Psalm 91 Is More Literary Than It Is Magical
The entire psalm has a well-designed symmetrical use of poetic devices. Figure 2 shows how verses 12, 1416 are direct speeches verses 26 and 1113 employ various metaphors and verses 710 emphasize that no dangers will draw near Gods people. The last three verses are the highlight of the psalm. They are Gods own confession consisting of seven I will verbs. As a whole, the psalm highlights two main points from the two halves respectively: what happens to those who trust and dwell in God? And why and how do these things happen?
Adventist Theologian Weighs In On Whether It Is Biblically Appropriate To Seek Immunization
The word vaccination does not occur in the Bible, as is the case with many other important health terms like vitamins, transfusion, high blood pressure, kidney transplant, injection, pills, and so on. In the Bible there are no Mothers Against Drunk Driving groups, anti-smoking campaigns, instructions on gym classes or breathing fresh air, drinking 68 glasses of water every day, washing your hands before each meal, brushing your teeth, and so on. We could create a much longer list of such good practices not verbally addressed in the Holy Scriptures.
Whats in Your Bible?
That list would include the command, Be vaccinated or Dont be vaccinated, so we need godly thinking to guide us as to whether to be vaccinated or not. Biblical teaching can help to counter mis- and dis-information on health issues, even though it is not a medical textbook on health.
The Holy Scriptures present important health principles that are to be the bases of such reflections, beneficial components, and elements we can implement in everyday routines of life. The general rule is plain: what is in harmony with biblical health principles and does not contradict them is permissible. One can argue that it may be recommended or even required when health or life is to be preserved.
The same sound rule must be applied to vaccinations: what is not prohibited is acceptable when it is in harmony with Gods revealed health principles.
Rules About Vaxingand Much More
Way out of Line
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On September 9, President Joe Biden announced new executive action concerning COVID-19 vaccines. According to the presidents plan, all employers with more than 100 employees must require their workers to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. Businesses that do not comply with the rule can be fined up to $14,000 per violation. The new mandate follows a recent mandate that all federal employees receive the vaccine, get tested weekly, or face dismissal from their job.
The new regulation is supposed to be drafted and implemented by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor . Currently, it is unclear what type of medical, religious, or conscience exemptions will be granted concerning the vaccine mandate.
How should Christians respond to President Bidens sweeping vaccine mandate? Specifically, how should Christians think about religious exemptions and accommodations? Admittedly, these are complex questions on which many biblically grounded Christians differ. But given the scope and far-reaching consequences for civil liberties, conscience rights, religious freedom, and the ability of families to make health decisions, these questions deserve careful consideration and reflection.
Legal concerns
Role of government
Political concerns
Conscience concerns
Abortion concerns
Final reflections
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Claims That Vaccines Involve Human Tissue Debunked
The intrusion of government is of special concern to many who oppose mandatory vaccines, says one anti-vaccination advocacy group.
“No one, including the government, has the right to insist that another person, or another person’s child, be injected with anything,” Vaccine Choice Canada states in a one-page explainer provided by email.
Many also fear acknowledged risks of getting vaccines, which have included rare instances of serious adverse reactions, while religious concerns include claims that vaccines include aborted fetal tissue, a spokeswoman added by email.
The medical community has debunked widely disseminated claims that vaccines involve human tissue.
Vaccine Choice Canada has taken a firm stand against pressure to drop non-medical exemptions, saying Thursday it intends “to defend our rights and freedoms of Canadians and will pursue a Charter challenge against the Ontario government should that be necessary.”
Addressing the various concerns of vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaccine crusaders is difficult, says Goldenberg, because their arguments run deeper than just distrust in Big Pharma, government,or science.
Data Collection And Satanic Surveillance
Finally, a veiled subplot of this pandemic is data collection on individuals and families. .
There are contact tracing efforts in countries all over the world as part of covid monitoring, prevention and treatment.
But this is already being plotted to become data collection for Satanic surveillance.
A BBC report quoted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as saying:
Collecting this data in one place, with one patient record, is going to be absolutely vital testing, vaccinations, every single thing to do with the development of this disease You need to record every single piece of data you can lay your hands on because we will be adjusting our vaccination programme as we go we may even have to adjust the vaccine itself.
As the BBC news report noted,
civil liberties and data rights campaigners have already raised concerns about issues such as the data collected by the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app, and about the role in building a virus dashboard the government has given to the controversial American firm Palantir.
