Do you trust the Bible?  Do you believe that every word of it is the Word of God in every area of its content?  Or are you, like many, selective in what you believe of that which is written in it?  Perhaps you have been led to believe that only certain parts of the Bible really came from God.  A broadcast commentator recently stated the idea that the “Gospels are not history, but just stories to teach us about truth.”  If you believe him, then your confidence in Jesus Christ is devastated because you must doubt His virgin birth, miraculous feats and His resurrection from the dead.

As we saw in Lesson 1, the Bible declares itself to be the Word of God.  It states without hesitation, without reservation, and without limitation, that it is all inspired (breathed) by God.  From the first verse which states unequivocally, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” to the last chapter which says,  “And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come…and whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely…” – the Bible never hints that there is any part of it that isn’t exactly and completely true.  In fact, it openly declares that “Thy Word is true from the beginning.”  (Palms 119: 160)

Yet some people still confidently assert that they know this to be false.  Surprisingly, even numerous professors of Bible colleges and seminaries do not believe the Bible to be completely true, and they teach their unsuspecting students to disbelieve its truthfulness and accuracy.  And of course, atheistic scientists assert that none of it is true so public school teachers pass this dogma of doubt on to their students.  Perhaps saddest of all is the fact that many Christians who say they believe the Bible, actually don’t act like they believe it.  This is especially true when they disregard the clear factual teaching and preaching of it.

This writer believes that the Bible reveals the Author to be God.  Now if God is the Author of the Bible then it should reveal this as fact.  Over the course of my own quarter century study of the Bible, I have found that the Bible does reveal itself to be the Word of God in all of the areas of its revealed knowledge.  Contrary to the false assertions by many, the Bible is accurate in its statements that concern matters of the physical world.  Though the Bible is not intended to be a science textbook, it does, during it discourses, make statements about the physical universe (nature).  It speaks of outer space, of earth, of the seas, of man and animal life.  As one studies some of these statements of science in the Bible, it becomes clear that the men who were the penmen of Scripture possessed knowledge that preceded man’s scientific knowledge.  This is as one should suspect if the Bible is written by the all knowing Creator of the universe!

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          History is another area that we can examine to determine the authorship of Scripture.  Unlike the Muslim Koran or other ‘holy books’, the Bible devotes itself to extensive discussions of events that actually occurred.  Though the historical accuracy of the Bible has been widely mocked, time and discovery increasingly show the historical events described in your Bible to be accurate just as you would expect and demand if it indeed is authored by God.

Finally there is the matter of prophecy – the prediction of future events.  The Bible is the most analyzed and discussed writing in human experience.  It has occupied the intellectual energy of the greatest minds that humanity has produced.  As the result, today we know a great deal about the history of its writing.  We know when most of the men who were its penmen lived and so we also know with reasonable accuracy when most of the books were written.  For example, we know that King David lived about 1,000 B.C. and that his son, Solomon, lived about 900 B.C. and so we know when Psalms and Proverbs, the books authored by these two ancients, were each written.  This is vitally important because it gives us knowledge about the time when the prophetic portions of their books were written.  Knowing these things, we can examine the prophecies of Scripture penmen and then examine whether those predictions came to pass as stated.  Since no mortal knows the future with precision, a fulfilled prophecy could only come from knowledge given to the prophet by God Himself.

This lesson will only present a small sample of those things which can be discovered from Bible.  Vast numbers of books and videos are available to thoroughly present the full body of knowledge about what the Bible reveals relating to its perfections in these three major areas of knowledge.  At the end of the written lesson material will be a list of resources where you can obtain more information.  Our church library is stocking some resources and our inventory will continue to grow in this and other areas of preserved biblical knowledge.

Matters of the Physical World

This is what we normally call “science”.  Science is merely a means for discovering how the physical world operates.  Science consists of data obtained by research.  Then this data is interpreted by “scientists”.   Each scientist has his/her own personal philosophy and this determines how they will interpret the data.  A scientist who rejects God will hold an evolutionary view point.  Other professional scientists who accept the reality of the Creator will interpret the data to fit the biblical perspective.

