Look at the next few verses there, 2 – 4:
“And five of them were wise, and five were foolish. They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.”
Moving on, we find the parable continuing…
“Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.”
Through the Old Testament, we find 353 prophecies dealing with Jesus’ first coming – all of which He fulfilled already. The statistics behind these prophecies are remarkable, too, and sooner or later I’ll share a few of those numbers here for you to contemplate.
What’s really astonishing though is that there are at least eight times more prophecies concerning His second coming!¹
Going into this bit of Scripture, I want you to think about something: Is God ever surprised about anything? Does anything ever catch Him off-guard? The truth is No; He’s omniscient. He knows everything that has ever happened! He knows everything that is happening! He knows everything that is going to happen! Nothing has ever surprised God.
When we look around at our world today, most of us cannot help but feel a sense of anxiety. No matter what side of the political spectrum you find yourself on, there is an air of conflict we cannot seem to escape, a burden of dread as we wait for the next shoe to drop. In reality, it need not be so. For those who believe, those who have been washed in the blood of Christ, who have accepted the salvation that He alone provides, no matter where this world is heading, we have another destination all together. That’s what I want to look at over the next few week: Where is the church going?
To be clear, I’m certain that most educators do not possess sinister ambitions in regard to their pupils, nor do they have much choice in what they teach or how they teach it. That duty tends to lie in the hands of those above them, controlled by various boards and councils and governmental bodies.
Demographics unmistakably demonstrate that the newest generation is by and large rejecting belief in favor of materialistic interpretations. For others, indifference is the default option. This is an utter shame, responsible not only by those actively leading that generation away from the truth, but also by those believers who passively allow it to go on unchallenged!
The issue of bias against creation in mainstream journals, and even centers of higher-learning, is one of double-standards, where evidence that contradicts the mainstream notions of our origins are criticized or excluded from inquiry, while the flawed naturalistic model is accepted outright for its omission of the supernatural…
Research into the origins of life, indeed the universe itself, is not limited simply to secular investigations. In fact, several organizations have dedicated their efforts to studying the evidence for Biblical creation. It is within the volumes compiled by such institutions, rigorously tested and peer-reviewed, that a wealth of factual evidence for creation is derived. This research has shed new insights into our origins by closely examining cutting-edge fields including cosmology, genetics, and geophysics. You may question why, if the evidence for creation is so compelling, is it not frequently discussed in mainstream circles?
To be honest, I do understand the position of the secularists in rejecting the supernatural for their own naturalistic models, as it is what they were trained to do, how they have been groomed as researchers. Indeed it’s their responsibility, as they see it, to present their version of the truth to the public at large. The result is a culture as we have today, whereby a belief in the Bible’s authority, indeed any belief in God, is becoming ever more marginalized and mocked. Though I understand their motivations, I cannot agree with their findings. The secular worldview and its researchers, even their very training, seem to inherently pit their views against any truth that may stand against that interpretation of reality, sadly blinding them, in many cases, to the exact nature of this world.