They can be expected to mount a vigorous fight against any attempt to create a national Covid passport and many MPs across the political spectrum will share their unease.
But not everyone will reject the idea out of hand. Some whose freedomshave been curtailed may think that giving away some of their data is a price worth paying for a return to normality.
Depend on The Blood of The Lamb to escape the mark of the beast.
Revised: 19 March 2021.
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Switch Your Faith To The Blood
The same faith you put in vaccines and other medical solutions, just switch it and put it wholly in The Blood of Jesus Christ The Son of God. Unlike vaccines, The Blood gives you unfailing Divine Protection, Healing and Health.
Many believers vouch for vaccines, but dont value The PRECIOUS Blood of Jesus! As He said,laying aside The Commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men .
As a sister, Sareeta, aptly commented on an earlier version of this Word, We must vaccinate ourselves with The Blood of Jesus everyday in these trying times
We overcome by The Blood, not vaccines. This I say with the boldness of The Lion of Judah.
For I am not ashamed of The Gospel of Christ, for it is The POWER of God to Salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it The Righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, The just shall live by faith.Romans 1:16-17 emphasis added.
Day by day, moment by moment, we must live by Faith from Faith to Faith in JESUS alone:
Focus
Him.
In other words, look unto Him and hold on to Him no matter what is happening. If you look at the troubling turbulence around, taking your eyes off The LORD Jesus, you will start sinking like Peter.
Faith is easy when you focus on Jesus Christ. As He said: See that you are not troubled for all these things must come to pass .
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help Isaiah 31:1.
The Number Of The Beast
Years ago, I remember hearing how some had taken President Reagan to be the end times beast. The reasoning went like this. When you take his full name, Ronald Wilson Reagan, you can see how each name contains exactly six letters. No wave of the wand or hat-trick was needed to see how that dreaded, mysterious number was embedded in the presidents name. To say this is silly is an understatement. In order to avoid embarrassing interpretations like this one , we must deal with the texts original context. Again, you cant simply jump to modern application without dealing with the historical context.
Scholars often associate the number of the beast with Nero Caesar. Theres actually good reason for doing so. For instance, we know from Suetonius that many people were at the time toying with the numerical values of Neros name . This practice, known as gematria, took a letter of the alphabet and assigned it an equivalent number. So, for example, in the case of Greek, the first letter alpha would be given the number one. The second letter beta would be understood as two, and so on. When you take Neros name and transliterate it into Hebrew, the result is the number of the beast: 666.10
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Is It Worth The Shot
The answer to this question depends on who you listen to. Vaccine advocates will tell you that it is beneficial while anti-vaxxers will tell you they dont. With so many self-proclaimed experts out there, its really difficult to sift the truth from lies.
Perhaps, it is worth noting why some people are against vaccines. Here are some of them:
I found a video on YouTube from AsapSCIENCE titled, Debunking Anti-Vaxxers. To see the two sides of argument, I recommend you watch this as well:
A Warning To Christian Pastors
I have to say, someone who teaches that God approves of rulers who murder the unborn, and steal our rights as free people, is slapping God in the face.
Thats perverting the Word of God to drive someones idea of what is right and wrong. It disturbs me greatly that a Christian would distort what God said to fit their ideology.
No Christian should ever, ever do that.
No Christian should ever shame another into believing they must obey an evil government that hates God. If our government loved God, God would be number 1.
Yet, its exactly the opposite.
Easily proven as God has been driven out of our life and government, and replaced with perversion and sin. The government helped make that a reality, rulers like that are not of God, they are not ministers of God.
Your take away, your health, no matter what we are talking about always remains your decision. The Bible does not grant an unrighteous government to make those decisions for you, whether they are mandates or laws.
Now that we understand Christians are not compelled to follow unrighteous rulers
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Letter To The Churches
First, we must remember that Revelation is a first-century letter to seven churches in Asia Minor . Letters in antiquity are much like modern letterssituational, personal, and contextual. To understand a letter between two people , you really need to know a thing or two about what necessitated the sending of the letter in the first place. In other words, you need context. In order to rightly interpret the letter of Revelation, we need to investigate these churches historical situation.
Many evangelicals tend to skip over this step and jump straight to application. This is a grave mistake. If we completely detach our modern-day applications from a texts original, historical context, we risk misapplying the textsometimes in embarrassing ways. Revelation 13:17 is one such text. In order to interpret it rightly, we need to know its context. We need some historical data from the letters time period in order to gain clarity into its meaning. Is there any such data that might shed some light on this passage? As it turns out, there is.