For more than a century, atheism had essentially owned the realm of scientific thought.  But starting about 50 years ago, a strong movement among professional scientists began who believe that the world was created by the supernatural God as described in the first two chapters of Genesis. 

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This movement has created an enlightenment that is as profound as the enlightenment that occurred 500 years ago when such scientists as Galileo first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun rather than visa versa.  The modern creation scientists have taken a fresh look at the Bible in relation to the scientific data and that look has been exciting to the Bible believing Christian.  Contrary to the notion that the Bible is antiquated in the field of science knowledge, it is increasingly understood that the Bible has always revealed accurate scientific truths about the earth and all life found on it.

What would you think about a person who had advanced knowledge about the mysteries of nature several hundred or even several thousand years before human science discovered the same things?    If such ancient persons had knowledge that a mortal could not have possessed in their own time, would that suggest that the person was more than a genius?  Indeed, we would conclude that such persons were informed by a higher Being Who had passed knowledge on to Bible writers out of His own creative design. 

The Bible does reveal knowledge that was not known by mankind in the time of its writing.  In other words, the Bible possessed advance knowledge about science that the writer could not have read or heard from anyone living in his own time.  We will examine a few of the advanced biblical revelations about science in this lesson.

The Earth’s Shape

This has long been a subject of great interest and debate.  We are all aware that in A. D. 1492, Christopher Columbus excited the imagination of his contemporaries by proposing to sail west from Spain farther than anyone believed possible.  According to the popular thought of his day, the world was like a flat table with an edge over which a ship would plunge into some abyss.  It is reported that Columbus had reasoned that the world was spherical out of the simple observation that the horizon at sea always spanned a limited distance.  From any point, one could not see past the horizon and this could only be explained by a spherical shaped earth.

Thinkers of that day could have turned to the Bible for insight about this question, for it definitely spoke on the subject.  If the reader will turn to Isaiah 40:22 you will see what God said about this before man discovered the spherical shape of earth:  “It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.”   Here the earth’s shape is spoken of as a circle.  Isaiah, the penman of this verse, wrote about 700 B.C., which was 1400 years before Columbus and 2,000 years before our time.   Though it is true that a circle need not be a sphere or globe, it is also true that every sphere is a composite of many circles of equal diameter and circumference.  A circle is certainly suggestive of a sphere to the discerning Bible reader.  So the Bible was the first to reveal that earth is a sphere.

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The Earth’s Support

The question of what supports the earth had long mystified the ancients.  In some parts of the world,  people pictured the world sitting on the back of a giant turtle.  And several hundred years before Christ, the Greeks had invented a god upon whose back the earth supposedly rested. 

The Scriptures suggested no such foolish inventions.  Turning to Job 26:7 we read: “…He [God]…hangeth the earth upon nothing.”  The ancients of Job’s time surely didn’t know about the mysterious force that we know today as gravity.  In fact it wasn’t until Isaac Newton, some 300 years ago, that man was able to think about an invisible force that acts over a distance upon a solid object such as a planet.  That force explains how the earth is kept in a circular orbit around the sun.  The earth is at the perfect distance from the sun to prevent it from being pulled into the sun but the gravitational force is sufficiently strong to prevent the earth from escaping, and so it does the only other thing possible – travel perpetually around the sun.   

We know today how refreshingly true the Bible has spoken all along about this incredible arrangement – for indeed the earth hangs in the nothingness of space!    We should wonder how this ancient writer could have known about this fact thousands of years before the discovery of gravity.  Serious consideration will bring us to the inescapable conclusion that God was His mentor and gave him the knowledge to write accurately.

The Orbit of the Sun

We are long past the idea that the sun orbits around earth as the “established scientists” once thought.  Today we understand that the opposite is true, that the earth rotates around the sun.  Our solar system consists of our sun around which nine planets (with their moons) revolve.  In this arrangement we picture the sun sitting in a fixed position in space with the planets whirling about it.  Is this so?

