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Amid change, Egyptian Christians are asking for prayer. In an e-mail shared with Baptist Press, an Egyptian Christian asked specifically that believers pray for Mubarak to be succeeded by a godly president who cares for the people; for freedom, including freedom of worship; for a democratic government; for a lifting of the oppression and injustice; and for the Arab and Muslim world to experience God moving.

Mark Hitchcock, a contemporary prophecy writer, references Smith’s calculation that “there are approximately 250 verses in the Old Testament that, at the time they were given, were prophecies of events yet to take place in Egypt.”[2] Nothing is said about any verses from the New Testament that deal with Egypt’s end-time place in prophecy. In fact, there is not a single verse in the New Testament that mentions anything about a prophetic role for any mid-eastern nation, including Israel! This means that the burden of proof is on the futurist to prove that Old Testament prophetic passages related to Egypt...

In November 2009, the Roman Catholic website Called to Communion posted an article titled Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority, critiquing one of the claims of my book The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Canon Press, 2001). The article is attributed to Bryan Cross and Dr. Neal Judisch. According to their website, Cross is a graduate of Covenant Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and currently a Ph.D. student at Saint Louis University. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 2006. Judisch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and a 2008 convert to Roman Catholicism. Like the...

Now let’s get down to where the real problem with all this hand wringing over prophetic signs. Given dispensational prophetic presuppositions, there can’t be any prophetic events or preparation of prophetic events this side of what dispensationalists call the “rapture.” If the “rapture” is “imminent,” that is, if it can come at “any moment” and could have come at any moment for the past 2000 years, then it has to be a “signless event.” Keep in mind that I am not a dispensationalist. What I’m about to show is the major flaw in so much talks about “signs of the...

It’s not just traditional liberals who are pushing the homosexual agenda. Ron Paul, the darling of libertarians, voted to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Then there is the co-opting of the American Conservative Union and its annual conference the Conservative Political Advocate Committee (CPAC) by the pro-homosexual group GOProud. Supposed conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart castigated those who wanted to exclude GOProud and even held a “gay”-themed party at CPAC to celebrate the “pride” of homosexuality and later joined GOProud’s advisory board. (I’m not quite sure what homosexuals are proud of. It seems to me that having “pride” in getting one’s...

Joel McDurmon, hosting today's show for Gary DeMar, exposes End-times Dysfunction (E.D.) for what it is. Joel shares with doomsdayers how they can get relief from their paranoia and troubled souls.

“It’s awfully hard to actually suggest abortion,” said Smith. “But, you know, I’m sure that, uh, in a case like this where the life expectancy is just, you know, is so bleak, and all, that I’m sure that the Lord would not condemn her if she went ahead and had an abortion at this early stage of the development of the fetus.”

Monsignor William Lynn, former head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's Office for Clergy, has been charged for allegedly failing to protect children from sexual abuse by priests, District Attorney Seth Williams announced today. Two felony counts of endangering the welfare were lodged against Lynn follow a grand jury investigation, Williams said at a news conference. Williams also announced the Revs. Charles Engelhardt, 64, and Edward Avery, 68, and Bernard Shero, 47, a former 6th grade teacher at St. Jerome's School in Northeast Philadelphia, had been charged with raping and sexually assaulting the same boy in the parish between 1998, when...

E. Earle Ellis writes that “the present existence of the Jerusalem temple (11:1) and its future desolation (11:2) are fairly strong indicators of a pre-AD 70 date for Revelation.”[8] In order for a post-A.D. 70 composition and futurist interpretation of Revelation to work, a rebuilt temple must be assumed, but it cannot be proved by anyone who claims to interpret the Bible in a literal fashion. There is not a single verse in the New Testament that says anything about a rebuilt temple, something that even dispensationalists acknowledge. Here’s what temple rebuilding advocates Tommy Ice and Randall Price admit: “There...

In others words, when God begins to bring the Jews back into their land He gave them, Christ will return! The phrase “will return” is omitted from most modern translations of the Bible since the Masoretic text (upon which the majority of modern translations of the Old Testament are based upon) and the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) do not include it. But the Dead Sea Scrolls copied some 150 years before the birth of Christ and over 1,000 years older than any previously discovered manuscript of the Bible includes this very phrase! The passage reads as...

A bank has threatened to take possession of First Family Church in Overland Park if it doesn’t pay more than $14 million in mortgage and other costs. A foreclosure petition filed in Johnson County District Court last week by Regions Bank asks that the property be foreclosed and if payment is not made that it be sold, with the proceeds applied to the debt. The mega church, which was described at one time as one of the fastest-growing in the country, came under scrutiny in 2007 after The Kansas City Star reported that hundreds of members had left the church...

