We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Peter had used his last key; the Gentile treasury of souls had been opened to the Lord. It was one thing to go into all the world and preach the gospel, and we can be sure the Jewish believers were thinking that meant chasing down Jews wherever they traveled. But the Lord said to make disciples of all nations, using the word that typically referred to Gentiles. There were no ethnic boundaries to the Kingdom of Heaven.

They still believed that Gentiles had to convert to Judaism first, before embracing Christ. When Peter got back to Jerusalem, he caught flak from his fellow Jewish Christians. So Peter took the time to explain the whole story in detail. We begin with the punchline: The Holy Spirit fell on these Gentiles. It was God's choice. All they could say to that was a subdued celebration that God had redeemed Gentiles, too.

Luke drops back a few months on the timeline to add something important. He mentions the Diaspora Jews driven out of Jerusalem by Paul. Those Greek-speaking Christian Jews from Cyprus and what is today the coast of Libya turned out to be very energetic evangelists. At first they shared the gospel with only their fellow Greek-speaking Jews. They did so in Lebanon, up the coast of Syria, and back home in Cyprus. Of particular interest here is that they clustered in Antioch; Turkish Antakya is the modern city. It was founded by the Seleucids and had become the third largest city in the Roman Empire, and the imperial headquarters for that region.

At some point, it was impossible to keep a lid on the gospel, and Christian faith began to blossom among the Gentiles there. The leadership in Jerusalem got wind of this after Peter shared his experience with Centurion Cornelius, and decided they should send their own ambassador to the growing community there to make sure things were on track. They chose Barnabas, the wealthy Cypriot who would carry some weight with the evangelists who had planted the church there.

Passing through the smaller Christian churches along the way, Barnabas arrived in Antioch and was delighted by the progress. Luke notes that the label "Christian" was first coined here to refer to someone who followed Christ. But Barnabas felt they needed someone strong enough to keep them on the path. He traveled up the coast a ways to Tarsus and persuaded Paul to join the work there in Antioch. The Christian community there grew massively.

After hearing how well things were going there, the believers in Jerusalem sort of adopted Antioch as family. In particular came a prophet named Agabus. At some point, he prophesied that there would be a famine in the Roman Empire. Luke notes this came true in AD 46 during the reign of Emperor Claudius, helping us to peg a date to his narrative as shortly before that. With the warning in their ears, the believers in Antioch, living in a very wealthy city, decided to gather a love offering for the first Christians back in Jerusalem, who had been driven underground. Things would be a lot tougher for them because of their situation, but also because the land itself was more vulnerable to famine in Judea.

They dispatched Paul and Barnabas back to Jerusalem with the relief funds.

SEC Charges Mormon Church For Concealing $32 Billion Portfolio

FBI To Retract Catholic 'White Supremacist' Memo, Launch Internal Investigation

These were national news items, not just things reported by Zero Hedge. With the Mormon story, I'm willing to bet the SEC knew about all of the holdings for quite a while, but decided to act on it now. Although, it feels like things like this with high-profile denominations happen all the time regardless, but this time they are being mentioned for a reason. Maybe as like warning shots? No one can tell...who knows how many layers of deceit there are in all of this.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Peter had already crossed every ritual barrier of exclusion keeping people from God's Presence, violating every Jewish prejudice. Jews remained hostile to allowing the Covenant blessings to fall on Gentiles, the very thing for which God had originally called them as His Chosen. Their Covenant was vacated. The New Covenant would ignore all those boundaries. Now the Lord was going to nudge Peter to open the final treasure house, using the last of those keys Jesus had given Peter.

Cornelius was a Roman Army Captain stationed at the port city of Caesarea. He commanded a portion of prestigious troops from the Roman homeland. His position prevented him becoming circumcised and converting fully to Judaism, but he was genuinely observant of Moses otherwise. As part of that devotion to Jehovah, he prayed often and gave generously to Jewish charitable causes.

While thus praying midafternoon, he had a vision. It was highly specific; the Lord was pulling out all stops, not so much for Cornelius' sake, but to ensure Peter didn't fail to understand that this was a divine mandate. Cornelius was commended for his piety and commanded to send for Peter where he was staying with Simon the Tanner in Joppa, some 30 miles (48km) away. He called two of his household servants and one of the soldiers in attendance on him and related the vision. They would understand, since they were also believers, and he gave them the mission to fetch Peter.

