The Door

In October of 2017, our family visited the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. We toured the impressive full-size ark. Of all the things we saw, what I appreciated most was the door.

When God gave the instructions for the building of the ark, He told Noah to put one door in the side of the ark: “the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof” (Gen. 6:16).

The ark is a picture of Christ. Being in the ark, Noah and his family were safe from the judgment of the worldwide flood. Likewise, being in Christ, we are safe from the ultimate judgment of the lake of fire. He is the “Ark” that delivers us from the judgment of God for eternity.

The door of the ark is a type of Christ as well. He is the door by Whom we enter into salvation. As the Lord taught Israel in His earthly ministry, and is a truth for us in the Body of Christ too, “I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved…” (John 10:9).

The way of salvation in Noah’s day was the wooden ark with its single door, and the way of eternal salvation today is by the wooden cross upon which Christ died. And as the ark had only a single door, so it is that Christ is the one way, the only way to eternal safety.

To the Reader:

Some of our Two Minutes articles were written many years ago by Pastor C. R. Stam for publication in newspapers. When many of these articles were later compiled in book form, Pastor Stam wrote this word of explanation in the Preface:

"It should be borne in mind that the newspaper column, Two Minutes With the Bible, has now been published for many years, so that local, national and international events are discussed as if they occurred only recently. Rather than rewrite or date such articles, we have left them just as they were when first published. This, we felt, would add to the interest, especially since our readers understand that they first appeared as newspaper articles."

To this we would add that the same is true for the articles written by others that we continue to add, on a regular basis, to the Two Minutes library. We hope that you'll agree that while some of the references in these articles are dated, the spiritual truths taught therein are timeless.


Two Minutes with the Bible lets you start your day with short but powerful Bible study articles from the Berean Bible Society. Sign up now to receive Two Minutes With the Bible every day in your email inbox. We will never share your personal information and you can unsubscribe at any time.

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The Depiction of Daniel’s Prediction – Daniel 2:31-39

Summary:

When Daniel says the “image” that the king dreamed about “stood” before him (v. 31), that indicates it was a man.  But not the walking, talking kind of man; the kind of image of gold or silver that the king worshipped (v. 32,33). The metals of this image get stronger from head to foot, which makes sense, for they represented nations that were about to rise and conquer one another in succession.  But the fact that these metals also get cheaper shows that God knows civilization is going downhill, spiritually speaking!

The “stone” (v. 34) is Christ (I Cor. 10:4).  “Without hands” means without human instrumentality (Col. 2:11 cf. Acts 7:48)He was “cut out” of “the mountain” (Dan. 2:44) of God’s kingdom in heaven when the Lord was born of a virgin, without the human instrumentality of Joseph.  He was given a body like the body made “without hands” that we will have in heaven (II Cor. 5:1).  Your new body will be “eternal” because God made it, but recognizable because it will be the same body your mother made.

When verse 34 says the stone will smite the metals of this image, that’s a picture of Revelation 19:15.  It will smite the image’s feet because the metals represent nations that would rule the world in the future, and the last nation that will rule the world will be Antichrist’s.  His nation will be the culmination of all the wickedness of all those previous nations, so in smashing it the Lord will be smashing them.  That’s why verse 35 says they’ll be smitten “together.”

After that, the nations will be “like the chaff” (v. 35).  That tells you how small the “pieces” are they’ll be broken into (v. 34)—like “powder” (Mt. 21:42, 44)—and blown away by the second coming of Christ!  And after that there will be “no place” found for them (v. 35).  That’s referring to places in the government of earth (cf. Jo. 11:47, 48).  Fallen angels currently have places in the government of heaven (Eph. 6:12) and will continue to do so until they lose their “place” in Revelation 12:7, 8.  And there will be no place found for the nations of the world in the government of earth at the Lord’s coming either.  That’s because the kingdom that the Lord will set up won’t be a culmination of all the kingdoms that came before it.  Verse 35 says the Lord will make “of Himself” a kingdom, not of them.

Someday the Lord will be “the king of kings” (I Tim. 6:15), but here in Daniel 2 He made Nebuchadnezzar “a king of kings” when He gave him his kingdom (v. 38).  God again claimed credit for giving him his kingdom in Jeremiah 27:5-7.  When it says he had power over man and beast in all the world, that’s similar to the power God gave Adam (Gen. 1:28).  None of the fallen angels that he was told to “subdue” could have conquered him if he hadn’t sinned, and no nation could conquer Babylon either.

The next kingdom of silver wouldn’t rise until “after” Nebuchadnezzar died (Dan. 2:39 cf. Jer. 26:6, 7), which is exactly what  history tells us happened.  Then God said to his grandson that his kingdom would be “divided” to the Medes and Persians (Dan. 5:28-31)—one kingdom with two parts, represented by the one breast and two arms of the image.  It is said to be “inferior” to Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 2:39) because the world is getting worse, not better!

We find out who that third kingdom of brass is (2:39) when God gives Daniel a vision of the same world powers in Chapter 8.  After seeing Media-Pesia described as a ram with two horns, he saw a he-goat representing Greece conquer them (8:1-21), so the kingdom of brass here is Greece.  God showed these kingdoms to Nebuchadnezzar as a bright shiny man because that’s how men see the future.  But He showed the same future to Daniel as animals getting progressively smellier, because that’s how God sees man’s future!