As I wrote last week, “Most people don’t realize that many if not most of Jesus’ parables were intended not as general morality tales, but as particular pronouncements of coming judgment and change. Jesus was warning Jerusalem to repent and to accept its new King (Jesus) or else fall under ultimate condemnation of God. In fact, much of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels pertains primarily to that pre-AD 70 crowd, and without reading it in this light, we misunderstand it. And when we misunderstand it, we misapply it.” The following section of Luke requires this understanding. The parables Jesus tells...

Steven Greenberg was a 20-year-old Orthodox rabbinic student from Ohio, studying in Jerusalem, when he realized his affections were "ripping me apart." So he visited a sage, an esteemed interpreter of Jewish law. "Master, I am attracted to both men and women," he told Rabbi Yosef Sholom Eliashiv. "What shall I do?" The ultra-Orthodox Eliashiv's answer came as a surprise. "My dear one, my friend, you have twice the power of love," the aged rabbi told him. "Use it carefully." Stunned, Greenberg beseeched him to elaborate. But Eliashiv simply smiled and replied, "There is nothing more to say."

Most people don’t realize that many if not most of Jesus’ parables were intended not as general morality tales, but as particular pronouncements of coming judgment and change. Jesus was warning Jerusalem to repent and to accept its new King (Jesus) or else fall under ultimate condemnation of God. In fact, much of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels pertains primarily to that pre-AD 70 crowd, and without reading it in this light, we misunderstand it. And when we misunderstand it, we misapply it. The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Weeds) For many (perhaps even most) Christians, the parable...

Dead birds . . . Dead Cows . . . Dead Fish. Some Christians see these events as signs that the end is near. So-called “on-line theologian” Paul Begley is one of them. TIME magazine quotes Begley : “There’s something biblically going on with the signs of the second coming of Christ.” He is using Hosea 4:3 for support: Therefore the land mourns, and everyone who lives in it languishes Along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and also the fish of the sea disappear. The context for this passage is very clear. It...

Modern American theologians, preachers, and Christians know little of these events. If they have anything to say, it usually is a word of condemnation. They reject what they call the “Constantinian model.” They believe that the church should never preach to the civil government. They believe the civil government has a different sphere of operation, one that the Bible doesn’t speak to, and therefore the church has nothing to say about. They limit the Gospel to a few propositions for individual salvation. The Gospel can’t and doesn’t speak to the civil ruler, they claim. The issues of justice are left...

The Silent History of Dispensationalism [Thomas] Ice hopes to rebut preterism by writing on "The History of Preterism" to show that preterism really doesn't have one. The odd thing about End Times Controversy is that five of the seventeen chapters use historical arguments to defend dispensationalism over against preterism. As anyone familiar with dispensationalism knows, there is scant evidence of anything resembling dispensationalism prior to 1830.5 Certainly there is no evidence of dispensationalism among the early church fathers up until the time of the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), which produced the Nicene Creed, a document that says absolutely...

So in Luke 17:20-37 the Lord explained the two phases of the Kingdom, the invisible phase (the Church) and the visible one (the Millennial Kingdom). He said he was going away and then coming back, and that His 2nd Coming will be physical just like His first one. He also said there will be a believing remnant preserved through the End Times judgments that precede His return (Israel), another group of believers who will be removed to a place of safety before the judgments begin (the Church), and a group of Tribulation survivors. Upon His return, some of the Tribulation...

Soon it will be spring again. The snow will melt, the dogwoods flower. Trumpets will blast, graves will open, and Earth will begin a five-month descent to its fiery end. Radio evangelist Harold Camping can hardly wait. May 21 is Judgment Day, when "this world will be a horror story beyond anything we can imagine," he asserts. ... In a phone interview last week from his Oakland, Calif., office, [Harold] Camping warned that those who do not accept his complex calculations, including even devout Christians, will face "sudden destruction" when Jesus returns. ... Essentially, he argues that May 21, 2011,...

NPR’s Scott Simon claims that events like the Tucson shootings “Didn’t happen when 63 million people watched Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) every night.” “Uncle Walter,” as he was affectionately called, reported during a time when there were only three major TV news sources—ABC, CBS, and NBC. There were no comparable conservative competitors. ... Now to the claim that during Cronkite’s anchorman era events like the Tucson shootings didn’t happen. How quickly we forget. There were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), his brother Robert Kennedy (1968), and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968). King was assassinated on...