          It is not.  Please turn to Psalm 19 and examine verses 1-6 which read in part as follows:  “The heavens declare the glory of God [v. 1]…In them hath He set the tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.  His going forth is from the end of heaven, and his circuit [circle]unto the ends of it…” [vs. 4-6].

In these remarkable verses the sun is described as traveling on a circuit (circle or orbit) through the heavens (space), just as a strong man would run a race on an oval race track!  It is known in modern astronomy that our sun is not fixed in one position but is in fact traveling along a great circular path through the Milky Way Galaxy.  As it travels this great circular path, it carries the nine planets, including earth, with it.  So we are in effect traveling piggy back with the sun through the galaxy just as the writer of Psalms long ago stated.

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Isn’t that amazing?  Remember that the Psalms were written by King David of Israel a thousand years before the birth of Christ, long before man had any scientific inkling of this astronomic fact.  None of the ancients of David’s day could have had any clue about this from their general observations of the constellations.  Where then could David have learned this marvelous truth?  Only from God, the author and architect of the heavens!

The Watery World

          Ours is a watery world with about 70 % of the earth’s surface covered by seas.  It has been said that even today we know more about outer space than we do about the world beneath the surface of earth’s oceans.  Each year, new creatures are discovered that modern oceanographers previously had no clue about.

How much could the ancients have known about the undersea world?  With no submarines, diving suits, underwater cameras, or remote mapping equipment, how would they know anything about the form of the ocean bottom?  They might have thought the oceans to be shallow or bottomless, mountainous or flat.  Most of what we know today about the oceans is less than 60 years old.  Let’s now consider what was recorded in the Bible about the watery world of earth more than 3,000 years ago.

First we direct our attention to Psalm 8:8 where the Bible uses the term “paths of the sea”.  We know what a path is – something like a narrow roadway where people or animals travel along an established route with definite boundaries.  The Hebrew word from which this word path is translated means a “well trodden road”.  This is an accurate description of the ocean currents which were first discovered by human science about 150 years ago.  Ocean currents are highways of water with edges that are defined well enough to be approximately mapped.  These currents are indeed highways of life because the vast bulk of marine life,  from the microscopic plankton to the great whales, routinely navigate these waters while traveling around the world.

Plunging now beneath the sometimes violent and sometimes calm surface of the oceans to their always tranquil mysterious depths, we will glide downward past great mountain ranges into deep canyons with vertical walls that plunge thousands of feet beneath even the floor of the oceans.  What could the Bible writers, if they were not inspired of God, have known about such submarine topography?  And yet we hear David, three-thousand years ago, use the term “channel of the sea”( II Samuel 22:16).  The translators of the King James Version chose the word channel from a Hebrew word which meant tube, bed or valley.  Whether in English or Hebrew, the Scriptures here do accurately describe the topography of the submarine depths.  The descriptions certainly would create an accurate picture in the minds of Bible readers.

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Before leaving our journey to the bottom of the sea we should check out some additional wonders.  Scattered across the floor of the ocean there exist numerous places where hot gases from within the earth escape through “vents” as they are called by oceanographers.  These vents are actually undersea geysers where superheated water and gases are released from the crust of the earth into the ocean depths.  The Bible writer knew about these as well.  In Job 38:16 the ancient writer spoke of the “springs of the sea”.   A spring is where water gushes up out of the earth to the surface of land.  So a spring in the sea can only be the same except it bubbles up at the very bottom of the oceans.    From where, we should consider, did this writer gain such modern knowledge about the undersea geysers on the floor of the ocean?

The Earth’s Creatures

The Bible also contains revelations about earth’s creatures that have long preceded scientific knowledge.

Let’s start in I Corinthians 15:20 where Paul the Apostle stated the following:  “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts; another of fishes, and another of birds.”  The reader may regard this statement as self evident but it was not evident to medical scientists early in the twentieth century who attempted to transplant tissues and blood serum from animal to man or between people.  The results of these efforts were disastrous because the immune systems of the recipients of such attempted transplants rejected the foreign tissues with disastrous complications.  Today, such transplants are only successful when powerful immunosuppressant drugs are used to suppress the immune system’s natural rejection of the foreign tissues.  Those researchers of a hundred years ago were like the sea captain described in Acts 27:10-11 who would not listen to a man inspired from God and so suffered great disaster.  Once again, the Bible was first in truth!