The other metals represent nations, but the gold represented the king of a nation because God couldn’t say Babylon was the head of gold because Babylon had kings before Nebuchadnezzar (II Ki. 20:12), and Babylon didn’t become head of the world until he was king.  Even then it wasn’t automatic.  In the fourth year of Jehoikim, he burned his Bible (Jer. 36:9-23), and a year later God gave Nebuchadnezzar this vision appointing him head of the world in Jehoikim’s place (Jer. 25:1 cf. Dan. 2:1).

Video of this sermon is available on YouTube: The Depiction of Daniel’s Prediction – Daniel 2:31-39

What Do You Call A Near-Sighted Dinosaur?

A Doyouthinkhesaurus, of course!

Speaking of things that we are not sure were seen, did you ever wonder why Paul wrote:

“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men” (Titus 2:11).

Christians often ask about this verse. They know that God’s saving grace got around to a lot of people in Paul’s day, but they also know that it hadn’t “appeared to all men” on earth. So what did Paul mean?

Well, to begin with, we know that

“The heavens declare the glory of God… day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard” (Psa. 19:1-3).

The stars can be seen by “all men” on earth, and every night they speak and send out a message to everyone on the planet, a message that says there is an all-powerful Creator who brought those innumerable stars into existence. But just knowing there is a God isn’t enough to save anyone, for even devils believe that (James 2:19). So how could Paul say that the grace of God that brings salvation had appeared to all men?

The solution to our puzzle is that the phrase “all men” doesn’t always mean every man on the planet. When the Lord told the twelve apostles, “ye shall be hated of all men for My name’s sake” (Matt. 10:22), He didn’t mean they’d be hated of other believers! He meant they’d be hated by all unbelievers, a prediction that will come true in the Tribulation that will follow the Rapture.

That tells us that the phrase “all men” must always be interpreted by its context. Sometimes it means all kinds of men, as when Paul said, “I am made all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22), and then spoke of men who were “under the law” and others who were “without law.” We see this definition for “all men” again when Paul later said that he chose to “give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles” so as to “please all men” (1 Cor. 10:32,33).

And it is different kinds of men that Paul had in mind in the context of Titus 2:11 as well. Under his ministry, God’s saving grace had evidently appeared to the “aged men” (2:2) in Crete where Titus was stationed (1:5), as well as to the “aged women” (2:3), the “young women” (v. 4), the “young men” (v. 6) and even “servants” (v. 9). God’s grace had obviously appeared to all those kinds of men, and saved all who responded to it in faith.

Now that, in and of itself, was nothing new. The men who preached salvation before Paul never had to stop and ask, “Are you a master or a servant?” before telling someone how to be saved, and they didn’t exclude men or women of any age. However, before God raised up Paul, they did have to ask if a man was a Jew or a Gentile, for before Paul was made an apostle, the grace of God that brought salvation could only appear to Jewish men. Even the Lord Himself was “not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24), and He told the twelve apostles to “go not into the way of the Gentiles” to preach the gospel of salvation because, as He told a Gentile woman, “salvation is of the Jews” (Matt. 10:5; John 4:22). And we know that didn’t change at Pentecost, for Peter declared that God raised Christ from the dead “to be… a Saviour… to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31).

But when God saved Paul and commissioned him to go “unto all men” (Acts 22:15), we know that here the phrase “all men” included Jews and Gentiles, for later he said that he obeyed that commission by preaching “first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles…” (Acts 26:20).

And when we apply this definition of “all men” to our text in Titus 2:11, that’s when we are introduced to something that was new, for no one before Paul could say,

“There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him” (Rom. 10:12).

And that’s how Paul could say that the grace of God that bringeth salvation had appeared to “all men.” Before he was made an apostle, Gentiles who wanted to be saved had to hear about God’s saving grace from the Jews to whom it had appeared.

If you’re thankful it appeared to you, why not thank God for His saving grace, and then tell someone about it. You’ll both be eternally glad you did.

To the Reader:

Some of our Two Minutes articles were written many years ago by Pastor C. R. Stam for publication in newspapers. When many of these articles were later compiled in book form, Pastor Stam wrote this word of explanation in the Preface:

"It should be borne in mind that the newspaper column, Two Minutes With the Bible, has now been published for many years, so that local, national and international events are discussed as if they occurred only recently. Rather than rewrite or date such articles, we have left them just as they were when first published. This, we felt, would add to the interest, especially since our readers understand that they first appeared as newspaper articles."

To this we would add that the same is true for the articles written by others that we continue to add, on a regular basis, to the Two Minutes library. We hope that you'll agree that while some of the references in these articles are dated, the spiritual truths taught therein are timeless.


Two Minutes with the Bible lets you start your day with short but powerful Bible study articles from the Berean Bible Society. Sign up now to receive Two Minutes With the Bible every day in your email inbox. We will never share your personal information and you can unsubscribe at any time.



Two Minutes with the Bible is now available on Alexa devices. Full instructions here.

The Run From the Outhouse – Daniel 2:14-30

Summary:

In Daniel 2:1-14, King Nebuchadnezzar had a bad dream and asked his advisers to tell him: 1.what he dreamed, and 2.what it meant.  None of them could, so he ordered them all killed, including Daniel and his friends. After Daniel learns why he had to die (v. 15) he asked the king for time to tell and interpret the dream (v. 16).  He then went home and asked his three Hebrew friends to pray with him about this dire situation.

