theological Conference in Atlanta and this month’s One God Conference in Austin to share and publish here.

I’ll start today with a paper I just received the other day from Dr. John Roller on the importance of Conditional Immortality.  I really enjoyed it and I hope you will too!

How Important Is “Conditional Immortality”?

by Dr. John H. Roller

Introduction

Hey all, you may enjoy reading 1 John today during your devotional time.  I noticed this morning a common phrase of John that will be helpful for our own lives and as we are discipling others – “by this”.  It says a lot of who the children of God are/aren’t as well as gives us some defining characteristics of God.  For example:

1 John 3:18-19 – Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.  19 We will know by this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him

1 John 3:24 – The one who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. We know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.

1 John 4:1-3 – Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God;  3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.

1 John 4:9 – By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

1 John 4:13-15 – By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.  14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.  15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.

1 John 4:16-17 -  We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  17 By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.

1 John 5:1-2 - Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.  2 By

this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments.

I’m now embarking on posting here on the KR blog the paper that I wrote and presented as a speaker at Sir Anthony Buzzard’s & the Atlanta Bible College’s “20th Theological Conference” in Atlanta, GA on 5/13/11.  Originally this paper was titled “A Common Sense Approach to the Biblical Presentation of Jesus, Death, and THE Devil“. However at 20 very long typed pages it is just too much to post on the blog.  In talking with Sean there at the conference about the KR blog, he brought up Victor’s thinking that more people will read short articles than long ones.  I think that’s a smart approach and is something I will try to do here where possible. Plus this gives me a lot of subject material for quite some time!  Keep in mind though, that I wrote this as a long-form paper and its topics won’t always break into similar sizes – in other words, some of these segments will be nice and short and others will be considerably longer.

Acts 26:16-18 16 ‘But get up and stand on your feet; for this purpose I have appeared to you, to appoint you a minister and a witness not only to the things which you have seen, but also to the things in which I will appear to you;  17 rescuing you from the Jewish people and from the Gentiles, to whom I am sending you,  18 to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me.’

Here’s an interesting piece from Ivan Maddox of West End Bible Fellowship in Atlanta GA.  He brings up some intriguing points concerning the trees in the story of the Garden of Eden.

By popular demand (2 requests!), here is the article from my website.

Introduction

One of the most hotly contested passages of Scripture is so well known that it has a name – the Comma Johanneum, or Johannine Comma. In this case, “comma” refers not to punctuation but to a clause. In the KJV, I John 5:7-8 reads as follows:

I John 5:
7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

Theology regularly takes the driver seat in Bible study. This is only natural since our theology is the construct or model we hold in mind while we read. For example, our theology of God informs how we read Scripture. If one believes that only the Father is God then he will struggle with certain verses (like John 20.28) while reading others with ease (like John 17.3). When we encounter difficult texts our tendency is to explain them away so that we need not alter our theological model on that particular subject. We may look at other translations until we find one that agrees with what we think it should say or else pontificate conspiracy theories that all the extant manuscripts are corrupt because the “evil” early Church Fathers and scribes had a nefarious agenda. Thus, our theology leads our Bible study rather than the other way around. But, what if this is doing things backwards? What if this way of studying the Bible is inherently dangerous?