A man walks into a bar….

Man Arrested for OWI with Zebra, Parrot in Front Seat of Truck

You will find that Mr. Jerald Reiter, 55 was refused access to the Dog House Lounge, but only according to the owner because they were serving food that night.  (Normally he would have been admitted with the Parrot and Zebra, I guess).  When police stopped him in the parking lot of the bar he had the Zebra and Parrot in the front seat of his pickup truck.  Reiter disputes the charges and says he realized he was too drunk to drive and was about to let a passenger in the truck to take the wheel when he was arrested.  Assuming that neither the Parrot or the Zebra had a valid drivers licence and as they were the only passengers in the truck police were forced to arrest poor Mr. Reiter as his alcohol blood test was  .14.  The legal limit in Iowa is .08.  Another case of police profiling I am sure!  Dubuque police should not have assumed that neither had a valid drivers licence.  If only Parrots and Zebras had effective civil rights organizations like the NAACP and La Raza!  The link in above will take you to the story and video of his wife explaining all of the details.

The Dog House Lounge, Dubuque, IA

Well, he’s in the Jail House now.

Another cloudy and rainy day in the Bitterroots but all the rain will be appreciated come fire season.  Our dry summers suck all of the moisture out of the trees if we don’t get enough rain and snow in the Winter and Spring months.

Just a few news items you may have missed this week.

Mormons, Catholics, Baptists & Jews Come Together to Plot Defense Plan for ‘Religious Liberty’

This is a short but uplifting story on Conservatives from many religious backgrounds coming together to fight against the Obama health care law.  Remember the old saying; “first they came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, then they came for the Catholics but I wasn’t a Catholic,  ……..Then they came for me but there was no one left to help.”

Meet Soros-Funded Domestic Terrorist Brett Kimberlin Whose ‘Job’ Is Terrorizing Bloggers Into Silence

This is a story that should be read by everyone no matter what your political leanings.  Without the freedom to share ideas and report facts the world will slip into anarchy.  Which makes me wonder why this isn’t a story in the main stream media.  This one hits particularly close to home since I am a blogger and some of my readers don’t agree with my viewpoints.

Theresa May: we’ll stop migrants if euro collapses

If you believe the main stream media; “the economy is recovering” then you might want to read this article.  The saying as goes Europe so goes the United States is still in effect.  As Greece talks of pulling out of the E.U. effectively declaring itself insolvent, it will create a line of falling dominoes.  It is so serious that the United Kingdom is making plans to protect it’s citizens abroad and keep people from other E.U. nations from flooding in.

Exclusive: Elizabeth Warren Listed as ‘Woman of Color’ by Harvard Journal in 1993

My grandfather on my mom’s side used to tell me as a boy; “kid, never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, (I think he got it from W.C. Fields).  Anyway, looking back on it, I don’t think he ever broke that rule.  Apparently Elizabeth Warren had a similar grandfather because she has taken it to all new levels in her life.  Ms. Warren, if you are not familiar with her, is running against Scott Walker for Senate in Massachusetts.  She is a blond, blue-eyed, ultra-liberal Harvard law professor who, despite a complete lack of evidence outside of “family lore” and “high cheekbones,” she listed herself as a “minority” professor in a law faculty directory for some years.  She has never produced documentation showing her to be 1/32 Cherokee — that is, having a Cherokee great-great-great-grandfather.  In fact it has turned out not to exist.  BUT, LET’S NOT LET THAT SMALL FACT GET IN THE WAY OF USING THE STORY TO FURTHER YOUR CAREER!

Have a great Saturday

Regular Joe

Related articles

• Cherokee Genealogist to Elizabeth Warren: “Never are your ancestors ever found living among the Cherokees” (notesandobservations.me)
• Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Story Won’t Go Away (theatlanticwire.com)
• New England Historical Genealogical Society Rescinds Conclusion that Elizabeth Warren Might Be Cherokee (volokh.com)

Well guys, its Friday morning of Memorial Day Weekend.  People are planning for a 3 day holiday weekend with NASCAR, BBQ’s, family outings and recreation.  But let’s not forget what started it all.

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service. Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.  I will have more on Monday’s post.

Paul’s letter to Timothy

As for today’s devotional; we are almost done looking at the use of the last days in Scripture but I am sure that it will run at least two more days.  Today we are looking at 2 Timothy 3:1-9.  Take a moment with me to read through it.

2 Timothy 3:1-9

1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.

2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,

3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,

4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—

5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires,

7 always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.

8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these men oppose the truth–men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected.

9 But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.  

Boy, sounds like the world I see today!  But let’s get into the text.  Paul wrote this second letter to Timothy as he was in prison in Rome as the result of persecution under Nero.  In chapter 1:8 and 4:6-10 he acknowledges his approaching death.  Verse 1 is a warning saying that there will be terrible times in the ‘last days’.  As we have seen earlier in this series, Paul was living in the last days.  Certainly being held in a cold dungeon alone and then being beheaded would rate as terrible times for Paul.  But, I believe the text is talking about general overall conditions in the world.  There have obviously been terrible persecutions of Christians over the past 2000 years and also times of peace and prosperity.