But how come he only calls God “the God of heaven” (v. 18), and not “the God of heaven, and the God of the earth” (Gen. 24:3)?  He left that last part off because God used to be known as the God of the earth through Israel.  When His people in Israel obeyed Him, they were the head of the earth (Deut. 28:1, 13, 15, 43, 44).  But once they got so disobedient God let Nebuchadnezzar conquer them, He made Nebuchadnezzar the “head” of the earth (Dan. 2:37, 38).  After that, God didn’t want to be known as the king of the earth, not with an unsaved pagan like that at the helm.

By the way, after Israel became a nation no one nation ruled the world like Egypt did before Israel became a nation.  That’s because as far as God was concerned Israel was the head of the nations for 900 years.  So he didn’t let any other nation rise over the others for 900 years, until Israel was released from Babylonian captivity.  Then God went back to being called “the God of heaven and earth” (Ezra 5:11).

A “night vision” (Dan. 2:19) is a dream (Job 33:14). God gave Daniel a dream to interpret the king’s dream—probably in the same night he was told he must die.  And if he was sleeping, that means he was dreaming.  Could you sleep if you were about to die?  You could if you did what he did.  He prayed and then leave it with the Lord (Phil. 4:6, 7).  Peace like that, in the dispensation of grace when God isn’t providing miraculous answer to prayer, “passeth all understanding” of unbelievers.

Daniel blessed God that He had the wisdom to know the king’s dream and the might to tell it to Daniel (Dan. 2:20).  And he blessed Him before he asked the king if he was right about what he dreamt! That’s like how we can thank God for the Rapture even though it hasn’t happened yet, forGod is wise enough to have planned our escape from the Tribulation in the Rapture and mighty enough to accomplish it.

Changing the times (Dan. 2:21) means setting up and removing kings like it says.  Antichrist will seek to remove kings and set himself up as king of the world (Dan. 7:25).  Daniel’s talking about this because God showed him that the king’s dream had to do with removing and setting up future kings.

When God set up Nebuchadnezzar as the head of the world, “the times of the Gentiles” began (Lu. 21:24), i.e., the times in which Gentile nations rule the world instead of Israel.  They will continue until the second coming of Christ (Lu. 21:24, 27) when God will put Israel back in charge of earth.

Would you stick up for the astrologers and soothsayers as Daniel did (Dan. 2:22-24)?  His Bible condemned their practices in Israel, but Daniel knew he wasn’t in Israel.  He didn’t expect unsaved men to know and do what God said.  Think about that the next time you hear a Christian condemn gay marriage and such.  We condemn sins like that in believers in church, but we shouldn’t condemn them in unbelievers outside of church.  Daniel hoped his lack of condemnation would open their hearts to the gospel, and we should pray the same about homosexuals and other sinners.

The king’s guard falsely claimed credit for finding Daniel (Dan. 2:25-27), but Daniel credited God for interpreting the dream.  Notice that he didn’t put God on the spot by mentioning Him before he learned the dream (2:16).  He knew God knew the dream, but he didn’t know if God would tell him the dream!  That’s how careful we should always be to make sure God always gets all the credit for things, and we get all the blame!

“The latter days” (Dan. 2:28) in this context has to do with the kingdom of heaven on earth (cf. Jer. 30:9).  The king went to bed wondering about the future (Dan. 2:29), so God told him about the future!

Video of this sermon is available on YouTube: The Run From the Outhouse – Daniel 2:14-30

The King Had a Dream – Daniel 2:1-13

Summary:

Later we learn the king only dreamed one dream, so the word “dreams” here (v. 1) must mean he had that one dream over and over.  Since it “troubled” him, it must have been a nightmare.  Don’t envy the rich; their riches won’t let them sleep for fear of losing their riches (Eccl. 5:12).  Besides, envy is unhealthy as well as unspiritual (Pr. 14:30).

The king called his advisers “then” (v. 2)—when “his sleep brake from him” in verse 1—in the middle of the night to show him his dream.  “Shew” means to interpret (cf. 5:15).  Pagans back then thought their gods communicated with them in dreams (cf. Mt. 27:19), so the king thought he’d just heard from his gods with troubling news that he needed interpreted pronto!  And he wasn’t the first pagan king to need a dream interpreted (Gen. 41:1-8).

In Chapter 1, we saw that Daniel and his 3 friends were in a 3-year program to become advisers, and Daniel 2:1 says that they were still in their second year, so the king only summoned his graduates to interpret this troubling dream.

The king told his advisers that he’d had a dream (v. 3) and they asked him what it was (v. 4).  “Chaldeans” (2:4) was another name for Babylonians (Ezek. 23:15).  “Syriack” (2:4) was what the Syrian language had evolved into in Babylon, the way English evolved in our country.  Daniel mentions this because at this point he starts writing in Syriack because it was the language that all the nations spoke after Assyria conquered them.  Daniel is about to describe the future of the nations, and he wants them to be able to read it, so they know Israel’s God is God.  It’s kind of like how God wanted the New Testament written in Greek because everyone spoke Greek after Alexander the Great conquered the world.

There’s also 15 Persian words and 3 Greek words in Daniel.  Bible critics say that this is because Daniel wrote his book after the Persians and Greeks conquered the nations and spread their language.  They say that because they don’t want to admit Daniel’s God predicted they’d conquer the world, because to admit that would mean admitting that the God of the Bible is God.  But Daniel spent his life standing in the king’s court (cf. 1:5) hearing ambassadors from Persia and Greece, so some of their words had crept into his vocabulary, the way Japan’s word tsunami crept into ours.

