Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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(Today’s Reading)
The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact
(Book Installment 58)
The Plan Behind the Second Coming
Chapter 4 – The Predetermined Plan
The Plan’s Three R’s: 3) Recordation
Instead of “recordation,” I could have said “documentation” – except that “The Two R’s and a D” is not as memorable as “The Three R’s.”
God’s plan had to produce a record of the revelation and restoration. Why? Because without a reliable record of all that He revealed and restored, the truth of it all could be distorted…and even lost.
Let’s think it through. If God’s predetermined plan and its execution had not been documented, this omission wouldn’t negate the revelation and restoration that had been achieved. That is, the absence of documentation wouldn’t and couldn’t affect reality. But that absence could, and probably would, affect what succeeding generations knew about that reality. This is because without written records, humanity would be solely dependent on word of mouth for information. Oral communications can work fine for contemporaries, but they’re not failsafe. More importantly, word of mouth really starts to break down when you have to rely on it generation after generation. Without texts to go back to, knowledge gets “lost to history.”
If the Bible had not been produced and preserved, everyone would still be going to heaven instead of Sheol (Hades) when they died as a result of the plan being completed at the Second Coming late in the 1st century…but would we in the 21st century know about it? Stop and think. You and I could be sitting here today, bound for heaven, but if we did not have a way of knowing that, how much more depressing, forbidding, and meaningless would be our existence on this earth! Half the fun of a vacation is looking forward to it.
God’s plan called for gradual recordation, along with ways to validate the records that were produced. He didn’t start the Bible with Adam or even with Abraham. He waited until Moses. Why? Because the time of Moses was when the descendants of Abraham became a nation. And a nation has the means and the motivation to maintain its founding documents, and/or copies thereof. God wasn’t waiting on someone who knew how to write; otherwise, he could have gotten the Bible started much sooner. He was waiting until there was a means of protecting, preserving, and passing on records to succeeding generations.
Early Christianity was a multi-national social movement. How then would those records be protected? Consider this: If, God forbid, the National Archives in Washington D.C were to be destroyed such that the originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution became nothing but ashes, all succeeding generations could still know what they said from the innumerable copies that reside around the country…and even the world. We know what the originals of the New Testament texts say, even though we don’t have them, by just the same means.
The effective recordation of God’s predetermined plan allows us to know – and teach our children about – the revelation and the restoration inherent in that plan. As long as we have the Bible, we can recover anything and everything about the plan that gets forgotten from one generation to the next – such as the Second Coming becoming an accomplished fact long ago.
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