Let’s now think about the ancient creatures that we call dinosaurs.  The discovery of dinosaur fossils several hundred years ago perplexed many Bible believers and caused many to reject the Bible on scientific matters and still others completely lost confidence in the Bible on any matter. It is supposed to be axiomatic that dinosaurs must have lived millions of years before any humans.  We wonder how humans could have even lived with such creatures as Tyrannosaurus Rex with its six inch teeth and enormous size.  Other dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus with its gargantuan body and treelike tail seem to be equally out of place among humans.

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And yet we now know that dinosaurs did not sneak up on the ancient Bible writers.  If the reader will turn to Job 40:15-24 we will examine a creature that lived in the time of Job.  Accepting the tenets of evolution, some Bible expositors have interpreted this creature to have been a crocodile, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, or whale.   Which is it?  Or is it any of those things?  That’s easy to discern with just a little thought.  What is the creature described in these verses?  The Bible writer calls him “behemoth” which refers to an immense creature.  Certainly any of the above might fill this description if we only consider size.  But we need to interpret all of the data that the Bible lists here.

This creature has the following characteristics:  it ate grass, had an enormous tail like a cedar [tree], and it lived on land, probably along the edges of water where reeds grew.  The description of this animal indicates that it wasn’t just large like a crocodile or even a rhino or hippo or elephant, but it was incredibly huge with enormous strength in its abdominal muscles and huge bones as strong as iron. 

At any rate we can eliminate all of the above proposed animals as being Behemoth.   Since the creature was a land dweller the whale is eliminated.  Since it ate grass the crocodile is also eliminated.  The hippo, rhino and elephant are left.  However all of these must also be eliminated because none have a tail that is anything comparable to a cedar [tree].   Now what is left?  Nothing that we have ever seen in the flesh.  But this Bible animal does perfectly fit the description of an enormous plant eating dinosaur such as Brontosaurus. Notice also that the Lord told Job (verse 15) to ‘behold’ or see this creature.  That would be ludicrous if Job had not actually seen such a creature.  And if he had seen the creature, then it lived during his time.

Long before the first dinosaur fossil was discovered the Bible had already described at least one major type of these marvelous, now extinct creatures.  And the reader may be surprised to know that human footprints have been discovered inside or alongside fossilized dinosaur footprints.  You may actually see these for yourself by visiting the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas south of Ft. Worth.  This museum has conducted careful X-ray studies on these human footprints and showed that they were not carved or artificially placed.

For More Information…

There are hundreds of books and videos produced by creation scientists around the world that reveal the amazing accuracy of the Bible on matters of science.  These scientists are fully professional scientists who received advanced degrees from the same universities that evolutionary scientists studied at.  The materials are written or produced for the general audience with other technical materials increasingly being written for professional scientists.

One excellent organization for these materials is the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).  (You can visit their online store at www. icr.org or call at 800-628-7640 for a brochure.)  Caprock Baptist Church will be stocking some of these books and videos in the church library.

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I recommend that you start with materials from ICR because these are unconditionally recommended because of the professional qualifications of the writers.

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Matters of Prophecy

Each evening’s weather report is man’s attempt to tell the future by means of science and experience.  The weather person says, “I think that we may have thunderstorms tomorrow…”, because he/she doesn’t know for sure what will happen.  We can make an educated guess at what the future will bring with some accuracy based upon our experience and knowledge, but no humans can know it exactly.  The future is knowable only by the supernatural which is not constrained by time.

Prediction of the future is called prophecy in the Bible.  If the writers of the Bible were instructed by God then we would expect that the Bible would accurately predict events in advance and we expect those events to occur as stated.

