6 Things Every Christian Should Know About the 1000 Years

Revelation 20 refers to a 1000 year period immediately following Christ's return. This period of time is pictured by the next of God's annual festivals: the Feast of Tabernacles, which is also called the Feast of Ingathering and the Feast of Booths. This feast begins this Wednesday night and lasts for 7 days. Here are some important points about the Millennium that we should be familiar with and keep in mind during this time:

7 Things Every Christian Should Know about the Day of Atonement

Tomorrow at sundown begins the Day of Atonement, the only day in the bible on which God commands His people to fast. This day has great significance for Christians today, and the following list contains just some of the important points that this festival of God represents.

7 Things Every Christian Should Know About Christ's Second Coming

The Feast of Trumpets, referred to as "Rosh Hashanah" by the Jews, begins tonight at sunset and continues until tomorrow at sunset. For the Jews, this day represents the beginning of the civil new year, a time of restoration and repentance leading up to the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). In truth, this Holy Day pictures the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth, as I explained in a previous article. This Feast is not just for the Jews, and Christians today should be observing this day. Here are 7 important points about Christ's second coming that are pictured by the Feast of Trumpets:

Stephen Hawking Says God is "Not Necessary" for Creation

Today, Fox News published a story about physicist Stephen Hawking crediting the laws of physics for the creation of the universe rather than God. He is quoted as saying:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"

From reading this, you might say to yourself that if God created the laws and the laws "created" the universe, then God still created the universe. If that is the case, then the existence of the universe is still dependent on the existence of God. However, to fully complete his denial of God, Dr. Hawking then goes on to exclude even this notion:

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Really?

God on Globalization

Yet another snack that originated from the food safety conference last month. When the representative from the CDC was speaking, he was talking about all of the difficulty in tracking outbreaks on a national scale. One of the things that he noted was that if 10 people who ordered the same dish in a restaurant in a small town on Tuesday all get sick on either Wednesday or Thursday with the same symptoms, then it’s not hard to trace the source. The difficulty comes in when you have a national outbreak with cases sporadically strewn across the nation. It’s much more difficult to diagnose food-borne illness when the patients have never met each other, their respective doctors don’t know each other, and there is no reason to think that the person is sick from something that they ate rather than from some other source. The curious thing is that these types of nation-wide outbreaks only occur because products are shipped from a single producer to retailers all over the country – so if it’s contaminated when it leaves the packaging plant, it’s contaminated in dozens of stores across several states.

I’m not necessarily advocating that we all buy local, but it does seem that life would be a lot simpler if we did. This lead me to pondering what God thinks of globalization. Globalization is good for consumers because it gives us greater variety and better prices. It's bad for consumers because it causes more pollution, more potential for spreading disease, and fewer local jobs in areas that are not productive enough to attract large-scale businesses. When I put it like that, globalization doesn’t look so great. It's not enough to effect a drastic change in my behavior, but it does make me wonder if this is the sort of thing that God was getting at in these scriptures:

Micah 4:4

Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.