Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
The city of Smyrna was located approximately thirty-five miles north of Ephesus. It was a prosperous city with a population of over one hundred thousand in John’s day (c. A.D. 95). That location had been inhabited for over three thousand years and no one knows for sure who founded Smyrna or exactly when it was established.
The numerous parallels between the Book of Ezekiel and the Revelation of John have arrested the attention of all readers. But the number and extent of Ezekiel’s prophecies carry him over a broader field than that of any other apocalyptic prophet so that he combines vision, symbolical-typical action, parable, allegory, and formal prophesying.
All interpreters agree that the empires or world powers denoted by the various parts of the great image in Dan. 2:31–45 and by the four beasts from the sea (Dan. 7) are the same.
We first direct attention to the apocalyptic form and method of the Book of Joel. His prophecy is arranged in two leading divisions. The first part consists of a twofold revelation of judgment. Each revelation is accompanied by words of divine counsel and promise (chapters 1:1–2:27). The second part goes over a portion of the same field again, but delineates more clearly the blessings and triumphs which shall accompany the day of Jehovah (chapters 2:28–3:21; Hebrew text, chapters 3 and 4).
Ancient biographies often opened with the noble background of their subject, background that would shed light on the identity or character of the person about whom they wrote.
Have you ever been quoted out of context? Sometimes people quote something you said, but by ignoring the context of what you said they can claim that you said something different—sometimes exactly the opposite of what you actually meant! We often make this same mistake with the Bible.
In Josiah’s day, the book of the law was found in the temple, and Josiah’s humble response to its demands changed his generation. Jesus later confronted religious teachers of His day who, for all their attention to the law, had often buried it beneath their religious traditions.
Jeremiah began his ministry at about twenty years of age in the thirteenth year of Josiah, that is, 626 B.C. For the greater part of his life he lived in his hometown of Anathoth (for he was of a priestly family) and appeared at Jerusalem at the annual feast days of the Jewish religious year.
As recently as the eighth edition of Driver’s ILOT, the genuineness of Ezekiel had been accepted as completely authentic by the majority of rationalist critics. But in 1924 Gustav Hoelscher advanced the thesis that only a small fraction of the book was by the historical sixth-century Ezekiel (i.e., only 143 verses out of 1273) and the rest came from some later author living in Jerusalem and contemporaneous with Nehemiah (440–430 b.c.).
We have grammatical-historical-interpretation and grammatical-critical-historical interpretation. The former preserved objectivity in interpretation, the latter subjectivity. The former preserved the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bible writers and the text; the latter made both the Bible writer and the text untrustworthy. In other words, New Hermeneutics, with its pseudo-scholarship has done nothing more than weaken and demoralize people’s assurance in the Bible being the inspired and fully inerrant Word of God.