THE BLESSING OF HAVING THE DIGITAL WORD OF GOD!

 

     In 1988 I paid about $90 for a set of 48 Bible on Cassette tapes as you see in the video. I had been trying to read the Bible every year—and my dream for several years was to listen also to it as I read. I used some inheritance money after Mom died, or I likely wouldn’t have paid that much, as I was still attending North Central College at the time. The prospect of listening to God’s Word as I read it was very exciting to me. I wanted to learn as much as I could about God’s real Living Word—Jesus!

     John 1:1 states the following: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus is the true Word of God—and the Bible in its entirety tells the whole story.

     I had just taken some keyboarding classes a year earlier at West Holmes High School on an electronic typewriter before I enrolled at North Central, so needless to say computers were very new to me. My boss in 1990 at my first job after college at Appleseed Mental Health admonished me that the future of mental health documentation was with computers—and that I needed to get a computer of my own to bring me up to speed. It was still the age of DOS if some of you old-time computer geeks know what that means.

     Computers can present many problems if not used for the glory of God. But for the past nine or ten years I have been using Bible Gateway, a wonderful computer Bible program for both Bible reading AND Bible listening. Oh, how things have changed since the days when I listened to the Bible on Cassette. The bad thing about cassette tapes is that there is a lot of fast-forwarding and rewinding to reach a designated spot. And then there are forty-eight separate cassette tapes to navigate. With Bible Gateway I can access a given passage with just a few clicks.

     Bible Gateway offers various Bible reading plans, and I prefer the Old Testament/New Testament one-year reading plan. Sometimes I even listen to the Bible when I lay in bed before falling asleep. It still amazes me that I can learn about the most wonderful person that ever lived—the Living Word of God—Jesus—by using a computer!

DO YOU HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN?

     I’m moving in another direction since I finished the posts on the book “Floods Upon Dry Ground”. My post today is entitled “Do You Have An Escape Plan?” In this video, at the beginning, you see the picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone who starred together in the popular “Escape Plan” action movie. The escape plan in their movie, however, is microscopic to the nth degree compared to the escape plan talked about in this video.

     Listen to the following sound bites from a sermon by Dr. J. Vernon McGee, an old radio preacher who died in 1988. The sermon was entitled “The Rapture Comes Next.” You can watch his entire sermon on YouTube. In the above YouTube video are the sound bites:

     So what do you think? Dr. McGee discussed the fact that some Christians think that the church will go through The Great Tribulation. His study of the Bible, however, contradicts that notion. He believed that the Bible gives incontrovertible evidence that before The Great Tribulation will come The Rapture of the Church, or an escape mechanism, or plan if you will.

     He said that Jesus will give a loud shout, and saved people, both living and dead, will be taken up in the air to meet Him. What a wonderful prospect!

     So what do you think? Do YOU have an escape plan?