The king didn’t like being asked what his dream was (2:5), so just said the thing was gone from him, meaning: “I meant what I said” (cf. Ps. 89:34).  After threatening to kill them if they couldn’t interpret his dream, he offers to reward them if they can (2:6), so they ask him again what he dreamt (v. 7).

The king accused them of stalling (2:8), hoping he’d get so desperate for an interpretation that he’d tell them his dream.  He told them his “decree” of killing them would stand (v. 9) if they didn’t tell him his dream.  He knew that every time he’d asked them to interpret a dream in the past that they “had prepared” lying words to tell him—i.e., they just made something up “till the time be changed.”  That refers to a change in administration (cf. 2:21).  In other words, they’d just interpret the dream to be a prophecy of something that wouldn’t come true till after he was no longer king, so he couldn’t kill punish them when it didn’t come true!

That means this wise king figured something out.  After a year of listening to their phony interpretations, he figured out that if he makes them tell him what he dreamed, then he can be sure they were in touch with the gods and he could trust their interpretation.

They were partly right when they admitted that only the gods knew his dream (2:10, 11), for Daniel’s God did (Amos 4:13).  But only Daniel’s God did (IKi.8:39).  But when those advisors admitted they weren’t in touch with the gods that knew his dream, the king commanded them to die (2:12).  He’d been paying them to tell him what the gods said, and now they admit they didn’t know what the gods knew!

This death order included Daniel and his friends (2:13) even though they hadn’t been given a chance to interpret the dream—probably because the king figured if the men who had graduated his advisory school couldn’t interpret it, there was no use asking men who were still in school.

Video of this sermon is available on YouTube: The King Had a Dream – Daniel 2:1-13

The Clarity of Sincerity

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul gave a young minister named Titus some advice that is good for any Christians who long to minister sound Bible doctrine to others:

“In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing… sincerity” (Titus 2:7).

The dictionary says the word sincere means pure and unmixed. That’s why Paul wrote,

“Let us keep the feast, not with… the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity…” (1 Cor. 5:8).

God told the Jews under the law to keep the “feast” of unleavened bread right after they kept the passover by not mixing leaven in their bread (Lev. 23:4-8), and Paul says that the way to keep that feast today under grace is to keep the leaven of sin out of our lives to show God how thankful we are that “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7).

Now you would think that every believer would know that our lives should be pure and unmixed with sins like “malice” and “wickedness” as we teach the doctrine of grace. But the carnal Corinthians were teaching grace but living in malice (1 Cor. 14:20) and wickedness (1 Cor. 5:13), wrongly believing that grace is a license to sin those particular sins and many others. If that describes your Christian life and ministry of the doctrine of God’s grace, I’d invite you to consider showing sincerity in doctrine instead. Ours is a high and holy calling!

And there are other things with which doctrine shouldn’t be mixed. Paul described his ministry to the Corinthians as one that was conducted “in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom” (2 Cor. 1:12). Corinth was a city in Greece, and the Greeks were known for the “wisdom” of their philosophers. So in writing to the Corinthians, Paul decried “the wisdom of men” over and over (1 Cor. 1:17-3:19), insisting that he had not mixed doctrine with worldly wisdom (1 Cor. 2:4) as evidently Corinth’s “ten thousand” false teachers had done among them (1 Cor. 4:15). Perhaps the reason they seem to have bought into this was that they thought such a mixture was the only way to make the doctrine of grace more palatable and popular. That prompted Paul to tell them what he told Titus, that doctrine should be preached in sincerity instead.

Now you’d think that nearly 2,000 years later preachers would know better than to mix Bible doctrine with the wisdom of men. But when the theory of evolution arose, many pastors were intimidated by science—science that was actually nothing more than “science falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20). So some of them mixed that example of unbiblical worldly wisdom with the doctrine of creation and came up with something called “theistic evolution.” That’s the theory that claims that evolution is real, but that it was set in motion and superintended by God! And there are many other examples that could be cited of mixing doctrine with the wisdom of men.

But instead of taking your valuable time to cite more examples of the folly of worldly wisdom, I’d rather point out one more thing with which sound Bible doctrine should not be mixed, something Paul pointed out when he told the Philippians about some who “preach Christ even of envy and strife; and… contention, not sincerely” (Phil. 1:15,16). There are believers who mix sound doctrine with things like envy and strife and contention. In other words, they preach doctrine just to pick a fight with others! I hear from men like this all the time, and I believe it is just as dishonoring to the Lord as mixing doctrine with carnal wickedness or fleshly wisdom.

Before you set this article aside, why not pray about this important matter? Doctrine that is unmixed with carnality, human wisdom, or contentious envy and strife is sure to give your words the clarity of sincerity that you long for as you share grace truth with others.

To the Reader:

Some of our Two Minutes articles were written many years ago by Pastor C. R. Stam for publication in newspapers. When many of these articles were later compiled in book form, Pastor Stam wrote this word of explanation in the Preface:

"It should be borne in mind that the newspaper column, Two Minutes With the Bible, has now been published for many years, so that local, national and international events are discussed as if they occurred only recently. Rather than rewrite or date such articles, we have left them just as they were when first published. This, we felt, would add to the interest, especially since our readers understand that they first appeared as newspaper articles."

To this we would add that the same is true for the articles written by others that we continue to add, on a regular basis, to the Two Minutes library. We hope that you'll agree that while some of the references in these articles are dated, the spiritual truths taught therein are timeless.


