COMMITTED to train men and women
to have minds for the Lord Jesus,
hearts for the truth, and
hands that are skilled to the task.

"birthright" Tagged Sermons

GO TELL THAT FOX

King Herod was the tetrarch of Galilee meaning “ruler of a fourth,” for the kingdom was divided) He was King of Judea and he ruled the territory with Roman approval. While Judea as an independent kingdom it was under heavy Roman influence and HEROD came to power WITH ROMAN SUPPORT. It was in Herod’s territory where Jesus was ministering. We all know about Herod the Great, the one who was in power when Jesus was born and who slaughtered the innocent children after the Magi told him about the Christ child, but this is his son, Herod Antipas. What do we know about him? Well, when Jesus calls him “that fox,” he is not just saying that he is as sly as a fox but Jesus is actually insulting him, for a fox is an unclean animal in the Israelite holiness codes. Herod the Great (Herod Antipas’ father) was by descent an EDOMITE, whose ancestors had converted to Judaism. Herod was raised a Jew.
C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”
“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”
As John Whitehead wrote:
“Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier – a surveillance matrix – the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction. Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery.
The government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in a guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without knowledge of consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
“There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: YOU.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your SINGULAR HUMANNESS.”
“Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself – mind, body, and soul – in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.”
These COVID-19 vaccines, which rely on messenger RNA technology that influences everything from viruses to memory, are merely the tipping point.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively unchartered, frontier; mental, emotional, of the human race.”
If you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in on the heels of the governments, rollout of this COVID-19 vaccine.”
The term “SINGULARITY” – that is, computers simulating human life itself – was coined years ago by mathematical geniuses Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann.
“The ever accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
The plan is to develop a computer network that will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of human beings by 2029. And this goal is to have computers that will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on earth.”
John von Neumann
Science and Technology Journalist Marcelo Gleiser published an article under the title :”The Transhuman Future; BE More Than You Can Be”
“How is it that we define a human? Is it our body? Our genome? Our behaviors? Our self-awareness? Our compassion? Our minds? All of these and then something more? What now may be obvious to most people about being human will become less so as we become progressively more integrated with technology both inside and outside our bodies.”
“The future? Transhumanism will only grow. Technological devices will be implanted in our heads and bodies, our used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities. Why see only in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Let’s go ultraviolet! Infrared! Let’s extend our hearing range, our memory capacity, our immune defenses, our life span, our brainpower.” Marcelo Gleiser
Ray Kurzweil is the brainchild behind what Google is doing. This is what he sees:
“Google will know all the answer to your question before you have asked it. It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.
Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book titled:
“SINGULARITY IS NEAR: When Humans transcend Biology”
“Artificial circuits replicating themselves at a molecular level will merge with the biological circuits that constitute our nervous systems, giving rise to an ENHANCED HUMAN SUPER INTELLIGENCE. Once this starts happening, what we now call the Internet will in effect become telepathic, giving these enhanced humans instantaneous access to all available knowledge and information as they fashion their brave new world. You see how explosive this gets? And its just the beginning.
Once the process gets underway, the evolving superintelligence keeps expanding until it permeates the entire planet and, still accelerating, eventually the universe.
That movement should one day facilitate rapid travel beyond our own galaxy, taking the process literally everywhere.”

WRESTLING with God

The life of Jacob covers HALF OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS. His birth is recorded in chapter 25 and his death is recorded in chapter 49. What we find between those two chapters are quite amazing stories about this man and the struggles he faced, because they are all pointing towards the struggles our forefathers faced and reveal the struggles or strongholds which we face today. Certainly, studying this man’s life will give us plenty of insight how NOT TO DO CERTAIN THINGS, and HOW TO DO CERTAIN THINGS IN LIFE.
God reveals Himself to Jacob and reaffirms the covenant He made with Abraham, Jacobs grandfather, promising Jacob that his offspring will be many and that the Promised Land will one day belong to his descendants. In this dream, Jacob sees something like a ladder or a stairway leading up to heaven. The Hebrew word translated “ladder” is SULLAM which simply means a connection between God and man.
What an encouragement to all of us who have been justified through faith in the work of God Himself through His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, who has become our ladder to heaven. Even after we became children of God, running from trouble, trying to ignore our strongholds, God comes along with a great encouragement, reminding us of the promises made long ago to our forefathers, reminding us that His promises and His covenant with us cannot be negated.
Jacob found out how the universal law of sowing and reaping is working its way through his life. He did not know that he had a stronghold of lying and deceiving, until he had to be on the receiving end of it. You see, our very own strongholds are not admitted as such until we are on the receiving end of it. Until someone else does the same thing to us and all of a sudden we can feel the pain, the hurt, the disappointment.
Jacob was still dealing and wheeling. Anxious for his life, he came up with the idea to bribe his brother with gifts of a caravan of goodies. He hoped he can pacify his brother. Once everything he could do was done, finally Jacob was physically exhausted and alone in the wilderness. He feared for his life. He was convinced that he would face death after the messengers he sent out came back to Jacob saying: We came to your brother Esau, and he also is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him. At this moment Jacob realized that he is powerless to control his fate. With his father-in-law behind him and Esau before him, he was now too spent to struggle any longer. In the process, Jacob the deceiver received a new name, ISRAEL. But that is not all. The most important part of this struggle comes at the end. It was when God wrestled with Jacob that Jacob’s stronghold was taken down and demolished. And it was after his stronghold was demolished that GOD BLESSED HIM.
“… Jacob’s divine encounter at the Jabbok River was a magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.” Frederick Buechner