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Jonah 3 - A second chance and a shadow of the new covenant to come

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Jonah 3:1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time saying, Arise go to Nineveh that great city and preach to it the message that I tell you. The picture of Christ Jesus shown in the book of Jonah is visible throughout and is well worth a study. Focusing on chapter 3, we see a picture of both the humanity of Jonah, which should serve as a lesson to ourselves in our application of God's grace, and a picture of God's plan for salvation from the Old Testament through to the New Testament.  Jonah 1:2   “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.”   If we read Jonah chapter 1 we can see that Jonah chapter 3 begins exactly the same way that Jonah 1 began. We know from reading the previous chapters that Jonah refused to obey God in chapter 1. Jonah had his own ideas and instead chose to flee to Tarshish from the port of Joppa (Tel-Aviv) rather than go and give God's message of repentance to

How much proof do you need before you believe?

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Belief in God is not about seeing God, nor is a lack of belief due to not seeing God. Belief in God is a choice you make about how you want to interpret the evidence for God's existence that has been presented to you.  Say a man was to begin speaking to you about his wife whom you had never met. It would be odd if you did not believe in her existence, even if you had never heard of her or seen her before. It is more than likely that you would take the man for his word. If for some reason you did not believe the man you may ask him to show you some proof that she exists, such as her photo I.D., marriage certificate or social security number. If the man was able to produce these documents, then this would be taken as proof of the wife's existence. The more evidence provided the more you would believe in her. The evidence could be documentary evidence or hearsay evidence, such as stories told about her by other people. Upon production of all this evidence, most people wo

John 7:52 - The Pharisee's unknowing self-fulfilment of Scripture

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John 7:47-52 47  Then the Pharisees answered them, “Are you also deceived?  48  Have any of the rulers or the Pharisees believed in Him?  49  But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.”  50  Nicodemus (he who came to Jesus by night, being one of them) said to them, 51  “Does our law judge a man before it hears him and knows what he is doing?”  52  They answered and said to him, “Are you also from Galilee? Search and look, for no prophet has arisen out of Galilee.” The Pharisees were constantly testing Jesus against the Scriptures to try and find fault in Him. Of course they were never able to find any faults and usually their 'testing' resulted in their own shortcomings being brought to light and the Scriptures being fulfilled by the Lord's teaching.  In John 7:52 the Pharisees are dismissive of Christ's teachings by remarking that  " no prophet has arisen   out of Galilee.”   Preachers often say that the reason the Pharisees said this w