Two Minutes with the Bible lets you start your day with short but powerful Bible study articles from the Berean Bible Society. Sign up now to receive Two Minutes With the Bible every day in your email inbox. We will never share your personal information and you can unsubscribe at any time.



Two Minutes with the Bible is now available on Alexa devices. Full instructions here.

The Builder and His Reward

One day a kindergarten teacher was reading the story of the three little pigs to her class. She started by explaining how the first little pig was looking for straw to build his house, so he asked a farmer: “Pardon me, sir, may I have some of your straw?” At that point the teacher paused and asked her class, “And what do you think that farmer said?” One little boy raised his hand and answered, “I think he said, ‘Holy cow, a talking pig!’”

If you’re wondering why I’m reminding you of the story of the three little pigs, it is because in 1 Corinthians 3 the Apostle Paul compares the ministry to the kind of house-building that the three little pigs were engaged in. Speaking of himself and Apollos (1 Cor. 3:5-9), he said,

“For we are labourers together with God… ye are God’s building” (v. 9).

When Paul said of himself and Apollos that “we” are God’s laborers, and then told the Corinthians that “ye” are God’s building, that’s his way of saying, “We’re God’s builders, you’re the church that we’re building.” The Corinthians were household members of “the house of God, which is the church of the living God” (1 Tim. 3:15).

Of course, Paul and Apollos were only “labourers together” when it came to the actual work of the ministry. Paul went on to make clear that he was the “masterbuilder” of the church (1 Cor. 3:10), and the Greek word for masterbuilder there is architekton, from which we get our word architect, the guy who draws the blueprints for a building. The blueprints for the church of this dispensation are found in Paul’s epistles!

Hail to the Chief

But if Paul is the architect of the church, why did our King James translators translate the word architekton as “masterbuilder”? Well, the “arch” part of architekton means chief, as when we read about “Michael the archangel” (Jude 1:9). Michael is said to be “one of the chief princes” in God’s angelic host (Dan. 10:13). And the “tekton” part of architekton is only used elsewhere to describe the occupation of Joseph, the Lord’s father, who was a carpenter. So when you put those two Greek words together, you come up with chief carpenter, or “masterbuilder.”

That’s what an architect was back in Bible days. He did more than just draw the blueprints of the building. As the building was being erected, he rolled up his sleeves and participated in the actual work of building the building.

That makes “masterbuilder” the perfect word to describe Paul, who wasn’t just some highfalutin apostle sitting in an ivory tower somewhere mailing out epistles to people. He labored together with men like Apollos on the construction crew of the church, traveling from city to city doing what we might call the “grunt work” of the ministry.

But don’t let that cause you to lose sight of the fact that Paul is the architect of the church, as it does with the many Christians who think Paul was just one of many ministers like Apollos that God used to build His church. If you fail to recognize that Paul is “the minister of Jesus Christ” for the present dispensation (Rom. 15:16), you’ll never understand how Paul could say of the church, “I have laid the foundation” (1 Cor. 3:11), and then add,

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11).

Those who fail to see, or refuse to believe, that Paul is “the apostle of the Gentiles” (Rom. 11:13) can’t explain how Paul could say that he laid the foundation of Christ. They know Paul wasn’t even saved when the Lord came to be “a precious corner stone, a sure foundation” (Isa. 28:16) for the kingdom church in Israel (Matt. 16:18, 19). The only possible explanation is that Paul laid the Lord Jesus as the foundation of a new church building, “the church, which is His Body” (Eph. 1:22, 23).

Grab a Hammer

But when it came to doing the actual work of the ministry, Paul and Apollos were “labourers together with God.” And they weren’t the only builders doing the grunt work of this new church. When Paul went on to say, “if any man build upon this foundation” (1 Cor. 3:12), he made it clear that laboring on this new church building wasn’t the exclusive privilege of “ministers” like him and Apollos (1 Cor. 3:5). Any members of the church can participate in this epic building project, and all of us should.

But Paul cautions us, “let every man take heed how he buildeth thereon” (v. 10). Building God’s house on the foundation of Christ is crucially important, of course. But it’s not just important what you build a house on. It’s also important what you build it with—as a couple of those three little pigs found out the hard way when they built their houses with straw and sticks that the big bad wolf easily blew down.

We know that God’s house can also be built with things like straw and sticks, for after telling the Corinthians to take heed how they built on Christ’s foundation, he added,

“… if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble” (1 Cor. 3:12).

As you can see, inferior building materials like straw and sticks are certainly available to use in building God’s house. But it doesn’t take a realtor to know that building it out of things like gold and silver and precious stones will ensure that God’s house is constructed in such a way that will make it of much greater value.

People Who Live in Gold Houses

Now here you might be thinking, “But who builds a house out of things like gold?” If so, the answer is Solomon. Look what it says he built the temple with:

“And the house, that is, the temple… was forty cubits long.… And… Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold…” (1 Kings 6:17-21).

And that house of gold was a type of what God will someday make the house of Israel into—a sort of living temple! That explains what John says about people who will overcome the temptation to take the mark of the beast in the Tribulation:

“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God…” (Rev. 3:12).

That’s a reference to the living “temple” of God, the one He had in mind when He said of the people of Israel, “I will dwell in them” (2 Cor. 6:16).

But as we’ve already seen, the house of Israel isn’t the only house of people that God has in the Bible. Today, in the dispensation of grace, “the house of God… is the church of the living God,” “the church, which is His Body.” That’s God’s other house of people in the Bible. And that’s the house that Paul had in mind when he talked about building on the foundation of Christ.