What this text predicts is that things will get worse and worse.  This contradicts the New Age and secular world view that we are all evolving and getting better.  According to these verses people will become worse and worse.  There is an interesting progression that I see in the text.  Let’s look at verse 2: People will be lovers of themselves, as people become more self-centered they find they have more and more ‘needs’. To get these ‘needs’ fulfilled usually requires money…so they become lovers of money, which often leads to comparing what they have to others around them to determine how successful or happy they are.  This makes them boastful, and proud.   Soon this behavior leads to a sense of entitlement or being better than those around them.  This entitlement attitude can lead them to be abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,

That leads us into verses 3 & 4;

3. without love, when one becomes totally consumed with self and self-fulfillment then it becomes impossible to love others.  Unforgiving, slanderous, without love for others it is impossible to have forgiveness which ultimately leads to slandering others to give permission to oneself to not love or forgive them.  Without self-control, as a person becomes totally focused on self they start to think of themselves as god or total authority.  This eventually leads to a lack of feeling for others which allows them to be brutal, in their actions to others. Not lovers of the good, at this point they no longer consider what is good or bad only what pleases them.  They no longer desire good.

This leads us to verse 4;

4 Such people who no longer desire good become treacherous and rash.  They become totally consumed with self…conceited, and in doing all of the above are motivated only by self-pleasure and fulfillment at all costs.  They are  lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—

As we move closer and closer to the ‘last’ of the ‘last days’ there will come a point where there will be a great ‘falling away’.  Man becomes so self-consumed that all types of sin and perversion are accepted.  In 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4  it talks about this time;

1 Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you,

2 not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come.

3 Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,

4 who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

It is in these last final years, (7 to be exact) that the Anti-Christ, son of perdition is revealed.  People will accept him because they have come to be self-consumed and love evil.  They will call evil, good and good, evil.  And what about this son of perdition?  What are his attributes?

He “exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped”, he “he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.  The ultimate blasphemy!  He has become so self-consumed that he imagines himself and declares himself to be God!

There are so many people and events that I could link to these verses but I am sure a few have come to your mind already.  As we move closer to the fulfillment of 2 Thessalonians 2, the people of the world will continue to become more self-centered and everything that goes with it.  We as Christians need to reach out to them with the love of Christ Jesus.  We also need to evaluate our own lives to make sure that even though we have the salvation of Christ that we do not fall into the sin of being self-centered and its accompanying evils.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Regular Joe

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Only half of the Bitterroot Mountains are visible this morning.  The other half is cloaked in fog and clouds.  The weatherman says 70% chance of rain; I think he got it right today!  It is a good day to pressure wash a couple of projects to get them ready for paint.  Pressure washing is usually a cold wet job with or without rain gear so a little more rain won’t make any difference.

I cannot believe it is already Thursday and we are into part 4 of a word study on ‘the Last Days’!  If you read yesterday’s post, Last Days Part 3, you will remember that we were studying in Acts 2 and that Peter identified the events of that Pentecost 2000 years ago as part of ‘the last days’.  I promised to answer the question; “how can we live in the last days for 2000 years?”

Where are we on God’s clock

Now I will start out by saying that I interpret all Bible verses literally unless they say that they are not to be taken literally.  Examples of verses that are not to be taken literally are ones that say something is like something else.  The writer is trying to explain aspects of something in terms that the reader will understand.  Another is parables where a story of a simple event is used to explain something that is very complicated or hard to understand.  If you have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord of your life and don’t agree with this then you will lose your salvation….NOT- NO- NEVER…you cannot lose the eternal gift of salvation.  We will just disagree.

Part of taking the Bible literally is that when Genesis says God performed creation in 6 days and rested on the 7^th; they were literal 24 hour days.  Genesis 1:5 says “God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.  So the evening and the morning were the first day.”  If those were hundreds of thousands or millions of years it was dark for a long time and then light for a long time.   Another important piece of the puzzle is the genealogies; remember the long boring lists of; Adam lived 130 years and begat Seth who lived 105 years and begat Enosh…..  I remember as a young Christian reading that and thinking, “why is this in the Bible?”  There are two main genealogical listings in the Scriptures; the first is in Genesis 5 and the second is in Matthew 1.  Among the purposes of these texts is to establish the lineage of Jesus Christ and the second is to show God’s plan for the ages and confirm his prophecies to man.

Using the genealogies and years they give for each of the patriarchs you come up with Adam being created roughly 4000 B.C.  The world until the 1800 almost universally believed in a “young earth”, less than 10,000 years in age.  It has only been with the coming of the theory of evolution that people have had to continually add time to make the process work.  If you add enough time to any process it “might be possible”

Irenaeus, an early church father, wrote his Against Heresies.  In book 1, chapter xxviii, 3, we read:

“For in as many days as this world was made, in so     many thousand years shall it be concluded.  And for this reason the Scripture says: ‘Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment.