What Does The Bible Say About Coronavirus
The coronavirus pandemic has caused great suffering and even death for many people around the world. It has also caused major disruption of our economic systems. Many people wonder why God has allowed it to happen, and is it an omen that the end of the world is near? The Bible does not really answer these questions, but it does have a lot of related information.
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Misusing The Bible Against Vaccination
Most of the emails and phone calls that I have gotten since I stated that the Constitution permits safe mandatory vaccination against highly contagious and lethal diseases have been from anti-vaxxers who claim the authority of the Bible. Have they actually read the Bible? Of course, the Bible says nothing about vaccinations: they were not even imagined at the time, but the Bible speaks volumes about the need to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Large sections of the Bible deal with diagnosing contagious diseases such as leprosy and quarantining carriers outside the city walls until they were no longer contagious. The Bible also demands that we choose life over convenience, money or other values.
To be sure, no one should be compelled to take a vaccine that has not been proven safe and effective. But once a vaccine meets those demanding standards, religion should be on the side of saving lives not risking them. At the very least, the Bible and God should not be cited against these life-saving measures. Anti-vaxxers are free to cite science, philosophy, law but do not miscite the Bible or God. It is irreligious and insults the intelligence of those who have actually studied the Bible by assuming, as many do, that the Bible opposes everything they oppose.
Our Rulers Must Be Just Fearing God
Lets follow this up by turning to the Book of Samuel which provides the qualifier for Romans 13.
2 Samuel 23:3The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.
Now that right there, that is exactly what I was talking about in Romans 13.
Those who rule over us must be just.
That means, our rulers must be righteous men, ruling with fear and love of God.
If our rulers are not doing that, they are not Gods rulers.
God may have appointed them, but they are not ministers of God to thee for good, and God does not approve of their actions.
This is why we must always remember, the Bible does not contradict itself.
Romans 13:1-4 is talking about adhering to righteous rulers, those are Gods ministers. Not unrighteous men and women, they certainly would not be Gods ministers.
God does good, not evil.
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What Does The Bible Say About Repentance What Does It Mean
www.gotquestions.orgrepentance
Repentance recognizes that our sin is offensive to God. To repent means to make an about-face, heart-directed turn away from self to God, from the past to a future ruled by Gods commands, acknowledging that the Lord reigns supreme over ones existence. Return to: Topical Bible Questions.
Is The Coronavirus Pandemic A Sign Of The End
7Teacher, they asked, when will all this happen? What sign will show us that these things are about to take place?8 He replied, Dont let anyone mislead you, for many will come in my name, claiming, I am the Messiah, and saying, The time has come! But dont believe them.9And when you hear of wars and insurrections, dont panic. Yes, these things must take place first, but the end wont follow immediately.10 Then he added, Nation will go to war against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.11There will be great earthquakes, and there will be famines and plagues in many lands, and there will be terrifying things and great miraculous signs from heaven.
However, Jesus made it clear that we cannot know when the end will come ” rel=”nofollow”> Matthew 24:27, , ).
Since Jesus spoke those words 2000 years ago, there have been many plagues that killed large numbers of people. The bubonic plague in the 1300’s A.D. killed about a quarter of the world’s population. Also since Jesus spoke those words, thousands of people have compared current events to Bible prophecies and predicted the end was near. They have all been wrong. So, as Jesus said, there is no good reason to believe anyone who predicts the end is near.
There is a summary of Bible teachings on the end-times, with references, in this article on our website: What Does the Bible Say About the Second Coming of Jesus?
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What Does The Bible Teach About Vaccines
Obviously, the words vaccine and vaccination arent found in the Bible. These are modern medical concepts that were used and popularized way back in the 1940s.
The Bible is specifically silent on the use of vaccines. It does not promote or prohibit its use. However, this does not mean that we should not do our part in exploring the pros and cons when it comes to vaccinations.
The Bible tells us:
Test all things hold fast what is good .
We also need to be like the Bereans . Though it was the Scripture that they were studying, we can also apply the same principle when it comes to examining what others are telling us.
Between Devastation And Deliverance
Even if Psalm 91 were written to ward off evil, its place in the Psalter would show us that it has a larger meaning. Only when we take refuge in Gods protection can we transcend the brevity of life and be established in Gods city. Ultimately, this refuge is Christ . As Jesus said, in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart I have overcome the world .
For further study, please see Dr. Hos book: The Design of the Psalter: A Macrostructural Analysis
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