Mossab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas founder, SILENCES Pro-Palestinian useful idiot student in a debate after he calls him dumb. pic.twitter.com/JhgXnMs9Af — ? ?️??? (@king27yan) August 18, 2024 FYI: Mosab Hassan Yousef was born in Ramallah in 1978. His father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, is a founding leader of Hamas, internationally recognized as a terrorist organization […]

On the morning of October 7, 2023, Meirav Gonen spent four hours on the phone with her daughter, 23-year-old Romi, who was at the Nova music festival in southern Israel. Meirav tried to calm Romi as rockets from Gaza struck the festival. She stayed on the phone while Romi hid with her friend, Galli, in some bushes; while a man tried to rescue Romi and Galli by driving them away from the festival; and while bullets hammered into the car, killing everyone inside except for Romi. As Hamas terrorists dragged Romi out of the car to take her hostage, all Meirav could do was say over and over again into the phone, “We love you; you are strong. We love you; you are strong.” Romi has been held as a hostage ever since. Romi was one of more than 250 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Galli was one of more than 1,300 people killed. Hamas’s surprise attack plunged Israel into a period of traumatized grief. Sometimes termed “Israel’s 9/11,” October 7 was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As we come up on the one-year anniversary of this event, here are five ways we can pray together. 1. Pray for God to comfort the grieving. This Sunday, October 6, is the day before the anniversary of last year’s massacre. In the conflict that followed, tens of thousands of Palestinians have also been killed. We’re commanded to weep alongside those who weep (Rom. 12:15), and praying in church for God to comfort them is one way to fulfill that command. Father, please comfort Israelis who lost loved ones in such harrowing circumstances on October 7 last year. Please restore the hostages to their families. Please would you also comfort Palestinians and Israelis who have lost family and friends in the ensuing conflict. We pray that they would know your loving presence near to them (Acts 17:27).  2. Ask God to give Israel and its neighbors lasting peace. Since last October, Israel has conducted military operations against Hamas in Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has also conducted an extensive operation against Hezbollah, a terrorist organization based in Lebanon that has launched near-daily rocket attacks against Israel since October 7. On Tuesday this week, Iran opened up a third front when it launched some 200 ballistic missiles at Israel. October 7 was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. When leading prayers in church, it’s important to pray in such a way that all present will be able to say “Amen” in their hearts. Some church members will likely believe that Israel’s actions are justified on the basis of self-defense. Others may believe that Israel’s actions have been overly aggressive. Congregational prayer is a time when, ideally, all God’s people should agree with the petitions brought before the Lord. Lord God, all power in heaven and on earth is in your hands. We commit to you the current conflicts in the Middle East. Under your oversight, would these conflicts be resolved in a way that allows Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians to live in lasting peace. Please protect civilians from harm. In your mercy, would you shorten this time of suffering in the Middle East.  3. Pray for Christian unity between Arab Christians and Messianic Jews. Sermons on Christian unity often feature encouraging stories of longtime enemies brought into loving fellowship by their shared faith in Christ. The past decade, however, has seen some Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews (the preferred term for Jewish Christians) moving from unity to disunity. There are three main areas of controversy. First, many Palestinian Christians believe Israel should be condemned for gaining additional territory through the wars of 1947–49 and 1967. Messianic Jews, however, are usually unwilling to condemn their country for the outcome of wars they regard as justified. Generally speaking, Palestinian Christians also take the view that Israel should be condemned for the way in which it controls the Palestinian Territories and for the nature of its current war on Hamas. Messianic Jews, on the other hand, typically think Israel’s actions are justified on security grounds. A third area of controversy is violence against Palestinians by ultranationalist Jewish settlers in the Palestinian Territories. In this case, many Messianic Jews would agree with Palestinian Christians that the actions of the ultranationalists are indefensible. Father, you say in your Word that “Christ Jesus . . . himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:13–14). We believe that all Jesus’s followers are already united in the body of Christ. Please would that spiritual unity become an outward reality for Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews. Show us once again that what is impossible for humans isn’t impossible for you (Matt. 19:26).  4. Ask God to overcome misinformation about Israel and Palestine. Few regional conflicts have had their past and present discussed as extensively and heatedly as the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Sadly, that discussion has often been marred by misinformation. In the social media age, false claims can spread instantly, and later clarifications rarely reach the original audience. Both sides are served best when provocative rhetoric is avoided and the highest standards of truth-telling and factual accuracy are observed. Heavenly Father, you warn us in your Word that the tongue can act as a fire. We pray that the international debate about Israel and Palestine would be based on facts rather than misinformation. Please would truth prevail over falsehood.  5. Pray for Israelis and Palestinians to be saved. The Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians who live in Israel and Palestine desperately need to hear the good news about Jesus. According to the missions app Operation World, 2 percent of Israel’s 9.3 million people are Christians; only 0.4 percent are evangelicals. (Out of those Israeli Christians, a minority are Messianic Jews; most are Arab Christians.) Of the 5.5 million Palestinians in the Palestinian Territories, 1.6 percent are Christians; only 0.1 percent are evangelicals. Living in a war zone makes questions of life and death much harder to avoid, which can create openness to the gospel. Living in a war zone makes questions of life and death much harder to avoid, which can create openness to the gospel. This is a time for us to pray earnestly for many to gain the sure hope of eternal life with Christ in the new heavens and the new earth, where there will no longer be any war (Isa. 2:4). Lord God, we pray that the message about Jesus would spread rapidly in Israel and Palestine and be received with saving faith (2 Thess. 3:1). Please send out your workers into this harvest field (Matt. 9:38). Give your people many opportunities to share the gospel and boldness to make the most of them.

