Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. This one comes from the apostle John, and from all Christians, in response to Jesus’ own words “Yes, I am coming quickly.”
On the fourth post of Doctrine for Everybody, concluded that the books the Lord says are Scripture are Scripture; that the Church doesn’t dictate the table of context, they confirm the index. For this reason we noted that the strongest support for the Old Testament Scriptures as we have them in the Protestant Bible are directly connected to the fact that it was the Bible that Our Lord Jesus Christ was using and confirmed as Scripture.
The contention is that the letters to the churches in the Revelation of Jesus Christ should be read in only one way with one intended purpose. If read in that way, the contender states, then the rest of the book should be read that way.
I will deal with the first charge by examining if the letters in Revelation 2-3 have only one purpose for one audience.
On the third post on Doctrine for Everybody, we noted that the revelation of God operates in certain spheres and modes within those spheres. We saw that God has spoken explicitly is in the Person of His Son, the Prophets, the Apostles, and finally recorded in Scripture.
But what Scripture? There are plenty of holy books: the Qu’Ran, the Book of Mormon, The Vedas, the writings of Guru Granth Sahib, the extra books dubbed canonical by The Roman Catholic Church and the general consensus of the Eastern Orthodox Church. After all—say some as if proving a point—it’s not like God ever said that these books are not Scripture!
On the second post on Doctrine for Everybody, we noted that the Church is to believe and teach what someone with Authority tells them to believe and teach—and that someone wasn’t a board of directors! Authority wasn’t derived from within the Church or from the collective body of the Church, but directly from God. Only God is the one who reveals to the Church what she is to believe and teach. In this post I want to discuss how God’s revelation operates.