In speaking of this house to Timothy, Paul wrote,

“But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour” (2 Tim. 2:20).

Here the word “great” refers to the size of God’s spiritual house, as when the Bible sometimes speaks of things “great and small” (2 Chron. 36:18, etc.). In a house as great as God’s church there are bound to be members who are vessels of honor and vessels of dishonor. But why would he call us “vessels”?

Household Containers

Well, a vessel is a container that is used to hold things, usually so you can carry those things from one place to another. There’s a reason that ships are called vessels. They contain people and cargo that are being carried to other places. The Bible uses the word “vessel” this way as well, as we see when Jacob told his sons:

“…take of the best fruits in the land in your vessels, and carry down the man a present” (Gen. 43:11).

And the reason Paul calls us vessels is that God has put something in us that He wants carried to other people, something we read about in 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul talks about the gospel (v. 3-6), and then says,

“We have this treasure in earthen vessels” (v. 7).

God made Adam out of the earth, and since you’re a son of Adam, you’re made of the same stuff he was. And if you’re saved, you’re the earthen vessel in which God has placed the “treasure” of the gospel.

But He didn’t put it in you just so you can be a container of it and live happily ever after in heaven. He expects you to carry it to others—just as He put it in Paul, and said of him:

“…he is a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel” (Acts 9:15).

The Lord put the gospel into Paul and told him, as it were, “Bear it in your vessel to other people.” That’s how the Lord built His church in Paul’s day, and He expects us to build it today by doing the same.

Swabbing the Deck

And the Lord believes in running a tight ship! So he inspired Paul to tell the Thessalonians,

“…ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour” (1 Thes. 4:3, 4).

God doesn’t want the vessel that’s carrying His gospel dishonored by sin. So when Paul says that in the house of God there are “vessels of honour, and some to dishonor” (2 Tim. 2:20), he means that some believers are possessing the vessel of their bodies in honor and some are living in sin instead.

But we know that being a vessel of honor involves more than just purging acts of sin from our lives, for after speaking to Timothy about the vessels in God’s great house, he added,

“If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use” (2 Tim. 2:20,21).

The “these” here are not sins, like he talked to the Thessalonians about purging. They’re the things that Paul mentioned earlier in the context, when he counseled young Timothy to

“Shun profane and vain babblings…” (2 Tim. 2:16).

Profane and vain babblings are also things you have to purge to be a vessel unto honor. You have to purge your words of wood, hay and stubble, not just your stubbly works.

Purge the Verbage

You say, “What kind of profane and vain words do we need to shun?” Well, Paul doesn’t leave us guessing. He went on to describe those stubbly words, saying,

“Shun profane and vain babblings… saying that the resurrection is past already…” (2 Tim. 2:16-18).

Now saying that the resurrection is past isn’t a doctrinal error, it’s a dispensational error. That is, they weren’t denying the doctrine of the resurrection as the Corinthians were doing. The false teachers Paul is talking about there had simply misplaced it.

And teaching dispensational errors like that will make you a vessel unto dishonor and unfit for the Master’s use just as readily as living in sin will. The Master wants to use you to carry Pauline truth to other believers in addition to carrying the gospel of salvation to unbelievers. If you’re not “rightly dividing the Word” (2 Tim. 2:15), you’re probably carrying the wrong gospel to the lost, and you’re certainly not building God’s church with the gold, silver and precious stones of truth. You’re building the church with wood, hay and stubble, and you’re a vessel unto dishonor, because you’re not taking heed how you build on the foundation that Paul laid.

And as you can imagine, the Lord is very concerned about how you build His church. That’s why Paul went on to tell the Corinthians:

“Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is” (1 Cor. 3:13).

The work you do to build the Body of Christ is not work that everyone sees, and the results of your labor involve much that even you never see. But there is coming a day when our work will all be “made manifest,” a day that Paul calls “the judgment seat of
Christ” (Rom. 14:10).

Your Final Exam

When you stand before this judgment seat, your entire body of work as a Christian will be made manifest, all the service that you rendered for the Lord after coming to know Him, all the work that you did to build God’s church on the foundation that Paul laid. The purpose of this review will be to determine if you qualify for “a reward” or if you must “suffer loss” of reward in that day (1 Cor. 3:14,15). To make this determination, Paul says that the Lord plans to “try” or test your work by “fire.”

What kind of fire? The fire of God’s Word (Jer. 23:29). Of course! What else would He use to evaluate our work? In that day, the Lord will assess our work with God’s rightly divided Word to make manifest “what sort it is.”

Now here it is important to notice that Paul didn’t say that the fire of God’s Word will test your work to reveal how much it is. That wouldn’t be fair to Christians who don’t live as long as others, or who don’t get saved until later in life and don’t have as much time to work for the Lord as those who are saved at an earlier age. If God were interested in the quantity of your work, He wouldn’t use a fire to judge it. He’d use a scale to weigh it, or a measuring tape to measure it.

Instead, He is going to use the fire of His Word to judge “what sort it is.” That word “sort” means kind, as when Moses wrote,

“Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together” (Deut. 22:11).

Wool and linen are different kinds of cloth, and God says if you’re wearing a shirt made of both, it’s time to change your shirt! Or at least it would be if you were under the law instead of grace.