They left early the next morning, and must have been traveling on, or drawn by, horses because they made the long journey by noon. There at Joppa, Peter had gone up on the rooftop to escape the bustle of a businessman's ground floor. He was praying, waiting for lunch to be prepared. There he had a vision, again highly specific, about a tarp let down from the sky full of non-kosher animals, and a voice commanding him to capture and kill one of them for his lunch. Peter protested that he had always been kosher. But the Lord responded that what He called ritually clean was now no longer unclean. This same vision came three times, invoking his denial and restoration with Jesus. Then he was warned specifically of the three visitors coming his way, and that he was to embrace their mission as his own from God.

So just as Peter was puzzling over this bewildering experience, the trio from Cornelius arrived downstairs seeking Peter. Having been called, Peter came to see them and asked what they wanted. They told of their master's vision. So Peter invited them to stay overnight so they could travel back together the next day.

And so it was that in the morning Peter set out with them, bringing a small entourage of Jewish Christians. Upon their arrival, the Centurion acted like Peter outranked him, but Peter insisted Cornelius recognize they were both just mere men in this context. The Roman had called together all his believing family and friends, expecting to hear an important message from the God they all worshiped.

First, Peter wanted to explain the significance of how God got his attention regarding something technically in violation of Jewish law. Clearly the Lord was behind this, nudging Peter to break with the old ceremonial laws and act according to the New Covenant. He outlined briefly how Jesus was the Messiah rejected by His own nation. His teaching and miracles should have been proof enough that God sent Him, but the Jews had long since lost their way.

Now raised from the dead, Jesus showed Himself only to those who would be part of His New Covenant nation. The risen Jesus very pointedly commanded His servants to cross all national borders and bring in those who were moved to commit their lives to His lordship. Peter affirmed that all of this was quite consistent with the Jewish prophecies that He would fulfill the original purpose of Israel to reach all nations.

At that moment, the same gift of the Holy Spirit fell on those Gentiles listening to this sermon. Peter was stunned, as were those who came with him. Clearly the Lord was claiming the folks in this household as His own. At this, Peter said it was time to baptize them into the New Covenant of the Messiah. Peter accepted their invitation to stay and they all spent the next few days together in fellowship and celebration.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

I cannot improve on my previous commentary.

Where Paul had previously officiated the execution of Stephen, he now took up the work of Stephen himself, debating with the same overpowering logic in the synagogues. To have their chief enforcer now become their chief antagonist was more than the rabbis could accept. They plotted to catch Saul leaving the city so they could kidnap and murder him. But their plans leaked and Saul slipped out of town by means of a house built atop the wall, with a window facing outside, where he was let down in a large basket.

Returning to Jerusalem, Saul had a hard time convincing the church that he was one of them. Here we see the wealthy Cypriot, Barnabas, in action again, vouching for Saul. Saul told the story of his conversion, and his ministry in Damascus. For a time, he remained with the church there, literally carrying on where Stephen left off, debating in the Greek-speaking synagogues of the city. Again, there was a plot to murder Saul, and he was spirited away by the disciples, down to the port of Caesarea, from whence he returned home to Tarsus. However, there was no one else willing to take his place as the whip hand against the followers of Jesus, so the persecution waned somewhat. Thus, for a time, the disciples grew stronger and more numerous in Judea, Galilee and Samaria.

The vessel was prepared. Now it was for Peter to cross that last line with the gospel of Jesus Christ. As the senior shepherd, he visited all the congregations he could find. At one point, he stopped off in Lydda, on the Plain of Sharon, against the foothills northwest of Jerusalem. While there, he encountered Aeneas, a man paralyzed for eight years. After healing the man, the news spread across the Plain of Sharon, and many were moved by this noteworthy miracle to follow Jesus. Just down-slope from Lydda was Joppa, on the coast.

A rather popular woman named Dorcas there was famous for charitable acts. She sickened and died. Jewish custom called for the body to be washed upon death, then a period of mourning for three days before embalming. The disciples there hastily sent word and had Peter brought down. He noted the widows showing off the clothing Dorcas had made for them, as such women seldom could afford to eat, much less clothe themselves. Recalling the way Jesus did things, Peter had the house cleared of guests, then prayed in the quiet privacy before calling Dorcas back to life. He pulled her up from her deathbed and presented her alive again to the Christians there.