Learning to read is the first and most important step in a child’s education, the principal doorway to learning about everything else. Reading both informs and forms, which is why children of God down through the ages have sought to figure out what the Bible means, why it matters, and how they should respond to or participate in the Bible’s story. Figuring this out is an art and a science, and it’s called hermeneutics. Why Hermeneutics? Hermeneutics is the study of the principles and practices necessary for textual understanding. It’s a discipline that asks, What exactly are we doing when we read, understand, or apply texts? Hermeneutics is for those who, like me, care about biblical literacy and are concerned about the conflict of biblical interpretations. It’s for those who, like me, are puzzled about the nature and method of literal interpretation. It’s for those who, like me, want to live under Christ’s lordship in every area of their lives, including their study of the Bible. Biblical hermeneutics isn’t rocket science; it’s theological science. And it transforms us as readers of God’s Word. Our concern, then, should be for seminaries and churches to become the kind of cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ. Forming Reading Cultures To read the Bible as God’s Word involves the science of God (theology) and the culture to which this science gives rise. The social spaces where reading happens are known as “reading cultures.” Not every reading culture acknowledges the Bible as God’s Word. Students at secular universities who enroll in “The Bible as Literature” classes belong to one kind of reading culture, participants in Bible Study Fellowship to quite another. What’s ultimately at stake is whether and to what extent we acknowledge the Bible as God’s inspired Word. What’s ultimately at stake is whether and to what extent we acknowledge the Bible as God’s inspired Word. The first step toward forming a reading culture that accords with Holy Scripture is to acknowledge the existence, and influence, of reading cultures. Some readers may resist the idea that they belong to any culture that might affect their reading. The cure for this naivete is a good dose of church history. Travel is equally educational. Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear quickly come to understand that culture pertains not only to those people over there but to all of us. Every person’s biblical interpretation is culturally conditioned, minimally, by the reading culture to which he or she belongs. Let me now set forth my working assumption: the kind of exegesis we do depends on the nature of the reading culture into which we’ve been socialized. Reading cultures are communities that value and practice a certain way of reading. They generate interpretations and, more importantly, form readers to conform to their community’s standards and practices. My question, then, is this: Is exegesis without reading cultures possible? Biblical interpreters do well to examine not only the presuppositions they bring to the text but also the ways their presuppositions and interpretive practices have been formed by the particular reading culture they inhabit. It matters because the ways Christians read the Bible eventually shape Christian culture. A disordered reading culture will form a disordered Christian culture (and vice versa). It’s a kind of hermeneutic circle: reading cultures form readers, and readers form reading cultures. Transforming Readers The urgent question concerns theology’s role. Different reading cultures attune readers to attend to different things. How are seminaries and churches forming Bible readers to attend not only to grammar but to God? What, if anything, is distinctly theological about biblical interpretation? The ways Christians read the Bible eventually shape Christian culture. To read the Bible “like every other text” is to do it an injustice, because in important respects, it isn’t like any other text. God is involved in the production (writing) and reception (reading) of the Bible in a way qualitatively different from his involvement with other texts. While the reading of the Bible is in some respects similar to the reading of other books, overall it’s marked by an even greater dissimilarity: “What makes the Bible like other books is the fact that it has authors; what makes the Bible unlike other books is that its primary author is God.” To read the Bible theologically is to be attentive not simply to its original historical context or even theological content but also to how the text effects a breaking in of God’s Word into the reader’s own context, making the reader one of those “on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). The question that remains is how readers should respond to, and be formed by, what John Webster called the “eschatological culture” brought into being by the living and active word of God that invades and interrupts our worldly places. To read the Bible theologically is to inhabit a context into which God breaks in. We, as Christians, belong to a peculiar, eschatological reading culture. We must therefore come to understand authors, texts, readers, and the process of reading itself in relation to God and the gospel of God. This is our proper theological context. It’s therefore important not to confuse the eschatological culture that all Christians share with particular ethnic, national, disciplinary, or denominational cultures. The goal is a mere Christian hermeneutic that accords with our eschatological Christian culture, a hermeneutic that will form readers to read canonically, in spirit and truth—and as a result, be transformed.

Most presidents weren’t handed the office on a silver platter. They had to strive to practically claw their way to power, and that often comes with some taste of failure. Indeed, failure is part of what makes a person’s rise to the presidency so inspiring. So, what sort of rivals needed to be overcome along […] The post 10 Politicians Who Beat a Future President appeared first on Listverse.

As the leader of a religious congregation, the pastor plays a vital role in leading people to God. They usually feel that they are called to serve others in their spiritual journey, and they help spread God’s teachings. However, some pastors have fallen far from grace, as they lived a much eviler life than they […] The post 10 Evil Pastors Who Killed Their Family appeared first on Listverse.

Flood damge following Hurricane Helene in the southern US – screengrab from the News&Observer On Friday evening Secretary of State Antony Blinken broke the news on X that the Biden regime is sending…

In addition to possibly losing control of the White House, Democrats are realizing that they may also lose control of the U.S. Senate this fall and panic is starting to set in among them. If the GOP takes…

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn talks with Tucson Mesh about cool things mesh networks can do, how to build community-led internet programs, and what goes on in all of those tubes. You can find out more about Tucson Mesh at https://www.tucsonmesh.net. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Email Signup Just in Case https://www.sustainableseasons.com/ Follow me on Twitter X Just in Case https://twitter.com/PatrickHumphre Breaking Elon musk has issued a warning on twitter about the situation on the ground in North Carolina near Asheville. He is reporting issued with his Starlink internet service in the area. Watch Patrick Humphrey prepper news updates. “Stand firm, and you will win life.” Luke 21:19