Daily Devotionals
Devotional: December 19th
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” (Lu. 21:33)
The Word of God is not only eternal; it is absolutely sure of fulfillment. In HYPERLINK "javascript:" Jesus said that not one jot or tittle will pass from the law until all be fulfilled. A jot is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet that resembles a comma or an apostrophe. A tittle is a stroke of a Hebrew letter; we might compare it to the bottom stroke of a capital E that distinguishes the E from the F. In other words, Jesus was saying that God’s word will be fulfilled down to the minutest details.
Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor who lived A.D. 331-36, decided that he would disprove the Bible and discredit Christianity. The particular passage he chose to disprove was HYPERLINK "javascript:" : “And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” He began by encouraging the Jews to rebuild the temple. According to Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they went to work eagerly, using even silver shovels in their extravagance, and carrying the dirt in purple veils. But while they were working, they were interrupted by an earthquake and by balls of fire coming from the ground. They had to abandon the project.
Almost 600 years before Christ, Ezekiel predicted that the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem would be shut and that it would remain shut until “the prince” would come. Many Bible students understand “the prince” to be the Messiah. The gate, subsequently called the Golden Gate, was closed up by Sultan Seuleman in A.D. 1543. In Kaiser Wilhelm’s plan to capture Jerusalem, he hoped to enter by this gate, but his hope was dashed. The gate remains closed.
Voltaire boasted that the Bible would be a dead book in 100 years. When the hundred years had passed, Voltaire was dead and his house had become headquarters for the Geneva Bible Society. Ingersoll made a similar boast. He said that he would have the Bible in the morgue in 15 years. It was he, not the Bible, who went to the morgue. The Bible outlives all its critics.
You would think that men would wake up to the fact that the Bible is God’s eternal Word and that it will never pass away. But then, as Jonathan Swift said, “There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.”
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