Time for some feedback. I would love to hear your questions and topics you would like to have a conversation about. Please comment below with your thoughts and I look forward to engaging you in some healthy, biblical conversations in the near future.

Missions
The Biblical Example For Sending Out Missionaries Vs Today’s Approach
Here is one instance from Acts 13:2-3 of how missionaries were sent out, “While they were worshiping the Lord and
7 Responses
For the holiday season the birth of Jesus with background information.
I am more than happy to do that!
Hi Matt, thanks for the opportunity to raise issues relevant to the faith and doctrine. I think some issues need to be re-addressed from time-to-time as sometimes things are missed by one body of thinking, and come to mind for later consideration as written-in-stone because a tradition of endorsing the accepted view has grown up. I think I’d like to know more concerning ’24-hour [God] days of Creation – the Biblical evidences for and against’.
What worries me is that viewpoints held in Classical times by some Jewish thinkers seem at variance with the message imparted by many preachers today, For example, the 2nd century BC ‘The Book of Jubilees’, Jubilees 4: 29-30 says:-
“29 And at the close of the nineteenth jubilee, in the seventh week in the sixth year [930 A.M.] thereof, Adam died, and all his sons buried him in the land of his creation, and he was the first to be buried in the earth.
30 And he lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore was it written concerning the tree of knowledge: ‘On the day that you eat thereof you shall die.’ For this reason he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it.”
So, those times that are to do with “the testimony of the heavens” are governed in duration by Moses’s injunction in Psalm 90: 4:-
“4 For a thousand years in Your sight, are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night.”
Surely, the accounting of the time of the Creation, seen from the Lord’s perspective in the heavens, is part of “the testimony of the heavens”, if anything is?
This, I think needs to be considered in the light of Jesus’s statement to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well [John 4: 6] – for they too are part of Paul’s famous graft [Romans 11: 17-18] – that:-
“You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.”
This is an important topic and one that I have spent some time thinking about. Best case scenario we don’t start with our conclusion but reason toward a coherent conclusion. We can dive into this in more depth in its own post but I will go ahead and point out two things. First, there are many instances where day (yom in Hebrew) is not a literal 24 hour period like the “day of the Lord.” Second, and maybe you have already considered this, but look when the sun, moon and stars are created and how many “days” have already gone by. The text even says, “And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,” on the fourth day. There wasn’t anything there to mark times, days (24 hours) and years until the 4th day of creation. Just something to consider that allows us to take the text literally and still end up with an old earth that is in sink with our paleontologist evidence.
I taught a class a few months ago that I posted to youtube that addresses some of what you are talking about. – https://mattdabbs.com/2018/10/25/connecting-the-creation-dots-in-the-larger-biblical-story/
Thanks for the open offer. I would like to see the Jewishness of Jesus mentioned. Too few Christians know much about Jesus, his lineage (House of David), how he responded to people in a crowd who called out to him “Son of David”, and the origin of his teachings. If you really are gutsy, the courage of Mary and her likely lineage from Aaron, would be beneficial.
This is one of my favorite topics. Let’s do a series on this very soon. Thanks for the help.