Does the Bible show such advance prophetic knowledge?  The answer is a definite YES!  The Bible is filled with prophecies which we can see fulfilled in stunning detail.  Some of these biblical prophecies were originally written hundreds or even thousands of years before fulfillment.  Often, the Lord would repeat the prophecies at intervals of years through His chosen writers and so there is a prophetic countdown in the biblical passages as the final fulfillment nears.  Some times the prophecies were given a few years before the fulfillment so we can see the fulfillment today in history.  Some prophecies have been partially fulfilled in history but remain to be fully completed.  For these, we have confidence that fulfillment will occur based upon the record of success in other biblical prophecies.

The rule of biblical prophecy is demanding as set down by God through Moses as follows:  “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken.” Deuteronomy 13:22   In other words, prophecy that doesn’t come to pass as written is not of God – God’s predictions do come to pass!  We will now examine a couple of biblical prophecies that were given hundreds of years in advance so there is no question about them being recorded after the fact of their occurrence, yet they are far enough back in history that we can know of their completion as written.

Prophecy of Tyre’s Destruction

This prophecy concerned the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre which was a mighty ancient trading city located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean sea.  Tyre was the hub of a vast trading empire of the famous Phoenicians and the city is well known in the documents of ancient history.  Tyre was actually built in two parts:  one part was a fortified city on the coast and a second part located on an island a few hundred yards from the mainland.

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Ezekiel was the prophet of interest here and his prophecy concerning this city is found in Ezekiel, chapter 26, verses 1-14.  The reader is invited to turn to this passage and read it through carefully.  The basics of the prophecy is that this city would be destroyed, that it would be scraped as flat as a rock, and that it would be a place suited only for drying of fishermen’s nets.

Ezekiel’s prophetic ministry lasted 22 years beginning in 592 B.C. and ending in 570 B.C.  This particular prophecy was written during this period, probably the earlier part of it.  The prophecy predicts the future destruction of Tyre which would be an unbelievable idea to people alive at that time.  The prophecy is presented in two parts as can be seen by a careful study of the passage.  The first part (vs. 7-11) specifies that the city would be attacked by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.  Note the specificity here in the naming of the king.  Then verses 12-14 seem to describe a second stage of Tyre’s destruction.

Archaeological records confirm that Tyre was attacked by Nebuchadnezzar in 572 B.C. which is only about 20 years at most after the prophecy was given.  The historical records tells us that this king attacked the mainland part of the city and succeeded in doing great damage to it.  However, the people of Tyre withdrew to the island city which was out of his reach since he lacked naval forces needed to attack the island.  At this point an observer might think that the prophecy was not fully complete.  For the next two-hundred years, Tyre continued as a mighty trading hub as it operated out of the island city.  Then came 330 B.C. when it was again attacked by Alexander the Great, the great conqueror from ancient Greece.  The defenders of the island city must have been amused as they saw Alexander’s forces draw up on the mainland as had Nebuchadnezzar’s two-hundred years earlier.  Their amusement must have turned to bemusement as his soldiers began to collect stones from the old mainland city and throw them into the water.  Their bemusement must have turned to amazement as the stones began to pile up and take shape as a roadway that was steadily advancing out to them.  Then their amazement must have turned to horror as siege machines were brought across the causeway that was built out of the very stones of the old city.  In the process of this, Alexander’s army scraped the old city flat as a rock exactly as the early prophecy had specified.  Alexander succeeded in defeating and destroying this island city.

Yet Tyre was hard to kill because after Alexander she arose again.  We read of her again in the New Testament as being a viable city in the time of Christ, though probably not to her former glory.  Had Ezekiel’s prophecy that Tyre would become a place where only fishermen’s nets would be spread, failed? 

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History was not finished with Tyre and neither was the prophecy of Ezekiel.  A full millennium passed after Jesus Christ to a time when Islam was trying to conquer the world for their god.  In 1291 A.D., (Unger’s Bible Dictionary) the Moslems attacked Tyre and finally destroyed it forever.  Today, the old site of Tyre is occupied only by a few fishermen where they spread their nets to dry and the old city has  been scraped flat as a rock - in exact accordance to Ezekiel’s prophecy written 1,800 years earlier!