Trial by Fire

It’s easy to understand how the fire of God’s Word will determine what sort of work we did for the Lord, for fire burns up combustible things like wood, hay and stubble, and leaves things like gold, silver and precious stones standing. Durable things of that nature can “abide” the fire, as Paul went on to tell the Corinthians:

“If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward” (1 Cor. 3:14).

Now here it is important to point out that the Lord doesn’t plan to put you in the fire to see if you abide or burn. That happened when you got saved and you were identified with Christ as the fire of God’s wrath fell on Him for our sins. You were able to abide that fire because you were baptized into Christ and identified with Him when you got saved. But at the Judgment Seat of Christ, the Lord is going to put your work in the fire of His Word to see if it burns or abides that fiery test.

This reminds me to say that I’m often asked if our sins will be judged in that day. I personally don’t believe that our sins will even be brought up at the Judgment Seat of Christ, for Paul says the Lord will judge our “work,” not our works. He plans to judge the entire body of work that we rendered while building His church, not our individual works.

But if you think otherwise, I would invite you to consider that if our sins are brought up in that day, they will only be evaluated as they affected our work, the work of carrying the gospel to the lost and edifying the saints with Pauline truth. That is, our sins wouldn’t be judged because they hurt God, but only because they hurt the work that God has given us to do.

Tarnishing Your Testimony

As you may already know by experience, unbelievers are naturally skeptical when you tell them how to be saved from their sins if you yourself are still living in sin. And when you live in sin and try to tell believers that they are not under law but under grace (Rom. 6:14,15), they naturally conclude that you must think grace is a license to sin, and are quick to dismiss the grace message because of it.

This is why Paul tells us to “adorn the doctrine of God” (Titus 2:10) with the kind of “holiness” he described in that passage (vv. 1-9). But the apostle never says that our individual works will be judged and rewarded, only our entire body of work as builders of God’s church.

Now when I say that, I’m often asked about Paul’s instructions to servants in Colossians 3:22-25:

“Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God… Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance.…  But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done.…”

Here Paul promises servants that if they serve their masters well the Lord will reward them, even if their masters don’t. But when he says that servants will “receive for the wrong” they do, this has caused some Christians to wonder if the Lord will withhold rewards at the Judgment Seat of Christ to punish us for our sins.

But let me ask you, what are the wages of sin? Romans 6:23 declares that “the wages of sin is death,” not a loss of reward. And Christ fully paid for your sins when He died your death, so there will be no additional death for your sins at the Judgment Seat of Christ. But then, what could Paul have meant when he wrote that servants will “receive” for “the wrong” that they do?

What’s Wrong With My Work?

Well, the first definition of the word “wrong” in my dictionary has nothing to do with sin or moral evil of any kind. It has to do with being not right, with being incorrect. For example, if you use the wrong letters to spell a word, like my dad used to do—he could do trigonometry, but one time he asked me how to spell “paper”!—if you spell paper with a “w” or a “z,” you’re wrong. You’re incorrect. But you’re not sinning. Likewise, if you give the wrong answer to a question on a test in school, as I often did, you’re incorrect, but you’re not guilty of moral evil.

No matter what you do in life, there’s always a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. And in the context of Colossians 3, the right way for a servant to serve his master is to obey him. The wrong way is to disobey him. Service like that does the very opposite of adorning God’s doctrine, it mars it.

And this is what Paul means when he says that servants will receive for the wrong they’ve done. Not obeying your master is a sin. But if it is a sin that will be brought up at the Judgment Seat of Christ, it is a sin that will only be judged there because it is the wrong way to serve a master, and that damages a servant’s work on the church. If a disobedient servant shared the gospel with his unsaved master, his words were more likely to fall on deaf ears, for they would be colored by the servant’s tarnished testimony.
That’s an attempt to build the church with the wood, hay and stubble of disobedience to Paul’s instructions to servants, and it would cause the servant a loss of reward.

When a servant obeyed his master instead, he was working with gold, silver and precious stones. The difference in these valuable commodities is the difference found in “what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Rom. 12:2). That’s talking about how, in any area of our spiritual lives, there is always a good way to go, a better way to go, and the best way to go. It is good for a servant to obey his master and not disobey him. It is better to serve him without eyeservice. But the best way to serve is “in singleness of heart… heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Col. 3:22,23).

That’s building the church with gold, silver and precious stones. And if the Apostle Paul were here, he would tell you to go for the gold!


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The Daniel Diet – Daniel 1:8-21

Summary:

The king’s meat (v. 8) probably included meats forbidden for Daniel to eat (Lev. 11).  And since they were meats the king himself ate (1:5), they probably came from animals sacrficed to his gods, for they only sacrificed the best to their gods, as did the Jews, and the king only ate the very best, of course.  And meat like that was also forbidden (Ex. 32:12-15).

Moses’ law didn’t forbid the drinking of wine (Dn. 1:8) but the king’s wine was also probably sacrificed to his god (Deut. 32:31-33, 36-38).  David refused to drink “their drink-offerings of blood” (Ps. 16:4), and the Bible’s connection be-tween wine and blood (Gen. 49:11) explains why Rome says the wine in the priest’s communion cup is Christ’s blood.

Catholicism calls their service “the sacrifice of the mass,” and in ancient times wine was sacrificed to a false god (Jer. 44:17), along with “cakes” (v. 19).  Jeremiah is telling us that the worship of false gods with bread and wine isn’t new with Catholicism, it goes back to the Old Testament.  But it was still around in Paul’s day, which is why he wrote that the bread and cup that “we” use in our Lord’s Supper observance isn’t the actual body and blood of Christ.  It represents “the communion” of His body and blood that we have with other members of His body (I Cor. 10:16-20).  But unsaved men back then were sacrificing to the “devils” behind their idols in their communion service, as Rome does.

