Prologue
We're living in significant
times, and there are those among us who believe that things won't
continue forever as they currently are. While some people, uncertain
whether there is a plan and design at all behind the world we see,
wonder, "If there is a God, why does He allow all the wars and
killings, etc.?" others, who are sure of their religion, seem to see
nothing wrong with the world as it is, and don't really see a need for
God to intervene at all. After all, they just signed a mortgage deal
for a new 5-year building plan for their new church.
So, while opinions are divided
on whether the Lord should hurry to fulfill His Promises about
returning to Earth as its rightful King in the Latter Days, there are
certain things which indicate that big changes are impending, whether
we want them or not. Biblical prophecies which have never been
fulfilled, nor were their fulfillments possible previous to the 20th
century, are finally finding their mates in our times, or at least we
can see the stage setting for some, and we find more and more parallels
between our lives and those of our heroes and biblical patriarchs we
have read about, heard about or watched movies about.
It seems as if all that
happened to them, happened for a purpose, as if to teach those upon
whom the Ends of the World have come, from their own example: Adam
& Eve, Noah, Abraham and his heirs, on down to the kings of Israel
and their prophets… They all have something to say to those who have an
eye to see the parallels between their times and ours, and to those who
have an ear to hear the voices of our forefathers, who, far from the
primitive ape men as which they are described by our arrogant secular
contemporaries, seem to have possessed values and a nobility totally
foreign to their 21st century descendants.
One of the great mysteries of the "Big Picture,"
which we, from our individual levels call "life," and which the world
of the present day retrospectively calls "history," and some believers
have called "His-Story," is that history, as it is, seems to repeat
itself.
I consider the Bible - at least
the part of it that deals with historic matters - to be one of the most
reliable sources of man's history available, no matter how disputed its
reliability may be among the secular scholar and Dan Browns of this
world. And one of the clues in understanding the Bible is to realize
that things weren't really as different back then as they are now.
Of course, modern man thinks he
has "evolved" from the stage of "primitive men" of biblical times, but
I belong to those who choose to doubt that world view and believe that
there's a lot we can learn from the folks in the Bible, a book I have
now studied for over 30 years.
The things that will be covered
in this book once upon a time used to be common knowledge in what used
to be called western or Christian civilization, and certainly there
will still be folks around who will not have any need of it whatsoever,
since they'll be familiar enough with the Bible and its characters to
derive the lessons to be gleaned from them for themselves.
However, the majority of young
people we come across in our daily lives seem to indicate that on the
other hand there's a vastly larger number of folks who don't really
have a clue about any of this. First of all they doubt the veracity of
the Bible, since its very first chapter, featuring the biblical account
of Creation, is being undermined daily, as their heads are being filled
with "knowledge" about all the millions of years it took for us to
evolve from ape men into what we are today. In other words, the Bible
is merely viewed as another collection of ancient fairy-tales, similar
to Greek mythology, with superhuman heroes, and well, things we don't
see happening in real life, and thus they couldn't have been true.
The author of this book
however, is naive and childlike to believe that "with God all things
are possible," and that the things described in the Bible actually
happened, and that we can learn a lot from them. In other words, I'm
not one of those who apply the stories from the Bible as metaphors, but
I relate to them as actual experiences that people in the past had to
go through for our benefit, just as we are making our own experiences
right now which may benefit future generations who might not want to
repeat our mistakes.
There are many people who share
the faith in the accuracy of the biblical account, but they would not
dare to believe that any of what happened "back in those days" could
ever happen on a similar scale. Not many Christians believe in
miracles. If we are to believe what the Bible has to say about the
"time of the End," though, a time preceding Christ's Second Coming,
which He called a time of "tribulation such as there has never been" (Matth.24:21), then we do find indications that the people of faith who know their God in those days will "do exploits" (Dan.11:32) similar to those of their ancient biblical patriarchs (see Rev.11:5, 6).
Furthermore, the great apostle
Paul, without whom Europe might have never come to see the light of
Christendom, believed and taught that those things which happened to
the folks we read about in the Bible "happened to them as an example
for us, and written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world
have come" (1Cor.10:11).
In other words, they were not written down, nor did they happen for
nothing, nor by coincidence, but God wanted to teach all of us
something through the things that befell them.
In my first study of this kind, "The Deeper Meaning of Everything"
I talked about the things God wants to teach us through all the things
in His creation. Here now is an effort to comprise the gist of the
lessons that are there for us in the lives of the great men and women
of God in the Bible, in hopes that others may benefit from it to an
extent that will enable them to become such a man or woman of God, too.
As a great evangelist once said, "The only Bible the world reads is the
one bound in shoe leather." May we all put feet to the lessons that old
Book has to teach us.
