Those of you who know me personally know that I was born and raised in Texas. We have a saying in Texas: “Don’t mess with Texas!” This phrase was developed in the 1970s by the Texas Highway Department as an anti-liter slogan. However, it has taken on many different contexts over the years, including the general notion that you don’t mess with Texans, because they are somewhat different than folks from the other forty-nine states...
I will never forget what one of my church history professors told us one day in class in the late 1970s at Dallas Seminary. He said something like the following: Those of us who will follow Christ and His Word, as opposed to the rising emphasis upon religious experience, will increasingly become a smaller group until one day we will be on the outside of the American Evangelical Church looking in. My reaction to my prof was, “No, things will never get that bad within Evangelicalism.” Well, my prof was certainly right...
Did key elements of the doctrine of the pretribulational rapture originate with either Edward Irving (1792–1834) or the broader Irvingite movement and then conveyed to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) and the Brethren? This is the general thesis put forth in dozens of books and articles for many years. However, I do not believe that there is merit to such a position since Irving and his movement never taught pretribulationism and both come from very different eschatological systems...
Elijah is seen as one of the most important figures in all of Judaism. He is the forerunner of the writing prophets to Israel, thus the first of the prophets who often confronted the kings of Israel and Judah. Elijah played the role of calling Israel back to her faith as revealed in Moses. Thus, Elijah was already yoked together with Moses as an embassy of the Lord in calling Israel back to the Mosaic Law as the basis of God’s rule over the nation...
The battle of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38 and 39 is one of the most debated items in the area of biblical prophecy. Commentator Ralph Alexander said, "One of the perennial enigmas of Biblical prophecy has been the Gog and Magog event described in Ezekiel 38 and 39." Almost every aspect of this ancient prophecy has been disputed, including whether it was fulfilled in the past or is still a future prophecy...