But King Nebuchadnezzar commanded Daniel to eat that meat, and God told him to obey him (Jer. 27:12, 17).  So what was he to do?  Well, first he “requested” to be excused from the king’s table (Dn. 1:8), a request his prince was inclined to grant because he liked Daniel (1:9).  God hadn’t forced him to like him, of course.  Daniel had just been obeying him in all other matters so he’d have compassion on him, as God had told him to do (I Ki. 8:46-50).  It worked! (Dn. 1:10).

The reason the king nourished Daniel was so he could stand before him (1:5) looking healthy.  Kings felt if their subjects didn’t look healthy and happy it made it look like they weren’t doing a good job keeping their people happy (cf. Neh. 2:2).  So the prince told Daniel he’d like to help him but feared the king would punish him if Daniel looked underfed (Dn. 1:10).  And the word “faces” (plural) in verse 10 shows that Daniel’s friends were standing with him.

Daniel appealed to the middleman (Dn. 1:11), saying, as it were, “If you’re trying to nourish us (1:5), let us prove that keeping God’s diet can nourish us just as well” (1:12, 13).  If “ten days” (v. 12) sounds familiar, it is because Daniel is a type of Tribulation Jews who will likewise be imprisoned and tested (Rev. 2:10).  He was in Babylon, and Antichrist’s church will be called Babylon (Rev. 17:5).  They’ll be tempted to eat meat sacrificed to false gods just as he was (Rev. 2:14, 20).  The number 10 is the number of the Gentiles (cf. Zech. 8:23) and a Gentile was testing Daniel, and Gentiles will test Tribulation Jews as well (Rev. 2:9).

The middleman agreed to the test (Dn. 1:14), and God worked a miracle to make them healthier than others (v. 15), a type of how God will similarly nourish Jews who just eat manna and not idolatrous meats in the Tribulation.  So the middleman let Daniel keep God’s diet (Dn. 1:16).  We know Daniel’s ability to understand dreams (Dn. 1:17) was a miraculous one, for it enabled him to interpret the king’s dream in Chapter 2 without knowing what he dreamt!  That means the “learning and wisdom” God gave all four of them was miraculous, and a type of the miraculous wisdom the saints received at Pentecost (Acts 6:3), and a type of the wisdom God will give Tribulation saints (Luke 21:15).

The faithfulness of the Fab Four enabled them to stand before the king (Dn. 1:18,19) to hear his wisdom (cf. II Chron. 9:7), but the king soon found that they could advise him (Dn. 1:20).  This additional reference to the number ten emphasizes how Daniel will focus on the future of the Gentile nations, not the future of the nation Israel like other Jewish prophets.

Daniel lives to see the captivity end (Dn. 1:21) and his friends don’t, making him a type of Jews who will live through the Tribulation to enter the kingdom, and his three friends types of those who will have to die and rise to enter it.  He had 3 friends, a number associated with resurrection (I Cor. 15:3).

Video of this sermon is also available on YouTube: The Daniel Diet – Daniel 1:8-21

Why Does Paul Say “Love Is Not Jealous”?

“God often says that He is a jealous God (Ex. 20:5; 34:14; etc.), and I John 4:8 says that ‘God is love.’ So how can 1 Corinthians 13:4 say that ‘love is not jealous’?”

This is an example of the kind of question that has to be answered by recognizing a translation error. The King James Version of the Bible says that “charity envieth not,” but I’m aware of at least two dozen new Bible versions that mistranslate the Greek word for “envieth not” as “is not jealous.”

Envy and jealousy are not the same. We know that jealousy cannot be a sin because God says He is jealous over and over (Deut. 4:24; 5:9; 6:15; 32:16,21; etc.), and “God cannot be tempted with evil” (James 1:13). On the other hand, envy is condemned as a sin numerous times (Prov. 24:1,19; Rom. 1:29; 13:13; 1 Cor. 3:3; Gal. 5:21,26).

Husbands and wives sometimes ask if it is wrong for them to be jealous. We know it’s not, for when some false teacher tried to woo the Corinthians away from grace by preaching the “Jesus” of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to them (2 Cor. 11:4), Paul told them to put him on the pay-no-mind list, adding,

“For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (v. 2).

Paul would not have made that comparison if marital jealousy were sinful. That means we should be as “jealous for the Lord” as Elijah (1 Kings 19:10,14) when it comes to those who would try to entice grace believers to forsake the Christ of Paul’s epistles.

To the Reader:

Some of our Two Minutes articles were written many years ago by Pastor C. R. Stam for publication in newspapers. When many of these articles were later compiled in book form, Pastor Stam wrote this word of explanation in the Preface:

"It should be borne in mind that the newspaper column, Two Minutes With the Bible, has now been published for many years, so that local, national and international events are discussed as if they occurred only recently. Rather than rewrite or date such articles, we have left them just as they were when first published. This, we felt, would add to the interest, especially since our readers understand that they first appeared as newspaper articles."

To this we would add that the same is true for the articles written by others that we continue to add, on a regular basis, to the Two Minutes library. We hope that you'll agree that while some of the references in these articles are dated, the spiritual truths taught therein are timeless.


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