Prophecies of Jesus Christ

The Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Micah and others spoke many times about the coming of Israel’s Messiah (Deliverer).  Their individual prophecies can be organized into a table such as one below.

Old Testament Messianic Prophecies

This chart contains just eight of the dozens of prophecies of Messiah that are written in the Old Testament.  Any man who claimed this distinction had to have satisfied all of these prophecies plus all of the others not here listed.  Briefly, Israel’s Messiah would be a man who was born in Bethlehem, of the Tribe of Judah and the family of David, he would enter Jerusalem and be hailed as a king, but then be crucified and buried in a tomb originally intended for a rich man. 

Prophecy also dictates the time of Messiah’s death ( # 8 on the chart).  According to Daniel 9:25, Messiah would be killed after 69 weeks of years had elapsed following the command to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  That command was issued by King Artaxerxes in the year 445 B.C., according to every historical authority that I have read. 

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(Verse 26 states the intervening weeks to be 62, or 434 years, but this refers to the interval starting after the walls were completed until the death of Messiah.)

Let’s do the math to calculate the predicted year of Messiah’s death according to this prophecy.  A  Jewish year was only 98.63 % as long as our year (360 days instead of 365) so multiply .9863 X 483 years and we get 476 years on our calendar from 445 B.C. to the predicted year of Messiah’s death.  Doing the math we actually subtract 476 from 445 to get, -31 which corresponds to 31 A.D. as the predicted year of Messiah’s death. 

Now we ask, did anyone having the prophetic qualifications of the Jewish Messiah, die in or about that year?  The answer is YES!!   THAT PERSON IS JESUS OF NAZARETH as attested by the vast majority of ancient historical experts.

The accuracy of Daniel’s prophetic calendar of Messiah’s death is almost convincing in itself but we can go farther in certainty that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed Israel’s Messiah and thus Saviour to the world.  Knowing that Jesus of Nazareth satisfied all of the above prophecies some might wonder whether this was just by chance.  We can get an idea about this question by calculating the probability that any one man could satisfy six of the above prophecies about Messiah.  This calculation is made by multiplying the individual probabilities of each of the above events.  The answer is the probability that one person could satisfy all by chance alone.  Some of the individual prophecies such as the triumphal entry and burial in the tomb of a rich man are difficult for me to determine an individual mathematical probability for so I will not use them in my calculation.  The following calculation is made on the basis of the following probabilities for the following six events:

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The calculation to determine the odds against any person fulfilling just six of the above messianic prophecies by blind chance is made by multiplying the second part of each probability together as follows:   2 x 100 x 12 x 250 x 10 x 483 = 2,898,000,000! 

The results of this calculation show that there is only 1 chance in nearly 3 billion that one person could accidentally fulfill just six of the Messianic prophecies.  This is a very conservative estimate since two of the probabilities in the table were not used.  Though I could not assign a realistic probability to those two events they are still real events that enter the equation making it even more improbable that Jesus of Nazareth satisfied those prophecies by random chance.  Also remember that we haven’t even considered all of the Messianic prophecies and so the odds against accidental fulfillment are thousands of fold higher than the above calculation.

With all this said, we can clearly and objectively say that JESUS OF NAZARETH WAS THE MESSIAH THAT WAS PREDICTED ALL THROUGH THE OLD TESTAMENT TIMES OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS.  JESUS OF NAZARETH IS JESUS THE MESSIAH; JESUS THE SON OF GOD AND GOD THE SON; JESUS THE SAVIOUR OF MANKIND; JESUS THE RESURRECTED ONE; JESUS THE SOON RETURNING KING OF EARTH; JESUS THE COMING JUDGE OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE AND YOUR ETERNAL SOUL; JESUS THE LORD; JESUS THE CREATOR AND ETERNAL GOD, COEQUAL WITH GOD THE FATHER AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT!!!!!!!    AMEN

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