As we might expect, this so overwhelmed the community there that they had Peter stay awhile. The time was ripe. We note that Peter stayed in the home of a tanner, a fellow who would be outcast in Jewish society as one who handled animal carcasses, a profession regarded as unclean by Jews. In every way, the old walls of division were broken down, and those who previously had little hope were becoming children of God. The old Israel was passing away, and the New Israel was aborning.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

For those of us here following what's going on with Ben and the Suspicious 0bservers: 
Earth Disaster Cycle | Live Q&A Feb.4.2023

The link brings you at the point in the video where he responds to a superchat question/comment. If you don't know, a superchat is when someone pays money to send a highlighted chat message, and it's courtesy for the streamer to answer them.

The superchatter mentioned God's promise in Genesis about not flooding the world again, and Ben from S0 failed in his answer. He said the Bible is a result of a telephone game, where the original text was passed around so much between people that we have ended up with something very different than what was intended. Which is...not true. We have original copies of most everything you read in the Bible, which is "enough" of a legitimate generation of text according to any historian you could talk to. 

Ben also said that the "world" as mentioned in Genesis 9 wasn't meant as the entire globe, likely just what Noah or the Genesis writer/Moses had considered the world to be. I'm gonna assume (Ed can weigh in on this) that ancient Hebrew folks knew there was a wider world out there, with nations and lands they didn't know about, but the need to nail down the details wasn't a pressing one. The wider world wasn't necessarily important to their every day life, so it was left at that. Maybe those Hebrews inclined to an active imagination did some thinking about it, but it didn't address the important questions in life.

Catacomb Resident mentioned another one of Ben's videos in this blog post, although I think Ben proposes a gradual rise in sea levels rather than a violent tsnuami.

Either way, despite a lot of the things with the disaster cycle Ben put together, this was a big fail.

Jewish prejudices were being dismantled bit by bit. The Messiah overcame their murderous rejection and unilaterally declared a new Kingdom of Heaven. He opened the door to Diaspora Jews, Samaritans, and the ritually impure Ethiopian Eunuch. Now He's going to open the door to one of His greatest enemies.

It took Paul a some months to work through the residents of Jerusalem and its suburbs, arresting Christians; the Sanhedrin's term for the movement at that point was "the Way" (meaning, of Jesus). Then he obtained a broad warrant for similar work in Damascus, with took some time to organize. This brings us up around 35 AD or later.

The entourage would have included some wagons for hauling prisoners and a team of the Temple Guard, mostly mounted on horses. It took a few days to travel east and north to Damascus. Bear in mind that Roman imperial policy was mostly typical of previous empires from farther east, in which each subject nation had at least some judicial authority over their own people throughout the empire. Paul couldn't touch Gentile Christians, but Jewish Christians were fair game for arrest, trial and prison. Damascus hosted a very large Jewish population, so Paul's mission was hardly out of the ordinary.

Despite the midday sun, the glory of the Risen Jesus was enough to blind Paul on his horse, and he fell to the ground. For a man who was at least bilingual in Greek and Hebrew Aramaic, it was very significant to him to recognize a Voice speaking to him in the latter. As a Pharisee, he believed in such miraculous events as this. He knew that, at a minimum, this had to be an angel of his God. The notion that he had been persecuting someone from Heaven was enough to rattle Paul; he was stunned at the thought. Learning that this Voice was Jesus ripped away from him everything he knew. Whether he lived or died, he could not imagine resisting at this point. He was conquered, his life the spoils of war.

All he had left at this point was to humbly ask what his new Master required of him.

Paul's entourage heard the Voice, but saw nothing they could identify. They knew the chief officer of their mission was now totally incapacitated. They could not act without him, as the warrant would name Paul as the executor of the Sanhedrin's will. They led him into town and had to leave him there and bring the caravan back to Jerusalem.

For about as long as Jesus lay in the grave, Paul was nearly dead himself. This tiny bit part played by Ananias is all we know of him. In obedience to his commission, he went up to the main street cutting through the center of the city, still visible today in the old city. The Lord's command to Ananias makes clear that suffering was already a normal part of Christian life, and Paul was going to enter into that.

Upon the touch and prayer of Ananias, Paul's eyes were opened, both literally and spiritually. All the lies of Judaism fell away like scales from his sight. Paul repented in baptism and became a student of the gospel. The message of Stephen was now his message. After some time listening and learning, Paul came out as a champion for the other side. Every Jew in Damascus knew why he had come. That he switched sides so suddenly, and so mightily, was shocking. This in itself was a grand testimony in favor of the message of Jesus.

In no time at all, Paul had stirred up all the Jews in the city.