And God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made; and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works.’

This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come.  For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed:  it is evident, therefore, that they will come to and END at the sixth             thousand year” (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol.1, p.557).

In 2 Peter 3:8 it says;

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Some Biblical scholars interpret this to mean only that time has no meaning to God, however I believe that this is a case where something is repeated two different ways for emphasis.  Obviously this is just a small sampling of scriptures to fit in a short post on the subject.  There are many more evidences both secular and from the Bible that the earth is relatively young.  A literal reading of the Bible confirms this.

Now, back to the question at hand: “how can we live in the last days for 2000 years?”  What did Peter mean when he made that statement in Acts 2?  I will through in another potentially confusing Scripture and then address them both.

Hosea 6:13

1 “Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds.

2 After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.

3 Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”  

Hosea is writing a prophecy to the unrepentant nation of Israel.  Hosea covers both current events in approximately 700 B.C. and then future events surrounding the coming of Christ 700 years later.  In chapter 6 he is talking about a future time; “after two days he will revive us and on the third day he will restore us….”  Now, either he was talking about literal 24 hour days, in which case he was wrong, the Bible in error and we should through it out, or he had another meaning.  If, using 2 Peter 3:8, he is talking of “a day with the Lord is a thousand years” and he is speaking of events around the time of Christ, then suddenly Hosea’s prophecy takes on a different meaning.

If God planned on 7000 years of earth history to reveal his plan for man, then translating that to Hosea 6 and Acts 2 looks something like this:

God’s Week

In Acts 2:17 Peter is viewing God’s Plan in the context above; he is on the beginning of Friday, one of the last two days of the week before the Sabbath, the Millennium.  In quoting  Joel 2:28-32 he is talking of God’s Week of Earthly existence.

This is the only way that I am aware of that the text from Hosea 6 makes sense also.  “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.”  From the time of the first coming of Christ there will be two days, 2 thousand years, that the Israelites, Jews will be in a state of ‘death’ but on the third day – the Millennium, the last thousand years or the Sabbath, God will revive them and they will be restored to fellowship with Him.

With God things don’t generally happen overnight, at least not as we count time, but God has a plan and it will all be fulfilled.  In 1948 Israel became a nation again after over 2000 years.  The only nation or people ever to do so!  Every day we move closer to the events of the Day of the Lord, which comes at the end of the 6000 years.  After I finish looking at last days texts we may move on to the ‘Day of the Lord’.

For now I have got to get out the door and off to work.  Have an exciting day discovering what God has in store for you today!

Regular Joe

Related articles

• The Last Days / Part 1 (5gsandacupofjoe.net)
• Last Days / Part 3 (5gsandacupofjoe.net)
• Last Days / Part 2 (5gsandacupofjoe.net)
• The Story of Hosea and What It Says About God (adw.org)
• On Reading the Begats (greenbaggins.wordpress.com)
• On the continuity of prophecy (creationconcept.wordpress.com)

Today promises to be a repeat of yesterday.  Spring in Montana requires being prepared for any kind of weather.  Yesterday it was 41 to start the day with rain and wind off and on requiring warm clothes but for a while around 3 pm the sun was out and I was down to my T-shirt and wished I had shorts along.  But by 4:30 the warmth was gone and I needed rain gear again.

In round three of looking what the Bible says about the last days we are moving into the New Testament.  Acts 2 is the accounting of the believers who were gathered together for the day of Pentecost.  This is the time when the Holy Spirit came as Christ had promised them; “the Comforter”.

Peter Addresses the Crowd

Acts 2:14-22

14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say.

15 These men are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning!

16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

17 ” ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.

18 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

19 I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke.

20 The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

22 “Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

This is one of the most interesting verses in the Bible to me.  It says that the events happening are what Joel the prophet was talking about.  If you are not familiar with the verses they are found in Joel 2:28-32.  Joel, the prophet wrote the book about 800 B.C. during the reign of King Joash.  Joel Chapter 2 is talking about a time of future blessing, ‘the last days’ yet Peter says that the events that the Jews were witnessing in approximately 33 A.D. were part of this prophecy!  That would mean that everyone alive from the time of Christ forward has been living in the last days.  You are living in the last days.  No one told me that through most of my life.  How can we be living in the last days for 2000 years?

Also notice that not all of the events of the verses in Acts 2 have been fulfilled yet.  Tomorrow I will go deeper into explaining what I believe the meanings of these verses are.

I must go out and do battle with rotting siding on an older home to replace it with new.  I will meet you here again tomorrow Lord willing.

Regular Joe

Related articles

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• Last Days / Part 2 (5gsandacupofjoe.net)
• Read It Here, Sunday, May 27, 2012 (graceblog.wordpress.com)
• On the continuity of prophecy (creationconcept.wordpress.com)